Thinking Exponentially Outside the Box

Robert Cheek
Korea Herald

Writing for The Korea Herald (November 10, 2015), Robert Cheek calls for "Thinking outside the box" about "AI bots and robotic IoT" - whatever those are - and he borrows a chessboard to give an example:

In the book "Race Against the Machine"” by MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, a chessboard is used as an example to describe the evolution of technology, specifically robotics and AI, an idea which they borrowed from Ray Kurzweil. In the story, the inventor of chess shows his new game to his emperor. The emperor is so impressed by the game that he grants the inventor the right to select his own reward. The inventor asks for a quantity of rice to be calculated as follows: One grain of rice is put on the first square of the board, two on the second, four on the third, and so on, with each square doubling the number of grains as the previous. The emperor agrees, thinking the reward too small. Much to his chagrin, he later sees that the doubling results in incredibly large numbers. The inventor ends up with 18 quintillion grains of rice, an amount which makes Mount Everest look like a molehill. The point of the story is that in an age of exponential technological growth, things only get really interesting in the second half of the chessboard. We are now on the second half of the board. And things are getting very interesting, indeed.

How interesting? Read on about how we'll all be 'impacted':

Businesses of all types have been impacted by the moves already taken on the first half of the chessboard during the IT revolution that started in the 1980s. One example is what happened to photography with the advent of digital photography, which brought about the demise of some companies and emergence of others. This scenario is now happening in AI and robotics. Intelligent, easy-to-use machines dedicated to the service of humans are being developed and are becoming accessible to the majority of consumers in terms of cost. These robot systems will spell the end of many jobs and businesses, but create new jobs and businesses for those positioned for the change. For employment, however, the net result will be negative, and mass unemployment will become an issue with which governments must contend.

The key difference between the intelligence revolution and the information revolution, however, is the rise of cyberphysical systems. The technology now improves itself and learns from mistakes. The digital genie is now out of the cyber bottle, whether as a classical humanoid robot, an autonomous car, a nanobot implant or a robotic chef system.

In the Cyberphysical Era we will see AI and robotics (AI-enhanced robots, or AI bots) permeate the physical world. The AI bots in the RIoT system will be components of a "hive mind," and use onboard processors as well as the cloud to learn from each other, not unlike a real-time Wikipedia for AI bots, thus magnifying their efficiency and growing its knowledge base. This year, IBM and Softbank gave birth to the first generation of AI bots by fusing Watson AI and Pepper, the service robot. While at the University of Cambridge, scientists have created a "mother robot" that builds smaller robots, and selects the fittest for survival, and rearranges the rest.

Now, let's see, the benefits are that "scientists have created a 'mother robot' that builds smaller robots," and "technology now improves itself and learns from mistakes," and "mass unemployment will become an issue." Yes, this is "getting very interesting, indeed." Are we sure we want all these 'benefits'? Was the Unabomber right about technology?

Ask yourself: "What would Jesus do?"

Secret Agent Man: Dark Knight in the Dark Web

Before he went underground . . .

Lawrence Baldwin, left
Defcon, Las Vegas in 2002
Credit YouTube
NYT

Nicole Perlroth and Matthew Goldstein introduce us to an unusual man fighting crime on the dark net: "On the Hunt for Wall St. Hackers, but Not the Spotlight" (New York Times, November 9, 2014).

