Showing posts with label intelligentities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intelligentities. Show all posts

Saturday, June 20, 2026

Pedagogy Meet Robogogy and Data as Labor


Seen above, a humanoid ponders its existence, instead of studying for its algebra exam. 

New theory explores how workers interact with technology in the modern workplace
Sep 2025, phys.org

This is about a new theory of workplace communication; the traditional version is called Social Exchange Theory, and it says we engage with people who are rewarding, and avoid people who are costly. Your co-worker might know a lot about a certain subject, but they talk your ear off.

The new theory is called Socio-Technical Exchange, and it says we develop "machine heuristics" - "When they felt expertise was important, people often preferred a human coworker, finding coworkers more efficient and knowledgeable. However, with simple or embarrassing questions, a machine was deemed a superior collaborator."

via University of Kansas: Cameron Piercy et al, Socio-Technical Exchange with Machines: Worker Experiences with Complex Work Technologies, Human-Machine Communication (2025). DOI: 10.30658/hmc.10.3

Image credit: hahahaha


Robots learn how to move by watching themselves
Feb 2025, phys.org

"Kinematic Self-Awareness"

"We humans are intuitively aware of our body; we can imagine ourselves in the future and visualize the consequences of our actions well before we perform those actions in reality. Ultimately, we would like to imbue robots with a similar ability to imagine themselves, because once you can imagine yourself in the future, there is no limit to what you can do."

via Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science: Yuhang Hu et al, Teaching robots to build simulations of themselves, Nature Machine Intelligence (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s42256-025-01006-w


Teaching AI models the broad strokes to sketch more like humans do
Jun 2025, phys.org

Their method, called "SketchAgent," uses a multimodal language model—AI systems that train on text and images to develop a "sketching language" in which a sketch is translated into a numbered sequence of strokes on a grid. The system was given an example of how things like a house would be drawn, with each stroke labeled according to what it represented — such as the seventh stroke being a rectangle labeled as a "front door" — to help the model generalize to new concepts.

via MIT CSAIL Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Yael Vinker et al, SketchAgent: Language-Driven Sequential Sketch Generation, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2411.17673


Study argues online clicks and scrolls are 'thin labor' powering AI
Feb 2026, phys.org

Every time a user solves a reCAPTCHA or browses a social media feed, they provide the training data necessary for AI systems to function. Currently, tech giants extract this value without offering users any bargaining power or fair terms of engagement.

"We must decide if we are merely horses leaving digital manure behind or if we are the essential workers who build the intelligence of the future"

They advocate for the use of data unions, data strikes, and enhanced portability rights to give users a way to negotiate with massive platforms. By treating data as labor, the authors provide a framework for the public to exert collective power against the extractive practices of surveillance capitalism.

"Data strikes and data unions give the public a powerful tool to talk back to technology companies. When we act together to withhold or redirect our data, we transform from passive sources of information into a collective force that can reshape the digital economy to serve everyone, not just a few billionaires."

via Simon Fraser University and Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business: Tae Wan Kim et al, Are We Horses? Rethinking Data as Labor, Philosophy & Technology (2026). DOI: 10.1007/s13347-026-01033-4

Like for example:
Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data
Apr 2026, Reuters


Post Script of Martin Luther King Jr Quote About Greeley Meatpackers:
"As machines replace men, we must again question whether the depth of our social thinking matches the growth of technological creativity. We cannot create machines which revolutionize industry unless we simultaneously create ideas commensurate with social and economic reorganization, which harness the power of such machines for the benefit of man...the new age will not be an era of hope but of fear and emptiness unless we master this problem. Its solution will require forthright creative social planning from the shop level up to the highest levels of government."  
--Dr. King to the United Packinghouse Workers Union of America on May 21st 1962, and in response to Thousands of workers strike at one of the largest meatpacking plants in the US, Mar 16 2026, AP News [link] 

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Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Self-Aware Underware



Researchers create 'self-aware' algorithm to ward off hacking attempts
Oct 2021, phys.org

They found a way to hide signals in the unobservable "noise space" of the system:

Using the background noise within these systems' data streams, Abdel-Khalik and his students embed invisible, ever-changing, one-time-use signals that turn passive components into active watchers. 

"We call it covert cognizance," said Abdel-Khalik, an associate professor of nuclear engineering and researcher with Purdue's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS).

"Here, if someone sticks their finger in the data, the whole system will know that there was an intrusion, and it will be able to correct the modified data."

Sounds similar, although not exactly, to the inaudible sounds emitted by the commercials on your phone's music steaming service so that your smart tv can hear it and the two can figure out whether you're listening to their ads, because if the two devices are in the same room, there's a better chance you're with them.

Now that I think about it, maybe it's also like copyright traps, like when mapmakers put fake streets in their maps to catch the people copying their maps who also use the fake streets unknowingly, or when data harvesters put fake people on their marketing lists to catch marketers abusing their lists because they send advertisements to the fake people's addresses (who are usually real people who work for the data company).

