SynapticNulship

Well, no. But so many people seem to be taking this seriously that I felt the need to make a skeptical commentary on society’s desire for mutants (and the lack of skepticism in memes):

Alien Mutant Hybrid Has Super Cat Eyes That Glow In The Dark

This is a belated post from April. I live near MIT, so when they held an open house on April 30 I felt it was my duty to attend.

However, the most surprising thing was not the technology on display so much as the vast swarms of yuppie larvae—aka virus vectors, aka children. After awhile (about 5 minutes) my perception of their presence incremented from “cute” to “horrific.” Even worse were the parents of said children, whose method for navigating crowds consisted of crashing into other people like a bunch of semi-autonomous pinballs. So I departed, but not without taking a few photos first.

El Cheapo Multi-Touch Table

Innards of the Student-Built Multi-Touch Table

Cars That Won't Crash

Supervisory Control of Cyberphysical Systems (poster)

A Wearable Vital Signs Monitor at the Ear (poster)

And now photos of human children engaged with robots:

Children with Robots

Children with Robots

Children with Robots

Children with Robots

Children with Robots

And just for shits and giggles, here are some ancient computing artifacts that were on display in the Stata Center.  The first is an Atari 2600 “video computer system” (nowadays, a “console”) with a Space Invaders cartridge, right underneath a sign about Moore’s Law.

Atari 2600 console (released in 1977)

And one of the first cell phones, being fondled by me:

Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (circa 1983)

I conclude with a video I took of a good ol’ floating electromagnet:

“Nothing New Under the Sun” is the title of Robert Silverberg’s column for the June 2011 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Although the sobering thought that humanity keeps repeating certain types of mistakes is not one I particularly relish, it should be discussed.

Sam holding a paper edition of Asimov's SF magazine

Crowd Stupidity

“Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable — as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead.”

—Schiller as quoted by Bernard Baruch as quoted by Robert Silverberg

Silverberg shares some excerpts from the mid-1800s book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written by Scottish lawyer / journalist Charles Mackay.

Silverberg compares the South-Sea Bubble disaster to the Internet dot com bubble, specifically failed companies such as Webvan (bankrupt in 2001), Boo.com (broke in 2000) and Flooz.com (died in 2001).

England’s South-Sea Bubble so long ago was not blamed, according to Mackay, on the general public’s avarice, lust of gain, etc. Instead, like with the recent economic crash of 2008, the “evil” bankers and executives are blamed. The collective insanity of a nation seems to be a major factor though. Perhaps it does take a cunning plan to fool the masses, but it also requires the masses to act idiotically as they urgently try to consume or become rich or whatever.

My intention in this post is not to get into the issues of blame for economic bubbles, but to note the special ability for a normally intelligent person to become less so in the context of a group.

Another popular delusion of humankind’s past is fortune telling, e.g. via astrology. Unfortunately, it’s still quite popular. As Mackay wrote:

Leaving out of view the oracles of pagan antiquity and religious predictions in general, and confining ourselves solely to the persons who, in modern times, have made themselves most conspicuous in foretelling the future, we shall find that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the golden age of these impostors. Many of them have been already mentioned in their character of alchymists. The union of the two pretensions is not at all surprising. It was to be expected that those who assumed a power so preposterous as that of prolonging the life of man for several centuries, should pretend, at the same time, to foretell the events which were to mark that preternatural span of existence.

Of course, most transhumanists would exactly like to do the same thing that those alchemists promised, which is to live for centuries (at least). And transhumanists are quite often found foretelling events or repeating the foretellings of popular writers. I recommend that transhumanists, including me, be all the more alert to traditional delusions dressed in sexy technolust clothes.

Crowd Intelligence

“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. ”

—Charles Mackay

Humans are social animals, surely there must be overall benefits to group intelligence? Well, even our relatives the chimps have group stupidity—they will keep copying the behavior of a leader even if a better strategy appears and they will copy the behavior of the dominant group member even if it results in less rewards than another way that they also learned.

But what about the so-called “wisdom of crowds?” Well, we don’t always have wisdom or higher intelligence emerging from groups because the system has to be set up correctly. The main criteria that James Surowiecki listed in his book The Wisdom of Crowds are:

• Diversity of opinion
• Independence
• Decentralization
• Aggregation

So, first every person should ideally have some private information or ideas that aren’t shared with the others. Second, people don’t allow others in the group to determine their opinions or decisions. Third, people don’t have to be stuck in a closed central structure of wisdom, they can draw from local knowledge and wisdom. Fourth, there has to be a part of the system that compiles judgements into a decision.

And it is not necessarily easy to achieve all four of those criteria for a given problem and a given group.

