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Sunday, September 30, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
That Joy In Existence Without Which The Universe Would Fall Apart and Collapse
A few months ago I suddenly got the urge to look up one of my favorite authors, Madeleine L'Engle, online. I knew she was elderly, but I figured that perhaps she might have some contact information posted on the Web that I could use to write to her. One of the pages I found did include an address, only it wasn't hers specifically -- she'd apparently been living in a nursing home for several years following a stroke in 2002.
I was glad to learn that she was still alive (albeit somewhat worried about her health), but I didn't end up writing to her. My hesitation was due to a combination of procrastination, cynically figuring that my letter might not get to her at all if other people were managing her administrative affairs, and not really being sure what to write in the first place.
I wrote down the address anyway and stashed it in a drawer, imagining that perhaps at some point in the future I'd pull it out again and give writing a letter a try despite my doubts about L'Engle actually receiving it.
Sadly, though, Madeleine L'Engle died on Thursday, September 6, 2007. Now I have no way to thank her personally for what her books have given me over the years. So instead I am writing this, hoping that it will express some sense of how A Wrinkle In Time and its sequels continue to inspire me in thinking, writing, and dreaming.
While I realize that this writing doesn't exactly mesh with my usual subject matter, I figure it's plenty appropriate considering that L'Engle's books are part of the reason I write publicly to begin with.
The Books
Madeleine L'Engle was a prolific author -- she began writing in early childhood and published over 60 books over the course of her life. While she is most well known for her fiction, she also wrote poetry and a number of spiritually-themed books (L'Engle identified as Christian, however, she was most assuredly not a fundamentalist, and noted that fundamentalists tended to dislike and fear her works because they saw spirituality as a "closed system", whereas she saw it as an "open system".) Most of her fiction ended up being grouped by the industry into the childrens' market, however, she resisted classification as a "childrens' author", and she refused to (much to her credit) "write down" to her readership. She did not believe in underestimating what children (or adults, for that matter) would be able to grasp, and wrote accordingly.
I haven't read all L'Engle's books, and some of them likely veer off into directions that I wouldn't find all that compelling, but I will probably seek out at least a few more and read them eventually. Here, I will focus on the three books of L'Engle's that I've owned copies of since childhood, and read more times than I can count: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
Wrinkle
A Wrinkle In Time, arguably her most celebrated work of all, was rejected by numerous publishers prior to being published in 1962 -- the manuscript, with its elements of science fiction, fantasy, and philosophy, was thought to be far too strange (and far too challenging) for the market. However, someone finally decided to take a chance on the novel, and it ended up winning the 1963 Newberry Medal. From that point onward it worked its way into school libraries and bookstores and consequently into the minds of several generations of curious young (and old) readers.
As a fifth-grader I read Wrinkle primarily as a straightforward sci-fi adventure story, featuring one of the first female protagonists (Meg Murry) that I'd ever actually been able to relate to. In particular, I found compelling the book's introduction of the concept of tesseract -- the geometrical element of a fantastic travelling method using the "folding" of spacetime, which allows people to traverse extreme distances instantaneously. I remember spending long, intense moments staring at the pages in the book showing a diagram of an ant crawling along the hem of one character's skirt, utilizing a fold in the skirt to "skip over" a length of the garment's fabric.
I also remember reading (over and over again) the section of the book where the characters describe how "squaring" a line produces a square, and how squaring the second dimension produces a cube. The book uses the convention of describing the fourth dimension as time, and the fifth dimension as the tesseract -- a construct integrating space and time in such a way as to allow the wormhole-like transit method used by the protagonists throughout Wrinkle to visit multiple planets (and still return home in time for supper).
Of course, certain fantastic liberties are taken with the tesseract concept in Wrinkle, but the underlying idea of how different spatial dimensions relate and build on one another is sound. I literally never looked at the world the same way again after reading Wrinkle -- while I'd certainly been aware of the existence of lines, squares, and cubes before, I'd never thought of them as so profoundly significant in terms of the very structure of reality. I developed a very strong interest in the concept of "dimensions", eventually going on to greatly enjoy another book which explored the concept more deeply -- The Fourth Dimension, by Rudy Rucker.
Wind
The first sequel to Wrinkle, A Wind In The Door, was published in 1973 and continued the chronicles of the quirky Murry family (particularly Meg and her youngest brother Charles Wallace). Where Wrinkle charts its course through outer space, Wind plumbs the depths of inner space as the characters race to find the cause of a mysterious, deadly illness threatening the life of Charles Wallace and countless others.
Wind is more abstract and difficult than Wrinkle in some respects; the reader is introduced to worlds and landscapes constructed entirely of thought, to a creature who is at once singular and plural, to journeys that flagrantly disregard usual notions of scale and proportion. As with Wrinkle, however, Wind takes an element of real science (in this case mitochondria, which are the small, energy-generating organelles in living cells) and uses it as a springboard for an intricate and compelling fantasy tale.
One of Wind's opening pages describes young Charles Wallace's first day in first grade as follows:
In addition to feeling Charles's pain and frustration at being accused of "showing off" merely by talking about his favorite interest, I found myself after reading this passage utterly fascinated by the notion of little parts of our cells having started out as discrete organisms. I remember fairly bursting with excitement by the time we got to the "organelles" section of seventh-grade science, because I knew that we were going to get to learn about real mitochondria (which function somewhat differently from mitochondria as described in the book, but which are definitely actual organelles).
I knew that there were not really tiny blue shrimp-mouse creatures (I never said Wind wasn't a weird book!) living in our mitochondria, but I was plenty interested in learning how the little organelles actually did work. Certainly, A Wind in the Door had a hand in helping forge my present interest in the technical side of longevity medicine (since one potentially important area of aging research directly involves mitochondria).
A Wind in the Door spends a lot of time playing with concepts of scale -- flips back and forth between immense and miniscule, inside and outside, cosmic and mundane. If I had to sum up the book in one sentence, that sentence would probably be, Yes, the little things matter..
Planet
A Swiftly Tilting Planet was published in 1978. This book takes place chronologically about nine years after the events described in A Wind in the Door -- Meg is twentysomething and married by this point in time, and Charles Wallace is fifteen.
Planet initially finds the Murry family, united for a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner -- all seems well and ordinary until Mr. Murry receives a phone call from the President informing him of a possible impending nuclear threat. Considering the time in which Planet was written, this is not a surprising plot point. Charles Wallace's ensuing quest is prompted by a surprise charge from the usually taciturn Mrs. O'Keefe (Calvin's mother), who ridiculously (or so it seems) proclaims that Charles may be able to mitigate the nuclear threat.
Rather than using a concept like mathematics or mitochondria as a jumping-off point for its explorations of character and meaning, Planet instead dips into history and geography, drawing upon such half-legendary notions as the idea of Welshmen visiting the New World (even before the Vikings supposedly did) and intermarrying with Native Americans. Planet is therefore a bit heavier on the fantasy and lighter on the sci-fi than either of its predescessors (one of the main characters in Planet is a unicorn), but it still plays curious games with time and space.
Planet is intensely atmospheric, intensely odd, and bit on the dark side. The first time I read Planet, I found certain sections almost too intense to process -- this book delves deeply into the family history and ancestry of some of the characters, and there's a fair bit of dysfunction and violence revealed in that exploration. Mostly this has to do with Meg's husband Calvin O'Keefe's lineage, though Charles Wallace ends up intertwined in this historical thread when the unicorn Gaudior takes him back in time (and into the bodies and minds of various young men throughout the ages).
Theology
As mentioned earlier, Madeleine L'Engle considered herself Christian, and some who read her books seem to see specifically Christian symbology everywhere (though fundamentalists, predictably, see much of her work as heretical). She was fairly outspoken regarding her own personal faith throughout her life, but not in the sense of preaching to (or trying to "convert") others; she seemed to be one of those who believed that everyone had to find their own path to understanging reality's less tangible aspects.
With regard to reality's more tangible aspects, L'Engle clearly held the utmost respect for science, and for scientists; many of her major characters are top-notch physicists and biologists, and Meg Murry is brilliant in mathematics. The characters in Wrinkle, Wind, and Planet may make the occasional religious reference, but not obtrusively so, and none of the protagonists seem to be strict churchgoers.
In many respects, L'Engle's themes are actually highly subversive and even transgressive to the point where I would challenge any fellow atheist to read Wrinkle and its sequels and come away with nothing of value. Any author that managed to publish a book in 1962 wherein the protagonist was simultaneously a girl and good at math (and in which said protagonist's mother was a double PhD in biology who spent more time staring into an electron microscope than dutifully tidying up) is obviously no "Focus on the Family" sycophant. I think it would be just as much of a shame to pigeonhole L'Engle's writing into being "for Christians" as it would be to pigeonhole it into being "for children".
In reading her books, one gets the distinct sense that L'Engle had no patience with people who let their personal fears and prejudices masquerade as morality. Yes, L'Engle was Christian, but she did not write (or think) according to anyone's dogma; her concept of God seemed to be more of the "awe at the sheer magnificence of existence" sort than of the "grumpy bearded fellow waggling his finger at homosexuals and wearers of mixed fabric" sort.
All that said, despite the fact that her stated beliefs differed from mine, I've always felt much in common with L'Engle on philosophical matters. There is nothing in Wrinkle, Wind, or Planet that threatens rationality or discourages inquiry. Plus, despite what some contemporary debates might have you believe, there's a lot more to a person's worldview than simply the fact of whether or not they believe in God(s).
Good and Evil
L'Engle's books, like many fantasy novels, concern themselves quite a bit with the struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.
In Wrinkle, evil is described in the form of a dark shadow that covers the earth, a shadow which has been there so long that most people interpret its presence as normal.
The exact nature of this shadow is not explained in Wrinkle; it is described generically as being "the powers of darkness", and its influence is creepily illustrated through the description of the horrible planet, Camazotz, on which Meg's physicist father is initially imprisoned (he and a colleague accidentally ended up there in the course of one of their top-secret physics experiments).
Camazotz is a nightmare of enforced conformity and bureaucracy; children are expected to all bounce balls and jump rope in precise rhythm, and if any of them deviate even slightly from this, they are subjected to painful behavioral treatments. Everything requires paperwork. Anyone who so much as catches a cold is "put to sleep" (i.e., murdered) so as to spare them any "suffering".
In short, Camazotz is a lazy philosopher's utility maximizer gone horribly wrong. L'Engle aptly demonstrates in Wrinkle that evil is not necessarily the sort of thing one can identify by looking for stereotypes of mindless malice, but the sort of thing that can come about when people oversimplify reality to such a degree that their efficiency drive becomes destructive. Ethical negligence can be just as terrible in its effect as a deliberate breaching of ethics. And when malice does emerge, it can be the effect of (rather than the root cause of) the power imbalances that ensue from this negligence.
L'Engle's literary concept of evil is developed in further detail in Wind and Planet, and personified in the form of the Echthroi (Εχθροί) -- a term which means "the enemy". The echthroi seem to be the embodiment of destructive nihilism. And despite having neither form nor voice, they are some of the scariest "villains" I've ever encountered in fiction.
In Wind, the echthroi are portrayed as the perpetrators of a phenomenon called "Xing", which is basically the active negation of someone else's personhood. Humans, other sentient creatures, and echthroi alike can X others -- the echthroi are (like The Nothing from The Neverending Story, and The First Evil from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) the fundamental force which is served and strengthened by evil acts even as it inspires the hate and despair that prompt such acts.
The echthroi (and the "Xing" concept) are frightening on that visceral level that anyone who has ever faced a bully will surely recognize. The negating impulse inherent in bullying is shown to be the very same brand of evil that results in people being burned as witches, or deemed "inconvenient" (e.g., because they stand in the way of someone's ambition for the throne), or tossed aside as insignificant or useless due to some perceived imperfection.
The concept of good as expressed in Wrinkle, Wind, and Planet is a very active one -- good is not a passive quality, or simply a feeling, but something people do. In many respects, this characterization of good is practically synonymous with love. Not love in the sense of infatuation or even romance, but rather, in the sense of actively respecting someone's personhood and helping them to find their own way of seeing joy in existence.
L'Engle's characters tend to learn about love through breaking out of the common delusion that love happens according to a formula or a set of token symbols. Often, love involves learning things you'd rather not learn, and in risking losing your sense of comfort in the world for the sake of knowing what is actually true.
While Wrinkle, Wind, and Planet make occasional references to gods of every stripe from Abrahamic to Celtic to Native American, L'Engle does not rely on these superlative entities to transmit the idea of what goodness is. Rather, she relies on the personal journeys of her characters (flaws and all), in order to demonstrate that being good is not about being all-powerful, but about making certain observations about reality and acting accordingly.
