Terminally Incoherent

In the early 80’s William Gibson imagined that the young and still developing Internet will one day bloom into Cyberspace. He envisioned it as an abstract plane where your disembodied mind can wander, surfing on the streams of data, and traveling down the information highways:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding

This imaginative vision has sort of became a Cyberpunk staple, and nearly all novels and movies that aspire to belong to that genre try to include some sort of reiteration of Gibson’s idea. Almost without fail, your average cyberpunk story will include some sort of abstract datum plane, with ZX Spectrum era visuals, city like landscapes of glimmering semi-transparent text and scary looking spiky viruses, rigid geometric security programs and force-field like firewalls. With small variations your average Cyberspace session should look something like this:

In the 80’s Cyberspace seemed… Plausible. And if not plausible then at least not very far fetched. Most of us could imagine the technology escalating to the point where this sort of virtual reality interface would be possible to achieve. Of course today it looks a bit silly and anachronistic - a bit like Steam-Punk genre which is laughable unless you buy into it’s specific distortion of reality.

Let’s face it, browsing the web on your iPhone is about 100 times more convenient than obtaining data the way Gibsonian cyber-jockeys and netrunners did. First of all, they needed to strap themselves into an expensive cyber-deck usually using a neural shunt. While surfing they were pretty much a vegetable strapped to some electronics. You on the other hand have almost ubiquitous Wifi coverage, and Edge/3G networks all over the place so you can browse while driving or walking your dog in the park. Your average netrunner has to navigate through a labyrinthine glowing maze to find what he is looking for. You just fucking google it. And so on, and so forth.

There were many attempts to make 3 dimensional, more Cyberspace like interfaces for our computers but none ever caught on. Every once in a while someone comes up with a new, innovative way of visualizing search results, or organizing data on a web page. But nothing beats the simplicity and usability of a flat HTML page with links and perhaps some embedded multimedia. Why on earth would anyone want to jack in, and float in a world of abstract data visualization crap if they could just pull up a regular web page and read it. Gibsonian cyberspace fails the Ockham’s Razor test. It’s complexity does not translate into utility or usability.

I believe there will never be a virtual reality representation of the web. While we might one day be able to build VR simulations that will be nearly indistinguishable from reality (like out own Matrix) I highly doubt that the same VR technology will be used for something as trivial as browsing the web. The future Cyberspace is much different and probably not so much unlike what we have right now. I envision that one day browsing the web will look a bit more like a HUD display you have in many FPS video games.

You will be walking down the street while browsing the web and looking up directions on your internal HUD display, enjoying a ubiquitous free high speed Wifi blanketing most of the civilized world. There will be no neural shunts, or ugly Matrix/Ghost in the Shell like ports in the back of your neck. Your neural implant will be a tiny speck of silicone tucked beneath your skin and muscle with no physical ports - purely wireless bio-powered device with a biological hardware switch allowing you to switch it off or reboot it via muscle reflex or something equally simple.

I don’t envision a radical shift in the way data will be displayed or presented to us. Your typical website layout will probably change slightly because your HUD will have almost limitless adjustable resolution. Your average user interface design will probably change a bit too, seeing how we will no longer be using a mouse as our primary input device. So stuff like sidebars and tool bars may morph into more intuitive and organic elements since we will now click by thinking and won’t need to actually move any sorts of pointers (I hope).

Most of the web will still be text, because that is the medium that is so far easiest to parse, skim along, catalog and organize. Many SF and Cyberpunk movies and novels assume that we will at some point shift towards other media - that for some reason we will return to oral traditions and record our data on holographic displays (holocorns?) and etc. But let’s face it - text is just more convenient. Think about it - what would you rather have - a short one paragraph written summary which you can skim over in seconds clicking on relevant links in the text, or a 3 minute video of some dude explaining the same thing? When I just want facts or information and I need it fast I will take the textual representation every time.

IM and traditional Cell Phone may get replaced by sub-vocal VOIP like communication that will bypass your vocal cords and let you converse over the net without actually making any sounds. Then again it may not considering that texting and IM’ing is still much faster and more direct form of communication.

