Author: Mark Davis

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

Inequality and Big Data Revolutions

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industrial-revolutionsI had some interesting new talking points in my Rock Stars of Big Data talk this week. On the same day, MIT Technology Review published Technology and Inequality by David Rotman that surveys the link between a growing wealth divide and technological change. Part of my motivating argument for Big Data is that intelligent systems are likely the next industrial revolution via Paul Krugman of Nobel Prize and New York Times fame. Krugman builds on Robert Gordon’s analysis of past industrial revolutions that reached some dire conclusions about slowing economic growth in America. The consequences of intelligent systems on everyday life will have enormous impact and will disrupt everything from low-wage workers through to knowledge workers. And how does Big Data lead to that disruption?

Krugman’s optimism was built on the presumption that the brittleness of intelligent systems so far can be overcome by more and more data. There are some examples where we are seeing incremental improvements due to data volumes. For instance, having larger sample corpora to use for modeling spoken language enhances automatic speech recognition. Google Translate builds on work that I had the privilege to be involved with in the 1990s that used “parallel texts” (essentially line-by-line translations) to build automatic translation systems based on phrasal lookup. The more examples of how things are translated, the better the system gets. But what else improves with Big Data? Maybe instrumenting many cars and crowdsourcing driving behaviors through city streets would provide the best data-driven approach to self-driving cars. Maybe instrumenting individuals will help us overcome some of things we do effortlessly that are strangely difficult to automate like folding towels and understanding complex visual scenes.

But regardless of the methods, the consequences need to be considered.… Read the rest

Alien Singularities and Great Filters

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Life on MarsNick Bostrom at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute takes on Fermi’s question “Where are they?” in a new paper on the possibility of life on other planets. The paper posits probability filters (Great Filters) that may have existed in the past or might be still to come and that limit the likelihood of the outcome that we currently observe: our own, ahem, intelligent life. If a Great Filter existed in our past—say the event of abiogenesis or prokaryote to eukaryote transition—then we can somewhat explain the lack of alien contact thus far: our existence is of very low probability. Moreover, we can expect to not find life on Mars.

If, however, the Great Filter exists in our future then we might see life all over the place (including the theme of his paper, Mars). Primitive life is abundant but the Great Filter is somewhere in our future where we annihilate ourselves, thus explaining why Fermi’s They are not here while little strange things thrive on Mars, and beyond. It is only advanced life that got squeezed out by the Filter.

Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis provides a potential way out of this largely pessimistic perspective. If there is a very high probability that civilizations achieve sufficient simulation capabilities that they can create artificial universes prior to conquering the vast interstellar voids needed to move around and signal with adequate intensity, it is equally possible that their “exit strategy” is a benign incorporation into artificial realities that prevents corporeal destruction by other means. It seems unlikely that every advanced civilization would “give up” physical being under these circumstances (in Teleology there are hold-outs from the singularity though they eventually die out), which would mean that there might remain a sparse subset of active alien contact possibilities.… Read the rest

Signals and Noise, Chapter 00011110 (Pregnant Logos)

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Signals and NoiseThe spirals again. Zach was back in a deprogramming room trying to recall the previous twenty four hours, the week, and the year. A thin rubber belt spun the red spiral in the glow of lights emanating from behind him. The walls were white and with the regulation textures of modern drywall, unlike the SCIDE installation in the reactor. There were other signs of middle-class Americana, too, like the shadow of a lamp Zach thought he had seen at Ikea. The spiral was the least interesting thing in the room and he tried to move, but was stopped by firm strapping on his arms, legs, and his forehead.

Not this again, he said loudly. The spirals don’t do anything.

Quiet, except for the faint hum of the motor powering the rotating infolded circles.

Is anyone here? he asked loudly, then yelled a haphazard help that emerged truncated because of his inability to stretch his neck as he raised his voice.

Aphrodite spoke from behind in the dark. Hey, hey, cool it, calm down, Zach. The spiral stopped and she walked into the light and pulled the Velcro holding his arms and head and legs loose with quick sawing noises. He rubbed his arms and asked her How long? How long have I been here?

Just a few hours, she responded. Let’s go meet everyone. Glad you’re back.

She led him into a common area that was more modern than the decrepit nuclear facility. The people were more polished, too, and older, ranging from the early teens to the twenties. Many were dressed in combat fatigues, but with distinctive SCIDE patches on their arms.

