Forget AI: We Should Really Worry About Dumb People Talking To Even Dumber Machines

There was a significant moment this past week when Professor Stephen Hawking warned the world that our species faces real dangers from the advances in artificial intelligence. He wrote:

There are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains.

The comments were significant in a number of ways, not least of which was that they managed to slip some soft science into the news agenda. When Hawking speaks, people tend to listen. Why they listen is a moot point. In a way, Hawking is our version of Albert Einstein: a non-scientist's idea of a scientist. Even if people don't understand why he's brilliant, they can recognise something about him which is obviously a mark of genius. Hawking also shares with Einstein a talent for using the media. It makes it hard to separate the tragedy of his illness, the heroic struggle to overcome those enormous difficulties, with the hard science he's actually achieved in his lifetime. I have no doubt that his reputation is well earned as a theoretical astrophysicist but I can't help but feel that there's an element of the TV scientist about some of his public comments. 'Danger, Danger, Will Robinson!' is always going to be far more exciting to hear than 'All is well, Will Robinson...' and Hawking is bright enough to know that.

Hawking's contribution to the debate about artificial intelligence is an interesting one but not, as far as I can tell, based on any particularly great insight into the field of thinking machines. He quotes "[r]ecent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy! and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana' as examples of the rapid rise of AI. However, all these developments are (also as far as I can tell) extensions of relatively simple advances in pattern recognition which has come about through the miniaturisation of chips. Moore's Law famously states that computer circuits double in density every two years. That roughly means that every two years the chips that drive our computers become twice as powerful. Moore's Law held for over half a century before, in recent years, it has started to slow, with the doubling now occurring every three years instead of two. Yet even if machines continue to increase in power at the rate predicted by Gordon E. Moore there's still some way to go before anything could be built approaching genuine artificial intelligence. The problems aren't simply problems that can be solved simply by throwing more memory and processing cores at it. As one of my old computing professors used to phrase it: a cow doesn't gestate its young more quickly because it's standing in a field with a dozen other cows. In other words, some problems can't simply be solved by cranking up the dial. Indeed, it might even be argued that if should a thing could happen, artificial intelligence won't be achieved using the relatively crude chip technology we use today.

The scale of the AI challenge is enormous and popularist pieces, such as the one by Hawking, merely serve the public's appetite for salacious science. There was a story a few months ago about a computer that had apparently defeated the Turing Test. The media ran the story with bold headlines and when I saw one such headline, I actually raised an eyebrow. Had a computer really tricked a person into thinking they were having a conversation with another human? I should have known, however, and once I'd read the article, I was left wondering why anybody with half an idea about the Turing Test couldn't tell that the claims were simply far too bold. The computer hadn't come anywhere close to passing the test and the result was barely more impressive than those produced by the old Eliza script of the 1960s which used to play the psychologist to the user's inputs.

True artificial intelligence is still the stuff of science fiction and, I suspect, will remain so unless there's one of those genuine leaps of technology that come along so rarely; the last one probably being the invention of the silicon chip, with everything that has come since being merely an evolution of that.

However, the debate around AI systems came to mind this evening as I was contemplating the data gathered by my blog over the course of the last week. I'm fascinated to the point of distraction by visitors. Not so much the numbers, though catch me at a weak moment and I'll say that, yes, I am addicted to page views. What interests me is to establish who or what is visiting the site. I know at times this sounds like my desperate need for affirmation but I sometimes wonder how this blog is received, perceived, and even if it's perceived at all. And I think I have good reason to be sceptical about the latter. One of the rarely expressed truths about the current internet (or, at least, I don't think I've ever read this written elsewhere but it's so obvious that it undoubtedly has) is the extent to which so much of what passes for social media is simply people talking to computers.

For example, tonight I posted a tweet. I hadn't done one in a while but I keep getting these urges to be social. So, onto Twitter I went and wrote the following:

Hmm... Who'll succeed Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian? My guess is a multigender Eco warrior privacy smurf into S&M and Coldplay.

