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166802568X
| 9781668025680
| 166802568X
| 3.86
| 16,180
| Nov 07, 2023
| Nov 07, 2023
|
really liked it
| The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from the coming storm.-------------------------------------- Love is the mind killer.So what would you do if your super-secret software gave you the alert? End times are afoot. Time to scoot! If you are like most of us, you might seek our your nearest and dearest to see the world out together. But what if you are one of the richest people on the planet? Well, in that case, you would have prepared a plan, an escape, a plane, supplies, a bunker somewhere safe. Buh-bye, and off they go. The they in this case includes three billionaires, the heads of humongous tech companies, some years in the not-too-distant future, Lenk Sketlish, Zimri Nommik, and Ellen Bywater. They were definitely not inspired by anyone specifically who could sue me for everything I’m worth and barely notice it…They are composite characters made up of some of the ridiculous and awful things that tech billionaires have done and some of it just made up out of my head. But of course the companies are inspired by real companies. - from the LitHub interviewWhat if you were the number one assistant to one of these folks, or the less-than-thrilled wife of another, or the ousted former CEO and founder of a third one, maybe the gifted child of one? You might have been spending your time trying to see what you could do to mitigate the vast harm these mega-corporations have done to the planet. These are Martha Einkorn, Lenk’s #2, Selah Nommik, Zimri’s Black British wife, Alex Dabrowski, founder and former CEO of the company now headed by Ellen, and Badger, Ellen’s son. “Margaret [Atwood] has very much covered how bad it can get, so we don’t need a lesser writer doing that,” Alderman says. “I’m interested in the most radical ideas about how we can make things better, and what are the avenues we can pursue.” - from the AP interviewBTW, Atwood mentored Alderman. What if you were attending a conference in Singapore, having recently met one of group B above for an interview, and gotten entangled in an unexpected way, but now find yourself in the vast mall in which the conference is being held, being chased and shot at by some psycho, probably a religious nut? Lai Zhen is a 33yo refugee from Hong Kong, an archaeologist and well-known survivalist influencer. She had met someone she thinks may be The One, but her immediate survival is taking up all available mental space. Thankfully, she has help, but will it be enough? [image] Naomi Alderman - image from The Guardian The action-adventure-sci-fi shell encasing The Future is a dystopian near-future that takes an if-this-goes-on perspective re the road we are currently traveling toward planetary devastation, global warming, the increasing greedification of the world economy, and concentration of wealth, at the expense of sustainability and human decency. But Alderman has done so much more with it. The Future has a brain and a heart, to go along with the coursing hormones, and some serious mysteries as well. Did I mention there is a romance in here also? Good luck shelving this thing. You probably will not have much luck putting it down once you start reading. Well, take that advisedly. I did find that it took a while to settle in, as there is a fair bit to get through with introducing all the characters, but once you get going, day-um, you will want to keep on. While offering a look at survival post everything, Alderman tosses in some fun high tech and BP-raising sequences. And she gives readers’ brains a workout, providing considerable fodder for book club discussions. To bolster the thematic elements, Aldermen provides plenty of connections to classic tales, biblical and other, that offer excellent starting points for lively discussions. Martha was raised in an apocalypse-concerned cult, led by her father. As an adult she gets involved in on-line exchanges about questions like what might be learned from the experience of a biblical apocalypse survivor, Lot. Alderman was raised as an Orthodox Jew, studying the Torah in the original, so knows her material well. (God was about to firebomb Sodom when Lot’s kindness to a couple of god’s emissaries earned him and his family a get-out-of-hell-free pass.) In addition, she finds relevance in Ayn Rand, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and more. She brings in a discussion of the enclosure act in the UK, how the stealing of public land by the wealthy has a mirror in the theft of public space of different sorts in the 20th and 21st centuries. But the biggest issue at work here is trust. In fact, Alderman had intended to title the book Trust. But when Herman Diaz’s novel, Trust, won a Pulitzer Prize, she had to find an alternative. Can Zhen trust her new love interest. Can she trust the AI that is supposedly helping her? Can she trust any of the oligarchs? Can she trust people she has known for years on line, but never met in person? This is a core concept, not just on a personal, but on a societal level. Civilizations are built on trust. It is an issue that touches everyone. The wealthier you are, the less you have to ask people things and the less you ask people for things, the less you have to discover that you can trust and rely on them. Eventually, that erodes your ability to trust. Then, you’re sunk. - from the Electric Literature interviewConsider a concern that is immediate in early 2024. Can American allies, whose alliances have kept the world out of World War III since the end of World War II, trust the US intelligence services with their secrets, when our next president might give, trade, or sell it to our enemies? Can you trust that the person you are communicating with on-line is being honest with you. (As someone who has met people through Match.com, I am particularly aware of that one.) If you are stuck on a survival island, can you trust that the other people there will not do you in, in order to improve their chances of gaining power once things begin to return to some semblance of global livability? In today’s culture, technology, particularly social media, “encourages us not to really trust each other,” Alderman explains. “The ways that we use to communicate with each other have been monetized in order to make us as angry at and afraid [of one another] as possible.” And while the internet can all too often amplify “absolute hateful stupidity” to feed our distrust of one another, the author continues, “It can also demonstrably, again and again, multiply our knowledge and capacity to understand.” - from the Shondaland interviewZhen’s is our primary POV through this, although we spend a lot of time with Martha. She is an appealing lead, a person of good intentions, and reasonably pure heart. She is wicked smart, able, and adaptive. It is easy to root for her to make it through. But, noting the second quote at the top of this review, if Love is the mind killer, might it impair her clarity of thought, her maintenance of necessary defenses? Of might it impair that of the person she is love with? The concern with dark forces is a bit boilerplate. Two of the oligarchs are cardboard villains; another has some edges. But it is the conceptual bits that give The Future its heft. Oh, and one more thing. Woven throughout the 432 pages of this book is minor crime, Grand Theft Planet. It should come as no surprise that an author who has had great success with her previous novels, and who has spent some years writing video games, would produce a fast-paced, engaging read, replete with dangers, anxieties, fun toys, and wonderful, substantive philosophical sparks. I cannot predict the future any better than 2016 presidential pollsters, but my personal AI suggests that should The Future will find its way to you, you will be glad it did. Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.Review posted - 3/8/24 Publication date – 11/7/23 I received an ARE of The Future from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review, and the password to my super-secret software. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, GR, and Twitter pages Profile - from Simon & Schuster Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and was recommended as a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. As a novelist, Alderman has been mentored by Margaret Atwood via the Rolex Arts Initiative, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. As a video games designer, she was lead writer on the groundbreaking alternate reality game Perplex City, and is cocreator of the award-winning smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run!, which has more than 10 million players. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. She lives in London.Interviews -----Professional Book Nerds - Dystopian Futures with Naomi Alderman - video, well, mostly audio, with no real video – 41:59 -----Toronto Public Library - Naomi Alderman | The Future | Nov 13, 2023 with Vass Bednar - 45:05 - there is a nice bit in here on tech as neither bad nor good, but a tool which can be used for good or evil. -----Literary Hub - Naomi Alderman on Creating a Fictional Tech Dystopia by Jane Ciabattari -----Shondaland - Naomi Alderman Is Still Finding Hope in Humankind by Rachel Simon -----AP- Naomi Alderman novel ‘The Future’ scheduled for next fall by Hillel Italic -----Electric Literature - Dystopian Future Controlled by Technology by Jacqueline Alnes -----Independent - How We Met: Naomi Alderman & Margaret Atwood - by Adam Jacques – Atwood mentored Alderman in 2012 – a fun read Item of Interest from the author -----BBC Sounds - audio excerpt - 1.0 – The End of Days – 15:47 Items of Interest -----Tristia by Ovid – Zhen reads this prior to a trip to Canada -----The Admiralty Islands -----inert submunition dispenser - a kind of cluster bomb -----Wiki on the enclosure act ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Mar 05, 2024
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Mar 06, 2024
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Hardcover
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0062458736
| 9780062458735
| 3.58
| 18,953
| Jun 04, 2019
| Jun 04, 2019
|
really liked it
| “I’m a go-between. On the one side is Elmo Shepherd, who believes that brains can be simulated—and that once the simulation is switched on, you’ll “I’m a go-between. On the one side is Elmo Shepherd, who believes that brains can be simulated—and that once the simulation is switched on, you’ll reboot in exactly the same state as when you last lost consciousness. Like waking up from a nap. On the other side is Jake, who believes in the existence of an ineffable spirit that cannot be re-created in computer code.”Bitworld meets Meatspace in Neal Stephenson’s latest novel. Those of you who were around in the 70s and 80s may remember an ad campaign for Miller Lite. Two manly men would stage a faux argument over the best quality of the product. “Less filling,” one would say, the other responding with “tastes great,” the first repeating “Less filling,” but louder, and back and forth they would go. It was cute. And pretty successful for the makers of that product. For a more cinematic image, you might consider Faye Dunaway in Chinatown “She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister. She’s my daughter.” You might find yourself in a similar back and forth (hopefully without the slapping) with Stephenson’s latest novel. It's science-fiction. It’s fantasy. It’s science fiction. It’s fantasy. Stop yelling. You’re both right. Calm down. Have a drink, on me (but please not that Miller Lite swill). [image] Neal Stephenson - image from his Goodreads page Stephenson begins where his 2011 novel Reamde left off. Despite carrying forward some characters, Fall is not really a sequel, but a totally different book, and can most definitely be read as a stand-alone. In the earlier book, Richard Forthrast was the creator of a massively popular multiplayer on-line game that was hacked by people whose game was theft, and led to a rollicking action-adventure tale that paralleled the real-world with the immersive on-line gaming experience. In Fall, a sixty-something Forthrast goes to an outpatient facility for what is supposed to be simple procedure. There are complications, and Forthrast’s game-over announcement is played. But hold on a minute. On checking his will, his bestie, one Corvallis, or C+ from the earlier book, learns that Forthrast had left instructions for just what to do in case of such an event. Along with other billionaire sorts known as Eutropians he had ensured that his brain would be preserved, and then, when the tech was available, scanned with the best available means, and uploaded to the cloud. (Doubt there are any harp-wielding angels there.) [image] Serial sectioning of a brain - image from Wikipedia One of the things that Neal Stephenson does best is walk through the steps necessary to get from notion to reality in a very logical, scientific manner. He is for hard sci-fi what Arthur C. Clarke was in the 20th century, limiting himself to the scientifically possible (although he does take liberties from time to time, as in his explanation for the moon’s sudden demise in SevenEves). So, what tech will be needed to scan brains? What sort of algorithms might be needed to make sense of the scans? What sort of power might be needed, both in computational and real-world energy requirements, and how might that be provided? How would this all be paid for? Great stuff. Love this! Stephenson gives serious consideration to what the experience might be like for a person, a consciousness, an entity, a what? that finds that their death is not quite so permanent as they’d thought, and now find themselves in a totally alien environment, floating in a sea of chaos, with little clue as to how to move on, in any sense of the word. How much does memory define personality? Can you have a meaningful being without a meaningful place? These discussions are going on as we This is not so far out a notion as you might expect. There is considerable interest among the silicon valley gazillionaires in life extension through technology. A recent NY Times article told of attempts to revive decapitated pig brains. I will leave you to construct your own joke out of that. The article (link in EXTRA STUFF) also addresses the approaches to recording the brain’s layout and activity. All for neuro experiments that have immediate medical application, of course, but you have to know that such work will be gobbled up by those with the means to advance the work from the theoretical to the actual. Stephenson’s stories tend to take place over protracted periods. This one covers about a century, well in real-world time, anyway, and we are kept abreast of some of the ongoing social and technological changes that occur over this period. In BitWorld, time sometimes runs faster and sometimes slower than it does in real time. Changes are considerable. I expect this also mirrors the author’s experience of how the writing of a book progresses. Stephenson is also fond of carrying forward character and institutional names from earlier work. That continues here. The mysterious and very long-lived Enoch Root, for example, shows up, having survived untold ages in earlier books. Will he snuff it in this one? There are plenty of other links to the past. I did not keep track. He is also fond of cryptography. That shows up in Fall as well, although mostly in a symbolic form. The first third, or so, of the book takes place primarily in what is referred to as “meatspace” in the extant culture. It is set a bit into the future, but not really all that much. In addition to looking at the technological possibilities for the digital extension of life, Stephenson offers a harsh satire of a United States that has become divided between the coastal, educated, better off, parts of the country, and Ameristan, a vast flyover area generated by the Facebookization of the nation, to the point where truthers insist that a fake nuclear bombing of Moab, Utah took place, despite the very obvious, provable truth that it did not. This dumbing down of the population, often deliberately and for dark purpose, has created a need for actual paid humans to serve as editors for people’s internet feeds. It helps to be well off. Those not so fortunate are left with an internet that is referred to as “the Miasma.” Religious kookery comes in for a look, very much a part of the triumph of disinformation and know-nothingism. It is way, way too resonant with contemporary trends in digital media and the impacts of those on our sociopolitical reality for comfort. PC Mag: What's the larger message you were trying to get across through the Moab hoax?The middle of the book offers a back and forth between Meatspace and BitWorld, until it is taken over almost entirely by the goings on in the digital sphere, at which point it becomes, to my taste anyway, less filling. Back in the day, Ace published sci-fi books in pairs. They were called