On Naming
One of the fantasy elements in Wind that I think bears particular mention here is the notion of people having particular vocations, or "callings". Meg Murry, for instance, is a "Namer" (whereas two of her brothers are "Teachers"). Another character (Proginoskes, who is nonhuman, looks like "a drive of dragons", and is either immortal or extremely long-lived) describes how he once had the task of memorizing all the names of all the stars in all the galaxies. The point of this exercise was to "help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be".
I am almost reluctant to try to describe the personal significance this Naming concept has for me, because I am afraid that no matter how I try, it still might come across as trite. But I am going to attempt it anyway, because a lot of L'Engle's goodness mythos is intimately tied to many of the notions of uniqueness, self, and identity that figure prominently in my own writing and thinking along these lines. The little anecdote about naming stars above might sound simple, but in my own private symbology (that I rarely, if ever, find the ability to describe in words), it is anything but.
Acknowledging the "little things" -- the small and seemingly mundane details of existence -- is a personal habit that borders on the sacred for me. When I leave work in the evening, I am often beside myself with joy as a result of seeing the tributaries of a particular crack in the asphalt, or of seeing a splash of patterned light (filtered through the windblown leaves of a tree) race across the ground as a breeze cools my face. And in some weird sense, I feel very much at these times as if I am exchanging information with the universe-at-large -- I am existing and perceiving the little things that make it up, and at the same time, those things are responding to my presence via the diversion of air current around my nose and the whisper of photons glancing off my retinas.
I know it might sound silly, but I guess I feel like there should be people who know the names of stars, and of leaves, and of sidewalk cracks, for that matter. As someone who used to read the dictionary for fun, and who still enjoys memorizing the ingredients label of every food or toiletry item that comes into my home, I can see perfectly the logic of memorizing stars.
I see the sum total of conscious minds in the universe as a sort of network through which information is processed into joy and beauty and art and music and mathematics (and all those other delightful forms into which we can now channel the energies evolution has serendipitously gifted us with). And the more different kinds of minds there are, the more the totality of sentience gets to experience of what there is to experience.
In short, it is all well and good to raise your eyes toward a fireworks display with your neighbors, but do not necessarily believe that the youngster watching a caterpillar slowly inch along the ground during the light show is "missing out".
So, while I strongly support the right of all persons to self-configure to the greatest degree possible, I think it is also important to avoid establishing overly nihilistic concepts of self that dismiss personal uniqueness (and the constraints that all of us face inasmuch as we can never be all things at once) as "essentialism" or "identity politics".
When Meg Murry learns to appreciate herself for who she is rather than pining to be someone else, this does not mean that she stagnates or tries to define herself according to a particular hairstyle, or on the basis that she wears glasses. It simply means that she learns to look within herself and see how to use the reality of how she is configured to accomplish her goals and grow up into a more competent and confident individual. Not according to the status quo, but according to a more personalized (and in many ways, more rigorous) set of standards.
Regardless of how someone gets to be the way they are -- whether they are born that way, or whether they become that way as a result of experience or development, or whether they choose to alter themselves over the course of their life -- they still exist in a particular form at every point. And there is a kind of art and skill to being able to know the ins and outs of one's form deeply. L'Engle's characters' journeys often involve coming to this level of self-awareness, and it is a great strength of her books that this is accomplished without recourse to platitudes or cliches.
Joy
Now, to explain the title of this article, and its connection to my writing. The title of my blog, Existence is Wonderful is basically my attempt at shorthand in expressing That Joy In Existence Without Which The Universe Would Fall Apart and Collapse.
This is a phrase that is repeated throughout A Swiftly Tilting Planet -- it is the stated meaning of the names of two characters (Ananda, a dog, and Gaudior, a unicorn). It is also the fundamental essence of Charles Wallace's quest in that story: to help the world recognize joy again. In Planet, the nuclear threat that drives the plot is representative of that basic, chill despair that sets in when a person decides that nothing means anything and that it therefore doesn't matter if it all goes away.
With that in mind, part of what I aim to do when I write -- whether it be about life extension, or neurological variation, or any of the other topics I cover fairly regularly -- is to get the message across that the universe is simply teeming with meaning and opportunities to experience joy.
Just because life won't grab you by the collar and tell you what it means doesn't mean that it doesn't mean anything.
I believe that it is far better to see the pursuit of meaning and joy as a creative process than as a passive one.
And toward that end, I will continue to publicly express the sentiment that existence is, undoubtedly and infinitely, wonderful.
I was glad to learn that she was still alive (albeit somewhat worried about her health), but I didn't end up writing to her. My hesitation was due to a combination of procrastination, cynically figuring that my letter might not get to her at all if other people were managing her administrative affairs, and not really being sure what to write in the first place.
I wrote down the address anyway and stashed it in a drawer, imagining that perhaps at some point in the future I'd pull it out again and give writing a letter a try despite my doubts about L'Engle actually receiving it.
Sadly, though, Madeleine L'Engle died on Thursday, September 6, 2007. Now I have no way to thank her personally for what her books have given me over the years. So instead I am writing this, hoping that it will express some sense of how A Wrinkle In Time and its sequels continue to inspire me in thinking, writing, and dreaming.
While I realize that this writing doesn't exactly mesh with my usual subject matter, I figure it's plenty appropriate considering that L'Engle's books are part of the reason I write publicly to begin with.
The Books
Madeleine L'Engle was a prolific author -- she began writing in early childhood and published over 60 books over the course of her life. While she is most well known for her fiction, she also wrote poetry and a number of spiritually-themed books (L'Engle identified as Christian, however, she was most assuredly not a fundamentalist, and noted that fundamentalists tended to dislike and fear her works because they saw spirituality as a "closed system", whereas she saw it as an "open system".) Most of her fiction ended up being grouped by the industry into the childrens' market, however, she resisted classification as a "childrens' author", and she refused to (much to her credit) "write down" to her readership. She did not believe in underestimating what children (or adults, for that matter) would be able to grasp, and wrote accordingly.
I haven't read all L'Engle's books, and some of them likely veer off into directions that I wouldn't find all that compelling, but I will probably seek out at least a few more and read them eventually. Here, I will focus on the three books of L'Engle's that I've owned copies of since childhood, and read more times than I can count: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
Wrinkle
A Wrinkle In Time, arguably her most celebrated work of all, was rejected by numerous publishers prior to being published in 1962 -- the manuscript, with its elements of science fiction, fantasy, and philosophy, was thought to be far too strange (and far too challenging) for the market. However, someone finally decided to take a chance on the novel, and it ended up winning the 1963 Newberry Medal. From that point onward it worked its way into school libraries and bookstores and consequently into the minds of several generations of curious young (and old) readers.
As a fifth-grader I read Wrinkle primarily as a straightforward sci-fi adventure story, featuring one of the first female protagonists (Meg Murry) that I'd ever actually been able to relate to. In particular, I found compelling the book's introduction of the concept of tesseract -- the geometrical element of a fantastic travelling method using the "folding" of spacetime, which allows people to traverse extreme distances instantaneously. I remember spending long, intense moments staring at the pages in the book showing a diagram of an ant crawling along the hem of one character's skirt, utilizing a fold in the skirt to "skip over" a length of the garment's fabric.
I also remember reading (over and over again) the section of the book where the characters describe how "squaring" a line produces a square, and how squaring the second dimension produces a cube. The book uses the convention of describing the fourth dimension as time, and the fifth dimension as the tesseract -- a construct integrating space and time in such a way as to allow the wormhole-like transit method used by the protagonists throughout Wrinkle to visit multiple planets (and still return home in time for supper).
Of course, certain fantastic liberties are taken with the tesseract concept in Wrinkle, but the underlying idea of how different spatial dimensions relate and build on one another is sound. I literally never looked at the world the same way again after reading Wrinkle -- while I'd certainly been aware of the existence of lines, squares, and cubes before, I'd never thought of them as so profoundly significant in terms of the very structure of reality. I developed a very strong interest in the concept of "dimensions", eventually going on to greatly enjoy another book which explored the concept more deeply -- The Fourth Dimension, by Rudy Rucker.
Wind
The first sequel to Wrinkle, A Wind In The Door, was published in 1973 and continued the chronicles of the quirky Murry family (particularly Meg and her youngest brother Charles Wallace). Where Wrinkle charts its course through outer space, Wind plumbs the depths of inner space as the characters race to find the cause of a mysterious, deadly illness threatening the life of Charles Wallace and countless others.
Wind is more abstract and difficult than Wrinkle in some respects; the reader is introduced to worlds and landscapes constructed entirely of thought, to a creature who is at once singular and plural, to journeys that flagrantly disregard usual notions of scale and proportion. As with Wrinkle, however, Wind takes an element of real science (in this case mitochondria, which are the small, energy-generating organelles in living cells) and uses it as a springboard for an intricate and compelling fantasy tale.
One of Wind's opening pages describes young Charles Wallace's first day in first grade as follows:
"Your parents are scientists, aren't they?" [The teacher] did not wait for an answer. "Let's see what you have to tell us."
Charles Wallace ("You should have known better!" Meg scolded him that night) stood and said, "What I'm interested in right now are the farandolae and the mitochondria."
"What was that, Charles? The mighty what"
"Mitochondria. They and the farandolae come from the prokaryocytes ---"
"The what?"
"Well, billions of years ago they probably swam into what eventually became our eukaryotic cells and they've just stayed there. They have their own DNA and RNA, which means they're quite separate from us. They have a symbiotic relationship with us, and the amazing thing is that we're completely dependent on them for our oxygen."
"Now, Charles, suppose you stop making silly things up, and the next time I call on you, don't try to show off. Now, George, you tell the class something . . . "
In addition to feeling Charles's pain and frustration at being accused of "showing off" merely by talking about his favorite interest, I found myself after reading this passage utterly fascinated by the notion of little parts of our cells having started out as discrete organisms. I remember fairly bursting with excitement by the time we got to the "organelles" section of seventh-grade science, because I knew that we were going to get to learn about real mitochondria (which function somewhat differently from mitochondria as described in the book, but which are definitely actual organelles).
I knew that there were not really tiny blue shrimp-mouse creatures (I never said Wind wasn't a weird book!) living in our mitochondria, but I was plenty interested in learning how the little organelles actually did work. Certainly, A Wind in the Door had a hand in helping forge my present interest in the technical side of longevity medicine (since one potentially important area of aging research directly involves mitochondria).
A Wind in the Door spends a lot of time playing with concepts of scale -- flips back and forth between immense and miniscule, inside and outside, cosmic and mundane. If I had to sum up the book in one sentence, that sentence would probably be, Yes, the little things matter..
Planet
A Swiftly Tilting Planet was published in 1978. This book takes place chronologically about nine years after the events described in A Wind in the Door -- Meg is twentysomething and married by this point in time, and Charles Wallace is fifteen.
Planet initially finds the Murry family, united for a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner -- all seems well and ordinary until Mr. Murry receives a phone call from the President informing him of a possible impending nuclear threat. Considering the time in which Planet was written, this is not a surprising plot point. Charles Wallace's ensuing quest is prompted by a surprise charge from the usually taciturn Mrs. O'Keefe (Calvin's mother), who ridiculously (or so it seems) proclaims that Charles may be able to mitigate the nuclear threat.
Rather than using a concept like mathematics or mitochondria as a jumping-off point for its explorations of character and meaning, Planet instead dips into history and geography, drawing upon such half-legendary notions as the idea of Welshmen visiting the New World (even before the Vikings supposedly did) and intermarrying with Native Americans. Planet is therefore a bit heavier on the fantasy and lighter on the sci-fi than either of its predescessors (one of the main characters in Planet is a unicorn), but it still plays curious games with time and space.
Planet is intensely atmospheric, intensely odd, and bit on the dark side. The first time I read Planet, I found certain sections almost too intense to process -- this book delves deeply into the family history and ancestry of some of the characters, and there's a fair bit of dysfunction and violence revealed in that exploration. Mostly this has to do with Meg's husband Calvin O'Keefe's lineage, though Charles Wallace ends up intertwined in this historical thread when the unicorn Gaudior takes him back in time (and into the bodies and minds of various young men throughout the ages).
Theology
As mentioned earlier, Madeleine L'Engle considered herself Christian, and some who read her books seem to see specifically Christian symbology everywhere (though fundamentalists, predictably, see much of her work as heretical). She was fairly outspoken regarding her own personal faith throughout her life, but not in the sense of preaching to (or trying to "convert") others; she seemed to be one of those who believed that everyone had to find their own path to understanging reality's less tangible aspects.
With regard to reality's more tangible aspects, L'Engle clearly held the utmost respect for science, and for scientists; many of her major characters are top-notch physicists and biologists, and Meg Murry is brilliant in mathematics. The characters in Wrinkle, Wind, and Planet may make the occasional religious reference, but not obtrusively so, and none of the protagonists seem to be strict churchgoers.
