Author: Mark Davis

Entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, and author. Bent on worldwide understanding.

Magic in the Age of Unicorns

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glitter-rainbow-unicorn-Favim.com-237329Ah, Sili Valley, my favorite place in the world but also a place (or maybe a state of mind) that has the odd quality of being increasingly revered for abstractions that bear only cursory similarities to reality. Isn’t that always the way of things? Here’s The Guardian analyzing startup culture. The picture in the article is especially amusing to me since my first startup (freshly spun out of XeroX PARC) was housed on Jay street just across 101 from Intel’s Santa Clara campus (just to the right in the picture). In the evening, as traffic jammed up on the freeway, I watched a hawk hunt in the cloverleaf interchange of the Great American Parkway/101 intersection. It was both picturesque and unrelenting in its cruelty. And then, many years later, I would pitch in the executive center of the tall building alongside Revolution Analytics (now gone to Microsoft).

Everything changes so fast, then changes again. If it is a bubble, it is a more beautiful bubble than before, where it isn’t enough to just stand up a website, but there must be unusual change and disruption. Even the unicorns must pop those bubbles.

I will note that I am returning to the startup world in a few weeks. Startup next will, I promise, change everything!… Read the rest

The IQ of Machines

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standard-dudePerhaps idiosyncratic to some is my focus in the previous post on the theoretical background to machine learning that derives predominantly from algorithmic information theory and, in particular, Solomonoff’s theory of induction. I do note that there are other theories that can be brought to bear, including Vapnik’s Structural Risk Minimization and Valiant’s PAC-learning theory. Moreover, perceptrons and vector quantization methods and so forth derive from completely separate principals that can then be cast into more fundamental problems in informational geometry and physics.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is then perhaps the hard problem on the horizon that I disclaim as having had significant progress in the past twenty years of so. That is not to say that I am not an enthusiastic student of the topic and field, just that I don’t see risk levels from intelligent AIs rising to what we should consider a real threat. This topic of how to grade threats deserves deeper treatment, of course, and is at the heart of everything from so-called “nanny state” interventions in food and product safety to how to construct policy around global warming. Luckily–and unlike both those topics–killer AIs don’t threaten us at all quite yet.

But what about simply characterizing what AGIs might look like and how we can even tell when they arise? Mildly interesting is Simon Legg and Joel Veness’ idea of an Artificial Intelligence Quotient or AIQ that they expand on in An Approximation of the Universal Intelligence Measure. This measure is derived from, voilà, exactly the kind of algorithmic information theory (AIT) and compression arguments that I lead with in the slide deck. Is this the only theory around for AGI? Pretty much, but different perspectives tend to lead to slightly different focuses.… Read the rest

Machine Learning and the Coming Robot Apocalypse

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Daliesque creepy dogsSlides from a talk I gave today on current advances in machine learning are available in PDF, below. The agenda is pretty straightforward: starting with some theory about overfitting based on algorithmic information theory, we proceed on through a taxonomy of ML types (not exhaustive), then dip into ensemble learning and deep learning approaches. An analysis of the difficulty and types of performance we get from various algorithms and problems is presented. We end with a discussion of whether we should be frightened about the progress we see around us.

Note: click on the gray square if you don’t see the embedded PDF…browsers vary.… Read the rest

Against Superheroes, Section 15

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coverar-v3-2-10-2015Back among the Western minds, first in Iceland and then his home country of America, living under a cloak of pretense, Sinister appears more human than ever since his transformation. We note that he has taken on a rather different engagement with his powers that is more nuanced and self-reflective. The gradual transformation from an undiluted, power-mad self into this new form operates at several different levels. First there are the physical transformations that ultimately recompose him into his human form. Then there are the mental acrobatics that allow a new sense of self to emerge out of the rubble of the tempestuous being that drove events at Oasis.

