Dick Pountain/Idealog 278/04 September 2017 09:57
Am I worried about a robot taking my job? The very question triggers in my imagination (and probably yours too) the vision of a shiny white plastic humanoid, possibly bearing a Honda logo, whirring smoothly into my study, sitting down in my typist's chair and tapping out this column on the keys of my laptop. But of course this isn't what happens at all.
Much of my job has already been automated away. 200 years ago I'd be writing this in ink with a dip pen, and forming each letter by hand. Now I press a key and the firmware of my computer forms each letter: I just choose the words and put them into order (were I foolish enough to turn on predictive text, the computer would try to bugger that up too). When I finished 200 years ago I'd probably roll up the paper and hand it to a boy who would run it round to the editorial office - robots had his job long ago. Now I press another key or two to send it by email. I'm just a word chooser and orderer and I get paid to do it, a crucial point.
Since we're such a social species it's hardly surprising that we're obsessed by humanoid robots, but they really aren't the biggest threat. They will certainly continue to improve in capability, and find roles in many service industries and social care where the more human they seem the better. Such applications raise deep ethical questions, and some very able people are already working on answers My old friend Prof Alan Winfield (alanwinfield.blogspot.co.uk) works with the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), IEEE and other bodies on a code for ethical regulation of robotics, based on principles like:
~ Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans.
~ Robots should be designed to comply with existing laws, rights and freedoms, including privacy.
~ Humans, not robots, are responsible agents, so a person must be attributed legal responsibility for every robot.
~ Robots are industrial products that must meet industry standards of safety and security.
~ Robots should not employ deliberately deceptive appearance to exploit vulnerable users: their mechanical nature should remain obvious.
No, the main threat is not a robot taking your job but of your job disappearing through less visible automation. "Moravec’s paradox" (named for AI researcher Hans Moravec) observes that it's easier for AI to imitate the advanced cognitive skills of a chess grandmaster than the simple perceptual and motor skills of a two-year old child. The hardest part of my opening scenario isn't writing this column, but walking through the door and sitting in the chair, which makes a humanoid robot hopelessly inefficient and far too expensive for the job. Cheaper and more efficient instead to generate this column using an AI program that scrapes all my 20 years of previous columns and does some inferring (though I do flatter myself that you might notice the difference...)
In a powerful recent Guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/20/robots-are-not-destroying-jobs-but-they-are-hollow-out-the-middle-class) Larry Elliot proposes a scenario in which increasingly polarised Western capitalist societies fragment further still. A tiny rich minority purchases the technology to automate away middle class jobs, then re-deploys the labour so displaced to perform cheaply those manual and service tasks that can't profitably be performed by machines. Automating those tasks would also have caused mass unemployment and destroyed the market for products, whereas paying a minimal universal wage might keep the whole shebang running after a fashion, with 1% living in extreme luxury and 99% still living, but in extreme drudgery.
Last Sunday I booked online our winter's worth of concert tickets - no box-office clerks were employed, even on the telephone. When the various days arrive, we'll travel, say to the Wigmore Hall, by bus (in 5 years time that might be driverless) to watch very talented people make unamplified music on acoustic wooden instruments designed over a century ago. And I'm prepared to pay and travel to hear this even though I could listen to "the same" music on Spotify. That evening I watched on TV a BBC Prom of marvellous Indian classical music, and noticed that one trio was using an electronic drone box in place of a human tanpura player, thus saving one quarter of their labour cost.
These are the sorts of decision that automation will increasingly face us with. I think I'm pretty good at choosing words and putting them into the right order, but the market may eventually not agree. However if we keep listening only to the market, then sooner rather than later we may find life is no longer worth living. What kinds of skills do we wish to preserve, regardless of efficiency or profit?
Friday, 16 February 2018
FAME GAME
Dick Pountain/Idealog 277/05 August 2017 11:05
I'm not overly prone to hero-worship, but that's not to say that I don't have a few: they include soldiers, scientists, philosophers and musicians, from Garibaldi to Richard Feynman. One of these heroes died in February of this year, Hans Rosling a Swedish doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. That may not sound a typically heroic CV, but his heroism consisted in inventing ways to make statistics both exciting and comprehensible to the public, then deploying this ability for a humane end, namely to counteract panic about overpopulation. This wasn't speculation, but based on his early experience as a doctor in various developing countries.
His brilliant 2013 documentary "Don't Panic - the Truth About Population" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E) employed state-of-the-art Musion 3D animated infographics to show that as a nations' population achieves higher living standards their average fertility drops so steeply that total world population is already peaking, and is set to plateau at around 11 billion by 2100. And he believed this number could be fed if resources (particularly African land) were sensibly used. To be sure 2013 now feels like a previous epoch in which one could sensibly assume people would get steadily more prosperous, and that no crackpot religion would take power to push the birthrate back up again.
Anyhow, I wanted to pay tribute to Rosling's amazing facility with statistics and his belief that when used properly they reveal truths that can help us survive, and so I've devised a thought-experiment that might have appealed to his impish Scandinavian sense of humour. It goes something like this.
Create a 3D coordinate system with three orthogonal axes labelled Knowledge, Fame and Wealth. Define these three quantities simplistically but pragmatically by devising functions to extract them from existing available databases. For example you might create a Knowledge function that compiles each person's years of primary, secondary and possibly tertiary education; Fame might be derived from a person's extended family size, to which add Google hits on their name, Facebook and Twitter friends, and for a few add professional data like number of TV or movie performances, books published, sporting successes and so on; Wealth would have to come from government tax databases, bank records (pehaps supplemented from the Panama Papers) and similar. Compile these three parameters for every person in the world, then plot them all into your 3D space.
You'll protest that this is impossible and I'll agree, but will then point out that a) it's only a thought-experiment and b) think back to the 2016 US election when certain Big Data firms like Cambridge Analytics claimed to have done something not too far off for most of the US electorate. It's nowhere near so far-fetched as it was even two years ago.
