Inventions – Page 3 – Auxiliary Memory

Could A Robot Read Jules Verne?

by James Wallace Harris, Friday, January 12, 2018

I’m listening to the AmazonClassics audiobook edition of Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, a novel originally published in France in 1864, and first translated into English in 1871. The translation I read was by F. A. Malleson, from 1877, and is considered a pretty good translation. Verne suffered from many bad translations, often ruining his reputation in the English speaking world. The story is impressively narrated by Derek Perkins. His voice perfectly matches this 19th adventure tale. This audiobook sounds more thrilling and real than most of the silly movie and television productions I’ve seen.

Journey to the Center of the Earth 26

However, I have one problem with Verne’s story. It’s not very believable. Of course, it’s well over a century-and-a-half since Verne imagined it, and science has progressed a great deal, but was it even believable in his day? I wish I had an AI robot that could read and understand fiction and nonfiction. I want to talk to it like Alexa but it would be much smarter. I want my AI mind to crawl across the web and answer questions for me. Google is so goddamn stupid that it drives me crazy. I searched for [19th-century reviews of “journey to the center of the earth”] but it only brought up modern reviews of recent book editions and movie versions. I thought my query was quite explicit. If Google is such a leader in AI, why can’t it understand my query? Don’t you get tired of all the crap Google searches return?

I want to build an AI mind that I could input texts of all the science fiction stories and novels from the 19th and 20th centuries and have it analyze those works by correlating that content with information found on the internet. Journey to the Center of the Earth was originally published in a magazine for boys. I’ve love to find diaries, journals, essays, and books by 19th-century readers who read Journey to the Center of the Earth when it came out and to know their reactions. Verne adds a good deal of science from his day into his story to make it sound plausible, but was it?

Hollow Earth theories and stories go back much further than Verne. Were its proponents and speculating on real possibilities and taken seriously? Or, were they the UFO nutters of their day? I get the feeling that the concept of dinosaurs had inflamed 19th-century imaginations and Verne used his story to speculate how dinosaurs could still exist. He was doing the same thing that Doyle’s The Lost World and Crichton’s Jurassic Park did, creating a theory to present live dinosaurs. I have many theories about the evolution of science fiction, and having an AI collaborator could really help.

I’d love to build an AI robot that I could chat with me about science fiction. I picture talking my digital companion like Mannie did with Mike in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1965) by Robert A. Heinlein. I imagine creating my AI friend like the AI machines in When HARLIE Was One (1972) by David Gerrold or Galatea 2.2 (1995) by Richard Powers, where Harlie and Helen came into consciousness by interacting with a human mentor. I fantasize talking with this AI and collaborating on articles about the history of science fiction. And what if it woke up and became conscious?

Computer scientists are building AI machines using machine learning to do all kinds of things today. If they can master games like Chess, Jeopardy, Go, and old Atari 2600 games, or analyze MRIs and X-rays for cancer, why couldn’t they learn everything to know about science fiction.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about learning ML (machine language) using Python. I’ve been daydreaming about building a machine after reading (“Deep Confusion: Misadventures in Building a Deep Learning Machine,” “The $1700 great Deep Learning box: Assembly, setup and benchmarks,” and “Build a super fast deep learning machine for under $1,000“) or just paying for a hosting service like Paperspace. There’s a new edition of Python Machine Learning: Machine Learning and Deep Learning with Python, scikit-learn, and TensorFlow by Raschka and Mirjalili that could get me started, or Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems by Aurélien Géron.

Of course, I doubt if I could ever program such a fantastic AI machine or even learn the basics of ML at my age. I’ve been watching a series of videos from Google Developers on Machine Learning Recipes. I’ve also been reading about Natural Language Processing with Python, a book I bought years ago when this idea first came to me. The concepts aren’t hard, but it would be just the first steps on a journey of ten thousand miles. I’m not sure I have the concentration power or memory space anymore. I’m probably too old and too feeble minded to do it, but that doesn’t mean some youngster couldn’t.

I’m quite envious and jealous that young people today can choose this kind of work for their career. I programmed databases during my work years, and that was fun enough, but imagine getting to develop robots, AI minds, and machine learning? What an exciting time to be a programmer.

JWH

How Quickly Do Ideas Spread?

by James Wallace Harris, Saturday, December 2, 2017

In 2009 group of environmental scientists led by Johan Rockström and Will Steffen proposed the idea of planetary boundaries. They defined nine indicators to monitor Earth’s environmental stability. In 2009 we had not crossed any of the nine boundaries, but by 2017 we had crossed four. Everyone knows about boundary number one – climate change – but do you know the other eight? I may have heard of planetary boundaries before in the popular science books I read, but it feels like I just discovered this concept when I read Thank You For Being Late by Thomas Friedman. So, it took me eight years to encounter this concept since it was first created. That’s not too bad. How long will it take this idea to spread to everyone? Have you heard of planetary boundaries?

