The Prophetic Words of Samuel Butler

We would do well to remember that this war has been taking place for almost two hundred years. We are not unique in identifying the threat. We are unique in that we are prepared to fight.

Statement made upon the arrest of Freedom Club member, Mr X, circa 2020-2025.

[W]e find ourselves almost awestruck at the vast development of the mechanical world, at the gigantic strides with which it has advanced in comparison with the slow progress of the animal and vegetable kingdom. We shall find it impossible to refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this mighty movement is to be. In what direction is it tending?

…

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.

The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, by Samuel Butler, 1835-1902

Robots and Children

“The children also came to prefer hugging QRIO more than they preferred hugging a teddy bear or an inanimate robot doll, and they touched QRIO carefully, in the same way that they touched other children, rather than bashing it as they did the doll.”

Robot Dearest? by B. Lester, Science Now Daily News, 5th November 2007

History Fragments: Google Knows

Dear Mr XXXXXX,

We are writing to inform you that your electronic CV has been rejected for the position of Senior Developer. An automated scan of your details using Google revealed several things about your personality that indicate you are not a suitable candidate for this company. Regardless, your qualifications appear to not meet the level we require, and your medical history also indicates that you have various health problems that could adversely impact your performance.

Regards,
XXXXXXX

Secretary for XXXXXXX

XXXXXXX Inc.

Why not, asks Mayer, “take the things you care about - your watch, your phone - stick little tags on them and watch for their receiving signals”? This is not a joke. “It would have been really useful to me yesterday when I lost my cellphone while it was out of power. It took me half an hour to find it had fallen behind a dresser.” And why not go one step further and tag your partner or your children, so that you can find out where they are whenever you want? Googleytes point out that we already do this with newborn babies and pets.

…

Google’s overall goal is to have a record of every e-mail we have ever written, every contact whose details we have recorded, every file we have created, every picture we have taken and saved, every appointment we have made, every website we have visited, every search query we have typed into its home page, every ad we have clicked on, and everything we have bought online. It wants to know and record where we have been and, thanks to our search history of airlines, car-hire firms and MapQuest, where we are going in the future and when.

This would not just make Google the largest, most powerful super-computer ever; it would make it the most powerful institution in history. Small wonder that the London-based human-rights group Privacy International has condemned its plans as “hostile to privacy”, and EU ministers called Google’s vision “Orwellian”. Even John Battelle, one of the net’s leading evangelists, who co-founded the technology bible Wired magazine, and wrote The Search, the definitive study of Google’s rise, now says: “I’ve found myself more and more wary of Google, out of some primal, lizard-brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source.”

Google. Who’s looking at you? by John Arlidge, TimesOnline, 21st October 2007

Making Music

The iBox sat in the corner, waiting for a flick of the wrist. It came, from a short, fat blonde that looked even bigger in her too-tight skirt.

“What would you like to hear, please?” it asked.

“Umm.” She giggled, looking at the sky for some sort of divine inspiration. “Something girly, a bit of pop. Something from the 90’s, like the Spice Girls?”

“You have been charged one pound. Your song shall play in two minutes time. Thank you, and have a fun evening!”

It played the song, exactly four minutes long. It sounded just as she asked for.

This piece of software analyses the underlying mathematical patterns in music and tells worried record company execs what they may or may not need to change in order to get the song into the charts.It is a heartbreaking notion, but one already being adopted by many labels. So now that we have decided that a computer is better able to listen to a song than a human being, how long before we conclude that computers rather than people should write the songs themselves? And would it really matter providing it fitted McCready’s algorithm and charted high?

From, Could Platinum Blue save the music industry, by Ben Marshall, Guardian Arts Blog, Music.

History Fragments: Don’t Ever Believe What You See

Whether adding people or objects to a photo, or filling holes in an edited photo, the systems automatically find images that match the context of the original photo so they blend realistically. Unlike traditional photo editing, these results can be achieved rapidly by users with minimal skills.

“We are able to leverage the huge amounts of visual information available on the Internet to find images that make the best fit,” said Alexei A. Efros, assistant professor of computer science and robotics. “It’s not applicable for all photo editing, such as when an image of a specific object or person is added to a photo. But it’s good enough in many cases,” he added. “Why Photoshop if you can ‘photoswap’ instead”"

Carnegie Mellon researchers use Web images to add realism to edited photos, 10th July 2007, Eurekanet (via Technovelgy)

History Fragments: The World’s First Remote Air Squadron

AI-guided military aircraft and vehicles have muddied the waters even further when it comes to responsibility for civilian deaths in war. Whereas before the fear was that a shift towards “video game” warfare would result in a detachment from killing, now the fear is that automated AI killing machines show no remorse on the battlefield, no human judgement, no crisis of conscience, and no ability to disobey orders that are clearly against accepted rules of warfare.