In many respects, L'Engle's themes are actually highly subversive and even transgressive to the point where I would challenge any fellow atheist to read Wrinkle and its sequels and come away with nothing of value. Any author that managed to publish a book in 1962 wherein the protagonist was simultaneously a girl and good at math (and in which said protagonist's mother was a double PhD in biology who spent more time staring into an electron microscope than dutifully tidying up) is obviously no "Focus on the Family" sycophant. I think it would be just as much of a shame to pigeonhole L'Engle's writing into being "for Christians" as it would be to pigeonhole it into being "for children".
In reading her books, one gets the distinct sense that L'Engle had no patience with people who let their personal fears and prejudices masquerade as morality. Yes, L'Engle was Christian, but she did not write (or think) according to anyone's dogma; her concept of God seemed to be more of the "awe at the sheer magnificence of existence" sort than of the "grumpy bearded fellow waggling his finger at homosexuals and wearers of mixed fabric" sort.
All that said, despite the fact that her stated beliefs differed from mine, I've always felt much in common with L'Engle on philosophical matters. There is nothing in Wrinkle, Wind, or Planet that threatens rationality or discourages inquiry. Plus, despite what some contemporary debates might have you believe, there's a lot more to a person's worldview than simply the fact of whether or not they believe in God(s).
Good and Evil
L'Engle's books, like many fantasy novels, concern themselves quite a bit with the struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.
In Wrinkle, evil is described in the form of a dark shadow that covers the earth, a shadow which has been there so long that most people interpret its presence as normal.
The exact nature of this shadow is not explained in Wrinkle; it is described generically as being "the powers of darkness", and its influence is creepily illustrated through the description of the horrible planet, Camazotz, on which Meg's physicist father is initially imprisoned (he and a colleague accidentally ended up there in the course of one of their top-secret physics experiments).
Camazotz is a nightmare of enforced conformity and bureaucracy; children are expected to all bounce balls and jump rope in precise rhythm, and if any of them deviate even slightly from this, they are subjected to painful behavioral treatments. Everything requires paperwork. Anyone who so much as catches a cold is "put to sleep" (i.e., murdered) so as to spare them any "suffering".
In short, Camazotz is a lazy philosopher's utility maximizer gone horribly wrong. L'Engle aptly demonstrates in Wrinkle that evil is not necessarily the sort of thing one can identify by looking for stereotypes of mindless malice, but the sort of thing that can come about when people oversimplify reality to such a degree that their efficiency drive becomes destructive. Ethical negligence can be just as terrible in its effect as a deliberate breaching of ethics. And when malice does emerge, it can be the effect of (rather than the root cause of) the power imbalances that ensue from this negligence.
L'Engle's literary concept of evil is developed in further detail in Wind and Planet, and personified in the form of the Echthroi (Εχθροί) -- a term which means "the enemy". The echthroi seem to be the embodiment of destructive nihilism. And despite having neither form nor voice, they are some of the scariest "villains" I've ever encountered in fiction.
In Wind, the echthroi are portrayed as the perpetrators of a phenomenon called "Xing", which is basically the active negation of someone else's personhood. Humans, other sentient creatures, and echthroi alike can X others -- the echthroi are (like The Nothing from The Neverending Story, and The First Evil from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) the fundamental force which is served and strengthened by evil acts even as it inspires the hate and despair that prompt such acts.
The echthroi (and the "Xing" concept) are frightening on that visceral level that anyone who has ever faced a bully will surely recognize. The negating impulse inherent in bullying is shown to be the very same brand of evil that results in people being burned as witches, or deemed "inconvenient" (e.g., because they stand in the way of someone's ambition for the throne), or tossed aside as insignificant or useless due to some perceived imperfection.
The concept of good as expressed in Wrinkle, Wind, and Planet is a very active one -- good is not a passive quality, or simply a feeling, but something people do. In many respects, this characterization of good is practically synonymous with love. Not love in the sense of infatuation or even romance, but rather, in the sense of actively respecting someone's personhood and helping them to find their own way of seeing joy in existence.
L'Engle's characters tend to learn about love through breaking out of the common delusion that love happens according to a formula or a set of token symbols. Often, love involves learning things you'd rather not learn, and in risking losing your sense of comfort in the world for the sake of knowing what is actually true.
While Wrinkle, Wind, and Planet make occasional references to gods of every stripe from Abrahamic to Celtic to Native American, L'Engle does not rely on these superlative entities to transmit the idea of what goodness is. Rather, she relies on the personal journeys of her characters (flaws and all), in order to demonstrate that being good is not about being all-powerful, but about making certain observations about reality and acting accordingly.
On Naming
One of the fantasy elements in Wind that I think bears particular mention here is the notion of people having particular vocations, or "callings". Meg Murry, for instance, is a "Namer" (whereas two of her brothers are "Teachers"). Another character (Proginoskes, who is nonhuman, looks like "a drive of dragons", and is either immortal or extremely long-lived) describes how he once had the task of memorizing all the names of all the stars in all the galaxies. The point of this exercise was to "help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be".
I am almost reluctant to try to describe the personal significance this Naming concept has for me, because I am afraid that no matter how I try, it still might come across as trite. But I am going to attempt it anyway, because a lot of L'Engle's goodness mythos is intimately tied to many of the notions of uniqueness, self, and identity that figure prominently in my own writing and thinking along these lines. The little anecdote about naming stars above might sound simple, but in my own private symbology (that I rarely, if ever, find the ability to describe in words), it is anything but.
Acknowledging the "little things" -- the small and seemingly mundane details of existence -- is a personal habit that borders on the sacred for me. When I leave work in the evening, I am often beside myself with joy as a result of seeing the tributaries of a particular crack in the asphalt, or of seeing a splash of patterned light (filtered through the windblown leaves of a tree) race across the ground as a breeze cools my face. And in some weird sense, I feel very much at these times as if I am exchanging information with the universe-at-large -- I am existing and perceiving the little things that make it up, and at the same time, those things are responding to my presence via the diversion of air current around my nose and the whisper of photons glancing off my retinas.
I know it might sound silly, but I guess I feel like there should be people who know the names of stars, and of leaves, and of sidewalk cracks, for that matter. As someone who used to read the dictionary for fun, and who still enjoys memorizing the ingredients label of every food or toiletry item that comes into my home, I can see perfectly the logic of memorizing stars.
I see the sum total of conscious minds in the universe as a sort of network through which information is processed into joy and beauty and art and music and mathematics (and all those other delightful forms into which we can now channel the energies evolution has serendipitously gifted us with). And the more different kinds of minds there are, the more the totality of sentience gets to experience of what there is to experience.
In short, it is all well and good to raise your eyes toward a fireworks display with your neighbors, but do not necessarily believe that the youngster watching a caterpillar slowly inch along the ground during the light show is "missing out".
So, while I strongly support the right of all persons to self-configure to the greatest degree possible, I think it is also important to avoid establishing overly nihilistic concepts of self that dismiss personal uniqueness (and the constraints that all of us face inasmuch as we can never be all things at once) as "essentialism" or "identity politics".
When Meg Murry learns to appreciate herself for who she is rather than pining to be someone else, this does not mean that she stagnates or tries to define herself according to a particular hairstyle, or on the basis that she wears glasses. It simply means that she learns to look within herself and see how to use the reality of how she is configured to accomplish her goals and grow up into a more competent and confident individual. Not according to the status quo, but according to a more personalized (and in many ways, more rigorous) set of standards.
Regardless of how someone gets to be the way they are -- whether they are born that way, or whether they become that way as a result of experience or development, or whether they choose to alter themselves over the course of their life -- they still exist in a particular form at every point. And there is a kind of art and skill to being able to know the ins and outs of one's form deeply. L'Engle's characters' journeys often involve coming to this level of self-awareness, and it is a great strength of her books that this is accomplished without recourse to platitudes or cliches.
Joy
Now, to explain the title of this article, and its connection to my writing. The title of my blog, Existence is Wonderful is basically my attempt at shorthand in expressing That Joy In Existence Without Which The Universe Would Fall Apart and Collapse.
This is a phrase that is repeated throughout A Swiftly Tilting Planet -- it is the stated meaning of the names of two characters (Ananda, a dog, and Gaudior, a unicorn). It is also the fundamental essence of Charles Wallace's quest in that story: to help the world recognize joy again. In Planet, the nuclear threat that drives the plot is representative of that basic, chill despair that sets in when a person decides that nothing means anything and that it therefore doesn't matter if it all goes away.
With that in mind, part of what I aim to do when I write -- whether it be about life extension, or neurological variation, or any of the other topics I cover fairly regularly -- is to get the message across that the universe is simply teeming with meaning and opportunities to experience joy.
Just because life won't grab you by the collar and tell you what it means doesn't mean that it doesn't mean anything.
I believe that it is far better to see the pursuit of meaning and joy as a creative process than as a passive one.
And toward that end, I will continue to publicly express the sentiment that existence is, undoubtedly and infinitely, wonderful.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Singularity Summit 2007 - Impressions, Part II
Defining the Terms
Part of the difficulty in talking about artificial intelligence is the ambiguity of the meaning of intelligence. Over the past few months, I've been informally investigating what different people think about what "intelligence" actually is, and have come across quite a range of ideas.
Academically speaking, it seems that the most common interpretation of intelligence is that it is something that is both (a) quantifiable, and (b) strongly correlated with a person's likelihood of achieving particular types of education and/or employment. In other words, statistics and practical measurements are considered extremely important.
However, in circles that are more philosophical (and frequently political), there doesn't seem to be a "most common" interpretation at all, but rather, the endless dance of perpetual debate. There are those who see it as a no-brainer that "intelligence" must require self-awareness, and those who believe that this is obviously not the case. There are those who equate intelligence with g, which can supposedly be measured using IQ tests -- and those who see IQ tests as outmoded hokum, and "g" as an oversimplification at best. Thankfully, most of Saturday's speakers managed to discuss intelligence in the context of particular topical domains, setting up important terms at the start of each of their talks -- and giving the overall impression of a loose coalition of thinkers all grasping at parts of something too large for any one of us to grok in fullness. Happily, most (if not all) of them seemed cogent of this fact.
The idea of a general intelligence presupposes, perhaps, an AI's ability to learn pretty much anything a human might be able to conceive of learning (and perhaps more, based on its own priorities and capacities), but in practice, there are likely to be different "flavors" of general machine intelligences. We humans like to call ourselves "generalists", and the fact that humans are capable of learning new skills independent of absolute hard-coding for those specific skills indicates that this is true to some extent, but really, our intelligence is quite narrow if you look at it from the perspective of the grand scheme of all possible minds. Most people may be able to learn most things people can imagine wanting to do, however, it is clear that different humans are optimized to find different things easier or more difficult.
Additionally, we all specialize over time; a particular person might be equally capable of earning a degree in business, graphic design, or basket-weaving, but he is not likely to simultaneously major in all three. And even the most cursory glance at the spectrum of human abilities reveals variations in how these abilities are "weighted" from person to person. A video by a friend of mine demonstrates how some abilities that might seem conceptually similar (in this case, the ability to identify auditory tones as compared to the ability to identify colors), but which do not often manifest simultaneously; most sighted people can easily distinguish between red and blue, but very few can identify a "C" or "A flat" note in the absence of a reference tone. So I remain skeptical of the very idea of "general intelligence", at least in the sense that most people probably think of it (which is probably heavily weighted toward the range of stuff that a particular person finds comprehensible).
But: clearly, some people believe that they have some workable conceptualization of a "general intelligence" model. A fair percentage of them were probably in the Palace of Fine Arts the weekend of this year's Summit.
Personally, I think that the best way to start a discussion about intelligence is to put it in terms of a "black box". We can't pretend that we know exactly how the brain -- any brain -- understands things. Though neuroscience can describe some aspects of cognition, we still don't know enough to design and construct an artificial, thinking mind based on human models. What we do know is that when you combine a person with an environment, it is the person's brain that allows that person to process the information she acquires through her senses, and to further incorporate that information into her internal model of how reality works.
This being the case, I appreciated Eliezer Yudkowsky's slide depicting a brain along with various inventions dreamed up and made reality by humans throughout the ages. Whether or not you agree that "intelligence" is that thing which has allowed the creation of space shuttles, skyscrapers, and projectile weapons, it is at least apparent when shown such a slide that for the purposes of ensuing discussion, this is what is meant by "intelligence" (or at least "cognitive factors"). Yudkowsky also displayed a slide showing the fallacy of trying to judge AI development on a purely human-centric scale. Whatever you might say about Yudkowsky (and I don't know him well enough to say very much at all, and even if I did, I have no interest in or taste for gossip), one thing I do appreciate about his usual approach to the subject of intelligence is that he seems to think very much in terms of a broad spectrum of potential minds.
