Curt Doolittle

Theme: AI

  • Can Computers Write Creative Programs That Solve Problems?

    ANSWERING YOUR QUESTION IN THE CONTEXT THAT YOU MEAN IT.

    In the context that I think you mean, creativity refers to the application of one pattern of relations to a different circumstance thereby solving a previouslly unsolved problem, and a problem whose solution is not already present in the domain of solutions expressed by the program code.  This set of associations is what produces ‘aha’ moments in humans: when ‘clouds’ of related ideas are connected.

    In this sense, I think the consensus is, that there is no reason we can’t build computers that can do this.  The problem is currently size, expense, and the structure of symbols’memories’ that we put into computers.  So, like interstellar flight, we are really just trying to find an affordable way to do it.  We CAN send someone to mars, or something to another star. It’s just absurdly expensive compared to what we THINK we can do with some innovation. So we’re waiting until its cheaper.

    I don’t have a lot of time right now to be thorough and the information is available elsewhere.  But the simple version is, that if you have a biological organism and start with basic stimuli (a subset of light, sound, vibration, touch, time and memory) that the structure of the physical universe, evolution and experience form a fairly accurate but simplified set of categories in our memories and therefore minds.  We build a set of symbols (patterns) from seemingly disparate stimuli, the same way we ‘see movement’ in the static figures of a flip-book.

    Computers we use today do not start with this atomic level of representation, they start with symbols. And we are just beginning to understand how to symbolically represent  physical reality in commensurable terms, and any computational system requires commensurable terms. Humans have senses,  instincts and preferences which largely form our commensurable terms; all language being an allegory to experience, and all systems of measurement producing allegories to experience.

    For example, money renders all things commensurable by price.  But without prices and money you couldn’t form a division of labor – a market. and we’d still be hunter gatherers or small family farmers.   Likewise  we can’t quite yet design software that symbolically represents reality. (ALthough this project has been underway for more than a century in philosophy, its largely been fruitless.)

    Since language (the written word) is an allegory to experience, that language should (in theory) represent symbols that are commensurable (subject to comparison and evaluation) even if only on ordinal (ordered), not cardinal (numbered) grounds – because humans operate ordinally not cardinally.

    The closest we have to that body of symbolic information that is broad enough in scope to represent enough of the physical world that the errors produced by sybmolic assocation are Turing-testable, is the Google search index.  (And google is fully aware of that). 

    But the computational power to use that data given that its index is not commensurable with other domains, (we think) is approximately equal to the total computing power present on the planet today. And even then, we suppose the mechanical process ‘thinking’ would be very slow.

    (I worked with a group of very bright people on the possibility of raising venture money for solving this problem, given that we are pretty sure how to a) create the programming tool set, b) use existing hardware technology, and c) represent the data in sets of mathematical manifolds, but it is far too early and far too costly to produce this scope of work. And to the venture community it is indistinguishable from snake oil.  So I’m not unfamiliar with the problem set, or the possible technical solutions. And I was willing to put my own money in. So I”m pretty confident.)

    Most solutions today are attempts to model the human brain with digital systems. The general idea is that it’s cheaper to do this with existing hardware than it is with to build dedicated hardware for the purpose.  And even with that technique, most recent estimates I’ve seen are in the billion dollar range.

    But it’s not that it’s not possible for computers to be ‘creative’.  Its that the minimum threshold for ‘creative association’ is a higher than the intelligence of a domestic dog, and we are still programming in symbols, not patterns, because those symbols incorporate our existing knowledge. And we’re doing that, it looks like, because it’s metaphorically the equivalent of a trip to the stars, and no one is ready to pay for that yet. 

    I think that in this short space, that’s the most accurate statement we can render.  It is a matter of money, not logical possibility either by the symbolic route, or the neural route, or the dedicated hardware neural route.

    Cheers
    Curt

    https://www.quora.com/Can-computers-write-creative-programs-that-solve-problems

  • DUNE: FUTURE PRESENT In Herbert’s masterpiece, the Mentat (human computer) has r

    DUNE: FUTURE PRESENT

    In Herbert’s masterpiece, the Mentat (human computer) has replaced mechanical computers because, after their ‘singularity’ event, computers became as dangerous as the clones in star wars or the hordes of zombies that are the current narrative equivalent. Or for us libertarians, the organs of the bureaucratic state.

    Working in my chapter on solutions to institutional problems in calculative fields (the politics of investment in the commons and the distribution of proceeds, the common law, the organization of jurisprudence, accounting and banking), and reading a bit of English and Roman law, it seems to me that we have already passed through our first singularity (scientism, socialism, positivism, postmodernism, statistics, dynamic stochastic equilibria, legislative law, and the concentration of banking made possible by computers and the hubris of statistical risk measurement. ) Most of this calculative bureaucracy made possible by the computerization of recordkeeping, accounting, actuarial and statistical data.

    The fact that numbers, in the form of priced and promises, cannot represent the values we attribute to them once ownership of the priced instrument changed, is overshadowed by the ability of nation states and their fiat money to act as an insurer of all this accumulated disinformation.