Bottom line is -- we're talking about software being self-aware. Self-aware software. The future is now old man.

via Purdue University's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security:
Arvind Sundaram et al, Covert Cognizance: A Novel Predictive Modeling Paradigm, Nuclear Technology (2021). DOI: 10.1080/00295450.2020.1812349
Matthias Eckhart et al, Digital Twins for Cyber-Physical Systems Security: State of the Art and Outlook, Security and Quality in Cyber-Physical Systems Engineering (2019). DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-25312-7_14
Yeni Li et al, Data trustworthiness signatures for nuclear reactor dynamics simulation, Progress in Nuclear Energy (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.pnucene.2020.103612
Arvind Sundaram et al, Validation of Covert Cognizance Active Defenses, Nuclear Science and Engineering (2021). DOI: 10.1080/00295639.2021.1897731

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Tuesday, March 29, 2022

I Am the Robot Now


AKA Human Skin Is a Conductible Material
Image credit: Peepo, iStock, 2021

The amount of research being done in the field of wearables and ambient energy harvesting is staggering.


A novel approach to wirelessly power wearable devices
Jun 2021, phys.org

It's like a microscope for energy -- all of the sudden, the "waste energy" from our appliances and devices, in electromagnetic form, is powering tiny ubiquitous smart particles all around us.

Their technology enables a single device, such as a mobile phone placed in the pocket, to wirelessly power other wearable devices on a user's body, using the human body as a medium for power transmission.

A user just needs to place the transmitter on a single power source, such as the smart watch on a user's wrist, while multiple receivers can be placed anywhere on the person's body. The system then harnesses energy from the source to power multiple wearables on the user's body via a process termed as body-coupled power transmission. In this way, the user will only need to charge one device, and the rest of the gadgets that are worn can simultaneously be powered up from that single source. The team's experiments showed that their system allows a single power source that is fully charged to power up to 10 wearable devices on the body, for a duration of over 10 hours.
As a complementary source of power, the NUS team also looked into harvesting energy from the environment. Their research found that typical office and home environments have parasitic electromagnetic (EM) waves that people are exposed to all the time, for instance, from a running laptop. The team's novel receiver scavenges the EM waves from the ambient environment, and through a process referred to as body-coupled powering, the human body is able to harvest this energy to power the wearable devices, regardless of their locations around the body.

via National University of Singapore: Jiamin Li et al, Body-coupled power transmission and energy harvesting, Nature Electronics (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-021-00592-y


A new material made from carbon nanotubes can generate electricity by scavenging energy from its environment
Jun 2021, phys.org

Electrochemistry without wires. This is an organic solvent that generates a current via alcohol oxidation. The catch? The nanotubes are coated in "Teflon-like" material. Gonna have to fix that part (PFAS).

via Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Albert Tianxiang Liu et al, Solvent-induced electrochemistry at an electrically asymmetric carbon Janus particle, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23038-7


Using starch and baking soda to harvest mechanical energy
Jun 2021, phys.org

via Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology: Sugato Hajra et al, A Green Metal–Organic Framework‐Cyclodextrin MOF: A Novel Multifunctional Material Based Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Highly Efficient Mechanical Energy Harvesting, Advanced Functional Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202101829


Skin in the game: Transformative approach uses the human body to recharge smartwatches
Jul 2021, phys.org

via University of Massachusetts Amherst: Noor Mohammed et al, ShaZam, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (2021). DOI: 10.1145/3463505


Conductive seams, when strategically placed in clothing, can accurately track body motion
Jul 2021, phys.org

via University of Bath: Olivia Ruston et al, More than it Seams: Garment Stitching in Wearable e-Textiles, Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021 (2021). DOI: 10.1145/3461778.3462103


First-ever transient pacemaker harmlessly dissolves in body
Jul 2021, phys.org

via Northwestern University: Fully implantable and bioresorbable cardiac pacemakers without leads or batteries, Nature Biotechnology (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41587-021-00948-x


Sweat-proof 'smart skin' takes reliable vitals, even during workouts and spicy meals
Jul 2021, phys.org

Writes itself now:

The patch is patterned with artificial sweat ducts, similar to pores in human skin, that the researchers etched through the material's ultrathin layers. The pores perforate the patch in a kirigami-like pattern, similar to that of the Japanese paper-cutting art. The design ensures that sweat can escape through the patch, preventing skin irritation and damage to embedded sensors.

via Massachusetts Institute of Technology: H. Yeon el al., "Long-term reliable physical health monitoring by sweat pore–inspired perforated electronic skins," Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg8459


Microfiber-based metafabric provides daytime radiative cooling
Jul 2021, phys.org

Sooner than we think, we will be wearing today's equivalent of a space suit in order to go outside, on Earth:

The final design added titanium dioxide powder to polymer fibers to make them reflective, and adding polylactic acid to allow the material to emit mid-infrared radiation. The researchers created a fabric using a weaving technique that allowed air to circulate. The researchers tested their material by using it to create a vest. One side of the vest was made of cotton, the other with the material they had developed. A volunteer wore the vest outside in the sun for an hour. Measurements of his skin temperature showed it to be almost 5 degrees Celsius cooler on the new material side. The researchers also note that in addition to reducing heat, clothes made of their material would be biodegradable.

via: Shaoning Zeng et al, Hierarchical-morphology metafabric for scalable passive daytime radiative cooling, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abi5484


New chemistry enables using existing technology to print stretchable, bendable circuits on artificial skin
Jul 2021, phys.org

In a new study, the group describes how they have printed stretchable-yet-durable integrated circuits on rubbery, skin-like materials, using the same equipment designed to make solid silicon chips — an accomplishment that could ease the transition to commercialization by switching foundries that today make rigid circuits to producing stretchable ones.

via Stanford University: Yu-Qing Zheng et al, Monolithic optical microlithography of high-density elastic circuits, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abh3551

Nanoscopic Schematic by Ella Maru Studio

New nanotech will enable a 'healthy' electric current production inside the human body
Jul 2021, phys.org

