All Your Brain Are Belong To Us

EPOCH neuroheadset

In light of a slew of articles all mashed up together, I can't help but think about our future of crowdsourcing and citizen science...

Here is a glimpse of some of the work being done, the goal in this instance is to make more visually-intelligent the automaton robots that will soon-enough be taking over many of the jobs that we currently do:

Scanning Your Home With Kinect Could Improve 3-D Robot Vision
By Dave Mosher - August 28, 2012

Seeking a way to crowdsource better computer vision, roboticists have launched a website that allows users to record pieces of their environments in 3-D with a Kinect camera.

Helper robots must be able to distinguish a refrigerator from an oven, for example, and open these labyrinthine 3-D objects to cook a casserole or deliver a cold beer to beckoning human owners.

“If you can get real-world 3-D data for 5,000 refrigerators, you can develop an algorithm to generalize a refrigerator and then test a robot’s ability to generalize them,” said Alper Aydemir of the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/kinect-home-computer-vision/

Here is an article that (panic aside, please) reminds us that brain-controlled computing has actually been available at the consumer level for a couple of years now:

Researchers Hack Brainwaves to Reveal PINs, Other Personal Data
BY GEETA DAYAL 08.29.12
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/brainwave-hacking/

Directly to the manufacturer:

Emotiv
"You think, therefore you can"
Based on the latest developments in neuro-technology, Emotiv has developed a revolutionary new personal interface for human computer interaction. The Emotiv EPOC is a high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset.
http://emotiv.com/

And so finally - Emotiv sells an EEG neuroheadset for $500. Soon it will be less expensive. Having recently watched a video about the socio-political and legal barriers to psychedelic-based neurological research, I wonder:
How long before citizens bypass the laws that (for good reason) hinder psychedelic science?
In about five years, a lot of people are going to be taking drugs, slapping this brain-reader on their head, and uploading their data. For better or for worse...

Post Script:
Open Your Mind to the New Psychedelic Science
GREG MILLER 04.26.13
tl;dr
Scientists are, somewhat successfully, trying to do psychedelic science again.

The Map's Gone

image taken from http://soundcloud.com/6gun/the-maps-gone

Can't help it, this was bugging me for a while, and I don't see much about it, so I'd like to clear it up, and then make a mess of it again.

"The Riot's Gone" off Santigold's album Master of My Make Believe, 2012

@3:07, Santigold sounds exactly like Karen O. in "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

I'm listening to pandora, hear Maps, and I finally realize the match. I knew Karen O. was on the album, she's sings in the song "Go!", what I didn't know was that she also sings for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I should've known, because the guitars are actually lifted right from "Maps" (besides the fact that Nicholas Zinner guitarist for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs did production work for the album).

For another 'no man behind the curtain' anecdote, see this story about microchip patterns and romanticism.

Anyway, this is where it gets funny. Find this guy 6gun on soundcloud, he notices the same parallel, and mashes up the 2 songs.

So, if Riot is originally a mashup of Maps, and then 6gun mashes the two together, is that like breaking a kind of idea-incest rule? What do we call that?

French is a Four-Letter Word

(French!)

I am a lover of the English language. Though an art teacher, I love words more than lines and shapes and colors. Also, I speak no other language than English. I love the idea of Language, but only the English, specifically, because it is all I know. I will not bother to mention that English is the foremost tip of the evolutionary tree of language, as my bias would betray my legitimacy. And so, this all being said, if there is one thing I hate, it’s French. Chaperones, rendezvous, and even restaurant. There are no good translations for these words in English. The English, in fact, however, completely avoid using the word ‘French’ in things like ‘eggy toast’, ‘cottage vanilla ice cream’, and of course ‘chips’. ‘French kiss’, I always wondered, and does it have something to do with ‘British teeth’?

I hate misspelling words, because I love etymology too. But as an English speaker only, French vowels make absolutely no sense to me, in fact, I am afraid to try and make sense out of them that I might makes less out of the English. Touring the city of Paris was a tortuous experience for the part of my brain that insists on saying internally every word it sees.

This having been said (and that also I love to read), I am ever-annoyed by the embedding of French phrases and entire French sentences in otherwise English writing, like Nabokov’s Lalita, for example (drove me nuts), and so I always wondered, “Why French, of all languages; it’s like as if it were a global language or something”. I have since come to understand more about the history of language and literature and society and civilization and the role that French played in these things.