What you'd now be looking at is a solid of roughly spherical proportions close to the origin, containing the vast majority of the world population, with numerous spiky protuberances that contain all the world's academics, celebrities and plutocrats: a sort of world hedgehog. The length and volume of these protuberances would be a measure of the inequalities along all three axes. Now let's get more implausible still, by updating this chart on a yearly basis and animating it in Rosling/Musion style, so that it throbs and twitches, grows and shrinks in various directions.
If you could project the data back into the medium-distant past you'd see the effect of various political programs and social movements: following World War Two the whole sphere would expand along at least the Wealth and Knowledge axes, up until the late 1970s when Wealth motion might cease, and may even go into reverse. From that point onwards you'd see some swelling along the Fame axis as the internet gives more people their Warholian 15 minutes, but the spikes along Fame and Wealth directions would grow enormously longer and far thinner as Wealth becomes far more concentrated. As for Knowledge, who knows: are we really getting smarter or dumber? It's easy to jump to conclusions here. Literacy is still probably increasing through much of the developing world, except where religious extremists obstruct it, while university attendance has continued to spread in the developed world, but may soon go into reverse due to massively increased costs - and there are furious arguments about quality and maintenance of standards. I do wish I had this experiment running and could see the "real" picture.
I'm sure you know that cynical modern proverb "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese". Well this proverb, like my thought experiment, illustrates the difference between natural and social competition. In human societies the playing field is anything but flat, in fact it's a spiky surface, something like a naval mine or huge sea urchin.
I'm not overly prone to hero-worship, but that's not to say that I don't have a few: they include soldiers, scientists, philosophers and musicians, from Garibaldi to Richard Feynman. One of these heroes died in February of this year, Hans Rosling a Swedish doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. That may not sound a typically heroic CV, but his heroism consisted in inventing ways to make statistics both exciting and comprehensible to the public, then deploying this ability for a humane end, namely to counteract panic about overpopulation. This wasn't speculation, but based on his early experience as a doctor in various developing countries.
His brilliant 2013 documentary "Don't Panic - the Truth About Population" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E) employed state-of-the-art Musion 3D animated infographics to show that as a nations' population achieves higher living standards their average fertility drops so steeply that total world population is already peaking, and is set to plateau at around 11 billion by 2100. And he believed this number could be fed if resources (particularly African land) were sensibly used. To be sure 2013 now feels like a previous epoch in which one could sensibly assume people would get steadily more prosperous, and that no crackpot religion would take power to push the birthrate back up again.
Anyhow, I wanted to pay tribute to Rosling's amazing facility with statistics and his belief that when used properly they reveal truths that can help us survive, and so I've devised a thought-experiment that might have appealed to his impish Scandinavian sense of humour. It goes something like this.
Create a 3D coordinate system with three orthogonal axes labelled Knowledge, Fame and Wealth. Define these three quantities simplistically but pragmatically by devising functions to extract them from existing available databases. For example you might create a Knowledge function that compiles each person's years of primary, secondary and possibly tertiary education; Fame might be derived from a person's extended family size, to which add Google hits on their name, Facebook and Twitter friends, and for a few add professional data like number of TV or movie performances, books published, sporting successes and so on; Wealth would have to come from government tax databases, bank records (pehaps supplemented from the Panama Papers) and similar. Compile these three parameters for every person in the world, then plot them all into your 3D space.
You'll protest that this is impossible and I'll agree, but will then point out that a) it's only a thought-experiment and b) think back to the 2016 US election when certain Big Data firms like Cambridge Analytics claimed to have done something not too far off for most of the US electorate. It's nowhere near so far-fetched as it was even two years ago.
What you'd now be looking at is a solid of roughly spherical proportions close to the origin, containing the vast majority of the world population, with numerous spiky protuberances that contain all the world's academics, celebrities and plutocrats: a sort of world hedgehog. The length and volume of these protuberances would be a measure of the inequalities along all three axes. Now let's get more implausible still, by updating this chart on a yearly basis and animating it in Rosling/Musion style, so that it throbs and twitches, grows and shrinks in various directions.
If you could project the data back into the medium-distant past you'd see the effect of various political programs and social movements: following World War Two the whole sphere would expand along at least the Wealth and Knowledge axes, up until the late 1970s when Wealth motion might cease, and may even go into reverse. From that point onwards you'd see some swelling along the Fame axis as the internet gives more people their Warholian 15 minutes, but the spikes along Fame and Wealth directions would grow enormously longer and far thinner as Wealth becomes far more concentrated. As for Knowledge, who knows: are we really getting smarter or dumber? It's easy to jump to conclusions here. Literacy is still probably increasing through much of the developing world, except where religious extremists obstruct it, while university attendance has continued to spread in the developed world, but may soon go into reverse due to massively increased costs - and there are furious arguments about quality and maintenance of standards. I do wish I had this experiment running and could see the "real" picture.
I'm sure you know that cynical modern proverb "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese". Well this proverb, like my thought experiment, illustrates the difference between natural and social competition. In human societies the playing field is anything but flat, in fact it's a spiky surface, something like a naval mine or huge sea urchin.
Monday, 4 December 2017
TALKS ABOUT TORX
Dick Pountain/Idealog 276/06 July 2017 14:44
I've decided that I would like you all to refer to me as an Essayist rather than a Columnist from now on. After attending a stimulating talk by Brian Dillon at the London Review bookshop the other day, I was lead to realise that, in a certain light, the stuff with which I populate this column looks quite a bit like an essay, and that essays are way cooler than columns. So I would very much like to be added somewhere near the bottom of a long list that starts with Montaigne, Hazlitt, Orwell, Sontag and Woolf.
Dillon's definition of an essay was a kind of text that starts by chronicling some everyday triumph or defeat, then draws from this some conclusion of universal validity. So, here goes. We were giving a dinner party for some old friends, when sometime between the espressos and the petit fours all our lights went out. Flipping the circuit breaker restored the power, so there was no continuing short anywhere, but these outages recurred several times over the next week. Our ancient electrics box contains five separately fused circuits, sequential removal of which enabled me to isolate the fault to one quadrant of the house, namely the living room, and soon after we identified and replaced the offending wall socket, which had been sporadically arcing, thanks to drops of moisture coming from a blocked gutter (now unblocked).