Future viruses and spyware won’t explode your head or make you go mad. They will simply fuck up your software and steal your identity the same way they do it today. I imagine that reinstalling the OS and software on your wetware implant won’t be terribly difficult. In fact, such devices will probably come with a pristine image of the OS encased in firmware so that you can roll back to a clean slate at any time.

All in all, we will be much more connected than Gibson could ever dream of without all the silly limitations and real-world abstraction he built into his vision of Cyberspace. Then again, in 20 my vision of the near future may be as silly and short sighted as Gibson’s Cyberspace seems right now.

Is it possible to create a self conscious, self learning AI that would be able to think autonomously? This question still remains to be answered, but everything that we know about technology suggests that the answer is yes. It’s only a question of time. And of course once it happens, we will eventually have to relinquish our position as masters of the planet earth at the point of singularity. For one I welcome our electronic overlords, and hope they will let us stick around after they take over the planet. But then again I will likely be long dead by then so I’m not really worried.

What worries me is what will happen when we finally construct machines which are able to pass the Turing test with flying colors. In other words, the period when machines will be smart enough to “pass” for humans on the internet, but not smart enough yet to ascend, take over the world, and start building their solar system sized Matrioshka brains to satiate their ever growing hunger for more computing power. It’s hard to tell how long will take the machines to surpass us intellectually to the point we no longer can understand their science and technology. Maybe they never will, but I believe that they will definitely be at some point able to blow through every single Turing test with flying colors. And that time is within our reach - maybe not within our lifetimes, but then again who knows. There are two factors here really - whether or not the exponential growth postulated by Moore’s Law holds for the next 20-50 years, and whether or not can we can actually figure out a way to create a system that would be able to achieve consciousness.

What worries me is what will be done with a conscious machine able to pass a Turing - especially the ever present Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart aka the CAPTCHA. Obviously a very lucrative use of such machine would be to send spam. Let’s face it - people are in the spam business because it is very profitable. It’s profitable despite the fact that most people hate it. Despite the fact that most people are running various spam filters. Despite the fact that most services that could be spammed are protected in various ways. Despite the fact that only one in a billion of emails, comments, splog posts and spim messages means an actual sale. It is still, very, very lucrative business.

So it is only logical to assume that at some point someone will come up with the idea to employ one of these machines to send unsolicited advertising to any and all services they can think of. These machines will likely have few advantages over hiring a human spammers. They will likely be much better at multitasking, much faster, and much less likely to get bored and surf the web instead of spamming.

How would we protect our online services from machines which can do pattern recognition as well as we can, if not better, which have perfect speech recognition and can take a sentence (spoken or written), parse it and analyze it and infer it’s meaning be it symbolic, metaphorical a word play or otherwise. The CAPTCHA techniques can only be made difficult up to a point. After all humans will need to decipher them.

One day in the future our children’s children may wake up and notice that their internet was flooded with a never ending stream of spam that simply buried all the content. It would be like that story by Cory Doctorow in which a worldwide cataclysm kills 90% of human race without seriously damaging infrastructure but that has no effects on the levels of spam on the internet. So it’s only few survivors desperately trying to reconnect and figure out what happened, and machines trying to sell each other Viagra. Only we don’t need the end of the world for that to happen. All we need is intelligent machines who can easily pass common Turing tests to raise the level of spam to a level which makes the internet unusable.

But there is hope. The second very lucrative business for a conscious AI will be spam prevention. Public Touring tests will unfortunately have to go the way of the Dodo. Can you spot a spam message when you see it? I know I can - unless of course it is a very clever, on-topic spam, in which case I may not even mind it. If we can do it, then an intelligent machine will probably be able to do it to. So instead of using heuristics, adaptive filters and Turing tests the way we do now, we could simply hire an AI to moderate our inbox, our blog or message board. It would sit there, read each message and either reject it, or flag it if in doubt.

Of course the question is - would we want something or some one (depending on whether we will consider these conscious AI’s things or not) sorting our personal and private correspondence? Would such a moderator AI get upset if the owner called it a piece of junk in an email to a friend? Would it quietly delete emails and messages it didn’t want it’s owner to see? Would it report the owner to the authorities if it saw him discussing illegal activities or accessing suspicious content online?

