Here’s an example of how serendipity and strange kinesis happens in Twain’s world. Tomorrow I’m going to a women’s tech event and these are some of the sessions I signed up for:

· Google’s MapReduce (distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers);

· How HP are dealing with Cloud Computing and the Law; and

· Financing your start-up

This was completely separate and several weeks prior to three events which happened today that I had no influence or control over:

(1.) Fish-head (aka Rick who’s a brilliant 3DMax-conversant marketer) sent me a link to Forbes.com’s special Artificial Intelligence report:

For those interested, here’s last year’s IEE Spectrum special on The Singularity, which is related as you’ll see later:

(2.) Wall Street & Technology, a site I used to track religiously — when I was a banker responsible for an investment portfolio that included consortia trading platforms, posted an article on IBM’s Websphere’s Cloud Computing and Low Latency Messaging Capabilities:

· http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/advancedtrading/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218100846&cid=RSSfeed_TechWeb

(3.) Terrestrial television showed a documentary, Another Perfect World, which explored several metaverses from Second Life to Eve to Lineage (US, Iceland and Korea-based, respectively). Now, for those who aren’t aware Second Life operates on a P2P framework and there are cluster servers involved here too. There are also all sorts of issues involved with bandwidth, i.e. world creations take up a lot of server space which makes the system slower than it should be and……..occasionally crash.

If we join the dots between items (3.) and (2.) we start to see that IBM’s architectural breakthrough will have a knock-on effect on the likes of Second Life and reducing bandwidth load.

It’s then related to item (1.) because a key motivation of Artificial Intelligence developments is to enable machines to simulate similar processes to the way human brain works. Those processes and their content are transmitted via nodes and connectors. The pursuit of AI (or “thinking machines”) is tied in with the creation of the Global Brain where each one of us can call up to the “Thinking Cloud” and get answers.

See what I mean by strange kinesis in my world? This is “Twaining”.

THE TURING TEST: TWAIN’S TAKE

Can machines think? This was the question posed by Alan Turing in 1950 and what the Turing test provides parameters for us to find out. Previously in my Global Brain knol, I’ve written about my encounters with Elbot, which came close (25%) but………..no cigar to passing the Turing test (30% threshold). Here’s a reminder of how my very first question flummoxed Elbot.

At point of site activation, Elbot asked me, “What mood are you in?” I typed in “indifferent”.

Elbot then asked, “What put you in this indifferent mood?”

I typed in “You.”

Elbot replied: “Fatal Error 42: Omission of Superfluous Input.”

Yes, this was funny but my question was also posed with a purpose.

A real-life person upon reading the text of me writing “You” would probably have become either self-conscious, defensive or displayed some form of ego, super-ego and identity. These complexes are as much a part of human consciousness as the sensations we experience during waking life, our dreams in our sleep and the mysteries within us which are as yet inexplicable like pre-cognition and genius.

A probable human response to my feigned indifference would have been another question like, “We just met and hardly know each other. What have I done to make you indifferent towards me?” or “*&^#%! Who do you think you are?! How dare you be indifferent to me! Do you know how lucky you are to be part of this Elbot experiment and how clever the maker is?!”

Instead, Elbot couldn’t compute and crashed.

For me, Elbot — although an improvement on previous attempts — is not conscious. It wasn’t aware of the context of my question. It wasn’t able to decipher it aurally for clues. It wasn’t able to see whether I was smiling or grimacing. It wasn’t able to pick up and smell any pheromones which would indicate my interest instead of my indifference. It wasn’t able to shake my hand and determine whether it was a firm grip (interested) or loose grip (indifferent), and so on.

When we consider the Turing test, it’s vital we remember that the stipulation is the machine and the human provide and are provided with TEXT-BASED content. There are no oral, aural or other sensory clues which are what helps make humans conscious and aware of ourselves relative to others and our environment(s).

In the Forbes’ article, Professor Kevin Warwick suggests that questions of a topical or local nature can help us better distinguish between whether the answer is from another human or a machine. For example, questions about the weather or what color the wall is painted. Then we can assess whether the machine’s answer is plausible and would be offered by a human.