Is this place new? Zach asked after Aphrodite.… Read the rest

Language Games

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Word GamesOn The Thinking Atheist, C.J. Werleman promotes the idea that atheists can’t be Republicans based on his new book. Why? Well, for C.J. it’s because the current Republican platform is not grounded in any kind of factual reality. Supply-side economics, Libertarianism, economic stimuli vs. inflation, Iraqi WMDs, Laffer curves, climate change denial—all are grease for the wheels of a fantastical alternative reality where macho small businessmen lift all boats with their steely gaze, the earth is forever resilient to our plunder, and simple truths trump obscurantist science. Watch out for the reality-based community!

Is politics essentially religion in that it depends on ideology not grounded in reality, spearheaded by ideologues who serve as priests for building policy frameworks?

Likely. But we don’t really seem to base our daily interactions on rationality either. 538 Science tells us that it has taken decades to arrive at the conclusion that vitamin supplements are probably of little use to those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world. Before that we latched onto indirect signaling about vitamin C, E, D, B12, and others to decide how to proceed. The thinking typically took on familiar patterns: someone heard or read that vitamin X is good for us/I’m skeptical/why not?/maybe there are negative side-effects/it’s expensive anyway/forget it. The language games are at all levels in promoting, doubting, processing, and reinforcing the microclaims for each option. We embrace signals about differences and nuances but it often takes many months and collections of those signals in order to make up our minds. And then we change them again.

Among the well educated, I’ve variously heard the wildest claims about the effectiveness of chiropractors, pseudoscientific remedies, the role of immunizations in autism (not due to preservatives in this instance; due to immune responses themselves), and how karma works in software development practice.… Read the rest

Profiled Against a Desert Ribbon

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The desert abloomCatch a profile of me in this month’s IEEE Spectrum Magazine. Note Yggdrasil in the background! It’s been great working with IEEE’s Cloud Computing Initiative (CCI) these last two years. CCI will be ending soon, but it’s impact will live on in, for instance, the Intercloud Interoperability Standard and other ways. Importantly, I’ll be at the IEEE Big Data Initiative Workshop in Hoboken, NJ, at the end of the month working on the next initiative in support of advanced data analytics. Note that Hoboken and Jersey City have better views of Manhattan than Manhattan itself!

“Animal” was the name of the program and it built simple decision trees based on yes/no answers (does it have hair? does it have feathers?). If it didn’t guess your animal it added a layer to the tree with the correct answer. Incremental learning at its most elementary, but it left an odd impression on me: how do we overcome the specification of rules to create self-specifying (occasionally, maybe) intelligence? I spent days wandering the irrigation canals of the lower New Mexico Rio Grande trying to overcome this fatal flaw that I saw in such simplified ideas about intelligence. And I didn’t really go home for days, it seemed, given the freedom to drift through my pre-teen and then teen years in a way I can’t imagine today, creating myself among my friends and a penumbra of ideas, the green chile and cotton fields a thin ribbon surrounded by stark Chihuahuan desert.… Read the rest

Spurting into the Undiscovered Country

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voyager_plaqueThere was glop on the windows of the International Space Station. Outside. It was algae. How? Now that is unclear, but there is a recent tradition of arguing against abiogenesis here on Earth and arguing for ideas like panspermia where biological material keeps raining down on the planet, carried by comets and meteorites, trapped in crystal matrices. And there may be evidence that some of that may have happened, if only in the local system, between Mars and Earth.

Panspermia includes as a subset the idea of Directed Panspermia whereby some alien intelligence for some reason sends biological material out to deliberately seed worlds with living things. Why? Well, maybe it is a biological prerogative or an ethical stance. Maybe they feel compelled to do so because they are in some dystopian sci-fi narrative where their star is dying. One last gasping hope for alien kind!

Directed Panspermia as an explanation for life on Earth only sets back the problem of abiogenesis to other ancient suns and other times, and implicitly posits that some of the great known achievements of life on Earth like multicellular forms are less spectacularly improbable than the initial events of proto-life as we hypothesize it might have been. Still, great minds have spent great mental energy on the topic to the point that elaborate schemes involving solar sails have been proposed so that we may someday engage in Directed Panspermia as needed. I give you:

Mautner, M; Matloff, G. (1979). “Directed panspermia: A technical evaluation of seeding nearby solar systems”. J. British Interplanetary Soc. 32: 419.

