omenti

two goats, one car

I just heard that Monty Hall died at the age of 96.  He was a game show host famous for a simple probability problem that gets people riled up.  His show, Let's Make a Deal, had three doors. Behind one door was something very desirable - like a new sports car.  The other two doors had, well, something like a goat.  You were asked to pick door number one, door number two or door number three.  At that point your chances of worrying about the color of your new car were one in three.  After you made your choice Monty would open one of the other doors revealing a goat and would ask if you wanted to switch.

 

People tend to think it's a coin flip at that point, but that's not thinking it through.  Monte has perfect knowledge of the situation and has added some information to the puzzle with is reveal.  The right strategy is to switch - always.  Your chances will have improved to two out of three.

 

One way to think about it is if you picked, say, door number one, the chances of it wining are one in three and the chances of each of the other two are one third each.  This means the chance of it being in either two or three is two thirds.  Monte, by opening door three (for example), has increased the likelihood of it being behind door number two to two thirds.   He added information. 

 

always use extra ground truth when it is available!

 

You won't always win, but if you play a large number of times, you'll win about two thirds of the time.  You can write a little program to convince yourself of imagine a game where Monte has ten thousand doors.  One car, 9,999 goats.  You choose door number one.  Monte opens all of the doors except, say, 1,729 and asks if you want to switch.  My guess is your intuition will do the right thing:-)

 

 

 

x marks the spot

That's a really stupid idea Steve.

 

It was somewhere around 1992 and wasn't the first or last time I heard something it.  In fact it's part of the process of doing science -  I just was applying it somewhere else.  The PR people and business units of AT&T were for looking futuristic communicatons ideas in the labs that could change it's user's lives as the company moved beyond telephony.

 

I didn't start out as a technologist and still wonder why some people think of me that way.  After some post-doc work in physics I joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories when it was still the best place this planet for certain types.  A wide range of technologies were not just represented, but were invented there.  My work was a bit to the side of the hardcore technologists and developers. My background going in was narrow -  I'd get lost in many of the talks.   But if you're curious, read and ask questions,  anyone can learn.  They gave me first-hand tours explaining  their ideas in languages  I could understand and, if they couldn't,  or if they couldn't, they'd find an interpreter.  That was considered part of my job.  You could see the trajectory of some of the technologies -- threads moving moving forward in time and in some space. Threads that had a history that allowed you to compare your projections with what went on before.   They had characteristics like cost, rate of development and dependencies on other technologies.  It became a game to look for threads that could weave together in a history of the future.  And every  now and again a fabric began to emerge.  

 

The rejection I began with was the most beautiful and poetic of the ideas I wrote down.  

 

Maybe in fifteen or twenty years you'll hold a piece of glass in your hand and watch a friend's face on the other side of the world as you wish them happy birthday.  The glass will be wireless and buttonless and the service will be too cheap to meter.

 

It was a weaving of wireless, battery technology, displays, silicon, image compression, and some things that were happen with user interfaces.  The need was there.  I had learned it paid to create an experience people craved.  AT&T had been after the videophone since 1928 with numerous failed attempts, but they kept hammering away at it.   It was clear that video over the Internet was possible - heck, I was doing it then -  and the other curves looked attractive.  The weaving was there, but there were these pesky questions..  How could you get that much bandwidth over a cellular connection.  Who would built out a wireless network?  

 

When, How, Why, Who ...?

 

These were all temporal questions that deserved attention if you were looking into the future.   You just need an excuse and the company arguably gave me too much freedom.  There were a few ideas they liked.  I started thinking about that distant point in technology space.  

 

In math and physics when you're solving for something you often call it X.

 

Five years later and I was involved in a group specializing in computer mediated human interactions.  About a dozen really bright people who knew things I had never thought about.  People with patience and their curiosity beyond their own backgrounds.   I brought my own background to the group.  We did a few neat things.  