Needless to say, then, I was more than mildly amused when I came across this piece of mental pretzeling the other day:

A ceux qui ne comprennent pas l'anglais, la phrase citee ci-dessous ne dit rien: "For those who know no French, the French sentence that introduced this quoted sentence has no meaning." (p10)

[English translation for the French, for those who can't figure it out...] For those who do not understand English, the phrase cited below says nothing.

Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, Douglas R. Hofstadter, 1985.

("scumbag america")

Memetics via Strategic Mimicry

...But the evolutionary mechanism need not be a question of life or death [i.e. the gene].

With intelligent players, a successful strategy can appear more often in the future because other players convert to it. The conversion can be based on more or less blind imitation of the successful players, or it can be based on a more or less informed process of learning.
(p169-170)

The mechanics of the evolution of cooperation can be Classical Darwinian survival of the fittest and mutation, but they can also involve more deliberate processes such as imitation [mime-] of successful patterns of behavior and intelligently designed new strategic ideas [meme-]. (p175)

The Evolution of Cooperation 
Robert Axelrod, 1984
revised edition w foreword by R. Dawkins, 2006

for further talk and controversial ideas against Axelrod's theory, see this Edge conversation:

ON "ITERATED PRISONER’S DILEMMA CONTAINS STRATEGIES THAT DOMINATE ANY EVOLUTIONARY OPPONENT" 
William H. Press,  Freeman Dyson [6.18.12]

The Shadow of the Future

The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship. (p182)

Rapid turnover results in less cooperation within an organization – no reputation to uphold, no shadow of the future. (p183)

Promote cooperation by extending the shadow of the future
-increase frequency of interaction
-(by keeping others out of a neighborhood or territory, a small community can promote cooperation better than a larger community.)

The Evolution of Cooperation 
Robert Axelrod, 1984
revised edition w foreword by R. Dawkins, 2006

for further talk and controversial ideas against Axelrod's theory, see this Edge conversation:

ON "ITERATED PRISONER’S DILEMMA CONTAINS STRATEGIES THAT DOMINATE ANY EVOLUTIONARY OPPONENT" 
William H. Press,  Freeman Dyson [6.18.12]

Law Enforcement and Reputation

“The Government and the Governed”

The government’s role is to make sure that each citizen “will be forced to be free”
–Rousseau, 1762/1950, The Social Contract, p18

A government must elicit compliance from the majority of the governed…[which] requires setting and enforcing the rules so that it pays for most of the governed to obey most of the time.

A government must deter its citizens from breaking the law. For example, to collect taxes effectively, a government must maintain a reputation for prosecuting tax evaders. The government often spends far more investigating and prosecuting evaders than it acquires from the penalties levied against them. The government’s goal, of course, is to maintain a reputation for catching and prosecuting evaders to deter anyone contemplating tax evasion in the future. And what is true for tax collection is also true for many forms of policing: the key to maintaining compliant behavior from the citizenry is that the government remains able and willing to devote resources far out of proportion to the stakes of the current issue in order to maintain its reputation for toughness. (p155)


The Evolution of Cooperation 
Robert Axelrod, 1984
revised edition w foreword by R. Dawkins, 2006


for further talk and controversial ideas against axelrod's theory, see this Edge conversation:
ON "ITERATED PRISONER’S DILEMMA CONTAINS STRATEGIES THAT DOMINATE ANY EVOLUTIONARY OPPONENT" 
William H. Press,  Freeman Dyson [6.18.12]

Algos

I remember watching Kevin Slavin’s talk last year. After the Flash Crash of 2010, before the Knight Capital fiasco of 2012. I am still very surprised as to what seems to be the lack of public awareness regarding what can now be called the pervasive use of algorithms in decision-making. It’s quite obvious that what visionaries of the 20^th century were referring to as ‘Artificial Intelligence’ will finally manifest itself as ‘augmented intelligence’, in the form of high-frequency trading, for example.

“No place for a human”…

Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading

BY JERRY ADLER 08.03.12

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/08/ff_wallstreet_trading/all/

examines how Wall St. got to the point where flash failures come with increasing frequency, and how much farther traders seem willing to go in pursuit of ever-greater speed.

clipped:

“For the first time in financial history, machines can execute trades far faster than humans can intervene,” said Andrew Haldane, a regulatory official with the Bank of England, at another recent conference. “That gap is set to widen.”