So we take solar sails and bioengineered lifeforms in tiny capsules. The solar sails are large and thin. They carry the tiny capsules into stellar formations and slow down due to friction.… Read the rest

Marshlands

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MarshlandsIt is purely by chance that I discovered a remarkable note, penciled in a deliberate cursive, on page one hundred something of a secondhand copy of Borges’ Labyrinths. The Huns were clashing about and trampling books, but one survived—that sort of chance or magical thing—and an arrow crawled up from the text and declared “all great civilizations are built on marshes,” seemingly in praise for the despoiled monastery and its now collapsed civilization, or perhaps referring to the banks of the Danube or the arc of historiography that passed from Athens to Rome later in the page.

Regardless of the minutiae of the referents, the statement remained in my head for days as I shuffled about through my ordinary occupation and preoccupations with information theory, intelligent machines, and some spectral analysis of the statistical distribution of gut bacteria/eukaryotes. Google was fragmentary in its responses to the phrase as a query and I quit before the end of the first page, anyway, distracted by other thoughts about why marshes would be so attractive for building a civilization. The fishing should be good, admittedly, as well as the availability of reeds for various structures, but the shifting nature of land and the threat of mosquito infestation struck me as negatives. And wouldn’t clean, fresh water be better served by a mountain stream? All great cultures should be at the base of a non-volcanic snowpacked mountain.

I returned to Borges later in the week and found myself fanning through the pages like a schoolboy watching a stickfigure animation until, seventy-five pages further, below the tail of an essay on Cervantes and the inversion of authors and characters and readers, there was another brief flash off a curlicue of lead embedded in the page.… Read the rest

The Deep Computing Lessons of Apollo

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Apollo 11With the arrival of the Apollo 11 mission’s 45th anniversary, and occasional planning and dreaming about a manned mission to Mars, the role of information technology comes again into focus. The next great mission will include a phalanx of computing resources, sensors, radars, hyper spectral cameras, laser rangefinders, and information fusion visualization and analysis tools to knit together everything needed for the astronauts to succeed. Some of these capabilities will be autonomous, predictive, and knowledgable.

But it all began with the Apollo Guidance Computer or AGC, the rather sophisticated for-its-time computer that ran the trigonometric and vector calculations for the original moonshot. The AGC was startlingly simple in many ways, made up exclusively of NOR gates to implement Arithmetic Logic Unit-like functionality, shifts, and register opcodes combined with core memory (tiny ferromagnetic loops) in both RAM and ROM forms (the latter hand-woven by graduate students).

Using NOR gates to create the entire logic of the central processing unit is guided by a few simple principles. A NOR gate combines both NOT and OR functionality together and has the following logical functionality:

[table id=1 /]

The NOT-OR logic can be read as “if INPUT1 or INPUT2 is set to 1, then the OUTPUT should be 1, but then take the logical inversion (NOT) of that”. And, amazingly, circuits built from NORs can create any Boolean logic. NOT A is just NOR(A,A), which you can see from the following table:

[table id=2 /]

AND and OR can similarly be constructed by layering NORs together. For Apollo, the use of just a single type of integrated circuit that packaged NORs into chips improved reliability.

This level of simplicity has another important theoretical result that bears on the transition from simple guidance systems to potentially intelligent technologies for future Mars missions: a single layer of Boolean functions can only compute simple things.… Read the rest

Just So Disruptive

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i-don-t-always-meme-generator-i-don-t-always-buy-companies-but-when-i-do-i-do-it-for-no-reason-925b08The “just so” story is a pejorative for cultural or physical traits that drive an evolutionary explanation. Things are “just so” when the explanation is unfalsifiable and theoretically fitted to current observations. Less controversial and pejorative is the essential character of evolutionary process where there is no doubt that genetic alternatives will mostly fail. The ones that survive this crucible are disruptive to the status quo, sure, but these disruptions tend to be geographically or sexually isolated from the main population anyway, so they are more an expansion than a disruption; little competition is tooth-and-claw, mostly species survive versus the environment, not one another.

Jill Lapore of Harvard subjects business theory to a similar crucible in the New Yorker, questioning Clayton Christensen’s classic argument in The Innovator’s Dilemma that businesses are unwilling to adapt to changing markets because they are making rational business decisions to maximize profits. After analyzing core business cases from Christensen’s books, Lapore concludes that the argument holds little water and that its predictions are both poor and inapplicable to other areas like journalism and college education.

Central to her critique is her analysis of the “just so” nature of disruptive innovation:

Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation. (“Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it,” the organizers of FailCon, an annual conference, implore, suggesting that, in the era of disruption, innovators face unprecedented challenges.

… Read the rest