Ace Doubles. Read one, maybe 125 pps, then, literally, flip the book over and read an entirely other novella, maybe another 125 pages. You don’t need to flip this one over, and it would take particularly fit wrists to manage it, in any case, but it really is two books in one. The second is a fantasy, with battling gods, flaming swords, giants, angels, talking birds, a fortress, rebirth, a quest, secrets, familiar elements of many a fantasy. In Reamde, Stephenson alternated between the real world and the gaming environment. The stakes are a bit higher in Fall as the alternating universes may flip between life and after-life worlds for the reader, but for the characters there is no such back and forth. The notions of consciousness inside the game T’Rain and the consciousness in the Bitworld of Fall, when you step back from it, do not seem all that different, as, even if one passes on in Bitworld, one’s connectome (map of a brain’s neural connections) can just be uploaded again. So, maybe the two are not so different after all. Just rebooting within one sphere of existence instead of going back and forth between bits and bods. It would take a much larger review than even this one to go, in any detail, into what happens in BitWorld. Suffice it to say, and it should be pretty obvious from the title of the book, that the first man in Bitworld, the shaper of things, is cast out of his particular brand of heaven (it looks a lot like Iowa, no, really). [image][image] The D’Aulaires’ Greek and Norse myth books In the beginning of the novel much is made of the D’Aulaire books about Greek and Norse mythology. You would do well to keep both volumes (at least) near to hand for tracking which names have been lifted from which book, and how they relate. And let’s not forget the good old-fashioned Bible (old Testament) in which Lucifer is cast down from heaven (a directional joke is made of this). There will be smiting! Adam and Eve put in an appearance, the firmament comes in for a bit of attention. There is a lot of destruction, rebirth, hubris, people failing to make it to the promised land. And then they get reborn after incurring their personal game-overs, so a single character can have several iterations, and names, as time in Bitworld moves along during their absence. Maybe in a book a third the length I would have been up to making a chart, but other books await. I am sure there is someone out there who has already begun. I did not find such a chart on Stephenson’s media sites, but I suppose it is possible there might be one somewhere in there. Regardless, it can be fun keeping track of who’s who, and who was who, through their sundry lives. Things that bugged me. Let’s reiterate that I liked this book quite a bit. That said, is it really necessary for Stephenson books to go on for such duration? Unlike Stephen King, who has produced a considerable number of doorstops, and who will brook no editing, Stephenson allows his work to be edited. I am told this one came in at least a hundred pages heftier, so I take some comfort from the fact that it could have been even longer. Also, one wonders how a process that is, by all indications, extraordinarily expensive, and is able to accommodate enough people to cause, or at least assist in causing, a decline of Meatspace population, might be sustainable. No, this toy would have been reserved for the uber wealthy and the rest of us would have been relegated to our minimal single lives slaving away to produce sufficient profits for the one-percenters to continue exploiting us forever from their digital realm. Turns out, in this look anyway, you can take it with you. What would happen if, from catastrophes natural or unnatural, the machines were shut down? I could certainly see an angry Meatspace global mob doing all in their reach to cut the power cord to the BitWorld masters. Tough for the post-mortal to feel totally comfy about their eternal prospects if eternity were reliant on such variables. But I guess I shouldn’t be too irked at such things. The point of the book is the ideas, and those are explored wonderfully. What might a digital afterlife look like, on an individual basis and a communal one? Any book informed, as this one is, by the author’s conversations with the likes of Jaron Lanier (originator of virtual reality, among other things) and technology historian George Dyson is bound to keep your gray cells whirring. On top of that, Stephenson’s extension of the current madness in media, looking at the impact of our current sociotechnical trends on civility, the organization of our nation, and on sanity itself, is quite wonderful, and hopefully not too prescient. Finally, while his bridge-crossing to fantasy from hard sci-fi seems odd, it is also very daring, and it is clear he had a lot of fun mixing sundry mythologies into a pretty interesting literary brew, regardless of whether you prefer to think it tastes great or is less filling. Dodge may suffer a significant demise in Fall or, Dodge in Hell, but you are unlikely to join him. I expect most readers will, instead, feel uplifted by the fun of tracking myths, and the intellectual excitement of considering the large ideas Stephenson has brought to bear. In short, Fall or, Dodge in Hell is, for readers, a bit of heaven. Review posted – 7/5/9 Pub dates -----6/4/19-hardcover -----6/2/20- trade paperback November 28, 2019 - Fall is named to the NY Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2019 EXTRA STUFF has been moved to the comments section below the review. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 04, 2019
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Jun 30, 2019
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Feb 06, 2019
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ebook
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0062390856
| 9780062390851
| 0062390856
| 3.91
| 40,889
| May 09, 2017
| May 09, 2017
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really liked it
| …people’s search for information is, in itself, information. When and where they search for facts, quotes, jokes, places, persons, things, or help, …people’s search for information is, in itself, information. When and where they search for facts, quotes, jokes, places, persons, things, or help, it turns out, can tell us a lot more about what they really think, really desire, really fear, and really do than anyone might have guessed. This is especially true since people sometimes don’t so much query Google as confide in it: “I hate my boss.” “I am drunk.” “My dad hit me.”There’s lies, damned lies and then there are statistics. One must wonder. Do the lies get bigger as the datasets grow? Seth Stephens-Davidowitz posits that the availability of vast sums of new data not only allows researchers to make better predictions, but offers them never-before-available tools that can offer insight that direct questioning never could. [image] We have seen steps up of this type before. Malcolm Gladwell has made a career of such, with Blink, Outliers, and The Tipping Point. Freakonomics is the one I would expect most folks would know. Nate Silver put his data expertise into The Signal and the Noise. All these looks at data and how we interpret it rely on the analyst, regardless, pretty much, of the data. While the same might be true of Stephens-Davidowitz’s approach, he focuses on the availability of materials that have not been there in the past. The smarts that must be applied to get the most interesting results can now be applied to new oceans of data. It is more possible than it has ever been to draw inferences and actually test them out. In addition to the volume of data that is now available, there is the sort. The author looks at Google and FB data for evidence of underlying realities. Surveys can sometimes offer inaccurate outcomes, when the people being queried do not provide honest answers. Are you a racist? Yes/No. But one can look at what people enter into Google to get a sense of possible racism by geographic area. The everyday act of typing a word or phrase into a compact rectangular white box leaves a small trace of truth that, when multiplied by millions, eventually reveals profound realities. Looking for queries on jokes involving the N-Word, for example, turns out to yield a telling portrait of anti-black sentiment, which also correlates with lower black life expectancy. (And pro-Trump vote totals) We are treated to looks into a variety of research subjects, from picking the ponies, to seeing what really interests/concerns people