LIFE IS CHEAPER

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 288/ 6th July 2018 20:19:52

I was struck by a recent article in Alphr about the newly important field of Emotional AI (http://www.alphr.com/artificial-intelligence/1009663/can-ai-really-be-emotionally-intelligent), the attempt to imbue computer-based Artificial Intelligence systems with something approaching human emotions, as a way of making communication with such systems easier, more effective and satisfying.

At one end these attempts are simplistic but do-able: Google’s Assistant is being tweaked to emulate some emotional connection, so that it apologises for errors (instead of that irritating ‘Something went wrong!’) and responds to praise with gratitude. At a slightly higher level, systems can be trained to deduce the emotional state of human users by combining cues in their recent inputs and knowledge of recent activities - so, you’re probably angry if you just got cut off before completing an online purchase.

At the highest level some researchers would like to build proper models of human emotional response that an AI system can employ when interacting with us, but critics have been quick to point out the flaw in this - an AI system that can understand human emotions but not feel them itself would be, according to the textbook definition, a sociopath, and how many more smart sociopaths do we need? And of course this would be the position, because as I’ve pointed out ad nauseam in these columns, a computer can’t feel emotion because emotions are biochemical processes that exist only in the bodies of living, moving, perceiving, eating, breeding creatures. Most computers have nothing resembling a body. The few that do - say the control system of an autonomous vehicle which has vision, motion and collision sensing - could perhaps be provided with a simple emotional system, but the emotions it would employ would be so unlike ours they’d be of no more use in communication than those of an ant would be.

Wanting AI systems to think and feel the way we do is actually futile pursuit, a product of juvenile sci-fi thinking. What AI is good for is amplifying, assisting and correcting our own perceptions and agency in the world, not for replacing us. Driverless cars will never be safe or economically viable, but super-smart cars that remove much of the burden of driving from a human driver are just around corner.

The pursuit of the android is futile not because of the software difficulties, great as those are, but from simple energetics. All living things are composed of cells (the ultimate modules, honed by 4 billion years of evolution) each of which contains not only its own energy storage but also the full blueprint and mechanism for its reproduction. Androids with brains made from silicon chips can’t ever reproduce themselves, whatever 3D-printer zealots would have you believe - mineral mines, metal works, chemical factories, wafer fabs are required for their reproduction. It will always be cheaper to train a human to do some difficult job, maybe assisted by sophisticated AI tools, than to build an android to do it.

And here’s where things have the potential to turn nasty. Stunning advances in genetic engineering enabled by CRISP technology (see Idealog 284) mean that it will soon be easier and cheaper to consider modifying an animal to do some difficult job than build an android robot to do it, and once created these would be self-replicating. I don’t normally go in for pitching sci-fi movie treatments, but I’m very tempted by an update of ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ in which the evil scientist, instead of chopping up animals and sewing their bits back together in different combinations, instead employs CRISPR to create a race of not undead but living zombies, which have sufficient intelligence to follow instructions but few emotions and no ability to disobey.

You may believe, as I’d like to, that we would recoil from such an immoral and disgusting invention and ban it immediately, but how sure are you of that? People are now seriously discussing the problems of unemployment caused by automation by robots, but the concensus nevertheless remains that it will happen and we’ll have to find ways to cope with it, for example a univeral basic income or similar. If the imperative to profitability leads people to aquiesce in that, why wouldn’t they eventually aquiesce to genetically-modified zombie slaves?

If you still object that it would never be allowed, may I recommend a book for your summer beach reading: it’s called ‘A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things’ by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore. It explores the stuff humans have been doing ever since the 1400s, and are doing still, to maximise profits by rendering labour, money, food, energy, care, lives, and nature itself, as cheap as possible. Admit it, you’d like a zombie butler.

[Dick Pountain would still rather open the pod bay door himself]

SMART ENOUGH?

