HAL Redux: The Threat of Intelligent Machines

Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey anticipated space travel with the voyage of the spacecraft Discovery to Jupiter. Movie space travel now seems dated, but the film-makers anticipated a question that has gotten more pressing: What kind of problems might arise when very smart computers are introduced into the human environment? HAL, the conversational, artificially-intelligent, supercomputer which controls the Discovery demonstrates one possibility. HAL suffers a fault, comes unglued in a very human and artificially intelligent way, and kills all of the crew members except for Dave, the mission commander, who manages to survive and shut down the rogue computer.

HAL (while refusing to allow Dave back into the ship): “I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that…. This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it…. I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.”

HAL (to Dave as he proceeds with shutdown): “I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.”

A little more than a decade later, in 1992, the computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment called the Singularity, when smarter-than-human machines would cause rapid change that would bring about the end of the “human era.”

In 2000, William Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and respected computer architect, found this vision plausible and began speaking and writing about the dark possibilities of unregulated technological advances.

Concern about the rise of intelligent machines continues, and the NY Times recently reported on a private conference, held earlier this year, which brought together a group of leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers, and roboticists to discuss the need to place limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems. They were responding to the resilient notion that intelligent machines and a.i. systems might run amok.

Participants noted that advances in artificial intelligence have the potential to:

¶ Create profound social disruptions

¶ Destroy a wide range of jobs

¶ Have dangerous consequences, given that robots that can kill autonomously will be among us soon and that there are many possibilities for criminals to exploit artificial intelligence systems

The hoped-for outcome of the conferences would be:

¶ An assessment of the possibility of “the loss of human control of computer-based intelligences”

¶ A look at the associated economic, legal, and ethical issues

¶ An estimate of possible changes in human-computer relations (“Open the pod door, HAL.”)

¶ Recommended research guidelines to avoid catastrophe, such as conducting research in secure laboratories

The report of the conference, which was organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, will be published later this year.

Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, by Bill Joy

Technological Singularity

Driving Distractions: Devices Compromise Safety

Do you talk on the phone or text when you drive? Do you fiddle with your navigator or stereo or other devices? Driving distractions caused by cell phone calls and texting and by the increasing array of automotive gadgets have become a serious problem.

Recently, as I was waiting for a light at a busy Boston intersection, a huge mobile crane navigated a left turn past me. I looked up at the driver as the crane lumbered past and saw an otherwise competent looking guy talking on his cell phone. At first I was taken aback, but then I thought, well at least he's just talking and not texting.

A recent NY Times series on driving distractions showed the dangers of distracted driving, the failure of state legislators to respond, the withholding of cell phone safety data by a federal agency, and the results of a study on truck driver texting. Here are a few of the points made in the articles:

Drivers using cell phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, with about the same likelihood as intoxicated drivers with an .08 percent blood alcohol level.

Research shows that using hands-free devices may be as dangerous as holding a phone because the conversation distracts drivers from focusing on the road.

A study of texting by truck drivers found that texting made their collision risk 23 times as great.

A Harvard study estimated that cell phone distractions caused 2,600 traffic deaths every year, and 330,000 accidents that result in moderate or severe injuries.

A 2007 NHTSA study estimated that at any time during daylight hours in 2007, 11 percent of drivers were using a cell phone.

A Nationwide Mutual Insurance survey found that 81 percent of cell phone owners talk on phones when driving but considered themselves safe drivers, although nearly half said they had been hit or nearly hit by a driver talking on a phone.

Although cars and roads have gotten much safer, car accident fatalities have stayed at the same level over recent years, apparently because of the distracting devices we use in our cars.

The articles:

• Drivers and Legislators Dismiss Cellphone Risks
• U.S. Withheld Data on Risks of Distracted Driving
• Cabbies Stay on Their Phones Despite Ban
• In Study, Texting Lifts Crash Risk by Large Margin

Ferrari Fever: The 458 Italia

Ferrari has announced the new 458 Italia. This two seater will be introduced in September at the Frankfurt Auto Show and is powered by a 4.5 liter, 562 hp V8 which will take it from zero to sixty in 3.4 seconds and to a top speed of 202 mph.

Price is not announced, but will probably approach $200k. (That's about $1000 for each mile per hour of top speed. What if a $25k Honda would only go 25 mph?

It's billed as a replacement for the F430, so I think I'd better go look in the garage and see if I've got one of those 430's that I'll want to trade up. (pause) No, nothing out there. I think I'll pass on it. I'd just get into trouble with something that fast. And expensive. Maybe you'll let me drive yours once in a while.

