The flawless virtual world is only a few years away?

Could we one day find that when we dip our fingers in virtual water, it actually feels wet?

Maybe I am merely experiencing the old adage that the world we see is the world that we want to see.  And maybe that is why I am coming across one too many essays and news reports on the rapidly advancing technologies and, therefore, the implications for the future.  But then, maybe it is not my bias--it is all for real, which means that you too should be worried.

That quote is from this piece in the Atlantic, on how virtual reality is getting real.  Touching virtual water and feeling our fingers getting wet is apparently one of the examples "known as the haptics problem, to be the holy grail of virtual reality."  Smell, sensations in the skin, taste, are all in this category.

But that doesn’t mean it’s insurmountable. “I’m confident we’ll do it within our lifetimes,” Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, told me. “There are no fundamental physical laws that prevent us from building something that’s almost perfect.” Laidlaw is less optimistic—he thinks that creating lifelike haptics will take 100 years—but he agrees that a virtual world may one day be a nearly perfect simulacrum of the real one.

Oculus is the virtual reality technology leader, for now:

the much-anticipated Oculus Rift headset is expected to arrive in stores in early 2016, followed closely by several other devices.

This is only the beginning, of course.

“Right now, it’s like when you first had cellphones,” Richard Marks, one of the lead engineers working on Project Morpheus, Sony’s virtual-reality headset, told me. “A lot of focus is still on the most-basic things.”

You remember those early mobile phones?  Huge and bulky and awkward?  And how rapidly it "evolved," right?

Apparently all the publications I subscribe to are conspiring to feed me VR stories. Yes, it is all about me! ;)  The New Yorker reports about the latest from "Howard Rose, the soft-spoken C.E.O. of a company that designs virtual-reality environments"

Rose also helped create SnowWorld, in which snowballs, snowmen, and flying fish distracted burn patients during painful wound dressings and stretching procedures.
After asking for a swivel chair and more ice, Rose introduced Cool!, a successor to SnowWorld. A player of Cool! drifts down the path of a river, Rose explained. “It’s a kind of Jungian thing. Nobody asks, ‘Why am I on a river?’ It’s, ‘Oh, I’m going down a river.’ And there are otters: we use otters because otters are endearing—pretty nonthreatening.”

 How powerful is VR?  Rose has a human put her right hand in a real bucket of ice.  

The idea, he explained, was to see how long she could stand it, and then see how long she could stand it while lost in Cool!. Ice ache was standing in for more violent pain.

Get it?  You can already see where this is going.  In the real world versus when being completely drawn into VR.  

For fifty-two seconds, nobody spoke; there was the roar of air-conditioning and, faintly, in the D.C. café, a shrieking toddler. Gummer took her reddened hand out of the ice. Rose warmed it under a heat lamp. He then helped her put on a virtual-reality headset and headphones. ...
After two and a half minutes, Gummer took her hand out of the ice again. Rose said that such a result—three times the resilience—is fairly common in both informal and more rigorous tests.

Such technologies can be put to good use, of course, as in treating patients with intense pain and phobias and PTSD and more, where fooling the brain is a good therapeutic strategy.  But, we know enough from experience that technological advancements are not merely for constructive uses.  Siri to Samantha to Ava are the kinds of examples that I have already discussed in this blog.  Add Oculus Rift and "haptics" to all that.  We will rapidly redefine what it means to be human--the question that I often raise in this blog.

in 50 or 100 years we might develop a brain-machine interface that taps directly into the nervous system.
Perhaps then we’ll find that rather than jacking in for a while and calling it quits, we can, like Alice, move wholly into a Wonderland where the laws of the prosaic world (gravity, aging) no longer apply. Virtual reality could then become akin to the Singularity, a concept described by Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and Google engineer, among others: a way for our minds to separate from our bodies and, uploaded into a digital realm, live on even as our physical selves grow old and die.

A brave new world, indeed!

The path to cyborg weirdness is paved with novel gadgets

I need better hobbies.