 

My favorite was a project a few of you were involved with - Air Graffiti.  I won't go into it deeply other than saying it was a realization that phones would become location aware computers with cameras.   We hacked together a few computational bricks that gave us a rather clear view into  a few things that happened ten to fifteen years later.  We thought the basic technology of a location-aware computerphone with a camera would start to mature around 2005 - about the time cellular networks could begin to support links a few tenths of a megabit per second.  That'd be a start. There were all kinds of objections, but we learned the trick was to not say much in demos and just give someone the test brick and let them imagine and invent on their own.   These were the most amazing demos I had seen and the folks in the group were just amazing...  Wayzen, Jessica, Gregg, Dave, Nancy and Steve (yes - we had two Steves).  We all developed a healthy respect for user interface and user experience and we had dreams of special hardware.  I began to think Apple was going to be the future, but had no idea it would be a phone .. 

 

 

The fundamental technologies are silicon and radio.  The 1992 piece of glass looked very do-able computationally.  The requirements were lower than a first generation iPhone and it was just a simple Moore's Law extension.  Batteries were more difficult.  I was sure GPS would get there with some military funding.  The camera and display were certainly possible - it was just a question of picture quality.  The big IF was the buildout of the wireless network.  I had been playing with folks building community networks in isolated areas in the West.   The technology was there .. and the need was there.  It was a question of buildout and price.  Several of us thought it would happen, but we had no idea what the path and timetable would be.  

 

 Today Apple showed me the spot ...  that point I called X.  It took twenty five years, but the implementation is so much richer than I had imagined.  Radio turned out to be an enabler, but in Apple's case amazing specialized hardware has been a driver.  It is coupled with software, but that ability to do both is what makes them special.  

 

But the fabric continues to move with new threads weaving their way in.  That's what makes it so fascinating and keeps it so rich.

 

Oh yeah ..  and hindsight is at least 20:20 ..  I get a lot of things wrong too. But that's how you learn. 

 

 

 

 

the start of school

For a few years I've been been asked to talk to speak to a science class at a local high school.  I've always chosen the topic.  Usually I ask a few kids in the class a few questions and go from there,  In the past few years it's been global warming, but this year I was warned not to go there due to political sensitivities.   There were about eighty kids from a few chemistry,  biology and physics classes.

 

I took my peanut butter cookie fee and asked a few questions that didn't go anywhere.  Then I asked how many have seen the Milky Way.  Only a quarter of the hands went up, but I continued..  "How many have seen Andromeda?"  Now we're down to five hands, but I continued.  "Does anyone know how far you can see with the naked eye?"  One hand - probably the class nerd.  "Two million light years"  She looked at another kid who raised his hand for Andromeda  - "You have too."

 

I had my topic and enough of an audience.  Here's roughly what I think I said.  It's as unedited as it was when I talked but it was literally working for peanuts.

 __________

Something remarkable has taken place in the past fifty years.  Aha Internet, you say.   It's almost that old after all, but I'm thinking about something deeper -  cosmology became a science.

 

It's sad there's so much light pollution these days.  Not enough of you have seen the Milky Way.  You really need to fix that.  Within a four hour drive from here you can find places where it'll cast shadows on dark moonless nights.  Being out then is intoxicating enough that you have to be careful or you'll lose track of time and the Sunrise will be on you.   Trust me - you need to do it.

 

When you're out with the stars and your thoughts the big questions flow.  Where did it come from, where is it going, how big is it, who else is out there...?  Religion and science started a sometimes star crossed dance over stories about the time of Copernicus.  Science was able to settle some of the questions - like the Earth is sort of a sphere and goes around the Sun, and the Sun is four hundred times farther and larger than the Moon.

 

Then Galileo Galilei turned one of those new fangled telescopes towards the sky and saw the moons of Jupiter move.  A window opened.  Our imaginations are nowhere near as wild as Nature.   Discoveries came with better telescopes and more people joining in.  Discoveries including a comet that told us Newton was on the right track and the accurate recording of the positions of things that moved in the sky.  

