On visualization (part II)

I’m going to watch today a film called “La Belle Verte“, which I saw a few years ago. It caused to me to think again about visualization.
So obviously (since Kant) the way we see the world affects how we understand & act within it, as our brain just renders one visualization of the world, which could have been programmed in many ways, with many different rendering results & bugs. I consider the visualization to be both statistical (i.e, subconcious emotion-based) & symbolic (i.e., conceptual language-based).
This implies that affecting this visualization is one of the best ways to affect the world, by changing the behavior of its cells. This is obvious (to every advertiser, missionary or activist), the question is about technologies for changing paradigms – interfacing with the visualization mechanism of the brain (our goggles), & planting modifications.
La Belle Verte presents such technologies, & also tries invoking them on the viewers, to shake their world visualization & perhaps even change it. The idea is scary, but the mind-thought done in this film, of how this technology could it be used for “good” purposes, renders it as very cool & fruitful. Recommended.

 

What is visualization

There are many things we cannot normally see with the naked eye, such as:

• how do things look from high above or deep inside, i.e., in different space scale
• how do things change in time, i.e., in a different time scale
• how do things look far away or how did they look in the past, i.e., in a different place or time
• how do things look in parallel potential worlds

Luckily we have tools that extend our senses, & allow us to see stuff that we cannot see with the senses we were born with.

Similarly, when developing a new visualization tool, e.g., software based, when it reflects things you cannot see/perceive in reality, it means that the tool is nothing less than a new sense, & whoever uses it is a more powerful being.

An even broader concept of vision includes abstraction & understanding, i.e., seeing how things work, what causes things &c.

Visualization can be very helpful for such vision, e,g,, a visual simulation can allow us to see things we cannot see & hence understand in any other way. especially when it comes to emergence & complex multi-agent systems (see more on this in the inspiring book by Mitch Reznick on StarLogo).

In business software, Business Intelligence visualizations can empower managers with senses that lets them see (become aware of) things they cannot see in any other ways. Using visual simulations BI applications can also provide the abstraction/understanding vision, on business flows / value streams, & undesired effects.

I was thinking “visual” visualizations, as in great infographics or 3d animated simulations, but hack, even the collection of stupid data records in information systems provide people vision that no sense has ever endowed them. I remember a manager of a company I worked with (which clearly was a genius manager – growing a small family shop to the world’s 2nd largest vendor of plastic home furniture) who could look at a grid of colored data arriving from a mainframe system, & see things happening in his company as if he was looking at the green code rendering of the matrix. For example, he could look at a grid & say that some employee is stilling something in some business unit, & be right of course.

So what is visualization? It’s both getting sensual inputs from various sensors, which we once wouldn’t have dreamed about (getting the twits or flickr photos of the mars rover or of the summer vacation of a “friend” you actually never met), & also the processing of these inputs outside our brain to convey higher level abstraction & understanding of our world.

 

Cinema as simulator for machines

I have this vision of software machines consuming cinema, as art form. It’s important not just to make the cylons more human-like (hence, weaker/better?), but also for other purposes, such as simulation. Sitting in front of the big screen is a simulation process after all, in which we run events & allow our brain to experience their impact. (Here’s a meme I just love for many years: always sit on the 1st row in the cinema theater, however painful it may be for your neck.)

Software machines could be qualified against different scenarios, to both test them & train their learning models. Moreover, they can become more adaptive to changes, to which they would never have been exposed otherwise. Their intelligence could improve from living more lives (Edward Yang says in “1..2″ that humans live about 5000 lives, due to cinema consumption).

Ultimately, cinema as art is a way to impact the deep values & preferences of software, like the art in cathedrals & cave walls. Need to find the time to prototype a cinema simulator architecture for software.

I remember an old caricature, maybe from Mad, in which an audience is seen crying in front of a sad movie, except for one guy, who’s smiling happily. Obviously, that’s a bug in that instance.

 

David Mcdermott’s ideas about time

GB Shaw said in one of his great prefaces that genius people are distinguished by their vision, they see things we don’t see. Many artists are genius, and you may think of art, for example paintings, as a way for genius ppl to share with us their vision.

I heard today of such genius artist, called David Mcdermott. You just must hear the WNYC RadioLab program on him. He’s a successful painter, that succeeds in living in the past, in the sense that everything he uses is at least several decades old, & usually more than a century old! He’s doing it religiously, strongly believing that the past is better than the present.

Mcdermott says that drifting forward, & even worst swimming fast, is simply a death trap, that leads to death.

To visualize just 1 prediction of how the waterfall will look like, read the asshole unabomber manifesto.

Mcdermott claims that we have a choice, maybe even a duty, to move backwards & live in the past, any that we want.

Moreover he claims that there is no such thing as a point in time: every event is really eternal. Due to technology, it seems rather accurate. See virtual & recording technologies (e.g., Memex devices).

Basically, if we make space virtual, we can make time as well.