    But like any problem of measurement under high causal density, its what we choose not to measure, what we cannot measure, what we cannot anticipate that we need to measure, and the inability of contrarians to insulate themselves from the accumulate risk, that creates fragility in the entire system.

    Norms, in particular are an asset that can only be measured by aggregate comparison to those with different norms.

    Trust can be priced. It can. And it makes health care look trivial by comparison. It is an absurdly expensive norm.

    My analysis, which is supported by what we are finally seeing in the data, is that we have already hit one singularity. And the way to correct it is not more computing, which by the process of aggregation launders all future-value information from any price or promise, but by more professionalization of calculative fields alpng the responsibilities of lawyers, doctors, and cpa’s. (albeit privately insured rather than certified.) And the weakening of limited liability protections.

    While i agree that government concentration of capital can create certain institutions, all such institutions can be privatized once economically viable.

    But taxes, laws, our current primitive accounting methods, banking, credit and dent instruments sll launder causal relations.

    This not only creates disinformation but prohibits the population from learning.

    The keynesian might argue that the good that results in the short term is more important than the harm in the long term. And that we can fix those problems when we get there. ( That is, in fact, their argument. )

    The truth is that the problem is approaching more rapidly, and we are nearly powerless to fix it by incremental means. Conversely, we could achieve all the same ends, and prosper even more so, by using known solutions to institutional problems of cooperation, and adapt to guture circumstances.

    But that program of action would require that the progressive program acknowledge that its postmodern failure is as great as its socialist failure was.

    And that cannot happen. Not the least of which is because it is tied too closely now with feminism. And numerically, policy change isn’t possible for that reason.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 16:20:00 UTC

  • TROUBLE WITH SERGEY BRIN’S COMMENTS ABOUT APPS *Please enlighten me.* I have a h

    TROUBLE WITH SERGEY BRIN’S COMMENTS ABOUT APPS

    *Please enlighten me.*

    I have a hard time taking Brin’s criticism of FB and Apple seriously. Google is an app. FB is an app. Apple is an app/hardware structure. Google makes its money from freely available information. FB and Apple, as well as some international sites, consist of closed content. Since advertising works on google and doesn’t work on FB and elsewhere, then I don’t understand what he’s complaining about. Google owns the commercial and intellectual sphere. Apple is trying to make sure porn and viruses don’t make it onto their platform, and FB is trying to make something, anything, that will make money over the long term by understanding consumers and their preferences in a way that Google seems unable to.

    Why this is bad just doesn’t make sense to me.

    Now, if you talk about the government’s threatening to hide information and communications from their people, then yes, I understand that. I understand that China should probably be isolated from the entire internet infrastructure so that we can as easily shut them out if we want to — and may need to since our military relies upon the internet now.

    But I don’t understand the concern with information that’s inaccesible in ‘apps’.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-16 14:47:00 UTC

  • Trying (For four weeks now) to catch up on all the recent tech on the web and ch

    Trying (For four weeks now) to catch up on all the recent tech on the web and changes going on. Tipping point is past. In mulitple areas. Fascinating.

    Source date (UTC): 2010-12-09 17:41:00 UTC

  • Don’t Tell the Creative Department, but Software Can Produce Ads, Too

    Software That Produces Ads?

    September 4th, 2010 


    The NYT

    “BETC Euro RSCG, part of the Euro RSCG Worldwide division of Havas, has developed software that can produce elementary advertisements. The software is called CAI, pronounced Kay, for Creative Artificial Intelligence.”

    (Posted in NYT comments)

    In the late eighties I wrote a very complex set of software applications that took data and made legal arguments. It horrified people in the profession, who were, at that time, still addicted to legal pads and lofty self impressions. But we were able to increase a docket (the set of cases a lawyer could manage) from the tens to the thousands. Admittedly, this was procedural law, and not dramatic legal theater. But it was law and argument none the less.

    The number of federal judges that have seen, read and processed documents, and adjudicated cases based upon arguments purportedly written by lawyers, but entirely generated by machine, and only given a cursory review, is in the many hundreds, and the cases the tens of thousands.

    Ads are not much different. They are commodities. Visual and literary symbolism adds high permutations to those commodities. But that does not mean that they are not formulaic.

    Except for perhaps the top half-percent of ads, and except for brand symbols like logos, almost all advertising (impressions that is) relies upon a very limited set of visual compositions.

    Any sufficiently mature technology becomes clerical in nature. And 2D ads are a mature and fairly tired technology. It matters more that you can afford to insert it into the consumer’s environment a hundred times, than does the quality of it. And the quality of an ad simply decreases the cost of the number of impressions needed to stick an idea into the consumer’s head.

    The reality is the reality: advertising is a commodity and it is rarely interesting, rarely innovative, and almost entirely derivative. And if it wasn’t it wouldn’t work.

    Almost all current creative innovation is in the digital arena, simply because it’s a deeper technology that hasn’t been fully explored.