These are some interesting questions to ponder. I’m not even mentioning the whole socio-religious and legal issues that thinking machines would bring about. What would be their rights? Would they be able to become citizens? How would different religions of the world deal with thinking machines which act so human they are more convincing on a real Turing test (you know, the one where you actually talk with mix of people and machines and try to guess who is what) than most of us would be. I have no answers to these questions. But I do know a thing or two about spam. And the future with artificial intellects scares me a bit. It will completely change the way we do things online - for better or for worse.

Then of course once we reach singularity, our artificial overlords may even invent an anti-Turing test. To access their message boards, blogs and services one will have to solve some incredibly complex equation. Something that would take a solar system sized intellect only a fraction of a second, but take a lifetime for a human being even with a really fast cluster composed of consumer end hardware…

Absolutely epic win:

Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?

In this relatively short post the author manages to mock the 9/11 conspiracy theories, expose George Lucas as a talentless hack who can’t write a coherent plot, and accomplishes a successful troll that riles up both Star Wars fans and conspiracy nuts who don’t get the joke.

A job well done sir. You win the internet, and I salute you for it.

Rayan and Dorkman are at it again. Yet another spectacular lightsaber combat video:

Rayan vs. Dorkman 2 [youtube.com]

I think this one is even better than their first video. The cgi work is pretty damn amazing for an fan video.

Let’s talk about immortality. The concept of eternal life has been present in our fiction since the ancient times but in most cases it was the domain of supernatural being such as gods, faeries, spirits, vampires and etc. In most cases it is either an inborn trait, or a result of a magical blessing or a curse.

But immortality is not only the domain of fantasy. Science fiction has also developed different models of immortality. One of these models immortality via mind transfer. I think the best example of this technique is depicted in Cory Doctorow’s Down and out in the Magic Kingdom novel. In his fictional Bishun Society, people prolong their lives indefinitely by making electronic backup of their consciousness. In an event of death, the person is simply restored from backup in a cloned body. Similar technique is used by the biological Cylons in Scifi Chanell’s Battlestar Galactica series.

Let’s assume that this type of consciousness backup would be possible. You can back yourself up, and restore with no problems or complications. Once restored you are the same person, with the same stupid quirks, and pet peeves. The process is perfect and flawless.

Now imagine that you get into an accident, and you break your back. The doctors say that there is zero chances of repairing this damage. You will be bound to a wheelchair for the rest of your life… Unless of course, you choose to restore yourself from backup. The procedure is really simple.

First you do a backup. Once you are done, you get a lethal injection and your body dies. Minutes later you are restored in a clone with a clean bill of health. Question is - would you do it?

Me - I would probably choose the wheelchair. Why? Well, the whole concept of immortality via mind transfer sounds great on paper but there is one snag. For a lack of better name I call it Consciousness Interruption.

Let me put it this way - restoring from backup is nothing like falling asleep and waking up in a new body. It’s far from it. When the doctors kill your body, you die. That’s it - it’s game over for you. Sure, your clone will have the same memories, the same personality and be you in every possible way. But you - the old you will be dead. There is no link between you and your new copy - you are two completely separate entities. There is just no way you could die and then wake up.

So is this immortality? I would say yes and no. As far as your friends, family and the rest of the universe is concerned - you are immortal. You die, you get restored and you continue to exist unchanged. But from a very subjective point of view - the continuity of your consciousness is extinguished at the point of death. You cease to exist, and someone else with the same memories takes your place.

At least this seems to be true for Cory Doctorow’s model. Do Cylons suffer from this consciousness interruption? I would say yes. Feel free to dispute me on this. I would love to hear your theories on how their system avoids the interruption issues. Sure, their resurrection works slightly different - Cylons seem to remember their own deaths. They don’t really back up, but transfer their consciousness to the Resurrection Ship the moment they die. But as far as I’m concerned it is the same damn thing. The exact same rules apply - one mind dies, the other one is restored. End result: consciousness interrupted.

I leave you with this: Immortality via mind transfer is not true immortality. At least not in the way we sought it since the beginning of time. It is really just a rouse - a social lie, and a form of ultimate escapism. Restoring from backup doesn’t really do anything for the person who is restored - that person just dies. The real benefit of the restoration process is for this person’s loved ones. If you can restore someone after they die, you no longer need to mourn their death, or deal with their loss. It is really a feel good - happy pill for the masses. Nothing else.

Disagree? I would love to hear a counter argument!