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 287/ 7th June 2018 10:42:22

It won’t have escaped your attention that a kind of backlash against the smartphone is going on, in certain elite circles. That picture of schoolkids rivetted to their phones in front of Rembrandt’s Night Watch went viral; in the Guardian rarely a week goes by without some columnist giving up her phone for Lent; and no lesser celeb than Simon Cowell just confirmed that he did it and it made him happier.

However, don’t expect me to come down on either side of this weighty debate. I’m not exactly indifferent to smartphones, but I’m far from being a dedicated or power user. I work at home and so still use a landline for most calls, and when out on the town or walking the green hills I use my mobile mostly for consulting Citymapper and listening to music on Spotify. This is not a case of Luddism: I was running the web on a Palm Pilot before the word smartphone was even coined, and used a Treo for several years before Steve Jobs’ bombshell burst onto the scene.

What it does mean is that I don’t fret about 'the notch', or curvy edges, or squeezy edges, or how easily fingerprints will wipe off my little jewel. I use an old HTC Desire from my provider-before-last which does me just fine: all black plastic I can stick it in my pocket without a case, it weighs nothing, it goes two days between charges, and if dropped it bounces. I rarely feel envy when I see someone flaunt the latest sliver of gleaming Peacock Blue sapphire glass, and was beginning to think this meant a lack of libido on my part. And then I read John Herrman…

I was browsing Medium when I came across a three-year-old article called ‘Shitphone: A Love Story’ and with that title, how could I not read it? Herrman - who turns out to be a prize-winning media reporter for the New York Times rather than some punkoid hacker - describes not giving up his smartphone, but giving up his smart phone, in favour of the cheapest no-name Chinese knock-off he could find. His article is amusing and deadly serious at the same time. In it he explains in clinical detail the phenomenology of living with a disgusting communication device, one that shames him in front of friends, colleagues, even waitresses. He unravels the psychic wounds that propel smartphone addiction: “The easy tactile pleasure of a nice phone makes you feel like you’re at the center of the internet, which is designed to respond to your desires.”

But that’s only the intro and he goes on to draw serious conclusions about the nature and life-cycle of the consumer electronics industry. Shitphone is just Poshphone of two years ago, (which is precisely what my HTC is). Shitphone is made from the same parts that Poshphone used to be. That’s inevitable because wafer fabs cost moon-landing bucks and no little Chinese bucket shop will ever be able afford to make its own chips. As Herrman put it: “Premium branded phones are the culmination of decades of research in wireless technology, computing, materials, and design. Shitphones are the culmination of decades of research in wireless technology, computing, materials, and design — minus a year or two.”

Branded phones are kept going (for now) by those ever-smaller improvements in usability that And here’s where things have the potential to turn nasty. Stunning advances in genetic engineering enabled by CRISP technology (see Idealog 284) mean that it will soon be easier and cheaper to consider modifying an animal to do some difficult job than build an android robot to do it, and once created these would be self-replicating. I don’t normally go in for pitching sci-fi movie treatments, but I’m very tempted by an update of ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ in which the evil scientist, instead of chopping up animals and sewing their bits back together in different combinations, instead employs CRISPR to create a race of not undead but living zombies, which have sufficient intelligence to follow instructions but few emotions and no ability to disobey.

You may believe, as I’d like to, that we would recoil from such an immoral and disgusting invention and ban it immediately, but how sure are you of that? People are now seriously discussing the problems of unemployment caused by automation by robots, but the concensus nevertheless remains that it will happen and we’ll have to find ways to cope with it, for example a univeral basic income or similar. If the imperative to profitability leads people to aquiesce in that, why wouldn’t they eventually aquiesce to genetically-modified zombie slaves?

If you still object that it would never be allowed, may I recommend a book for your summer beach reading: it’s called ‘A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things’ by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore. It explores the stuff humans have been doing ever since the 1400s, and are doing still, to maximise profits by rendering labour, money, food, energy, care, lives, and nature itself, as cheap as possible. Admit it, you’d like a zombie butler.