Running Latte: The Urban Dictionary

I subscribe to Word of the Day from dictionary.com. Every day I'm e-mailed an interesting word which varies from familiar to vaguely familiar to unknown . But, familiar or not, these daily e-mail messages give me the feeling that I'm maintaining my vocabulary. I like to write simply and concisely but, hey, I'm a writer, so more words must be better. Here's an example of a recent dictionary.com Word of the Day:

glabrous \GLAY-bruhs\, adjective:

Smooth; having a surface without hairs, projections, or any unevenness.

This species has a bluish-tinged body completely covered in white flecking in the typical species, though completely glabrous green variants are also seen without any of the body flecking. -- Kevin G. Belmonte, "The woolly Astrophytums", The Philippine Star, June 6, 2009

Glabrous is from Latin glaber, "smooth, bald."

And now I have, in glorious counterpoint (koun'tr-point', A contrasting but parallel element, item, or theme) the Urban Dictionary. Described recently in the NY Times as providing "unruly, unlexicographical but surprisingly useful offerings" and as the "online open-source dictionary of slang."

I signed up immediately, and I now get another daily e-mail containing the Urban Dictionary Word of the Day. The two daily words could hardly be more different, and here are a few examples of the urban variety:

running latte

Showing up late to work because you stopped for coffee along the way.

I told them I got stuck in traffic, but really I was running latte.

DWT

Driving While Texting. Operating a motor vehicle while texting friends on your cell.

"Gina almost killed us driving over here, she was DWT. I finally grabbed the phone out of her hand before we wrecked."

Note: The Urban Dictionary, while often amusing, is a collection of slang and street language which contains many off-color terms and definitions that I wouldn't include here, and which you might not find amusing.

The Urban Dictionary

Street Smart: Urban Dictionary

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects

Will Rogers was a famous vaudevillian, humorist, commentator, and actor who starred in 71 movies (the majority of them silent films) and had a syndicated newspaper column.

He was born in 1879 in Oklahoma Indian Territory, and was 1/4 Cherokee. He liked to joke that his ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat. He died in 1935 on a round-the-world trip when his small plane crashed near Barrow at the northern-most tip of Alaska.

I only know what I've read about him, but he seems like the best kind of comedian… the kind whose jokes are as wise as they are funny. Two of my favorite Will Rogers quotes, in addition to the one in the title of this post, are these two:

An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.

Everything is funny, as long as it's happening to somebody else.

I wish I'd said that. Thanks, Will.

Cinema Violente

Scanning the cable movie listings recently I was struck by the collective violence in the short descriptions of that night's movies.

Documentaries and animations and comedies were there, Horton the elephant was even there, but they were overwhelmed by an onslaught of violent language: killer, murder, tragic, sadistic, relentless, vicious, violent, mutilated, brutal, amoral, gruesome, psychotic, hideous, and on and on.

The majority of the films were action-oriented and murderous. I'm as used to, and immune to, this stuff as anybody who watches movies, but that night it reached a critical mass. So I decided to extract a selection of descriptive phrases from those cable movie listings to serve as a contemplation on entertainment in our culture.

The extract that most caught my attention with its bizarrely mundane presentation of the plot was this: "His drinking starts to interfere with his assassination duties...." So, is this a fall-down-drunk-and-couldn't-hit-the-side-of-a-barn comedy? Or are assassins now presented as skilled high achievers -- as long as they manage their drinking?

I planned to list some of the other phrases I extracted from the movie listing to show how they are individually more or less commonplace, but how they collectively describe a film industry and a culture drunk on violence. (There's that drinking problem again.) But I think we've all seen enough of that stuff.

Instead, here's a video essay on how the mpaa film rating system is much more tolerant of violence than of sexual content in films.

Blind to the Rear: Backing-up Accidents

Ever looked out the back window of your vehicle and thought about all the things that you couldn't see back there? Blind spots vary, but, unless you're sitting on a motorcycle or golf cart, you obviously can't see everything that’s behind you. However, you may be surprised at how large blind spots can be, and truck and SUV blind spots can extend for 30 feet or more. And those blind spots are a big hazard for little people who play in driveways.

A recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study says that in 2007 about 14,000 people were injured and 221 people were killed in backing-up accidents. The study found that such accidents accounted for one-fifth of all fatalities in accidents that occur in driveways, parking lots, and on private roads, the category of "non-traffic accidents." Kids and Cars says that backing-up accidents cause almost half of non-traffic fatalities of children.

The NHTSA study is part of a process to establish rules for rear-view visibility in cars, SUVs, and vans. In advance of these guidelines, vehicle owners can install systems to provide a warning or a rearward view. Sensing systems, often marketed as parking helpers, can provide audible alerts to warn of objects behind a vehicle, and rear-facing cameras can show what is directly behind a car using its own display or the vehicle’s navigation screen.