Lawrence Baldwin is a dark hero of the Internet whom you have probably never heard of[, but a] decade ago, Mr. Baldwin made a name for himself and his Atlanta-based security firm . . . . [a]nd then he seemed to disappear . . . . For the past seven years, several security consultants and former law enforcement personnel say, Mr. Baldwin has immersed himself in the so-called dark web, using what most describe as unorthodox methods to gather intelligence about online financial crime . . . . To his supporters, Mr. Baldwin, who has a degree in computer science from the University of Hartford, is something of a secret agent. "He has eyes directly on the perpetrator," said one security expert who did not want to be identified because of Mr. Baldwin's preference for a low profile . . . . [and a]nother described his work as "very cloak and dagger." All agree that the intelligence he provides is very effective. "I would take his intelligence over anyone else's any day of the week," another said . . . . All of this has created a market for a handful of consultants like Mr. Baldwin who go undercover and track the criminals' activity in real time . . . . [Thus] "Baldwin stands out because he provides actionable intelligence," said Avivah Litan, a security analyst with Gartner, the research firm. "It's exact, it's original and he barely charges for it, whereas other firms repackage intelligence from many sources" . . . . Two people familiar with his methods said that Mr. Baldwin's company maintains listening posts on Internet service provider networks and infects tools used by criminals, like underground botnets - networks of infected computers - to see what criminals are collecting and where they are collecting it from. He has also developed a web of contacts across industries and knows who is stealing information . . . . A few years ago, law enforcement officials spoke to Mr. Baldwin to ensure he understood what he could do without breaking the law, according to two people briefed on the conversation. One concern is that while Mr. Baldwin has a record of developing intelligence on hacker activity, the information cannot be used as evidence in a criminal proceeding because of his methods, and the confidential relationships he uses to gather it . . . . Early in his career he worked at BellSouth, helping to introduce its dial-up network. Immediately, hackers tried to break in. What began as a curiosity - figuring out who they were and how they attacked their victims - became his life's work . . . . Mr. Baldwin stands out as a "boy scout" who simply wants to catch criminals and routinely shares information free . . . . He works closely with the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, a nonprofit based in Pittsburgh that brings together law enforcement, private industry members, security consultants and academic scholars to share information to prevent and mitigate the threats. The group works closely with many American banks and corporations and has received contributions in recent years from Bank of America, Microsoft and Symantec.

So . . . why haven't we heard much about this man? Because, in a rare answer to the query, he says:

"I'm not a press hound . . . . There are serious personal safety issues to consider."

In other words, he's made a lot of enemies of the very dangerous kind, so why are we drawing attention to him?

Good question. This post will self-destruct in five seconds . . .

Internet as Brain-Booster?

Ben Wiseman
The New York Times

As a follow-up to yesterday's news about stimulating our brainpower, I report today on Walter Isaacson's review ("Brain Gain," The New York Times, November 1, 2013) of Smarter Than You Think, Clive Thompson's book on how technology is making us smarter. We humans might have felt collectively dumber back in May 1997, when the chess-playing computer Deep Blue apparently defeated Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest grandmaster ever, but most of us missed what happened next:

The year after his defeat by Deep Blue, Kasparov set out to see what would happen if he paired a machine and a human chess player in a collaboration. Like a centaur, the hybrid would have the strength of each of its components: the processing power of a large logic circuit and the intuition of a human brain's wetware. The result: human-machine teams, even when they didn't include the best grandmasters or most powerful computers, consistently beat teams composed solely of human grandmasters or superfast machines.

Interesting . . . but what of it?

Thompson's point is that "artificial intelligence" -- defined as machines that can think on their own just like or better than humans -- is not yet (and may never be) as powerful as "intelligence amplification," the symbiotic smarts that occur when human cognition is augmented by a close interaction with computers. When he played in collaboration with a computer, Kasparov said, it freed him to focus on the "creative texture" of the game. In the future, Thompson writes, we should not fear being beaten in chess by Deep Blue or in "Jeopardy!" by Watson. Instead, humans will find themselves working in partnership with the progeny of these supercomputers to diagnose diseases, solve crimes, write poetry and become (as the clever double meaning of the book's title puts it) smarter than we think.

