Brett Hutley's Blog » singularity

Rewiring the Brain

brett — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:18:40 +0000

There is an absolutely awesome bit of Neal Stephenson's book Reamde, that goes like this: The brain "was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu. A whole lot was going on in Mogadishu that required copper wire for conveyance of power and information, but there was only so much copper to go around, and so what wasn't being actively used tended to get pulled down by militias and taken crosstown to beef up some power-hungry warlord's private, improvised power network. As with copper in Mogadishu, so with neurons in the brain. The brains of people who did unbelievably boring shit for a living showed dark patches in the zones responsible for job-related processes, since all those almost-never-exercised neurons got pulled down and trucked somewhere else and used to beef up the circuits used to keep track of NCAA tournament brackets and celebrity makeovers."

In the silicon.com post "Your brain vs technology: How our wired world is changing the way we think", Baroness Susan Greenfield is quoted, professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford: "If the human brain is exquisitely adapted to the environment, which it is, if the environment is changing, which it is, then it's a given the brain will change". She is concerned by how our brain changes as a result of increasingly spending our time in front of technology, that areas of the cortex may be going dark as we spend our lives immersed in Big Brother and Facebook.

It seems to me that in order to get good things out of our interactions with technology, we should focus on how we can use our screen time to exercise areas of our brain in ways that wouldn't normally happen.

A good example of this was a recent post on Scientific American called "In the mind of others - Reading fiction can strengthen your social ties and even change your personality". This article is about research that indicates how reading fiction may help social interaction by building experience on how to interact with other people, without physically interacting with other people. As people empathise with characters in the book and those characters relate to other characters in the story, they build up this mental database on how to behave. This mental database helps with later, "meat-space" interactions.

I remember reading related work on using virtual reality to overcome phobias through repeatedly experiencing a fear-inducing situation in a safe, virtual environment.

Is it just our thinking and behaviour we can affect through computer interaction? The BBC had a news story about how a virtual gym could help with weight loss which suggests that maybe our virtual experiences also affect our body. What are the limits for this? This sounds like a wonderful area to explore. How can we re-wire the brain in beneficial ways using our computers?

Were the Luddites Right?

brett — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:36:14 +0000

The Luddites were a 19th century anti-industrialisation movement (and militia), who believed that their jobs were at risk because of the industrialisation of manufacturing. They proceeded to try and destroy mechanical looms in a vain attempt to turn back the rising tide of industrialisation. These days anyone seen as a "Luddite" is perceived to be backward and anti-technology.

But were the Luddites right about the consequences of technological progress? The Luddite Fallacy states that the argument that technological progress decreases the amount of jobs is fallacious, because increases in productivity does not mean that employers will keep their production constant. Rather, employers will increase their production to suit available demand.

The Economist has a post that points out that the Luddite Fallacy is only a fallacy as long as new technology increases capital, without reducing the need for human labour. But what happens if technology increases the capital and replaces the need for unskilled human labour?

The Luddites may have been a revolution or two short of the mark, springing from the industrial rather than the computer revolution, but maybe they weren't wrong about the long-term consequences of technological progress, believing that it would destroy jobs, and cause greater income inequality. Smashing the looms is obviously not a solution to the socio-economic problems of the structural changes to our society, but neither is burying our heads in the sand.

Race Against The Machine

brett — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:52:11 +0000

I just finished reading the Kindle book Race Against The Machine, a book I thoroughly recommend. This was the driver of the NPR article I blogged about recently.
The book is mostly oriented towards the US, although the issues they discuss seem to be prevalent across all major economies. The authors make the case that technological improvements are severely impacting every job market except those for highly-skilled individuals.

They argue, as I have argued, that the current employment crisis is caused by structural factors such as increased productivity due to technology, rather than cyclical or stagnation factors. We are simply living in a world where the educated and skilled are able to contribute to the economy in a disproportionate way, and the less educated/skilled are forced to compete for the fewer and fewer jobs that are currently too expensive to automate. This leads to money flowing from the workers to the owners of the business, which is an unsustainable situation for the long term.

The authors point out that to a large extent, we operate in a "winner take all" society. Technology enables the best and fastest-moving in the business to capture the bulk of a market. That in turn provides a strong incentive for those with capital to further invest in technology, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Not only is this situation self-perpetuating, but increased capital allows winners a disproportionate advantage in the race to take advantage of another business opportunity.

The positive news is that as we use technology to expand the frontiers of innovation, this will in turn create an exponential increase in the possibilities for further innovation.

Written by Robot

brett — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:58:01 +0000

I've just read two blog posts on creating written content programatically. The first was the article How I automated my writing career by Robbie Allen. This article gives a brief description of how the author's company generates web-site content automatically using the quantitative analysis of data.

The second blog post is about generating a Monty Python parody using markov chains. Even though the code is very simple, it generates very convincing nonsense!

How long will it be before the prose in our stories, the plots on our TV series, the lyrics in our songs are all machine generated?

Rage against the machine

brett — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:23:14 +0000

NPR has a story about How Technology Is Eliminating Higher-Skill Jobs. It features IBM's Watson System, that can beat the world's best human Jeopardy competitors. This technology is currently being used to automate the fields of law and medicine, so a lot of very technical jobs will disappear from some quite high-paying and respected professions.

Rather than rage against the machine, I think we need to embrace it. The survivors of the infopocalypse will be those who leverage the technology. Bring on that A.I. augmentation! I'm not sure what the socio-economic/political consequences will be if the trend for increasing unemployment continues. I am sure that we can't stuff that genie back in the bottle, and our society will need to adjust accordingly.

Of Gaps and Grass-Eaters

brett — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:12:20 +0000

Are the American people obsolete? Salon argues that because of globalisation and technology there is now a increased separation between capital and labour. The activities that generate wealth have both been outsourced to cheaper shores, and become more efficient because of technology. As a consequence the social contract in Western society between rich and poor - the rich provide the capital while the poor provide the labour - is breaking down. The rich still have capital, but they can now move the production of goods to the East, creating a shortage of jobs in the West.

Philip Greenspun wonders if unemployed people are 21st Century equivalent of Draft Horses after the Industrial Revolution. Is it far more expensive to keep people in work, than automating their jobs, or outsourcing?

Finally; DailyFinance has a story of how the disappearance of the middle class and the increasing gap between rich and poor has affected Japan. Apparently those that have given up on ever breaching that economic chasm and who retreat from society are termed "Grass-Eaters" by the media. Is this a taste of what will happen in the West if this trend continues?

Evidence of the Impending Singularity?

brett — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:47:01 +0000

While reading this article in The Economist, the section on rising inequality leapt out at me. The newspaper suggested that technology may be to blame. This is certainly a situation that I've been expecting for a while.

In contrast to the Singularity proposed by Vernor Vinge, I believe that as people become more educated, have better tools, and live longer, it will be harder and harder for young, less well educated, and poorer people to compete. This will stratify society.