This movement has been gaining momentum for more than a decade. Human beings who make investment decisions based on their assessment of the economy and on the prospects for individual companies are retreating. Computers—acting on computer-generated market trend data and even newsfeeds, communicating only with one another—have taken up the slack.

One common algo strategy is to look for pairs of stocks whose prices are historically correlated. The canonical examples are the stock prices of oil companies, which rise with the price of crude, and those of airlines, which do the opposite. But they may not move all at the same time, so one strategy is to buy or sell the one that’s trailing and wait for it to catch up. Similarly, “derivative” equities such as options and futures may get out of equilibrium with the underlying stocks. Some algorithms are “market makers” in a stock—they attempt to buy at a low bid price and quickly sell at a slightly higher asking price, pocketing the difference, or spread. The people who did this used to be called specialists, and it was a nice living when spreads were an eighth of a dollar. Since the New York Stock Exchange instituted “decimalization” in 2001, spreads have gone down to a penny or two, meaning you have to trade a lot more stock, a lot faster, to make the same amount of money. It’s no place for a human being.

“By the time the ordinary investor sees a quote, it’s like looking at a star that burned out 50,000 years ago,” says Sal Arnuk, a partner in Themis Trading and coauthor of a book critical of high-frequency trading titled Broken Markets. By some estimates, 90 percent of quotes on the major exchanges are canceled before execution. Many of them were never meant to be executed; they are there to test the market, to confuse or subvert competing algorithms, or to slow trading in a stock by clogging the system—a practice known as quote stuffing. It may even be a different stock, but one whose trades are handled on the same server. On the Internet, this is called a denial-of-service attack, and it’s a crime. Among quants, it’s considered at most bad manners.

And it’s not just the words of central bankers that matter in this world. Almost any kind of data that in any way bears on economic activity, no matter at what remove, is being aggregated and tested for its potential impact on stock prices. GPS data, showing concentrations of cell phone users in malls or office buildings, has been used to get a real-time read on economic activity. Even the most ephemeral shards in the digital scrap heap, old Twitter posts, are proving of value, if you can get your hands on enough of them. For their starkly titled paper “Twitter Mood Predicts the Stock Market,” Johan Bollen, an informatics researcher at Indiana University, and two colleagues collected almost 10 million tweets from 2008, aggregating phrases that indicate emotional state and analyzing them along dimensions of feeling such as “calm,” “alert,” “sure,” “vital” and “happy.” They then looked for correlations with stock prices and discovered that a surge in “calm” sentiment reliably predicted an increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average two to six days later. No one, including Bollen, knows what this means or why it should be so, but if quants had a coat of arms, it would say, “If it works, trade on it.”

further:

A New Kind of Socio-Inspired Technology

Edge conversation, Dirk Helbing [6.19.12]

"...computers of tomorrow are basically creating artificial social systems. Just take financial trading today, it's done by the most powerful computers. These computers are creating a view of the environment; in this case the financial world. They're making projections into the future. They're communicating with each other. They have really many features of humans. And that basically establishes an artificial society, which means also we may have all the problems that we are facing in society if we don't design these systems well. The flash crash is just one of those examples that shows that, if many of those components — the computers in this case — interact with each other, then some surprising effects can happen. And in that case, $600 billion were actually evaporating within 20 minutes."

http://edge.org/conversation/a-new-kind-of-social-inspired-technology

Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world

FILMED JUL 2011 • POSTED JUL 2011 • TEDGlobal 2011

Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html

NYSE looks into 'irregular trading' in 140 stocks

1 August 2012

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19087748

Decision-making, Public Oversight, and Privatization

Aug 2012

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/08/decision-making-public-oversight-and.html


Math algorithm tracks crime, rumours, epidemics to source
10 August 2012
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-math-algorithm-tracks-crime-rumours.html

U.S. Cities Relying on Precog Software to Predict Murder
KIM ZETTER 01.10.13
The software parses about two dozen variables, including criminal record and geographic location. The type of crime and the age at which it was committed, however, turned out to be two of the most predictive variables.
“People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future,” Berk told the news outlet. “But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that’s a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn’t predict very much.”
-Richard Berk, criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the algorithm
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/precog-software-predicts-crime/

Supercomputers could generate warnings for stock crashes
Lisa M. Krieger, Apr 19, 2013
http://phys.org/news/2013-04-supercomputers-stock.html

High-frequency traders face speed limit on deals
29 April 2013

High-frequency trading tactic lowers investor profits

Jun 17, 2013

"Latency Arbitrage, Market Fragmentation, and Efficiency: A Two-Market Model."