This is all very well, but here’s my issue with the Turing test. It sets out to answer the question, “Can machines think?”

The more perspicuous answer we should seek is:

“CAN MACHINES MAKE SENSE?”

To date in IT development (including the Semantic Web), the definition of thinking machines or smart systems is predicated on their abilities to do the following:

· link (as in hyper-text)

· connect (as in social nets)

· compute / calculate (as in Deep Blue and Wolfram Alpha)

· choose (as in what to display at a specific time-geolocation)

· sort, filter and prioritize (as in eBay lists of items)

· rank (as in YouTube videos)

· re-direct (as in cookies in browsers)

· visually represent (as in Flickr on Google Maps)

· synch (as in iPhone with iTunes store and Apple Macbooks)

· stream (as in videos and IM channels)

Now, some of us would argue that all of those attributes are the same as thinking so if a machine can do those things then it must be as — or even more than — intelligent as a human.

Evidently, this isn’t the case yet; no machine has even passed the Turing test much less tests where a robot can make sense the way we do with touch, taste, sight, hearing and smelling abilities to complement our neural, moral, memory, humor and relativism ones. We’re several years from The Terminator and Skynet (aka “The Cloud”).

Personally, I don’t want machines to be able to simply think. I want them to be able to MAKE SENSE. If we look at ourselves as a species, 99 percent of us can think (some form of brain activity / electrical impulses) with less than 1 percent of us incapable of thought because of coma or brain damage. However, not all 99 percent of us are making sense. If we were there would be none of the following:

· wars, crimes and non-natural deaths;

· climate change dangers;

· global economic crisis; or

· any other man-made catastrophe which stops, sets back or sabotages human development, achievement and advancement.

Hmmmn, and it’s now really late and I have a looooooooooooong day ahead of me.

Twain brain starting to switch off for sleep now. I’ll return to this “GUNK” another day soon.

LOL. G’night.

*************************

TURING: A CHILD TWAIN HERO

Alan Turing is undoubtedly a genius whilst I am being a Devil’s Advocate at worst and marginally bright at best. I have a lifelong admiration for Turing, actually. I first learnt about him and the Enigma machine when the Royal Society of Mathematics invited me along to their master classes for “gifted” children. One of our first exercises was to create our own code machine.

I’m no longer a “gifted” child. My (older, male) colleague at the bank who had a Harvard degree and Cambridge PhD in robotics wrote in my review that I was “prodigious”. One important thing I’ve learnt is that it’s not in the words others use about us that we discover who we are. It’s in the doing, the discovering and the democracy of collectively making sense that we realize it.

G’night!

Following is an sanitized version of an exchange I had with a friend of mine about taxonomies in relation to Semantic representations. 

First, a Google Tech Talk on ‘Visual Perception with Deep Learning’ — 10 April 2008 :

————————————————————————————

I do appreciate the value of taxonomies. It’s the way most scientific classifications are arrived upon. For example, we have a periodic table structure which provides:

(i.) high-level overview of each of the seven groups of chemicals;

(ii) information about how many outer electrons are in each shell according to their membership of a particular group (this proxies parent-child identities); and

(iii.) how they could possibly connect and interact with another chemical from another group. 

I also came across this interesting article on the ‘10 Myths of Taxonomies’ which essentially highlights the risks involved in having to adopt someone else’s sets of taxonomies — particularly one in which we have no democratic voice or implementation:

* 10 Myths of Taxonomies — the Montague Review

IS THERE HOPE FOR HUMANS?

There seems to be this postulation amongst the Singularity brigade that

increased AI smartness ===> increased collective intelligence

The counter-argument would be…..

increased AI smartness ===> decreased collective human intelligence

(because they’ll have to think less)

AAAAARGH! QUICK! STOP THE GLOBAL BRAIN EXPRESS!

Personally, I don’t believe the proliferation of information pre-processed by AI necessarily makes each one of us SMARTER. It actually means the knowledge of how that AI was structured to pre-process the information is in the brains of a few select bleeding edge techies and everyone else is simply sheep-like or “dogs eat the dog food” like following whatever results are generated! (Incidentally, this is an anachronistic phrase from Microsoft circa 1988 still apparently being bandied around Silicon Valley — supposedly the cradle of avant garde progress, and let’s bear in mind we’re in 2008 and are supposed to be advancing humans not denigrating their intelligence or identities by ill-thought out associations).

