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

Nanodata

A future 'human brain/cloud interface' will give people instant access to vast knowledge via thought alone
Apr 2019, phys.org

Biodistribution and biocompatibility of nanoparticles, looking out for that.

Image Source: M.C.Escher - Bond of Union - 1956

On the Multi-Dimensionality of Cultural Communication

Facebook 'labels' posts by hand, posing privacy questions
May 2019, Reuters

Facebook uses only five dimensions to categorize your pictures. Of these, we have these: 1. Subject (food, person, animal), 2. Occasion (day at the office, 1st birthday party), 3. Intention (plan, inspire, joke). The labeling is done by hand, in order to train machines. Meat-handlers they're called in the industry. Just kidding I made that up; but that's what they are -- because our machines are too stupid right now to be able to do this.

The problem is that humans are also too stupid. Rephrase that -- it's not that humans are stupid, it's the wrong humans being used. The Big F-Book uses meatmen in Romania and the Philippines. Now I'm not sure if I'm getting this right, but it sounds like some human flesh engines from one culture are interpreting the actions of another culture a half a world away.

The problem is when things get lost in translation. If we don't get the cultural nuances right, the resulting data will be messed up. Imagine there is some little quirk, a little difference or misunderstanding between the Filipino labeler and the American poster that labels all x-posts as y. And that error gets scaled up until a huge mistake is made when screening your background for some dystopian automated system that you really want to be a part of, or not, like the criminal justice system for example.

We can't ignore these differences. They may seem small, but they get scaled by the millions. At 150mph, the tiniest pebble will throw your motorcycle right off the road.

Post Script:
Talking about multi-dimensionality, try categorizing smells.

On the Brains of Machines

This picture is kind of like an infrared camera but for algorithms.

It's a heat map for the eyeballs of a computer; what is it looking at, what are its clues?

In this case, it's looking at the water, not at the ship, in order to identify the image as a ship. (We're also assigning agency to this thing, in case anyone's keeping track.)

Neural nets are a big deal these days, but they come with a new problem. We don't know what they're doing, because the thing that makes them so special is that they figure out their own algorithm. (Agency again.) Computer programmers are not writing the programs; the networks write the programs using trial and error. Machine Learning is another name for this idea of iterative development.

There's a lot of people who would like to know what's going on in there, mostly to see how these things are getting their answers, and to make sure that the algorithms don't cheat to get their answers. Some learn bad habits, like detecting "ships" in pictures with water (which means they're good at detecting water, not ships), or by skimming metadata, which means they're good at classifying metadata, not pictures of stuff. These heat maps, and more importantly the forensics-like algorithms that inform them, are very helpful. They let us see inside the brains of the machine.

***

Speaking of disembodied brains, here's the artificial synapse. It uses a new type of hardware memory system that works more like a brain does, in an array, where they can do their computing business simultaneously. Neuromorphic computing.

And if you want to grow those artificial synapses in a 3-D tissue culture (brains in a dish), call these guys.

Cerebral organoids -- they're more for studying how the brain works than they are about making artificial brains. At least they're not using human brains, right?

Wrong; there are ethical concerns that these organoids might develop consciousness, or have already developed consciousness. 

Notes:

What is it like being a brain in a computer?
Clarifying how artificial intelligence systems make choices
Mar 2019, phys.org

Sebastian Lapuschkin et al, Unmasking Clever Hans predictors and assessing what machines really learn, Nature Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-08987-4

Fast, efficient and durable artificial synapse developed
Apr 2019, phys.org

Elliot J. Fuller et al. Parallel programming of an ionic floating-gate memory array for scalable neuromorphic computing, Science (2019). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw5581

Researchers grow active mini-brain-networks
Jun 2019, phys.org

Stem Cell Reports, Sakaguchi et al.: "Self-organized synchronous calcium transients in a cultured human neural network derived from cerebral organoids"
https://www.cell.com/stem-cell-reports/fulltext/S2213-6711(19)30197-3
DOI: 10.1016/j.stemcr.2019.05.029

On Free Will, Decision Making and Sovereign Awareness

Let's start here:
Our brains reveal our choices before we're even aware of them, study finds
Mar 2019, phys.org

Our thoughts can be predicted 11 seconds in advance by looking at patterns in brain activity.

"We believe that when we are faced with the choice between two or more options of what to think about, non-conscious traces of the thoughts are there already, a bit like unconscious hallucinations," Professor Pearson says.

"As the decision of what to think about is made, executive areas of the brain choose the thought-trace which is stronger. In, other words, if any pre-existing brain activity matches one of your choices, then your brain will be more likely to pick that option as it gets boosted by the pre-existing brain activity."
-Professor Joel Pearson, Director of the Future Minds Lab at UNSW School of Psychology

*note, researchers caution against assuming that all choices are by nature predetermined by pre-existing brain activity.
Roger Koenig-Robert et al. Decoding the contents and strength of imagery before volitional engagement, Scientific Reports (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-39813-y

Aside from the idea of biases in general, This all reminds me of another article on digital telepathy:

A bunch of people each have a tetris game controller with only one button, so that one person's button rotates, the other slides sideways, etc. Together they have to make decisions by consensus, verbally, while they collaboratively control the tetris-block.

The division of labor is ruthless (only one button) but the communication is rich (human speech). The result is a complex procedure that has been stripped-down to operate in a digitally-mediated environment.

Then there's the straight telepathy style collaboration where they bypass the verbal communication and go straight to brain waves:
How you and your friends can play a video game together using only your minds
July 2019, University of Washington News

A University of Washington team is doing telepathinc collective problem-solving. It's called BrainNet. Three people play a Tetris by talking to each other with their brain waves and wireless signal.

As in Tetris, the game shows a block at the top of the screen and a line that needs to be completed at the bottom. Two people, the Senders, can see both the block and the line but can’t control the game. The third person, the Receiver, can see only the block but can tell the game whether to rotate the block to successfully complete the line.

Each Sender decides whether the block needs to be rotated and then --passes that information from their brain, through the internet and to the brain of the Receiver.-- Then the Receiver processes that information and sends a command — to rotate or not rotate the block — to the game directly from their brain, hopefully completing and clearing the line.  

The screen also showed the word “Yes” on one side and the word “No” on the other side. Beneath the “Yes” option, an LED flashed 17 times per second. Beneath the “No” option, an LED flashed 15 times a second. Once the Sender makes a decision about whether to rotate the block, they send ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the Receiver’s brain by concentrating on the corresponding light [which then sends frequency-specific signal downstream].
-University of Washington

If we take this splintered form of decision-making, and combine it with the fact that we don't seem to be making decisions in the way that we think we are (the decision is already made seconds before we realize it), then it would be expected that as we get better at collaborating and complexifying our distributed cognition network, we will have robots, i.e., artificially intelligent entities, helping us, and becoming part of us.

Scale this up and imagine 700 people collectively coordinating a robot's movements, but not just one robot, hundreds and thousands. All semibots, no more line between us.

Notes:
We have come a long way since Emotiv's EPOC headset almost a decade ago; just imagine 2030.

Try Not to Think
Network Address, 2017

All Your Brain Are Belong To Us
Network Address, 2012

Playing Tetris by committee
May 2019, BBC

^Developed by Patrick Lemieux of UC Davis, California, the Octopad single button controllers mean each player can only trigger one kind of movement in the game so it forces co-operation and conversation between players.

Post Script:
Shared control allows a robot to use two hands working together to complete tasks
May 2019, phys.org

A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Naval Research Laboratory has designed and built a robotic system that allows for bimanual robot manipulation through shared control.... a technique that enabled a robot to carry out bimanual tasks by sharing control with a human being. ... The robot did not progress to the point of performing the task on its own—instead, it learned to serve as a more fully capable augmented assistant.

Pedestrians at crosswalks found to follow the Levy walk process
Apr 2019, phys.org

As people cross an intersection, they interface each other in predictable ways. 

"Rather than people continually meeting face to face, walkers would simply follow a person moving in the same direction, preventing the constant need to shift their path. ... Doing so increased efficiency both for the individuals and for the crowd as a whole."

They also found that these streams followed a Lévy process.

...
The Lévy walk process is a mathematical description, which means it's predictable. It says that as you walk, or as your eyes dart across a screen, or as you do a whole bunch of repetitive actions, you will move in short stops interspersed with long stops. Many short strides intermittent with some long strides. But the ratio of short to long, and the distances of each, are determined by a power law distribution that is the Lévy process. That our walking follows a Lévy process means we can predict how many steps you will take as you cross a given intersection.

And if you happen to be walking funny because you have a shotgun in your trousers, that can now be recognized by a persistent surveillance system, to either alert in advance of atypical behavior, or to aid in identifying individuals of interest in footage of an event after it has taken place. 

In The Fractal Closet

Behold the Mandelbrot Set, a world-renowned image and a powerful symbol of infinity. The mathematical concept it illustrates is one of the most intuitive --it describes self-similarity-- and yet it remained unknown, even unbeckoned and unsought-after, until the advent of the modern computer. This dormant formula only came to life after iterations so numerous as to be considered infinite were the human hand the one computing. The computer showed us what a simple formula could do, if you scale it up. It shows us a behavior, not of things, but of space-time itself.

I wake up to the sound of rain, splattering. Then I wake up some more, and realize it's not rain.

It's coming from the ceiling. The plumbing. One hundred years of building and habitating and changing and changing has left me with an unfortunate design that is now leaking water from a ruptured pipe above the kitchen ceiling, and into my pantry closet.

Now I am fully awake, and fully out of bed, and pulling out all my things from the closet. I am transporting a 3x3' closet's worth of possessions to a 10x10' back room, and hastily.

The plumber has come and gone, and the handyman who repaired the closet. It's time to replace my things, to fill the closet again. But all I can do is stare at the sprawling piles of stuff, that was once compacted, compressed into a 3x3' closet. How did all this stuff possibly fit in that little closet. And it occurs to me -- this is fractals.

link

We are all familiar with the general idea of fractals, the Mandelbrot set, the self-similarity, the LSD. But that intuitively recognizable feature is an outcome of an underlying objective. The reason a fractal looks the way it does is because of its space-filling behavior, which itself is a function of growth limited by space. In order to keep jamming more and more stuff into that space, you have to follow the fractal formula.

A better example of fractals is not a tie-dye t-shirt but the coast of England. If you were to measure the coastline of England with a one-mile long measuring stick, it would be a pretty vague approximation of the coastline, but with a defined length.

Then if you were to measure with a one-foot stick (which would be ironic), you would get a much better approximation, but also a much larger coastline, because now that your shorter imperial stick can reach into all the nooks and crannies, it makes the total length that much longer. In fact, the smaller your measuring stick, the longer the coastline.

By this reasoning, the length of the coastline is infinite. In other words, it is not a 1-D line at all. Yet neither is it 2-D. It is 1.456-D, or maybe 1.879-D; it is a fraction of a dimension.

When you fill a closet with things, it doesn't just happen all at once. Sure, you start by "filling" the closet. But over time, as you use the things and remove things, add more things, and rearrange, you are filling the space more and more. But you're not just filling it with things now, you're filling it with intelligence.

The more time goes by, and the more you use things, remove, add and rearrange, you are going to fill all the nooks and crannies of that 3-D space until it is no longer 3-D. It becomes a fraction of a dimension.

Then, when you take everything back out, you collapse the extra fraction that you helped to create. When the things come back into normal 3-D space, they seem bigger in aggregate, they seem to have gained size in the process. The closet is now sprawling across an entire room. That difference is fractals. (It's also because the 3-D closet is now spread across a 2-D floor; but that doesn't account for all of it's 'enlargement', as the same phenomenon is experienced with filling a box truck on moving day).

If we could extrapolate this to the 4th dimension, what would we be talking about? Or do I need to be on acid to have that conversation. Maybe an easier question would be -- what does the airtight Tetris block have that the jumbled pile of pieces does not? (Well, it doesn't have air, obviously.) But besides that, it's the entropy. The block is ordered, and the pile disordered. The pile is a random mess, and the block an intelligent artifact.

I hadn't thought of my catch-all pantry closet as an intelligent artifact, yet here it is, an entropy-reversing portal that uses intelligence to loop out of it's limited dimensions.

Post Script:
It is still hard to see the pantry closet as having something to do with intelligence. Try taking it out and putting it all back so it fits. Then you'll see how much "intelligence" went into its arrangement. The difference is that in its natural state, the closet possesses an accumulated intelligence. Over time, as you use all the things in the closet, your intelligent behavior leaves its residue on the things in it. It is a storage depot, not of things, but of an arrangement.

Post Post Script:
[I start looking up these deepdream images and I have to post them all.]

link

link

[can't find source bc pinterest; thanks obama]

(Virtual Art) by Rein Bijlsma

link

Deep Dream Burger by Matthias Hauser

Style Transfer, which is not the same as DeepDream, but does use neural nets, i.e., robot brains. Link.

For Real Though

aka Full Meta
I know this is old news, but we have to document these things for posterity -- The real President of the United States verifies the authenticity of his twitter account by calling it The Real [President of the United States].

Image source: The Real Seal
Effective March 15, 2012, the management of the REAL® Seal program was transferred from the United Dairy Industry Association to National Milk Producers Federation. This transfer is symbolic of the renewed purpose. From helping consumers discriminate real from fake cheese on pizza, the new purpose of Real dairy products distinguishes animal milk from soy, rice and nut milk. (But nobody wants to say nut milk.)