Listen to the WNYC RadioLab show “Beyond Time” on a bunch of ppl including Mcdermott that are creatively fighting time.

 

Important hearings on vision & diversity

So good you can listen to wise people & without living your house. I’m quite grateful to the TED conference & NY public radio. Please listen:

• Daniel Dennet talks about the need to educate our children with facts on all religions – to help make them more humble & tolerant to others
• Wade Davis talks about the great loss of knowledge & heritage in the global ethnocide – hundreds of thousands of wisdom & amazing culture & practices are lost due to stupid & cruel self-interested people, in the name of “development”
• Richard Dawkins talks about the reason why some science findings seem queer to us – our inner modelling software is designed to be useful for our survival needs, which are specific to the scale & conditions of our environment

 

Finally understood the architecture of the world

The famous programmers quote that “to iterate is human, to recurse, divine” has some good insight. The architecture of the world is simply: recursive multi-agent system. The pattern is so visible & clear: watch every piece of the world & you’ll see many agents, interacting with each other & pursuing their goals. Zoom in & you’ll see that each agent is composed of many smaller agents, that are similarily interacting & pursuing their goals. Zoom out & you’ll see that from the agents interactions & goals pursuing, emerges a higher-level behavior, which turns all of them into a larger agent.

(the great Powers of Ten movie by IBM)

If this is how the world is designed, all the OOP/AOP architectures have a long way until they’ll be able to model anything properly, instead of just stuffing tons of logic into useless huge complexity. Only some Emergence based new architectures (such as Echo & StarLogo) are starting to model the world as it really is.

 

Stanford Singularity Summit

What an event, too bad I can't attend:
http://sss.stanford.edu/

A real summit bringing together most of my hero's: Kurzweil, Hofstadter, Yudkowsky, Mckibben, as well as the leading transhumanism & AI visionaries.

Since my youth I always wished to work on the software that will form the "moral layer" of intelligent machines, that will turn them into "benevolant" friendly AI, as the singularity institute calls it. I made some progress over the years, & am now working on a very exciting emergence based AI engine as a goal-system infratrsucture, but still has much more work to do. The Singularity Institute guys seem to be already working on the Turing Police technology!

Thanks a lot for the all-too-important work!

I hope to read/hear as much as I can.

 

Imagination-Bases

Data-Bases describes the data of the existing world, i.e., the empirical recording of facts, used for machines that were programmed to process the world.
Knowledge-Bases describe the existing world, i.e., the ontological knowledge transfer required for machines (or aliens) that need to sense & affect the world.

Imagination-Bases describe possible worlds, i.e., the simulation of potential future worlds, that humans & machines can build & live inside.

IB’s require the same knowledge representation facilities as KB’s, but also Simulation facilities & the sensual-stream generation capabilities.

There are some interesting IB projects (spring-alpha, second-life), but too bad we don’t have the legendary Imagination Engineers of the past, such as Jonathan Swift.

“Imagination is more important than Knowledge” (Albert Einstein)

 

Kak’s article

Reader of this blog, if you haven’t already, please proceed to read Subhash Kak’s article: Artificial and Biological Intelligence

Some remarks:

• A principle of emergence is self-organizing. Reorganization is a primary process of intelligence.
• the self-awareness of the humanity animal is somewhere else, encoded in a different language & world model.
• an ai could work on the science of understanding humans, as they themselves can’t
• quantum computing theory may explains the brain (remember von Neumann’s quote in Dyson’s article, that logic will have to pseudo-morphose into neuroscience, & not the other way around.)
• “unification of minds or consciousnesses”
• (to be continued)

 

Human tissue project – Important warning

Pay extreme notice & caution not to conclude unfalsifiable conclusions. Everything must be testable & falsifiable.

Your task is to draw a picture, but also provide the means of testing whether the picture fits reality or not.

 

Disruptive technologies

What characterizes these technologies

• Internet
• Linux

& maybe:

• Web2.0 (such as del.icio.us & its-like)
• Grid computing
• Semantic Web

is that they’re open, free (as in freedom), bottom-up, disruptive: x-times better/faster/more powerful than the technologies that existed before them (think cars & carrieges, &c).

There’s another thing – an architecture of participation, meaning that it’s by people & for people.

 

Human tissue project

Picture:

human tissue, made of 6B humans. what makes it a tissue are connections. connections are made thru “chemicals”, manifested as feelings felt by the humans. such connections bond families, friendships, organizations, communities. other connections are done by means of social mechanisms.

the imagined outcome is a clear zoommable picture, that explains the bonds, the layers of the tissue, & the macro behavior of the tissue: what kind of animal is it, what does it do.

to get there, I can take the normal biological investigation methodology, or try a more rigid one, using description logic (OWL) & simulations (StarLogo). I can try use Wolfram’s New-Kind-Of-Science methodology, which seems to be so fruitefull.

Next task: map the chemicals. (not yet the social mechanisms)