 

Knowing where things would be in the sky turns out to be useful if you're trying to navigate a ship and doubly so once accurate ship's chronometers were invented.  Astronomy now had commercial value and the science part lost some luster.  That is until a physicist put a prism on a telescope and started to learn enough about the light that these tiny dots in the sky were giving us a good idea of what they were made of.  Helium was discovered on the Sun before it was found on Earth.  The field of astrophysics was born.  That's sort of a love of mine.  

 

Now it was possible to deduce much more.   That there is more to space that just the Milky Way, which our solar system is part of and as the twentieth century unrolled we learned the Milky Way is but one of many galaxies and that it is all expanding.  We learned that our Sun is very old and the Universe even older.  We learned how stars make light.  Then the bomb shell, about fifty years ago, was the discovery of the remnant of the Big Bang.  A radiation that is everywhere in space - including in you. 

 

The last discovery came about forty years after radio telescopes were invented.  Both the invention and the discovery took place at Bell Labs and both were quite accidental.  Radio and visible light are closely related - they're both electromagnetic radiation.  You'll learn all about that in physics if you haven't learned it already.  Radio waves just have a much longer wavelength than visible light.  Radio astronomy vastly widened our electromagnetic radiation widow to the heavens.

 

Every time you open a new window on the Universe you find the unimaginable.

 

Now we're listening to the sounds of the Universe.  There's a new kind of telescope called a gravity wave interferometer.  Einstein theorized that gravity is quite a bit different from the force you might think it is. Basically space and time send ripples made of space and time like waves traveling through the Universe at the speed of light.   If you shake a really big mass - like if you crash a couple of black holes into each other - the ripples can be pretty big.  When a ripples passes by you get a little thinner and then a little thicker  and then go back to where you were.  That's what the telescope - it's called LIGO - measures.  Even for crashing black holes the effect is tiny and the most difficult measurement that anyone's attempted.  And you can even play the vibration back once you've separated it from the noise and amplified it a lot.  It sounds like a little chirp.  An information laden chirp.

 

 

There are huge puzzles to solve.   Only about four percent of the Universe is made up of the matter we're family with and are made of.  As things go we're pretty rare.   Nearly thirty percent is dark matter.  It hasn't been directly found yet, but it evidence for it's existence is great.  We think it's another sort of elementary particle - not like protons, neutrons and electrons, but something very different.  What makes that exciting is it isn't out there, but it's right here - in this room and in you. That means we can build detectors deep underground to look for them.  

 

And it gets even stranger.

 

The dominant form of energy in the Universe is called dark energy - almost seventy percent of the energy of the Universe.  And I'll leave you with this.  If you take away all of the matter in space and all of the radiation in any form you should be left with nothing but empty space, right?  There's nothing there, but it still weighs something.  And we don't understand why.  

 

Isn't that beautiful? The most important thing about science is the questions.  Answers are  just stepping stones.

 

_________

They didn't throw rotten fruit, so I was happy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

humanism and the dawn of machine learning

Walking in the woods a few months ago I had one of those moments of synthesis.  A dozen or so threads I'd been thinking about for a long time  suddenly wove together into a single something that made sense.  It is something of a form of story telling and I need to see if it really makes sense.   I started writing about it, but it struck me many people who see the post title will think of super intelligent AI.    I'm talking about something much more immediate - something we're dealing with now, but I'll begin with my two bits on super intelligent AI to get it out of the way,.

 

intelligence that is different and beyond

 

There's nothing in physics that says our brains are special.  Intelligence is just a kind of information processing where information goes into some sort of arrangment of elementary particles and a result emerges.   The particle arrangements can take a variety of forms.  A mouse is more intelligent than a tea cup and most of us (with the exception of Douglas)  think ourselves more intelligent than mice.  There are some information tasks where other animals or  machines beat us.  A twenty dollar calculator (or a free app)  destroys most of us when it comes to arithmetical calculations.    As time goes on it's reasonable to assume computation will improve.  There is the sticky wicket of "self-aware" and "thinking" .. I'll punt on those as we're unclear as to exactly what that means for humans.  

