Machine vs. Man, Part 2

In Yesterday's column, I showed why humans are evil: we cheat. Computers, on the other hand, only do what's best. They follow their programming.

And they're fast! Damn fast. Just today, a co-worker had the gall to complain when his computer took two whole minutes to scan a 600 megabyte file. 600 megabytes? That's as much as a CD! And it took me at least 10 minutes to know that the new Will Smith album sucked.

But if you've even just dabbled in popular culture during the last half-century, you've seen some tale of computers killing humans or robots beating up seniors for their pills. Allow me to take a moment to say (as both a computer scientist and a hater of near-deads): this is not going to happen. We are so far from understanding human emotions (computer scientists especially) that we will never be able to mimic this sort of irrational bias.

Instead, we will craft agents with irrational exuberance. They will be the best moneymakers out there. They will bid with astounding precision and lightning speed. Faster than a human could observe, heck, faster than any human could audit...

And they'll learn. They'll know to increase the price of ice when it's hot and to sell Sell SELL whenever a music label signs Will Smith (ha! Twice in one posting! Who's fresh now?). Amazing things. Optimizing profits and conversions, all that lovely stuff.

But, here's the thing: we don't believe in the Rising-tide Survival-of-the-fittest Laissez-faire capitalism. We live in a fluffy-bunny hugs-to-everyone bastardized marketplace. You have to pay people a "minimum wage" and give them "time off" for such hoitsy toitsy extravagances of the union imagination as "maternity leave" and "paternity leave" and "sawing through their bone with improperly installed welding equipment."

But the key thing is, you aren't allowed to talk to your competitors. Even though, it would be really good for you (the Stovepipe-Hat-wearing Fat Cat that you are) to do so: you could set prices to be artificially high. We begrudgingly begrudge knowing that gas station owners on an adjacent corner may *wink wink* *nudge nudge* each other and that's why they have the same damn prices. But computers, well... they can wink and nudge 5000 times a second.

If that's not clear, think about it this way: Amazon learns that when Barnes & Noble increases its price by x%, it will increase its price by y%. Barnes & Noble realize this, and adapts to it. The two co-evolve, until they have a signaling infrastructure as complex and indecipherable as the absurdity of baseball (where coaches mime Parkinson's to tell their batters orders for which a few syllables of speech would suffice).

This is not evil. It is dumb logic. The sort of "Lord of the Flies" naivete that you get whenever you give a child a machine gun. So what to do with these computers? You can't put them on the stand in court. And it's certainly not their fault. But, heck, we can barely make computers that can do this, we could never make computers that could do this and describe *why*. That's the central point of artificial intelligence as it currently stands: perhaps human-style responses are only 10 years away, but it will take at least 50 before we have a machine that can explain like a person (and a full century before they can ever lie like one).

Join us tomorrow for the resolution of this revolution.

Man vs. Machine, Part 1

An exploration, serialized because A) it relates to the classwork I'm doing in 18th Century Literature (when serialization was popular) and Freshman Writing (because I'm studying 18th Century Literature) and B) I have classwork in 18th Century Literature and Freshman Writing.

Over the course of the next few days, I intend to tackle the man vs. machine problem. Today, we learn how man is imperfect. Tomorrow, how machines may end up being even imperfecter. On Friday, we synthesize, and perhaps come to appreciate more the Amish (or, in a compromise, the Mennonites).

From today's Times: "In one case, at 9:41 a.m. on Oct. 2, 2002, the computer of a specialist in General Electric stock indicated that at a price of $25.85, there were orders to buy 39,500 shares and orders to sell 35,000 shares. The specialist, David A. Finnerty of Fleet Specialist, should have matched the 35,000, prosecutors say. Instead he bought 22,700 shares for Fleet's own account at $25.85, then raised the price to $25.95. Just after 9:42, he sold 12,800 shares from the same account[.]" Well, that certainly seems like a... series of events. But what does it mean? How does this fit into the conception of the world that you, a mere mortal, care about? To continue with their sentence, he "[made] $1,280 in about 14 seconds." Damn. I've spent the last 14 seconds trying to come up with an absurd comparison of what that amount in that time is more than (that metaphor's approximate street value: $0.017), and failed even at that.

So obviously, humans are both exploitable and exploitative. The solution being, make your money off them, but don't let them be in a position to screw you. (To paraphrase Polonius: "Don't a lender be.") Instead, the teeming masses of the uneducated pundit are lining up to scream, we should use the magic of "computors" and "market economies" make everything magically work. Democratization of capital ensues, and soon we've changed the NYSE building into the meeting place of orgies of hippie wealth. Whee!

Join us tomorrow on the Enfranchised to learn why this is the first step towards Skynet, or at least Robber Baron Mainframes.

Dr. Foster's Dictionary: 12 April, 2005

In honor of the 250th anniversary of the publication of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary--the tome that didn't so much define the English language as it did unleash it upon subsequent generations of poets and philologists--I thought I'd go out on a limb and post excerpts from a work in progress I hope will one day replace my fellow Pembrokian's. Today's entries come from the section on comparative ideological taxonomy:

lib·er·al
n.

2. Someone who prefers the message of Neil Young's "Southern Man" to that of Lynrd Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama". Jones is a classic liberal vis-a-vis classic rock.

Know-Noth·ing
n.

4. Someone who prefers listening to Neil Young's "Southern Man" over Lynrd Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama". Sean has displayed disturbing Know-Nothing tendencies of late.

Success Metrics that my High School never subscribed to

My father once set up a shooting range on a girlfriend's farm. I learned many things at that shooting range: treat every weapon as if it is loaded (a side note, if conservatives treated gun control like they treat abstinence, they would think teaching me how to be safe with a gun would only lead to violence); that reaslistically the shots Lee Harvey Oswald was reported to make were not difficult to pull off (except for that trick of making the bullet turn seventeen which-ways after it's left the barrel); and that guns, even the puny air guns we had, are pretty cool (except for that whole death and destruction implication). But the most important lesson I learned was this: never say what you're aiming at before you take your shot.

Our leaders could stand to learn this lesson. They could have been vague, saying, "Saddam is a bad man. We stand against bad men. We want to be better than bad." Instead, they concocted/discovered/group-thought this rationale of weapons of mass destruction. They planted in our heads dreams of sugar plums and Iraqis dancing besides our M1A2 Abrams rolling through Baghdad (but not for long: they had a democracy to set up, and quickly!) The end result being a near-quagmire. But we all know this.

The news, as I see it, is a report I heard yesterday on NPR (I love NPR). It was discussing how we were winning, because there were now fewer insurgency attacks. Ah, that's what I wanted to hear. Uncle Sam was winning the war, through a combination of Hearts and Minds turning to our side and, frankly, the inevitable attrition that must plague any suicide bombing squadron. That sort of optimisim (September 10th mentality, I guess it must be called) was apparently too much to ask for. The joyous news was that attacks were down to 30 or 40 a day, from the 130 or so that we were coming under in the run-up to the election.

Oh what a world we live in, when we define our goals not as universal acclaim, or universal acquaintanceship-but-maybe-you-don't-get-invited-to-strictly-every-party-on-Friday-night or even not having anybody who wants to kill us. No, now the Gold Standard for American acceptance is halving the number of people shooting at you.

Heh, by that metric, I'm even popular.