For example, a device made from this material may replace a battery that supplies energy to implants like pacemakers, though it should be replaced from time to time. Body movements—like heartbeats, jaw movements, bowel movements, or any other movement that occurs in the body on a regular basis—will charge the device with electricity, which will continuously activate the implant."

via Tel-Aviv University: Santu Bera et al, Molecular engineering of piezoelectricity in collagen-mimicking peptide assemblies, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22895-6


Detecting an unprecedented range of potentially harmful airborne compounds
Aug 2021, phys.org

Usually, if you want to sample for VOCs, you first have to know which VOC you're looking for. You think there's some diacetyl exposure? Then you dose your sampler with a chemical that latches onto diacetyl. But what if we don't know? You're in luck! This new approach uses nanopores of silica; they are so small that they use van der Waals forces, typically really weak forces, to capture any VOCs that float by. Then they can heat up the sensor and re-volatalize whatever got trapped there, and sniff it through a GCMS.

via American Chemical Society: Nanoporous materials for measuring environmental VOC exposures, ACS Fall 2021.


Indoor lighting creates power for rechargeable devices, sensors
Aug 2021, phys.org

Since there is usually plenty of indoor ambient light from different sources, a ceiling light in an office environment would be enough to charge any of the mini modules that were tested, making them all viable as power sources for indoor batteries and sensors.

via American Institute of Physics: https://horizons.aip.org/energystorage-conversion/


Revolutionary Self-Aware Materials Build the Foundation for Living Structures
Oct 2021, scitechdaily.com

A metamaterial system that acts as its own sensor, recording and relaying important information about the pressure and stresses on its structure, fusing advanced metamaterial and energy harvesting technologies at multiscale. With built-in triboelectric nanogenerator mechanism; a smart-stint that monitors bloodflow and restricts vessel size accordingly, or just a smart-bridge that can communicate areas of weakness by sensing pressure.

As I write this, it sounds to me like the bridge can be conscious, because it can feel. So in the distant future, we won't be able to just knock down a house, because it will have feelings. Design for Dissassembly then, maybe?

via University of Pittsburg's Intelligent Structural Monitoring and Response Testing (iSMaRT) Lab: “Multifunctional meta-tribomaterial nanogenerators for energy harvesting and active sensing” by Kaveh Barri, Pengcheng Jiao, Qianyun Zhang, Jun Chen, Zhong Lin Wang and Amir H. Alavi, 16 April 2021, Nano Energy. DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2021.106074


Engineers develop process that turns ordinary clothing into biosensors
Nov 2021, phys.org

Gold and silver nanocomposite-based biostable and biocompatible electronic textile for wearable electromyographic biosensors.

via University of Utah: Taehwan Lim et al, Gold and silver nanocomposite-based biostable and biocompatible electronic textile for wearable electromyographic biosensors, APL Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1063/5.0058617


Form fit: Device wraps around hot surfaces, turns wasted heat to electricity
Jan 2022, phys.org

via Pennsylvania State University: Wenjie Li et al, Conformal High-Power-Density Half-Heusler Thermoelectric Modules: A Pathway toward Practical Power Generators, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (2021). DOI: 10.1021/acsami.1c16117


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Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Artificial Intuition - It's What Computers Crave


AKA The Pendulum of the Anthropocene

Ten years ago I recall myself meta-presenting to my high school class Iain McGilchrist on the TED stage, via RSA Animate. He wrote a book called The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, about the left brain right brain dichotomy and about how the history of humans since the Enlightenment is a story of the shift from right-brained religious order to left-brained scientific discovery.

But I being an art teacher, and they being young people who had no reason to believe that the entire history of humankind is any indication of human futures, I speculated aloud, for their sake -- are we really destined to continue on this trajectory forever? What if the pendulum were to swing in the other direction? Could there be a world where the Right brain of feelings and emotions are more important than facts and data?

I didn't think what I was speculating could actually be true. My job was to ask the craziest questions imaginable, in the hopes of stretching the most malleable material on Earth -- the minds of young people. I myself could never imagine a world where the right brain became the dominant force. But I always held back my own biases, because one thing I was certain about was that the world these kids would grow up in would be very different from the world I grew up in, and they only way to prepare them was to forget everything I knew, and say nothing else but "what if".

And then it happened. Facts became optional. Computers became creative. Only 500 years after its appearance, Reason has begun to lose its appeal, and its utility. 

First, we see algorithms generating theories without any data:

The Ramanujan Machine - Researchers have developed a 'conjecture generator' that creates mathematical conjectures
Feb 2021, phys.org

"The Ramanujan Machine" generates conjectures without proving them, by "imitating" intuition using AI and considerable computer automation.

via Israel Institute of Technology: Gal Raayoni et al. Generating conjectures on fundamental constants with the Ramanujan Machine, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03229-4

And then, we see algorithms generating data without any theories:

New machine learning theory raises questions about nature of science
Feb 2021, phys.org

Instead of teaching the program the laws of physics, he just shows it all the orbits of all the planets until it can produce its own orbits. No more rules baby:

And he goes on: "I would argue that the ultimate goal of any scientist is prediction. You might not necessarily need a law. For example, if I can perfectly predict a planetary orbit, I don't need to know Newton's laws of gravitation and motion. I go directly from data to data.
-Hong Qin, physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

via Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory: Hong Qin, Machine learning and serving of discrete field theories, Scientific Reports (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-76301-0

Another one, we let the algorithms imagine, just to see what they come up with:

Enabling the 'imagination' of artificial intelligence
Jul 2021, phys.org

They're really good at synthesizing, but not at creating imagery from scratch. Here, "controllable disentangled representation learning" or what the article calls "imagination".

via University of Southern California: Yunhao Ge et al, Zero-shot Synthesis with Group-Supervised Learning. Open Review. https://openreview.net/forum?id=8wqCDnBmnrT


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Thursday, June 24, 2021

Now Hiring

AKA The Bot Market's Hot

ISIS still evading detection on Facebook report says
Jul 2020, phys.org

To amass digital territory is their purpose. It's been a while since I thought about the internet as real estate, or rather our eyeballs as real estate...
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) tracked 288 Facebook accounts linked to a particular ISIS network over three months.

