Next time you are seduced into the idea that computers have evolved at an extraordinary exponential pace, think about what COULD be, what SHOULD be. This morning, I took to the internet to find an application that would automatically classify my photos, would go through them all and tease out their contents (cars, people, friends, family, objects, places, situations, time of day, time of year, etc.), you know, the who what where how why of my images. But nope. No such software exists at the consumer level. Nope.
My computer (your computer), doesn't have a f-ing clue what you do, what you create, who you are, what you want, where you've been, who you interact with, what characterizes any of the interactions you have with any of it, and it certainly doesn't care or know or have the capacity to do anything about any of what you are or want or could be or create. Nope, your computer doesn't do anything but sequence your typed instructions, you computer sits their dead-dog until you click on a button, or until you type a key.
All this talk of Artificial Intelligence? None of it is anything but desperate attempts to manipulate you as a consumer. You have been pimped out to the highest bidder, and mostly to tap into the most basic of your desires, to get you to buy pizza or to watch porn or distracting cat videos that make you say "Ahhhhhhh so cute!" or to protect yourself from spying eyes, from the manipulation it is all set up to accomplish.
Do you understand the "cloud"? Here I will explain. If your data can be stored off site, not on your hard drive, but on banks of hard drives owned by someone else, than any of that data about you and your behavior and the things you've made, all of it is wholly owned by someone other than you and can be sold to others out to get you to send your dollars towards the hands of their clients.
At least relatively, your computer is getting dumber while the cloud gets "smarter" (gets better at manipulating you).
Who is at fault? You wont like the answer, but it is you. At fault is your inability to imagine something more powerful from your computer.
Yes it is your fault. But there is blame to go around. Where you might be too busy doing what you do to have the time to understand how the computer industry is messing with you, the computer industry itself isn't. Silicon Valley tech workers and especially tech entrepreneurs, they know, they are each of them well aware of the situation, and even of how to fix it. It is their inaction their active ignore-ance of the problem that is directly to blame.
And why do tech companies and tech workers continue to choose consumer manipulation over human-potential? Because its dead cheaper to get you to buy another pizza, than it is to provide the tools that will amplify your efforts.
But am I asking for too much? Is what I am suggesting, computers that know what you are working on and why, who know how to put it all together and offer you collaborative intelligent predictions and that build out solutions for you and your most potent future? Actually, yes. And it isn't particularly hard to do.
I am an amateur programmer at best. Yet I have been able to hack together bits and pieces of the foundation of a system that would allow a computer to collaborate powerfully with its user. And I have done this with less than a couple of thousand lines of poorly written code.
My code isn't magic or profound in any real way. Pretty simple stuff actually. The trick is thinking the problem through. The trick is digging down past all of the particulars and looking instead at the general, the shared, the commonalities. The trick isn't so much providing the most profound answer, but asking a general enough question.
What is intelligence? What would be required of a computer that would act intelligently in collaboration with you? Well if you look deeply, intelligence is simply the capacity to predict, or more accurately, the fidelity of your predictions. So the problem facing any person wanting to build a computer that is intelligent is to design a system that gets better and better at prediction.
Getting better and better at prediction presents yet more questions. What are the resources the components of a system that evolves, that gets better and better at anything at all? Turns out the answer is fairly simple, though it requires a bit of thinking, of thinking at a level most of us are not comfortable with, of thinking that goes against the grain of how we like to believe thinking to be. Turns out thinking as a process can be broken down into components that are themselves simple as hell, components that can be combined in simple ways into a system that produces a full spectrum of intelligence, a spectrum upon which any particular instance of intelligence can be found not of some special qualitative magic, but simply as a result of how many of the component parts have been associated to each-other.
At any rate, the reason we don't have machines that collaborate with us, the reason we don't have machines that get better and better at collaboration, has nothing to do with how difficult it may be to produce them, and has everything to do with the fact that its cheaper to sell us pizza and porn.
I am begging all of you to expect more, to demand more of the tech industry.
Randall Lee Reetz