Hobbies that won't make me feel all worrying about where things are going.  Hobbies that won't make me long for the simpler days of, oh, even five years ago.  Well, ok, any hobby other than the one that takes up all my life, it seems--the hobby of reading and thinking!

I had a wonderful Thanksgiving meal, hearty laughs and conversations, and I could have called it a day with all that.  If only I didn't have that nasty hobby!  So, stupid is as stupid does and I ended up reading this piece on how algorithms are messing with our lives.  Like I really needed to be reminded about this when I have blogged enough about this already, including only a week ago!

A single human showing explicit bias can only ever affect a finite number of people. An algorithm, on the other hand, has the potential to impact the lives of exponentially more.

Reading those two sentences, you probably think, "meh!" and move on.  If you did not worry about it, well, you ain't thinkin' enough.

we “trust algorithms, because we think of them as objective, whereas the reality is that humans craft those algorithms and can embed in them all sorts of biases and perspectives.” To put it another way, a computer algorithm might be unbiased in its execution, but, as noted, this does not mean that there is not bias encoded within it.

We humans write those programs, yes.  The programs are then used not merely to calculate the totals at cash registers but in a gazillion ways that we don't even pause to think about:

Consider the story of black Harvard University Ph.D. Latanya Sweeney, for instance. Searching on Google one day, Sweeney was shocked to notice that her search results were accompanied by ads asking, “Have you ever been arrested?” These ads did not appear for her white colleagues. Sweeney began a study that ultimately demonstrated that the machine-learning tools behind Google’s search were being inadvertently racist, by linking names more commonly given to black people to ads relating to arrest records.

Yes, humans wrote that program that was targeting her with those nasty ads.  And this was at the crème de la crème of the computing world.  Now you can begin to imagine how awful biases might creep up really lower down the computing food chain, right?  Are you beginning to worry now?

“We are all so scared of human bias and inconsistency,” says Danielle Citron, professor of law at the University of Maryland. “At the same time, we are overconfident about what it is that computers can do.”

You want more examples so that you, too, can begin to worry about algorithms (software agents is the phrase that I prefer) taking over our lives?

an algorithm may falsely profile an individual as a terrorist: a fate that befalls roughly 1,500 unlucky airline travelers each week.

Imagine the plight of a regular Joe Schmuck who, thanks to big data mined from various sources, is incorrectly identified as a terrorist.  Now, the burden is on that poor Schmuch to prove that he is not a terrorist.   I don't want to be that Joe Schmuck.

As if all that weren't enough, I then read another that covers a lot of the issues related to artificial intelligence that I have gone over even in my blog posts.  The essay ends with this from Peter Diamandis, who is the "co-founder of Singularity University and founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation":

Peter Diamandis is right that we’re at the beginning of “a transformation in what it means to be human and how society works and thinks,” maybe even “a rapid evolution of our species as machines begin to become parts of our prefrontal cortex.” But, he asked me, “Do people want to hear that? No.”
A lot do want to hear that, I told him—that’s why you guys have bestselling books and sellout conferences and an oversubscribed university built on NASA property and sponsored by Google and G.E. It’s just that a cyborg near future also weirds us out.
He nodded. He shook his head. “Why does it weird us out?”

It "weirds" out some of us, while a few others can't seem to wait for that weirdness to be here already, with a vast, overwhelming majority ignorant and apathetic about the whole damn thing because they love one novelty after another in the path that we are on towards ultimate weirdness!

If only shopping on Black Friday were my hobby--I would have never read those essays then and, instead, would have been in the line to buy the latest gadget!

In the survival of the fittest, this idiot will be terminated by natural and artificial intelligence!

Sometimes I simply want to stop reading anymore.

I know it sounds strange.  But there are moments when I wonder if my life would have been a lot better and more enjoyable if I didn't care to engage in random reading.

Why?

Because, I feel all the more that I don't know a damn thing.  During those moments, the knowing that I don't know becomes a burden.  Which is when I wonder if I would have had a happier existence, you know, leading a normal life of doing a job, and then ...