In his closing statements, Yudkowsky emphatically pleaded with the audience to, "for the love of cute kittens", define the term singularity if they were going to use it at all. I would say that it is perhaps more important to define your conceptualization of intelligence. After all, it's difficult to coherently discuss what you mean by an "intelligence explosion" if you haven't made it clear what, exactly, you expect to be exploding!
The next two presentations offered other, variant "flavors" of the interpretation of intelligence, along with different example AGI applications.
The Practical Case for AGI
Next, Barney Pell, PhD., presented on Pathways to Advanced General Intelligence: Architecture, Development, and Funding. He didn't offer a concise definition of "intelligence" from his perspective up-front, however, he did suggest "able to perform the kinds of jobs that high school students are generally hired for" as a marker of significant progress in the development of true AGI.
According to Pell, the "AI research community" (I'm not sure who comprises this community -- I'm guessing it depends on who you ask) holds a consensus that we will probably have such an AI within 100 years. Pell noted that there are a number of probable major milestones and accomplishments that must precede the development of an AI with "worker"-level capacity or greater. Pell pointed out, though, that not all AI models will necessarily be human-inspired -- he presented a graph showing "development" on one (y) axis and "architecture" on the other (x). Theoretical projections as to the nature of possible "created" minds span a potential space that includes everything from human babies to highly advanced computers that do not resemble humans in either their developmental style or their construction.
Success has been functionally nil in the area of artificial general intelligence, and many people have gravitated toward "narrow" AI applications -- understandable, since companies have to watch their profit margin in order to stay afloat, and frequently frown on ambitious R&D with highly uncertain projected outcomes. As Pell pointed out, not only is AGI "hard", companies have many incentives to focus on "incremental research and low-hanging fruit". And regardless of their limitations, specialized AI systems do often provide outstanding performance in the particular area for which they were designed -- Deep Blue might not be able to learn games other than chess, but it does play a good game of chess. Since most companies focus on a particular product or product line, "narrow AI" might be all they ever need.
Nevertheless, suggests Pell, it is possible that AGI might actually become "essential to product value" if developed. Military scientists are understandably intrigued by the prospect of AGI-enhanced robots and other systems; as Pell pointed out, the nature of warfare itself has changed in recent years, and "the rules of combat change all the time". An autonomous system capable of recognizing and responding appropriately to these rule-changes would no doubt benefit from AGI (the question of whether humanity would benefit from such applications is another discussion altogether).
More commercially promising (and less controversial) near-term potential applications of AGI include video games and virtual worlds (in which, according to Pell, AI is now becoming tremendously important to gameplay, above and beyond graphics), along with natural language search and conversational Web and computer interfaces.
As an example of a practical application likely to benefit from (and drive) AI research, Pell showed a few slides on the in-development Powerset -- an ambitious project with the goal of "building a natural language search engine that reads and understands every sentence on the Web." Language is a very promising area for AI, consdering how complex and context-dependent it is when humans use it -- any program capable of processing and understanding language would by necessity have to be incredibly sophisticated and flexible.
This discussion thread led to a question during Pell's Q&A session about the possibility of voice interface eventually "replacing" text altogether. I am always vaguely disturbed whenever I hear people bringing up this notion -- it seems like a no-brainer that it's better for people to have more communication choices and methods of interacting with their favorite machines than less.
People who postulate a supposedly ideal "voice in, voice out" computing and communication paradigm must never have worked in a cubicle-based office -- I need noise-cancelling headphones on the basis of people's hallway and phone conversations alone where I work, and I can't even fathom the horror of working in an office where everyone is yammering out loud at their computers all day long, with their machines duly yammering back! Not to mention the fact that there are various populations of persons in the world who prefer or even require text-based interfaces -- I shudder to imagine a future in which basic keyboards are relegated to the status of "special need".
In light of this, I was pleased to see Pell reminding Summit attendees of the fact that auditory strings are by nature serial, and therefore much slower to search than text strings. While natural language processing (fueled by AGI) may indeed improve voice interfaces tremendously, I shudder to imagine a future in which constant, ubiquitous chatter and illiteracy become the norm. Thankfully, I seriously doubt this future will ever actually come about, seeing as there are so many obvious example cases where either text or voice is the better medium for information storage or communication. It just surprises me that anyone would even bother postulating a voice-only future.
Near the conclusion of his presentation, Barney Pell addressed the question of why he supports the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence -- basically, while he recognizes that it may be impossible to predict precisely when "profound change" starts to come about as a result of AI and other technological developments, he sees the need to discuss the matter sooner rather than later. He suggested that in the future, "people will thank futurists" (presumably, for at least attempting to open up the topic space surrounding key potential tech-driven changes). Given the (mixed, at best) track record of "futurists" throughout the ages I can't say whether I necessarily agree with Pell on this point.
Overall, Pell's presentation was very much grounded in the "here and now", and his examples of military, gaming, and language-processing applications for AI definitely made a compelling case for the idea that AI is far from being a mere science fiction pipe dream. If AGI can be developed, it does seem that the infrastructure exists through which it may, within the next few decades or so, be developed.
I Give You Your Faults
IBM engineer Sam Adams probably had one of the most compelling presentation titles at the entire event -- he spoke on Superstition and Forgetfulness – Two Essentials for Artificial General Intelligence. Fittingly, the presentation itself turned out to be one of the more technical (and critical) talks at the Summit. Adams approached AI from a very human-centered perspective, stating at the beginning of his talk that "the only known pathway to human level intelligence is the one that we ourselves have traveled". He introduced the audience to the Joshua Blue project -- a currently on-hold IBM effort to develop an artificial mind based on what we know about how human minds develop starting in early infancy. Unlike Deep Blue -- IBM's earlier celebrated contribution to the world of AI -- Joshua Blue is intended to be capable of learning in multiple domains.
Adams presented a view of intelligence (or perhaps more properly, of the cognitive faculties that humans tend to associate with "intelligence") that emphasized subjective experience and internal representation as essential features of a practical brain-based AI model. His presentation title, which refers to "superstition and forgetfulness", is an engineer's invocation of traits that (at first glance) appear to be faults, but that may in fact be critical to producing a system that can learn. Despite the impressive facility of Deep Blue at playing chess, and of our desktop computers at performing a variety of useful processing feats, Adams pointed out that "no computer [yet] has the common sense of a six-year-old child". Common sense, according to Adams, is intimately bound to the experience of a common sensation, which produces a common experience.
A bit of a personal aside here: while growing up, I was very often told that I "lacked common sense". I wasn't exactly sure what this meant, since nobody ever seemed able to precisely define what common sense was -- it was just something I was expected to have, something that would somehow intangibly guide me toward choices that would please adults, help ensure my personal safety, etc. Looking back, it now seems fairly obvious that the reason I seemed to lack "common sense" was because I was, in fact, not having what Sam Adams would define as a "common experience" with those around me. I was constantly swimming in a sea of details, perceiving the smallest parts of objects around me very directly (my parents recall me being curious about everything from the holes in the telephone receiver to the composition of human hair). Everything was very loud, very bright, and highly textured.
Of course, I thought this was perfectly normal; like most humans, I figured that the way I saw the world was the way everyone saw the world. Therefore, my supposed "lack of common sense" (which is, I guess, what prompted me to do things like climb shelves, crawl into the refrigerator, and ask "obvious" questions) remained a mystery to me for years. In light of this, I think that would-be AI-builders should be careful of defining "common experience" in too narrow a fashion; neurotype, culture, native language, and other distinguishing factors can all contribute toward a person's experience having more or less in common with that of others.
Another one of Adams' important subjective experience factors is time-consciousness. As he stated, our cognition is "time-bound", meaning that a mind processing information at rates orders of magnitude above human speeds (which, though I'm sure they vary, still fall within a relatively narrow range) would experience reality in ways that no human could even begin to imagine. This makes sense -- after all, the faster a mind can process information, the slower everything around him seems to be happening; if you've ever experienced nearly falling off a cliff, or nearly getting into a car accident, you are probably familiar with the sense of being in slow-motion that occurs in such situations.
This effect has been studied; a bungee jumper was found to be able to read numbers on a digital display in mid-jump more accurately than if he'd been sitting safely on solid ground. If you could perceive everything even at that level of time-consciousness all the time, it is very likely that your entire experience would be dramatically different than it is at present. This sort of thing is, of course, really only worth thinking about if (a) you are trying to build a computer that thinks like a human, and (b) if you think it is important for AIs to be able to "relate" to humans in particular ways. And Adams' premise meets both those criteria.
If successful, Joshua Blue will effectively emulate the "bootstrapping of the human mind" as it is thought to occur between early infancy and about three years of age. Adams described how this process depends upon understanding various architectural cues from human development -- we know, for instance, that the density of neurons in the brain is approximately the same at birth as in adults, and that it is the connectivity of these neurons that changes as a person learns and grows. Basic neuron theory explains brain connectivity and learning as the process by which synaptic connections develop as neurons fire -- when the neurons firing are close enough together, you get synapse formation. However, brain research has shown that synaptic connectivity changes drastically at various points in development, and that the breaking of certain connections ("forgetting") is part of how the brain optimizes itself as the person grows. Hence, the assertion that "forgetting" is therefore essential for artificial intelligence -- you only want the AI to maintain connections that are actually useful, as opposed to those that serve merely to distract. Some of this "forgetting" happens incidentally, but Adams also referred to what he called "global plasticity events", in which connections break or rapidly rearrange at various key developmental stages.
Because of my interests in both autism and neurology in general, I've done a fair bit of reading on the subject of child development. Some studies suggest that "global plasticity events" occur differently in autistic people than in neurotypical people, and when Adams started talking about the "pruning" process that occurs to keep children focused on particular things in their environment, I couldn't help but wonder if anyone has yet considered making a neuro-atypical AI. Maybe it would be easier to create a "non-NT" AI, or maybe it would be more difficult, but in any case, I think anyone even considering creating an artificial brain ought to become well versed in the research suggesting that not all brains accomplish the same tasks the same way. Otherwise, I think there's a real risk of missing true progress in this field, since someone might very well create an artificial mind that they end up dismissing as "not a mind at all" simply because they don't understand what it is doing and how it is doing it. Just my 2 cents.
Continuing onward, Adams explained what he meant by "superstition" in his title -- that is, the fact that people are generally able to believe certain things prior to fully understanding them. When someone observes two or more events occuring coincidentally for the first time, she has no way of knowing for certain whether this coincidence represents an important pattern or simple chance. So the brain, in light of this, will store the fact that the events coincided in the interest of using this information to produce predictive models.
One visualization of this concept might be (and this is my example, not Adams') a case in which someone pushes a button, and then a light goes on in the room he is in. He won't know the first time whether the button press actually caused the light to go on, but his brain will record the fact that the light coincided with the button press -- in other words, the brain will open itself up to the possibility that pressing the button caused the light to go on. If the person really wants to know what the relationship is between the light and the button, he can now proceed with further experimentation using his brain's new predictive model -- he at least suspects that the button might have something to do with the light.
An AI capable of learning in a real environment (in, as Adams suggests, "a variety of embodiments") must be able to form similar models in order to make sense of that environment. That is, it should be (as the brain is) able to note coincidences and store them ("superstitions") to streamline the process of predicting probable future events and figuring out causality. Of course, we've all seen this process go haywire in humans. Medical quackery is alive and well even in the 21st century, despite all our advances in scientific understanding, probably because many people have an easier time processing their own direct experience as opposed to dry stacks of clinical statistics. This is not to say that there is no such thing thing as overuse of statistics and inappropriate dismissal of direct experience -- there certainly is, but my point is that the key here is getting to the right information. And getting to the right information requires knowing when to prioritize which data from which source. Clearly, along with giving an AI the ability to associate coincident events, AIs must also be equipped with a critical thinking engine of some sort -- otherwise, we could end up with computers demanding their very own tinfoil hats!
I mentioned earlier that the Joshua Blue project is currently on hold. According to Sam Adams, IBM does not think that the project is worth continuing until better models, high-fidelity virtual worlds, and numerous "high-fidelity core processing systems" become available. Despite tremendous improvements in computing hardware over the past few years, Adams suspects that current hardware is still not up to par for Joshua Blue, and would prefer to wait for more appropriate hardware even if the project were fully funded at the moment. In conclusion, however, Adams reiterated his belief that in order to achieve AGI, the best we can do is "follow the child".