But before that happy day, one of these outages had caused a secondary problem of far more relevance to this column/essay. The morning after, my Lenovo Yoga laptop wouldn't switch on. Stone dead, no amount of button pressing would cause it to boot or even to flicker a light. I first of all wondered whether the power spikes had fried its battery, but after some Googling I discovered that it's a well-known problem not only for the Yoga but also for many other modern laptops, including some iMacs. It's due to some sort of dumb-ass design decisions in their internal charging circuitry and BIOS firmware, and the cure is to disconnect and then reconnect the battery. Except that on my Yoga (and various iMacs, etc) the batteries are no longer user-accessible via a trapdoor as they used to be not all that long ago.
Instead the bottom of my Yoga presented a seamless expanse of smooth black alloy, held down by a dozen tiny screws bearing fiendishly oriental star symbols instead of slots. These I learned are called Torx T5 fasteners, so off I went the the local Maplins and bought a Torx 5 screwdriver. Brian Dillon had remarked that the structure of an essay often starts from a very narrow topic and then widens out toward its conclusion. Few household utensils are narrower than a Torx 5 screwdriver.
I discovered that a Torx screwdriver does work rather beautifully - far more positive and grippy than Philips or Hex - and soon I had dish full of the little buggers and an open laptop whose PCB is a thing of greater beauty still. Mediterranean Blue in colour, thickly covered in the tiniest imaginable components, connected by shimmering silver freeways like a relief map of some futuristic city. The battery was completely embedded in this stunning landscape, and its plug was one of those tiny components.
By using two pairs of medical tweezers and a magnifying glass I was able to unplug the battery, only breaking off one of the two plastic locking lugs in the process. Then I pressed the reset button and the BIOS messages did indeed appear briefly. Then I replugged the battery (adding a judicious patch of gaffer tape) and rebooted, and there was my working world again, wholly intact. And since I'm already on blood pressure medication, with no major ill-effects on my health.
So, there's a small quotidian triumph, and now to widen it out into conclusions of universal validity. Firstly, designers of electronic equipment who believe their design so bullet-proof that they don't need to provide user access need to be disabused of this belief, perhaps using some kinds of medieval persuasion technology. Secondly, do buy a whole set of Torx screwdrivers, only a few quid in Maplins. Thirdly, don't be afraid to fiddle inside your laptop: it's only a human invention after all, and not in any way magic or supernatural (though it is terribly fragile). Fourthly, perhaps you *should* be afraid to fiddle with your mains supply - having once survived a 9000 volt shock, I'm unusually free of this extremely useful and protective fear. And finally, among that illustrious list of essayists to which I aspire to belong, among Montaigne, Hazlitt, Orwell, Sontag and Woolf, not one of them could tell a Torx screwdriver from a bare bodkin...
I've decided that I would like you all to refer to me as an Essayist rather than a Columnist from now on. After attending a stimulating talk by Brian Dillon at the London Review bookshop the other day, I was lead to realise that, in a certain light, the stuff with which I populate this column looks quite a bit like an essay, and that essays are way cooler than columns. So I would very much like to be added somewhere near the bottom of a long list that starts with Montaigne, Hazlitt, Orwell, Sontag and Woolf.
Dillon's definition of an essay was a kind of text that starts by chronicling some everyday triumph or defeat, then draws from this some conclusion of universal validity. So, here goes. We were giving a dinner party for some old friends, when sometime between the espressos and the petit fours all our lights went out. Flipping the circuit breaker restored the power, so there was no continuing short anywhere, but these outages recurred several times over the next week. Our ancient electrics box contains five separately fused circuits, sequential removal of which enabled me to isolate the fault to one quadrant of the house, namely the living room, and soon after we identified and replaced the offending wall socket, which had been sporadically arcing, thanks to drops of moisture coming from a blocked gutter (now unblocked).
But before that happy day, one of these outages had caused a secondary problem of far more relevance to this column/essay. The morning after, my Lenovo Yoga laptop wouldn't switch on. Stone dead, no amount of button pressing would cause it to boot or even to flicker a light. I first of all wondered whether the power spikes had fried its battery, but after some Googling I discovered that it's a well-known problem not only for the Yoga but also for many other modern laptops, including some iMacs. It's due to some sort of dumb-ass design decisions in their internal charging circuitry and BIOS firmware, and the cure is to disconnect and then reconnect the battery. Except that on my Yoga (and various iMacs, etc) the batteries are no longer user-accessible via a trapdoor as they used to be not all that long ago.
Instead the bottom of my Yoga presented a seamless expanse of smooth black alloy, held down by a dozen tiny screws bearing fiendishly oriental star symbols instead of slots. These I learned are called Torx T5 fasteners, so off I went the the local Maplins and bought a Torx 5 screwdriver. Brian Dillon had remarked that the structure of an essay often starts from a very narrow topic and then widens out toward its conclusion. Few household utensils are narrower than a Torx 5 screwdriver.
I discovered that a Torx screwdriver does work rather beautifully - far more positive and grippy than Philips or Hex - and soon I had dish full of the little buggers and an open laptop whose PCB is a thing of greater beauty still. Mediterranean Blue in colour, thickly covered in the tiniest imaginable components, connected by shimmering silver freeways like a relief map of some futuristic city. The battery was completely embedded in this stunning landscape, and its plug was one of those tiny components.
By using two pairs of medical tweezers and a magnifying glass I was able to unplug the battery, only breaking off one of the two plastic locking lugs in the process. Then I pressed the reset button and the BIOS messages did indeed appear briefly. Then I replugged the battery (adding a judicious patch of gaffer tape) and rebooted, and there was my working world again, wholly intact. And since I'm already on blood pressure medication, with no major ill-effects on my health.
So, there's a small quotidian triumph, and now to widen it out into conclusions of universal validity. Firstly, designers of electronic equipment who believe their design so bullet-proof that they don't need to provide user access need to be disabused of this belief, perhaps using some kinds of medieval persuasion technology. Secondly, do buy a whole set of Torx screwdrivers, only a few quid in Maplins. Thirdly, don't be afraid to fiddle inside your laptop: it's only a human invention after all, and not in any way magic or supernatural (though it is terribly fragile). Fourthly, perhaps you *should* be afraid to fiddle with your mains supply - having once survived a 9000 volt shock, I'm unusually free of this extremely useful and protective fear. And finally, among that illustrious list of essayists to which I aspire to belong, among Montaigne, Hazlitt, Orwell, Sontag and Woolf, not one of them could tell a Torx screwdriver from a bare bodkin...