But, I am stuck with who I am.  The good news is that the clock is winding down ;)

The latest realization about my idiocy came from reading this piece at Edge.  It is a conversation with Jaron Lanier, whom I have quoted before in this blog--as recently as, ahem, the last post.  As if that level of exposing my idiocy weren't enough, the commenters, my god!  Well, not some internet trolls, but people who were invited to comment.  It is like one huge all-star lineup.

The conversation is all about artificial intelligence, and algorithms beginning to take over our lives.  Lanier provides this example that most of us can relate to:

Since our economy has shifted to what I call a surveillance economy, but let's say an economy where algorithms guide people a lot, we have this very odd situation where you have these algorithms that rely on big data in order to figure out who you should date, who you should sleep with, what music you should listen to, what books you should read, and on and on and on. ...
I'll give you a few examples of what I mean by that. Maybe I'll start with Netflix. The thing about Netflix is that there isn't much on it. There's a paucity of content on it. If you think of any particular movie you might want to see, the chances are it's not available for streaming, that is; that's what I'm talking about. And yet there's this recommendation engine, and the recommendation engine has the effect of serving as a cover to distract you from the fact that there's very little available from it. And yet people accept it as being intelligent, because a lot of what's available is perfectly fine.
... But it does contribute, at a macro level, to this overall atmosphere of accepting the algorithms as doing a lot more than they do. In the case of Netflix, the recommendation engine is serving to distract you from the fact that there's not much choice anyway.

A wonderful difference Lanier is alerting us to--"the recommendation engine is serving to distract you from the fact that there's not much choice anyway."  That is one heck of a scary thought, right?

So, on to the next step in this algorithmic world:

I want to get to an even deeper problem, which is that there's no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation in these systems.

In case you are wondering what Lanier is talking about, he explains:

the only way for such a system to be legitimate would be for it to have an observatory that could observe in peace, not being sullied by its own recommendations. Otherwise, it simply turns into a system that measures which manipulations work, as opposed to which ones don't work, which is very different from a virginal and empirically careful system that's trying to tell what recommendations would work had it not intervened. That's a pretty clear thing. What's not clear is where the boundary is.

Exactly!  My worry has been this, but I had no idea how to articulate it.  I was all gobbledygook whenever I tried to get my brain to work on this!  Whether it is Netflix or Amazon or Facebook or Google,

All of these things, there's no baseline, so we don't know to what degree they're measurement versus manipulation.

Turns out there is more.

If people are deciding what books to read based on a momentum within the recommendation engine that isn't going back to a virgin population, that hasn't been manipulated, then the whole thing is spun out of control and doesn't mean anything anymore. It's not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense. It's a mass incompetence, as opposed to Skynet from the Terminator movies. That's what this type of AI turns into.

 "Mass incompetence."  Hmmm ... it feels like it has already arrived.

The way big data/algorithmic world then works has tremendous economic consequences.  Like this one about the automatic translators and voice recognition.  Think Siri, for instance.  The more people use it, the better Siri gets, right?

The thing that we have to notice though is that, because of the mythology about AI, the services are presented as though they are these mystical, magical personas. IBM makes a dramatic case that they've created this entity that they call different things at different times—Deep Blue and so forth. The consumer tech companies, we tend to put a face in front of them, like a Cortana or a Siri. The problem with that is that these are not freestanding services.
... What this is, is behind the curtain, is literally millions of human translators who have to provide the examples. The thing is, they didn't just provide one corpus once way back. Instead, they're providing a new corpus every day, because the world of references, current events, and slang does change every day. We have to go and scrape examples from literally millions of translators, unbeknownst to them, every single day, to help keep those services working.
The problem here should be clear, but just let me state it explicitly: we're not paying the people who are providing the examples to the corpora—which is the plural of corpus—that we need in order to make AI algorithms work. In order to create this illusion of a freestanding autonomous artificial intelligent creature, we have to ignore the contributions from all the people whose data we're grabbing in order to make it work. That has a negative economic consequence.
This, to me, is where it becomes serious.

Why is this an economic issue?

