Ken's Blog

I heard an interesting lecture today by Richard Bonneau about his work using machine learning to analyze genetic codes and also to understand interactions between the proteins they express. He said many fascinating things, and my head is still reeling from all of the exciting ideas and possibilities.

But one thing in particular struck me, from my perspective as somebody who programs computers. He talked about the rich multiple interconnections between different parts of how our biology functions at the molecular and cellular level.

The redundancies built into the interactions between these various components creates a very robust system. One effect of this is that our genetic code is remarkably resistant to damage.

In other words, the great majority of gene mutations turn out to be harmless. Thinking of the cybernetic equivalent, imagine that your computer program was modified by somebody flipping random bits in its binary image.

How many bits would need to flip before the program stopped working? In most cases, even one bit would suffice to crash the program.

But in the biological equivalent, you can flip lots of bits and the whole thing continues to run just fine. Which led me to start thinking about the following hypothetical problem:

Could you design a computer program that would be resistant to random mutations? In particular, could you design it so that many bits in its binary image could be randomly flipped, and the program would continue to run?

We can define a program’s “robustness” as the number of bits you would need to flip, on the average, before the program breaks. So how to you make a program robust?

One problem is that it would be very easy to cheat. You could just make a million copies of the program, and then toss out whichever parts of any copies don’t match the corresponding parts of other copies.

So let’s be more specific: Is there a way to minimize the size of a computer program for any given degree of desired robustness?

I know I need to go through all of those boxes of paper in my apartment. Each box is the product of a kind of mental laziness.

Rather than sort through everything, and make difficult choices about what to keep and what to throw away, it’s so much easier just to sweep it all into a large cardboard box. But sooner or later the day of reckoning arrives, and I need to sort through those boxes and make some hard decisions.

I always find this difficult because there is a finality to throwing something away. Once something is gone, it’s gone.

In order to ease the stress of what would otherwise be a mentally taxing task, I’ve decided to upgrade my terminology. I no longer think in terms of throwing things away.

Instead I have opted to draw upon the gentler language of our modern cyber age. What I am really doing, I now know, is moving things into write-only memory.

Am I the only person who thinks this is weird timing? Our country is in a current headlong rush toward inward-looking isolationism, handing all influence over the world’s economy to a rival superpower, building systematic extreme economic disparity directly into our tax laws, and celebrating fascism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and white supremacy.

And this is all happening mere months after everybody saw that mini-series adaptation of The Man in the High Castle. Don’t get me wrong — I like Philip K. Dick as much as the next guy. But isn’t this all a bit extreme?

I mean, wasn’t it creepy enough when we were watching this on TV as a fantasy? Do we really need to enact it in real life?

Or is this what that annoying TV show host with the orange hair job actually meant by “reality television”?

If everyone is wearing mixed reality glasses then, as Vernor Vinge pointed out in his novel Rainbows End, we all get two complementary super-powers: (1) We can collectively see things that are not physically there, and (2) We can collectively not see things that are physically there.

People talk a lot about the first of these powers, but not so much about the second. But let’s imagine for a moment that we are living in a world where everybody is wearing.

While redecorating your home, perhaps you wish to have a nice new vase on your mantle to hold some flowers. Using one finger, you draw in the air above the mantle to specify the contour of the vase, and then you gesture to choose a nice color and pattern for your creation. From that moment on, the vase becomes visible, but not yet tangible, because it is not yet fully developed.

Meanwhile, somewhere nearby a 3D printer gets to work. After it is done, a robot delivers the finished vase to your door. You and your neighbors never see this robot because it doesn’t show up in your wearables.

There are also domestic robots that roam invisibly about your abode as needed, cooking and cleaning, making your bed, and performing various other chores that humans used to do for themselves. One of your domestic robots picks up the delivered item from where the delivery robot dropped it off, removes it from its protective package, and places it in its intended location.

You don’t see any of this. From your perspective, that lovely vase you had already added to your home simply takes on a more substantial appearance, which is how you know that it is ready to hold some lovely flowers.

If we’d elected
Al Bundy instead of this,
Would it be better?

“On the Holodeck,”
I heard him say, “nobody
Knows you’re a robot.”

At this week’s Exploring Future Reality conference in NYC, I watched an interesting debate. Terence Caulkins warned against a future in which you would walk around wearing some plastic device on your face in order to see an augmented version of the reality around you.

Matt Hartman disagreed. He said that when Terence had first started describing this scenario, he thought it was going to be a positive description. Matt added that he personally thought it would be awesome to be able to wear some sort of device on your face that gives you an enhanced view of your surroundings.

What amazed me about this exchange was that the two gentlemen in question were both enacting the very thing they were debating, apparently without realizing it. Matt was wearing glasses. Terence was not.

At a research meeting today, one of my colleagues was bemoaning the fact that there isn’t enough publicly available open source human movement data. That is, data recorded on a motion capture stage of people walking around, waving, sitting, standing, and doing all sorts of natural movements.

Medical researchers use such data to understand human movement and to study balance disorders. Animation studios and game designers use it to create animated characters. Computer scientists use it to train machine learning algorithms that mimic human movement.

But there just isn’t enough of it. There is an open source human movement library at CMU, but that’s pretty much the only one and it’s not nearly extensive enough. It’s mostly all of a single young white male grad student, which is not nearly good enough to represent a general population.

So in the meeting, I suggested that we take a tip from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. That’s a system which allows people to earn money by solving problems on-line that computers aren’t yet good at. The name was inspired by the famous 18th century hoax by Wolfgang von Kempelen.

We could pay people to act out movements. Participants would see somebody moving or gesturing on their computer screen, then imitate it, and the result would be recorded by their webcam. In this way we could capture all of the many variations in movement style that you get from a diverse population.

In general, figuring out human movement from video is hard, but it gets a lot easier if you know what movement to look for. So if you know you are looking at people imitating a particular movement or gesture, it’s fairly straightforward.

We can also add a layer of verification: We pay other people to look at those movements, and we filter out the ones where the imitation clearly doesn’t match the original.

The best thing about this project is that I already have a cool name for it: Biomechanical Turk.

Today I was on a panel about the potential societal impacts of VR/AR. The moderator first asked me what are some potential positive outcomes.

So I described a scenario, perhaps five years from now, when ubiquitous wearables will allow us to return to face-to-face conversation, something our evolution has wired us to do very well, rather than spending our time staring at screens.

Then he asked me about potential negative outcomes. I said it’s possible that people will merely pretend to engage in face-to-face conversation, while they are actually reading their Facebook feeds. Whether that happens, I pointed out, is not up to technology, but up to us.

But then later in the panel the moderator asked whether there were some really nightmare scenarios for advancing technology. So I told him one that’s not really about AR or VR.

Two weeks from today (on December 14), the FCC is likely to do away with Net Neutrality. When that happens, Comcast will be in its rights to refuse internet service to any content provider if there is a legal cloud over that content.

So in one scenario, the President tweets that CNN is fake news, and the Justice Department promptly issues an indictment against CNN for fraud.
While that case is wending its way through the courts, Comcast does not carry any CNN content.

In a democratic society, if only one party controls what information citizens can see, that party is guaranteed to win elections. The party in power then becomes locked in, and the society remains a democracy in name only.

So that was the answer I gave. Between you and me, I don’t think the tax bill was the end game. I think this is.

if, when tidying,
you swept it all in a box,
did that really count?