Technology and Society

I have been meaning to write about this for a while, but have always procrastinated on it because I didn't want to figure out the logic behind my intuition. But then today I was linked to an article about how computers are making a lot of people unemployed, so I thought it's time explain my idea:

I think we are taking the first steps towards the guarantee of food, shelter, and clothing for everyone in the world.

This seems crazy, but here are the trends I'm seeing:

• As the article suggested, networked computers are very quickly replacing a number of jobs. Where before humans are necessary for communication between individuals and organizations (grocery stores, shopping malls, airlines), this can now all be done digitally. From the users' perspective, this is desirable, since it's generally faster and less hassle. But it does mean that most people in the communication pipeline will be out of a job.
• A separate article suggests that the people out of a job will be forced to move either up or down the social hierarchy. There are three main classes of jobs that haven't been automated yet: jobs that require significant creative input, such as scientists, CEOs, etc; jobs that require non-information-based interaction with humans, such as actors, babysitters, etc.; and jobs that exist in a chaotic environment, such as janitors, plumbers, etc. These categories obviously overlap; surgeons, for example, fit all three categories. Back to the point, only a subset of these roles can be filled given the average education of workers. These jobs, in general, are lower-paying than information-exchange-based jobs in the service industry.
• But that's not all - the bigger problem is that jobs are disappearing. This article says the same thing. It is not the case that technology is merely changing the distribution of jobs, but it is actively shrinking them. A system which allows people to buy things online replaces thousands of workers who would otherwise have to be in a brick-and-mortar store - while maybe creating a hundred jobs of mostly warehouse workers and a couple programmers. I think, for the first time in history, the sustenance of human civilization no longer requires the input of the majority of its population.
• Which begs the question: are jobs necessary? This article has a great quote: "We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?" Taken to the extreme, which considering the growth of technology is very likely to happen, society will be automated to the extent that only a minority is needed to maintain the automation. By the law of supply and demand, these are the only people who will have jobs. Of course, the rest of the population will still have to eat, sleep, and fulfill other needs, but it's unclear how.

This is one of the reasons I've said to anyone who would listen that we live in interesting times. Technology is changing at a quick enough pace that governments can't keep up. Just look at the mess that surrounds every contact point between technology and law: software patents, internet censorship, net neutrality, social network privacy, online anonymity, and so on and so forth. There are also spill over effects from the massive userbase of the internet: WikiLeaks, dissemination of police brutality recordings, DDoS attacks, and so on and so forth.

While we're here, I want to bring up a rarely discussed facet of copyright, that of 3D printing. As material extruders become more popular, the fight over design of physical items is going to eclipse that of over music, films, and other pure information. This article gives more details.

What I find even more intriguing is that, while technology is disrupting the fabric of social by creating a jobless world, it may also be on the cutting edge of suggesting solutions to those problems. The main insight I had was that the digital world already has many of the properties of a jobless society. They include:

• Zero marginal cost. Software, once written, can be copied at essentially no cost. This is already somewhat true of what has been automated - we are being charged very little for buying things online.
• Universal access. Anyone can get online (assuming the minimum equipment of a computer and a connection), and without censorship, can access everything the internet has to offer.
• Voluntary contribution. It used to be the case that most users of the internet are passive receptors, only receiving information but not contributing any. With the rise of social networks and online collaboration, many of the users are now also contributing - voluntarily.

It is not surprising that, giving these properties, we are still struggling with some of the implications:

• Artificial scarcity. In other words, companies are trying to artificially increase the marginal cost. This is, ultimately, what DRM comes down to:  making people pay for something which otherwise costs nothing. This can also be seen in the (however small) charges we incur for making online transactions.
• Competing with free. How does a company remain in business when other people are giving the same product away? I am writing this post in Firefox on Linux, neither of which I paid for. Ditto for most of the tools I use for research; in fact, our entire research project can be downloaded for free. Chris Anderson's book is all about this topic.
• Attention-based economy. This is somewhat surprising to me, since I don't understand it. I rationally know that Google makes 40 billion USD each year, most of it from advertisements. I have personally never clicked on an ad, and have software which blocks them. But the plus side is that I have free access to a lot of things - including this very blog - because other people are clicking on the ads.