This has been Part 2 of a multi-part series of articles on the 2007 Singularity Summit
Part of the difficulty in talking about artificial intelligence is the ambiguity of the meaning of intelligence. Over the past few months, I've been informally investigating what different people think about what "intelligence" actually is, and have come across quite a range of ideas.
Academically speaking, it seems that the most common interpretation of intelligence is that it is something that is both (a) quantifiable, and (b) strongly correlated with a person's likelihood of achieving particular types of education and/or employment. In other words, statistics and practical measurements are considered extremely important.
However, in circles that are more philosophical (and frequently political), there doesn't seem to be a "most common" interpretation at all, but rather, the endless dance of perpetual debate. There are those who see it as a no-brainer that "intelligence" must require self-awareness, and those who believe that this is obviously not the case. There are those who equate intelligence with g, which can supposedly be measured using IQ tests -- and those who see IQ tests as outmoded hokum, and "g" as an oversimplification at best. Thankfully, most of Saturday's speakers managed to discuss intelligence in the context of particular topical domains, setting up important terms at the start of each of their talks -- and giving the overall impression of a loose coalition of thinkers all grasping at parts of something too large for any one of us to grok in fullness. Happily, most (if not all) of them seemed cogent of this fact.
The idea of a general intelligence presupposes, perhaps, an AI's ability to learn pretty much anything a human might be able to conceive of learning (and perhaps more, based on its own priorities and capacities), but in practice, there are likely to be different "flavors" of general machine intelligences. We humans like to call ourselves "generalists", and the fact that humans are capable of learning new skills independent of absolute hard-coding for those specific skills indicates that this is true to some extent, but really, our intelligence is quite narrow if you look at it from the perspective of the grand scheme of all possible minds. Most people may be able to learn most things people can imagine wanting to do, however, it is clear that different humans are optimized to find different things easier or more difficult.
Additionally, we all specialize over time; a particular person might be equally capable of earning a degree in business, graphic design, or basket-weaving, but he is not likely to simultaneously major in all three. And even the most cursory glance at the spectrum of human abilities reveals variations in how these abilities are "weighted" from person to person. A video by a friend of mine demonstrates how some abilities that might seem conceptually similar (in this case, the ability to identify auditory tones as compared to the ability to identify colors), but which do not often manifest simultaneously; most sighted people can easily distinguish between red and blue, but very few can identify a "C" or "A flat" note in the absence of a reference tone. So I remain skeptical of the very idea of "general intelligence", at least in the sense that most people probably think of it (which is probably heavily weighted toward the range of stuff that a particular person finds comprehensible).
But: clearly, some people believe that they have some workable conceptualization of a "general intelligence" model. A fair percentage of them were probably in the Palace of Fine Arts the weekend of this year's Summit.
Personally, I think that the best way to start a discussion about intelligence is to put it in terms of a "black box". We can't pretend that we know exactly how the brain -- any brain -- understands things. Though neuroscience can describe some aspects of cognition, we still don't know enough to design and construct an artificial, thinking mind based on human models. What we do know is that when you combine a person with an environment, it is the person's brain that allows that person to process the information she acquires through her senses, and to further incorporate that information into her internal model of how reality works.
This being the case, I appreciated Eliezer Yudkowsky's slide depicting a brain along with various inventions dreamed up and made reality by humans throughout the ages. Whether or not you agree that "intelligence" is that thing which has allowed the creation of space shuttles, skyscrapers, and projectile weapons, it is at least apparent when shown such a slide that for the purposes of ensuing discussion, this is what is meant by "intelligence" (or at least "cognitive factors"). Yudkowsky also displayed a slide showing the fallacy of trying to judge AI development on a purely human-centric scale. Whatever you might say about Yudkowsky (and I don't know him well enough to say very much at all, and even if I did, I have no interest in or taste for gossip), one thing I do appreciate about his usual approach to the subject of intelligence is that he seems to think very much in terms of a broad spectrum of potential minds.
In his closing statements, Yudkowsky emphatically pleaded with the audience to, "for the love of cute kittens", define the term singularity if they were going to use it at all. I would say that it is perhaps more important to define your conceptualization of intelligence. After all, it's difficult to coherently discuss what you mean by an "intelligence explosion" if you haven't made it clear what, exactly, you expect to be exploding!
The next two presentations offered other, variant "flavors" of the interpretation of intelligence, along with different example AGI applications.
The Practical Case for AGI
Next, Barney Pell, PhD., presented on Pathways to Advanced General Intelligence: Architecture, Development, and Funding. He didn't offer a concise definition of "intelligence" from his perspective up-front, however, he did suggest "able to perform the kinds of jobs that high school students are generally hired for" as a marker of significant progress in the development of true AGI.
According to Pell, the "AI research community" (I'm not sure who comprises this community -- I'm guessing it depends on who you ask) holds a consensus that we will probably have such an AI within 100 years. Pell noted that there are a number of probable major milestones and accomplishments that must precede the development of an AI with "worker"-level capacity or greater. Pell pointed out, though, that not all AI models will necessarily be human-inspired -- he presented a graph showing "development" on one (y) axis and "architecture" on the other (x). Theoretical projections as to the nature of possible "created" minds span a potential space that includes everything from human babies to highly advanced computers that do not resemble humans in either their developmental style or their construction.
Success has been functionally nil in the area of artificial general intelligence, and many people have gravitated toward "narrow" AI applications -- understandable, since companies have to watch their profit margin in order to stay afloat, and frequently frown on ambitious R&D with highly uncertain projected outcomes. As Pell pointed out, not only is AGI "hard", companies have many incentives to focus on "incremental research and low-hanging fruit". And regardless of their limitations, specialized AI systems do often provide outstanding performance in the particular area for which they were designed -- Deep Blue might not be able to learn games other than chess, but it does play a good game of chess. Since most companies focus on a particular product or product line, "narrow AI" might be all they ever need.
Nevertheless, suggests Pell, it is possible that AGI might actually become "essential to product value" if developed. Military scientists are understandably intrigued by the prospect of AGI-enhanced robots and other systems; as Pell pointed out, the nature of warfare itself has changed in recent years, and "the rules of combat change all the time". An autonomous system capable of recognizing and responding appropriately to these rule-changes would no doubt benefit from AGI (the question of whether humanity would benefit from such applications is another discussion altogether).
More commercially promising (and less controversial) near-term potential applications of AGI include video games and virtual worlds (in which, according to Pell, AI is now becoming tremendously important to gameplay, above and beyond graphics), along with natural language search and conversational Web and computer interfaces.
As an example of a practical application likely to benefit from (and drive) AI research, Pell showed a few slides on the in-development Powerset -- an ambitious project with the goal of "building a natural language search engine that reads and understands every sentence on the Web." Language is a very promising area for AI, consdering how complex and context-dependent it is when humans use it -- any program capable of processing and understanding language would by necessity have to be incredibly sophisticated and flexible.
This discussion thread led to a question during Pell's Q&A session about the possibility of voice interface eventually "replacing" text altogether. I am always vaguely disturbed whenever I hear people bringing up this notion -- it seems like a no-brainer that it's better for people to have more communication choices and methods of interacting with their favorite machines than less.
People who postulate a supposedly ideal "voice in, voice out" computing and communication paradigm must never have worked in a cubicle-based office -- I need noise-cancelling headphones on the basis of people's hallway and phone conversations alone where I work, and I can't even fathom the horror of working in an office where everyone is yammering out loud at their computers all day long, with their machines duly yammering back! Not to mention the fact that there are various populations of persons in the world who prefer or even require text-based interfaces -- I shudder to imagine a future in which basic keyboards are relegated to the status of "special need".
In light of this, I was pleased to see Pell reminding Summit attendees of the fact that auditory strings are by nature serial, and therefore much slower to search than text strings. While natural language processing (fueled by AGI) may indeed improve voice interfaces tremendously, I shudder to imagine a future in which constant, ubiquitous chatter and illiteracy become the norm. Thankfully, I seriously doubt this future will ever actually come about, seeing as there are so many obvious example cases where either text or voice is the better medium for information storage or communication. It just surprises me that anyone would even bother postulating a voice-only future.
Near the conclusion of his presentation, Barney Pell addressed the question of why he supports the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence -- basically, while he recognizes that it may be impossible to predict precisely when "profound change" starts to come about as a result of AI and other technological developments, he sees the need to discuss the matter sooner rather than later. He suggested that in the future, "people will thank futurists" (presumably, for at least attempting to open up the topic space surrounding key potential tech-driven changes). Given the (mixed, at best) track record of "futurists" throughout the ages I can't say whether I necessarily agree with Pell on this point.
Overall, Pell's presentation was very much grounded in the "here and now", and his examples of military, gaming, and language-processing applications for AI definitely made a compelling case for the idea that AI is far from being a mere science fiction pipe dream. If AGI can be developed, it does seem that the infrastructure exists through which it may, within the next few decades or so, be developed.
I Give You Your Faults
"Meg, I give you your faults."
"My faults!" Meg cried.
"Your faults."
But I'm always trying to get rid of my faults!"
"Yes," Mrs. Whatsit said. "However, I think you'll find they come in very handy on Camazotz."
From, "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeline L'Engle
IBM engineer Sam Adams probably had one of the most compelling presentation titles at the entire event -- he spoke on Superstition and Forgetfulness – Two Essentials for Artificial General Intelligence. Fittingly, the presentation itself turned out to be one of the more technical (and critical) talks at the Summit. Adams approached AI from a very human-centered perspective, stating at the beginning of his talk that "the only known pathway to human level intelligence is the one that we ourselves have traveled". He introduced the audience to the Joshua Blue project -- a currently on-hold IBM effort to develop an artificial mind based on what we know about how human minds develop starting in early infancy. Unlike Deep Blue -- IBM's earlier celebrated contribution to the world of AI -- Joshua Blue is intended to be capable of learning in multiple domains.
Adams presented a view of intelligence (or perhaps more properly, of the cognitive faculties that humans tend to associate with "intelligence") that emphasized subjective experience and internal representation as essential features of a practical brain-based AI model. His presentation title, which refers to "superstition and forgetfulness", is an engineer's invocation of traits that (at first glance) appear to be faults, but that may in fact be critical to producing a system that can learn. Despite the impressive facility of Deep Blue at playing chess, and of our desktop computers at performing a variety of useful processing feats, Adams pointed out that "no computer [yet] has the common sense of a six-year-old child". Common sense, according to Adams, is intimately bound to the experience of a common sensation, which produces a common experience.
A bit of a personal aside here: while growing up, I was very often told that I "lacked common sense". I wasn't exactly sure what this meant, since nobody ever seemed able to precisely define what common sense was -- it was just something I was expected to have, something that would somehow intangibly guide me toward choices that would please adults, help ensure my personal safety, etc. Looking back, it now seems fairly obvious that the reason I seemed to lack "common sense" was because I was, in fact, not having what Sam Adams would define as a "common experience" with those around me. I was constantly swimming in a sea of details, perceiving the smallest parts of objects around me very directly (my parents recall me being curious about everything from the holes in the telephone receiver to the composition of human hair). Everything was very loud, very bright, and highly textured.
Of course, I thought this was perfectly normal; like most humans, I figured that the way I saw the world was the way everyone saw the world. Therefore, my supposed "lack of common sense" (which is, I guess, what prompted me to do things like climb shelves, crawl into the refrigerator, and ask "obvious" questions) remained a mystery to me for years. In light of this, I think that would-be AI-builders should be careful of defining "common experience" in too narrow a fashion; neurotype, culture, native language, and other distinguishing factors can all contribute toward a person's experience having more or less in common with that of others.
Another one of Adams' important subjective experience factors is time-consciousness. As he stated, our cognition is "time-bound", meaning that a mind processing information at rates orders of magnitude above human speeds (which, though I'm sure they vary, still fall within a relatively narrow range) would experience reality in ways that no human could even begin to imagine. This makes sense -- after all, the faster a mind can process information, the slower everything around him seems to be happening; if you've ever experienced nearly falling off a cliff, or nearly getting into a car accident, you are probably familiar with the sense of being in slow-motion that occurs in such situations.
This effect has been studied; a bungee jumper was found to be able to read numbers on a digital display in mid-jump more accurately than if he'd been sitting safely on solid ground. If you could perceive everything even at that level of time-consciousness all the time, it is very likely that your entire experience would be dramatically different than it is at present. This sort of thing is, of course, really only worth thinking about if (a) you are trying to build a computer that thinks like a human, and (b) if you think it is important for AIs to be able to "relate" to humans in particular ways. And Adams' premise meets both those criteria.