We take a moment to try to correlate his rather detailed descriptions of the nature of his powers with known current technologies. He describes the physical world as collections of particles that have deterministic trajectories, for example, and describes his engagement with those particles as affecting that determinism to change both material things as well as affect the “neural” structure of humans themselves. Other Collectives have weighed in on how precisely this technology might work, but the general conclusion is that it closely resembles the bio-essence fields of levels 2 and 3, as well as their control. His misunderstanding of how the technology works is quite understandable; he lacked the educational context that we have.

It is important to consider his statements within the broad contours of his primitive worldview. He views the world as fundamentally composed of small components of material things (atoms and molecules), and he also conceives of mental function as derivative of the motions of these things. We know this to be a primitive and fundamentally bizarre way of comprehending reality.… Read the rest

Monsters in Paradise

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JotunheimenComing down out of Jotunheimen in the early morning hours, the crackling fragile ice of Nigardsbreen dropping behind us, we listened to Sigur Rós for the first time since leaving Iceland. I had taken a brief pulse of walk-around violence in Reykjavík before jumping in our 4×4 in the Thorsmork highlands and beating the poor beast down through 30 klicks of bad road and twelve random river fords, each fraught with mild uncertainty given that we didn’t have a snorkel on the Suzuki Jimny manual (manual!). The BBC reported on the issue of violent crime in Iceland in an article by an American researcher who made the country the topic of his doctoral thesis. 90,000 guns in the hands of 300,000 citizens and nary a murder.

And Norway makes Iceland look quaint with its massive sovereign wealth fund that controls 1% of all securities worldwide. Social services, low levels of inequality, 4th highest GDP in the world, 48 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave–these are the features of a society that has chosen to follow the uniquely Scandinavian model of growth and peace.

But unlike Iceland, Norway joined its near-neighbor Finland in horrific style when Anders Behring Breivik murdered a whole bunch of kids who were involved in a summer program on a lake island northeast of Oslo. Karl Ove Knausgård wrote the definitive piece in the New Yorker on the events and aftermath of that day I need to write something else about Knausgård and his style of writing in both My Struggle and recent New York Times pieces titled My Saga, but the Breivik piece sums up something that is I think critical to our attempts to understand these horrific events.… Read the rest

Word Salad Wednesday: Ergodic Cybernetic Textuality and Games

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Salad with catsWell the title is a mouthful, yet it relates to an article in The Guardian concerning the literary significance of role-playing games. Norway’s Aarseth coined the term “ergodic” to describe literary systems that evolve according to the choices of the reader/player.

First, this is just incorrect. Ergodic has a very specific meaning in thermodynamics. Ergodic means that the temporal evolution of a system will be random and irreversible. Aarseth takes the Greek meanings too literally choosing to equate the ergo (work) and hodos (path) with the temporal evolution of hypertexts (where one chooses the next step) or RPGs (where players choose the next steps but there may be random decisions dictated by dice roles). He also likes the term “cybernetic” which was literally “pilot” and was given its modern meaning by Norbert Weiner wherein it refers to autonomous control of a system to stabilize against environmental signals.

Neither of these relate to RPGs or hypertext per se, nor to the general class of reader/engager-based control of media access or fiction. The concept of generative art might be more apt, though it should be modified to include the guidance of the reader. Oddly, guided evolution or change might be the best metaphor altogether leading us to something like Lamarkian Literature (though that is too culturally loaded, perhaps).

Or we could just say “games.” After all, these are games, aren’t they?… Read the rest

Intelligence Augmentation and a Frictionless Economy

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Speed SkatingThe ever-present Tom Davenport weighs in in the Harvard Business Review on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on knowledge workers of the future. The theme is intelligence augmentation (IA) where knowledge workers improve their productivity and create new business opportunities using technology. And those new opportunities don’t displace others, per se, but introduce new efficiencies. This was also captured in the New York Times in a round-up of the role of talent and service marketplaces that reduce the costs of acquiring skills and services, creating more efficient and disintermediating sources of friction in economic interactions.

