Babybots

'Grow and prune' AI mimics brain development, slashes energy use
Dec 2019, phys.org

Coming soon -- autobiographical biobots designed to learn from birth. And after that, finally, a robot nose.

Seeing Around Corners

I try to think of what things will be like in the future. And so I try to come up with the most impossible thing, and then explain it backwards. In the future, we will be able to see in old photographs other things not in the frame of the picture. All the information in the whole room will be available in the photons recorded in the picture plane. How? I don't know, photon interference and artificial intelligence, that's how.

And then I get headlines like this:
Deep learning enables real-time imaging around corners
Jan 2020, phys.org

Never far enough; it's already here.

This doesn't see invisible objects in old pictures, but it does shoot lasers in real-time and then read the interference patterns of those lasers on themselves as they bounce off of other objects not "visible."

image source: Hyperspace Bypass Construction Zone

Notes:
Deep-Inverse Correlography: Towards Real-Time High-Resolution Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging.
Chris Metzler et al. Optica (2019). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.374026

Style Transfer In Reverse

How AI helps unlock the secrets of Old Master and modernist paintings
Jan 2020, Ars Technica

Agog, askance, agog; I am still unable to look at a series of style-transfered images without unfettered vacillation. How is this real? This can't be real. But it's not that hard; if you just look at the way the...no. This can't be real.

I went to college for art history, so I spent 4 years looking for meaning in visual patterns. Never did I think computers would be able to do this. It's one of those things that will be human all the way til the end. Wrong. Machine learning, of the Deep kind, using neural networks, is not like your grandmother's computer. The wet parts, the sloppy parts, the imperfect, uncountable, and very human parts are now under the cold hard gaze of Technology's highest achievement, artificial intelligence.

A properly trained program can take a picture of Sesame Street's Big Bird, run it through a hundred Francis Bacon paintings, and return an avian nightmare phantasm. It can even abstract a tree in the style of peri-abstraction-Mondrian!

And as one would expect, it can also look at a hundred paintings and tell you if they're really from the same artist. One step further and it can actually fill-in missing pieces of damaged work.

So it sounds like computers can now make the art themselves. Finally, now the humans can move on to more important tasks.

Notes:
Raiders of the Lost Art.
Anthony Bourached, George Cann. arXiv, 10 Sep 2019. https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05677

Semi Automatic Artifact Generator
Oct 2018, Network Address

Initial musings on genenrative adversarial art etc.

Polysemiosis

Parking this here, from the year 2032:
Polysemiosis is a disease that hobbles artificial intelligence entities, or intelligentities, by infecting their lexicon with a polybot that makes every word have multiple meanings so the logic system can no longer make sense of itself or the world around it.

From Memetics to Metabolomics

Obesity, heart disease, and diabetes may be communicable
Jan 2020, phys.org

I learned in health school that we are living in the fourth epoch of public health, the one where chronic disease (4th) is more of a problem than infectious disease (3rd). Public health interventions are not about killing germs, but about improving your lifestyle (in addition to arming yourself with knowledge of adverse genetic predispositions and environmental exposures).

So when that idea came out that obesity is a meme that infects via your friend-vector-network, it already made sense. Mind viruses, it's the 21st century.

This sums up the mechanics:
“You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,” Dr. Christakis said..
-New York Times

But now we're swinging back in the other direction, back to the days of infectious immunological threats. Threats that come from the microbiomes of our friends and neighbors and countryfolk.

This rewrites and reverses the current underpinning theory of public health, which is that your behavior is a major cause of your own health outcomes (even if that behavior is resulting from memetic infection). This new idea is that you're being infected all right, but by the same old bacteria, fungi, viruses that caused the previous "Infectious Era" of public health.

The consistent part of all this is the social network, or network science in general, and that our hands aren't on the wheel.

Notes:
Are noncommunicable diseases communicable?
B. B Finlay et al. Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz3834

The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years.
Christakis NA, Fowler JH. N Engl J Med. 2007 Jul 26;357(4):370-9. Epub 2007 Jul 25.

This is the study about obesity being contagious; it was a social network analysis based on the Framingham Heart study, which is known as a good dataset in health science.

Data Free Lifestyle

Grindr and Twitter face 'out of control' complaint
Jan 2020, BBC News

As an American, I like to read from the BBC, because it's good for perspective.

Some of the big dogs in Personal Data (aka social media networking platforms) are being accused of an "insane violation" of massive commercial surveillance and unlawfully sharing user data.

The complaint says that every time you use one of these applications on your mobile device, the advertisement company -- not the social site you're using like Ashley Madison (jk) but the advertiser behind them -- they get your GPS location, as well as a dozen other device identifiers (such as the fact that you're cheating on your wife).

In Europe, there is a thing that protects web users from "leaking" their personal data every time they access the internet. It's called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and it says that any website that holds in a database user information -- any user information, like usernames and passwords -- they have to disclose that to the user. Even if they're going to use cookies on their site (to track you), they have to disclose that, and they have to be clear about how they're getting your information and what they will do with, like who else they'll give it to (and how much they charge for it jk).

This complaint, however, says that the advertising companies use policies that are straight-incomprehensible. And then they say they are "out of control." Pretty intense accusations.

***
Again, as an American reading this, I am struck because well, these accusations point to behavior that is totally normal and acceptable in the United States. There is no GDPR here. Advertising companies make money and the websites make money, and we love money, shit. If they do it by exploiting the massive data-collecting and profile-building opportunity that is the internet, then they are entrepreneurs.

Europeans are outraged. Americans however, meh. When the news broke that the NSA was conducting a panoptical surveillance operation on the entire nation's population, and under the direction of and coordinated by the government, folks didn't seem to mind.

If the general commercial industry is doing it too, not a problem. And that's the perspective you get when reading a foreign country's news, you get to turn the camera back on yourself. The country that believes in freedom at all costs and in all ways, they've got nothing to hide, and so they don't worry about these things. 

***
How about the Internet of Things, where your house is like there is no more internet; I am the internet now. Here's a current example from a company that connects your doorbell to the internet. They're getting riffed for sending personal data about the user to third parties with names like Crashalytics, which sounds helpful, and also to "deep-linking platforms" which sounds a bit ominous.

What do they get?

• full name
• email addresses
• app settings
• time zone
• device model
• screen resolution
• IP address
• magnetometer
• gyroscope
• accelerometer
• "a number of unique identifiers"
• *Google-owned Crashalytics - an amount of customer data "yet to be determined" -link

Notes:
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
International non-profit digital-rights group based in the U.S.

Ring doorbell 'gives Facebook and Google user data'
Jan 2020, BBC News

Computing Without a Computer

This is a repeat, but worth it.

I'm reading Isaac Asimov's Opus 100, which details his course through a writing career that changed the world of science fiction forever. In the chapter on Mathematics, he recounts a story called "The Feeling of Power" where a character is trying to explain to a space age military how he can navigate their ships without computers, which are at the time susceptible to enemy interference:

"Nine times seven, thought Shuman with deep satisfaction, is sixty-three, and I don't need a computer to tell me so. The computer is in my head." 

"Computing without a computer, said the President, is a contradiction in terms."

Post Script
Also from Asimov's Opus 100, on the topic of Words:
"New Jersey"
The state of New Jersey is named after the birthplace of George Carteret, who was given the territory by Charles II of England. He was born on the island of Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands between England and France, and originally called "Caesar's Island" until barbarians garbled it into "Jersey".