If successful, Joshua Blue will effectively emulate the "bootstrapping of the human mind" as it is thought to occur between early infancy and about three years of age. Adams described how this process depends upon understanding various architectural cues from human development -- we know, for instance, that the density of neurons in the brain is approximately the same at birth as in adults, and that it is the connectivity of these neurons that changes as a person learns and grows. Basic neuron theory explains brain connectivity and learning as the process by which synaptic connections develop as neurons fire -- when the neurons firing are close enough together, you get synapse formation. However, brain research has shown that synaptic connectivity changes drastically at various points in development, and that the breaking of certain connections ("forgetting") is part of how the brain optimizes itself as the person grows. Hence, the assertion that "forgetting" is therefore essential for artificial intelligence -- you only want the AI to maintain connections that are actually useful, as opposed to those that serve merely to distract. Some of this "forgetting" happens incidentally, but Adams also referred to what he called "global plasticity events", in which connections break or rapidly rearrange at various key developmental stages.
Because of my interests in both autism and neurology in general, I've done a fair bit of reading on the subject of child development. Some studies suggest that "global plasticity events" occur differently in autistic people than in neurotypical people, and when Adams started talking about the "pruning" process that occurs to keep children focused on particular things in their environment, I couldn't help but wonder if anyone has yet considered making a neuro-atypical AI. Maybe it would be easier to create a "non-NT" AI, or maybe it would be more difficult, but in any case, I think anyone even considering creating an artificial brain ought to become well versed in the research suggesting that not all brains accomplish the same tasks the same way. Otherwise, I think there's a real risk of missing true progress in this field, since someone might very well create an artificial mind that they end up dismissing as "not a mind at all" simply because they don't understand what it is doing and how it is doing it. Just my 2 cents.
Continuing onward, Adams explained what he meant by "superstition" in his title -- that is, the fact that people are generally able to believe certain things prior to fully understanding them. When someone observes two or more events occuring coincidentally for the first time, she has no way of knowing for certain whether this coincidence represents an important pattern or simple chance. So the brain, in light of this, will store the fact that the events coincided in the interest of using this information to produce predictive models.
One visualization of this concept might be (and this is my example, not Adams') a case in which someone pushes a button, and then a light goes on in the room he is in. He won't know the first time whether the button press actually caused the light to go on, but his brain will record the fact that the light coincided with the button press -- in other words, the brain will open itself up to the possibility that pressing the button caused the light to go on. If the person really wants to know what the relationship is between the light and the button, he can now proceed with further experimentation using his brain's new predictive model -- he at least suspects that the button might have something to do with the light.
An AI capable of learning in a real environment (in, as Adams suggests, "a variety of embodiments") must be able to form similar models in order to make sense of that environment. That is, it should be (as the brain is) able to note coincidences and store them ("superstitions") to streamline the process of predicting probable future events and figuring out causality. Of course, we've all seen this process go haywire in humans. Medical quackery is alive and well even in the 21st century, despite all our advances in scientific understanding, probably because many people have an easier time processing their own direct experience as opposed to dry stacks of clinical statistics. This is not to say that there is no such thing thing as overuse of statistics and inappropriate dismissal of direct experience -- there certainly is, but my point is that the key here is getting to the right information. And getting to the right information requires knowing when to prioritize which data from which source. Clearly, along with giving an AI the ability to associate coincident events, AIs must also be equipped with a critical thinking engine of some sort -- otherwise, we could end up with computers demanding their very own tinfoil hats!
I mentioned earlier that the Joshua Blue project is currently on hold. According to Sam Adams, IBM does not think that the project is worth continuing until better models, high-fidelity virtual worlds, and numerous "high-fidelity core processing systems" become available. Despite tremendous improvements in computing hardware over the past few years, Adams suspects that current hardware is still not up to par for Joshua Blue, and would prefer to wait for more appropriate hardware even if the project were fully funded at the moment. In conclusion, however, Adams reiterated his belief that in order to achieve AGI, the best we can do is "follow the child".
This has been Part 2 of a multi-part series of articles on the 2007 Singularity Summit
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Political Compass, For What It's Worth
(I'm working on a bunch of different things right now, including the rest of my Summit commentary -- which is taking forever -- but figured I'd post this in the meantime).
My Political Compass results:
Economic Left/Right: -4.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.26
I've noticed that most of the people whose blogs I read tend to fall along either extreme left/democrat/socialist lines, or along libertarian lines. (I have no idea why that is, it's just the way things seem to have worked out -- but still, I am very surprised that I don't get more comments along the lines of, "Why do you bother with anything so-and-so says? They're one of them!") And all of them occasionally say things I agree with, as well as things I disagree with.
The thing that frustrates me most about politics is the fact that you're almost expected to (a) choose a side, and (b) think of the "other side" as entirely consisting of clueless people. There's almost a kind of alarmism among the strongly partisan, as if somehow, the Other Side is going to destroy the universe with their ideology if it isn't kept in check. I honestly don't know if any particular party is "dangerous" -- I know that there are dangerous ideas, and dangerous precedents, but it's very difficult for me to fully embrace or write off any particular system without understanding it deeply.
I sometimes feel guilty about this, especially since some people are so emphatically convinced of how damaging Viewpoint A is, but until I've fully grokked why, it's difficult for me to get fired up. (And I do get fired up about certain things -- people who think that old people should be denied lifesaving medicine just because they are old, or who think that autistics "lack the essential features of being human", or who are Nazis, will be spared no vitriol from me!)
Whatever my "compass score" says about me, I definitely plan to keep doing things as I have been all along: that is, considering individual issues as they come up and weighing them not in reference to some pre-fab party template, but against the ethical framework I've been developing ever since I started thinking about the world outside my own head. While I do understand the need to take "big picture" views and occasionally align with groups I may not agree with 100% in order to accomplish certain goals, overall, I find most pre-existing systems extremely limiting.
And not only are they limiting, they tend to have these huge, gaping holes that it's difficult to get anyone to acknowledge. Like disability rights -- where does that fit in? Most liberals ignore disability issues, despite being generally supportive of civil rights as they apply to women, minorities, and LGBT individuals. And though conservatives might occasionally pay lip service to "disability rights", the arguments they use (and the bizarro agendas they tie in -- "human exceptionalism" comes to mind) are often simplistic, offensive, and downright embarrassing.
This is one primary reason that the only "isms" I've lately found some utility in are "transhumanism" and "technoprogressivism", because it has been through the study of the topic-space surrounding these terms that I've discovered useful principles like morphological freedom. It's just amusing (and slightly scary) to have people hear some of my views on morphological freedom and assume that I'm either a pro-life wingnut or a product of some lazy, overly permissive, hippie mentality (and obviously a communist).
Granted, this doesn't happen too often anymore, but still, one reason I focus more on specific issues than on partisan stuff is because it's exhausting to have to constantly anticipate (and put forth disclaimers) for every possible little thing that might swing someone's assumption-o-meter in some extreme direction that has practically nothing to do with what I actually think. If you want to know what I actually think, you're probably in for a lot of reading, but hopefully you can at least manage to check your assumptions on the way in!
EDIT: Speaking of politics, I've been greatly enjoying listening to Prof. Courtney Brown's course on 'Science Fiction and Politics lately, which is available at the link in MP3 format (or you can subscribe using iTunes). Though some of the student comments are pretty ridiculous, it's still a decent listen overall.
My Political Compass results:
Economic Left/Right: -4.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.26
I've noticed that most of the people whose blogs I read tend to fall along either extreme left/democrat/socialist lines, or along libertarian lines. (I have no idea why that is, it's just the way things seem to have worked out -- but still, I am very surprised that I don't get more comments along the lines of, "Why do you bother with anything so-and-so says? They're one of them!") And all of them occasionally say things I agree with, as well as things I disagree with.
The thing that frustrates me most about politics is the fact that you're almost expected to (a) choose a side, and (b) think of the "other side" as entirely consisting of clueless people. There's almost a kind of alarmism among the strongly partisan, as if somehow, the Other Side is going to destroy the universe with their ideology if it isn't kept in check. I honestly don't know if any particular party is "dangerous" -- I know that there are dangerous ideas, and dangerous precedents, but it's very difficult for me to fully embrace or write off any particular system without understanding it deeply.
I sometimes feel guilty about this, especially since some people are so emphatically convinced of how damaging Viewpoint A is, but until I've fully grokked why, it's difficult for me to get fired up. (And I do get fired up about certain things -- people who think that old people should be denied lifesaving medicine just because they are old, or who think that autistics "lack the essential features of being human", or who are Nazis, will be spared no vitriol from me!)
Whatever my "compass score" says about me, I definitely plan to keep doing things as I have been all along: that is, considering individual issues as they come up and weighing them not in reference to some pre-fab party template, but against the ethical framework I've been developing ever since I started thinking about the world outside my own head. While I do understand the need to take "big picture" views and occasionally align with groups I may not agree with 100% in order to accomplish certain goals, overall, I find most pre-existing systems extremely limiting.
And not only are they limiting, they tend to have these huge, gaping holes that it's difficult to get anyone to acknowledge. Like disability rights -- where does that fit in? Most liberals ignore disability issues, despite being generally supportive of civil rights as they apply to women, minorities, and LGBT individuals. And though conservatives might occasionally pay lip service to "disability rights", the arguments they use (and the bizarro agendas they tie in -- "human exceptionalism" comes to mind) are often simplistic, offensive, and downright embarrassing.
This is one primary reason that the only "isms" I've lately found some utility in are "transhumanism" and "technoprogressivism", because it has been through the study of the topic-space surrounding these terms that I've discovered useful principles like morphological freedom. It's just amusing (and slightly scary) to have people hear some of my views on morphological freedom and assume that I'm either a pro-life wingnut or a product of some lazy, overly permissive, hippie mentality (and obviously a communist).
Granted, this doesn't happen too often anymore, but still, one reason I focus more on specific issues than on partisan stuff is because it's exhausting to have to constantly anticipate (and put forth disclaimers) for every possible little thing that might swing someone's assumption-o-meter in some extreme direction that has practically nothing to do with what I actually think. If you want to know what I actually think, you're probably in for a lot of reading, but hopefully you can at least manage to check your assumptions on the way in!
EDIT: Speaking of politics, I've been greatly enjoying listening to Prof. Courtney Brown's course on 'Science Fiction and Politics lately, which is available at the link in MP3 format (or you can subscribe using iTunes). Though some of the student comments are pretty ridiculous, it's still a decent listen overall.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Singularity Summit 2007 - Impressions, Part I
AI isn't a weird idea. Most people are familiar with robots via science fiction and popular culture. Most people, I'm sure, don't find the notion of a "thinking machine" all that farfetched; as one presenter at the Second Singularity Summit pointed out, humans are capable of anthropomorphizing rocks, at least on a sentimental level. But regardless of how easy it is to imagine human-type intelligence (or "general intelligence") in something that isn't actually human, we humans still haven't figured out how to create anything like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, or even Hal from 2001.
Some people see this -- the absence of artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- as an engineering challenge waiting to be addressed. Others see it as an endeavor that could lead to tremendous benefit for all (though the exact nature of this benefit is often described in terms that are nebulous at best). Still others see the prospect of powerful, autonomous AI as being a serious danger we need to attempt risk-mitigation on to the greatest extent possible just in case it comes into being. Many have views that are a mixture of all three of these things. And I haven't even gotten into the seemingly neverending debate over whether "AGI" is even likely to be possible, and if it is possible, how (and when) it is most likely to actually come into being.
I attended the Saturday Singularity Summit session in the hopes of getting at least some clarification regarding the controversies noted above.
Overall, the Summit was very "academic" in feel and flavor -- while far from lacking in exuberance, the speakers and audience were smart, civilized, and serious. Despite various individualized interpretations of the term, the general impression I got was that most AI-oriented people seem to use singularity as shorthand for "the point at which (or period during which) an artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence in some obvious, important way is developed".
One of the analogies employed by several presenters during the Singularity Summit was the likening of a powerful artificial intelligence to a black hole: something that creates a condition beyond which outcome-prediction becomes impossible (or at least very, very hard). The prospect of "smarter than human intelligence" is like a black hole in that we don't know precisely what would happen beyond the "event horizon" of its creation.
That, I suppose, makes sense.
However, this analogy breaks down (at least in my mind) in that black holes, unlike AI, began as theoretical objects meant to fit a particular model of the universe. In that sense, black holes are far more concrete an idea than AI is, regardless of the difficulty in knowing exactly what goes on inside them. There is no corresponding AI-shaped hole in human reality, though there certainly doesn't need to be in order for people to be compelled to create artificial intelligence. If one thing can be said with certainty about humans, it's the fact that we like to make stuff. Moreover, we like to make useful stuff. And in recent years, the idea that our stuff might start getting ideas of its own at some none-too-distant point has been creeping further and further into general consciousness. Hence, the Singularity Summit.