Johan Rockström came out with a textbook, Bankrupting Nature: Denying Our Planetary Boundaries in 2012, but I rarely buy textbooks (the Kindle edition is $45!), but even if I did, I’m not sure I’d find them readable because of my knowledge level. Rockström did come out with a popular science level book, Big World, Small Planet in 2015, which I do wish I had discovered. How often do we buy new books with new ideas when they first come out? (I ordered it today, even though I’m two years late.)

The first laser was built in 1960. I read about it in Popular Science sometime in the mid-60s. I got to see one in 1967 at a science museum in Miami. In the 1980s I finally got to own one when I bought my first CD player. So it took about a quarter century to spread laser technology to the masses.

On the other hand, it took algebra thousands of years to finally get to me in 1963. In fact, most of what I know is pretty damn old. I finally learn about calculus in the early 1970s, when its concepts were only as old as Newton and Leibnitz. I guess astronomy is the science I’m most up-to-date with, and I’m sure I’m years behind and only know its discoveries in the most rudimentary of ways.

The concept of climate change has taken decades to spread through society and it’s often rejected. How long will it take other planetary boundaries to become universally known and affect political action? Even with the speed of the internet we just don’t seem to learn new ideas quickly enough. Most people are stuck on religious ideas proposed thousands of years ago which have been completely invalidated by later knowledge.

And, we forget so much knowledge! My awareness of mathematical concepts has de-evolved to a time before the classical Greeks. To make matters worse, Republicans seem hellbent on rejecting science. Even if knowledge flows freely and fast around the internet there are barriers to absorbing it.

The concept of planetary boundaries is essential to our survival. And I bet there are way more the nine boundaries – that’s just the number scientists are working with now. (Of course, there might already be a new number and I won’t acquire it for a few more years.)

I’m looking for the best popular science books on the nine boundaries. Read about them at Wikipedia but here’s the table they use to define them. (Hope it’s okay to copy.) If you’ve read good popular science books on each that you’d highly recommend, let me know. I consider This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein to be the best book for boundary #1, and The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert for boundary #2. But I’m having trouble finding bestsellers that focus on boundaries 3-9.

9-planetary-boundaries

JWH

Will Puerto Rico Be The 1st Climate Change Retrofit?

by James Wallace Harris, Saturday, September 30, 2017

The disaster in Puerto Rico is truly horrendous. What’s important now is how we respond. I worry this Mag-10 catastrophe will be shoved off the news and be forgotten. I know Republicans are horrified at the cost of helping Puerto Ricans but we should make Puerto Rico our 51st state and divert all that tax-relief for billionaires into rebuilding their country. The scale of such a project would be awe-inspiring like the Apollo moon program.

You have to admit as a taxpayer, making the rich richer has gotten rather boring. I just can’t work up any more sympathy for people with private jets, and I’m tired of them conning us into giving them more money because of their self-serving lies about helping the middle class. Rebuilding our infrastructure will make America great again. Designing a self-sustaining economy for the 21st-century will make America great again. Cleaning up the environment will make America great again. Creating social equality will make us great again. Inequality in all its forms is only flushing us down the toilet.

The intellectual challenge of retrofitting Puerto Rico to survive future super-hurricanes is thrilling. And it will be great practice for when we need to rebuild all the southeastern coastal states. Is it possible to create an island paradise that can withstand rising seas and periodic Cat-5 hurricanes? Could we design homes that can be sealed like submarines from flooding and aerodynamically shaped to withstand 250 mph winds? Can we create a cell phone, power grid, water, and sewer system that can take a beating and keep on ticking (like a Timex watch in those old commercials on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom)? Is it possible to develop a self-sustaining economy for 3.6 million people that can periodically withstand the worst nature can throw at them?

Since we won’t solve global warming we need to learn to take regular spankings from a pissed off Mother Nature.

After we retrofit Puerto Rico and other Carribean islands, we can work on Florida.

SanJuan Puerto Rico is the canary in the coal mine. Those folks down there are Americans even though we treat them like red-headed stepchildren. Congress is driven by greed, so I doubt those bastards will change their stripes, but maybe, just maybe, a disaster of this size will crack open their greedy little hearts just enough to let in a ray of compassion. I don’t think our rich folks need tax relief as bad as 3.6 million Americans without power, water, food, internet, and cell phone coverage.

