FULL CIRCLE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 360/ 07 Jul 2024 11:12

Astute readers <aside class=”smarm”> which of course to me means all of you </aside> will have noticed from various other features that this is the 30th Anniversary Issue of PC Pro, and since this is a monthly magazine, and since there are 12 months in a year, and since this is Idealog 360, the corollary is that I’ve been writing here since the beginning. I used the word ‘corollary’ there because it suggests a mathematical proof, and that is a ham-fisted way of introducing my theme for this month, which is mathematics. 

360 is a special number to me not simply because it represents 30 years, but because when expressed as an angle in degrees it represents a full circle, a return to the beginning. Another way to look at a full circle is in radians as an angle of 2π which I find more congenial because π is an irrational, even transcendental, number and I like to think of this column as being sometimes irrational and occasionally even transcendental (which you astute readers may have noticed). 

What I’m tiptoeing around here (in this nauseatingly arch manner) is a confession, namely  that I’m only posing as a computer nerd, that I’m actually a mathematician manqué, a math sheep in hacker/wolf’s clothing. At school, way back in the early 1960s, maths was my top subject in which I got a distinction at S level. I had to choose between reading chemistry or maths at uni but was seduced into the former by the lure of stinks and bangs over pencil and paper. My introduction to computing did come very early, in 1962, as part of a school team who built a prize-winning computer out of ex-RAF radar set parts, but that computer was analog, not digital, and all it could do was solve sixth-order differential equations and display the result as green squiggles on a cathode ray tube (which only real maths nerds could appreciate).

Math-nerdship never left me even once I discovered ‘real’ digital computers. At college I only ‘used’ London University’s Atlas to process the statistics for my biochemistry experiments. After Dennis Publishing (or H. Bunch Associates as we were called then) bought Personal Computer World in 1979, as the only maths nerd in the room I was delegated to take home a Commodore PET and learn how to program. I discovered that I loved it, but math-nerdship continued to steer my journey because after Basic I learned Pascal, Forth and Lisp, rather than C which would have been the obvious choice were I to want to make a living from coding (which I didn’t and don’t).   

Elsewhere in this issue you’ll find our nominations for the most important milestones in computing over the last 30 years, so rather than recap those here I’ll instead name a few of my favourite milestones in computer-related math-nerdship. Thanks to the internet everything is computer-related now, so I follow developments in maths through YouTube videos, Wikipedia articles, Royal Institution and TED talks, but most of all through the excellent, non-profit, Pulitzer-Prize-winning online magazine Quanta. 

Launched in 2012 to promote public understanding of mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and the basic life sciences, Quanta is funded by, but editorially independent of, the Simons Foundation. James Simons is a mathematician, educated at MIT and Berkeley, who started out working on pattern recognition, string and quantum field theory, then went to Wall Street and used his maths as a  ‘quant’ investor to become the 51st richest person in the world.

My favourite recent Quanta pieces have been by Philip Ball on [The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges | Quanta Magazine] and one on Dedekind [How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number | Quanta Magazine]. Number theory is the part of maths that still entrances me. Irrational and transcendental numbers like π have infinitely many, non-repeating digits after their decimal point which makes them a little awkward to handle. Dedekind found a stunningly elegant way to pin them down, by splitting the number line into everything below and everything above the one you want. 

I still write programs – in QPython on my Chromebook – though nowadays they’re almost always about maths, playing with palindromic numbers or fiddling hopelessly with the Collatz Conjecture, or just solving a puzzle from Quanta magazine. I watch tons of YouTube videos that use clever visualisation tricks to explain p-adic numbers and their relation to the Riemann Hypothesis. The great thing about maths is that it doesn’t require a lot of apparatus, just a brain plus some sand and a stick, chalk and a blackboard or pencil and paper (or Python and a Chromebook). And there’s always a chance of being that amateur who makes a significant discovery…   

[ Dick Pountain is quite satisfied with his slice of the π ]

AI EVERYWHERE?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 359/ 11 Jun 2024 09:48

A few weeks ago I  'attended' an interesting webinar organised by IT security firm Sophos in which one of their researchers, Ben Gelman, demonstrated how someone with no knowledge of programming or web design can construct a convincing e-commerce site complete with product pictures,  audio, even video for around £4.23 in 8 minutes. He did this live on screen using GPT4, Stable Diffusion and a couple of other free tools.Then he dropped the bombshell: by  adding just a tiny knowledge of HTML, a couple of lines,  he created from this an agent-based framework capable of churning out hundreds or thousands of similar sites from simple text templates.

The web will soon  be swamped by such sites since  it takes a lot longer than 8 minutes to take one down, or they may even disappear themselves once a quota of suckers have been hooked. It’s happening already, we’ve recently been ‘fleeced’ by items of clothing and pottery that bear little resemblance to AI-augmented pictures on certain sites.

Last week we went to a restaurant we’ve enjoyed for years and suffered a revolting, shoddily prepared meal. Went to Tripadvisor and found hundreds of still gushing five-star reviews, so on a hunch I filtered for one- and two-star reviews and found a few dozen accurate and mostly temperate complaints about drastic decline (‘What have they done to….’). Do all those five-stars mean most customers have no taste buds? Or were they paid for? Or are they AI generated? The fact I even ask that question speaks volumes…. Once it becomes known that you can use AI to prop-up dodgy businesses  the technology has arrived in the mainstream. 

On a completely different note, Apple just announced its deal with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its operating system on all  devices including Siri. Add to this similar projects from Meta and Google and it’s clear that it won’t be long before ‘AI-query’ becomes a commodity service on the same level as internet access and telecommunications, with transactions in the billions and trillions. Ideally they’d all merge into a single ‘information utility’ but of course that ideal is quite impossible to realise for several very serious reasons. 

Reason one is intellectual property. All those streams of content are owned by different, competing corporations whose only rationale is profit rather than public education. That hare has started running already with Scarlett Johansson’s suit against OpenAI for illicit use of her voice.Reason two is that even were the  AI vendors to get all necessary permissions to use other people’s content to train their GPT models, that content is going to become polluted at an exponentially-increasing rate by the gibberings of billions of dodgy websites created by their own customers.    

Reason three is the killer though. We’re all now aware of the colossal amounts of compute power needed to train and deploy GPT systems. Given present technology it’s quite impossible to train or fully query such a system on your local computer/phone/tablet (at the so-called ‘edge’) so these services will remain mostly cloud-based for the foreseeable future. Advances in analog-based AI processors and similar technologies can reduce telecommunication bandwidth requirements to some extent by more ‘edge processing’, but cloud AI servers will still consume as much of that old-fashioned utility, electricity, as a medium-sized African nation.

This is all happening during a world-threatening climate crisis which most sane commentators agree requires us to find cleaner ways to generate electricity and equally importantly to use far less of it. AI companies are already starting to worry about  where all that electricity is going to come from and the Wall Street Journal recently reported that OpenAI is in talks to buy “vast quantities” of energy from the startup nuclear fusion company Helion, in which CEO Sam Altman has invested $375 million. Fusion power occupies an ontological niche rather like that of quantum computing, somewhere between hope and reality, real-soon-now-perhaps… 

And then there’s the question of how to pay for all this juice, which leads into the realm of blogger Cory Doctorow’s concept of ‘enshittification’. He summarises his caustic take on tech evolution thus:

“Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

Read his argument at The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok. Corporations like Apple and Amazon didn’t spend the original AI research money and hence have to pay for it now, by buying the AI companies or by paying some kind of rent. The cost is so substantial they must get it back from their customers. The days of freebie services are numbered. 

[ Dick Pountain thinks it will all end in tears]