Let me share this: when I’m in NYC and Boston I’m planning to go to Columbia and MIT campuses. The former, in particular, for a good reason…….
At the weekend I caught up with some reading and happened upon this ’FT’ article in which Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 Nobel Prize Winner for Economics, wrote about the need for a new economic paradigm:
* http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d5108f90-abc2-11df-9f02-00144feabdc0.html
The sentences which struck a chord were these:
Many (economists) used “representative agent models” – all individuals were assumed to be identical, and this meant there could be no meaningful financial markets (who would be lending money to whom?). Information asymmetries, the cornerstone of modern economics, also had no place: they could arise only if individuals suffered from acute schizophrenia, an assumption incompatible with another of the favoured assumptions, full rationality.
I’ve presented the case several times on this blog that we need a radical overhaul of the mathematics underpinning economic models and computational code for a myriad of reasons, including the fact that QUALITATIVE ELEMENTS are not carried into the calculations of demand, supply, interest rates, search context etc. Those are predominantly quantitative metrics (“full rationality”) which provide us with limited insights into the underlying motivations and intent of consumption as well as why we go in search of content (perceptions, emotions, values, mood modalities, intelligence orientation and more).
At the same time, it’s emergent in the tech sector that ASYMMETRIC revenue models — in which we allow the tailoring of products and services by the individual rather than to the homogeneity — works more effectively than symmetric models.
In the case of what I’m focussing on, well…….a picture says 1000 words, so……

I’ve also defined previously my concept of “autistic algorithms” with its over-emphasis on logic and absence of emotion, ambiguity or cultural context capture, and this symmetry versus asymmetry approach in economic modeling also is a variation on this autism.
It’s important because, aware as I am about Ray Kurzweil’s proposals to re-engineer the human brain to create an AI version that somehow exponentially becomes self-aware and accelerates towards a Singularity……….Last week I wrote this:
Often I think that if Turing was alive today he’d have revised his criteria for machine intelligence in the light of these developments:
• Neuroscience as a scientific discipline became established in the 1960s after his passing in 1954.
• Following Alfred Binet’s tests for children’s intelligence in 1904 there have been a whole series of psychometric and IQ tests (including Myers-Briggs 1962, Bebin 1981, Baron-Cohen 1985 and more) that redefine what we consider to be “intelligence”.
The limitations of IQ tests have also been documented, including: cultural bias, left hemisphere weighting and sensory exclusion. Sensory exclusion meaning that most IQ tests are based on our ability to read and visualize the problem rather than to hear, touch, taste or smell it.
So, for example, is there intelligence in Nigella Lawson being able to smell variations in chocolate depths and notes or intelligence in Roger Federer being able to hear and “touch” the weight of a ball on his racket and determine how much topspin is needed?
Notably, neither of these skills is tested in IQ tests and yet both people are intelligent.
• The invention of MRI scans in 1977 transformed how much we can see into the brain. Plus the advancement of nuclear medicine in the 1970s, which enabled most organs of the body to be visualized.
(NB: visualizing it is not directly equivalent to experiencing and walking in every step of its myriad of interactions.)
All of these advances have changed and are changing how much we know about the human brain and about the nature of intelligence — knowhow not available to Turing in his time.
If he was alive I don’t doubt he’d propose that instead of Babbage’s difference engine (which itself forms the basis of the Enigma machine), we should be examining ways to develop coherent differentiation systems in the first instance and use these as a basis of then building out context and eventually artificial consciousness — again the distinction should be kept between organic human consciousness and silicon machine consciousness.
Just because we attribute (rather than impart) “human characteristics and personalities to complex but inanimate objects like our cars and computers” does not mean they are alive. They’re not oxygen, water and sunlight dependent for their existence and growth so even by this most basic of definitions of Life………….they cannot be alive.
These inanimate objects are a reflection of our intelligence rather than intelligent in their own right; the machines depend on us humans to reproduce and to adapt their shape, materials, personalities — “A customer can paint a car in any color he wants it as long as it’s black” as Henry Ford said and we’re all aware that human marketing is responsible for giving objects like the iPad identities and characteristics rather than the object being able to self-generate these.