Wednesday, 1 November 2017
FANTASY FOOT-PEDAL
Dick Pountain/Idealog 275/01 June 2017 15:44
I'm sitting at my desk typing the sentence "I've never really been a gadget person" with a waist-high pile of old gadget boxes glowering in my peripheral vision. Nevertheless I stand by my assertion: many of them are years old and relate to photographic rather than computer equipment. I don't see a therapist so can't answer why I keep them: initially rational (might be faulty and need returning), eventually quasi-rational (may become collectors' item so keep the box). By and large though I'm really not. I upgrade my mobile and laptop around once a decade. I have all the camera gear I'll ever need. I don't go in for smart watches, fitbits, digital recorders or the like. Except. I just bought two gadgets to do with music making. Sorry.
In my last column I explored the way modern digital tools affect various creative endeavours, and proposed that a human being always needs to be in the iterative enhancement loop to make aesthetic judgements about when to stop. Well, since then I've taken this argument a few steps further, assisted by my two new gadgets, namely a guitar looper pedal and an Akai MPKmini keyboard. To take the latter first, this keyboard connects to my Lenovo laptop which runs Ableton Live.
Anyone who creates EDM (electronic dance music) will have heard of Ableton, a production-and-performance system in which, as well composing tracks, you can also arrange and perform them like a DJ. I'm not producing EDM myself, but as I've described here before, my interest lies in experimental algorithmic music. Playing the MIDI files my system generates through the Microsoft GS Wavetable synthesiser bundled with Windows is good enough during composition, but its instrument voices aren't really good enough for public consumption, so my more successful efforts I post-compose in Ableton using its superior instruments, and also some AWE32 SoundFonts.
Ableton is a very clever program, developed partly at the University of Berlin using advanced "granular synthesis" theory: it's enormously flexible, mixing sampled audio seamlessly with MIDI, changing tempos while maintaining pitch, its "warp"engine syncs different clips automatically, and much, much more. However it's also one of those mega-programs like PhotoShop, or the 3D animation program Maya, for which a mere human lifespan is too short to find all its (literal) bells and whistles, let alone use them all. I originally chose it because its user interface does *not* imitate a rack full of brushed aluminium knobs and dials: I'm not a sound engineer so that stuff isn't home to me.
My algorithmic music is getting steadily more capable, now displaying far greater rhythmic and dynamic complexity. Shortish passages can sound alarmingly like some six-armed Indian deity playing the piano, but it still has difficulty with long-range structure: pieces longer than three or four minutes tend to betray their mechanical origin. Dividing the code into shorter movements, generated as separate MIDI files, is one way around this, but another is to intervene myself. So thank you FaceBook for showing me that Akai mini ad. For £60 this little beauty, with its 25 keys, 8 pads and 8 knobs is just perfect. I can play a MIDI file in Ableton and overdub parts of it using the keyboard, but better still, map the whole piece onto the Akai so that each key I press sounds a whole multi-instrument phrase in perfect time. When combined with the Akai's built-in arpeggiator this makes for terrifying displays of orchestral pseudo-virtuosity that I may one day inflict on the unsuspecting public if they don't behave themselves.
And what about my other gadget? That belongs in the curious domain between the analog and the digital, a tiny Donner looper pedal that records two separate tracks of guitar of 10 minutes duration via a foot button. The guitar rig I've built up over the years incorporates a 10W Marshall practice amp with a variety of effects, a vintage Zoom digital drum machine and a micro-mixer, all feeding into this new looper. I can now generate some unfeasibly complicated algorithmic/orchestral backing track in Ableton, output it to a WAV file on my tablet and plug that into the mixer, then play live guitar over it. Or I can snitch a few seconds of bass from my favourite Dave Holland album on Spotify, into the looper, and put some drums onto it played with my fingers on the Zoom's pads. The looper has built-in reverse and speed-up effects so I can pretend to be in one of Bill Frisell's great trios, if only for a few minutes. Virtual Reality isn't the only way of using digital technology to live in a make-believe world, and you don't bump into things so often in a sound world...
I'm sitting at my desk typing the sentence "I've never really been a gadget person" with a waist-high pile of old gadget boxes glowering in my peripheral vision. Nevertheless I stand by my assertion: many of them are years old and relate to photographic rather than computer equipment. I don't see a therapist so can't answer why I keep them: initially rational (might be faulty and need returning), eventually quasi-rational (may become collectors' item so keep the box). By and large though I'm really not. I upgrade my mobile and laptop around once a decade. I have all the camera gear I'll ever need. I don't go in for smart watches, fitbits, digital recorders or the like. Except. I just bought two gadgets to do with music making. Sorry.
In my last column I explored the way modern digital tools affect various creative endeavours, and proposed that a human being always needs to be in the iterative enhancement loop to make aesthetic judgements about when to stop. Well, since then I've taken this argument a few steps further, assisted by my two new gadgets, namely a guitar looper pedal and an Akai MPKmini keyboard. To take the latter first, this keyboard connects to my Lenovo laptop which runs Ableton Live.
Anyone who creates EDM (electronic dance music) will have heard of Ableton, a production-and-performance system in which, as well composing tracks, you can also arrange and perform them like a DJ. I'm not producing EDM myself, but as I've described here before, my interest lies in experimental algorithmic music. Playing the MIDI files my system generates through the Microsoft GS Wavetable synthesiser bundled with Windows is good enough during composition, but its instrument voices aren't really good enough for public consumption, so my more successful efforts I post-compose in Ableton using its superior instruments, and also some AWE32 SoundFonts.
Ableton is a very clever program, developed partly at the University of Berlin using advanced "granular synthesis" theory: it's enormously flexible, mixing sampled audio seamlessly with MIDI, changing tempos while maintaining pitch, its "warp"engine syncs different clips automatically, and much, much more. However it's also one of those mega-programs like PhotoShop, or the 3D animation program Maya, for which a mere human lifespan is too short to find all its (literal) bells and whistles, let alone use them all. I originally chose it because its user interface does *not* imitate a rack full of brushed aluminium knobs and dials: I'm not a sound engineer so that stuff isn't home to me.