I’ve noticed the proliferation of services for connecting home improvement contractors to customers lately, and have benefited from them in several renovation/construction projects I have ongoing. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime has absorbed an increasingly large portion of our shopping, even cutting out Whole Foods runs, with often next day deliveries. Between pricing transparency and removing barriers (delivery costs, long delays, searching for reliable contractors), the economic impacts might be large enough to be considered a revolution, though perhaps a consumer revolution rather than a worker productivity one.

Here’s the concluding paragraph from an IEEE article I just wrote that will appear in the San Francisco Chronicle in the near future:

One of the most interesting risks also carries with it the potential for enhanced reward. Don’t they always? That is, some economists see economic productivity largely stabilizing if not stagnating.  Industrial revolutions driven by steam engines, electrification, telephony, and even connected computing led to radical reshaping our economy in the past and leaps in the productivity of workers, but there is no clear candidate for those kinds of changes in the near future.

… Read the rest

Non-Cognitivist Trajectories in Moral Subjectivism

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imageWhen I say that “greed is not good” the everyday mind creates a series of images and references, from Gordon Gekko’s inverse proposition to general feelings about inequality and our complex motivations as people. There is a network of feelings and, perhaps, some facts that might be recalled or searched for to justify the position. As a moral claim, though, it might most easily be considered connotative rather than cognitive in that it suggests a collection of secondary emotional expressions and networks of ideas that support or deny it.

I mention this (and the theories that are consonant with this kind of reasoning are called non-cognitivist and, variously, emotive and expressive), because there is a very real tendency to reduce moral ideas to objective versus subjective, especially in atheist-theist debates. I recently watched one such debate between Matt Dillahunty and an orthodox priest where the standard litany revolved around claims about objectivity versus subjectivity of truth. Objectivity of truth is often portrayed as something like, “without God there is no basis for morality. God provides moral absolutes. Therefore atheists are immoral.” The atheists inevitably reply that the scriptural God is a horrific demon who slaughters His creation and condones slavery and other ideas that are morally repugnant to the modern mind. And then the religious descend into what might be called “advanced apologetics” that try to diminish, contextualize, or dismiss such objections.

But we are fairly certain regardless of the tradition that there are inevitable nuances to any kind of moral structure. Thou shalt not kill gets revised to thou shalt not murder. So we have to parse manslaughter in pursuit of a greater good against any rules-based approach to such a simplistic commandment.… Read the rest

Against Superheroes, Section 7 (Chapter 5)

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coverar-v3-2-10-2015Section 7

With Chapter 4 we see a combination of narrative forms. There is, first, the factual discussion of the details of the archaeological dig itself. There are the problems that arise from the details of the ground, the water, the shaft, the descent. These problems and the detailed resolution of them lend to a sense of consistent realism concerning the tasks at hand in the everyday lives of the protagonists. The level of detail is strikingly at odds with the other primary narrative form: Sinister’s soliloquy on the symbolism and history of other deities. The position of these paragraphs juxtaposed amongst the more detailed discussion has produced several potential explanations, the most important of which was the requirement for presaging the unknown technology and its role in past conflicts. While there is an element of that, as a memoir presenting a linear sequence of developments (remember that he was concerned about that presentation), it is equally plausible that his recollections were merely jumbled and possessed of a certain confused emotional state.

The content of the soliloquy is worth further analysis. The primary descriptions are of conquest of people and their gods against others. There is a spreading out of the various factions, Hellenists, Israelites, Romans, etc. They are constantly at war with one another and the more powerful gods subjugate the less powerful. The subtle indication that amongst at least some of them, the Hellenists, that the gods were somewhat distant to them is of particular interest because it begs the question of how, amongst all the spirits and entities that are referenced, they were applied during war? What means of attack and influence did they have that apparently led to them conquering Yahweh and others?… Read the rest