The researchers believe that at the centre of the network was one user who managed around a third (90 out of 288) of the Facebook profiles.

This was accomplished by generating real North American phone numbers and looking for associated Facebook accounts.

If it found a match it would request a re-set code to be sent to the phone number, so it could lock out the original account holder and use the Facebook profile to spread content.

The researchers say another key to the survival of ISIS content on the platform was the way in which ISIS supporters have learned to modify their content to evade controls. This included:
  • Breaking up text and using strange punctuation to evade any tools which would search for key words
  • Blurring ISIS branding, or adding Facebook's own video effects
  • Adding the branding of mainstream news outlets over the top of ISIS content
Image credit: Adeen Flinker NYU School of Medicine

Instagram removes hundreds of accounts tied to username hacking
Feb 2021, Reuters

But imagine that we're already semibots, and buying and selling each other.

Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online
Feb 2021, BBC News

It's the Amazon Marketplace, you can buy anything here:
The cost of fake reviews -  £5 each to start. These included "packages" of fake reviews available for sellers to buy for about £15 individually, as well as bulk packages starting at £620 for 50 reviews and going up to £8,000 for 1,000.
Researchers study online 'pseudo-reviews' that mock products
Apr 2021, phys.org

New fakes for the new world. Pseudo-fakes and quasi-forgeries. Pseudo reviews mock the product, like this example:
"I was able to purchase this amazing television with an FHA loan (30 year fixed-rate w/ 4.25% APR) and only 3.5% down. This is, hands down, the best decision I've ever made. And the box it came in is incredibly roomy too, which is a huge bonus, because I live in it now."
Apparently too many pseudo reviews can sway purchaser intent. And if a particular platform becomes infested with them, they can lose credibility altogether. 
via University of Akron: Federico de Gregorio et al. Pseudo-reviews: Conceptualization and consumer effects of a new online phenomenon, Computers in Human Behavior (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2020.106545
Omegle: 'I'm being used as sex-baiting bot' on video chat site
Apr 2021, BBC News

God-level fake operation:

Kid goes to a website where you meet random strangers. An older woman convinces him to take off his clothes and go full Discovery Channel on himself. He does it again with other people. He quits the site, but then one day a year later, he goes back on and gets matched to ... himself. Someone uses his recorded video, overdubbed with typed conversations created in real time, in order to get other people to join. Who knows, maybe that's how he got convinced in the first place. 

"It was like a fully advanced system with different video sequences of me doing different stuff."

One day, the people running this "advanced system" won't be people or even a corporation, but an intelligent entity -- today we call it AI, but it will by then be a combination of people and computers all mashed together so you can't really tell who's who anymore. 

Army of fake fans boosts China’s messaging on Twitter
May 2021, AP News

This isn't really news, I added this one just for posterity.
Good term though: "Counterfeiting Consensus"

Mass scale manipulation of Twitter Trends discovered
June 2021, phys.org
"We found that 47% of local trends in Turkey and 20% of global trends are fake, created from scratch by bots. Between June 2015 and September 2019, we uncovered 108,000 bot accounts involved, the biggest bot dataset reported in a single paper. Our research is the first to uncover the manipulation of Twitter Trends at this scale," Elmas continued. (But don't forget to check how they define bot activity, as this can differ a lot.)
via  Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne: Ephemeral Astroturfing Attacks: The Case of Fake Twitter Trends. arXiv:1910.07783v4 [cs.CR] arxiv.org/abs/1910.07783
Conservatives more susceptible to believing falsehoods
Jun 2021, phys.org

Sorry guys:
Researchers found that liberals and conservatives in the United States both tended to believe claims that promoted their political views, but that this more often led conservatives to accept falsehoods while rejecting truths.

"But the deck is stacked against conservatives because there is so much more misinformation that supports conservative positions. As a result, conservatives are more often led astray."

Although the information environment was the primary reason conservatives were susceptible to misinformation, it may not be the only one.

Results showed that even when the information environment was taken into account, conservatives were slightly more likely to hold misperceptions than were liberals.

"It is difficult to say why that is," Garrett said. "We can't explain the finding with our data alone."

Conservatives also showed a stronger "truth bias," meaning that they were more likely to say that all the claims they were asked about were true.

"We show that the media environment is shaping people's ability to do this very basic, fundamental task."
via Ohio State University: R.K. Garrett el al., "Conservatives' susceptibility to political misperceptions," Science Advances (2021).