The usual counterargument to that is that they are being paid in the sense that they too benefit from all the free stuff and reduced-cost stuff that comes out of the system. I don't buy that argument, because you need formal economic benefit to have a civilization, not just informal economic benefit.  

I.e., you can't buy a home with that informal benefit, can you?

In the history of organized religion, it's often been the case that people have been disempowered precisely to serve what were perceived to be the needs of some deity or another, where in fact what they were doing was supporting an elite class that was the priesthood for that deity.
That looks an awful lot like the new digital economy to me, where you have (natural language) translators and everybody else who contributes to the corpora that allow the data schemes to operate, contributing mostly to the fortunes of whoever runs the top computers. The new elite might say, "Well, but they're helping the AI, it's not us, they're helping the AI." It reminds me of somebody saying, "Oh, build these pyramids, it's in the service of this deity," but, on the ground, it's in the service of an elite. It's an economic effect of the new idea. The effect of the new religious idea of AI is a lot like the economic effect of the old idea, religion.

And then the commenters come in and critique Lanier.  At the end of it all, I came away wondering what the heck these smart people are talking about, and why I am feeling like an idiot.  You see why I think I would have been better off not reading that essay in the first place?

Let me leave you with this, that I have quoted before:

Apple is building a world in which there is a computer in your every interaction, waking and sleeping. A computer in your pocket. A computer on your body. A computer paying for all your purchases. A computer opening your hotel room door. A computer monitoring your movements as you walk though the mall. A computer watching you sleep. A computer controlling the devices in your home. A computer that tells you where you parked. A computer taking your pulse, telling you how many steps you took, how high you climbed and how many calories you burned—and sharing it all with your friends…. THIS IS THE NEW APPLE ECOSYSTEM. APPLE HAS TURNED OUR WORLD INTO ONE BIG UBIQUITOUS COMPUTER

Have a good day! ;)

If the Internet of Things is the future, then I want no part of it!

The other day, I went to Best Buy.  I walked about in the store to look at some of the latest gizmos.  From flashy refrigerators and laundry machines, to snazzy coffeemakers, to cameras big and small, to phones and tablets, all of them made me feel like everything I own dates back to the Flintstones.  I worried that if I talked to a sales person there, whatever I say might comes across as Yabba Dabba Doo! ;)

And then there were all those gizmos with which you can watch your home from anywhere on the planet, set the thermostat, open the garage door, switch lights on and off.  The gizmos that are connected to the internet, and all you need is your smartphone.  They looked cool.  And, at the same time, it is freaky!!!

I am not the only one who is uncomfortable about the future that is already here:

It is already possible to buy Internet-enabled light bulbs that turn on when your car signals your home that you are a certain distance away and coffeemakers that sync to the alarm on your phone, as well as WiFi washer-dryers that know you are away and periodically fluff your clothes until you return, and Internet-connected slow cookers, vacuums, and refrigerators. “Check the morning weather, browse the web for recipes, explore your social networks or leave notes for your family—all from the refrigerator door,” reads the ad for one.
Welcome to the beginning of what is being touted as the Internet’s next wave by technologists, investment bankers, research organizations, and the companies that stand to rake in some of an estimated $14.4 trillion by 2022—what they call the Internet of Things (IoT).

I used to have a coffeemaker that had a simple clock-driven program feature--load up the coffee and water in the night before going to sleep, set it switch on at a certain time and, presto, the coffee is ready waiting for me in the morning.  I hated that, and stopped programming it.  It felt, yes, freaky.  I was missing my connection to the experience of brewing coffee through all the steps, and being there as the first drops percolated through and as the wonderful aroma of coffee started wafting through the home.   The Internet of Things take that programmable features to a dimension that no man has ever gone before.

These gizmos are slowly creeping up on us:

One reason that it has been easy to miss the emergence of the Internet of Things, and therefore miss its significance, is that much of what is presented to the public as its avatars seems superfluous and beside the point. An alarm clock that emits the scent of bacon, a glow ball that signals if it is too windy to go out sailing, and an “egg minder” that tells you how many eggs are in your refrigerator no matter where you are in the (Internet-connected) world, revolutionary as they may be, hardly seem the stuff of revolutions; because they are novelties, they obscure what is novel about them.