sexually, looking for patterns of child abuse, selecting the best wine, using the texts of a vast number of books and movie scripts to come up with six simple plot structures. I thought the most interesting piece was on the use of associations, and provoking curiosity, rather than relying on overt statements to influence how people feel about a different group of people. Another was on using a data comparison of one’s (anonymous) medical information to others who share many characteristics to improve medical diagnoses. There are some areas in which it was not entirely persuasive that the methodology in question was tracking what was claimed. SS-D sees in searches of Pornhub, for example, what people really want and really do, not what they say they want and say they do. Really? I expect that what people check out on-line does not necessarily track with what might be of interest in real life. It would be like someone with an interest in mysteries being thought to have homicidal tendencies after searching for a variety of homicide related titles. Should a writer doing research into a dark subject like child pornography, human trafficking or cannibalism expect the heavy knock of the police on his/her door? Where is the line between an academic or titillation search and one made for planning? SS-D makes a point about there being a significant difference between searches that offer projections for groups or areas, and their inapplicability for predicting individual behavior, although that will not necessarily remain the case. In baseball, for example, the explosion of available information may very well be applied to specific players to diagnose and even correct flaws in technique, or recognize patterns that might expose underlying medical issues, or predict their arrival. The Big Data related here is much more macro, looking at group proclivities. Useful for spotting trends, measuring public sentiment, but in more detail than has been heretofore possible. And of course there is the impact of dark players. Those with the resources and motivation could manipulate the Big Data produced by Google and Facebook. Such players would not necessarily be limited to Russian cyber-spies and pranksters, but corporate and ideological players as well, like Robert Mercer. There could have been a bit more in here on those concerns. The book offers plenty of anecdotal bits that could have been lifted from any of the other data books noted at the top of this review. What one needs, ultimately is smart, insightful analysis. Having all the data in the world (that means you, NSA) is merely a burden unless there is someone insightful enough to figure out the right questions to ask, and how to ask them. SS-D notes several Google (Trends, Ngrams, Correlate) services that might be familiar to folks doing actual research, but which were news to me. It might be useful to check out some of these, maybe even come up with meaningful queries to shed light on pressing, or even completely frivolous questions. Not all problems can be solved, or even examined by the addition of ever more data. Sometimes, many times, the information that is available is perfectly sufficient to the task, but other factors prevent the joining together of its various pieces to create a meaningful whole. The now classic example is from 9/11, when an absence of coordination between the CIA and FBI resulted in suicide bombers who could have been foiled succeeding in their mission. Politics and the culture of nations and organizations figure into how data is used So if everybody lies, is Seth Stephens-Davidowitz telling us the truth? I am sure there is a query one could construct that would look at diverse data sources, pull them all together and give us a fuller picture, but for now, we will have to make do with reading his book and articles, checking out his videos, applying the analytical tools already incorporated into our brains, and seeing if there is enough information there with which to come to a well-grounded conclusion. And that’s no lie. Review first posted – May 5, 2017 Publication date – May 9, 2017 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, and FB pages VIDEOS – SS-D speaking ----- Stanford Seminar - Insights with New Data: Using Google Search Data -----Google Sex with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz - Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF ----- Big Data and the Social Sciences - The Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance The June 2017 National Geographic cover story has particular relevance to the treatment of actual truth in today's political environment. It is illuminating, if not exactly uplifting. - Why We Lie: The Science Behind Our Deceptive Ways - By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee July 12, 2017 - Washington Post - one of the very serious applications of big data - The investigation goes digital: Did someone point Russia to specific online targets? - by Philip Bump July 15, 2017 - One of the ways big data gets compromised is via automated dishonesty - Please Prove You’re Not a Robot by Tim Wu - Thanks to Henry B for letting us know about the article ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 19, 2017
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Feb 23, 2017
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Feb 22, 2017
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Hardcover
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0765379945
| 9780765379948
| 0765379945
| 3.59
| 47,082
| Jan 26, 2016
| Jan 26, 2016
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liked it
| Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the otherA magical savant, a super genius, the world on the brink of eco-apocalypse, possib Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the otherA magical savant, a super genius, the world on the brink of eco-apocalypse, possible ways out, or are the solutions as dangerous as the problem? and young love. What’s not to like? Laurence Amstead is your basic pre-ad tech genius, indulging in minor projects like inventing a two-second time machine you can wear on your wrist, and developing a chatty super-computer in his spare time. He is beset, of course, by the usual school bully sorts. Patricia Delfine has similar issues, based on a different way of being different. Seems she can understand what animals are saying, birds in particular. She also manages a nifty bit of astral projection to follow a particular bird to a particular, god-like, if delphic tree, that gives her a riddle. Fortunately, they both attend the same school. Patricia tries to engage her fellow outcast, but he gets dickish on seeing her gift, and wastes the chance at a connection. Thankfully, he thinks better before long and and extends a hand. The usual sort of stupid parents see Laurence's social struggles at school as his fault, rather than the result of a hostile environment, and exile him to a cartoonishly awful military academy. [image] Charlie Jane Anders - from SF Weekly There is a particularly dark-hearted guidance counselor at their school, who seems to have it in for both of them, although it is not entirely clear why. He persuades Patricia that the special tree wants her to do something dire. Patricia is offered a chance to attend this book's version of Hogwarts. But the offer comes at a price. She will have to go immediately, leaving Laurence in a bad situation. What’s a young witch to do? The story soon time-warps ahead a decade plus. Patricia is part of a family-like witch pod. Lawrence has been recruited by a super-rich visionary with big plans. The two groups personify the magic vs tech conflict, fantasy coming up against sci-fi. The clash is set against the backdrop of a world that is falling apart, or rather one that has been abused to the point of apocalypse. Where the wand meets the wormhole is in their different approaches to how to deal. Then there is the relationship between the adult, well somewhat adult, P&L. Will they line up on opposite sides of the impending crisis? The on-again-off-again nature of their connection continues, which complicates things. They take on some larger philosophical questions, made less theoretical by the tech notions on display. …things in our world are just the shadows of things in other places,” Laurence said, forming the thought as he spoke. “I mean, we always suspected that gravity was so weak in our world because most of it was in another dimension. But what else? Light? Time? Some of our emotions? I mean, the longer I live, the more