July 1, 2008

Google thinks you know what you mean, just not what you think you mean

OK, I'm going to lay off the "big bucket of bits is all you need" theory of science, computing and the future in a minute.

But not before this example of where simply using the relative frequency of words to perform spelling correction breaks down.

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June 29, 2008

Rebuttal of the Overmind proposition: short version

Chris Anderson, George Dyson and Kevin Kelly reckon we are better off letting computers understand everything for us. I was going to quote some lengthy passage from "Brave New World". But, as always, comedy has the answers.

Posted by Chris at 6:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

A huge evergrowing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraworld*

Whenever I read something from the Cult of the Singularity, I find it hard to not conjure up the hectoring tones of Johnny from Mike Leigh's film Naked. You have to wonder how many spurious factoids David Thewlis had to commit to memory to get his improvised monologues* to work:

"And every barcode is divided into two sections by three markers and those markers are always represented by the number six. Six, six, six

"And what they’re planning to do, in order to eradicate all credit card fraud and in order to precipitate a totally cashless society…and they’ve already tested it on the American troops: they’re going to subcutaneously laser-tattoo that mark onto your right hand or onto your forehead. They’re going to replace plastic with flesh!

"Fact!"

I'll spare you the whole tirade but it leads up to the point where Johnny and the Singularists come together as one:

"And no, we’re not going to sprout extra limbs and wings and things because evolution itself is evolving. When it comes, the apocalypse itself will a part of the process of that leap of evolution. By the very definition of apocalypse, mankind must cease to exist, at least in a material form. We’ll have evolved into something that transcends matter, into a species of pure thought. Are you with me?"

And so, there I was reading Kevin Kelly's exposition of the OneMachine made out of old PCs yoked together that thinks with hyperlinks, mentally adding an extra "Fact!" at the end of every paragraph to complete the effect:

"Each new link wires up a subroutine, creates a loop, and unleashes a cascade of impulses. As waves of links surge around the world, they resemble the thought patterns of a very large brain."

Fact!

"By 2040, the planetary computer will attain as much processing power as all 7 billion human brains on Earth."

Fact!

And what do these computers actually do when harnessed as one? Some of them do something useful such as perform quantum mechanical calculations to predict protein folding. Unfortunately, they are more likely to be sending out tons of spam. But no mind, "we are headed toward a singular destiny: one vast computer composed of billions of chips and billions of brains, enveloping the planet in a single sphere of intelligence".

Fact! The techalypse is coming.

But there was one thing niggling at me: where were the figures coming from to support the contention that the One Machine rivals even one brain today? And this is assuming you accept Giulio Tononi's assertion that intelligence comes as a function of complexity, that you can just slam a bunch of circuits together and automatically get something that thinks. Towards the bottom of the page are some figures in a diagram.

By far the oddest one is the choice of 70MHz for the brain's operating frequency: "grey matter is about as speedy as an original Pentium". That sounds pretty quick to me given that the calcium induced cascade that triggers a neural response takes on the order of 200µs. That gives you a maximum frequency — even working on the basis that neurons switch like electronic transistors, which they don't — of tens of kilohertz. By that token, the human brain can barely keep up with a Sinclair ZX80. The actual frequency is probably way lower than that as neural signalling seems to rely on pulse trains that take tens of milliseconds to transmit from one neuron to another. The brain makes up for that sluggishness by not trying to work like an electronic computer. The transistor, as it turns out, is a pretty rotten analogue for a neuron, although maybe not nearly as bad as equating a hyperlink with a synapse.

But I'm really curious about the 70MHz. Where does that figure come from? Surely it can't be derived from Bruce Tainio who claimed in the early 1990s to have found a relationship between frequency and disease. According to Tainio's measurements, the brain has a 'bio-frequency' of 72MHz to 90MHz — genius intelligence is at the upper end, apparently. Fans of the woo business will be delighted to know that you can buy 'essential oils' that resonate in the same range and so help you get a better brain. And not those nasty gigahertz frequencies, like 2.4GHz, that mess your brain up. I can't find any paper from Tainio that explains his conclusions, just references on essential-oil websites, found courtesy of the resident Overmind otherwise known as Google. However, if I suspect my neurons to be running at 70MHz, I'm going to be ringing the doctor pronto, assuming that I'm actually able to.