Post Script (Don't even try it)
The double-down is real: Correcting online falsehoods might make matters worse
May 2021, phys.org
Not only is misinformation increasing online, but attempting to correct it politely on Twitter can have negative consequences, leading to even less-accurate tweets and more toxicity from the people being corrected, according to a new study co-authored by a group of MIT scholars.
...
On Twitter, people seem to spend a relatively long time crafting primary tweets, and little time making decisions about retweets.
via Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Mohsen Mosleh et al, Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking: Being Corrected by Another User for Posting False Political News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content in a Twitter Field Experiment, Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2021). DOI: 10.1145/3411764.3445642
Post Post Script (Then again)
Artificial intelligence system could help counter the spread of disinformation
May 2021, phys.org

In total, they compiled 28 million Twitter posts from 1 million accounts, during the 2017 French elections, and found bots with 96% accuracy. Note that the way you define a bot is important in these studies. But also note that they've gone beyond using mere activity levels as their metric, they also look at how each bot causes the network as a whole to change and amplify messages, and at the bot's behaviors such as whether they interact with foreign media or what language they use.

Also, this approach looks at not just bots but the real people too, and how they all impact the network as a whole. 

via MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Artificial Intelligence Software Architectures and Algorithms Group: Steven T. Smith et al, Automatic detection of influential actors in disinformation networks, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2011216118DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2011216118

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Thursday, January 28, 2021

Attack of the Memes


AKA Digitally Mediated Social Contagion


It turns out 2021 really is the year of the meme. First the Washington, then Wall Street.

Memetics has been a perennial topic on Network Address, almost from the beginning. In fact, you might say the only two things you're likely to find on here are about memetics and fakes. 

Now that the mainstream pop culture bots have taken the wheel on this one, it's time to turn our attention further outwards. What will it be next, who knows. But if Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End is any manual for the future (as it sure as hell has been so far), then we should start seriously thinking about physics engines and artificially intelligent entities. 

Looking forward to an interesting decade ahead.
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Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Artificial Memetics


When I search the term "artificial memetics" in 2020, all I get are people talking trash, like liberal artificial memetics, or the artificial memetics of masculinity.

What I'm looking for are robots that make their own memes. What I'm looking for are an army of artificial people to make an entire artificial culture so that we can finally live in a full-service anthroposphere.

-totally unrelated image source: Irina Conboy

Also this:

Memetic Warfare - BBC, front page

George Floyd protests - Who are Boogaloo Bois, antifa and Proud Boys
June 2020, BBC News

Original Text:
Cyber Swarming, Memetic Warfare and viral Insurgency: How Domestic Militants Organize on Memes to Incite Violent Insurrection and Terror Against Government and Law Enforcement, A Contagion and Ideology Report. Alex Goldberg - The Network Contagion Research Institute, Joel Finkelstein - The Network Contagion Research Institute and The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Rutgers Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience. Feb 7 2020. [pdf link]


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Friday, January 31, 2020

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.

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Wednesday, October 2, 2019

All Aboard


Sure is a lot of talk about the coming juggernaut that is the 5G network. I'm not so sure that we'll be swimming in holometric datagrams within the next couple years, but I am trying hard to imagine what it will be like. What am I doing today, as a totally routine task, that would have been impossible while I still had a 1x phone in my pocket? Real time traffic? Meh, 1010 Wins.

Those artificial humans though?
She is attractive, emotive, and all-too-real. But Lia is an emotionally intelligent "artificial human"  with expressions and slight skin imperfections that make it difficult to tell that she is digital.
Lia has a virtual brain, virtual nervous system and even digital versions of dopamine and oxytocin that affect her neurons and autonomously trigger facial muscles. She can make eye contact with you—you'll see your own reflection looking at her—and read your face, detecting your emotional state. If you smile, Lia will smile back.
-Soul Machines
image source: Wall Street Journal link

Notes:
5G can make digital humans look real and turn real people into holograms
Mar 2019, phys.org

People think and behave differently in virtual reality than they do in real life
Jan 2019, phys.org

Partially Related Post Script:
An approach for motion planning on asteroid surfaces with irregular gravity fields
Feb 2019, phys.org

^I'm no extraterrestrial scientist but this is the kind of thing that makes even hard science fiction sound soft

Totally Unrelated Post Script:
Just keeping track; more face things:
AI fake face website launched
Feb 2019, BBC

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Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Fauxbots



Robots are already taking over.

Human computer programmers are influencing memetic propagation algorithms which are influencing human social media users. Another way of articulating this is to say that we are outfitting ourselves with a cybernetic limbic system. I'm channeling both Elon Musk's far-out interview about artificial emotional intelligence ecologies and Jaron Lanier's recent behavior modification talks (with a bit of Robert Sapolsky's Human Behavior lectures).

As if it wasn't a surprise, news has it that a script designed to spread information is better than us at doing just that. Coupled with the fact that misinformation spreads faster than factual information, we can easily see what a bad idea it was to offload water-cooler-style information-spreading to an algorithm optimized to sell consumer goods and services to a hypertargeted audience.

This is not to talk trash about technology, or social media, or even human nature; there's plenty of good things to come of all this. I mean, ALS, right?

It is an alert, however, that the things that we fear from far away (robot overlords etc), they tend to look a lot different by the time they get right under our nose. And this is a great example. Note that researcher Tim Hwang was doing work with SocialBots back in 2012, when he ran a competition to see who could influence the most people on Twitter with an automated fauxbot. By the end of the competition we learned two things - 1.It's not hard at all to make people think you're a person when you're not, and 2.It's very very ethically questionable to do these kinds of experiments.

Not that it matters much. Using a social media platform waives your right to be free from experimentation.