I think there are lessons that can be translated from the digital world to the physical world, which may give rough predictions of what will happen in the next century. At the risk of looking like an idiot when that time comes, here are some analogous societal changes I think might (and I hope will) occur:

• Copyright holders will finally give it up as a lost cause. Beginning with software patents, it is becoming very hard to say when something is novel or not. There will still be patents, but their domain would be strictly limited. In the mean time, people will be sharing a majority of the creative output of the world, free of charge.
• Work will be for the most part voluntary. It would be for pay if the final product is conducive to such; otherwise, attribution credit is all the creator will get. A lot of the results of "work" will fall into the public domain by default, which benefits the population as a whole.
• Companies will be the main providers of social welfare, including food and shelter. They will do this because the economy is no longer focused on physical currency, but on something less separable from the individual, such as attention, time, and so on. Basically, the company will stand to gain more from you being well fed than from you starving. An interesting take on this is that people will start buying experiences.

I have been keeping an eye out on how technology - computers and the internet in particular - have changed society. It's astounding to think that even my childhood twenty years ago is very different from the childhoods of the people growing up now. I cannot begin to imagine the world in which children in another twenty years will be accustomed to. I wonder to what degree will the above problems be solved, and what new problems would have arisen as technology takes more unpredictable turns.

I guess there is one last question I haven't asked. Let's say all this becomes true. Is this a world we want to live in?

PS. A more speculative, transhumanist take on technological evolution.

Maybe We Should Rethink Education

Sebastien Thrun on how his online AI class changed him:

http://new.livestream.com/channels/556/videos/112950

Thoughts on a Cognitive Sport

Note: this post contains a lot of rock climbing jargon and may be hard to comprehend for the uninitiated. Interested readers should refer to Wikipedia‘s glossary of climbing terms.

A description of rock climbing that I wish I had thought of is that it is a “cognitive sport”. I found this term used in two separate blog posts and found it intuitively apt, but it took me a little longer to understand why it is so. All sports contain cognitive elements: the psychological drive to perform better requires will power, any sport with opponents requires outsmarting them, many team sports require cooperation and strategy. But more so than other sports, climbing requires more deliberate thinking than most other sports.

For one, climbing requires participants to overcome their fears. I have long since accepted that a good portion of climbers are afraid of heights, and an even larger portion afraid of falling – despite rationally knowing that they are not going to die. From this perspective, climbing is akin to asserting control over irrational fears, which is very much a cognitive process.

Then there are the steps necessary to reduce the risk of climbing outdoors. Alpine climbers need to consider the weather, their supplies, and their physical condition before deciding whether to attempt a summit. For more routine climbers, there is a body of technical knowledge to be mastered before stepping on rock. The most mundane of these is knowing how to belay and tie knots, but climbers need to know more before going outside. Setting up a top-rope outdoors requires not only more specialized gear and more knots, but also an elementary understanding of physics involved so as not to overload a rope. More cautious climbers may also learn to rescue others and/or themselves, which may involve creating pulley systems – more physics – and creative use of the limited gear on hand. I admit that the application of this technical knowledge forms a large part of the appeal of rock climbing.

Another cognitive aspect of climbing – in my opinion, the most cognitive aspect of climbing – is the climbing itself. Bouldering routes are called problems for a reason, and that is because climbers often need to decipher how to use the holds before getting to the top. Brute strength can only get a climber so far, and technique will get them the rest of the way there, but only if the right technique is used at the right place. What this “right place” is depends on the climber; short climbers may be more comfortable with high foot placements, but may need to use more dynamic moves to reach the next hold, while taller climbers can easily skip through sequences, but suffer when the problem requires them to control their swing. Even on indoor walls the correct sequence may not be immediately obvious, and I’ve been stuck on routes until an “Aha!” moment led me to trying a different sequence, more often than not allowing me to finish the problem.

This problem-solving aspect is so salient in my mind that I sometimes think of it directly in psychological terms, specifically by describing a bouldering problem as a problem space over body positions. There are a number of start states (hands on the wall and feet off the ground), a number of goal states (both hands on the finish hold), intermediate states (the holds in the middle), actions to change states (movement), constraints on which actions to take (usually physiological constraints, but also strength, balance, technique, etc.), and finally control knowledge (the decision to take a particular action). I even map the progression of climbers onto the naivety of their search of this space. Novice climbers, not knowing what holds are good or how they should position their body, blindly try everything in reach and settle on the first good hold (a greedy, one-step lookahead search). As they gain experience, climbers internalize which holds are bad enough to ignore (heuristics), while also taking into account future holds before moving (multi-step lookahead). Eventually, climbers acquire the ability to read routes, deducing the best sequence by simply looking at the holds (global optimization). Interestingly, I think most climbers only do this through simulation, as even experts are often stuck on more cryptic problems. The “aha!” moment mentioned above came from considering the route as a mechanics problem and how the body might be balanced on the holds given. This is a completely different line of thought than mental simulations, and I wonder if it is unique to climbers with a physics background.