It might not be the greatest Tweet penned by man but I was quite proud of the result of about ten seconds of thought and fingers. And within about another ten seconds, I had a message come back to me. Some Chris Martin fan account had favourited my tweet. For a moment I smiled. That was really nice of them. It was nice to know that my wit is appreciated and... and...

Hmm...

Then I realised that there was very little chance that the Chris Martin fan account was actually being manned by a Chris Martin fan. A human being -- even a Chris Martin fan -- would surely have spotted that my reference to Coldplay was actually scathing and not worth marking as a favourite. It was obvious that a computer had merely picked out the word 'Coldplay' and automatically given it the virtual thumbs up.

Now, this, in a small sense, was a victory for the computers which had fooled me into thinking that I was dealing with a human. Yet the sad truth of all this is that so many of my daily interactions are probably with computers. It's one of the reasons I don't use social media. Look beyond the likes, the up votes, the Google + scores, the follower counts and you see just one enormous machine whirring away. A human puts input in and automated systems produce the required response. They like you, they follow you, they vote you up and some even send you messages asking you to like them back. Yet none of it is real. None of it means as much as even the simplest smile.

I do occasional work for a company who believe strongly in all of this social media. They love their follower counts and work hard to get more. I merely look at their numbers and wonder what it all means. Do those thousands of votes actually mean that people like the company? The answer, of course, is no. Those numbers really represent how long they've been present on the web. The follower counts really mark their own need for affirmation and the urgency with which they play the social media game. The real people are lost in all of this. You, the person out there, reading this... You are the person I'm writing this for. I'm not asking for anything other than a connection of our minds. A shared humanity contained within these words written as I sit here at my desk at 11.53 at night and scratching three days growth of beard. And that's all that ultimately matters. How my blog feed might be digested by the machines, the media crawlers, the influence registers... They really don't interest me. Yet I also fear that mine is a lone voice in a day and age when people prefer to speak to and be read by a million computers than understood by a single human brain.

The galling part of it is knowing that these words will be read by thousands of machines and, if I'm lucky, perhaps by only three or four humans. Or perhaps it will be read by thousands of people and only a few machines. The problem is that I simply cannot tell. And in this limited sense, I think Hawking is more right than his media friendly comments probably warrant. There might come a time when AI becomes self-aware and capable of taking away our freedoms. In the meantime, however, it's the dumb systems we already have that are doing that to us, right this very moment.

Explicit Stupidity

I keep writing things that I intend to post but get sidetracked, so I'm making a conscious decision to write something quickly, post it immediately, and only begin to regret it later. It might get me back into the habit of blogging again. I miss regular blogging.

Blogging is about the immediate response, so this is my immediate response to today's news but I suppose I also find myself writing because I feel confused in my thoughts and writing is a good way to see myself clear of that confusion. I'm confused about these naked photographs of some pretty famous (though, I admit, to me, insignificant) people that have been released onto the web by a hacker. The first thing I'm meant to say is that I think it's a terrible invasion of their privacy and that the hacker(s) need to be made to suffer. That is shorthand for all the hand wringing I'm meant to do before I can discuss anything more significant such as the fact that I can't help but feel bemused that people in such famous positions would put themselves in such positions, usually on their back, naked, and lit seductively from one side while not wearing their knickers.

It is, however, a perennial problem with technology that rich people buy (or are often given) expensive toys without fully understanding (or learning) what they really do. This, after all, was the reason why the phone hacking scandal started, as the rich and famous used expensive phones without learning to do something as simple and important as change their pin number. The current scandal is little more than an extension of that. Many gadgets are automatically connected to 'The Cloud' yet too few people actually bother to learn what that means: that their private data (including data of the knickerless variety) is being stored on a server somewhere where somebody with mastery of the technology can access it. Note to the rich and famous: if you do want to photograph your vulva(the reason isn't important though remains a mystery to me), go into the your phone's settings and deselect 'Backup photos to Cloud'. It seems self-evidently obvious once you put it into those terms.