[Dick Pountain would still rather open the pod bay door himself]

FLICKER OF RECOGNITION

Dick Pountain/ Idealog286/ 9th May 2018 14:38:14

Their casual dropping of the “e” was a bravado touch (and I don’t imagine it had anything to do with Oulipo) but when I joined in 2006 I still found Flickr rather an odd name, simply because for we Brits a “flick” is a motion picture rather than a still. OK, Flickr did later admit video content, but it remains overwhelmingly a platform for still photography. And it’s not half so odd a name as SmugMug.

SmugMug is the US firm which back in April bought Flickr from its previous owner Yahoo, and recently emailed me, first to assure me that my Flickr account would remain unchanged for the forseeable future, then to invite me to try its own offering (which to my surprise was founded in 2002, two years before Flickr).

Regular readers may recall that I’m a dedicated Flickr user, with 1856 photos and other graphics displayed there. I’d have to confess though that my dedication has been, er, flickering somewhat over the last year or two, because getting pictures seen on Flickr feels increasing like a chore. The reason is simply the site’s success: it currently holds well over 10 billion pictures, and has 75 million users who upload as many as 25 million more pictures per day. Put another way, there are more Flickr users than the UK population, so getting a picture seen is much like stepping out into the street and waving it above your head.

Flickr’s organising principle is the photostream: your pictures get displayed in strict chronological order, so only the most recent, head of the stream, gets broadcast to your followers. Each picture becomes progressively less visible as time passes. Flickr’s Groups are the way around this. There are over ten million of these, created by users on specific themes: I’m in 221 of them, from birds, flowers and water to surrealism, abstract art and the disturbing. Putting a picture into groups gets it far more views than merely leaving it on your photostream for people to find. Unfortunately, due to that torrent of fresh content, many groups impose restrictions - for example only one or two pictures per day - and many also demand that you comment on some number of other people’s pictures for each of yours posted (to discourage spamming and careless use).

I like to make picture sequences that need to be seen together, but to get enough attention on Flickr I need to post them into at least 20 groups, most of which will only permit one or two a day, and require up to three comments. Hence it can take several days to post them all, and half-an-hour each day to add the comments (even using short-cut macros).

It’s becoming a chore, so I often put a sequence into a Facebook album instead, with just one on Flickr. However Facebook is an awkward platform for pictures, so I decided to check out SmugMug’s 14-day free trial.

SmugMug is all about selling your pictures, which I wouldn’t mind doing (and which Flickr has never achieved). Instead of a photostream you get a customisable website that looks highly professional, with its own URL for potential customers (Flickr has a slightly unfriendly face for non-members). However you pay for these services, a monthly fee that rises with the promotional features you require, and 15% of any sale goes to SmugMug.

The Basic plan at $4 is twice what I now pay on Flickr, while the Power ($6), Portfolio ($16) and Business ($30) plans would need to sell a lot of pix for me to break even.

It was viewing the sample sites that made up my mind. Most showed portraits, family pictures or postcard scenes, like those high-street photography shops you still see in many small towns. I realised that I’m not actually a photographer at all, just someone who employs a digital camera and computer software to make images. I don’t aim at the perfection of professional photographers, I don’t enter competitions, and I don’t share the dominant aesthetic on Flickr which is for over-saturated, over-sharpened photos that hit you in the eye.

My favourite among the famous photographers is Saul Leiter, who worked for Vogue but for his own pleasure preferred the out-of-focus, the eccentrically framed, the sudden splash of highly emotional colour. I heavily process my pictures to make them look more like paintings, I fiddle with fractal images in Sumo Paint for hours until something catches my eye, usually through colour as much as form. What pleases me is unlikely to be what would sell. Posting to Flickr is a chore, but then so is stretching a canvas. It’s art, innit.

[Dick Pountain would be delighted if you viewed his creations at https://www.flickr.com/photos/dick_pountain/ and it won’t cost you a penny]

MAKE ME A UNICORN?