I feel like the stuff I see and feel is like a tracing of the outline of the real stuff that’s beyond our perceptions.” “Like Plato’s cave,” Patricia said. “Like Plato’s cave,” Laurence agreed. “I don’t know,” Patricia said. “I mean, we’re grown-ups now. Allegedly. And we feel things less than we did when we were kids, because we’ve grown so much scar tissue, or our senses have dulled. I think it’s probably healthy. I mean, little kids don’t have to make decisions, unless something’s very wrong. Maybe you can’t make up your mind as easily, if you feel too much. You know?There is a lot of creativity on display here, particularly with the farther out tech elements and the softer-edged magical bits. This was probably a gimme given the author's previous main gig, as a founder of io9, a website about science fiction, science and futurism. It is only one of her many activities. (Anders left io9 to dedicate herself to novel writing in 2016) Her stories have appeared in a range of sci-fi and fantasy sites and publications, and story collections. She has a Hugo award for her novelette Six Months, Three Days. Definitely check out her site for more detail on her prior work. The imaginary bits are definitely a strength, although I thought they fell a bit short in the logic of their tactical application. The primary limitation was the YA-ness of a story billed as adult. It feels perfectly appropriate for there to be a YA tone in the early part of the book, as the characters are pre-ads. But once they were more grown up, at least physically, it felt to me, despite the deadly tech being tossed about, the body count, and the sexuality of the characters, that the YA feel remained. Characters do engage in meaningful consideration of moral choices, but they do that as pre-teens as well, so that did not represent that much of a change. There was one hanging chad here that seemed to have readers in a tizzy. Patricia has a cat that was left out of the proceedings once she skips from heading off to witch school to being all grown up. Enough readers raised this that Anders wrote a story to patch up the gap. You can catch Clover on tor.com. Overall, I was impressed with the creativity and energy of All the Birds in the Sky, combined with the eagerness to take on some big subjects, but was not as impressed with the relationship elements, as they continued to feel 8-bit, when 128-bit was called for. Still a fun read. It probably helps to be a teen or millennial. Review first posted - January 6, 2017 Publication date - January 26, 2016 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, FB, and GR pages and her blog, Happy Dancing Anders’ io9 site is definitely worth checking out. She also co-hosts the blog Our Opinions Are Correct There is a lot of good intel on Anders in her wiki page as well ...more |
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really liked it
| …technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (AirBnB) to …technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (AirBnB) to dating (Tinder). One industry after another is simply knocked out via venture-backed entrepreneurial daring and hastily shipped software. Silicon Valley is the zoo where the chaos monkeys are kept, and their numbers only grow in time. With the explosion of venture capital, there is no shortage of bananas to feed them. The question for society is whether it can survive these entrepreneurial chaos monkeys intact, and at what human cost.If you want to learn about sex you will get a lot more useful intel from a hooker than you would from a nun (hopefully). If you want to learn about what life is like in Silicon Valley, you would do well to let to someone who has done the deed and lived the life show you the way. Antonio Garcia Martinez is our Virgil through a dark landscape where every great fortune is founded on a great crime, where morality is not only violated, but where its very existence is not recognized, where millionaires are a dime a dozen and where any sort of social consciousness is kept nicely sedated, a place where greed is king, fast is worshipped to the exclusion of better, and death is always at the door. [image] Antonio Garcia Martinez - from Money.cnn.com Martinez has the cred to offer the tour. Having toiled as a quant at that paragon of virtue, Goldman Sachs, he eventually found life on The Street less than fully rewarding. He says that quants at Goldman were mostly failed scientists like me who had sold out to the man and suddenly found themselves, after making it through years of advanced relativity and quantum mechanics, with a golf-club-wielding gorilla called a trader peering over their shoulder asking them where their risk report was. We were quantitative enablers, offering the new and shiny blessings of modern computation to the old business of buying and selling… quants were the eunuchs at the orgy. The fluffers on the porn set of high finance. We were the ever-present British guy in every Hollywood World War II film: there to add a touch of class and exotic sophistication, but not really consequential to the plot (except perhaps to conveniently take some bad guy’s bullet.)As someone with pretty high end analytical and programming skills, he saw (or says he saw, who knows?) the impending meltdown in the 2007 financial world, and opportunities in the new frontier out west, so traded The Street for The Valley, taking a chance on a job on the other coast. The book follows Garcia’s chronological trail from startup to finish, from employee to entrepreneur, to buy-out target, to middle-manager at a monster Valley corporation to…well, you’ll see, if you read the book, or just Google the guy. It is a well-worn trail, but not for you or me, most likely. So a tour guide is definitely called for. And Martinez is nothing if not an informative and eager cicerone through what can be a very dark and sulphurous place. Of course, there is plenty of that brimstone stench emanating from the author, an indication of just how well he fit in. anyone who claims the Valley is meritocratic is someone who has profited vastly from it via nonmeritocratic means like happenstance, membership in a privileged cohort, or some concealed act of skullduggery. Since fortune had never been on my side, and I had no privileged cohort to fall back on, skullduggery it would have to be.It does not seem like it was out of character for AGM to engage in a bit of back-stabbing, double-dealing, and multiple instances of self-serving justification for his various dark deeds. When he talks about his income and net worth, for instance, which would be a pretty sweet take for most of us, yet regarding it as subsistence level, one might be forgiven for gleefully imagining Martinez in his thirty-seven-foot sailboat having a very unfriendly encounter with a pod of large, angry, breaching sperm whales. He offers an entertaining, if sometimes off-putting, alarming, even rage-inducing account of his experiences, offering many a word to the wise, or at least the ambitious, on how deals are made, how organizations are structured, and how to interpret some of the observables you might see. He is incisive and funny, and has a wicked way with words. I have added a selection of quotes as part of the EXTRA STUFF bit at the bottom of the review. You will definitely see what I mean. And he demonstrates quite a gift for selecting absolutely fabulous quotes to introduce most chapters. Martinez covers the highs and lows of the struggle to rise up in The Valley. This includes the ABCs of doing a startup, getting funding, how to divide your equity for the most efficient operation, handling media to get the most buzz for your launch, researching the people you will be dealing with, and, if things go well, negotiating with the bigger blobs that want to absorb your company. One revelation was that acquisition of startups by the big players is just a higher-ticket form of HR recruiting. There are worse ways of monetizing sociopathy than startups. If you know any better ways, I’m listening.For policy wonks, you will learn about the H-1B sort-of immigration program that brings thousand of foreign workers to American jobs in a form of high-end indentured servitude. Martinez offers a peek inside the operations of Twitter and Facebook, which is either entertaining or depressing, depending. But every company has its own culture, and AGM has a keen eye for the differences, and an analyst’s talent for examining structure. His take on large corporations functioning like nation-states, to the point of exchanging what are