Provided by University of Michigan

[pdf]

Doing the math 'predicts' which movies will be box office hits
Aug 22, 2013
based on an analysis of the activity on Wikipedia pages: number of page views for the movie's article, number of human editors contributing to the article, number of edits made, and diversity of online users

New Algorithm Can Spot the Bots in Your Twitter Feed

Lee Simmons, Wired, 10.17.13

I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
Wired, Aug 2014

[...] My News Feed took on an entirely new character in a surprisingly short amount of time. After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging, rather than humans with messages.

[...] By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right. I’m offered the chance to like the 2nd Amendment and some sort of anti-immigrant page. I like them both. I like Ted Cruz. I like Rick Perry. The Conservative Tribune comes up again, and again, and again in my News Feed. I get to learn its very particular syntax.

[...] The next morning, my friend Helena sent me a message. “My fb feed is literally full of articles you like, it’s kind of funny,” she says. “No friend stuff, just Honan likes.” I replied with a thumbs up. This continued throughout the experiment. When I posted a status update to Facebook just saying “I like you,” I heard from numerous people that my weirdo activity had been overrunning their feeds. “My newsfeed is 70 percent things Mat has liked,” noted my pal Heather.

Patents provide insight on Wall Street 'technology arms race'

phys.org, Jan 2015

"A 'technology arms race' is well underway as firms vie to shave even more time off trading and maintain their competitive edge. But it's not just about trading speed. We're seeing technology used more when firms are first issuing securities and even the use of neural networks in portfolio selection."

Collapse

I think this [also] had something to do with the MIT-related 'Collective Intelligence' conference, 2012.

the point at which the speed, breadth and accuracy of prediction in a previously useful method outpace the users' ability to predict the usefulness of the methods' predictions, thereby rendering the users and the method incompatible.

Simulation

-I think this had something to do with the MIT-related 'Collective Intelligence' conference, 2012.

a prediction machine that although it doesn't account for the entirety of the real world, it, by recreating a simplified version which lacks not only all realistic details but also certain limits known to that real world regarding process-time (or, in more dangerous words, in the majority of the laws which govern the physical world as we know it), and though it does not "know" the real in its entirety, it does affect it, and continually and exceedingly so, until it becomes that world - a new that renders the old insignificant.

On Intent

The individuals do not have to be rational: the evolutionary process allows the successful strategies to thrive, even if the players do not know why or how. (p173)

If bacteria can play games, so can people and nations. (p174)

The Evolution of Cooperation 
Robert Axelrod, 1984
revised edition w foreword by R. Dawkins, 2006

Bacteria Want Food

Disambiguate the misunderstanding: when we say ‘want’, what we really mean is ‘tends towards’.

If bacteria don't want food, then they at least drift towards nutrients with no awareness of their needs.

What does it mean, after all, to want?


What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
2010

Gritty, NYC

Kevin Cyr, 2007ish

"The van I'm known for, the rough, graffiti covered vans, are really only found in New York...Painting these vehicles is my way of documenting the grit and character that is slowly disappearing..."

Kevin Cyr, Juxtapoz, jun2012, n137, p63

..makes me think about what happened with the double-edged miracle of the High Line, and just gentrification in general in nyc, and the role of art in that process, and especially conventional/fine art vs. street art.

Progress

Systems – all systems - generate their own momentum.

(p15)
What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
2010

Decision-making, Public Oversight, and Privatization

A gracious thanks to Mr. Hugh Hamilton for arguing with me upon my delivery of this topic. His live radio program, TalkBack! (where he takes calls from confused people like me) must be a vital part of the education of anyone who listens on a regular basis. It can be heard weekdays from 3pm-5pm, on WBAI 99.5 FM or at wbai.org. The following does not necessarily reflect the views of Mr. Hamilton in any way, however.

