Evolution: Optimizing a Definition of Fitness

We think of evolution as a process that optimizes organisms (things) through the filter of fitness. Fitness as means - the species - as end. I have long suspected that this interpretation is wrong-headed, and results in conceptual mistakes that ripple though all of science, blinding us to much that could be understood about the Universe, process, and the basic shape and behavior of reality.

So let's flip it. We'll instead, re-frame evolution as a process that uses things (organisms, species, systems, ideas, etc.) as a means (channel, resource, armature, vehicle) for the optimization of fitness. From this inverted vantage, optimizing the criteria of fitness is the goal – species, nothing more than a convenient means.

It always feels wrong to talk of evolution's "goals".  Certainly a universe doesn't start out with a plan or agenda.  Things like plans and agendas are only possible within advanced abstraction apparatus like a brain or computer.  Universe's start out simple and chaotic.  Only chance causal interactions played out amongst a universe sized accumulation of matter and force over ridiculous amounts of time will lead to the types of rare and energy demanding structures that can "think" up things like plans and agendas.  So when I talk here of "a process that optimizes",  I make use concepts and terms that are more generally associated with self, ideation, and will – with the products of advanced abstraction machinery found in humans and maybe eventually in thinking machines.  But what I mean to convey is the direction of a process.  That processes have direction and that direction is (or can be) independent of the types of advanced computation necessary for things like planing and intent is in fact, the exact conceptual jump that the idea or discovery of "evolution" demands.  Evolution = direction without intent.

The directionality we see in evolving systems (all systems) is blatantly and obviously non-random.  Our job then is to understand, explain, and ultimately, exploit this understanding. Because we humans have trouble imagining non-random direction coming from systems without a brain, a soul, an agenda, we are left with a slim set of emotionally acceptable options; anthropomorphizing the universe and evolution, inserting a deity, or simply rejecting evolution (or reality) out of hand.  The non-emotional option, the science option, evolution, recovers from this dissonance through the application of inductive logic, physical evidence, and frankly, by simply offering a emotionally dissonant option.

The thesis of this essay is the suggestion that evolution might be agnostic to optimization of species and is instead simply using species as a conduit for the optimization of this thing called fitness.  That fitness might in fact be more real, and species, ethereal.

This entire domain is so fraught with potential miss-interpretation.  I feel a constant urge to over-explain, to be extra careful, to make sure the reader isn't thinking one thing when I mean something else.  For instance I feel a need to define the term "species", especially because I am using it in a more general way than is usually required within the boundaries of its original domain, biology.  This is because I am convinced that evolution is a universal process, that it has nothing in particular to do with biology or life, that it happens in all systems, all of the time, an unavoidable aspect of any reality.

So when I write "species"  I mean the thing or system that is "evolving" – the animal, the planet, the culture, the idea, the group attitude in line at the post office this morning.  And in the context of this essay, I use "species" to mean the thing upon which "fitness" acts (as judge, jury, pimp, or executioner).  Species is the thing, fitness the criteria that molds the thing.

But by this definition, species is corporal and measurable, suggesting that fitness is… is what?  If we are talking about something, shouldn't we have some way of examining it, measuring it, comparing it, holding it in our hands, flipping it over, squeezing it, spitting it open and looking at its parts?  That seems a more reasonable proposition for species than for fitness.

We like to think we can man-handle a thing like species, take it to the lab and do lab things.  But maybe that is more illusion than truth.  We can dissect a frog, but that particular frog isn't really the species "frog".  The species "frog" is an average, a canonical concept, a Platonic solid, a moving target, an arbitrarily bounded collection, a gelatinous arrow through foggy potentialities.

I was in route to show that "fitness" is a real thing, but all I accomplished was a picking away at the real-ness of "species".  Maybe that will end up being more helpful anyway.  The colloquial image of species, even amongst evolution theorists has always seemed more visceral, more thing-like than fitness.  We point to a single nervous animal on the savanna and declare, "that is gazelle".  Worse, we often fail to make a semantics distinction between that declaration and the categorical; "gazelle is that".  That fitness is a much harder thing to point to, really doesn't mean it is less real, or as I have shown, that real-ness applies to either.

Now that I've reduced both species and fitness to the realm of concept, it should be easier to argue my thesis.

Even at the concept level, "species" is a thorny concept fraught with pedagogy and hubris.  It is hard to look at a penguin, a porpoise, or a planet and imagine something more amazing, more evolved than its current form.  Which probably goes a long way to explain why we have a natural tendency to overlay onto the concept "species" notions of perfect form, of an apex, a pre-determined goal.  But this certainly has less to do with species and more to do with the limits of our cognitive facility.  It would be absurd to assume that this particular now is in some way special, that forms are complete and that we just happen to inhabit the planet just at the point when evolution has finally and completely finished its big 14 billion year project.