The second thing to note about these photographs is how society has devolved (or evolved, depending on your point of view) into a culture where nothing seems to exist until it's photographed. I hate (and actively refuse) to have my photograph taken, even when I'm fully dressed and in a dark room. Not that I have a Victorian sensibility about anything, though I do begin to wonder if Victoria and Albert (notoriously active and open about their sexual life) would have posed in front of a bathroom mirror playing with each other's genitals. Probably they would. People say, of course, that these photographs (like so many sex tapes before them) were meant to be private between a couple, but it appears to be an extension of the 'selfie' syndrome, a psychological extension of the endless need for fame and celebrity in which the self doesn't really exist in any form (intellectually, sexually, or spiritually) unless it exists inside the memory of a mobile phone.

Do these stars really feel violated that their most intimate parts of their bodies are now visible to the world? Perhaps they do and I feel sorry for them, though perhaps they can rest easy knowing that one nipple looks pretty much the same as the next. There really are few parts of the body that the internet haven't made everyday and mundane. From hardcore pornography to beheadings, the body has lost so much of its mystery that really, in the grand scheme of things, we aren't seeing something that we haven't already seen before and usually larger and well oiled. These photographs will be forgotten tomorrow except by a few sad people who will always be excited by these things. The next evolutionary stage of our collective sexuality will be the internal organs and I suspect in the next ten years, some actor will be complaining that intimate photographs of his newly tattooed spleen have been leaked onto the internet. We have come a long way from the tantalising shots of Bo Derek running down a beach in '10' or a brief glimpse of Barbara Winsor's breasts circa 1965. There is a difference between explicit and erotic and we definitely live in an explicit age and I fear there's just no going back.

Dear Samsung: Please Take My Soul For A Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition!

Does whoring yourself out over the internet ever work?

Most mornings of the week I arrive at my desk to discover at least one email from a web marketing company offering to buy my soul. They don’t phrase it as succinctly as that. They talk about this great opportunity to fill my blog with high quality content written by their talented team of writers and ‘totally in the style of your blog’. It’s all bullshine, of course. They really mean they’d burden this blog with the same steamrollered prose as fills 99% of everything these days. They just want to use my smiling (ha!) internet presence to sell something to you without you noticing that I’m being paid to slip you a lie.

That doesn’t mean that lots of bloggers are immune to taking their shilling. Perhaps I’d even take it myself if they offered me enough, though my soul does come with a hefty price tag attached. It would take life-changing amounts (so that’s many thousands not hundreds of shillings) before I’d even consider sticking an ad for online gambling on my blog. Even then, I’d probably feel so guilty about the deception that I’d highlight the whole sordid business with large red arrows and write personal letters to every single one of you asking for your forgiveness.

Having said all that, I’d now like to sell my soul to Samsung but I don’t know how to go about it.

I’m beginning to seriously obsess about Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition and that’s never a good sign. It’s very rare that I really obsess over new technology. I pride myself on not desiring things. Despite my loving technology, technological abstinence has become one of the ways I’ve managed to keep writing, drawing and blogging. There hasn’t been a single Apple launch that excited me enough to want one of their products. My mobile phone (an old Sony Ericsson Cybershot) is about ten years old. I haven’t got a mobile contract, never bought anything with 3G or 4G, and I don’t really want to start now. There was a time, about a year or so ago, when I needed a better graphics card to help with my 3D animation work but that wasn’t twitchy as much as needy. The last time I felt this twitchy about a product was about the original Nintendo DS but, luckily, I had a job at the time and could satisfy my craving.

The problem this time is that the Samsung Note uses Wacom technology and there’s no word in the advertiser’s lexicon that gets me quite as excited as ‘Wacom’. Wacom make the graphic tablet I use (Bamboo), the graphic tablets I really should get (Intuos), and the graphic pen monitors I lust after (Cintiq). Microsoft also used Wacom tech in their pricier Surface tablet which was also lust worthy, especially after a video surfaced of Penny Arcade's artist, Mike Krahulik, using one.