My algorithmic music is getting steadily more capable, now displaying far greater rhythmic and dynamic complexity. Shortish passages can sound alarmingly like some six-armed Indian deity playing the piano, but it still has difficulty with long-range structure: pieces longer than three or four minutes tend to betray their mechanical origin. Dividing the code into shorter movements, generated as separate MIDI files, is one way around this, but another is to intervene myself. So thank you FaceBook for showing me that Akai mini ad. For £60 this little beauty, with its 25 keys, 8 pads and 8 knobs is just perfect. I can play a MIDI file in Ableton and overdub parts of it using the keyboard, but better still, map the whole piece onto the Akai so that each key I press sounds a whole multi-instrument phrase in perfect time. When combined with the Akai's built-in arpeggiator this makes for terrifying displays of orchestral pseudo-virtuosity that I may one day inflict on the unsuspecting public if they don't behave themselves.
And what about my other gadget? That belongs in the curious domain between the analog and the digital, a tiny Donner looper pedal that records two separate tracks of guitar of 10 minutes duration via a foot button. The guitar rig I've built up over the years incorporates a 10W Marshall practice amp with a variety of effects, a vintage Zoom digital drum machine and a micro-mixer, all feeding into this new looper. I can now generate some unfeasibly complicated algorithmic/orchestral backing track in Ableton, output it to a WAV file on my tablet and plug that into the mixer, then play live guitar over it. Or I can snitch a few seconds of bass from my favourite Dave Holland album on Spotify, into the looper, and put some drums onto it played with my fingers on the Zoom's pads. The looper has built-in reverse and speed-up effects so I can pretend to be in one of Bill Frisell's great trios, if only for a few minutes. Virtual Reality isn't the only way of using digital technology to live in a make-believe world, and you don't bump into things so often in a sound world...
WHEN TO STOP
Dick Pountain/Idealog 274/05 May 2017 11:06
You're probably familiar with the expression "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", but what exactly do you think it means? The obvious interpretation is relativist: what I find beautiful need not be what you find beautiful. But we could also take it literally, namely that beauty is property of, or a process within, the human eye (or visual cortex, or brain in general) rather than a property of external objects.
My two main "hobbies", regularly chronicled in this column, are fiddling with photographs in PhotoShop Elements 5, and composing algorithmic music using my own software recently rewritten in Python. What these activities have in common is firstly that they are both pursued on a computer, and secondly that they are both iterative in nature: I make a change, look at it or listen to it, decide whether or not it's for the better or the worse, accept or reject it, then make another, and so on until I'm sufficiently satisfied to stop and call it a finished "work".
You may have already spotted that this is the very same process practiced by artists of all eras, on all materials and in all styles - with one exception made possible by the computer and the digital nature of its material. That exception is that in most real-world materials, the step changes are irreversible. That's most clearly true for a sculptor who chisels off chips of marble that can't be replaced, but partially so for an oil painter who applies daubs that can't be removed, only overpainted, or a water colourist who lacks even that option. Writers, before the advent of word-processing, had recourse to crossing-out, the india rubber, Tippex or the waste-paper basket. None of that matters so much as does the end point of the process, knowing when to stop, and in this the computer hinders rather than helps.
That tempting Undo icon means I could go on fiddling with the same piece until death, or the heat-death of the universe (whichever comes first). There is a defence against such runaway fiddling though, and that's the number of parameters involved. When processing a photo I have available 120+ filters, 23 blend modes and 20 other adjustments that, when applied even to just two layers, makes for 3 billion possible combinations per iteration, and I make dozens of iterations. Documenting all the parameters for each step, to make the whole process reproducable, would be impossibly tedious, but in any case I don't want to. I'm happy to play on the same level field as Michelangelo and Beethoven, even if my game is far less impressive.
Playing on the same field is another way of saying that it's our eyes, ears, arms, legs, brains that decide when to stop, the decision that creates what we call beauty. (Actually it's noses and tongues too, if you're prepared, as I am, to include cooking and perfumery as arts). This ability to know when to stop may have been hard-wired into our brains by evolution. Animal brains contain many pattern analysing circuits, some imparted by evolution, some further trained by early experience. On the evolutionary side it's been suggested that colour vision offered a dietary advantage in distinguishing ripe from unripe fruit (many carnivores lack it), and it's also deeply involved in sexual display, and hence selection, particularly among birds and insects.
When Pablo Picasso drew a freehand squiggle it always looked better than my own squiggles, and I propose that's a matter of radii of curvature: some curves are right and some are wrong (too acute, jerky). In other words some curves are just sexier than others, and I'll leave the evolutionary "explanation" to you. We could analyse this mathematically using line integrals, div, grad and curl, but that would be pointless. Our pattern circuits are connected to our limbic system, source of emotions, that is, of dopamine reward. No amount of maths can substitute for looking, then feeling good at what you see.
Another possible evolutionary advantage of curve sensing is for landscape recognition. I used to spend time in a small croft near the sea in northern Scotland, where the seaward skyscape was dominated by seven distinctive humps of hills that we, of course, called the Seven Sisters. I can still imagine that shape if I close my eyes, leading me to hypothesise that this ability to recognise your home landscape may have had great survival advantage in the epochs before roads, church steeples or GPS. To zealots of strong AI, I'll just say this: we might analyse all such sensual recognitions and turn them into algorithms, but so far there's no way that a computer can *feel* good, and without that it can't have any real understanding of what beauty is.
You're probably familiar with the expression "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", but what exactly do you think it means? The obvious interpretation is relativist: what I find beautiful need not be what you find beautiful. But we could also take it literally, namely that beauty is property of, or a process within, the human eye (or visual cortex, or brain in general) rather than a property of external objects.