OK, the apologies have been met out, the slippery territory marked, the standard arguments abutted, the inconsistencies delineated, the usual misinterpretations admitted. These are standard precursors to any serious discussion in the study of evolution and bare witness to both the complexity of the subject and the apparent inability of the brain to readily make sense of its many dimensions.

So why should I want to reorder the relative hierarchy of fitness and species?  For one, I have always felt the standard Darwinian definition of evolution to be a bit circular.  Wow, before that comment ruins my standing, I had better get to work defending Darwin.  I am a "standard model" realist.  Darwin got most or all of evolution correct.  Especially if you restrict your focus to biology.  Darwin is the dude!  The positions I detail here are meant as additions, as icing on the cake Darwin baked.  But Darwin built his theory around life and his bio-centrist focus on evolution restricts and warps the applicable idea-space it scopes.  I always say that Darwin explained the how of evolution with regard to biology, and that I am interested in the why of evolution with regard to all systems.

To restrict the scope of evolution to biology, is to somehow draw a line in the sand between life and not-life, a special sauce within life that categorically separates it from all other systems.  I can't find that line.  So I am left with the responsibility of understanding and defining evolution as a domain independent attribute of any system or system of systems.

Structurally, all systems are ordered as hierarchical stacks.  Each level receives aggregate structures from lower (previously constructed) levels and produces from these, new super-aggragates, that it in turn passes to the next higher level.  That this process of aggregate layering is historically dependent is obvious.  The non-obvious mapping is to energy.  The lowest levels of the hierarchy, the earliest levels, represent high energy processes, energy levels that would rip apart aggregates at higher levels.  In this universe, all systems are built upon the aggregation processes laid down in the earliest moments, aggregations that occur at the upper limits of heat and pressure –  strings, quarks, sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules.  Each corresponding to a matching environmental energy level, an energy level that is cooler and less pressurized than the ones that came before it.  The universe gets cooler and more dispersed.  Always.  The growth of complexity, evolution, is dependent upon this predictable and unavoidable dissipation of energy over time.

Those who would argue that life is special, that evolution is exclusive to it, well they are obligated to draw a definitive boundary between life and everything else, and because life, like everything else, is dependent upon the historical layering of aggregate systems, will have to draw that line historically.  They will have to show a moment in time before which there was not life or evolution and after which there was life and evolution.

There are many ways to define life in order that such a line could be drawn.  If you say, as most do, that life is that set of systems that incorporate and utilize both R and D Nucleic acids, well there is surely some moment in the past which would accurately delineate those earlier systems which didn't have both RNA and  DNA, from the later systems that did.  Such a definition is some what arbitrary, but all categorical definitions are.  But if you seek instead to hinge your definition of life to the process of evolution, then you are faced with a tautologically intractable problem.  Either you must accept the nonsensical proposition that the universe started with RNA/DNA preformed, or the more rational causal proposition that evolution is independent of and proceeded biology, preparing over vast periods of time, the aggregate ingredients necessary for the super-aggregate we call life.  If you insist despite this logic, that evolution is a property exclusive to biology, then you are left with the thorny problem of defining aggregation processes happening simultaneous to and independent of biology.  Processes that continue to produce atoms, molecules, stars, planets, galaxies, cultures, ideas, sand dunes, ocean currents, etc. And, you must also show how these continuous and omnipresent processes are qualitatively different when they happen outside of systems that use RNA and DNA from those that do.  But that isn't enough, you must also show either that no system after biology will ever evolve, of that the entire future of evolution will happen within the confines of biological systems.

The evidence and logic weighs overwhelmingly on the side of life being an arbitrarily bounded category, and evolution defining a process unbounded by domain, history, or complexity. Both of which are difficult concepts for humans to accept.  We like to think we belong to a category made exclusive by some secret sauce, some magic that applies in some measure only to life, and which has reached its zenith in the human form or spirit.  We like to imagine evolution to be that process that shaped the shapeless gasses of primal soup into the perfect form that we now enjoy.  Wow.  The ego and hubris drips and pools.

If I may, back to fitness.  The above arguments are crafted to shake we humans free of our innate bio/human/self centrism and to show how such hubris works to emphasize contemporary corporal form over timeless ephemeral process, placing a sort of artificial spotlight on species and downgrading the in contrast, fitness.  Its only natural.  And it is wrong.