It is possible we humans will erode our own capacity to perceive, to reason, to innovate and to communicate because some of us are too readily abdicating our responsibilities to do so to the machines!

However, we don’t have anything to really worry about because I’m going to share a simple truth…….

THE SINGULARITY IS A PIPE DREAM

The Singularity is unlikely to happen in the way the futurologists insist or according to their timescale of 2040. They all read far too much science fiction and need to more closely proxy terra firma.

Moreover, as evinced by my exclusion from a certain SemWeb some form of ideological eugenics and police state is going to apply to the Global Brain. Not everyone will be invited or have access to plug into it. As much as technologists bleat and spin on like autobots about open source and open house, Terms of Service and contracts (as well as undemocratic feudal warlord oppression of the serfs) will still apply as it has since land laws of C12th England.

TechCo SAYS it’s open this and open that, Google and wannabe minnows alike. However, notice how each tech platform imposes its (sometimes Draconian and contradictory) rules and evicts those whose opinions are different (or threatens to as per the unimaginative and inflexible mindset of the Administrator — please also see Kafka’s writings or Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’).

This is why the Global Brain is never going to be truly global, open or democratic. The controllers/owners can be dictators and the constituents are the conformists, not necessarily by choice or personal conviction but by consideration towards others which is not reflected in a similar equivalence of respect towards them.

Interestingly, it’s well-documented that it could be the unconventionals who “think out of the box” and may be touched by genius or madness, and create the quantum-level breakthroughs in thinking — please see Einstein, Dali, Dosteovsky, other artistic intellectuals and bipolarly brilliant but insane people (more often than not the world’s greatest comedians).

INTELLIGENCE: THE KIDS IN THE CLASSROOM + ONLINE

Let me make this observation. In a class of 30 kids who are 5 years-old they all have exactly the same access to the same stimulus, reading materials, toys, etc. Yet there will always be 1 kid who is knock out quicker and brighter than their peers.

In the same way, every teenager has the same access to the index of information on the Internet. Yet only 1% of those teenagers will actively go in search of the wealth of knowledge with the specific intent of increasing their own know how. 

Technologists and educators imagine that if kids get more tools this will make them smarter.

Not necessarily. It depends on their pre-existing mental orientation, character traits and emotional sense of reward about knowledge. Some of them assign 0 value to knowledge and +1 to Grand Theft Auto rankings. 

FUN+GAMES

Certain proponents of the Global Brain theories and the Singularity are probably breathing huge sighs of relief I’m nowhere near them to present obvious and prescient counter perspectives. They can postulate we’ll all have boosted collective IQs (by the osmosis of proximity to smarter AI) without my notes of pragmatic perspective. Oh and we haven’t factored in the ego element of consciousness and self-awareness yet either! 

Ack! Taxonomies is one thing. If the perception of the person doing the classification is not spot on or nuanced in the first place the mandolin ends up being related to a string instrument because it looks like violin (plus dyslexia or plain ignorance could be involved). 

It’s not the taxonomic tags that show Paris is either a city, a personality or a romantic aspiration which ultimately matters, imo. It’s actually what emotions it evokes and elicits in a person: nostalgia, disregard or longing which help each of us discern meaning from the world and intakes around us.

PERCEPTIONS MORE THAN TAXONOMIES

I’m leaving others to think out the taxonomies issue. The perception dimension has interested me more since childhood. In terms of semantics, graphing the connections that a grape is a fruit that we eat and make wine out of and grows on a vine is less interesting and challenging to me than trying to figure out WHY people like to eat grapes, to drink wine and designate all kinds of adjectives to it — sweet, succulent, tannin aftertaste, globulous, shriveled, meaty, aromatic, green, over-ripe etc. — which reveal their personalities, life aspirations and purchase decisions. 

It’s the perception dimension I’m coding a tool to capture…………………….