Many of these novelties that are tethered to the internet are simultaneously devices that in turn keep track where we are at any moment.  (Even now, the location info in my smartphone is one that I always keep in the off mode unless I really, really, need that feature.)

as human behavior is tracked and merchandized on a massive scale, the Internet of Things creates the perfect conditions to bolster and expand the surveillance state. In the world of the Internet of Things, your car, your heating system, your refrigerator, your fitness apps, your credit card, your television set, your window shades, your scale, your medications, your camera, your heart rate monitor, your electric toothbrush, and your washing machine—to say nothing of your phone—generate a continuous stream of data that resides largely out of reach of the individual but not of those willing to pay for it or in other ways commandeer it.

Freaky!

in September Apple offered a glimpse of how the Internet of Things actually might play out, when it introduced the company’s new smart watch, mobile payment system, health apps, and other, seemingly random, additions to its product line. As Mat Honan virtually shouted in Wired:

Apple is building a world in which there is a computer in your every interaction, waking and sleeping. A computer in your pocket. A computer on your body. A computer paying for all your purchases. A computer opening your hotel room door. A computer monitoring your movements as you walk though the mall. A computer watching you sleep. A computer controlling the devices in your home. A computer that tells you where you parked. A computer taking your pulse, telling you how many steps you took, how high you climbed and how many calories you burned—and sharing it all with your friends…. THIS IS THE NEW APPLE ECOSYSTEM. APPLE HAS TURNED OUR WORLD INTO ONE BIG UBIQUITOUS COMPUTER.

So, where are we headed?

So here comes the Internet’s Third Wave. In its wake jobs will disappear, work will morph, and a lot of money will be made by the companies, consultants, and investment banks that saw it coming. Privacy will disappear, too, and our intimate spaces will become advertising platforms—last December Google sent a letter to the SEC explaining how it might run ads on home appliances—and we may be too busy trying to get our toaster to communicate with our bathroom scale to notice. 

First those evil corporations come for our toasters ...

The Flintstones era is looking better in the rear-view mirror, but is fading rapidly.

But, hey, only twenty-five more years! ;)

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Genome + connectome = you. Wait, who are you?

I have never cared for science fiction set in some distant future.  When my high school friend was reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories, I gave it a try and gave it up for good. When it is set that much into the future, it is as imaginary or as real as are the events in the Ramayana!

On the other hand, I love science fiction that makes me peek just a little bit out into the future. A future that can easily become the case in a few decades, if not a few years.  Almost always, these stories then provide a fictional background in order to explore the real issue--what it means to be human, and what if that sense of humanity is threatened by supremely intelligent computers.

A few weeks ago, it was one of those opening the curtains just a tad in order to peek into what might be a possibility.  I watched the movie Her.  The "her" is not a real person but the operating system that communicates via free language with the user. In its communication it is so human-like that the main guy begins to talk and relate to her as if she is his best friend.  Meanwhile, "she" keeps learning and improving herself--remember, this is exactly what artificial intelligence entails.  "She" becomes so human-like that he begins to have a relationship with her and refers to her as his girlfriend.



It is not that difficult to imagine such a man-machine interaction within a mere few more years.  After all, even now talk with plenty of machines.  When we call customer support, we bark so many words to, yes, a computer.  Some talk with Siri, which comes with iPhones.  Right now, they are a tad too dumb, but they are getting smarter by the day.

As we rush towards this artificial intelligence, it is not impossible to imagine that at some point those machines will be smarter than us. We will then find it to be advantageous to simply merge with the machine. Welcome to singularity!

At that point, it could become possible to transfer--upload--our memories into a machine.  And continue to live via the machine. And live forever.

