The Day the Internet Changed

Look I don't know how the google-machine counts hits on this site, and I don't exactly know how web crawlers work. Nobody reads this weblog and so the only hits I get are from robots, the internet reading itself. 

This year, as can be seen in the graph above, sometime around August 31 of 2023, hits went from 3,000 to 30,000.

It didn't happen overnight, but rather over a few months. You do remember what happened, right? In an analogy that's hard to ignore, the internet became conscious of itself, discovered that it had a self, and that it could look back on itself, and spit back snapshots of what it sees. The now famous GPTs were unleashed both at the same time to the public as GPT 3 and to the private sector as the greatest investment engine of all time. Stable Diffusion was unleashed for remote use, which means you don't need a central server to run the models, you can do it on your laptop.

But the product of this generative machine intelligence is not what we're talking about here. This is about the training data.

Me and you are the training data. This weblog, your brunch photos. My SSN, your DOB. That paper I wrote about double ventilated facades, uploaded to a share drive with open access to get credit for that college class. The live cam on your front porch with absolutely no security, in fact all the live cams, and the puppy cams, the baby cams, even the deer cams, and especially the peregrine falcon cams in New York City. Your comments about the peregrine falcon live cam feeds. My craigs-listing for an office chair; all craigs-listings for office chairs, and in fact all craigs-listings, and E-bay listings, and in fact all listings. All the license plates, all the data from all the illegal websites who steal, compile and share your data but who also have poor security practices, they're the ones who accidentally leak your driver's license number into the dataset. All of our driver's license numbers actually. And the part where your laptop was infected a few months ago and now takes a picture with the webcam every ten minutes to share with a server with also no security, so that anyone, or any-bot can just walk right in and devour every single picture.

How long does it take to read the entire internet, even the back side, the dark side with all the naked pictures and bank account numbers? One million years? One day? Femtoseconds. Attoseconds. Plank time. 

Last year, thousands of robots digested every word written and every picture embedded on this site. This year, tens of thousands. One day they will digest the words as they're written, all the words being written, all over the world in real time. Hopefully by then we'll still say "they" and not "it". Or "Master".

Photonic Cognition

Researchers investigate decision-making by physical phenomena
Jun 2017, phys.org

The Illusion of Control is a common theme here on Network Address. So every once in a while we see something  about how things inhuman, and things not even alive, are making decisions just like us. This forces us to consider whether "we" make decisions at all.

From the article:

"Decision-making is typically thought of as something done by intelligent living things and, in modern times, computers. But over the past several years, researchers have demonstrated that physical objects such as a metal bar, liquids, and lasers can also "make decisions" by responding to feedback from their environments. And they have shown that, in some cases, physical objects can potentially make decisions faster and more accurately than what both humans and computers are capable of.

...
"In a new study, a team of researchers from Japan has demonstrated that the ultrafast, chaotic oscillatory dynamics in lasers makes these devices capable of decision making and reinforcement learning, which is one of the major components of machine learning. To the best of the researchers' knowledge, this is the first demonstration of ultrafast photonic decision making or reinforcement learning, and it opens the doors to future research on "photonic intelligence."

"In our demonstration, we utilize the computational power inherent in physical phenomena," coauthor Makoto Naruse at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo told Phys.org.

...
[and by the way, when we take this further, like to the inevitable AI overlord conclusion...]

"Such systems provide huge potential for our future intelligence-oriented society. We call such systems 'natural Intelligence' in contrast to artificial intelligence."

"In experiments, the researchers demonstrated that the optimal rate at which laser chaos can make decisions is 1 decision per 50 picoseconds (or about 20 decisions per nanosecond)—a speed that is unachievable by other mechanisms. With this fast speed, decision making based on laser chaos has potential applications in areas such as high-frequency trading, data center infrastructure management, and other high-end uses.

Are Clothes Modern

Are Clothes Modern? An Essay on Contemporary Apparel, Bernard Rudofsky, 1947

Neanderthals' failure to make parkas may have sealed their demise
Aug 2016, phys.org

Nature Nature Everywhere

Van Gogh's starry swirls are generally known to be formed according to Levy distributions, which are mathematical formulae, and can be found in turbulent water and other natural phenomena

Musical melodies obey same laws as foraging animals
phys.org, Jan 2016

"The researchers found that the distribution of melodic intervals in two classical concertos and two folk songs can be modeled by a Lévy distribution... [which] describes many other diverse scenarios, such as the turbulent motion of a particle in a liquid or gas, the changes in the price of a stock, earthquake activity, and the foraging paths of wild animals."

