Borg or HumaNet?

Some discussion of the way that consciousness might evolve and grow.


From: joss@software-that-works.co.uk

The link I posted yesterday http://www.sdc.org/~pwolf/addnots.shtml contained an interesting point about how people with ADD (or ACD - Ability to Concentrate Deeply as I prefer to think of it) should drive cars with warning devices that remind them they left their lights on. This reminded me of some other thoughts I've had to do with how computers can easily obliterate the mundane advantages that packer style concentration has over mapping.

AI (my background) is interesting as an intellectual curiosity, but the more immediate thing to look forward to is better human computer interaction. Much, much better HCI. The implications of this are somewhat surprising. Right now you type on your keyboard, its inefficient. Well lets just imagine the key board and type in space then used a camera hooked up to a computer to observe the fingers. This is possible today but pointless. How about if electrodes were planted in your arm and acted on the signals before they reached your fingers. Again, we could do this today. How about we tracked the signals back and intercepted them via an implant in the brain. This is today's cutting edge. However things are moving fairly fast. There already exist mechanisms that can detect brainwaves and people have been trained to move a mouse around a screen just by thinking about it. The interface is kinda clunky at the moment, they have to think about sex to move left and right, or oceans to move up and down. Still, it's a proof of concept, things will improve.

Screw wearable PC's, bring on the implants. With the kind of information density, we can manage these days it's actually worthwhile. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to remember everything ever said to you, or said by you. If nothing else, it would be a great help when you get into one of those "he said, she said" arguments. With todays technology you could build a portable device that remembers and voice recognizes everything you ever hear for five years. A little further down the line, and you'll be able to get an implant which will let you remember everything you ever saw. When the interface gets good enough, it will be pointless to worry about whether its stored in neurons or stored on a chip.

BT are already working on the foundations for a device that could be installed in the brain to store everything you ever see,hear feel touch or smell. Its called project "Soul Catcher", I'm not making this up.

And for all those out there who think we're going to evolve into a race of cyborgs: you're crazy... it'll go MUCH further than that.

After all, once people have got decent hardware implanted in their heads, do you think we're going to be satisfied with a 200baud connection (human speech). No, we'll use the hardware in our heads to communicate with other people (through the hardware in their heads). With sufficient communication, it stops making sense to talk about multiple communicating processors - you end up with a single, massively parallel computer. When people get used to the taking part in the enhanced meta-brain it will become literally unthinkable to go back being an individual entity. You might as well try to imagine what it would be like to be a mollusc. Don't believe me ? - we already have this idea of "however did we manage without the internet", it's only been in mainstream use for 2 years !

We will become the Borg, but not in a bad way. If you combine the properties of humans and computers and end up with something which does not have the best of both.. then you haven't done it right. The internet will evolve from being a global suppository of all human knowledge into actually being humanity. We will be the nodes on the network. It won't take long either. Just a couple of hundred years or so at this rate. If Alan's idea of the universe being consious and human brains being resonators is correct, you can just think of it as building a bigger resonator.

Of course, this is bound to cause a little friction during the transitional period. Some people will doubtless object, and probably consider the end of humanity as we know it to be a bad thing. I don't think the induhviduals (as Dogbert would have it) will stand much of a chance though, they'll be seriously out-smarted and the reliance which regular humanity places on computers will make them pathetically unable to fight against those who have plugged in. The HumaNet might have to annihilate them to protect itself. It's a bit like the old chestnut of being trapped in a room with a potential madman - you best kill him first in case he's thinking the same thing that you are. The HumaNet and humanity will essentially be different species so the potential for distrust and misunderstanding is high.

Personally I hope that won't be necessary. The HumaNet will probably be smart enough to protect itself without resorting to annihilation even if humanity tries to destroy it. The HumaNet will take pleasure in letting some loose humans roam free - in the same way that we like to think of Apes still living wild and free in the jungle.


From: Basil Rathbone Fishburg the Infinite

Is it just me, or does this post scare the bejeezus out of anyone else?? I'm happily contented with my individuality, thank you. I think the "Borg" concept is something we can (possibly) achieve thru technology, but I don't want it, my brothers wouldn't want it, and god help me my children won't want it either.

I agree with the statements on human-computer interaction. This is definitely the area most needing development. The hardware technology will of course continue to increase but it's the interface that needs the most work. My personal interests are in user-interfaces (voice recognition technology and 3D-UI's). However I'm of the firm belief that implants are exactly the wrong direction. Build peripherals to read or influence brainwaves (ala the 'trodes in Gibson's Neuromancer series), fine. But don't even think about putting a jack in my skull!!

Instead of the Borg, I'd much rather have the Federation's computer technology. A semi-intelligent voice interface, touch-pad controls that can be reconfigured via software, holosuite-style techology to provide full 3D immersion in a virtual world if that's desired (but not required for basic information access). Nothing that's outside the realm of possibility these days; we just need to work the bugs out.


From: Alan Carter

Some applications of the thinking (and a few run-of-the-mill but informed observations) applied to Direct Neural Interface (DNI), Intelligence Amplification (IA), Upload, the Borg - and selfishness.

Direct Neural Interface

This means installing the interface inside our bodies. What for? As a first cut, lets just think about data input and output, rather than any kind of conceptual or otherwise IO.

I could have a nerve attached to a bioelectronic transducer so that I get a particular sensation as a monitored quantity in the outside world changes. This technology exists. Another transducer might rewire the nerve that controls my left little finger. I can now sense and react. This saves me watching a monitor and pressing a button. In some circumstances this might be useful. In "Shadrach in the Furnace" by Robert Silverberg about 1976, a tyrant is so wired into his doctor. His doctor can then stop his heart by clenching his fist, and he's never away from the controls. Oops. In a more extreme example I might have a bit of my visual cortex connected to a video card, like the detective in Gibson's "Virtual Light" whose expert system overlays cartoon arrows pointing out clues at the scene of the crime. There is a per pixel relationship between the optic nerves and cells in the retina, so this is possible, even if I have to wait for nanotechnological assemblers to do the wiring.

Most of this invasive embedding of kit is pretty un-necessary. Three years ago the Nokia 9000 cellular telephone and PDA did the critical integration. We are now ready to put the next stage in the toyshops. Eyewriters that paint an image on the retina using a low power scanning laser fired from spectacles have been demonstrated. Nokia is now offering an 11Mbs wireless LAN that uses PCMCIA cards for use on large campuses such as airports. The next generation keystroke input device is on the way - I know 'cos I helped invent it (see below). Negreponte will soon have a computer I can put in my shoe and I'm away. Why do I need to risk injecting nannys into my head, even if Seven of Nine looks kind of cute?

Intelligence Amplification

What we're really after of course is not really a TV in our heads. It's more like the protagonist in "True Names" by Vernor Vinge, who is deluged by the data available on the Internet until he "uses all of it" - uses the processing power as well as the storage capacity. We want to be "vastened" like Robinette Broadhead in the Heechee novels by Fred Pohl. I reckon that the idea that we can ever create plug-in technological wisdom is fundamentally flawed. This is because I've already been vastened. Once I was a small child with a simple Map and so limited opportunities to draw insights from it. I had to draw the insights that were available and add them to my Map to make it bigger. Iterate, and I am vastened to my current state. Wisdom is determined by the scale and quality of one's Map. It is this that determines the profundity of the insights I can draw in any situation, determining my right action. The only way that I can build my unified, integrated Map is to build my Map. If you give me a big chunk of a Map on a ROM, I've still got to go over all of it, connecting it to my Map, before its useful.

We must be careful to avoid the errors in the M0 paradigm that insist that anything in the universe, including my own growing awareness, is a thing distinct from myself - seperated from myself by an eternal, invisble system boundary. It isn't like that. I am me.

Think of the comments relating to Hermetic Journeys in the Programmers' Stone. When the essence of a part of reality is added to my Map, It's like I've eaten the essense and made it part of my own self, just like I can eat a biscuit and make it part of my body. Henceforth, I'll spot isomorphic situations because the essence is now part of me. Unless its part of me, I don't have this direct access. So I don't think a Map on a ROM is really much better than a Map in a book. I've got to eat it all. Maybe hypertext makes the eating a bit easier, but that's all.

I interpret this business of combing over impressions and fitting data into one's Map as the "being-partkdolg-duty" in Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson", whereby "Objective Reason is perfected" and the "body kedsjan" forms.

Maybe with help from DNI I could be provided with ever more subtle machine Viziers, who observe my actions, and help me with expert systems logic. We've already got that kind of thing, in websites that tailor content per surfer. But they won't be able to pick up my half-formed impressions from within the "me" boundary, and give me what I didn't quite know I wanted yet. I have to communicate somehow with them. And such viziers would be a two-edged sword. All kings know that viziers only tell them what they want to hear. I wouldn't like another feedback loop that auto-restricted my inputs based on my preconceptions in my head - I've got one already called life!

Maybe there's some milage for the "partials" of Greg Bear's "Eon" - the "Olivers" of John Brunner's "Shockwave Rider" and "Jagged Orbit"? These are expert systems that fake it over viewscreens to deal with routine stuff, and whistle for help when they get out of their depth. Frankly, in a deritualised society just interfacing our systems and reserving head-to-head for interesting stuff would make more sense.

There is one aspect of vastening that I'd hold out great hope for. It returns to the comments I made about MDMA and the visual field. In "4: Consciousness" I propose that there may well be an electrothermal feedback loop of much lower sophistication than we have ever suspected being the neural correlate of consciousness (as Francis Crick is pleased to call it). I have suggested that by making the stochastic coolings that can occur in this loop as a result of multifractally co-ordinated sensory inputs bigger, by heating the brain, we can increase the size of our conceptual field.

How does this tie in with the above? It's like our Maps are too big for our brains. At any time, chunks of my Map are in the electrothermal loop being cooled to generate insights, while parts are sitting (largely) dormant in chemical memory. Think of RAM and disk swap. A limit on how fast I can perform being-partkdolg-duty is how big my RAM is. I don't see why we shouldn't just add more electrothermal resonator (out of the blue bucket of nannys) to make the conceptual field bigger and the insights obtained more profound. This would speed the "eating" process of course, helping me to get vastened more quickly. But there's no point in doing this until I have learned to use the RAM I've already got, which is pretty much a dead art in our societies today. Again, no wisdom on a chip. To put it another way, if you've got wisdom on a chip, its the chip that's wise, not you. And you'll probably argue with everything the chip tells you!

Upload

Port yourself into a computer. Called Upload instead of download because where we're going is supposed to be better than where we've come from. I am currently running on a physical object in space called my brain. (Plus various hormones etc - would I still be me if I could not know Fear? Sexual Arousal? What about "gut feelings" - there's mounting evidence that the solar plexus does indeed play a part in mentation.)

There is not any other world. No other reality that my body is connected to by invisible silver cords or anything else. There are two causal sequences in play, because of the two arrows of time in "3: Reciprocal Cosmology", and over the ages people free of dopamine self-addiction and with their minds the right way around have described this as the "spiritual" causality. In Ghost Not afflicted societies this is always interpreted as something different to the reality around us. (Rudolf Steiner explicitly states that the precondition for spirtual perception is the recognition that there is a backwards evolution in time.)

If I can run on one physical platform, I can run on another. So far so good. But I have a nasty feeling that we have not yet shown that Upload is possible. What bugs me is that "I" - my perception of myself as existing in time from one moment to the next, is a consequence of information building on itself. It is the building that is "me" - not what is built. If you prefer, I'm a fistula between the creative and re-creative arrows of time which is seeing implicit structure on the creative stream, and making it explicit on the re-creative stream. How does one copy a hole? That which has been built can be copied - if only by two collaborating sets of nannys from the red and green buckets, one monitoring my total neural state and the other reproducing it somewhere else. But the building? Here I'm not so sure. Maybe its like wisdom - I can get from here to there, but only by traversing the intervening space. Maybe we can extend the physical limits of my RAM, let my old RAM die, slowly replace bits of my chemical memory, so there is always a "me", but we can't Xerox "me".

The Borg

The Borg is a picture of total integration as conceived in a society of people addicted to their own boredom products and with their minds turned inside out by the delusion that anything they don't already "know" doesn't exist. Nothing happens in the Borg cubes. They don't do anything. With all the cultural richness the Borg have assimilated, you'd think they'd be more fun. And it's done by turning people who are already nothing more than totally proceduralised machines into machines better integrated at the hardware level. It's a completely M0 kind of a fantasy.

I'm currently working on something called the "1000 Minds". It's going to be what the Borg really should be. Like all good hacks it does several things at once, and like everything else worth doing, it creates benefits for all through following selfish motives - the desire to bring authentic benefits to myself.

We'e all ex UK Defence Research Agency types. Our initial hardware technology consists of several kinds of input devices. The best is an optical tracker that can follow movements of the head or other body parts. This can be manufactured for $50 (as opposed to the defence version which costs $10,000 per unit). Manufacture should be started by late February. It means that a person who is restricted to head movements or a finger twitch can use these to control a mouse. Alternatively we can use it as a comfortable and ridiculously sensitive zero force switch.

We've also got software that can read the tracker, microswiches etc., and then issue commands to Linux as if the keyboard and mouse was being used. It can do macros and run programs, and has a specialist menu for using vi. I've used the interface myself for a week, and have controlled web servers, written emails, used Netscape, and even used the interface to enhance itself. Therefore the bootstrap is started. The software is still primitive, and the Windows version is lagging behind the Linux version, but it's coming along. We installed the latest version with an alpha tester who broke her neck 5 years ago this afternoon. It needs simplifying more because she needs to learn systems as well as her new interface :-(

Anyway, armed with this stuff, we can give a person who has lost all movement (usually road traffic accidents, falling off mountains etc.) full Internet access. I have no doubt that we'll be able to get the effective output rate of people up to that of a blind programmer I once worked with, who used a Braille keyboard. This means that the users will be able to do useful jobs, earn money, control their own bank account, and thus be able to tell people to fuck off, which is the definition of freedom I use in this circumstance. They will be in the same situation as myself. Take away my spectacles and I'm not a software engineer any more. Take away my insulin injector and I'm dead inside two months. Same difference.

Software in the pipeline will have genetic algorithms for heuristically optimising the layouts of menus that work by sequencers and single clicks, file choosers, word pickers, fancy macros and other good bits. We're going to use commercially available electronics controllers like X10 and IR toys to do environmental control and stuff. Later waldos for doing things like scratching noses and hiding pornography. I look forward to the day when one of my users is had up in court for fitting a canister of chemical Mace to his wheelchair. Don't get sanctimonious about "advocating violence" please - I'm not. But if I've done the job well, some people will use the kit to extend their abilities to defend themselves (currently zero) and in their shoes I would probably feel the same way.

But the really good bit is what happens next. One person can't do too much to improve their situation with the limited stuff we've got, but it's nearly enough to get a gestalt effect. We put the software on a website along with instructions to enable non-specialists to lift the sales manager's old PC before his kids get it, load Linux and the software and connect their friends or relatives to the site. There they find training materials, groupware and peopleware (respects to DeMarco and Lister for the eponymous book). The groupware will do little things like collect statistics from all instances of EnglishProseLowerCaseMenu and distribute the optimisations, but it will do big things too.

We've got loads of people coming onto the website, learning how to use Linux and needing a team effort to work. This is the very best circumstance for democracy to work. All can read and inform themselves, all need the team effort to work, and no-one can mouth off because they are output limited. I'm saying that low bandwidth is an ASSET for creating HumaNet!!!! There's a trick that comes in here. We all know when we are in the presence of another awake person - a mapper. What is extraordinary is that after a couple of years staring at the wall, a great many brain injured people become blantantly awake. You just look at them and you know. Somehow they break through the other side of boredom addiction. Don't ask me how but they are awake It must be hell. Or maybe there's something known only to them and St. Theresa of Avila. Whatever. What the groupware does is assist mapper convergence to objective reality by supporting dialogues between output limited people. This enables the group to "coadunate". This effect is discussed in Eric S. Raymond's paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man". We have things like discussion groups where people can post statements. Others can then endorse or reject the statement with a click, and the system sorts the most active statements to the top. We need modelling tools where a group Map can be displayed - UML meets SGML on a Zetetic gameboard (don't know how to do that yet). We need sophisticated support for caucuses and overlapping interest groups. Smart repositories designed for facilitating sharing rather than locking out assholes. And so on.

And using the groupware, entangled with it at all points of both structures I expect to see an emergent layer of peopleware. I'll give an example. (Remember that as with the Situation Rehearsals in the Stone, all members know what the group is doing, but know their own bit best of all. All are co-ordinated not by policemen forcing them to act to avoid punishment but positively by mapper convergence to objective reality. This is how Linux was built.)

One day the statement "We must do something about bedsores" gets to the top of the MainAgenda discussion group. Assessors - people with the knack of seeing the parts of the answer before they know what it is - start doing literature searches to learn about bedsores. They feed their little nuggets to Synthesists - people who are good at seeing big pictures. Synthesists put the Map together and pass it to Investigators for verification and fleshing out. They call on Implementors to perform experiments, perhaps using waldo assisted organic chemistry labs. Eventually the Map yeilds up a series of options that cannot be further illuminated without serious committment of resources. These are then considered, and the massed value judgements of the entire group make the call. Perhaps an inflating massage pad with multiple cells and a complex movement pattern is called for. This is designed, and the software is written, by groups of Implementors who work togther because they enjoy it, and sub-divide tasks amongst themselves. Each simple class might take a slow moving person a long working day to write. But they write 200 classes in parallel, so it only takes one day. All the while the only words written will be by Poets - people who are very good at expressing key truths very succinctly, and watching everything. No-one will ever begin a sentence "...but", as in "my factoid denies your factoid". Always the deeper truth must be found.

The idea isn't to solve the problem - its to build something that will first solve the problem, and then be available to do other problems. As Dan Goldin said of the Space Station, it's a capability, not a mission.

And that is what HumaNet will look like - no lasers embedded in the head, just an ever more complex entanglement of the clear interface between peopleware and groupware, in the absense of the endemic assholeism of our present societies. It worked with Linux.

Selfishness

This is an example of how my selfish desire to obtain the authentic benefits of sharing a planet with the 1000 Minds (later the 1000000 Minds) plus the commercial spinoffs of tackling a much more general HCI problem (surgeons gloved up using trackers, new generation mobile phones), can only bring authentic benefits to the initial user base, people who buy spiffy mobile phones for reasonable prices, and society at large which gets a bunch of people who contribute instead of being a burden to be carried.

In conventional thinking, I should either be "altruistic" (which is really being anti-selfish), give all my kit to the local school, and trash the project, or be "selfish" (which is really being anti-altruistic) and refuse to let the users have the software until they have money, and again trash the project.

Authentic benefit to self can only bring authentic benefit to others. The trick is being smart enough to understand what "authentic" means, and that means having all cognitive layers running and one's head the right way around.

Perversions

Just some creepy thoughts.

I suppose it might be possible to get the kind of telepathy whereby one person knows what another is thinking before they've even formulated the thought by connecting the electrothermal resonators of two brains while they are still gestating. Then you'd get a single "me" with two bodies and a very nasty case of deja vu when the phasing went wrong. I can't see the point. Moreover, I can't see many mothers standing for it - they get very protective of their little monsters and quite right too. So you'll have to keep the foetus in a box, like in "Life of Brian".

If the current state of affairs goes on, all employees of large firms will have pressure detectors implanted in their bladders so that Petty Snotnose from Personell can determine if they really need to go to the toilet. I'd rather die.

The ultimate model of everything in existance that pervades M0 society, due to the effect of the Ghost Not, is that it is a machine with a closed state space that is disconnected from the thinker. This includes the thinker's own mind. One can see the error, "My mind is a machine that is disconnected from me" in a lot of discussions of IA. Such people really will wire themselves into production lines given the chance, and make the Borg a reality, spots, pasty-faced complexion and all. As above.

Alan

P. S. Compare "3: Reciprocal Cosmology" with "6: History". Can you see what I mean? I reckon that's a back-echo of HumaNet right there. Never mind what people who don't have the faintest idea what it is have "said" it is in the past.