Better poetry through cooperating with a computer? As if that weren't scary! But against pessimists who would worry that such interaction is making us dumber, Isaacson lets Thompson speak for himself:

Thompson counters that . . . [pessimists have ever failed] to foresee "the types of complex thought that would be possible once you no longer needed to mentally store everything you'd encountered," [such as also happened with the mental relief provided several thousand years ago through the invention of writing, deplored by the pessimists of those days,] and he surmises that the same will turn out to be true of our ability to digitally store and easily access huge amounts of information and memories outside of our own brains. "What's the line between our own, in-brain knowledge and the sea of information around us?" he asks. "Does it make us smarter when we can dip in so instantly? Or dumber with every search?"

His answer is that our creative minds are being strengthened rather than atrophied by the ability to interact easily with the Web and Wikipedia. "Not only has transactive memory not hurt us," he writes, "it's allowed us to perform at higher levels, accomplishing acts of reasoning that are impossible for us alone."

Isaacson agrees, and again quotes Thompson:

"Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college . . . . This is something that's particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers or marketers. For them, the act of writing and hashing out your ideas seems commonplace. But until the late 1990s, this simply wasn't true of the average nonliterary person."

True, everybody's writing more nowadays, but I suspect that this phenomenon is a transitional stage between no internet and software that can understand spoken language perfectly, when the vast majority can stop text-messaging and return to chatting out loud.

But Thompson is right about the Internet as "transactive memory" -- it has enabled me to perform at a higher level, assisting me greatly when I was writing my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, which I basically hammered out in a couple of weeks, sped up by instant access to literature online for checking the accuracy of my literary allusions.

Nonlinearity: E-Books vs. Physical Books?

The Reading Device: A Short History
Illustration by Joon Mo Kang
New York Times

Lev Grossman, writing two years ago in "From Scroll to Screen" (NYT, September 2, 2011), made an incisive point about e-books and physical books:

We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet's underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don't turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It's no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That's the kind of reading you do in an e-book.

The codex is built for nonlinear reading -- not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn't just another format, it's the one for which the novel is optimized. The contemporary novel's dense, layered language took root and grew in the codex, and it demands the kind of navigation that only the codex provides. Imagine trying to negotiate the nested, echoing labyrinth of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" if it were transcribed onto a scroll. It couldn't be done.

Nonlinear reading is easier in a codex than in an e-book, as I've recently discovered, though I'm happy with my e-books' convenience in other respects even though the e-book poses difficulties for "a single rich document like" my novella, given the "way a deep reader . . . [reads] it, navigating the network of internal connections" that offer the joy of enjoyment in reading.

I think, however, that solutions will be devised to overcome the e-book's limitations and render its reading fully as easy as a physical book.

Sophisticated Phishing?

Carmen

(Image from Wikipedia)

Phishers may be getting more sophisticated. A few days ago, I received the following email from a certain "Carmen":

I was reading "An Insightful Use of Reader-Response Literary Theory" and had a comment. Hmm, I think you might be misunderstanding Fish. His notion of interpretive communities suggests that the community creates the sole definition of a text, not a "fuller" definition.

One more thing, are you interested in getting paid to add a link on your page? Just a text link and it'd go to an education site.

I'd pay via PayPal at $100 for the link. Let me know and I can give you a call if needed.

I was somewhat taken aback by this email. While I appreciated the correction in my understanding of Stanley Fish, the offer of $100 triggered my suspicions. Nobody offers money to get a link, especially from a minor blog such as mine. But I didn't want to misjudge a helpful individual like "Carmen," so I replied:

I'm not interested in any money, but I might link to the site if I find it relevant.

In response . . . nothing, nichts, nada. "Carmen," apparently, believes that one gets what one pays for and thus wanted no free link. If it cost nothing, it meant nothing, I guess.

Was "Carmen" phishing? I can't be sure, but nobody offers to pay for a link, as I said, and she hasn't replied to my 'generous' counter offer. I therefore conducted a Google search using her full name (or the one supplied, anyway) and found only one site, a blog where she had apparently left a message in some fashion or other . . . indirectly, I take it, for the blogger herself seems to have had to post the message from "Carmen" (which strikes me as odd).