The Surface tablets run closer to £1000 which takes them well into dream territory. The Samsung Note is cheaper and would fulfill all my needs. As much as I love using pen and ink, there are times in the day when that’s simply not possible. My logic then begins to run down this narrow and utterly immoral line of reasoning: a mobile tablet would allow me to work seamlessly at home and away, blog more often, and produce more graphic content. It would double my productivity, at the very least, and would surely pay for itself over a year…



Oh, get thee behind me… This kind of thinking will lead me to the madhouse unless I can get creative about my predicament.

So, my question is: how do I get Samsung to send me one of those Galaxy Note 10.1 inch beauties to review? I know this blatant kind of scheming works for some people. Things I’ve got free in my time as a blogger: one copy of a book of Clive James’s essays, a copy of ‘Hunger’ by the Norwegian Modernist writer Knut Hamsun, and a copy of a nameless book by a popular and multi-award winning blogger which was so appallingly bad that I quickly dumped it into a charity box and felt bad for inflicting such dross on a charity. (I won’t name the book but, if you’re interested, email me for details).

That’s a rather pitiful return, when you think about it, though none of those books came because I actively lobbied for freebies. This time I am and I'm aiming a little higher...

So, things to do in the next few days:

• relaunch this blog as one of those technology blogs that always get exciting new products;


• begin to act more like Brian Tong or shave my head and adopt ridiculous glasses like Jason Bradbury so Samsung begin to take notice;


• promise them a five star review and constant plugging for the next five years;


• get a large Samsung tattoo covering my buttocks (à la Cheryl Cole), which I also promise to flaunt in public over the next five years or until third arrest.

Hmm… Alternatively, perhaps those ads for online gambling aren’t such a bad idea...

New Cordless Technology

Google's Soma: An Argument Against Glass

“And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Reading about gadgets can all too easily make me leak spittle like a malnourished dog sat whining at a butcher’s ankle. I’m the first to admit that I love new technology. I love unboxing new technology, exploring new technology, and using new technology. I even adore peeling away that plastic film that protects a new screen. Yet over the years, I’ve also started to regard new technology with a certain hesitant caution.

It worries me how irrational I become when I desire something that’s newly out there and available. It worries me how online services creep into our lives and how satisfying and addictive their functionality is deliberately made to look and feel. It also worries me that advances of neuro-linguistic programming and behavioural science are finding their way into the marketing and design of our electronic goods. Yet it’s only with the imminent arrival of Google Glass that I find myself feeling genuinely chilled by the way technology threatens to impose itself on our future.

Although Glass is high-tech gadgetry, it produces – as yet – quite low-tech results. It seems faintly ludicrous, therefore, to make grand statements about a technology that only places a low resolution display in the corner of our vision. Yet, as the consumer giants continue to demonstrate year upon year, huge strides can be made in short periods of time. Google Glass might look quite arcane compared with the devices in store and in our stores in a few years but it still hints at the profound changes we might be ready to enter into with barely a thought to the deeply significant contract we will have effectively signed through our simple participation.

Any criticism I make of Google Glass should be considered, therefore, in the light of what might follow. I don’t wish to stand here preaching about hellfire but I would like to ignite debate among people genuinely interested in the ramifications of a technology that will vastly alter the way we view and interact with the world. My argument is as much about the ‘what ifs’ of Glass and related technology as it is about that technology in its prototype stage. And let’s be clear: it is still barely more than a prototype. Resolutions will increase and the screen will get less cumbersome as the functionality expands. We will undoubtedly develop better ways to present an image to the eye, perhaps by advances in retinal projectors that can already paint images directly onto the retina. Yet before those technological leaps do happen, wouldn’t it be sensible to ask what might happen if we do continue down this road of augmenting our vision?

In its most extreme implementation, some Google Glass of the future might do for reality what the new Xbox One is about to do for TV: re-present it with extra information overlaid on the picture and allow it to be paused or even switched off. Is it too much of an exaggeration to imagine a scenario by which the wearer of one of these devices might simply choose to disconnect themselves from the direct feed of their eyes? They could then view everything through the equivalent of the forward mounted cameras you see on some luxury cars, allowing their vision to be suitably enhanced with different overlays filtered through clever on-board algorithms. You want thermal vision? Night vision? What about vision that replaces red flowers with blue? It sounds innocuous enough, especially if the same technology can do something as useful as blocking out any headline you might spot about the soap opera storyline you’ve not yet watched. Implausible? Technology already exists by which a foreign language written on a surface can be changed into English in real time when viewed through your iPhone. What if you don’t want to ever see Lady Gaga’s face again? Then you might think that this technology might just have its uses but what if that same filter can also obscure signs of poverty or aging or news about a war? Is that pure science fiction or merely the contents of the next firmware update? I’m not so sure that the distance between the two is all that great.