The last aspect I want to address is also the last one to occur to me. Although climbing is an individual sport, I realized that some amount of meta-cognition/opponent modeling is required – by the route setters. This is a role that I find myself increasingly attracted to, for several reasons. First among these is that it allows me to test my climbing prowess in any way I want. Having access to holds and a wall allows me to recreate the hard moves on an outdoor route or the inspiring sequences from climbing videos. Of course, anything I set will be far inferior in quality and difficulty to what athletes are filmed doing, but making the moves similar enough will require much of the same muscles. Although in theory setting my own problems should make me better-rounded as a climber, in reality I tend to set routes which I would enjoy climbing. Most of the time these are technical problems, ones which involve small crimps and precise balance and foot placement. Once in a while I will set something cryptic, introducing climbers to an unusual sequence. Only rarely will I use slopers, which I don’t enjoy climbing on and don’t understand how to place. Luckily, this shortcoming is fill by other setters, and part of the joy of setting is understanding how they incorporate slopers and, indirectly, how to better use them when climbing.

Which brings me to the mental side of setting. The main point of route setting is not for the setter to enjoy the route, but for other climbers to enjoy the route. This requires that the setter take into account how others approach climbing; after all, setting a cryptic problem requires knowing that the average climber will not immediately see the crux move. The setter must also prevent the climber from circumventing the move. This is often called “cheating” when done as a climber, although I don’t believe that using the easiest sequence should be discouraged. Rather, the onus is on the setter to design their route such that cheating is not possible – or at least, that it would be as difficult as doing the move in the first place. This is easier said than done, which is precisely why setting is cognitively challenge. A good route should not only force a climber to do the intended sequence, but to force every climber to do it. This requires placing holds such that climbers would be coming from the same direction, in the same body position with the same hand free. In the problem space analogy, this is equivalent to adding enough constraints such that there are only very few paths connecting the start to the finish. These constraints must work for climbers of different heights, and the setter must make sure that a bump and a foot chip for a short climber would not be useful for a tall climber. Juggling these constraints and thinking one level above the climber is why setting a route is as cerebral, if not more so, than climbing a route.

Let me end this essay with a brief exploration of what I think good routes should have. Not all routes are created equal, and inexplicable as it may be, there are such things as incoherent routes. These are the routes that climbers suspect were set by throwing random holds at the wall. A common result is an extremely difficult move in an otherwise easy problem, or perhaps a move which may easily injure the climber (like a dyno to a pocket). In contrast, well-set routes give a sense of movement. I suspect this has to do with balancing many dichotomies: dynamic moves that require precision and static moves that require balance and power, footwork that requires thinking and holds that require courage and commitment. A good route is one that flows – one that, when a climber is on it, they forget about everything else.

Flexibility and Ambiguity in Chinese

I was surprised to find myself having a new appreciation of Chinese (the language, not the people) on this trip. I've never been a good student of Chinese; my last formal course in it was in middle school, and that I almost failed. I can understand Chinese fine, but I can't write it to save my life. Understandably, I tend to shy away from Chinese literature even though I read it without problems. I was therefore surprised to find myself thinking about two aspects of the language I had not considered before.

The first thought is on how words are constructed. You might have heard that Chinese doesn't have an alphabet, instead using radicals in some combinatorial fashion. It is strange to think of letters and words in Chinese. Not knowing how linguists classify the language (that is, IANAL: I Am Not A Linguist), Chinese seems to jump straight from pen strokes to morphemes. Each radical (usually) has its own meaning, and often may be a "word" by itself. Word is in quotes because, while it is the small free-standing unit, it is often not sufficient to refer to objects. For example, "lions" may be written as 獅 by itself, but if mentioned in isolation 獅子 is more often used. In this sense Chinese phrases look more like idioms, except there are also other Chinese idioms with less transparent meanings. Furthermore, each individual word may be used in multiple phrases, which gives that word by itself some flexibility in meaning.

What most textbooks don't mention, however, is how new words (in the combination-of-radicals sense) are often created. There is a common, but not universal, pattern in Chinese words, where one portion of the word gives the pronunciation and another portion gives the semantic association. These portions, especially those for semantics, are often radicals, but they can often be entire words. The word for lion, for example - 獅 - contains the word for master - 師. Indeed, the two words are homophones of each other, and the remaining radical - 犭 - is often used in words related to animals. This compositional nesting is similar to the prefix and suffix system in English, which allows the creation of words like anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism. I suppose one could call it an infix system - the prime English example being abso-fucking-lutely - except that it's more specific than that. This allows authors to transcribe colloquial, spoken Chinese, which uses words and sounds which did not exist. One example of this is a Cantonese word for stuff - 嘢 - which uses the traditional word 野 plus the radical for mouth, semantically meaning that it's mostly a spoken word. The expressive power of this system has escaped me until now.

