Assisted suicide : Writer's Rest meets Unofficial Cambridge Film Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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21 November

Brain-controlled robot interface. Look at something, robot knows what you want. tinyurl.com/clznfxk
— Lindsay Edmunds (@EdmundsLE) November 20, 2012

@edmundsle I'll take a peek later - but I'm guessing : is it like speech recognition, in that the robot only gets any good through training?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 20, 2012

@theagentapsley IT is an EEG controlled interface, which is brain waves. HOW it happens I do not know.
— Lindsay Edmunds (@EdmundsLE) November 20, 2012

@edmundsle Suicide by proxy: I associate a thought with a knife lunged at me. If I later cannot do this myself... © Belston Night Works 2012
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 20, 2012

@theagentapsley Now that is a wild idea. Thoughts have always been powerful, advances in AI are on way to making them concretely powerful.
— Lindsay Edmunds (@EdmundsLE) November 20, 2012

@edmundsle Yes, wild (and kind of repellent, unsure why), but I hope that you liked it: to me obviouswhich is why X's mind doesn't map Y's
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 20, 2012

Short story now Work in Progress (no Exagmination or Incamination involved)...


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More from Writer's Rest I

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18 October

Lindsay Edmunds has set off some more thoughts, this time in relation to whether a PIN could, for fraudulent use, be identified by scanning someone's brain-waves, and what the limitations are of our thinking, the technology, and how we relate them.

Read more at Run Away! Mind-Hackers Can Harvest Your Brain!...


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The Perfection Thing - over at Writer's Rest

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14 October

Lindsay, again, has set off some interesting talk in the realm of AI with a recent case of applying The Turing Test.

To read your correspondent's and other people's comments, go to The Perfection Thing.


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News from Writer's Rest

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8 September

Lindsay's latest posting at http://writersrest.com/2012/09/06/pretending-to-be-human-the-latest-thing-in-robo-calls/#comment-1542 has enthused me to write this :


Ah, The Turing Test, one of the beloved things that returns and returns, and always pays returns!

I always had an interest in Alan Turing and his fellow theorists and code-breakers, and had been to the place that gave rise to the present GCHQ (the UK’s Government Communications HQ), but seeing the play about his life, brilliantly performed by an all-amateur cast, had me taking my then girlfriend that same weekend to that place in Buckinghamshire, Bletchley Park.

Turing’s sister (who calls him Alan M. Turing) has written a book about him, which I shall some day read, as I shall some day read the text of the play and be amazed again at how much the actor who played him embodied that role and knew a huge role almost word perfect.

For now, I see a little bit of his lively mind and thinking from the thirties and through and beyond the Second World War, and feel moved to support the campaign that he should be pardoned for being gay before his time, and also for his seeming suicide to be looked at not as the self-crime that it then was in law.


If that does not encourage you to visit Writer's Rest, I admit failure...


Plus there's now :

Another thing is that the best AI is where the money is being sought: it is not in the very unconvincing services that ‘direct your call’ by getting you to press 1 then 3 then 2, etc., etc., or the stilted automated announcements at the station, as they have no interest in conveying the notion that they are persons, just suitably comprehensible cut-up bits of persons’ voices.

Actually, that is no false economy, but not pretending to be any more than one is, whereas those who use highly developed AI fail to realize how objectionable people will almost always find a however-clever machine that rings them up, if they catch it out as one, and may have to learn a difficult lesson about what matters to human-beings.

The reason? Simply the same affront at a computer seeming to personalize a form-letter, but addressing me incompetently as Mrs Apsley, because of the principle rubbish in, rubbish out – the seeming care about me as this mythical ‘valued customer’ is belied by not even knowing who I am! Just as irritating as if the new doctor calls one by the wrong name, but he or she can be corrected, and should apologize…


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Firewalls at Writer's Rest

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14 August


Just a little leisurely winding-down (for me, as I'm not in The States) conversation with Lindsay at Writer's Rest about what a firewall is and how to picture it.

I'm sure that any other views or images would be very welcome...


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Statistics and the brain (1)

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11 April

On Lindsay's blog, another discussion about AI and virtual immortality.

In a side-strand, generated by comment, I have added:


If they do actually mean anything, and are not more inventions (which, however imaginative they may be, just mislead everybody), these statistics about, for example, how much of the brain we use are in the realm of science - but how good is the science, as, if it were crucial to making the right finding to have more of the scientist's brain working than 10%, then the measurements might be ones that defy or defeat the measurer.

An often-quoted one, and one used by those who like wearing hats to justify the preference, is the claim that - and I think that it is usually this sort of figure - 20% of heat lost by the body is through the head. To which I retort:

1. When someone inverted the figure, and made it 80% heat loss, I really had to question whether he ever engaged the brain before speaking;

2. If this is the loss from the head, and one wants to minimize it, a hat is clearly not the answer, where a balaclava is;

3. Maybe that's where the 10% usage of the brain comes from - it's overheating because of people trying to block its cooling system.


See more, if you will, at Writer's Rest...

And now, also, at Statistics and the brain (2)


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Blogging is infectious

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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26 January

I have mentioned Writer's Rest already.

Time does not permit a link to those postings to this blog, but here is my latest comment in the debate on cars that drive themselves:

I’m not sure that it is that [sc. that technology fails, because it is only as good as its human designers]:

Someone might be able to say what it is that makes my PC sometimes crash or go into a loop, and I’m not convinced that it is (directly) attributable to having been designed by human-beings – computer systems do just fail in ways that, as far as I am aware, are not predictable.

(Or, maybe, not worth predicting at the cost that would be attached: there’s always a cost, just as, if the maker of the PC, laptop or BlackBerry has skimped, we pay the price as the person using it, especially if we do not lose the simple time to try again, but data, or the chance to bid for that item at the last moment on eBay – the small fatalist in me then invokes You weren’t meant to win it?.)

After all, I believe both that the Apollo missions ran the flight software in multiple parallel because of this very problem, and that, because I understand jumbos that take off and land themselves have the same ‘redundancy’ with which we are, maybe, more familiar from the 32x oversampling of our CD-player (which still fails, but maybe for other reasons, such as a dirty lens), the problem is inherent and has not been solved.

Except by the very simple expedient of rebooting, and hoping that you can carry on, with whatever autosave routine was invoked in those crucial closing nanoseconds…


More available at Writer's Rest...


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