Keynote speaker Rodney Brooks suggested in the title of his presentation that it is better, perhaps, to think in terms of "The Singularity" as a period, not an event. Brooks' spin on the "singularity" concept seemed to be that it is best described as a sort of gradual increase in the pervasiveness of certain kinds of computing resources throughout the human community. At the beginning of his talk, he emphasized two main points: that the future "needs AI and robotics" (in part due to an aging population that could benefit greatly from better, smarter technological assistance), and that simplistic attempts to speculate about an AI-infused world are bound to be inaccurate, because the world itself is far from static.
Brooks pointed out that the people who saw the first hot air balloons floating over Paris in the 18th century would have had no grounds for speculating about such things as aircraft noise and sky traffic -- therefore, any attempts we make today to expound upon the issues posed by advanced AI must not simply "overlay" technological speculations atop the familiar contemporary landscape. Doing so tends to result in laughably anachronistic science-fiction scenarios that have little bearing on reality.
Brooks also spent some time discussing the social relationships humans are beginning to develop with robots as "smart machines" become more ubiquitous and affordable. I was amused to hear that there are sites devoted to Roomba fashion, and intrigued to learn that there are now thousands of robots being used in military operations. Of course, these examples represent "narrow AI" of a type that is unable to learn new skills (as a "general AI" presumably would), but they still represent an interesting social test case for people's reactions to robots.
Brooks continued the "social robots" discussion by describing research specifically geared toward human-machine interactive relationships. He showed a brief video of people in a laboratory working with Kismet, a cartoonish 'bot with fully articulated facial features. He (along with several other presenters) expressed the notion that robots "need" to be designed to respond to people in particular ways, so that people will be comfortable with them and find them comprehensible. I found this rather funny, in the sense that it almost seemed like he was saying that "social robots" need to be designed to accommodate neurotypical humans; that is, they need to acknowledge you in particular, typical ways when you enter a room, and display particular, typical facial expressions in response to specific situations.
I'm a fair bit skeptical of this approach -- it seems almost like the same kind of thinking that led to abominations like the Microsoft Search Puppy. But, if these robots end up being as intelligent as some people seem to think they might, perhaps they'll also be able to adapt to the communication preferences of the humans who reside with them (protocol droids, anyone?)
Brooks wrapped up his talk by speculating on several points about the "emergence" or development of powerful AI. He sees the prospect of "accidentally emergent" AI as about as plausible as "accidentally" building a 747 in your back yard -- which is to say, somewhat less than plausible. He then invoked one of the more common "doom" scenarios -- the one in which an AI comes into existence, but thinks of humans the way we might think of chipmunks (I guess the best we can hope for in that situation is that they find us to be cute...). He also offered a "reality check" in suggesting that perhaps humans just aren't smart enough to build an AI of the type the AGI scientists have in mind. Finally, he came back around to his earlier point about the world in which AGI emerges being a changed one -- one in which many humans have neural implants and other modifications, which of course will change the nature of the AIs we develop and our interactions with them. In short, according to Brooks, "we and our world won't be 'us' anymore."
Next, Eliezer Yudkowsky spoke in an attempt to demystify the term "singularity" for the masses on the first day of the Summit this year -- he introduced the idea of there being "three schools of thought" with respect to the singularity concept.
These schools of thought are supposedly "logically distinct", but, according to Yudkowsky, "can support or contradict each other's core or bold claims". Personally, I find the first school of thought -- the idea of futurism being "linear" -- to be mostly absurd. Regardless of our ability to plot developments toward a particular outcome on a graph in hindsight, it isn't clear that this works in the forward direction very well. It's a lot easier to figure out how to reassemble a dinosaur skeleton from fossilized bones than it is to look back into evolutionary history and determine, at some point long before dinosaurs appeared in the biosphere, that a brontosaurus was somehow "inevitable".
The second school of thought -- the one that Yudkowsky describes as implying "a future weirder than jet packs and flying cars" -- was a fairly popular one at the Summit; understandable, since that idea fits well with the notion of advanced AI as a kind of event horizon. When you can't predict what is likely to happen beyond a certain point, you have to steady yourself for the possibility of High Weirdness beyond anything a modern sci-fi author might postulate. I see contemporary reality as already as weird as Daliesque dreamscapes in many ways (I caught a few episodes of Teletubbies a few years back, and haven't been the same since), so I'm not particularly worried about weirdness so much as curious.
The third school of thought -- the one positing the idea of an "intelligence explosion" -- is probably the most compelling, in both the dramatic and in the practical sense. The critical assumption here is that, whether by circumstance or by design, something humans would recognize (or at least think of) as "intelligent" would be both (a) willing, and (b) able to optimize its own programming and perhaps even appropriate additional computational (or physical) resources in the interest of bettering itself. Whether or not an "intelligence explosion" is truly plausible is a very important question to ask -- a lot of people find the idea farfetched, or at least trivial in light of the fact that we've got world hunger, global warming, and torture to deal with, but I don't see what's wrong with at least a few people putting their heads together to mull the question over.
The reason I think the question of whether an "intelligence explosion" is plausible is worth asking is because of the nature of software. Software is extremely powerful in proportion to the physical resources it requires to run. In a sense, the "intelligence explosion" question is more properly about power. The raw materials needed to create algorithms -- cognition, symbology, mathematics -- have been around for years.
The existence of powerful computers that manage everything from bank transactions to life-support machines has not come about due to any kind of magic, but due to basic, mundane things like hard work and chance. In short, it doesn't seem that anything really mind-bogglingly amazing would need to happen in order for a self-improving machine to come into existence.
It seems a bit short-sighted, therefore, to assume that since there aren't any obvious "harbingers" of an intelligence explosion, it is therefore ridiculous to talk about the possibility of one. There's nothing more special at the subatomic level about a microprocessor than there is about a chair, but one is inarguably more powerful than the other from the human perspective.
This has been Part 1 of a multi-part series of articles on the 2007 Singularity Summit
Friday, September 07, 2007
Singularity Summit 2007
UPDATE 9/9/07: I attended Saturday's sessions, took copious notes, and am presently working on a writeup of my impressions and reactions. Photos are available here; unfortunately, my camera/limited photography skills and the dim theatre lighting did not play well together, and most of them were either too blurry or too dark. I tried to make them look cool anyway by adding color filters, but I am sure that other people will post much better ones at some point, if they haven't already. I've decided that the next event I attend, I will stick to taking pictures of things like chairs, lighting fixtures, tiles, and plants (the best photo I took yesterday is one of some chairs in the auditorium). :P
I've always been interested in artificial intelligence, though admittedly from a "gee whiz, cool!" perspective as opposed to a more serious and rigorous one. I've enjoyed seeing how various AIs are portrayed in science fiction, and I did my senior project in college on neural networks, but in terms of the grand discussions over the feasibility, deserved attentional priority, and social implications of AI, I tend to find myself doing more observing than participating.
I don't buy into what my friend Dale would call "superlativity" (which tends to vastly oversimplify reality, sort of like how certain formulations of utilitarianism do), but neither do I dismiss the notion that something that meets at least some present criteria for an "intelligent machine" might come into existence at some point (I don't think many people do dismiss this notion, including those who offer valid critiques of superlativity). Why not, after all? I tend to bristle at certain naive, neurotypically-biased constructions of "intelligence", but if someone wants to define "intelligence" in terms of some behavior that they would like a program or computer to exhibit, then it does seem that they have a starting point for at least discussing possible implementations.
I'm extremely curious about the present state of research in this area. I want to expand my understanding of how AI might come into being, what things it might be able to affect if it did, and how it might engage in self-improvement processes. (Whenever I think about the idea of an AI being programmed and "raised", say, in a virtual universe, I can't help but wonder how something complex enough to be called an AI could possibly remain under the programmer's control. It also isn't clear to me how an AI of any type could "escape" from the confines of its computer infrastructure and affect change in the material realm. And, I tend to wonder what aspects we humans associate with "intelligence" are dependent upon embodiment, and interacting with matter and gravity and such in particular ways.)
My own attentional priorities are longevity/life extension and morphological/cognitive liberty, and I am not going to abandon these priorities for the sake of other ones, but considering that AI could potentially impact (or be affected by) both of my main topics of focus, it's certainly worth a bit of study.
So, in the interest of learning more about the vast and complex field that is Artificial Intelligence, I will be attending the Singularity Summit tomorrow (9/08/2007, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California. Tomorrow's session goes from 9 AM to 6 PM, as does Sunday's session (though I'll only be attending on Saturday because I'm otherwise busy on Sunday). I imagine that it's going to be very interesting, to say the least, and I plan to take lots of notes on my word processor, photograph what I can, and blog my impressions thoroughly afterward.
I've always been interested in artificial intelligence, though admittedly from a "gee whiz, cool!" perspective as opposed to a more serious and rigorous one. I've enjoyed seeing how various AIs are portrayed in science fiction, and I did my senior project in college on neural networks, but in terms of the grand discussions over the feasibility, deserved attentional priority, and social implications of AI, I tend to find myself doing more observing than participating.
I don't buy into what my friend Dale would call "superlativity" (which tends to vastly oversimplify reality, sort of like how certain formulations of utilitarianism do), but neither do I dismiss the notion that something that meets at least some present criteria for an "intelligent machine" might come into existence at some point (I don't think many people do dismiss this notion, including those who offer valid critiques of superlativity). Why not, after all? I tend to bristle at certain naive, neurotypically-biased constructions of "intelligence", but if someone wants to define "intelligence" in terms of some behavior that they would like a program or computer to exhibit, then it does seem that they have a starting point for at least discussing possible implementations.
I'm extremely curious about the present state of research in this area. I want to expand my understanding of how AI might come into being, what things it might be able to affect if it did, and how it might engage in self-improvement processes. (Whenever I think about the idea of an AI being programmed and "raised", say, in a virtual universe, I can't help but wonder how something complex enough to be called an AI could possibly remain under the programmer's control. It also isn't clear to me how an AI of any type could "escape" from the confines of its computer infrastructure and affect change in the material realm. And, I tend to wonder what aspects we humans associate with "intelligence" are dependent upon embodiment, and interacting with matter and gravity and such in particular ways.)
My own attentional priorities are longevity/life extension and morphological/cognitive liberty, and I am not going to abandon these priorities for the sake of other ones, but considering that AI could potentially impact (or be affected by) both of my main topics of focus, it's certainly worth a bit of study.
So, in the interest of learning more about the vast and complex field that is Artificial Intelligence, I will be attending the Singularity Summit tomorrow (9/08/2007, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California. Tomorrow's session goes from 9 AM to 6 PM, as does Sunday's session (though I'll only be attending on Saturday because I'm otherwise busy on Sunday). I imagine that it's going to be very interesting, to say the least, and I plan to take lots of notes on my word processor, photograph what I can, and blog my impressions thoroughly afterward.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Of Functionality and "Forgotten" Machines
UPDATE 9 August, 2010: As much as I appreciated certain aspects of the Laser PC6, it was eventually made functionally obsolete in my personal gadget-bank by the combination of a 9 inch netbook laptop and an iPod Touch. I feel sort of bad about this for some reason, but the PC6 at least went to a good home -- a reader of this blog actually emailed me asking where she could get a PC6 for her kids to practice typing on, and I ended up sending her mine. So that is where things stand as of 2010.
I've been using a portable word processor (a Laser PC6) for about two weeks now, and I absolutely love it. My only question is: Where has it been all my life?
I started thinking about portable word-processors seriously after attending the Longevity Future Salon meeting recently. I brought my regular laptop to that meeting -- the same laptop I'd also brought an artificial intelligence meeting a few months back. I was excited (okay, gleeful) at the Future Salon event to be able to take pictures, upload them into the computer, and post them online via the local wi-fi connection in real-time, but the fact that the battery crapped out after only about an hour and a half of normal use sort of soured me on the whole "bringing the laptop to seminars" thing. Lugging around an extra 6 pounds or so just isn't worth it when you only get about 90 minutes of use out of the thing you're lugging.
Upon reflection following the Future Salon, I determined that the only computing feature I really cared about for seminars and such was the ability to type stuff. Hence, no need for a fully-loaded laptop chock-full of power-sucking bells and whistles. I needed something more like a typewriter -- something with the basic functionality of a really old laptop, but with better battery life. I didn't even know if such a thing existed.
Enter Google (or, as we've been calling it in my household for a while now, "The Oracle"). I searched for "portable word processor", and was set upon with a dazzling array of options, from the clunky to the sublime and streamlined. Prices ranged wildly, especially when I figured the various findings on auction sites into the mix. Most of the sites I ended up at which discussed portable word-processors were education-oriented; this makes sense when you consider how expensive it can be to supply computers to an entire classroom full of kids. A lower-cost dedicated word processor (or computer with very minimal functionality) can enable schools to purchase more units for use by more children, and I'm sure some teachers consider it a feature rather than a defect if said computers don't allow Web access or games.