 

Science fiction often portrays malevolent super intelligent AIs.   We probably shouldn't worry about how anthropomorphic it's thought process is and accept it will be different. A more fruitful way of looking at the problem may be to ask if we share goals and consider it's competence.     It would be good to at least share goals with a super competent AI.   Think of it this way...  we're more intelligent and usually more competent than insects.  We might want to build a house on a field with a large number of them.  We don't think of ourselves as malevolent, but our goals aren't aligned and end the end we wipe them out without noticing.  On the other hand my ferrets are skilled at aligning their goals with mine.  Dogs rule when it comes to aligning goals with humans often outperforming other humans.  Perhaps that's a reasonable model for going forward.

 

There's a lot of hype and science fiction, but we're only taking baby steps on the fundamental problems. Every serious researcher I know, and there are a number,  thinks this kind of intelligence is decades away - perhaps many decades.   We have some time and we need to be thinking about how to handle it now.   We need to think deeply about what kind of future we want and how we share decision making.  These thinkers need to represent a wide range of backgrounds.  Individuals with great intellectual range as well as focused specialists forming groups that communicate.  More than ten percent with engineering backgrounds is too high.  There is time, but I worry that our track recored dealing with such change has not been good.  

 

There are other interesting aspects of super intelligent AI to think about - the sort I'm attracted to.  You can think about the limits of intelligence in the Universe.  It is a function of  entropy, energy, the expansion of the universe, and limits to communication set by the speed of light.  As you might imagine there's a lot of headroom, but the limits are harsh.  And you can turn your focus in the other direction and compare the brain and human sociology to existing and theoretical computer architectures.   Energy, entropy and communication speed are also important.  You can even put an upper bound on the optimal physical size for human style brains - we're fairly close to the limit. (curiously some animals have some neat evolutionary tricks).  And then there are the alien intelligences already among us - the Cephalopods.  

 

rebooting:

 

humanism and the dawn of machine learning

 

Sometimes I try to teach it to someone else or at least play around with the idea of how I"d turn it into a course.   Here's a quick pass of a syllabus for a hypothetical course.

 

° Eight generations of change - a brief history of the first industrial revolution.  Per capita energy use increased by and order of magnitude and our lives changed.  The distribution of impact was very uneven ranging from increased slavery and war to the shrinking of the world.   

 

° The scientific revolution and the electronic revolution that followed.  How the invention of the scientific laboratory and the revolution that followed was at least as important as the industrial revolution.  

 

° The externalities of change.  We never see the big picture in the beginning and as it emerges we adapt, but sometimes the adaptations are flawed.  Can we begin to think about externalities early in the game and who should participate?

 

° The smartphone - the convergence of at least six technology curves bound together by a bit of social clue into a partner that is always with us.  Is it one of those rare events that socially and culturally rewired us?  Is it one of those events that neurologically rewire us?

 

° Surveillance capitalism and big data - when the consumer is the product.  Herds of winners and losers.  Connections to consumerism and politics.  The concentration of power in the hands of a few. 

 

° Algorithms - what they are and how they are used and abused.  Who gets to control them and do they understand the consequences?  What would it mean to require oversight or openness?   

 

° What is modern numeracy and algorithmic literacy?  Where and when can it be taught? 

 

° Security, privacy.  Did we ever have them and in what degree?  Will we get some of what we've lost back and the fundamental differences and between the large informations companies.

 

° Brogrammers, sexism, racism and the sterile algorithmic culture.

 

° A brief history of machine learning.  Where it wins and where it fails - reality and hype.  

 

° thread weaving (although this is done throughout).  What will power do with ML and emerging AI?  What are they doing now?  Safeguards...

 

° Another look at the industrial and scientific revolutions.

 

I have a hard time thinking about shoehorning something like this into a single semester, but the point is to refine my own thoughts.

 

Thanks for indulging me