The Future of Madness

“Pretend to be mad? Who would notice a madman around here?”
—Capt. Blackadder (from Blackadder Goes Forth, which takes place in the trenches of World War 1)

Robert Silverberg’s essay presents the solemn attitude that humanity keeps on repeating its old mistakes. It sounds like a cliché (although perhaps not a popular enough one); in fact Silverberg says one falls back on clichés in this context. Is the adage of Alphonse Karr that Silverberg quotes, “The more things change, the more they remain the same,” really a behavior of the humanity system?

It’s been said that a true science fiction story is one in which the world is irreversibly changed by the end of the story. But can that happen in real life? Transhumanists very much want to instantiate science fiction’s promises. And it seems like certain technologies have transformed everything, such as the Internet.

Perhaps national delusions, group idiocy, Ponzi schemes, witch hunts, economic bubbles, and so on, are not actually a concern for us in the long run. But, let’s explore the premise that they are, just in case.

So, what would be some therapies for humankind’s collective insanity? One obvious answer for a transhumanist is of course to change the very nature of our intelligence, and that can be at an individual level and/or in networked assistance via computer systems, etc. But, what if we were to imagine reducing madness today, using today’s infrastructure?

Philosopher Daniel Dennett had a concept he called “Super Snopes.” Snopes.com is the popular debunking database which explains the truths and lies behind urban myths, chain emails, etc. Super Snopes would be some sort of more massive collection of truth utilizing the power of the Internet, and which would counter the misinformation on the Web.

But Snopes, and maybe even a Super Snopes (if that’s even possible), don’t really address the serious delusions which can last for years. And how does one even know they have subscribed to a delusion if everybody they talk to (or follow) is deluded in the same way? What would motivate a person to even participate in a (Super) Snopes?

Perhaps one glimmer of hope is that the Internet and social media allow different groups to communicate. Never are all people in the world under the exact same delusion. So if the people of sufficient difference were able to trade criticism in a way that overcame our primitive tribal nature, major delusions could be stopped before total disaster.

I suspect we have just begun to tap the power of constant global connections and social media. As Clay Shirky points out, we have a “cognitive surplus” of billions of hours per year that’s largely been used to watch television. In this century some of that time has shifted from passive consumption of media to video games (especially massively multiplayer games) and to actual content creation such as with Wikipedia and of course blogs.

Yet the memes that run rampant are often not about debunking or skepticism, they are simply viral without regards to truth. Our system presently allows simple amplification of normal human social emotions and behaviors. It doesn’t take much cognitive power to go along with bandwagons: repeating—and buying into—what everybody else says on Twitter or Facebook to a major news event. And of course, as it always has been with news, the social news gives the same attention to celebrity gossip and cat photos as it does to natural disasters and national revolutions. And the lifetime of a meme or popular event can be extremely short lived.

So, we have this powerful worldwide networked community, but could it be used for the good of groups? Could it be used at longer time scales, e.g. to stop a decade-long delusion?

Could we evolve our social web so that humankind (or at least those online) are constantly keep ahead of the game when it comes to tricks and delusions?

Also published in H+ Magazine.

I noticed today that Kyle Munkittrick posted about Sherry Turkle’s concerns about people having emotional attachments to machines (The Turkle Test).

Love at first sight?

Turkle, who’s been at MIT for a long time, is not against machines or emotional machines. She’s skeptical of taking advantage of the human tendency to be social and have emotional attachments to machines which merely pretend to be social or pretend to have other emotional capabilities.

As Kyle says:

Yet these lovable mechanoids are not what Turkle is critiquing. Turkle is no Luddite, and does not strike me as a speciesist. What Turkle is critiquing is contentless performed emotion. Robots like Kisemet and Cog are representative of a group of robots where the brains are second to bonding. Humans have evolved to react to subtle emotional cues that allow us to recognize other minds, other persons. Kisemet and Cog have rather rudimentary A.I., but very advanced mimicking and response abilities. The result is they seem to understand us. Part of what makes HAL-9000 terrifying is that we cannot see it emote. HAL simply processes and acts.

Kyle’s post was apparently triggered by this recent article: Programmed for Love (The Chronicle of Higher Education). Turkle has a new book out called Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.

I haven’t read it yet, but it supposedly expands her ideas into the modern world of social technologies. As for the robots such as the aforementioned Kismet and Cog, Turkle’s been talking about them since at least 2006 if not earlier, and Kismet and Cog are ancient history (from the 90s). The Programmed for Love article says Turkle was using Kismet in 2001; it wouldn’t surprise me if that was Kismet’s last experiment before being put in the MIT museum.

Kismet

I mentioned Turkle’s point of view in my article “Would You Still Love Me If I Was A Robot?” that was published in the Journal of Evolution and Technology (it was originally written in 2006 but didn’t get published until 2008).

Image credits:
1. Contra Costa Times
2. Jared C. Benedict