The second source of appreciation of Chinese comes from the ambiguous meaning of single words. The inspiration for this came from a restaurant in the Hong Kong Sheraton, called 雲海. This directly translates to "sea of clouds", which is decently poetic, but not succinct enough to be a restaurant name. Then there's the matter of connotations. The word 雲, or cloud, can also be used to mean a large amount and in high density, usually as referring to people (雲雲人海). Similarly for sea, 海, which also connotes an unsurpassed depth and vastness. For two weeks, the question of how to properly translate this name popped into my head whenever I was bored. My best attempt, although its still missing some of the connotations, is "rolling clouds". Of course, it's also the case that "rolling" here cannot be directly translated back to Chinese. There's an art to translating more abstract concepts; it reminds me of the various translations of Jabberwocky, whose meaning is not so much written than connoted. For Chinese, I think, there's a power which comes from the ambiguity and flexible of each word, giving every phrase a deeper connotation than otherwise exists.

Displaying Calendars

I've talked about my small obsession with digital calendars before. I just want to mention that "logarithmic calendars" seem to be in vogue recently. Then I discovered the timeline widget from the MIT Simile project. It's a cool idea, displaying the same data in two separate views in different time scales. I also like how time is truly represented in a single dimension, allowing the user the scroll infinitely into the past or the future. Having played with it a little, my only complaint is that creating and syncing more than three such timelines really slows down the browser, which is unfortunately, as it would be cool to simultaneously see events on the day, week, month, year, and decade scales. I think for this to work there would also need to be a hierarchical classification of events. We definitely think of history in this way (World War II being a time period, but within which could be further divided into battles, and each battle into smaller engagements and skirmishes), and there's literature suggesting that our brains organize our past experiences in this way too (Conway, 1996. Autobiographical Memories and Autobiographical Knowledge). This makes me think of Gantt charts, but I have yet to see a good integration of logarithmic calendars (although I haven't really looked).

On My First Return to Hong Kong in Three Years

Potential titles for travel books on Hong Kong

• Pollution (You Name It, We Got It)
• Holy Shit, Chinese People!
• What Personal Bubble?
• Wrong Side of the Road, Dude!
• ¿Hablas cantonés, mandarín e Inglés?

More seriously, some of the changes since the last time I was here (which was December 2008):

• A lot of ads have Android/iPhone app icons, even Facebook links. QR codes doesn't seem to be quite as popular yet, although there's some similar system that seems local to Hong Kong.
• All the steps on stairs seem really short. I can't tell if I've grown taller in the past three years, but I've noticed that I'm definitely above average height when on the trains. YES.
• When I first got to the States I kept doing price conversions back to HKD. Now I do it the other way around, except that I have no clue what the baseline should be. 39 HKD seems instinctively more than 5 USD, but it's ultimately the same. Obviously, small numbers are inherently more likeable (since we see them more often). I wonder if there's literature on how the conversion rate influences spending...
• I've lost a lost of my spatial memory of Hong Kong, even for places I would visit on a weekly basis. Then my parents' house has also been remodeled, so it's a little harder to get around.
• Whenever I've stayed in the States for a while then come back, I get allergic to something in Hong Kong and would always have a runny nose and keep sneezing. This time I settled with a partially stuffed nose. I think being sick just before leaving somehow buffered whatever I was reacting to.

Font Fun

I'm heading to DC tomorrow for the AAAI Fall Symposium on Advances in Cognitive Systems. My paper got a poster acceptance, and so the last two weeks was spent wrangling with beamer. One can only focus on LaTeX for so long, so to pass time when I'm not sword fighting I decided to play around with some fonts. Can you guess the major web businesses that use the following fonts? Hover over the images for the answer.

While making the poster, my advisor noted that people sometimes confuse the Michigan block M wordmark with the Missouri block-M wordmark. So I looked up all the M states (turns out there's eight of them; my initial list left out Maine and Massachusetts), and collected their wordmark for comparison:

University of Maine

University of Maryland

University of Massachusetts

University of Michigan

University of Minnesota

University of Missouri

Mississippi State University

Montana State University