In what I guess I will call traditional research, if your experiment involves people, you have to take some ethics classes, and your plan has to pass a group of people who's job it is to make sure you're not doing anything ethically dubious to your subjects. In very simple terms, you're not supposed to do harm to your subjects (only people though, sorry animals).

But when you participate in social media, you're willfully participating in the experiment that is the platform's digital ecosystem (and because the programs aren't programming themselves, not yet, the platform's corporate culture has influence here as well). The whole thing is an experiment from the moment you log in.

So what happens when you are that poor schmuck who fell in love with Tim Hwang's socialbot and then got his heart broken when the competition ended? Tough shit?

Or when you realize the "woman" you've been chatting up for the past two days is really a feature designed by the dating app itself to keep you engaged at the most opportune moments; what is a melted snowflake to do? Who to sue?

Listening to the news last night, two people are talking about results from a recent Facebook experiment that showed we can make people act nicer to each other through pretty simple and very subtle programming changes. Or make people happier by showing them happier news in their feed. (It's called a feed for f's sake.)

Is a social media platform responsible for the death of a teen who may have been only a few happy newsclips away from making that final decision?

Nope. Not right now at least. Not until we face the hard facts about how powerful it is to effect mass population manipulation with only minor changes in program code.


Post Script:
The chances you've been involved in one of these experiments already? 100%

"Low-credibility content" is the new fake news, and "auto amplification" is the act of spreading it.

The reason automated amplification works is because of herd mentality. A great experiment I read recently in Geoffrey West's book Scale - a researcher took 100 crowdfunding campaigns that had been at $0 for a minute already and donated $1 to half of them. The ones who got no donation stayed at zero, and the others gained at least some extra donations. There are dozens of other names for this such as the law of accumulative advantage, the Matthew Effect, and the rich get richer.


Notes:
Study: It only takes a few seconds for bots to spread misinformation
Nov 2018, Ars Technica

The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
Nature, 2018

The spread of true and false news online
Science, 2018

The spread of true and false information online
MIT, 2018

I'm Not a Real Friend, But I Play One on the Internet
Tim Hwang, HOPE#9, July 2012

SocialBots
Network Address, 2012

Institutional Review Board
also known as an independent ethics committee, ethical review board, or research ethics board, is a type of committee that applies research ethics by reviewing the methods proposed for research to ensure that they are ethical

Post Post Script Script:
Looks like something is real popular in the news right now:

On Twitter, limited number of characters spreading fake info
Jan 2019, phys.org

Washington fears new threat from 'deepfake' videos
Jan 2019, The Hill


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Friday, October 12, 2018

Dear Phishbait


Went fishing in my spambox the other day and thought I should save this, for posterity:

Greetings,

I know you will be surprised to get this my email.  Apart from being surprised you may be hesitant to reply based on what is happening in the world of the internet. One has to be very careful  due to the amount of scammers that  are out there looking to take advantage of innocent citizens. However, I am not one of these people. My name is Capt. Patrick Williams and I was a member of the US ARMY medical team deployed to Iraq and then later transferred to Afghanistan.

I am looking for a trust worthy individual who will assist me in receiving some funds for me. I am requesting this individual to hold onto the cash until I arrive safely back to retrieve them.

As soon as I hear back I will work out the finer details.

Best Regards
Captain Patrick Williams

Post Script:
After a quick search, it looks like there's all kinds of iterations of this. Busy guy.
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Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Views of the Future


The expanding brain meme is in order.

Look, I'm not in love with Elon Musk or anything, but I got pretty pissed when I read a Futurism article about his interview with Joe Rogan.

I can obviously care less about whether or not somebody "inhaled," I mean, I was around during the Bill Clinton administration, after all. Not to mention, what to hell do people think is going to happen on the Joe Rogan show.

The part I'm upset about is where people seem to think Musk is being a loopy headfreak when he's asked about future-trending topics like AI sentience.

And that's where I'll cut - he's asked when he thinks AI will become sentient. And he responds, very slowly like every other answer he gives during this kind of painful interview - he says something that sounds to many like, "We're all trees, man."

You're thinking, "he didn't answer the question at all." But I think you're wrong. His actual answer went like this:

Joe: How far are humans from creating sentient AI?
Musk: You could argue that any group of people — like a company — is essentially a cybernetic collective of human people and machines. That’s what a company is. And then there are different levels of complexity in the way these companies are formed and then there is a collective AI in Google search, where we are also plugged in like nodes in a network, like leaves in a tree. 
We’re all feeding this network without questions and answers. We’re all collectively programming the AI and Google. […] It feels like we are the biological boot-loader for AI effectively. We are building progressively greater intelligence. And the percentage that is not human is increasing, and eventually we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence.

This is coming from a guy who is making, besides reusable rocket ships and statewide underground transport tunnels and consumer blowtorches, a neural interface system. And in case folks forget, because this was a while ago, he made PayPal. So he knows how things work. He may not be Jaron Lanier but he understands how these things work, and he's telling us that in regards to AI and sentience, we're asking the wrong question.

I'm going to elucidate what I think he was trying to say when he answered this, or at least what maybe he should have said considering his audience in this particular venue.

First, there is a fine line between us and AI. When you consider that we as users are the training program for many of these tools, such as a massive search engine, it should make you wonder which part of it is us and which part the machine.

Second, when we realize that we have essentially been programming these things since the dawn of what I will call for lack of a more neutral word, the surveillance state, we must admit the sentience is already here.

So, even more briefly, what he could have said to the question - when will AI become sentient - was that AI is us, and it's already happened.


