Post Script

Max Ernst and the rest of the Surrealists experimented with 'automatic generation' a hundred years ago.

I'm reading an article here about how we're now using 'robot-generated script' to make things funny. Because, you know, robots are stupid, and we like to laugh at stupid things.

You give a script-writing robot a thousand Seinfeld episodes and ask it to make a Seinfeld episode. And when it messes up, we laugh.

I'm saying all this half tongue-in-cheek. Don't get me wrong, a lot of this stuff is funny. Maybe these smarty pants experimenting with neural  nets can give you plenty of examples of what I'm talking about.

It's funny when a computer screws up. It's funny when anyone screws up. I had a classmate in third grade who wore yellow-tinted stonewash jeans, and I remember making fun of him and getting in trouble for it. The stonewash was right on for that time in the world of fashion, but the yellow not so much. Things have to be messed up to be funny, but not too messed up.

There's a good formula for funny (and a good graph too) which says the level of funniness in a joke is a function of the probability of the punchline vs your expectations. Researchers exploring 'creative AI' look at the novelty vs the quality, because to be creative we have to be new, novel, unexpected, but not completely out of the ballpark.

My friend in 3rd grade got the stonewash right, but not the yellow dye. A trained neural net (I call them all robots for short) gets most of the material right, but once in a while it throws in there something crazy (something wrong) and we laugh.

The part where things get tricky is when we stop to consider what  we're laughing at - is it the abstracted novelty of the output, or is it that we've assigned agency to the network and are now making fun of it for messing up.

I'm just saying, we might not want to get into the habit of poking fun at these things - not because they will one day retaliate and destroy us, but because they are a reflection of ourselves.


image source: Max Ernst 1937 L'Ange du Foyer - Engel des Kamins

Was That Script Written By A Human Or An AI? Here’s How To Spot The Difference
Jun 2018, Futurism

Anatomy of a Joke
2012, Network Address

Botnik is a community of writers, artists and developers using machines to create things on and off the internet.

Cultural Behavior Modification - Perspicuity vs Deception

California's water saving brings bonus effects
Jan 2018, phys.org

California had a major drought, maybe a couple years in a row, circa 2016. Things got so bad they had to enforce water saving efforts. There were signs on people's lawns that said "Brown is the New Green".

They didn't hit their target, but they did a pretty good job. But the real news is that they did better than the energy efficiency efforts.

In other words, asking people to save water actually saved more energy than asking people to save energy.

This should be somewhat obvious to people who know something about public water infrastructure - it uses a heck of a lot of energy to run these things. So, obviously, saving water would mean saving energy.

This "discovery", however, leads one to imagine other ways of getting people to do things, or nudging people's behavior.

The drought made the water problem palpable. Brown literally was the new green. I flew to California during this time, and you could see the levels of the rivers and Lake Mead; you could see where they used to be. It was undeniable. Our energy crisis is a bit less palpable. The scale is too large, both in space and in time, for us to feel any urgency from it.

I mention this because perhaps the reason water-saving yields more results than energy-saving is the sheer visibility of the problem. But the more interesting possibility here is that people are not really that hard to manipulate, that is, if you're willing to be deceptive about what you want them to do. We can leave it at that.

image source

Blockhain-Breedable 256-bit Genomes For Sale

CryptoKitties craze slows down transactions on Ethereum
Dec 2017, BBC

But that's not how any of this works.

Digital currencies were supposed to be used to trade money online, not to serve as a lab for Frankensteined bit-genomes.

But of course, this IS how these things work. The internet was supposed to be for sending science articles among scientists.

Ether is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, supported by a record of transactions that is copied and stored on lots of different computers spread all over the world. In this case, that network is called Ethereum. People are using it to buy pizza and drugs, and to make money by speculation.

But people are also now using it to play with digipets, or cryptokitties. But more, they aren't just playing, they're breeding these things by turning a digital money transfer service into a bio-inspired creation-machine. 

Each kitty is unique, and their unique DNA can lead to four billion possible genetic variations when they breed. I wish I knew more about how numbers work. There is a lot of computation going on here in order to do this. People are worried that this "frivolous game" is holding up real business.

You know, until it turns out that the game is the real business.

Post Script
Absolutely completely unrelated - in case you haven't noticed, google owns pinterest, and when you image search, there's a high chance you're being directed to pinterest to see the full image of the thumbnail you're viewing in the google results. But you have to be a user to get in and see the image. Smart way for google to make sure everyone is using its other services. And a good way for folks to understand how monopolies work, and corporate/capitalistic culture in general.

Unless you would like to add "-site:pinterest.com" to you search results. For example, the search bar would contain "old school refrigerators -site:pinterest.com". Helps.

In fact, do it with and without and see just how much google has gamed the image image market.

Aunt Colony

"I am beginning to see things from two different vantage points. From an ant's-eye point of view, a signal has no purpose. The typical ant in a signal is just meandering around the colony, in search of nothing in particular, until it finds that it feels like stopping. Its teammates usually agree and that moment the team unloads itself, by crumbling apart, leaving just its numbers but none of its coherency. No planning is required, no looking ahead, nor is any search required to determine the proper direction. But from the colony's point of view, the team has just responded to a message which was written in the language of the caste distribution. Now from this perspective, it looks very much like purposeful activity."

"Prelude...Ant Fugue", Douglas Hofstadter
in The Mind's I, Hofstadter and Dennett, eds., 1981

Beauty, Time, and Intent

In his book, The Life of the Cosmos, Lee Smolin asks:

What is the beauty of an ancient city vs. the ugliness of modern shopping center?

but I'll take a stab at the answer:

It is built up over time and by many different people.
Together, they cancel-out the individual conscious intent.

Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997, Oxford

Primitive Dreams

Just some notes from Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s Primitive Mentality (1923)

1966 Beacon Press edition, eng. trans.

[For the Primitive Mind] “What is seen in dreams is, theoretically, true. To minds which have but slight perception of the law of contradiction, and which the presence of the same thing in various places at one and the same time does not perturb in the least, what reason is there for doubting these data more than any others. …Since nothing seems more natural to him than the communication between the seen and the unseen worlds, why should he mistrust what he sees in dreams any more than what he sees with his eyes wide open?” (And these things are even more valuable to him because of their mystic origin.) (p101)

It may happen that what the primitive sees in dreams are circumstances which are to occur later; these circumstances are both prospective, because he foresees their happening, and they are also retrospective, because he has seen them take place. Such a thing is an impossibility to minds governed, as ours are, by the law of contradiction, for they have a clear representation of time unfolding in a unilinear series of successive moments. How can the same event occupy two different places in this series, at a distance from each other, and thus belong to the past and the future? Such an impossibility, however, puts no strain upon the prelogical mentality…. …Their simultaneity of data, as well as their ‘multi-presence of a person’ cannot coexist in time and space with us… (p105)

Regarding a native’s dream about the theft of some of his pumpkins by a white man, and even though the white man had never even been to this native man’s property, the native says, “If you had been there, you would have taken them”. And so the character of the white man in the dream was actually the will of that person. It doesn’t matter what you do… (p106-107)

Also see “Consciousness and Dreams”, by Marcel Kuijsten in The Jaynesian: Newlsetter of the Julian Jaynes Society, 2010, volume 4, issue 1

www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/jaynesian_volume4_issue1.pdf