The circumstantial evidence might therefore suggest phishing, I hazard to think, but would a phisher of men like me be so knowledgeable about that Milton scholar and radical postmodernist Stanley Fish? Perhaps I should be unsurprised, however, that phishers might know about Fish . . .

Whether "Carmen," was a phisher or merely a naive, would-be letter-linker saying the darndest thing, the internet is a peculiar fishing hole . . .

Keep Reading: This'll Make You Smarter!

More Perspicacious Minds?

Illustration by Patrick Thomas

(Image from NYT)

Worried about computers and the internet dumbing you down? Fret no more, dear reader, for according to Jonah Lehrer, "Our Cluttered Minds" (NYT, May 27, 2010), quite the reverse occurs:

[T]he preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind. For instance, a comprehensive 2009 review of studies published on the cognitive effects of video games found that gaming led to significant improvements in performance on various cognitive tasks, from visual perception to sustained attention. This surprising result led the scientists to propose that even simple computer games like Tetris can lead to "marked increases in the speed of information processing." One particularly influential study, published in Nature in 2003, demonstrated that after just 10 days of playing Medal of Honor, a violent first-person shooter game, subjects showed dramatic increases in ­visual attention and memory.

Lehrer is citing this against the argument by Nicholas Carr in his recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, for according to Lehrer, Mr. Carr argues that the internet and "computers are destroying our powers of concentration" because "our mental malleability has turned us into servants of technology, our circuits reprogrammed by our gadgets" as we "lurch from site to site, if only because we constantly crave the fleeting pleasure of new information." Web surfing is a rather different issue than 'gaming', I would think, but as Lehrer notes after this summary of Carr's views:

Carr's argument also breaks down when it comes to idle Web surfing. A 2009 study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that performing Google searches led to increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, at least when compared with reading a "book-like text." Interestingly, this brain area underlies the precise talents, like selective attention and deliberate analysis, that Carr says have vanished in the age of the Internet. Google, in other words, isn't making us stupid -- it's exercising the very mental muscles that make us smarter.

I'm pleased to hear this. Now if only the internet would compensate us monetarily for the time we spend surfing it.

Despite Lehrer's optimism, I still wonder if the internet doesn't distract us from deeper, more continuously sustained thinking. Lehrer does note, consistent with Carr's pessimistic concerns, that "numerous surveys suggest that the Internet has diminished our interest in reading books." I certainly read fewer books these days, though that's also due to the demands of my work. Editing, translating, and researching all detract from my time as much as or more than the internet distracts me from reading. But at least, I'm getting smarter, if Lehrer is right.

If . . .

The 'net -- dragging us nowhere?

Mash-Up

Harry Campbell

(Image from New York Times)

The literary critic Michiko Kakutani has an interesting New York Times article, "Texts Without Context," speculating on where the internet is taking us, apparently nowhere, and we'll all be unreal nowhere-men in a dystopian monadological universe of discourse. Well, that's my rather imprecise, metaphysically solipsistic take on Kakutani's argument, so there may be some irony to what I'm doing in this post.

What Kakutani actually says, among other interesting points that she makes, is that our "snip here, paste there" approach to writing -- as with David Shields's recent book Reality Hunger, consisting of "618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers" -- has been made so easy by the internet that it is simultaneously altering our method of reading by making radically subjective deconstructionists of us all:

As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual readers' subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article for The New York Times Magazine looked forward to the day when books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be "unraveled into single pages" or "reduced further, into snippets of a page," which readers -- like David Shields, presumably -- could then appropriate and remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.