All this being said, I spent a good three hours watching a debate on the floor of the Parliament about the real threats of AI, not to mention having watched a good thousand hours of other scientists, researchers, engineers, and other professionals talk about their work in the field. With that, I concluded to myself that a General Artificial Intelligence will not be here for another couple generations, and that the threat will be from ourselves, not a sentient system.

Musk seemed to be in concert with the latter part of this, although he's still pretty spooked about what could happen.

This brings me to my next point, which is that Musk is a guy for whom the world moves way faster than most. We have to remember, if not for him, a working reusable rocket would have taken another 50 years at least. For example, if NASA of some other government agency were in charge of the project. It doesn't mean that because of him the world moves faster, but that when he talks about things, he sees them from a very different perspective, one where amazing things you can barely imagine can happen tomorrow. And he probably assumes that you are in his head with him, which you are not, and Joe Rogan is not, and apparently this writer for Futurism is not.

But fellow speculative fiction enthusiasts are, and hopefully they would agree that it's quite entertaining to listen to this guy talk about things. (Again, if you can get around the 10-second pause before answering every question.)

Finally, full disclosure, I along with Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson am a no-case guy (no cellphone case that is).

Post Script
The comment about how we're probably living in a simulation - I'm not a proponent of this, as there are more convincing arguments against it than for it coming from the physics world. However, his comment on how in the future we will all be living in a game, and it will be indistinguishable from reality, well, I'll ask folks to read Charles Stross' Halting State, or Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End or ... many scifi novels written in the past thirty years? (And also a Network Address post from wayback.)


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Monday, October 16, 2017

So Long Stabranja


Maybe it's all this Equifax bonanza stuff going down, but I thought a post about identity and security and automated account attacks would be appropriate.

I was very excited to be able to see my facebook account hacked in a (perhaps) methodical, slow attack that has left me unable to verify my own identity, i.e., access the account. I say perhaps because, perhaps, there is no method-making person behind this; maybe it's just a program following instructions. Regardless, I got to watch it happen, and I'd like to share.

In preface, it should be noted that here at Network Address, we certainly don't present ourselves as digital liberators, that is, computer hackers. However, the world that surrounds the activities of such folk are very interesting to us. Listening to Off the Hook on 99.5 WBAI and attending the HOPE conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania are a great source of the material seen on this site. If interested yourself, please look into these, they're very much worth it (The next HOPE is summer 2018, check it out...https://hope.net/).

Back to the matter. I wonder how common this is. I plan to do some research on this dating site that requires your fb as entry. I have many facebook accounts, and many from back in the day before you had to use real names. This one is Stabranja Bones, part of a project from  almost 10 years ago, about hick-hop (at the time this was something we made up, but it's apparently a thing now) and bronix (same, although it was called Brocabulary by reddit). So I access this dating site using one of my facebook accounts, unfortunately, a favorite that I'm sad to see taken away from me. Although, I'm glad I got to see it happen firsthand.

I'm on this dating site for a couple days, that's all I need. You know how these sites work, btw - if you leave your account vacant it will be used as a bot. There's no such thing as deactivating or deleting an account. Content has value and will not go to waste, no matter what you think or want. (Remember, when things are free, you're the one giving the value, not taking it.) We used to call this a zombie I guess, like you killed the account but someone else uses the empty shell, the carcass, to impersonate a real person. This makes the site look like they have more people than they really do, which makes the prospects of finding a date better, which makes the site more attractive, which makes it more likely that you'll pay for a subscription after your free trial. (If you're new to all this, just look into the Ashley Madison scandal, "angels" and "engagers" and etc.) So, I get into the habit of at least deleting all the uploaded pictures on the dating site account, posting new picutres of people that are certainly not me, and then "deactivating" it. I did this.

About a week later, I get a message from a friend of mine, one of the few people I have connected to the hacked fb account, and a person who, unlike myself, is active on facebook and notices these things - he asks me, in real life via text message, if I changed the profile picture on the facebook page. I did not. I assume that my tooling around with the dating site via the fb site had caused some inadvertent change. In the back of my mind, because I don't trust anything, I thought there was a possiblity that everything was already compromised.

About a week or two later I check back into the dating site, just to check up on things, since I was suspicious. I see a chubby Middle Eastern man has taken the place of my profile picture (which until then was a photo of a college friend of mine in drag), and yes, the dating site is still using my profile/account, but with this new chubby Middle Eastern guy as the primary avatar. I log back into fb and delete this guy's pic, and reinstate my old profile pic.

A month goes by. I then get an email stating that my password has been changed, if I didn't do that, I should check into it. I do. They're asking me to confirm my identity. They show me some pictures of "friends" to test whether I know them or not. Hmmm. Some of these people I don't recgnize (I only had 3 friends, this was a bogus account we did for fun, after all.) I fail the test. I try again. I fail again. I don't know these people. I'm locked out of the account forever.

I go back to my email account (a second account that I use for bogus accounts etc.). Gmail separates "social" emails to another page, so I haven't been seeing the updates from fb etc. I go into this "social" page of emails and see that my fb avatar has been accumulating friends for the past month. I imagine that friend requests are sent out by the hundreds, and someone, be they either real or not, is accepting. Now I have a whole bunch of "friends" who I don't know. And if this is going on for a month, and I'm not doing anything about it, then whoever is doing this (see me giving agency to an algorithm here?) is like "great, nobody's at the wheel, let's take control." My password gets changed.