My two main "hobbies", regularly chronicled in this column, are fiddling with photographs in PhotoShop Elements 5, and composing algorithmic music using my own software recently rewritten in Python. What these activities have in common is firstly that they are both pursued on a computer, and secondly that they are both iterative in nature: I make a change, look at it or listen to it, decide whether or not it's for the better or the worse, accept or reject it, then make another, and so on until I'm sufficiently satisfied to stop and call it a finished "work".
You may have already spotted that this is the very same process practiced by artists of all eras, on all materials and in all styles - with one exception made possible by the computer and the digital nature of its material. That exception is that in most real-world materials, the step changes are irreversible. That's most clearly true for a sculptor who chisels off chips of marble that can't be replaced, but partially so for an oil painter who applies daubs that can't be removed, only overpainted, or a water colourist who lacks even that option. Writers, before the advent of word-processing, had recourse to crossing-out, the india rubber, Tippex or the waste-paper basket. None of that matters so much as does the end point of the process, knowing when to stop, and in this the computer hinders rather than helps.
That tempting Undo icon means I could go on fiddling with the same piece until death, or the heat-death of the universe (whichever comes first). There is a defence against such runaway fiddling though, and that's the number of parameters involved. When processing a photo I have available 120+ filters, 23 blend modes and 20 other adjustments that, when applied even to just two layers, makes for 3 billion possible combinations per iteration, and I make dozens of iterations. Documenting all the parameters for each step, to make the whole process reproducable, would be impossibly tedious, but in any case I don't want to. I'm happy to play on the same level field as Michelangelo and Beethoven, even if my game is far less impressive.
Playing on the same field is another way of saying that it's our eyes, ears, arms, legs, brains that decide when to stop, the decision that creates what we call beauty. (Actually it's noses and tongues too, if you're prepared, as I am, to include cooking and perfumery as arts). This ability to know when to stop may have been hard-wired into our brains by evolution. Animal brains contain many pattern analysing circuits, some imparted by evolution, some further trained by early experience. On the evolutionary side it's been suggested that colour vision offered a dietary advantage in distinguishing ripe from unripe fruit (many carnivores lack it), and it's also deeply involved in sexual display, and hence selection, particularly among birds and insects.
When Pablo Picasso drew a freehand squiggle it always looked better than my own squiggles, and I propose that's a matter of radii of curvature: some curves are right and some are wrong (too acute, jerky). In other words some curves are just sexier than others, and I'll leave the evolutionary "explanation" to you. We could analyse this mathematically using line integrals, div, grad and curl, but that would be pointless. Our pattern circuits are connected to our limbic system, source of emotions, that is, of dopamine reward. No amount of maths can substitute for looking, then feeling good at what you see.
Another possible evolutionary advantage of curve sensing is for landscape recognition. I used to spend time in a small croft near the sea in northern Scotland, where the seaward skyscape was dominated by seven distinctive humps of hills that we, of course, called the Seven Sisters. I can still imagine that shape if I close my eyes, leading me to hypothesise that this ability to recognise your home landscape may have had great survival advantage in the epochs before roads, church steeples or GPS. To zealots of strong AI, I'll just say this: we might analyse all such sensual recognitions and turn them into algorithms, but so far there's no way that a computer can *feel* good, and without that it can't have any real understanding of what beauty is.
A GLINT OF CHROME
Dick Pountain/Idealog 273/07 April 2017 11:19
Taking on a new computing platform was furthest from my mind, but it just happened anyway. I'm still basically wedded to Windows (albeit in v8.1) which I've wrestled to a stalemate that works well enough, only needing a reboot around once a quarter. For mobile I'm equally wedded to Android, via my 7" Asus tablet and HTC smartphone, with Google providing the interface between the three devices via Gmail, Contacts, Calendar and the beloved Keep, plus a little help from Dropbox. But now they are four...
PC Pro's publisher, Dennis Publishing Ltd, is on the last lap of preparing to move office, after 20+ years, from one 1930s block in London's Fitzrovia to a smaller one nearby. The new offices are extensively refurbished, very much in Silicon Valley style with lots of wide-open meeting and relaxation spaces and almost no horrid "open-plan" partitions. The CEO of Dennis Publishing is James Tye, whom regular readers may remember was once Editor of this very magazine and is hence very IT-savvy. When deciding the IT infrastructure for the new building, James chose one as radical as the interior design: as many staff as possible would be issued with Chromebooks in place of PCs, and the company LAN mostly replaced by The Cloud. There are necessary exceptions, like the accounts department which still needs its servers and software suite, and the designers who still need Macs to run Indesign, but the LAN will cease to be the main data store for everyone else, and most internal communication will be via Slack, Gmail and Google Drive.
They're buying upwards of 200 HP Chromebooks, whose 12+ hour battery life makes entirely wireless working feasible (the building has designed-in Wi-Fi with three incoming fibre lines for redundant backup) so people can work in places other than their desks. During a tour I expressed admiration for this brave leap into The Cloud, but though curious about Chromebooks, I stressed my Android/Windows devotion. James immediately and generously offered to loan me a Chromebook to see for myself whether they do everything I need.
What arrived wasn't an HP but a Dell 13, purchased during their evaluation phase, with a smart illuminated keyboard and magnesium chassis. Spec isn't everything in a Chromebook since much of the oomph is supplied at Google's end, but this one does look and feel good, with Gorilla Glass screen and trackpad that are noticeably superior to my own Lenovo Yoga. More disconcerting was turning it on to a practically blank screen. On closer inspection there was an unlabelled round icon in the lower left-hand corner that brought up the Google app launcher, familiar from my other devices, containing the Chrome browser, Gmail, Maps, Calendar , Translate, Keep and all. More surprisingly there were also several of my mobile apps - Guitarists Reference, GIF Maker, The Guardian and Pocket - that I'd assumed that as Android apps I'd have to replace. Of course all my calendar, contacts and Google documents were there already, which is the whole point.
After a couple of weeks I'm writing this on the Chromebook, in a Google Docs editor that’s just as responsive as the LibreOffice Word or TextPad I normally use. What still drives me mad though is the absence of a Delete key: you have to use Alt-Backspace which my brain knows but my fingers don’t (and perhaps never will). My brain on the other hand has difficulties with the Chrome OS file system, whose use of "download" and "upload" is the opposite of what I mean and deeply counterintuitive. I've put up a lot of my data on Google Drive, but still find it harder to navigate than Windows. I know I should just create and store all new stuff in the Cloud, but as a crusty product of the PC revolution I need to know stuff is on my local hard drive too.