As John Updike pointed out, Mr. Kelly’s vision would in effect mean "the end of authorship" -- hobbling writers' ability to earn a living from their published works, while at the same time removing a sense of both recognition and accountability from their creations. In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling "performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information" and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. [Jaron] Lanier says he fears that for "the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers" it simply means "career oblivion." (page 3)

This isn't a danger only for journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers, and I'm curious what Carter Kaplan and Michael Moorcock might have to say on this point with respect to literary authors, given Kaplan's permitted use of Moorcock's characters, concepts, and topics, for this sort of overlap seems already a step in the deconstructive direction. But I won't expound on that excursus. I merely wish to mention it and quickly return to my own point of noting that not only journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers face oblivion in the subjective appropriation of their material. Despite the ubiquitous footnoting in scholarly works, scholars also confront this oblivion:

And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking. (page 2)

No one reads scholars' entire texts anymore! One need only note the scholarly use of Google Books and Google Scholar to see this at work. I know firsthand -- from my own use of these specialized search engines -- of the tendency to find only what one is already sure of, for a sharpened search often takes one precisely there. Conflicting findings are not ignored; they are often not even seen! Even the immediate context to a nugget of information is too often ignored, scarcely to mention the larger context, and the scholar who constructed the entire text is thereby also lost. Arguments and the person who made them no longer exist as scholarship grows ever more solipsistic.

Being aware that this often happens, as an artifact of the search-engine process itself, enables one to circumvent the danger of self-fulfilling investigations. I can if I really try, but I was schooled in research before the digital age and have read widely enough to a degree of depth sufficient to have provided me with a bit of judgment in evaluating what I find.

What of the younger, digital generations, though. Do they read entire books? Or is nowhere now here?

Internet Jihad

Internet Map

Charting the pathway to radicalization?

(Image from Wikipedia)

One of the students in my Islamism class is looking into the role that the internet plays in spreading radical Islam, so this issue has been on my mind lately.

I therefore noted what Philip Bobbitt writes concerning this point in his recent book, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008):

E-mail is heavily relied upon by market state terrorist groups, using cybercafes and discarding e-mail accounts after only a single use to avoid detection. Doctrine and strategy are debated through online discussion groups and chat rooms. A Saudi interior ministry spokesman estimated that the Internet is responsible for 80 percent of the recruitment of youths for the jihad.[116] Photographs are shared -- the Abu Ghraib prison pictures were instantaneously provided worldwide -- and responsibility for attacks may be claimed. Most of all, perhaps, the diverse rage of many hundreds of thousands is channeled rather than dissipated. Often overlooked is the participatory dimension of the Web: it's not just that the Internet allows remote leaders to reach thousands or hundreds of thousands of otherwise inaccessible persons, it's that it allows these alienated, often isolated people to speak back, to receive encouragement and reassurance as they separate themselves from society. "Islamists view themselves as fighting a global war to create or restore the big Islamic nation without borders or nationalism, and the Internet is the best tool for building their virtual ummah."[117] (pp. 56-57)

The important factor here is "not just that the Internet allows remote leaders to reach thousands or hundreds of thousands of otherwise inaccessible persons, it's that it allows these alienated, often isolated people to speak back, to receive encouragement and reassurance as they separate themselves from society." In other words, the internet does not serve simply as a medium of communication; it serves as a means of radicalization. It contributes to the creation of an Islamist identity among multitudes of young, alienated Muslims by encouraging their radicalization and a sense of belonging to a powerful, global movement destined to conquer the world.

Each of us who uses the internet has discovered this fact, namely, that it enables us to 'find ourselves' in ways that we previously could not, for we locate communities of like-minded individuals and 'radicalize' one another by obsessing upon issues that have grabbed us.

Not that every internet user gets trapped in a Mobius loop of increasing radicalization till utterly enclosed within the Klein bottle of an alternate universe of discourse . . . but some do.

Notes:

[116] Abdul-Rahman al-Hadlaq, supervisor of the Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry's Good Counsel Committee, quoted in Asharq al-Aswat (2 May 2007), cited in "Saudis Claim Internet Responsible for 80 percent of Jihadi Recruitment," Terrorism Focus 4, no. 13 (8 May 2007).

[117] Reuven Paz, quoted in Corine Hegland, "Global Jihad," National Journal 36, no. 19 (2004), 1402.