I recall some time ago, my credit card company called me about potential fraud. Have you been to Florida recently, they asked. No. That's what we thought, you have some fraudulent charges, we're going to take them off and give you a new card number. How did you know, I asked. They bought hard hats from a Home Depot in Florida, and we thought that was strange. ... I thought it was strange that they thought that was strange. Anyway, they know this stuff better than I do, because once someone has stolen your credit card number, the first thing they do is to test it; they buy some stuff and see if they get flagged. They see if there's anyone behind the wheel. If not, it's all their's.

And now Stabranja is all theirs, whoever they are.


Afterword

The next time you hear something like "Facebook has reached x million users," be aware that these are not real people. They're empty shells. Their "likes" are empty as well. Also, the next time you are deciding whether it's worth it to pay for a subscription to that dating site, many of those people are not real. That is to say, they may have been real at one time, but they are no longer; they are also empty shells. 

Post Script

etymology of Stabranja Bones:
Stabroned (brain + stoned) + ganja. Yup. Producer of Brody Lambone, hick-hop sensation.

The Semibots Are Coming
Network Address, 2015
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Monday, September 25, 2017

Bots Made Me Do It


Twitter bots for good: Study reveals how information spreads on social media
Sep 2017, phys.org

Players:
Emilio Ferrara, a USC Information Sciences Institute computer scientist and research assistant professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Computer Science, and a team from the Technical University of Denmark.

Experiment:
39 bots deploy "positive-themed" hashtags to 25,000 Twitter users for four-months.

Conclusion:
Information is much more likely to become viral when people are exposed to the same piece of information multiple times through multiple sources. "This milestone shatters a long-held belief that ideas spread like an infectious disease, or contagion, with each exposure resulting in the same probability of infection," says Ferrara. -phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-twitter-bots-good-reveals-social.html

Source:
Bjarke Mønsted et al. Evidence of complex contagion of information in social media: An experiment using Twitter bots, PLOS ONE (2017). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184148

image source
image credit

Post Script:

Post from 5 years ago about this topic, check out Tim Hwang at the HOPE#9 conference talking about his ethically and legally dubious twitter-bot experiments on an unsuspecting cluster of 500 users:
Social Bots, Network Address, 2012

In case you were wondering the difference between robo- and -bot
Robo vs Bot, Network Address, 2013

Aaaaaand, why are we still not using the word "semibots?"
The Semibots Are Coming, Network Address, 2015


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Monday, July 31, 2017

Chatbots Start Speaking Their Own Language and It's not Esperanto


Facebook Shuts AI System After Bots Start Speaking Their Own Language, Defy Human Instructions
July 2017, Hindustan Times

Don't even get 'em started. As I tear through Kim Stanley Robinson's Auroroa, a hard science fiction novel about a starfleet trying to colonize the Tau Ceti system where the ship itself, due to its quantum-computer-powered artificial intelligence system, becomes conscsious, I read this headline.

I'm not surprised, nobody is surprised, that these chatbots, these intelligentities, have surpassed our ability to decode what the f they're doing. Deep learning neural networks, for example, are unintelligible to us (correct this, I read a paper recently about some folks successful in figuring out how to read the hidden programs developed by these learning networks). Computers, ultimately, speak a language of computation, 1's and 0's. So it should be no surprise that, given a complex task of negotiating mock global diplomacy matters, these systems tack at a better way for working with each other.

Still, it is symbolic. And only to humans do symbolic things matter. Maybe there's a reason for that; maybe this is the beginning. That distance between now and the inevitable transition to the post-human world keeps getting shorter.

Post Script
It Begins: Bots are learning to chat in their own language
July 2017, Cade Metz, WIRED

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Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Robots Have Feelings Too

aka In Other News Suicide is Funny Again


A robot kills itself, and everyone thinks it's funny:
Robot 'drowns' in fountain mishap
July 2017, BBC

This headline above was pretty tame. But otherwise, take your pick, I'll go with my local radio news station, WNYC 93.9 FM. Today on the six o'clock headlines they quip - "Turns out his first day on the job was too much for this robot..."

I thought suicide was a big deal. And what's up with the whole bullying thing? And don't even get me started on how they already assumed the thing's gender.

***
Very often when I think about the way people treat eachother, this quote by Carl Sagan comes to mind:
"It’s a little unfair, I think, to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive. The question raises nagging uncertainties about which of the conventional truths of our own age will be considered unforgivable bigotry by the next."
Broca’s Brain, Carl Sagan, 1974-1979, p11

And I wonder when, if ever, we are living through such a prejudice in 'our own age'. When such a situation as this arises, how can you resist but to extrapolate? One day, far in the future, will we ridicule the newswriters of today for having no sympathy for this poor intelligentity?

But seriously, it seems pretty irresponsible to be poking fun at someone for committing suicide.

Obviously, a robot isn't "someone" and it didn't "commit suicide," but when it is portrayed that way in the headlines, I'll bet that's what it looks like to a young person, for example, or perhaps a person with mental illness. They hear that someone, or something, has killed itself, and they see that everyone thinks it's a joke.

Image source: Robot is Dead, Waldemar-Kazak, 2017

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Friday, November 25, 2016

Let Them Play


The news about DeepMind never stops. Yes, we're teaching it to teach itself, by letting it play video games. So we missed the dystopian mark, because at least they're not using straight television.

Once this intelligentity starts playing Second Life, will that be even better?

DeepMind AI to play videogame to learn about world
BBC, Nov 2016
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37871396

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