What I do most, apart from writing, is process my photographs and program in Python, so how do these fare on Chromebook? After trying dozens of photo editor extensions, Sumo Paint has about 75% of the Photoshop Elements features that I need, though it's unfashionably Flash-based. As for Python, I can run small modules on the Skulpt interpreter Chrome extension, but it won't import all the modules of my large music project. For that I'd need a full Python 3.4 implementation which means either installing a Linux distro, or running Android apps (QPython) which the Dell won't do by default so I'd need to switch to unstable beta-developers' mode. Both are tech hassles I can do without. Google is really missing a trick with its failure properly to integrate Chrome OS with Android, because that combination could really give Apple and Microsoft sleepness nights.
Taking on a new computing platform was furthest from my mind, but it just happened anyway. I'm still basically wedded to Windows (albeit in v8.1) which I've wrestled to a stalemate that works well enough, only needing a reboot around once a quarter. For mobile I'm equally wedded to Android, via my 7" Asus tablet and HTC smartphone, with Google providing the interface between the three devices via Gmail, Contacts, Calendar and the beloved Keep, plus a little help from Dropbox. But now they are four...
PC Pro's publisher, Dennis Publishing Ltd, is on the last lap of preparing to move office, after 20+ years, from one 1930s block in London's Fitzrovia to a smaller one nearby. The new offices are extensively refurbished, very much in Silicon Valley style with lots of wide-open meeting and relaxation spaces and almost no horrid "open-plan" partitions. The CEO of Dennis Publishing is James Tye, whom regular readers may remember was once Editor of this very magazine and is hence very IT-savvy. When deciding the IT infrastructure for the new building, James chose one as radical as the interior design: as many staff as possible would be issued with Chromebooks in place of PCs, and the company LAN mostly replaced by The Cloud. There are necessary exceptions, like the accounts department which still needs its servers and software suite, and the designers who still need Macs to run Indesign, but the LAN will cease to be the main data store for everyone else, and most internal communication will be via Slack, Gmail and Google Drive.
They're buying upwards of 200 HP Chromebooks, whose 12+ hour battery life makes entirely wireless working feasible (the building has designed-in Wi-Fi with three incoming fibre lines for redundant backup) so people can work in places other than their desks. During a tour I expressed admiration for this brave leap into The Cloud, but though curious about Chromebooks, I stressed my Android/Windows devotion. James immediately and generously offered to loan me a Chromebook to see for myself whether they do everything I need.
What arrived wasn't an HP but a Dell 13, purchased during their evaluation phase, with a smart illuminated keyboard and magnesium chassis. Spec isn't everything in a Chromebook since much of the oomph is supplied at Google's end, but this one does look and feel good, with Gorilla Glass screen and trackpad that are noticeably superior to my own Lenovo Yoga. More disconcerting was turning it on to a practically blank screen. On closer inspection there was an unlabelled round icon in the lower left-hand corner that brought up the Google app launcher, familiar from my other devices, containing the Chrome browser, Gmail, Maps, Calendar , Translate, Keep and all. More surprisingly there were also several of my mobile apps - Guitarists Reference, GIF Maker, The Guardian and Pocket - that I'd assumed that as Android apps I'd have to replace. Of course all my calendar, contacts and Google documents were there already, which is the whole point.
After a couple of weeks I'm writing this on the Chromebook, in a Google Docs editor that’s just as responsive as the LibreOffice Word or TextPad I normally use. What still drives me mad though is the absence of a Delete key: you have to use Alt-Backspace which my brain knows but my fingers don’t (and perhaps never will). My brain on the other hand has difficulties with the Chrome OS file system, whose use of "download" and "upload" is the opposite of what I mean and deeply counterintuitive. I've put up a lot of my data on Google Drive, but still find it harder to navigate than Windows. I know I should just create and store all new stuff in the Cloud, but as a crusty product of the PC revolution I need to know stuff is on my local hard drive too.
What I do most, apart from writing, is process my photographs and program in Python, so how do these fare on Chromebook? After trying dozens of photo editor extensions, Sumo Paint has about 75% of the Photoshop Elements features that I need, though it's unfashionably Flash-based. As for Python, I can run small modules on the Skulpt interpreter Chrome extension, but it won't import all the modules of my large music project. For that I'd need a full Python 3.4 implementation which means either installing a Linux distro, or running Android apps (QPython) which the Dell won't do by default so I'd need to switch to unstable beta-developers' mode. Both are tech hassles I can do without. Google is really missing a trick with its failure properly to integrate Chrome OS with Android, because that combination could really give Apple and Microsoft sleepness nights.
Sunday, 6 August 2017
TRUST ME, I'M NERD
Dick Pountain/Idealog 272/15 March 2017 13:54
A few months ago (issue 269 to be exact) I wrote a column about the way the so-called 'alt-right' in the USA had built an alarmingly effective alternative web of sites that pumped a continual stream of 'fake news' stories into the mainstream social and news media during the 2016 presidential election campaign. A US professor of communications, Jonathan Albright, mapped the topography of this dark web, which he dubbed a 'micro-propaganda machine', and the Guardian printed his map. This network employs advanced SEO and link tweaking tricks to stay hidden.
Turns out though that this was barely half the story, and after I found out some of the other half I rather wished I hadn't, because I've been feeling slightly queasy ever since. I found out through a highly entertaining blog post by Dale Beran, a writer and comic artist who had the distinction of being an early user of the 4chan.org website (where his comic work was admired). Now I've personally only been on 4chan.org once - by accident when following some obscure search - and I began to feel uncomfortable after about three minutes, fled after five and spent the next half hour scrubbing against malware. Bit like a jungle, bit like a locked-ward, bit like a circus, good test of your anti-virus solutions...