Dick Pountain/Idealog 285/ 08 April 2018 11:18

In recent weeks I've been thinking a lot about the future, which is sort of surprising when the world's politicians are conspiring to make us wonder whether there'll even be one. It feels to me as though a bunch of technologies that we once thought revolutionary, then took for granted, are all at once maturing so as to deliver on their original promise.

It started as I was reviewing Greg Milner's book "Pinpoint", about the history of the GPS system. An excellent read, it tells you about those non-obvious applications for which GPS is used most, beyond the sat-nav on the dash of your car: agriculture, transport logistics, timing (and of course delivering smart bombs, for which is was originally invented). I concluded that, unlike the telescope or telephone, GPS actually enhances the planet rather than our senses. Its signals are just there, for anyone who chooses to capture them and hence discover exactly where they are and when.
Next I visited a Virtual Reality show called Future Tech Now at Islington's Design Centre. I've been writing about VR for 25 years now, and know all the jokes about how this years is... but it feels as though this year really is. It was a small show, of small firms, with VR kit that worked, was cheap and did interesting, fun or useful stuff. Learning how to suture a surgical incision from another continent (Medical Realities and Global Health Informatics); a thrilling and bone-shaking augmented VR ride from the top of the Shard to ground level down a huge twisty-loopy slide (Happy Finish); and a tiny drone with sub-match-box-sized camera that delivers full VR to your phone via Google Cardboard, for under £100 (Microdrone/Extreme Fliers). 

Perhaps most provoking of all was the Teslasuit, which has nothing to do with Elon Musk (I do hope they have a good IP lawyer). It's a gaming/simulation accessory developed by a firm based in the UK and Belarus, which provides all-body haptic feedback and motion-capture, in a very interesting way. I'd followed this sort of application through 20 years-worth of CeBITs, watching electric motors, pneumatics and hydraulics all come and go, rejected as too dangerous in case of failure. The Teslasuit uses transdermal stimulation, tiny electrical voltages applied to pads in its lining that affect your touch and temperature sensitive nerve ends to fool you into feeling an external force - without the risk of breaking your arm with actual forces.

Next, Jennifer Doudna's "A Crack in Creation", the book I wrote about last month, has the nowadays-compulsory lengthy subtitle which I forgot to mention, "Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution". Note well that "unthinkable". Doudna explains that the CRISPR/Cas 9 system she pioneered makes it possible to assemble a gene-editing kit for around $2000, which anyone who's prepared to do a lot of homework could employ in their kitchen or bathroom. You no longer need a million-dollar DNA sequencer, nor to send off, wait months and pay $50,000 to have a string of custom DNA made. You can buy capsids - small rings of RNA that encode CRISPR and Cas 9 - off the internet for more like £100. With my background, if I ever get bored writing Python programs I could maybe buy a shetland pony and start designing a unicorn. 

The final prod to my imagination came via a story in Nature about solar geoengineering, injecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere to reflect away sunlight and combat global warming. A group of scientists from those developing nations who have most to lose are in favour. No-one can know what unwanted effects it might have, but if you're going to be underwater in 20 years anyway, it might seem worth a shot. 

There is a common thread linking all these phenomena, and it's the same old idea I've been flogging to death in this column for ever, the difference between atoms and bits. VR technologies are getting good enough to build wholly convincing worlds in the realm of bits, that is, inside our heads. Meanwhile GPS, geoengineering and gene editing will enable people, both good and bad, to modify the real world of atoms in ways that are potentially terrifying and devastating. It's hard to say which road is the more risky. 

One could be optimistic and hope that with judicious control over their use, some combination of both approaches would make for an incredible new world. On the other hand a bunch of CRISPR-capable terrorists might cook up the bug that will eradicate all of us (or just the ones they don't like). What's certain is that our current generation of leaders are utterly incompetent to make the necessary decisions. 

[Being a boy, Dick Pountain isn't all that into unicorns and would really prefer a flying monkey]
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