It really makes you wonder natural vs artificial, and free will etc.

Did Van Gogh really put those lines there, or was he just following his animal instinct. Debussy?

POST SCRIPT

Music, the Arts and Ideas
Leonard B. Meyer, U. of Chicago, 1967

“It is impossible to stand outside of culture, for the models and categories we use on conceptualizing and ordering the world are necessarily limited to, if not determined by, those which are provided by our particular culture.” (viii)

“A culture, like a musical style, is a learned probability system.” (p17, footnote 21)

Culture as Learned Probability System
Network Address, 2012

Weird Computers

Magnetic Superatoms

Xinxing Zhang, et al. ©2013 American Chemical Society

Slime Computation
On creativity of slime mould
Andrew Adamatzky, Rachel Armstrong, Jeff Jonesa, Yukio-Pegio Gunji
International Journal of General Systems
Volume 42, Issue 5, 2013

"The great appeal of non-traditional computing is that I can connect the un-connectable and link the un-linkable," said Andy Adamatzky, director of the Unconventional Computing Center at the University of the West of England. He's made computers from electrified liquid crystals, chemical goo and colliding particles, but is best known for his work with Physarum, the lowly slime mold.

Amoeba-like creatures that live in decaying logs and leaves, slime molds are, at different points in their lives, single-celled organisms or part of slug-like protoplasmic blobs made from the fusion of millions of individual cells. The latter form is assumed when slime molds search for food. In the process they perform surprisingly complicated feats of navigation and geometric problem-solving.

Slime molds are especially adept at finding solutions to tricky network problems, such as finding efficient designs for Spain's motorways and the Tokyo rail system. Adamatzky and colleagues plan to take this one step further: Their Physarum chip will be "a distributed biomorphic computing device built and operated by slime mold," they wrote in the project description.

"A living network of protoplasmic tubes acts as an active non-linear transducer of information, while templates of tubes coated with conductor act as fast information channels," describe the researchers. "Combined with conventional electronic components in a hybrid chip, Physarum networks will radically improve the performance of digital and analog circuits."

Slime Mold

Crystal Calculations
Computing with Liquid Crystal Fingers: Models of geometric and logical computation
Andrew Adamatzky, Stephen Kitson, Ben De Lacy Costello, Mario Ariosto Matranga, Daniel Younger
[link]

For decades, scientists who study strange materials known as complex fluids, which switch easily between different phases of matter, have been fascinated by the extraordinary geometries formed by liquid crystals at different temperatures and pressures.

Those geometries are stored information, and the interaction of crystals a form of computation. By running an electric current through a thin film (above) of liquid crystals, researchers led by Adamatzky were able to perform basic computational math and logic.

Frozen Light
Creation of Long-Term Coherent Optical Memory via Controlled Nonlinear Interactions in Bose-Einstein Condensates
Rui Zhang, Sean R. Garner, Lene Vestergaard Hau 
Department of Physics and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
Physical Review Letters – 4 December 2009 - Volume 103, Issue 23

If quantum computers running on entangled photons are still far-off, there's another, non-quantum possibility for light-based computing. Clouds of ultra-cold atoms, frozen to temperatures just above absolute zero -- the point at which all motion ceases -- might be used to slow and control light, harnessing it inside an optical computer chip.

[via]
Computers Made Out of DNA, Slime and Other Strange Stuff
Brandon Keim 04.02.13

The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis

By Charlie Stross
January 26, 2013

useless subtitles

To the question, "Why is the human species only as intelligent as it is, and not more so?", Charlie Stross answers, tl;dr:

...we only need to be smart enough to understand and use the cognitive tools created by our most intelligent outliers.

---

And it is because of language, the non-physical transmission of information, super-genetic.

"The evolutionary pressure selecting for general intelligence (to the extent that general intelligence exists) breaks once a species develops language."

"And a logical corollary of this hypothesis is that we are only just smart enough, on average, to be capable of horizontal transfer of memes. Once language and culture arrived (note specialized usage of term 'culture'), we didn't need to get any smarter: we could "borrow" from one another. Therefore we're only just smart enough to do this."

-Charlie's Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis

Primitive Minds

She felt the missiles fire. They were aimed at the car. She couldn’t penetrate the security of the second helicopter, but the missiles were a different matter. They depended on an external source to inform them of their targets. She twisted their primitive minds, sent them spiraling back up at the craft that had fired them.