According to Beran's extraordinary piece (https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-election2016-micro-propaganda-machine-383449cc1fba#.gp86cg9ns) 4chan was the breeding ground for the Anonymous hackers network, the 'Gamergate' scandal, Bitcoin, and more recently for the alt-right micro-propaganda network. Its denizens tend to be nihilistic, misogynistic, game-playing nerds with an extremely dark (and often very funny) sense of humour. Beran explains why they swung their considerable online skills behind Donald Trump, not because he was any good, not because they agreed with his politics (they don't really do politics) but precisely because he's so awful - the ultimate prank, elect a nutjob as president of the world's sole superpower. They also supplied the Trump team with its mascot, that unpleasant cartoon frog Pepe.
I recommend you read Beran's piece for yourself, with couple of big Solpadeine and a glass of water to hand. And I have to admit being jealous of the deft way he wove a Charles Bukowski novel about horse racing into his narrative. But what I intend to pursue here is the likely effect of this apotheosis of fakery on the future of our affairs, which might go way beyond mere prankery. The overall effect of all this fake news and contempt for rational argument - which has started popping up not only in Whitehouse press briefings but everywhere from Sweden to Turkey to China - is to erode trust, and trust is perhaps the most valuable commodity in the whole world.
Surely a slight exaggeration? Everyone tells a white lie now and again don't they? No need to get so worked up about it. Actually I'm not worked up at all, because I don't see this from a moral perspective. No, what terrifies me is that debt, credit, markets and even money itself, are all just forms of materialised trust. If I hand you a fiver, you not only trust that I didn't forge it but more importantly you also trust everyone else to recognise its value and give you the equivalent goods in exchange for it. The very word 'credit' is defined by Collins as 'the quality of being believable or trustworthy'. Undermining trust is like putting sand into the engine-oil of the world economy.
To be sure the relationship between money, credit and trust is rather more complex than I've just suggested, as extensively analysed by everyone from Adam Smith to Maynard Keynes. My favourite recent study is 'Debt: The First 5000 Years', a lively and groundbreaking work by David Graeber (one of the masterminds behind Occupy) in which he says:
'A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust. Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else will be willing to accept it.'
Which brings me to another dangerous online lifeform, the gold-bug. You'll have seen those websites where folk that argue that all our bank-created 'fiat money' is actually worthless, bits on hard disk, and that gold is the only real source of value. A few years ago this seemed either mildly eccentric or mere gold-salesman hucksterism, but keep undermining trust in everything and these arguments start to be believed. That way eventually leads to Northern Rock. Once you believe nothing, in practice you'll believe anything: say, that insulting China will resurrect America's rusting factories, or that leaving the EU will save the NHS from collapse.
A few months ago (issue 269 to be exact) I wrote a column about the way the so-called 'alt-right' in the USA had built an alarmingly effective alternative web of sites that pumped a continual stream of 'fake news' stories into the mainstream social and news media during the 2016 presidential election campaign. A US professor of communications, Jonathan Albright, mapped the topography of this dark web, which he dubbed a 'micro-propaganda machine', and the Guardian printed his map. This network employs advanced SEO and link tweaking tricks to stay hidden.
Turns out though that this was barely half the story, and after I found out some of the other half I rather wished I hadn't, because I've been feeling slightly queasy ever since. I found out through a highly entertaining blog post by Dale Beran, a writer and comic artist who had the distinction of being an early user of the 4chan.org website (where his comic work was admired). Now I've personally only been on 4chan.org once - by accident when following some obscure search - and I began to feel uncomfortable after about three minutes, fled after five and spent the next half hour scrubbing against malware. Bit like a jungle, bit like a locked-ward, bit like a circus, good test of your anti-virus solutions...
According to Beran's extraordinary piece (https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-election2016-micro-propaganda-machine-383449cc1fba#.gp86cg9ns) 4chan was the breeding ground for the Anonymous hackers network, the 'Gamergate' scandal, Bitcoin, and more recently for the alt-right micro-propaganda network. Its denizens tend to be nihilistic, misogynistic, game-playing nerds with an extremely dark (and often very funny) sense of humour. Beran explains why they swung their considerable online skills behind Donald Trump, not because he was any good, not because they agreed with his politics (they don't really do politics) but precisely because he's so awful - the ultimate prank, elect a nutjob as president of the world's sole superpower. They also supplied the Trump team with its mascot, that unpleasant cartoon frog Pepe.
I recommend you read Beran's piece for yourself, with couple of big Solpadeine and a glass of water to hand. And I have to admit being jealous of the deft way he wove a Charles Bukowski novel about horse racing into his narrative. But what I intend to pursue here is the likely effect of this apotheosis of fakery on the future of our affairs, which might go way beyond mere prankery. The overall effect of all this fake news and contempt for rational argument - which has started popping up not only in Whitehouse press briefings but everywhere from Sweden to Turkey to China - is to erode trust, and trust is perhaps the most valuable commodity in the whole world.
Surely a slight exaggeration? Everyone tells a white lie now and again don't they? No need to get so worked up about it. Actually I'm not worked up at all, because I don't see this from a moral perspective. No, what terrifies me is that debt, credit, markets and even money itself, are all just forms of materialised trust. If I hand you a fiver, you not only trust that I didn't forge it but more importantly you also trust everyone else to recognise its value and give you the equivalent goods in exchange for it. The very word 'credit' is defined by Collins as 'the quality of being believable or trustworthy'. Undermining trust is like putting sand into the engine-oil of the world economy.
To be sure the relationship between money, credit and trust is rather more complex than I've just suggested, as extensively analysed by everyone from Adam Smith to Maynard Keynes. My favourite recent study is 'Debt: The First 5000 Years', a lively and groundbreaking work by David Graeber (one of the masterminds behind Occupy) in which he says:
'A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust. Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else will be willing to accept it.'
Which brings me to another dangerous online lifeform, the gold-bug. You'll have seen those websites where folk that argue that all our bank-created 'fiat money' is actually worthless, bits on hard disk, and that gold is the only real source of value. A few years ago this seemed either mildly eccentric or mere gold-salesman hucksterism, but keep undermining trust in everything and these arguments start to be believed. That way eventually leads to Northern Rock. Once you believe nothing, in practice you'll believe anything: say, that insulting China will resurrect America's rusting factories, or that leaving the EU will save the NHS from collapse.
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