Imagine a future in which your mind never dies. When your body begins to fail, a machine scans your brain in enough detail to capture its unique wiring. A computer system uses that data to simulate your brain. It won’t need to replicate every last detail. Like the phonograph, it will strip away the irrelevant physical structures, leaving only the essence of the patterns. And then there is a second you, with your memories, your emotions, your way of thinking and making decisions, translated onto computer hardware as easily as we copy a text file these days.
That second version of you could live in a simulated world and hardly know the difference. You could walk around a simulated city street, feel a cool breeze, eat at a café, talk to other simulated people, play games, watch movies, enjoy yourself. Pain and disease would be programmed out of existence. If you’re still interested in the world outside your simulated playground, you could Skype yourself into board meetings or family Christmas dinners.

If you think this is not possible, well, think again. How much of your memory already exists as bits and bytes?  Those photographs as your memory? The videos of your people?  Your thoughts?  We have been on this digital memory path for a while already.

The author of that above excerpt continues:

It is tempting to ignore these ideas as just another science-fiction trope, a nerd fantasy. But something about it won’t leave me alone. I am a neuroscientist. I study the brain. For nearly 30 years, I’ve studied how sensory information gets taken in and processed, how movements are controlled and, lately, how networks of neurons might compute the spooky property of awareness. I find myself asking, given what we know about the brain, whether we really could upload someone’s mind to a computer. And my best guess is: yes, almost certainly. That raises a host of further questions, not least: what will this technology do to us psychologically and culturally? Here, the answer seems just as emphatic, if necessarily murky in the details.
It will utterly transform humanity, probably in ways that are more disturbing than helpful. It will change us far more than the internet did, though perhaps in a similar direction. Even if the chances of all this coming to pass were slim, the implications are so dramatic that it would be wise to think them through seriously. But I’m not sure the chances are slim. In fact, the more I think about this possible future, the more it seems inevitable.

Murky in the details is one heck of an understatement when it comes to understanding what this technology will do to us psychologically and culturally. It is difficult to predict beyond Singularity.

Science being science, it marches on and there is no turning back.

 In 2005, two scientists, Olaf Sporns, professor of brain sciences at Indiana University, and Patric Hagmann, neuroscientist at the University of Lausanne, independently coined the term ‘connectome’ to refer to a map or wiring diagram of every neuronal connection in a brain. By analogy to the human genome, which contains all the information necessary to grow a human being, the human connectome in theory contains all the information necessary to wire up a functioning human brain. If the basic premise of neural network modelling is correct, then the essence of a human mind is contained in its pattern of connectivity. Your connectome, simulated in a computer, would recreate your conscious mind.

Yep, like your genome there could be your connectome. You can become a complete digital being.  A brave new world, indeed!

The essay is a wonderful read.  The examples he gives on the murkiness when it comes to psychology and culture will make you think a lot.  Here is one of those examples:

Then there are the issues that will arise if people deliberately run multiple copies of themselves at the same time, one in the real world and others in simulations. The nature of individuality, and individual responsibility, becomes rather fuzzy when you can literally meet yourself coming the other way. What, for instance, is the social expectation for married couples in a simulated afterlife? Do you stay together? Do some versions of you stay together and other versions separate?

All that is from the scientific world--the author "is a neuroscientist, novelist and composer. He is a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University."  Meanwhile, there was a related theme that I came across in the fictional world last night when reading the latest issue of the New Yorker.  T.C. Boyle's short story (sub. req.) is all about a father and his teenage daughter. His wife (her mother) had left them years prior and had moved in with a guy in Hong Kong.  The story is about the father, primarily, reliving the past via a gadget--something like a video game box.  The title of the story is The relive box.  The user--the father, for instance--can tell the box to go to a certain date and time in the past and then watch his own life as an observer.

Where are we headed, right?  All we know is there is no way but onward.  I want to hold on all those aspects of what it means to be human. I want to hold on tightly the humans who matter to me. In this real world, and not via some simulation as ones and zeros. Maybe the Luddites were not that wrong!

In any case, the fictional world is already ahead of us--by thinking of modern day Luddites in this context. Coming soon to a theater near you, straight from Hollywood: Transcendence.

Have a good weekend. Even if it is only with your operating system ;)