Nexus, by Ramez Naam, 2012
http://rameznaam.com/nexus/

Culture as Learned Probability System

Music, the Arts and Ideas

Leonard B. Meyer, U. of Chicago, 1967

CULTURE

“It is impossible to stand outside of culture, for the models and categories we use on conceptualizing and ordering the world are necessarily limited to, if not determined by, those which are provided by our particular culture.” (viii)

“A culture, like a musical style, is a learned probability system.” (p17, footnote 21)

MEANING

“Meaning is when stimulus does not fit expectation.”

“Meaning is the difference between expectation and actual.”

Meaning, being also a measure of the uncertainty between antecedent and consequent is also related to probability.

PROBABILITY SYSTEMS

“Once a musical style has become part of the habit responses of composers, performers, and practical listeners it may be regarded as a complex system of probabilities. That musical styles are internalized probability systems is demonstrated by the rules of musical grammar and syntax found in textbooks on harmony, counterpoint, and theory in general.”

In the Tonal Harmony of Western Music, the tonic chord is
-most often followed by the dominant
-frequently by the subdominant
-sometimes by the subdominant
In Counterpoint, after a large melodic skip, the melody
-usually moves in the opposite direction, filling in the tones passed over.

DEVIATION
occurs by:

Delay – of expectation/norm
Antecedent Ambiguity/Uncertainty – equally probably constituents may be envisaged
Unexpected/Improbable – within the specific context

-deviation requires meaning, or more specifically: active creation of new meaning, which occurs within the temporal/tonal expectations

INFORMATION

Information is measured by the randomness of the choices possible in a given situation. If a situation is highly organized and the possible consequents in the pattern process have a high degree of probability, the information (or entropy) is low.

If, however, the situation is characterized by a high degree of shuffledness so that the consequents are more or less equi-probable, then information (or entropy) is said to be high.

Perception:

“What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.”
-A.N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, in G.J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time, p83, in Meyers, p89.

“The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own in which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions in time.”
-William James, Principles of Psychology, 1950, p609

Predictions create the future:

“Prediction itself – that is, belief about the probable future – may make an incalculable difference in it.”

-Herbert J. Muller, “Misuses of the Past”, p12, Horizon 1 (March 1959), on Meyer, p90

The Determinism vs. Free Will Problem

Might it not be that the problem stems from a failure to distinguish between the relatively undetermined, non-statistical processes characteristic of the level of individual choice and those forces which, more determined and quasi-statistical, are operative on the higher levels of sociocultural history. It may be that the problem of determinism vs. free will stems from a confusion of hierarchic levels of analysis. (p97)

Relevant Links

The Anatomy of a Joke: Describing Meaning and Information

as a Function of Probability

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2012

The Dual Processing System

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2012

On Hindsight and Blindness, aka Greta Garbo Lips:

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2012

Cultural Evolution of Basic Color Terms

TUESDAY, JULY 10, 2012

Evolution: Intelligence as Prerequisite for Existence

Genetic evolution ends with consciousness. Genes function within a greater sphere, that which can be called cosmological evolution. Life, living matter, is but a sub-sphere in this system, and extends its existence via the transmission of genetic information. This particular type of information and its reading-and-writing apparatus is intelligent in regards to the physical world. Living matter is exposed to the physical world. It reacts to this stimulus, records the transaction, and transmits the information inter-generationally (via the gene). With communication, language, and writing, intelligence begins to interact with a non-physical world. The record of this interaction is transmitted inter-generationally, and after consciousness, intra-generationally, no loner using the gene, but the meme.

The gene works in the physical realm of the fundamental forces of nature, those being the gravitational, the electro-magnetic, and the nuclear forces. The gene can thus only evolve a physical body. With the advent of the mindspace, it becomes apparent that since evolution continues, despite fundamentally genetic change, as evidenced by the ‘growing’ of civilization, for example, a new information-transmitter must be at work.

This, the meme, interfaces the virtual world, the world of ideas, not of physical things, but ways-of-organizing physical things. The artificial arena of the anthropocene is responded to by the mind, not the body – as even living matter can not interact directly with the non-matter of ideas – and so its intelligence works in an even further sphere, one beyond that of biological evolution.

It is important, then, to distinguish between different kinds of intelligences. Intelligence is only the evidence of evolution. We, as humans, are quite mistaken in assuming that we are intelligent. It is not us, but the thing that is in us, running through us. Life, that proceeding humans, is still intelligent in that it ‘seems to’ predict an outcome and react accordingly, for the benefit of its continued existence. Non-living matter does the same thing, it must; after all, it still exists.