JWH

To Be A Machine by Mark O’Connell [Annotated]

by James Wallace Harris, Saturday, September 22, 2017

Are you a transhumanist? I am not. I reject transhumanism for the same reason I reject religion – both unrealistically crave immortality. The faithful feel their soul will leave their body upon death and move into another dimension. Transhumanists believe technology will someday copy their soul to a machine or clone body. Science has never found any evidence for souls. I’m confident our conscious self-awareness can’t be separated from our bodies. In fact, I believe our body is essential in creating our consciousness.

That said, I find transhumanism to be a fascinating philosophical topic. Transhumanism is a very popular theme in 21^st-century science fiction, and a goal embraced by many in our high-tech culture. Religion is the old way people hope to escape death. Transhumanism is the new way of fulfilling that old hope. I think both reject the reality of our finite lives. Transhumanism is just another belief system that lets its believers avoid who we really are.

To Be A Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O’Connell is a book about the future of humans I just finished. O’Connell, a journalist from Dublin traveled the world exploring transhumanistic endeavors by men and women whose goals feel more like science fiction than science. O’Connell is a skeptic of transhumanism, and so am I. However, wherever O’Connell went, he found brilliant, often eccentric people working hard on exciting projects. I thought it would be fun to find links to each of those endeavors and people he describes in the book.

I envy journalists who get to see in person the exciting events and people they write about. That’s why I love a good documentary. Seeing is believing, and O’Connell got to meet many far-out prophets of transhumanism. O’Connell’s book is well worth reading because he applies contextual history and philosophy to a growing belief system emerging our of technological culture. The men and women O’Connell interviews are the John the Baptists of Transhumanism.

Anyone who is interested in the future should enjoy this book, but especially science fiction readers and writers. I’m going to go chapter-by-chapter providing links to what O’Connell writes about. I envy him for being about to wander the globe to check out cutting-edge research.

System Crash

This first chapter deals with death and transhumanism. Transhumanists are people who seek everlasting life with the help of technology and not waiting on any promises from theoretical entities.

An Encounter

London Futurists
Dr. Anders Sandberg
Alberto Rizzoli
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler
Mind uploading
Future of Humanity Institute – University of Oxford

A Visitation

This was my least favorite chapter, about people who freeze themselves in hopes future medicine might give them life again, or transfer the contents of their brain to a new body or machine. We might eventually invent some kind of suspended animation, but I flat out disbelieve we can copy our conscious minds to another body.

Alcor Life Extension Foundation
“The False Science of Cryonics” MIT Technology Review, Michael Hendricks
FM-2030 – Motherboard
The Tomorrow People
Extropy: Journal of Transhumanist Thought

Once Out of Nature

Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence by Hans Moravec
The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil
The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
“Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap” by Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom
3Scan
De Corpore by Thomas Hobbes
The Human Brain Project
Miguel Nicolelis
The Relativistic Brain by Ronald Cicurel and Miguel A. L. Nicolelis

A Short Note on the Singularity

The Technological Singularity
“The Coming Technological Singularity” by Vernor Vinge
The City of God by St. Augustine

Talkin’ AI Existential Risk Blues

A Short Note on the First Robots

R.U.R. by Karel Čapek

Mere Machines

DARPA Robotics Challenge
Boston Dynamics robots
Pepper
“Treatise on Man” by Descartes
“L’Homme Machine” by Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Tesla and robots

Science and Invention 1924 May interior art

Biology and Its Discontents

Faith

Please Solve Death

The Wanderlodge of Eternal Life

JWH

My War On Ads!!!

Is it me, or am I seeing an explosion of ads on the internet? First it was on page ads, then pop-up ads, then double pop-up ads, and now we’re seeing new kinds of animated ads attacking us from the bottom up, or expanding out from the sides of our web pages. We’re forced to see video ads that demand 30 seconds of our precious time – when will it be 60 seconds? This sucks. If I had to watch ten 30-second ads a day, that would be 300 a month, or 1.5 hours a month devoted to waiting to see content. I’m getting old, and time counts, because it’s running out.

Everywhere I look there is bait to trap me into viewing ads. Are we intelligent beings seeking information, or just gerbils being trained to click on ads.

Again, is it me, or is the web content changing, so as to trick us into seeing more ads by offering more prurient content? Many sites are sexing up their article come-ons, either with sexy photos, or with outrageous titles, or tempting us with juicy tidbits of gossip, to get us to click to read, only to force us to wait through one or more ads before rewarding us with their lame-ass stories. Often a promised video news story is shorter than the ads I have to watch to pay to see it, and often that news is seldom worth seeing.