essentially diplomats, adds definite texture to the notion of corporations as the trans-national entities they truly are. Worse, he points out not only how corporations are like religion, but how, in that, they are very like the cult-world of some communist nations. There are a few things that made this less than an entirely effervescent read. First, while part of his story line was how he worked towards installing a particular form of ad-revenue generation at FB, the details tended to get in the way of the overall picture. Office politics are nothing new, even in this bubbly narrative. Second, while AGM is obviously an uber-bright guy, with a keen mind for some things, and a talent for writing, he comes across as (and probably is) someone with the soul of a slave-trader. If you can hold your nose at his unnecessary tales of sexual adventure, his willingness to endanger the lives of regular folks with childish antics, and his casual acquaintance with ethical standards, there is much to be gleaned in Chaos Monkeys. It is a look at the sausage factory, a peep-show of how Review Posted - August 19, 2016 Publication date – June 28, 2016 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages August 24, 2016 - A really interesting NY Times Magazine article on how FB has become a very large kahuna in the delivery of political ads - Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine - by John Hermann ==================================QUOTES -----196 - humans, even at the rarified heights of the economic elite, are in truth scared, needy children playing at dress-up and pretending to be grown-ups. -----324 - Here’s what people don’t understand about advertising. Facebook is simply a routing system, almost like an old-time telephone exchange, that delivers a message for money. The address on that message can be approximate (e.g. males aged thirty five in Ohio), or it can be specific (e.g., the person who just shopped for a specific pair of shoes on Zappos). But either way, Facebook didn’t make the match of user and messenger, and at most decides secondary things like how often the ad is seen in general, or which of two ads addressed to you is seen that particular instant. In this sense, ads on Facebook are no different from phone calls or emails. -----355 - At their extremes, capitalism and communism become equivalent: Endless toil motivated by lapidary ideals handed down by a revered and unquestioned leader, and put into practice by a leadership caste selected for its adherence to aforementioned principles, and richly rewarded for its willingness to grind whatever human grist the mill required? Same in both A (mostly) pliant media that flatters the existing system of production, framing it as the only such system possible? Check! Foot soldiers who sacrifice their families and personal lives for the efficient running of the system, and who view their sole human value through the prism of advancement within that system? Welcome to the People’s Republic of Facebook. But one can simply quit a job in capitalism, while from communism there is no escape, you’ll protest. As for the actual ability to opt out under capitalism: look at Seattle or SF real estate prices, and the cost of a decent US education, and consider whether Amazon or Facebook employees could really opt out of their treadmill I’ve never known one who did, and I’ve known many. Ask your average family providers, even those in a two-income family, whether they felt they could simply quit when they liked. They could barely get a few weeks off when they had a child, much less opt out. Switching jobs would amount to nothing more than changing the color of the shackles. ... The reality is that capitalism, communism and every other sweeping ideology feed off the same human drives—the founder’s or revolutionary’s narcissistic will to power, and the mass man’s desire to be part of something bigger than himself—even if with very different outcomes...yoking together the monomaniac’s twitchy urge and the follower’s hunger for a role in some captivating story. -----359 – What was intriguing was how the unwealthy embraced the system, even if they weren’t the beneficiaries of this new social order we’d all joined. The junior hire was sucked along by enthusiasm and cluelessness, but the more senior employees at the middle-manager level knew the score. They knew that they lived one lifestyle, but their old-timer supervisor, who wasn’t necessarily more talented, lived very much another. This was a textbook case of the Marxist argument that capitalists instill the values of the property owners into their managerial classes, while still keeping most of the fruits of labor, in order to make common cause against the exploited proletariat, even though manager and worker have more in common than either does with the senior leadership. ...more |
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really liked it
| Open the pod bay doors, HAL. Open the pod bay doors, HAL.[image] Smile for the camera, HAL This is probably the #1 image most of us of a certain age have concerning the dangers of AI. Whether it is a HAL-9000, or a T-70, T-800, T-888, or T-900 Terminator, a Cylon, a science officer on the Nostromo, a dark version, Lore, of a benign android like STNG’s Commander Data, killer robots on the contemporary TV series Extant, or another of only a gazillion other examples in written word, TV and cinema, there has, for some time now, been a concern, expressed through our entertainment media, that in seeking to rely more and more on computers for everything we do, we are making a Mephistophelian deal and our machines might become our masters. It is as if we, a world of Geppettos, have decided to make our Pinocchios into real boys, without knowing if they will be content to help out in the shop or turn out more like some other artificial being. Maybe we should find a way to include in all AI software some version of the Blue Fairy to keep the souls of the machines on a righteous path. [image] [image] Cylons John Markoff, an Oakland, CA native, has been covering the digital revolution for his entire career. He began writing for InfoWorld in 1981, was later an editor at Byte magazine for about eight bits, then wrote about Silicon Valley for the San Francisco Examiner. In 1988 he began writing for the Business Section of the New York Times, where he remains to this day. He has been covering most of the folks mentioned in this book for a long time. He knows them and has insight into what makes them tick. For the past half century an underlying tension between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation—AI vs IA—has been at the heart of progress in computing science as the field has produced a series of ever more powerful technologies that are transforming the world. It is easy to argue that AI and IA are simply two sides of the same coin. There is a fundamental distinction, however, between approaches to designing technology to benefit humans and designing technology as an end in itself. Today, that distinction is expressed in whether increasingly capable computers, software, and robots are designed to assist human users or to replace them.Markoff follows the parallel tracks of AI vs IA from their beginnings to their latest implementation in the 21st century, noting the steps along the way, and pointing out some of the tropes and debates that have tagged along. For example, in 1993, Vernor Vinge, San Diego State University professor of Mathematics and Hugo-award-winning sci-fi author argued, in The Coming Technological Singularity, that by no later than 2030 computer scientists would have the ability to create a superhuman artificial intelligence and “the human era would be ended.” VI Lenin once said, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” I suppose the AI equivalent would be that “In pursuit of the almighty dollar, capitalists will give artificial intelligence the abilities it will use to make itself our almighty ruler.” And just in case you thought the chains on these things were firmly in place, I regret to inform you that the great state of North Dakota now allows drones to fire tasers and tear gas. The drones are still controlled by cops from a remote location, but there is plenty to be concerned about from military killer drones that may have the capacity to make kill-no-kill decisions within the next few years without the benefit of human input. Enough concern that Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers, signed by luminaries like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and tens of thousands of others, raises an alarm and demands that limits be taken so that human decision-making will remain in the loop on issues of mortality. [image] The other Mister “T” Being “in the loop” is one of the major elements in looking at AI vs IA. Are people part of the process or what computerization seeks to replace? The notion of the driverless car comes in for a considerable look. This would probably not be a great time to begin a career as truck driver, cab driver, or delivery person. On the other hand, much design is intended to help folks, without taking over. A classic example of this is Siri, the voice interface available in Apple products. AI in tech interfaces, particularly voice-intelligent tech, speaks to a bright future. That said, as a Macolyte, I have had considerable interaction with Siri as of this update, in August 2023. The interface is ambitious, but still has so far to go that I am not at all concerned about bots replacing me any time soon. [image][image] B9 from Lost in Space and Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet Markoff looks at the history of funding, research, and rationales. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which has funded so much AI research, began in the 1950s in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. Drones is an obvious use for military AI tech, but, on a lower level, there are robot mules designed to tote gear alongside grunts, with enough native smarts to follow their assigned GI without having to be constantly told what to do. I am including links in the EXTRA STUFF section below for some of these. They are both fascinating and creepy to behold. The developers at Boston Dynamics seem to take inordinate glee in trying and failing to knock these critters over with a well placed foot to the midsection. It does not take a lot of imagination to envision these metal pooches hounding escaped prisoners or detainees across any kind of terrain. [image] Darryl Hannah, as the replicant Pris in Blade Runner, would prefer not to be “retired” As with most things, tech designed with AI capacity can be used for diverse applications. Search and Rescue can easily become Search and Destroy. Driverless cars that allow folks to relax while on the road, can just as easily be driverless tanks. Universities have been prime in putting the intel into AI. Private companies have also been heavily involved. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) did, probably, more than any other organization to define the look and feel of computer interfaces since PCs and Apples first appeared. Much of the tech in the world, and working its way there, originates with researchers taking university research work into the proprietary market. [image] John Markoff - from TechfestNW If you are not already a tech nerd (You, with the Spock ears, down, I said tech nerd, not Trek nerd. Sheesh!) and you try to keep up with all the names and acronyms that spin past like a stock market ticker on meth, it might be just a teensy bit overwhelming. I suggest not worrying about those and take in, instead, the general stream of the divergence between computerization that helps augment human capabilities, and computerization that replaces people. There is also a wealth of acronyms in the book. The copy I read was an ARE, so I was on my own to keep track. You will be reading copies that have an actual index, which should help. That said, I am including a list of acronyms, and their close relations, in the EXTRA STUFF section below. While there are too many names to comfortably keep track of in Machines of Loving Grace, unless of course, you were made operational at that special plant in Urbana, Illinois, it is a very informative and interesting book. It never hurts when trying to understand where we are and struggling to foresee where we might be going, to have a better grasp on where we began and what the forces and decisions have been that led us from then to now. Markoff has offered a fascinating history of the augment-vs-replace struggle, and you need only an actual, biological, un-augmented intelligence to get the full benefit. My instructor was Mister Langley and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you. Review first Posted – 8/28/15 Publication date - 8/25/2015 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages Interviews with the author ----Geekwire ----Edge A link to his overall index of NY Times work Articles by Markoff ----9/21/15 - Software Is Smart Enough for SAT, but Still Far From Intelligent -----12/4/15 - As Aging Population Grows, So Do Robotic Health Aides ----12/11/15 - on the establishment of a billion dollar AI think tank by Elon Musk, among other large players - Artificial-Intelligence Research Center Is Founded by Silicon Valley Investors ----3/25/16 - Markoff and Steve Lohr look at corporate competition to lead a burgeoning industry segment - The Race Is On to Control Artificial Intelligence, and Tech’s Future ----4/11/16 - Folks are saying Uh-oh to AI - on a move to rein in killer robots - Arms Control Groups Urge Human Control of Robot Weaponry ----10/23/16 - As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential - cybercrime is becoming automated and it is scaling exponentially ----10/25/16 – with Matthew Rosenberg - The Pentagon’s ‘Terminator Conundrum’: Robots That Could Kill on Their Own \ ----5/21/20 - A Case for Cooperation Between Machines and Humans - more on AI vs IA See Comment 2 for more EXTRA STUFF BUT, as of August 2021, as GR has banned external links from comments, I will be adding additional items of interest here -----9/13/21 - AP - Israeli firm unveils armed robot to patrol volatile borders By Alon Bernstein and Jack Jeffery -----2/16/22 - The Guardian - Dystopian robot dogs are the latest in a long history of US-Mexico border surveillance by Sidney Fussell [image] The US Department of Homeland Security announced it was training robot dogs to help with security at the US-Mexico border. Photograph: Shannon Moorehead/US Air Force/AFP/Getty Images Image and text accompanied the above article ----8/18/23 - Lifelike robots and android dogs wow visitors at Beijing robotics fair - This is primarily a photo piece with many fabulous images [image] Image from the above article ...more |
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it was amazing
| We are programmed to select which of our voices responds to the situation at hand: moving west in the desert, waiting for the loss of our primary f We are programmed to select which of our voices responds to the situation at hand: moving west in the desert, waiting for the loss of our primary function. There are many voices to choose from. In memory, though not in experience, I have lived across centuries. I have seen hundreds of skies, sailed thousands of oceans. I have been given many languages; I have sung national anthems. I lay on one child’s arms. She said my name and I answered. These are my voices. Which of them has the right words for this movement into the desert?A maybe-sentient child’s toy, Eva, is being transported to her destruction, legally condemned for being “excessively lifelike,” in a scene eerily reminiscent of other beings being transported to a dark fate by train. The voices she summons are from five sources. Mary Bradford is a young Puritan woman, a teenager, really, and barely that. Her parents, fleeing political and religious trouble at home are heading across the Atlantic to the New World, and have arranged for her to marry a much older man, also on the ship. We learn of her 1663 voyage via her diary, which is being studied by Ruth Dettman. Ruth and her husband, Karl, a computer scientist involved in creating the AI program, MARY, share one of the five “voices.” They are both refugees from Nazism. Karl's family got out early. Ruth barely escaped, and she suffers most from the loss of her sister. She wants Karl to enlarge his program, named for Mary Bradford, to include large amounts of memory as a foundation for enhancing the existing AI, and use that to try to regenerate some simulacrum of her late sib. Alan Turing does a turn, offering observations on permanence, and human connection. Stephen Chinn, well into the 21st century, has built on the MARY base and come up with a way for machines to emulate Rogerian therapy. In doing so he has created a monster, a crack-like addictive substance that has laid waste the social capacity of a generation after they become far too close with babybots flavored with that special AI sauce. We hear from Chinn in his