The NHTSA only recently began to study non-traffic accidents, and says it plans to continue doing so. And I'm going to start looking behind my vehicle before I back out of the driveway.

The danger of blind zones

Dwarf Planet Arrives: Oxford Updates

A friend sent me a link to a cracked.com article about new words recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The article listed fifteen amusing words, from Bouncebackability (ability to recover from a setback) through Cyberslacking (you can probably guess that one) and Threequel (one more than a sequel) to Prebuttal (pre-emptive rebuttal). It was clear that these were "new words" and not words the the OED had somehow overlooked all these years.

The article piqued my interest in that twenty-volume repository of the English Language. How do they keep up with the dynamic growth of English? The OED currently contains about 60 million words, but new words keep popping out of the ether, so the busy OED editors are constantly discovering and including new words. And watching and thinking about words they may add in the future, like earworm: the tune that you can't get out of your head.

The OED editors periodically announce additions and updates to the existing content on their website (oed.com). Here are a few selected new entries that were published just this month:

amateur night, n. and adj.	dwarf planet, n.
bailout, n.	fudgsicle, n.
blue state, n. and adj.	grilled cheese, n.
Bushian, adj.	plasmoditrophoblast, n.
Clintonesque, adj.	searchability, n.
commitment-phobia, n.	swotty, n. and adj.
configurable, adj.	turducken, n.

Of course, you know what all of those words mean. Well, not plasmoditrophoblast, I suppose, unless you are perhaps a plasmoditrophoblastologist. And why did it take so long to get fudgsicle and grilled cheese? Swotty is obviously about studying too much, as you probably knew. But then there’s turducken down there at the bottom. That's a catchy little word, about which the OED has this to say:

"A coming together of three words and of three birds. As a blend of the nouns duck and chicken are affixed to the first part of the word turkey, so a boned chicken is used to stuff a boned duck, which is in turn used to stuff a partially boned turkey. The result, in both cases, might equally be regarded as inventive, elegant, and appetizing, or as an ungainly way of overdoing things somewhat.”

Say waiter, on second thought I think I’ll just have a salad.

Postscript. The Oxford Latin Dictionary (OLAT) also has some new words. The Oxford editors want the Latin repository to be as complete and up-to-date as the English dictionary. So here are the new Latin words recently included: Just kidding. Latin is a dead language. You knew that. Quisque comoedus est.

Fifteen Words You Won't Believe They Added

Cyber-Neologoliferation: The Oxford English Dictionary Meets Cyberspace

Superpowers: Take Your Pick

I've always liked Superman stories. More the comics than the movies. And the result, I guess, is that it often seems like it would be easier to work one's way through the daily to-do list with a few appropriate superpowers. Or at least one.

A good friend of mine facilitates leadership boot camps for teens. She knows how to engage her audience, and sometimes asks them to respond to the role call with their favorite superpower. And what do they say? Most often they say “flying” or “invisible,” she reports. ("Good thing they're not," she adds with a smile.)

What if you could have a superpower? Which would you pick? If you google "superpowers" you'll find many possibilities. Here's a short list of everyday superpowers to start with.

Flying	Shape shifting	Talk with animals
Future telling	Slow or stop time	Teleporting
Invisibility	Multi-lingual	Telekinesis
Invulnerability	Super intelligence	Time travel
Longevity	Super speed	Water breathing
Mind reading	Super strength	Weather control
Mind control	Super senses	X-ray vision

My choice, at least for today, is time travel. But I'm going to give it some more thought.

Berliner: A JFK Story

Today, May 29, is the birthday of John F. Kennedy, who was elected the 35th president in 1960 and served until 1963 when he was shot in Dallas. Had he lived, he would be turning 92 today and would have the legacy of having been a notable president.

He had a good sense of humor, like our current president, and he would have enjoyed the humor about the Berliner Urban Legend.

When speaking to a crowd in Berlin, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he said "Ich bin ein Berliner," or "I am a Berliner," by which he meant to say that he was one of them, a citizen of Berlin. The legend is that "berliner" also means jelly donut, and the joke is that his German listeners understood him to say "I am a jelly donut."

Although this joke has certainly had legs, the experts say that it is inaccurate. Residents of Berlin called their donuts by the German word for pancakes. The berliner term for donut was used to some extent in the rest of Germany but was not common. Berliners are residents of Berlin. Apparently it's just a legend, but it is a funny one.

Berliner Urban Legend

Data Driving: CR Rates 09 Cars

The Consumer Reports New Car issue comes out in April, and the current issue is titled Best & Worst 2009 Cars.

What with all the financial troubles in Detroit, I thought it would be interesting to see CR's take on the current crop of vehicles from the Big Three.