Who, then, accepts responsibility when the deaths of one hundred civilians are blamed on a glitch in the machine, or incorrect parameters? Is there a way to even tell the difference between an error, and an AI that is doing exactly what it was designed to do?

From an Amnesty International Report, 2018, The Automation of War.

At five tons gross weight, the Reaper is four times heavier than the Predator … It can fly twice as fast and twice as high as the Predator. Most significantly, it carries many more weapons. [...] “It’s not a recon squadron,” Col. Joe Guasella, operations chief for the Central Command’s air component, said of the Reapers. “It’s an attack squadron, with a lot more kinetic ability.”

“Kinetic” Pentagon argot for destructive power is what the Air Force had in mind when it christened its newest robot plane with a name associated with death.

“The name Reaper captures the lethal nature of this new weapon system,” Gen. T. Michael Moseley, Air Force chief of staff, said in announcing the name last September. [...] The Reaper is expected to be flown as the Predator is by a two-member team of pilot and sensor operator who work at computer control stations and video screens that display what the UAV “sees.” Teams at Balad, housed in a hangar beside the runways, perform the takeoffs and landings, and similar teams at Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base, linked to the aircraft via satellite, take over for the long hours of overflying the Iraqi landscape.

Robot Air Attack Squadron Bound for Iraq, 15th July 2007, Associated Press

History Fragments: Brain Scans, Law, and Crime

Pauline Newman: But one of the more chilling uses of brain scans could be outside the courts and even before people have committed a crime. When it comes to protecting vulnerable populations like children from possible perpetrators, can we ever dare take chances? Emily Murphy.

Emily Murphy: I think that research in that area if it continues to be pushed forward might be one particular area where that’s really taken up in the public. Anybody who works with children even in a volunteer capacity in hospital are screened for any sort of strange behaviour but particularly criminal backgrounds. And the screening is very intense, it’s not necessarily a big step then to add a scan in.

Pauline Newman: But a scan would be predictive and someone might not have ever done anything wrong in their lives.

Emily Murphy: That’s entirely true and that’s going to be a very difficult issue to deal with.

Pauline Newman: But then the possibility arises of maybe changing people’s brains if we know they have tendencies.

Emily Murphy: Absolutely, there are technologies and drugs out there that are already able to do that. The forced use of those technologies is something which we haven’t yet encountered to my knowledge but is definitely on the agenda.

Pauline Newman: Horrifying as that scenario sounds, could the tools and techniques of neuroscience prevent crimes before they occur? Could it make our streets safer, and even empty the jails? Gary Marchant.

Gary Marchant: That’s one thing these kinds of technologies could leave to, maybe a more happier outcome is basically to change our criminal system from being a legal and a punishment system to more of a medical system. If we can either treat people who have committed crimes or even better, anticipate people who have these problems and treat them ahead of time to avoid these terrible tragedies - for primarily the victims but also the people who commit them - that would be a really positive result. But of course it raises all kinds of difficult issues of privacy, of free will, and free choice if we’re going to start intervening before people commit crimes. And that raises a lot of sort of science-fiction scenarios that may not be that far away.

Mind Reading: Neuroscience in the Witness Stand, All In The Mind, 23rd June 2007

History Fragments: Quote of the Day

“So with the robot, you give it an instruction like: ‘Clear the building - anybody pointing a weapon at you should be killed’. Robots are infinitely brave. They have no hesitation in killing and feel no remorse. And the great thing is you don’t have to send condolence letters to their families if you put them in harm’s way.”

– John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, from Robot Cop: Coming To A City Near You Soon, The Guardian, 30th June 2007

History Fragments: Swarm Theory

Here’s a great look at one of the major inspirations behind today’s iBrain network. It’s sometimes hard to imagine that it was the studying of bees and other natural swarms and hives that have led to things like today’s craze of “swarming”, whereby groups of people interlink each others minds in order to process vast amounts of data. Of course, the military have been exploring this concept for some time, running tightly coordinated, self-contained military units using the same process, but it should come as no surprise to know that nature already knew best.

The bees’ rules for decision-making-seek a diversity of options, encourage a free competition among ideas, and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices-so impressed Seeley that he now uses them at Cornell as chairman of his department.

“I’ve applied what I’ve learned from the bees to run faculty meetings,” he says. To avoid going into a meeting with his mind made up, hearing only what he wants to hear, and pressuring people to conform, Seeley asks his group to identify all the possibilities, kick their ideas around for a while, then vote by secret ballot. “It’s exactly what the swarm bees do, which gives a group time to let the best ideas emerge and win. People are usually quite amenable to that.”

From Swarm Behaviour, National Geographic Magazine, July 2007: