Archive for May, 2010

Singular Now


The Singularity is coming…

…or so says Ray Kurzweil.

And while technicians, sci-fi writers, and futurists quibble over the details of the Singularity, within these we find that fundamental questions remain unasked—questions so integral to Singularity Studies that, until they are answered, each talking point amounts to little more than piss in the theoretical river. I’ll get around to those questions in a minute, but first, what is the Singularity, exactly?

A recent Singularity Go-To Guide on io9.com states:

The term singularity describes the moment when a civilization changes so much that its rules and technologies are incomprehensible to previous generations. Think of it as a point-of-no-return in history. ¶ Most thinkers believe the singularity will be jump-started by extremely rapid technological and scientific changes. These changes will be so fast, and so profound, that every aspect of our society will be transformed, from our bodies and families to our governments and economies.

Likewise, the Wikipedia entry Technological Singularity:

Technological singularity refers to a prediction in Futurology that technological progress will become extremely fast, and consequently will make the future (after the technological singularity) unpredictable and qualitatively different from today. … ¶ Theoretically, if a machine built by humans could bring to bear greater problem-solving and inventive skills than humans, then it could design a yet more capable machine. If built, this more capable machine then could design a machine of even greater capability. These iterations could accelerate, leading to recursive [machine-based] self improvement. … ¶ It is alternately suggested that a singularity could come about through amplification of human intelligence to the point that the resulting transhumans would be incomprehensible to their purely biological counterparts.

And going back to Kurzweil’s original definition (taken from the Wikipedia entry on Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near):

Kurzweil first defines the Singularity as a point in the future when technological advances begin to happen so rapidly that normal humans cannot keep pace, and are “cut out of the loop.” Kurzweil emphasizes that this will have a profound, disruptive effect on human societies and on everyday life, and will mark the end of human history as we know it. In place of normal humans, Strong Artificial Intelligences and cybernetically augmented humans will become the dominant forms of sentient life on the Earth.

So, in a quick, extrapolated, digested summary, the Singularity is a time/point when most of the following will (have) be(come) true:

  • Technological advance is so rapid that normal humans can’t keep up (though transhumans are probably okay with it);
  • The political and economic structure of the pre-Singularity world (heh… the Pluralistic World) has been destroyed by the Singularity and *something new* has taken their place;
  • The social structure of the world exists in a manner previously unknown (i.e., lacking a good deal of the Universal Features of Human Culture)

Sounds reasonable enough, right? Sound like a good old-fashion testable scientific hypothesis, right? Maybe not. At least one major question has been left unaddressed, namely…

Will we recognize the Singularity when we see it?

Humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future—most predicted futures are little more than gussied-up present-days; is there any reason that our predictions for the world of the Singularity should be any different?

When I was a kid in the early 1990s, AT&T did a series of commercials—the “You Will” ad campaign—about what the amazing AT&T-jet-pack enabled future would look like. At the time—less than 20 years ago, mind you—everything they showed us seemed unimaginably far-off, like an honest-to-dirt Star Trekian future. I finally found those commercials on YouTube recently, and, well… see for yourself:

Rewatching them now, is there anything in “You Will” that still feels like The Future? Most of that showcased technology now seems beyond commonplace, bordering on clunky, old, and antiquated. Again, this was less than 20 years ago. As quoted on io9, of the coming Singularity, MIT Research Scientist Rodney Brooks said:

“The lives of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be as unrecognizable to us as our use of information technology … would be incomprehensible to someone form the dawn of the twentieth century.”

But because each of these generations coexists alongside one another, what may be Singularity-like advances as understood by the younger generations would a priori be misinterpreted by older generations. After all, how could anyone be expected to recognize something that’s by definition unrecognizable? Is there any greater hubris than to believe we would comprehend the fundamentally incomprehensible?

Which brings us to a second question: How should we demarcate the pre- & post- Singularity worlds from each other? Or, in other words, when has the Singularity arrived? Has the singularity arrived when the first forays into post-Singularity type advances occur? Has the Singularity arrived only after technology, government, medical treatment, and society have all advanced to their post-Singularity states? Has the Singularity arrived only after the entirety planet has caught up with itself, or can the Singularity hit different nation-states at different times?

It seems unreasonable to expect to wait for the whole world to catch up before we start hailing the arrival of The Singularity. After all, we’ve been talking about the Information Age for over two decades now, even though many parts of the world still don’t have clean drinking water. I’m not getting on a worldcare soapbox, I’m just pointing out that even with the Singularity we should expect some trickle-down stragglers. Is there then a critical point where >n people need to have been affected by the Singularity before we acknowledge it?

How about the four-part paradigm shift—Technology, Society, Government, Medical—the Singularity will bring? We surely can’t expect to wait for each of these to fall in line before we claim the Singularity is here. Government is notoriously slow to change, the diffusion of medical care relies on a government, which relies on a Society that’s eternally fractured into the more progressive and more traditionalist camps. It seems that Technology will be the first to change, ushering in the other cultural pillars. This is nothing new and is wholly in line with Kurzweil’s outline. But, again, when do we start to describe the world as post-Singular? Only after all four entities catch up? That will likely take much longer than the 35 years we have left before Kurzweil says we’ll be post-Singularity (2045).

So, summing up the major questions… Regardless of where one stands in the Singularity debate, we still don’t have a reasonable answer to whether we’ll notice the change or how the change will proceed. This can be further reduced to saying that while Kurzweil et al. appear to have a good idea of the *post-* Singularity and *pre-* Singularity worlds; they don’t have even a suggestion for what the *intra-*Singularity world might look like. Which brings me to my third point…

The Singularity is already here…
…it landed, hit, happened—whatever—sometime between 2008 and 2009. Sometime around when the supposedly infallible world economies started to collapse, sometime around when Communist China morphed into Capitalism, sometime around when every phone became a smart-phone.

We’ve already moved into the realms of transhumanism, with artificial arms, artificial legs, and artificial eyes. And while these may, for now, be mere single instances—case studies—in transhumanity, that’s my point. What’s the critical level, how many transhumans must we have, before we admit they’re here? [I'd also point out that we post-modern humans are a far cry from our pre- and early-modern brethren in other ways as well].

And what of technology? As the Cybertheorist blog reminds us, the world at large has already hit the Age of the Zettabyte, while here in the U.S., defending the homeland is becoming more about virtual security than geophysical defense. And, as I’ve pointed to in previous posts, current human interaction with technology is both much further reaching and more unlike previous communication analogues than I think we realize.

That is to say, I think we have already reached the age where the older generation doesn’t understand technology or society—at least not in the same ways that their kids and grandkids do. Perhaps rather than debating the Singularity and what the post-Singularity wold will look like, we should start to accept that we’re already living it—the Singularity isn’t near, the Singularity is now.

-doug

Beauty beholden and beheld


I saw Iron Man 2 last night…
The Boy From 1963…but rather than give a two-weeks-late-to-the-party review, I’d like instead to focus on the scene depicting Stark Expo ‘74. In the first place, they were off by about 10 years–the aesthetics of that scene were lifted straight from Walt Disney’s Epcot promos, and while the park didn’t begin until 1978; the promo film Jon Favreau wonderfully stole was Disney’s 1966 introduction to the Epcot Plan. The “work here, live here, play here” designs of today’s urban renewal projects look like lipstick on a mixed-use chicken compared to the underground roads, automated people movers, and nuclear powered hair salons of Disney’s fabled tomorrowland. I know it’s been said before, but really, 40+ years later, where’s my fucking jetpack?

In the second place, I will never stop loving the optimistic aesthetic of the post-Kennedy 1960s. Nothing says “Don’t worry; things are getting better! Tomorrow will be great, next week amazing, next year unimagiable!” quite like white plastic countertops with tangerine and lemon appliances.

Building upon the atomic-era kitsch-style of the 1950s, refining the passive Formica patterns boomeranging around barely understood physics, beyond the naivety of McCarthyist optimism came the hyperreal idealism of the 1960s. That bright, glowing, everywhere-can-be-Florida look that congealed a decade later, heralded by Tang and other artificial living. An aesthetic that triggered science, a look that compelled exploration; rather than providing just a limp metaphor for emotion, the color swatchbooks of the 1960s worked to actively trigger those emotions.

Josef Albers’s Color Harmonies, 1963

For example, take a look at Josef Albers’s 1963 Color Harmonies paradigm. As Albers understood, “feeling blue” isn’t just sadness, it’s melancholy and serious and reflective. Or, looked at another way, when I’m melancholy, I may also be a little bit serene, serious, reflective, or even mighty, but I won’t be lucid. If I think I’m feeling both melancholy and lucid, I’m not—I’m serious or reflective, instead. Sounds about right, doesn’t it?

But that was a paradigm for 1963; that was how things worked in a just-after-Camelot duck-and-cover world. In today’s world we have a different sense of beauty, a stranger brand of optimism, a more sophisticated way to feel. It’s not only new words like “disordered, dysfuncitonal, and dysemic” that we need for these awkward new feelings, but wholly new shades of rose to color our glasses; a Pantone Matching System to accompany the DSM-V; a new way to process the colors of our lives.

Colorformatics: Précis on Color as Information

You’re afraid of the dark (or at least you used to be). But why? What’s waiting for you in the dark? Is it the primordial beginning trying to reclaim you? The fairytale forest hiding wolves and ogres that want to eat you? The urban legend backseat where a man with a hook waits to maul you? Maybe. Or maybe the dark is more basic than all of that. Maybe, I would like to suggest, the dark is nothing but a simple lack of information, and our fear nothing more than cautious erring in a low-information situation.

If the color—the space, the emotion, the mood, the condition—of low-information content is black, then it’s corollary—white—is the color of input, the color of information, the color of data, the color of light.

City night streets after a torrent of rain; the pavement is slick, puddles and miasmas of wetness abound. Each drop collects, reflects, and refracts the little light that’s available, doubling, tripling, n-tupling the red of the stoplight, the halogen coral of the street lamp. Each drop multiplies the mid-century-modern data of the scene. At times there’s so much reproduced information that a cacophony of light erupts; too much to see, too much to take in, too much to process.

This is the basic dichotomy, the balance between everything and nothing, information available and wanting. As light becomes dark, as white gives way to black, we need a new vision of the color wheel to capture this emotional infotech chiarascurro. And thanks to the wonders of blog-world, I think I’ve found it.

Nemcsics 1974 - Coloroid Model Although based on Nemcsics’s 1974 Coloroid Model (left), the 2001 Revised Color Wheel of an anonymous blogger from a decade ago (right) has really captured my heart. This weird graphic is surely the way I feel, the semiosis for my infinite being. This isn’t just a pretty picture or a color-theory dorkathon, but a whole new way to think about the metaphors we live by.

Looking at the unnamed blogger’s Escherian stairway of color you find you’re “green with envy” precisely because you have a lot of the information for a given situation, but not enough to understand the truth (and, depending on how much you know or don’t, your envy takes on shades of feeling yellow or blue…). The “purpled royalty” live woefully uninformed about the ways of life of the peasants you lord over. The bright orange traffic signs provide exactly the information you need—Caution!—but no more, while the red of a stoplight tells you to learn more before you continue. The red of anger, likewise, is born of knowing 100% of your side of the story, but almost none of the other side. And what about those cases where you’re suffering from a surfeit of information—knowing nearly but not quite all? You grow yellow with cowardice in times when all you lack is knowledge of the outcome, while if you know so much that your mind can’t let you sleep, but not quite enough to reach the white light of nirvana… well, that’s what the yellow wallpaper is all about, isn’t it? And there in the middle, the compass rose pointing to all the other colors, is the silvery gray of a mirror; giving back exactly the information put into it, no more, no less.

And me? I’m almost in the dark. I know where I’ve been, but not where I’m headed. I don’t know if what’s happened before will help, hinder, or even be applicable to what will happen next. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think; I don’t know how I got here; I am lacking information. That is, I’m feeling blue.

More slices of the aesthetic wheel

This post was kicked off by my recent purchase of Enoch Light’s Provocative Percussion vol. 4, with a cover design by Josef Albers.

Though, really, Suzanne Vega’s Night Vision would have been equally appropriate.

A thorough Googling of Josef Albers came up with these two most informative posts:
A review the Hirshhorn Museum’s Josef Albers exhibition on Artblart & DesignBloom’s summary of Albers’s stained-glass windows exhibit at Musée Matisse. Looking at Albers’s stained glass in light of Colorformatics, we see the black and white bars become the request and dissemination of information, a conversation against the backdrop of a certain mood.

The Handprint website? blog? course-notes? of an unknown author (Benet?). This is where the 2001 Revised Color Wheel comes from. I am deeply indebted to this unknown writer.

The Tecta products page… marketing desk lamps inspired by Albers.

A wholesome dose of beautiful retro-futurism from the Formica Corporation. Click on the typewriter icon and go to Retro Gallery. It’s well worth it.

And finally, the cartoon that really formed my aesthetic mind, Bugs Bunny’s Hare-way to the Stars:

Why, yes, I know how to type…


I’m stuck…
…in a dead-end, low-paying, unskilled office labor job. Frankly, the job is beneath me. That’s not me being uppity—even though I have a ridiculously high IQ, 5+ years of experience as a programs manager, and a god-damned Ph.D.—the job is beneath all of my seven co-workers as well (well, almost all of them). It’s a piece-of-shit job and we’re being tossed the lips-and-assholes at this asswad company’s steak dinner. I won’t even go into my distaste at working for a publishing company where no one on the actual payroll (that’s right… I’m a ‘temp’) knows the difference between “who’s” and “whose.” I don’t want my blood to boil any more than it already is…

With that in mind, I’ve been seeking other options and, a few weeks back, I thought I had found a good one that was going to pan out. The job, as described, was for a computer repair technician—no experience needed—at slightly fewer hours per week, but 175% of the pay of my current job. Sounds good to me. Making more, working less, doing something I would actually enjoy, using my phenomenal problem-solving skills for good… y’know, adult-type work.

So, I go through the motions, send off my resume and cover-letter (cover-letter, n. : the most pointless 500 words I’ve ever written; now written hundreds of times in the quest for a decent work-life), and wait. Weeks I sit, hearing nothing from anyone, which actually feels better than hearing “You have a Ph.D.? You’re overqualified for this job. Sorry.” which is what I heard over and over again in my last major job-hunt, the one that landed me in the proofreading idiotarchy, six months ago. And then, luck be with me, about a month ago I got a nibble.

“Hey, Doug. Sorry it took me so long to respond to your e-mail, things have been hectic around here. We’re interested in you as a job candidate, just answer these five questions about customer service in the computer repair industry and if we like what you have to say, we’ll set up an interview.”

So I answer the five questions. I respond succinctly but well, thoroughly researching, editing, and proofing my answers, and send off the e-mail. I wait another week for the response—a response which comes at 9am.

“Hey Doug. We really liked how you answered our test questions. Could you meet us today for a lunch interview? Say around 11?”

Yes, of course I could meet you for an interview. That’s what this whole this is about, right? RIGHT? Even though you’ve given me a scant two hours to respond, shave, shower, dress, and prepare myself. Yes, yes I could meet you at 11. Sounds great. See you then.

The lunch interview, all 25 minutes of it, goes great. Two nice guys from the small six-person company; I choke down a couple of their “hot receptionist” jokes without going off on my ‘Don’t assume I’m straight’ rant, etc etc etc. It ends thus:

“Okay, well, we think you’re probably the best candidate for this position. The problem is, we haven’t told the manager yet that we’re looking to hire someone. He knows we should, though, and he knows we need to, but we just have to find a way to break it to him gently—he kind of freaks out sometimes when something isn’t his idea. So it might take a couple weeks for us to get back to you. Is that okay?”

You haven’t told the *manager* yet? You have to break it to him gently? WTF? But, of course, I haven’t got anything else on my plate, so sure, why not? Take all the time you need.

Another week passes by. On Thursday of the second post-interview week, I get an e-mail:

“Hey Doug, sorry for the short notice, but it’s taking forever to really get this process going. Could you go ahead and come into the shop for about three hours this Saturday? You’ll get paid $30 and we wouldn’t ask you to actually fix anything yet, just come in, hang out, see how the shop is set up, stuff like that.”

Yes, I can come in on Saturday. No, sadly, I didn’t have any other plans for my one real day off. Sounds great; I’ll see you then.

“Oh, PS. Just to warn you, we’re not always tremendously prompt in opening, so if you get there right around 10 and it looks like no one is there, don’t panic. A receptionist by the name of Janelle will be opening. Just wait around outside for her.”

At this point, I’m feeling good about my potential new job. 1/3 of the office I’ve already met and like well enough, they don’t open promptly so one assumes they’re pretty laid back… all is well, I am excited.

I get there, promptly, at 10 and the shop is not yet open. I’ll be waiting another half an hour for the shop to get opened. It goes downhill from here.

Long story short, the manager (who you can read about here), who had to have the news of my hire ‘broken to him gently,’ still hadn’t had the news broken to him and, therefore, had no idea I was coming in. Neither did anyone else, apparently. And no one but the receptionist was going to be in all day. So I sat there for three hours, doing nothing, chatting with Janelle, the 24-year-old receptionist with two too many layers of hungover whorescara on, while she answered phones, told me about her daughter, and gave me the low-down on my potential new coworkers. The potential new coworkers ran the gamut of awful, including but not limited to:

• the owner, a recently recovering (we think; he disappeared for a couple months last fall and claimed he’d gone into rehab, but who knows?) crack addict who regularly tries to cheat his workers out of their paychecks;
• the manager (see link above);
• coworker Neil, who often forgets to come in because he’s trying to smoke himself into a higher plane of being, but don’t touch his blunts if you see them lying around—he’s protective of his stash;
• coworker Kevin, an overweight man in his late-30s who snorts Ritalin off his work desk (HIS COMPUTER REPAIR STATION WORK DESK), collects parrots and other rare birds, and has an omitted fondness for well-developed 15-year-old girls. Yes, the pictures of Emma Watson and Jodie Foster (from Taxi Driver, natch) are his.  I wouldn’t go into the bathroom after him if I were you.

Are you kidding me? Is this what the job market has come down to? Working for functional idiots or miscreant non-idiots? And the real punch line? I still haven’t heard back from them about the job.  I’ll probably get an e-mail with my work schedule sometime next month.  Please let me have another job by then…

-doug

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