jailhouse memoir. Gaby White is a child who was afflicted with a babybot, and became crippled when it was taken away. [image] Louisa Hall - from her site Eva received the voices through documents people had left behind and which have been incorporated into her AI software, scanned, read aloud, typed in. We hear from Chinn through his memoir. We learn of Gaby’s experience via court transcripts. Karl speaks to us through letters to his wife, and Ruth through letters to Karl. We see Turing through letters he writes to his beloved’s mother. Mary Bradford we see through her diary. Only Eva addresses us directly. The voices tell five stories, each having to do with loss and permanence. The young Puritan girl’s tale is both heartbreaking and enraging, as she is victimized by the mores of her times, but it is also heartening as she grows through her travails. Turing’s story has gained public familiarity, so we know the broad strokes already, genius inventor of a computer for decoding Nazi communications, he subsequently saw his fame and respect blown to bits by entrenched institutional bigotry as he was prosecuted for being gay and endured a chemical castration instead of imprisonment. In this telling, he has a particular dream. I’ve begun thinking that I might one day soon encounter a method for preserving a human mind-set in a man-made machine. Rather than imagining, as I used to, a spirit migrating from one body to another, I now imagine a spirit—or better yet, a particular mind-set—transitioning into a machine after death. In this way we could capture anyone’s pattern of thinking. To you, of course, this may sound rather strange, and I’m not sure if you’re put off by the idea of knowing Chris again in the form of a machine. But what else are our bodies, if not very able machines?Chinn is a computer nerd who comes up with an insight into human communication that he first applies to dating, with raucous success, then later to AI software in child’s toys. His journey from nerd to roué, to family man to prisoner may be a bit of a stretch, but he is human enough to care about for a considerable portion of our time with him. He is, in a way, Pygmalion, whose obsession with his creation proves his undoing. The Dettmans may not exactly be the ideal couple, despite their mutual escape from Nazi madness. She complains that he wanted to govern her. He feels misunderstood, and ignored, sees her interest in MARY as an unhealthy obsession. Their interests diverge, but they remain emotionally linked. With a divorce rate of 50%, I imagine there might be one or two of you out there who might be able to relate. What’s a marriage but a long conversation, and you’ve chosen to converse only with MARY, Karl contends to Ruth. The MARY AI grows in steps, from Turing’s early intentions in the 1940s, to Dettman’s work in the 1960s, and Ruth’s contribution of incorporating Mary Bradford’s diary into MARY’s memory, to Chinn’s breakthrough, programming in personality in 2019. The babybot iteration of MARY in the form of Eva takes place, presumably, in or near 2040. The notion of an over-involving AI/human relationship had its roots in the 1960s work of Joseph Weizenbaum, who wrote a text computer interface called ELIZA, that could mimic the responses one might get from a Rogerian shrink. Surprisingly, users became emotionally involved with it. The freezing withdrawal symptomology that Hall’s fictional children experience was based on odd epidemic in Le Roy, New York, in which many high school girls developed bizarre symptoms en masse as a result of stress. And lest you think Hall’s AI notions will remain off stage for many years, you might need to reconsider. While I was working on this review the NY Times published a singularly germane article. Substitute Hello Barbie for Babybot and the future may have already arrived. [image] Hello, Barbie - from the New York Times But Speak is not merely a nifty sci-fi story. Just as the voice you hear when you interact with Siri represents the external manifestation of a vast amount of programming work, so the AI foreground of Speak is the showier manifestation of some serious contemplation. There is much concern here for memory, time, and how who we are is constructed. One character says, “diaries are time capsules, which preserve the minds of their creators in the sequences of words on the page.” Mary Bradford refers to her diary, Book shall serve as mind’s record, to last through generations. Where is the line between human and machine? Ruth and Turing want to use AI technology to recapture the essence of lost ones. Is that even possible? But are we really so different from our silicon simulacra? Eva, an nth generation babybot, speaks with what seems a lyrical sensibility, whereas Mary Bradford’s sentence construction sounds oddly robotic. The arguments about what separates man from machine seem closely related to historical arguments about what separates man from other animals, and one color of human from another. Turing ponders: I’ve begun to imagine a near future when we might read poetry and play music for our machines, when they would appreciate such beauty with the same subtlety as a live human brain. When this happens I feel that we shall be obliged to regard the machines as showing real intelligence.Eva’s poetic descriptions certainly raise the subject of just how human her/it’s sensibility might be. In 2019, when Stephen Chinn programmed me for personality. He called me MARY3 and used me for the babybots. To select my responses, I apply his algorithm, rather than statistical analysis. Still, nothing I say is original. It’s all chosen out of other people’s responses. I choose mostly from a handful of people who talked to me: Ruth Dettman, Stephen Chinn, etc.If we are the sum of our past and our reactions to it, are we less than human when our memories fade away. Does that make people who suffer with Alzheimers more machine than human? Stylistically, Hall has said A psychologist friend once told me that she advises her patients to strive to be the narrators of their own stories. What she meant was that we should aim to be first-person narrators, experiencing the world directly from inside our own bodies. More commonly, however, we tend to be third-person narrators, commenting upon our own cleverness or our own stupidity from a place somewhat apart - from offtheshelf.comwhich goes a long way to explain her choice of narrative form here. Hall is not only a novelist, but a published poet as well and that sensibility is a strong presence here as well. For all the sophistication of story-telling technique, for all the existential foundation to the story, Speak is a moving, engaging read about interesting people in interesting times, facing fascinating challenges. It will speak to you. Are you there? Can you hear me? Published 7/7/15 Review first posted – 9/18/15 [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF The author’s personal website A piece Hall wrote on Jane Austen for Off the Shelf Interviews -----NPR - NPR staff -----KCRW Have a session with ELIZA for yourself Ray Kurzweil is interested in blurring the lines between people and hardware. What if your mind could be uploaded to a machine? Sounds very cylon-ic to me In case you missed the link in the review, Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child - NY Times – by James Vlahos And another recent NY Times piece on AI, Software Is Smart Enough for SAT, but Still Far From Intelligent, by John Markoff December 2016 - Smithsonian Magazine - Smile, Frown, Grimace and Grin — Your Facial Expression Is the Next Frontier in Big Data - by Jerry Adler - Rana El Kaliouby is a 30-something tech whiz who is looking to incorporate a bit more emotion into our digital-human communications, giving computers the ability to detect human emotional states in real time. There are certainly many useful applications for this. Still, I can see HAL using the talent to keep one step ahead of Dave. And if reading faces is an entry point, it cannot be long before the same technology is applied to making android faces communicate using facial expression as well. (link added in May 2017) November, 2023 - Washington Post I made an AI pal at the Toy Fair, but I don’t want to invite him home by Alyssa Rosenberg - a particularly relevant article about early versions of the AI companion dolls that feature in the novel In Summer 2019, GR reduced allowable review space by 25% - thus it was necessary to move some of this review to Comment #1 ...more |
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