Consider also the issue of injuries and viruses. Organic matter which is alive strives to stay alive and regenerates tissues and chemicals that can help that organic matter to ward off or deal with that injury or virus. An inanimate object that gets broken or catches a virus stays in that state and is dependent on human intervention, repair and troubleshooting. That’s another obvious distinction between what constitutes something being alive and something being an attribution by something that’s alive.
Now it would take too long to dissect Turing’s Test in detail and there are people more intelligent who can share their attempts to pass the Turing test with their machines:
* http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/2010/06/28/watson-fails-the-turing-test-but-just-might-pass-the-jeopardy-test/
• http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/10/15/232669/Meet-Elbot-Loebner-Prize-Turing-Test-contest-winner-transcript-and.htm
• http://www.a-i.com/show_tree.asp?id=67&level=3&root=1
What is important, though, is to be reminded of the specific premise and parameters of Turing’s paper on ‘Can Machines Think?’
At its core it’s about a machine MIMICKING a human purely according to text-based inputs.
It isn’t about a machine being able to interact as a human at all.
For example, the Turing test doesn’t require a machine to do face recognition to determine whether we’re smiling or showing any other emotion and the extent of authenticity of that emotion from our body language and pupil dilation. It isn’t about the machine being able to smell our hormones to determine other emotions (fear, desire, anger etc.) either. Nor is it about a machine that can hear the emotion in the timbre of our voices or that can reach out and touch our smile / tears out of sympathy or empathy.
Importantly, it isn’t a test for Consciousness as such. It’s a test to see if a machine can copy our pattern of text-based conversations (understanding and extracting the context, humor, emotion etc. from the text).
There’s simply so much more complexity needed for a true test for Consciousness and we haven’t even definitively answered what that is for the human brain yet…………….
So…………… to the books, the drawing boards, the brain imaging scanners, the Web and the code kitchens for all of us!
And this:
There’s an obvious variation between my approach and what Kurzweil propounds about the Singularity. I start from the basis that humans are more intelligent and complex than machines; also that the heritages of our DNA as well as our moral conditioning affects our socio-economic-philosophical psychology and human contracts.
Meanwhile, Kurzweil seems to want us to revert our brains to mere matter (information) that can be transmitted digitally in the same way that information was via the Reading Machine he invented.
Kurzweil believes the code answers to the artificial brain lie in genome. Interestingly, Craig Venter the man who successfully sequenced the human genome and is involved in all types of experiments involving it ranging from biofuels to software gave this interview to Der Spiegel in July 2010:
* http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,709174,00.html
And this:
If readers will (and I have no intention to start a “battle of the sexes” scenario), we could potentially reverse engineer the left “male” hemisphere of the human brain. The right hemisphere which is concerned with language, intuition, free association, consequentiality and more may prove to be more of a challenge.
Now………Even if we did manage to reverse engineer both sides of the brain this still doesn’t necessarily mean the machine would be as intelligent or capable of sense-making as us. This is before we’ve even factored in the fact that intelligence varies in the human population and so this variance would be replicated in whichever reverse engineered artificial brain we built. It would have the intelligence of its human creators and that intelligence would be limited by their intelligence (reference points, linguistic abilities, perceptions and modalities of thinking etc.)
Moreover, we would still encounter the crux of consciousness that separates Man from machine: the biochemistry of emotions that informs our values, our beliefs, our morals, our humanity, our empathy and consideration for others and for Society.
Ergo the core issues in economic models and also Web code are the same: it’s not only the quant logic functions that count (the binary 1′s and 0′s and probability %), it’s the qualitative asymmetric dynamics that also contribute to VALUE and will enable us to map the context, consequentiality and coherency of more of our models (be they resource allocation, conscious consumption or risk management) .
Anyway, maybe I’ll manage to visit Professor Stiglitz at Columbia…….
Oh and, at the w/e, I found out that a PARC team (Palo Alto Research Center which is where Alan Kay worked for 10 years) has started to follow me on a social media site. This is interesting since I used a pseudonym and alternate email which is not associated with any of my public profiles and I didn’t post any materials about Semantic tech there.
Yet this PARC team decided to follow me. Maybe it’s the Yin Yang logo that caught their eyes, :*).