Even if Glass remains merely a device that gives us a peripheral view of email, Twitter, Facebook updates, newsfeeds, and the internet, I believe we must all face the fundamental questions this technology raises about how we function as human beings. How important does memory become when facts are in-vision and immediately accessible? Anybody who has taught in Higher Education will already know that the knowledgebase of undergraduates is at an all-time low. The web has already become the favoured source of essay answers and a common refrain that all secondary school teachers hear is: ‘why do we need to learn it when we can just check on Wikipedia?’

Google Glass is already being sold to us for its ability to present additional information to us as we view the world but will our minds begin to operate in different ways when constantly absorbing information from concurrent sources? Might it mean that we improve our ability to perform rapid task-switching but how might that impact on our concentration levels? If you doubt that it would, consider the quality of conversations you last had with a friend preoccupied with Twitter on their mobile phone or playing Candy Crush on their tablet. Might our thoughts broaden but grow less complex? What does that do to the way we think or write? Consider that some experts already suggest that the average length of an ebook should be 30,000 words. Will that small change impact on the kinds of books we’ll be reading in the future? Will authors of the future be less like Dickens, Conrad or Henry James, and more inclined to write in pithy one-liners usually no more than 140 characters long?

The questions seem interminable because the ramifications of this technology are so great yet barely considered. What interests me most of all, however, is the broader context of social interaction. To many of us, the virtual societies we belong to on the internet are often already more vital than any society we nominally belong to in what might now be called the ‘unfashionably real world’. I know I have more varied and interesting discussions by leaving comments beneath The Guardian’s articles than I have going about my daily life. For the most part, then, all this innovation seems beneficial. Yet might that also be the underlying danger?

The tyranny of the future probably won’t look like tyranny. It will look like entertainment or a beneficial technology you simply can’t live without. The tyranny will not even function as a tyranny in that it won’t be overt. Like Huxley’s reality-neutralising drug soma, it will be something we passively choose in what we believe is an expression of our own free will. Tyranny will look no different to an addiction and you will be the tyrant of your own life.

The closer we align ourselves to the services provided by companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the countless other would-be information gateways, the more we allow those services to decide who and what we are, what we see and what we think and believe. Consider a life where your entire world view is in the control of the media giants, feeding you a diet of talent shows and Simon Cowell. Mobile phones are already changing the nature of our social interactions, as well as the way we think of ourselves as individuals both real and virtual. Google Glass is a very significant step towards a future where we are in a mode of almost permanent distraction and where reality itself might be pre-filtered before we experience it. This is already happening to a certain degree when we select our news feeds and tell the web crawlers what kind of stories we want to read. Yet what do we become if we are only fed a diet of what we think we want rather than the things that we prefer not to see because they can often be difficult, troubling, yet also life changing and ultimately life affirming? As Victor Hugo wrote, ‘thought is the labour of the intellect, reverie its pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment.’

Google Glass is the kind of technology we might have been dreaming about for a long time but we should also be very cautious about replacing our power of thought with that kind of reverie. The better we become at some things, the less able we might become at others. Technology might help us advance more quickly as a civilisation but it might just as easily stunt our growth. Google Glass is one technology I will be watching very closely but one I genuinely doubt I’ll ever want to wear.

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Another article I wrote thinking it might stand a chance to get published over at The Guardian's 'Comment is Free'. Since they ignore everything I ever send them, I'm beginning to think it might be me, not them... Anyway, I've just come across a blisteringly good article on Google by Bryan Appleyard. It makes the case the Google are crazier than even I thought they were.

When People Buy An iPad...

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