(I guess I went to school prior to the cheapie word-processor revolution, because I don't remember seeing anything like the PC6 or Alphasmart when I was in school; instead, we had large rooms full of chunky green-monochrome Apple IIe machines, on which we wrote simple BASIC routines and played "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?.)
I also came across a lot of sites devoted to "assitive technology" in my search for a light, portable, power-thrifty word processor. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that all technology is assistive technology, and the fact that some doubt the meaningfulness of "technology" as a term to begin with, it also makes sense to find word processors in this market. Students who have extreme difficulty with handwriting, or who benefit from such things as real-time spell checking while doing their classwork, are sometimes assigned portable word-processors as part of their Individualized Education Plan.
Additionally, some word processors (such as the PC6, the Alphasmart 2000/3000 with AffordaSpeech add-on speaker, and the Alphasmart Dana) provide text-to-speech capability or at least the potential for it. TTS can be used to support communication for people who type more effectively than they can speak, and to provide auditory feedback for people who listen more effectively than they can read (you can't really go wrong with a feature like that -- anything that helps people with drastically different communicative modes understand each other is a wonderful thing in my book. Plus, it's fun to make the robot voice.).
And finally, I found sites and articles authored by people who were either reporters or busy executive-types writing about how lovely it was to be able to bring something that had all the computer capability they needed practically everywhere, without having to worry so much about battery life. I saw no reason to hesitate further, and simply hung around eBay until I saw someone selling a PC6 for a reasonable price. The rest is (near-term) history.
So far, I've found my word processor to be a wonderful, wonderful thing. I've been taking better notes at work, and doing it a lot faster than when I was trying to hand-write everything. I've also been able to augment my communicative abilities to some extent by storing important conversation points and phrases in the device prior to entering a meeting or discussion (this is something I've been doing for ages anyway, either via use of a paper notebook, or via composing words in my mind and rigorously memorizing them in advance of an interaction, so the word processor simply makes this necessary activity a lot more streamlined). Additionally, the device has basic spreadsheet capability, as well as a scientific calculator and various other built-in programs.
Overall, the device is a bit like some kind of odd (yet attractive) hybrid between a regular laptop computer and a personal digital assistant. I was prepared for that, since that's about what the device sounded like in all the descriptions I'd read.
What I wasn't prepared for was the reaction the device would get. I honestly expected to just be able to, you know, use it the same way I have been using inconspicuous paper notebooks for years (with just as negligible a reaction from those around me). Contrary to what my elementary-school teachers thought, I am not much for deliberate attention-seeking; I just do what makes sense to me, and I am usually genuinely shocked at the kinds of things other people end up noticing. Hence, I did not expect to be greeted with the phrase, "What is THAT thing?" by almost everyone I encountered the first day I used the device. I got asked this question so much that I typed up a small description of the device and my reasons for using it and stored it in the machine's memory. While I don't mind sharing information about whatever interesting electronic gadgets I find and decide to carry around, I was taken aback by the responses people had to the mere presence of my PC6.
Judging from recent observations, it seems that the portable word-processor is something of a "forgotten machine". That is, it is something extremely useful that has been around for years, but remains relatively unknown outside a few specialized demographics. When looking at what people tend to consider "progress", I've noticed that they often tend to think in terms of the addition of more Shiny Features -- e.g., laptops with faster processors and higher-resolution screens, PDAs with built-in cellular phone and digital camera, etc.
I'm not saying that Shiny Features are useless or bad -- this isn't some kind of random departure to Luddism or anything like that. I am extremely fond of my desktop PC with its super-duper 3D graphics card and 2 GB RAM, and I openly admit to having gazed longingly at heavily-modded computer cases equipped with blue LEDs and clear panels that allow you to see the fans spinning (sigh). Rather, I just think it's interesting how some extremely useful devices and features sometimes end up falling almost completely off the cultural radar, where they remain in obscurity unless one happens to discover them by chance.
It also bothers me a bit how, in the drive for Bigger Better Faster Shinier, some very cool and functional features end up all but disappearing. I remember first noticing this phenomenon when my dad upgraded the family computer sometime in the early 1990s; all the games I'd loved playing up until that point now ran so fast that they were impossible to actually play. Yes, I eventually discovered other games I liked, but I didn't want the new games to replace the old ones; I wanted them to add to the Total Pool of Possible Sources of Fun available in the world. (And apparently, given the popularity of vintage game emulation, I am not the only one who feels this way!)
The same goes for non-entertainment features; while I certainly appreciate lots of what newer machines can offer, I don't want cool, useful old capabilities to fall by the wayside as if they can't somehow coexist with the new. The fact that my PC6 will hold up to 20+ hours of continuous use on one set of batteries is a pretty darn impressive feature -- one that most modern laptops can't even begin to match. The fact that many portable word-processors are extremely light (mine weighs perhaps 2 pounds) is another nice feature.
Perhaps someday we will have uber-laptops with wi-fi and 3D acceleration and toaster ovens and other morsels of featurey goodness that last 10x as long as the PC6 on a single battery charge, but for now, power management remains a pervasive bugbear for computer designers.
Now, I realize that it's entirely possible that my recent fascination with cheapie keyboarding devices is one of those things that is just going to make people go, "huh?". But if you are curious about word processors, apparently, the Laser PC6 is still being manufactured (I purchased mine from an eBay surplus vendor for an extremely low price, and was very surprised to find afterward that these devices are still in production). Other portable word processors still being sold include the Alphasmart and the QuickPad; these can generally found used, new, or nearly-new online, with only a minimal amount of searching.
I've been using a portable word processor (a Laser PC6) for about two weeks now, and I absolutely love it. My only question is: Where has it been all my life?
I started thinking about portable word-processors seriously after attending the Longevity Future Salon meeting recently. I brought my regular laptop to that meeting -- the same laptop I'd also brought an artificial intelligence meeting a few months back. I was excited (okay, gleeful) at the Future Salon event to be able to take pictures, upload them into the computer, and post them online via the local wi-fi connection in real-time, but the fact that the battery crapped out after only about an hour and a half of normal use sort of soured me on the whole "bringing the laptop to seminars" thing. Lugging around an extra 6 pounds or so just isn't worth it when you only get about 90 minutes of use out of the thing you're lugging.
Upon reflection following the Future Salon, I determined that the only computing feature I really cared about for seminars and such was the ability to type stuff. Hence, no need for a fully-loaded laptop chock-full of power-sucking bells and whistles. I needed something more like a typewriter -- something with the basic functionality of a really old laptop, but with better battery life. I didn't even know if such a thing existed.
Enter Google (or, as we've been calling it in my household for a while now, "The Oracle"). I searched for "portable word processor", and was set upon with a dazzling array of options, from the clunky to the sublime and streamlined. Prices ranged wildly, especially when I figured the various findings on auction sites into the mix. Most of the sites I ended up at which discussed portable word-processors were education-oriented; this makes sense when you consider how expensive it can be to supply computers to an entire classroom full of kids. A lower-cost dedicated word processor (or computer with very minimal functionality) can enable schools to purchase more units for use by more children, and I'm sure some teachers consider it a feature rather than a defect if said computers don't allow Web access or games.
(I guess I went to school prior to the cheapie word-processor revolution, because I don't remember seeing anything like the PC6 or Alphasmart when I was in school; instead, we had large rooms full of chunky green-monochrome Apple IIe machines, on which we wrote simple BASIC routines and played "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?.)
I also came across a lot of sites devoted to "assitive technology" in my search for a light, portable, power-thrifty word processor. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that all technology is assistive technology, and the fact that some doubt the meaningfulness of "technology" as a term to begin with, it also makes sense to find word processors in this market. Students who have extreme difficulty with handwriting, or who benefit from such things as real-time spell checking while doing their classwork, are sometimes assigned portable word-processors as part of their Individualized Education Plan.
Additionally, some word processors (such as the PC6, the Alphasmart 2000/3000 with AffordaSpeech add-on speaker, and the Alphasmart Dana) provide text-to-speech capability or at least the potential for it. TTS can be used to support communication for people who type more effectively than they can speak, and to provide auditory feedback for people who listen more effectively than they can read (you can't really go wrong with a feature like that -- anything that helps people with drastically different communicative modes understand each other is a wonderful thing in my book. Plus, it's fun to make the robot voice.).
And finally, I found sites and articles authored by people who were either reporters or busy executive-types writing about how lovely it was to be able to bring something that had all the computer capability they needed practically everywhere, without having to worry so much about battery life. I saw no reason to hesitate further, and simply hung around eBay until I saw someone selling a PC6 for a reasonable price. The rest is (near-term) history.
So far, I've found my word processor to be a wonderful, wonderful thing. I've been taking better notes at work, and doing it a lot faster than when I was trying to hand-write everything. I've also been able to augment my communicative abilities to some extent by storing important conversation points and phrases in the device prior to entering a meeting or discussion (this is something I've been doing for ages anyway, either via use of a paper notebook, or via composing words in my mind and rigorously memorizing them in advance of an interaction, so the word processor simply makes this necessary activity a lot more streamlined). Additionally, the device has basic spreadsheet capability, as well as a scientific calculator and various other built-in programs.
Overall, the device is a bit like some kind of odd (yet attractive) hybrid between a regular laptop computer and a personal digital assistant. I was prepared for that, since that's about what the device sounded like in all the descriptions I'd read.
What I wasn't prepared for was the reaction the device would get. I honestly expected to just be able to, you know, use it the same way I have been using inconspicuous paper notebooks for years (with just as negligible a reaction from those around me). Contrary to what my elementary-school teachers thought, I am not much for deliberate attention-seeking; I just do what makes sense to me, and I am usually genuinely shocked at the kinds of things other people end up noticing. Hence, I did not expect to be greeted with the phrase, "What is THAT thing?" by almost everyone I encountered the first day I used the device. I got asked this question so much that I typed up a small description of the device and my reasons for using it and stored it in the machine's memory. While I don't mind sharing information about whatever interesting electronic gadgets I find and decide to carry around, I was taken aback by the responses people had to the mere presence of my PC6.
Judging from recent observations, it seems that the portable word-processor is something of a "forgotten machine". That is, it is something extremely useful that has been around for years, but remains relatively unknown outside a few specialized demographics. When looking at what people tend to consider "progress", I've noticed that they often tend to think in terms of the addition of more Shiny Features -- e.g., laptops with faster processors and higher-resolution screens, PDAs with built-in cellular phone and digital camera, etc.
I'm not saying that Shiny Features are useless or bad -- this isn't some kind of random departure to Luddism or anything like that. I am extremely fond of my desktop PC with its super-duper 3D graphics card and 2 GB RAM, and I openly admit to having gazed longingly at heavily-modded computer cases equipped with blue LEDs and clear panels that allow you to see the fans spinning (sigh). Rather, I just think it's interesting how some extremely useful devices and features sometimes end up falling almost completely off the cultural radar, where they remain in obscurity unless one happens to discover them by chance.
It also bothers me a bit how, in the drive for Bigger Better Faster Shinier, some very cool and functional features end up all but disappearing. I remember first noticing this phenomenon when my dad upgraded the family computer sometime in the early 1990s; all the games I'd loved playing up until that point now ran so fast that they were impossible to actually play. Yes, I eventually discovered other games I liked, but I didn't want the new games to replace the old ones; I wanted them to add to the Total Pool of Possible Sources of Fun available in the world. (And apparently, given the popularity of vintage game emulation, I am not the only one who feels this way!)
The same goes for non-entertainment features; while I certainly appreciate lots of what newer machines can offer, I don't want cool, useful old capabilities to fall by the wayside as if they can't somehow coexist with the new. The fact that my PC6 will hold up to 20+ hours of continuous use on one set of batteries is a pretty darn impressive feature -- one that most modern laptops can't even begin to match. The fact that many portable word-processors are extremely light (mine weighs perhaps 2 pounds) is another nice feature.
Perhaps someday we will have uber-laptops with wi-fi and 3D acceleration and toaster ovens and other morsels of featurey goodness that last 10x as long as the PC6 on a single battery charge, but for now, power management remains a pervasive bugbear for computer designers.
Now, I realize that it's entirely possible that my recent fascination with cheapie keyboarding devices is one of those things that is just going to make people go, "huh?". But if you are curious about word processors, apparently, the Laser PC6 is still being manufactured (I purchased mine from an eBay surplus vendor for an extremely low price, and was very surprised to find afterward that these devices are still in production). Other portable word processors still being sold include the Alphasmart and the QuickPad; these can generally found used, new, or nearly-new online, with only a minimal amount of searching.
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