I completely understand that nothing in life is free and I have to pay for my lunch, but some techniques used by contemporary publishers are just so damn annoying that it makes me want to avoid their wares completely and the products they advertise.

This morning The Mail promised me story about adult elephants rescuing a drowning baby elephant, but when I clicked to see the video they asked me which ad I wanted to watch. Neither were appealing, so I just closed the window. If they had had an ad for something I’m interested in I might have watched, but most ads are for things I completely don’t care about. The time it takes to watch them are a complete waste of my life.

That’s what I do more and more, close the window or tab, rather than see the ads. I’ve even thought about going back to paper magazines to learn about the world, because web page ads are ruining the internet for me.

Demanding Our Attention

I understand that reading on the web requires seeing ads. Ad supported sites are the norm. However, the visual bombardment of ads on landing on a web page seems to be escalating to the point that I wished I could tell Chrome and Google to ban some sites for the rest of my life. The other day I went to a site that resized the screen to blow up ads on the right and left, and along the bottom of my screen. And pop-up windows with ads is becoming the norm. And audio ads that automatically turn on are growing in popularity too, even though they are extremely annoying.

Advertisers are finding ways to capture our attention and not let it go until we’ve seen what they want us to see. I hate that. I wish there was some way to send you the finger online.

I’ve learned from growing up reading newspapers and magazines how to tune out passive ads. And I’ve tried Chrome extensions like AdBlockPlus, but it doesn’t work perfect, and I’m not really sure it’s kosher. I’m willing to pay for my supper, if it’s reasonable. That’s the trouble with internet ads, they aren’t reasonable. Neither, are television ads. Or phone soliciting. Because I don’t subscribe to cable, I get over-the-air TV, which is chock full of ads.

A big portion of my retirement life is avoiding ads. It’s becoming a war.

Ads want our attention, and that’s understandable. If only I only had to watch or read ads for things I was interested in. The advertising world is based on grabbing our attention, but I can’t believe all the expense they go to in gaining our attention is practical. How many people actually buy something because of an ad?

What we need is a new ad paradigm.

Information in Slide Shows

A common trick now is to have a sensational topic that involves 12, or 15 or 25 pages of slides. Each segment of the list involves reloading the page, and thus regenerating ads. Isn’t this just web page trickery to add counts to their ad counters? Part of the problem is not the advertisers, but the publishers. All too often content on the web is geared to making us click. Just how much worthy news do we need each day. Certainly not enough to fill millions of web sites.

We’re just rats in the maze being taught to click. That’s not good for us, or for people selling stuff. I want people who have something worthy to sell to succeed, but find success with people who need and want their products. I hate that the internet has become a click factory generating economic activity.

Man, we really need a new ad paradigm.

How Could Things Be Different?

Aren’t web cookies, the NSA, credit card transactions and cash register scanners already supposed to know what I buy? Why can’t I log into a web site daily and see ads meant just for me and earn some kind of ad income credits to be automatically spent as I go to web pages during the day? They could see I’ve already prepaid and let me look at their content without annoying me.

I’m willing to pay not to see ads. I subscribe to Rdio, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Warner Instant Classics so I don’t have to see ads. I also subscribe to Hulu Plus, and they force me to see ads, which seems incredibly unfair. I’m seriously thinking of canceling them because of this. If I pay for a subscription I should NOT have to see ads. I also subscribe to The New York Times, and their site does have ads, but so far they aren’t too annoying. Yet, every time they interrupt my reading with a pop-up, I think about cancelling my subscription.

There’s got to be a better way. However, I don’t think Advertising Age disciples are thinking in that direction. Generation Like, as one PBS documentary called our young people of today, not only accept ads, but embrace them, becoming marching morons for advertisers and these kids don’t even understand the phrase “selling out.” Our modern world has become so Orwellian in ways that George Orwell failed to foresee. He thought only communism would use Newspeak to conquer the masses, not understanding that capitalism would use it too.

In my war against ads and telemarketers, I feel like I’m Winston from Nineteen Eighty-Four always seeking ways to avoid the view screens of Big Brother. John Varley wrote the classic paranoid science fiction story about machine intelligence called “Press Enter _” back in 1984. In it, his character moves off the grid and won’t use anything electrical to escape from an evil intelligence living on the net. Is that the only way to escape the advertising world?

Take Up the Cause!

Watch what you click. Don’t encourage the enemy. Close those windows. Don’t go to sites that take advertising too far. And please some of your brilliant tech gurus, invent some way for people to market their wares to people who want them without making billions of us not have to see trillions of ads we don’t want to see.

JWH – 5/14/14