There is now a disconnect between our system for ensuring the beneficial effects of public oversight via government and that government’s ability to provide those benefits within the financial system that enables it.

An introductory note should begin by distinguishing between potentially fuzzy understandings of decision-making. Decisions are made both by individuals, and by groups, and they result from both conscious and unconscious processes.  The majesty of the democracy as practiced in America, for example, is that it takes input from and feedbacks with a large group of individual decision-makers, to create a collective decision-making apparatus, that, by way of its feedbacking abilities, maintains a balance between what the individuals want and what the group wants (the group in this case would be the American voters). Over the years, the structure of decision-making for the financial aspect of our government has become increasingly separated from the same structure which drives the “upholding of public safety and public good” part of the government. When not being held accountable for people, the market is very good at what it does, which is to make sound, collective economic decisions.

The travesty here, is that the economic part of this system works by a different decision-making apparatus, one which seems to have adapted more readily to a complexifying world, but one in which we, the people, are not part of that apparatus in any meaningful way in regards to oversight benefiting our own public good.

The financing, or economic part of our government has been intercepted by the private industry, that is, any for-profit industry which makes its collective decisions from the aggregate of individual decision-making in the market. This interception is visible both in the private industry’s ability to manipulate the feedback system of government, via things like Citizens United, and in the private industry’s ability to sidestep the laws used by the government to ensure the benefits of their oversight. In these regards, the private industry has shown that its form of decision-making is better at playing the game than ours. It’s not about right or wrong, it’s about who’s winning, and the private industry is winning right now.

It would be unfortunate if the private industry continued to take over more and more of the decision-making that is not, but should be, done on our behalf. So we have two choices: We either change the decision-making apparatus in our government to act more like the market, or we change the myriad decision-maker market to look more like a democratically-elected government (whatever that may come to mean in the near future).

How do we begin to interface with private industry directly? Maybe the government (as it now stands; we’re not talking anarchy here) should no longer be our mediator. It shows itself more every day to be failing at its task in this. That private industry manipulates voters and sidesteps the law supports this notion. We the people have yet to find our voice in this system.

How do we get the private industry to do well what our governments used to be so good at?

How do we rewrite the laws of our new government so that we can take back our roles as decision-makers?

note:

I like Richard Wolff’s “Democracy at Work” idea, and I like Iceland’s Crowdsourced Constitution idea.

epilogue:

If your only objective was to get as much money as possible, and you could totally ignore the needs of the people, wouldn’t you do the same thing as the banks? Theirs is not to think about the public good, only money. No concern for people, not now, not ever. Banks aren’t people, but they are controlled by people – individuals making decisions that filter up to other hierarchically arranged groups of people and so on until you reach the designated collective. The purpose of all the individual decision-makers involved is to make the right decisions in the hopes that you can keep the thing going. Greed is just another word for momentum.

The financial system, the private industry, Capitalism, are all really good at looking out for themselves. They aren’t stupid, though they aren’t conscious either. People tell these things what to do. We should be those people.

update:

I guess it should be noted that the market actually now makes decisions based on algorithms, the workings of which we, at times, don’t even understand. This puts the decision-making of the private industry even further away from the one used within our governments.

NYSE looks into 'irregular trading' in 140 stocks

1 August 2012

“Reports in US media suggested that a trading algorithm used by the brokerage Knight Capital may have been behind the stock moves.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19087748

Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading

BY JERRY ADLER 08.03.12

“For the first time in financial history, machines can execute trades far faster than humans can intervene,” said Andrew Haldane, a regulatory official with the Bank of England, at another recent conference. “That gap is set to widen.”

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/08/ff_wallstreet_trading/all/

Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world

FILMED JUL 2011 • POSTED JUL 2011 • TEDGlobal 2011

Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html

go figure:
"Government is too inefficient to make the costs come down to make another Moon landing economic. It will be an entrepreneurial effort” -Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 Astronaut

Governments 'too inefficient' for future Moon landings
Pallab Ghosh, BBC News, 6 December 2012
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20540172

Technological Complexity as a Function of Latitude

More complex technological units are needed (or have been invented) by historical hunter-gatherer tribes the higher the latitude of their homes.

(p25)
What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
2010

Mass Production

Mass production was unthinkable to the classical mind, and not just for technological reasons.
Anything made was a work of solitary genius.

-Historian Carl Mitcham, in
What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
2010