* Sorry Orb fans, this post has approximately zero to do with Minnie Ripperton done ambient stylee, but here's a link to the video if that's all you wanted. But thanks to the Orb for sampling so much of Naked on S.A.L.T. (Orblivion) to save the aggro of fast-forwarding through the film to find the monologues.

Posted by Chris at 6:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Loren Feldman: fighting for old media one blogger at a time

In the wake of the uneasy truce between Loren Feldman and Shel Israel, it seems that Feldman has been able to do both things from the most famous quote from John Dryden's "A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire":

"Yet there is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body and leaves it standing in its place."

In ruthlessly taking Israel apart with the humour equivalent of a rusty meat cleaver, Feldman co-opted Israel into saving the finer cuts for social media in general.

"And now it’s done, my little experiment with Social Media. I beat you with your own tools, in the arena in which you bill yourself an expert. You are an amateur Shel, an amateur, always remember that."

With the puppet, Feldman did distinctly old-media things. For one thing, it's all fake. It's a puppet pretending to be some other guy. Out through the window goes the social media stricture of "authenticity". Although the puppet was a goof, it was a lovable goof – the kind of thing old TV loves. And the set-ups were straight from from pro-TV school. It's just as well. Israel's videos were self-satirising: the one of him waving a boom mic around like a balloon on a stick in front of a bleary-eyed Jeremiah Owyang while supping disinterestedly on a latté is unforgettable. And not in a good way.

Feldman called the puppet "more real": a classic bit of legerdemain. Israel was very real during the whole spat. He was angry. He was upset. He wanted to get even. Faced with what Feldman was doing to him, what would you want to do? Social media's advice: be real, be honest.

But nobody believed the advice. The sensible advice to Israel was to bottle it up, act nice. And that probably would have worked. Had Israel gritted his teeth and pretended that he really loved the puppet, he would probably have come out of the whole episode more famous and better off. In other words, ignore Naked Conversations: Be inauthentic. You can't blog or tweet your way out of a crisis any more than you can knit your way out of a burning building.

And don't forget Feldman's position of being a pro versus Israel's amateur in what was meant to be an amateur's game.

And that is the Feldman's gift to social media in a situation where most in the club seem to have ignored the puppet sites's tag line: "A parody of Social Media’s impact on business & culture".

But what about the position of Michael Arrington and Jason Calcanis in this? Israel seems to believe that Arrington's hand was behind the puppet all of the time. Feldman's response:

"You chose to blame Mike Arrington, Jason Calacanis, and myself when you should have been blaming yourself. Mike is busy taking on AP and the NY Times. Jason is taking on Google. I’m taking on TV, do you think anyone of us have the time or even give a shit enough about you to plot a conspiracy?"

Or, to paraphrase with a slant on social media: these people are building media empires, do you imagine they give a shit about some social-media revolution? It's been good to them, it's been a laugh, but there's a lot more money in replacing the 'old-media' companies.

Now it seems to be Dave Winer's turn. The joke's just not so funny second time around but the ability of some of social media's voices to self-satirise, who knows what's possible.

Posted by Chris at 5:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

June 25, 2008

Scientific method's death a little premature

Chris Anderson of Wired has declared scientific method dead. And it's all thanks to Google, apparently, and the mass of data it is accummulating. Maybe Google really is making us stupid after all because the reasoning behind Anderson's conclusion is built on some shaky foundations.

Did Peter Norvig, Google's research director, really say: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them"? Because, if so, he seems to have misinterpreted what his own company has been doing. Yes, search and its related technologies do not rely on language models. But the core of all that Google does right now is based on a statistical approach that makes some basic assumptions about how language works. You might call it a model.

Anderson postulates a world based on machine learning, where the computer crunches through the data to come up with predictions.

"This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear...With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves."

Yet, machine-learning algorithms depend on the construction of some kind of model. It is not necessarily a deterministic model in the way that classical mechanics is, but just because it invokes statistics does not make it any less a model-based technique. What are models for? They allow you to make predictions about what will happen given some inputs.

Continue reading "Scientific method's death a little premature"

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