If you get your car news from car magazines, you’ll find a very different perspective in Consumer Reports. CR is practical and data-oriented with a focus on gas mileage and safety and reliability. The new car issue of CR has an economical Honda Fit on the cover.

To see what CR has to say about American cars (and trucks and vans and SUVs), I looked at their recommendations to buyers. To be recommended, they say, vehicles must "meet Consumer Report’s stringent testing, reliability, and safety standards... must perform well in our testing, have average or better reliability, and, if crash-tested, provide an adequate overall safety rating.”

Of the 250 vehicles they profile, 30 are new models and are not yet considered for recommendation, so that out of a possible 220, 117 are recommended; slightly more than 50% overall.

The percentages of Detroit vehicles recommended by CR are: 75% for Ford, 22% for General Motors, and 0% for Chrysler.

For reference, the percentages for Japanese vehicles are: 100% for Subaru and Mazda, 88% for Nissan, 86% for Honda, 84% for Toyota, and 20% for Mitsubishi.

CR's recommendations aren't a great surprise, and they reinforce the idea that things are looking up for Ford, mixed for GM, and uncertain for Chrysler, at least for now. Ford is still financially healthy and its cars are getting good reviews.

I have a friend who comes from “a Honda family” and who most recently has been driving a Subaru WRX. He says his next vehicle is going to be an Escape, Ford's small SUV. Recommended by Consumer Reports.

July Update

A July 1st NY Times article said: "Automakers had another difficult month in June, but sales figures released Wednesday included faint glimmers of hope for the industry." The article goes on to say that compared to last year, Ford sales were down 11%, GM sales were down 33%, Chrysler was down 42%, and industry sales overall were down 28%. A positive note for Ford is that they outsold Toyota for the third straight month and that in half the country their sales were even or better than a year ago, suffering only in the West and Southeast where the housing industry is hardest hit.

Alpha to Zulu: The Phonetic Alphabet

Every letter of the alphabet has a word to describe and clarify it in transmission. We’ve all seen movie air traffic controllers and cops and military people use the Alpha Bravo Charlie code for non-civilian lingo like, “Tango 33, you’re cleared for takeoff on Runway Whiskey Two.”

Every once in a while I'll grasp for the right word to clarify a letter as I give a mix of letters and numbers over the phone to describe something like an account number. And it's hard to quickly think of just the right word that will unmistakably translate a letter as itself and not produce an "E" where there should be a "D."

So what are the words in such a spelling alphabet? The list below is from the NATO Phonetic Alphabet. All you have to do is memorize its 26 words and you'll never have a letter clarification problem again. As long as you don't mind sounding like an air traffic controller.

Alpha	Bravo	Charlie	Delta
Echo	Foxtrot	Golf	Hotel
India	Juliet	Kilo	Lima
Mike	November	Oscar	Papa
Quebec	Romeo	Sierra	Tango
Uniform	Victor	Whiskey	X-ray
Yankee	Zulu

NATO Phonetic Alphabet

Cook Your Life: Edward Espe Brown's Zen Bread

The Sundance cable channel recently offered an interesting and offbeat documentary on Edward Espe Brown, a "Zen chef." The documentary, titled How to Cook Your Life, follows Brown to Buddhist monasteries -- mostly the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California -- as he gives workshops on bread-making and life philosophy.

Brown is the author of a number of cooking books, including the classic Tassajara Bread Book which dates back to the 1970's. In this documentary he uses food preparation as a vehicle for teaching a simpler and more hands-on life style to the participants who are presumably there to learn about Zen as well as bread-making.

He stresses the importance of using our hands for more than mousing and clicking and on the need to focus on what we're doing. He quotes his Zen teacher, Suzuki Roshi, who said, "When you're stirring the soup, stir the soup." In other words, pay attention to, and immerse yourself in, what you're doing.

The current cook at Tassajara, as Brown once was, is shown kneading bread. He says, "When people ask me what I'm doing, I say 'baking bread.' When they ask me how I'm doing, I say 'baking bread.'" The ideas are simple and appealing and enhanced by the context, since the workshops are presented at simple and elegant monasteries in beautiful natural settings.

After watching this, my wife, who learned how to make bread from that same Tassajara cookbook, said she is going to start making bread again. And I'm going to practice thinking about washing the dishes when I'm washing the dishes. And so on.

How to Cook Your Life

The Tassajara Bread Book

Tassajara Zen Mountain Center

Not Wasting Time: Bertram Russell is 137 today

Today, May 18, is the birthday of Bertram Russell, who was born in 1872. That's him at 35. He lived to be 98.

“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time,” he said, and who could ask more from a philosopher than that?

Thanks to Garrison Keillor for reminding us of Bert's birthday on The Writer’s Almanac.

And it's also Sarah's birthday, so hope the card arrives in time.