    Current attempts at automating 2D ads are not all that impressive. But given a sufficient pool of images, a sufficient pool of phrases and quotes, and a sufficient influx of cultural symbolism, and a simple enough set of requirements, most ads are derivative and permutations rather than informative and persuasive, and as such most ads can be automated.

    And given the diverse quality of ads (impressions, not media) the median of the curve of quality of ad would undoubtably shift to the better, given automation.

    http://www.puretheoryofmarketing.com

  • There is No End Of Data, Because There Is No End Of History

    Regarding Tech and Storage, and the idea of ‘finite content’ as an allegory to the ‘end of history’: Humans are notoriously victims of boiling-the-frog biases: they cannot sense long term changes and discount prior (and forgotten) opinions for current ones. Inter-temporal cognitive biases are legion. We are going to store increasing amounts of data – nearly endless in quantity. And as that data accumulates we will transform business, social life, and the economy. Think of it along these lines: We have decreased the transportation cost of content. But in doing so we have reduced the barrier to distributing content. The problem will be whether we become better at the use of the available content, or whether we can synthesize something from all that content, good and bad, and produce another generation of new content. Frankly, as the number of channels with weak or repetitious content demonstrates, we are short of content, and innovative content is becoming very expensive to produce. Or are we stuck with the same limited number of permutations of our basic narratives, and stuck with the same very large number of human cognitive errors and myths, and destined to live under the eternal problem of pedagogy: the vast number of permutations of the same content needed in order to convey the same 1500 ideas (that’s all there are) to billions of people in hundreds of cultures, all at different ages, at different states of development, each solving different problems in the context of their own individual experiences? Can we produce the conceptual equivalents of the mono-myth is each of our fields of study? Can we simplify pedagogical symbols as if they were fundamental truths, when such truths would be contra-beneficial to some cultures, races, classes, and much more beneficial to others? As someone who does a painful amount of research, it is vastly easier today to learn anything at all than it was even five years ago. And compared to library-trading obscure works in college, vastly faster. What will come of this availability of information, or rather the frictionless availability of information? Our accounting standards are a catastrophic block on data collection, because as they exist, they launder causality – accounting as we practice it is the dusty remnant of a bygone age of sea voyages. if we changed to tagged accounting data we would produce volumes of data for mining that cannot be easily found today. What would this mean for data and analysis? Taxation? Policy? Product development? THe structure of the corporation and credit cycles? There are a number of startups producing hardware that you wear around your neck, and that take photographs every second, and record all sound all day long, creating a visually indexed record of your day. How would a storage system of that nature change the world? Privacy is changing because we are socializing a new kind of manners wherein everyone is expected to be flawed, or imperfect. How will that change the world? From a product and service manufacturer’s standpoint, the typical economic analysis using factors of production is antiquated. The primary problem for most companies is to produce a product that is interesting enough to purchase. All other things being equal, today people are purchasing almost entirely aesthetic objects for purely status-seeking and therefore opportunity-seeking purposes. The price of materials is not an issue any more than is the price of food. How is this design-economy accounted for in our models and how does this affect the craft of economics, when the design function is not as visibly a factor of resource costs? Companies do not measure their brand potential (the sentiment of consumers toward a company and its products and how that sentiment is convertible into revenue) as a form of equity. If investors could see this information, how would that affect management of companies? If it becomes increasingly easy to measure it, how will that affect markets? In the post war period, social democratic society was unified under a proletariat-and-middle-class system of inclusion-and-status-seeking-through-consumption. Now that the consumer society is ‘saturated’, and status due to ownership is insufficient to provide access to opportunities, (because everything is so cheap) how will people express their identities as purchases? Each nation state has a different IQ distribution. (If you don’t like the reality of it, I’m sorry.) Since there are material thresholds to the learning of, and use of, abstractions, there appear to be limits at 130’s for designing and using ideas, 122 for designing machines, 110 for a classical education. 105 for repairing machines. How will this affect the markets, demand for technology, or the lack of demand for it? There is no end of history. The problem of human coordination and cooperation is an endless process of temporal calculation for intert-emporal ambitions. The great revolution in farming took thousands of years to span the globe. The revolution in scientific thinking started by the anglos has only been in process for eight hundred years. The great revolution in production (and calculation) of the Anglos has taken only five hundred so far. But it has been a bloody process of resistance to change. There is no end of content. Because there is no end of history.

    [callout]Because, in the end, the primary purpose of our data collection is political in nature.[/callout]

    There are a limited number of fundamental truths available to man. But fundamental truths are not as useful as we think they are. THe coordination of human beings toward shared goals requires that they believe in myths. And truth will only hinder their achievements. Combined with the human drive for status, and the different abilities of men – some less, some more – the permutations of myths (or deceptions) will create similar themes as we have seen in the past, forever. And the media and data used to distribute those infinite permutations will do nothing except increase in scale. ***Because, in the end, the primary purpose of our data collection is political in nature.*** It always has been.