The tendency to focus on species is easy to understand.  If you are looking at an animal and asking questions about evolution and process it is only natural that the scope of your thinking would be restricted to that animal, that species, that family of life and its struggle to survive.  Even when you back your self out to a vantage wide enough to include all of life, the full fan of Linnaean Taxonomy over the full 4.5 billion year crawl, the focus is still thing, still survival, still some sort of cosmic engineering project.  It is only when you back all the way out, when you look at all that is, the entire Universe, every moment since the big bang, life and the stuff between, in, and of it, that you might be forced to ask questions big enough to frame the why of evolution.

The why of evolution has to be big enough to comfortably hold all change, all systems, any aggregate and any aggregate chain, not just those that succeed, not just those that are fit, not just things that can be called things… everything!  Any process that explains the existence of one system should also be able to explain every other system.  Universality, at this depth of scope demands a bigger reason than can be explained by the concept "species".  Darwin's big how in biology then becomes a local mapping to a specific domain.  It isn't wrong, it just isn't universal.  You can know everything about pianos, but won't really understand music until you know enough about enough instruments that you begin to see the formative patterns that unite, from which all instruments are informed.

Species, be it a valid concept at all, must be but a subset, an example, a non-special representative, a member of a perfectly inclusive, and domain independent set.  Sets that include everything are not informative as a set.  So we look elsewhere.  That species, as a label, pointing to the subject of evolution, can equally be applied to any thing, forces us to look elsewhere for that which explains the big why of change. Change must not reside in thing, product, tailings, result, or even detritus.  If the big why isn't thing, but has to explain thing, any thing, all things, than the big why must be a process or action or modifier or pressure.  Some common attribute of any change regardless of domain.  What process is agnostic to domain?

In a word, entropy. In an attempt to determine the maximum work that could be extracted from any source of energy, steam era engineers teased apart the relationship between source and output and found an intriguing and strangely universal leakage.  Energy, when used, degrades, diffuses, is no longer as useful or available to the original process.  When scientists discovered the same leak, this time with structure, a strange universality began to appear.  Energy and information, force and structure, an unexpected symmetry.  Then Einstein revealed the exact relationship between energy, time, space, and mass, allowing thermodynamic transforms on all physical terms.  Despite initial objections by Stephen Hawking (and others attracted to the notion that nooks and crannies of the universe might provide respite from the second law's rigid causal prescriptions), Leonard Susskind and others have brought both the quantum world of the impossibly small and the black hole world of the impossibly big, together under a shared entropic umbrella.  What we are left with, like it or not, is a universal.  A universal that is universal to all physical domains and dimensions, regardless of scale.  Wow. That doesn't happen very often in nature.  That hasn't happened in science.  Ever.  Significant?

In his 1927 book, The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Eddington, put it this way:

"The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

Any theory or assessment of evolution that is not written in response to thermodynamics, information theory, and entropy would seem to be a theory not particularly interested in validity.  That the laws of thermodynamics and evolution both direct their unblinking stares upon the domain of change would seem to me an invitation to at least begin to consider the possibility of a concerted union between the two.

[more to come…]

Randall Reetz

Social Media… Amplifying The Inner Sheep

In the early days of computing, those involved were pioneers, innovators, original thinkers, the super-passionate, driven by curiosity and the purity of adventure. These were a strong people. Proud. And though it sounds precious to say so, the early computing pioneers were not unlike other gritty pioneers in that they enjoyed being out well beyond the known, striding forward where there was no trail, no strength in numbers, no peer support, no mentors, no accepted pattern.

Now? Well now that computers have become ubiquitous, now that everyone has one, uses one like they use a knife and fork, the pioneers have long since been replaced by Plumber Joe, by the middle of the bell curve, by everyman and everywoman and their kids.

The computer industry is market driven! I hate that it has taken me this long to recognize the importance and implications of this now overwhelmingly obvious and simple fact. The diffusion of computers into the daily routine of the entire population has resulted in a dramatic shift in the demand landscape that informs what computing becomes. The market for computing is its users. The user today, the average user, is a whole different animal than the user/creator that defined its early history. Those of us that jumped in early probably resist the idea that what we care about really doesn't matter anymore. Though it might be true that knowledge and a deeply theoretical bases for that knowledge still matters, from a consumer market demand perspective, we grey hairs are simply invisible. The fact that we nerds ever defined a market for anything at all is the more surprising historical footnote. It is a bittersweet realization, that success of our industry would of mean the marginalization of its founders.

In every grade school class I attended there were a few kids (one or two) who were driven by a passion to know, to understand, to create. The rest, well the rest excelled at a completely different set of skills, getting through the day, unnoticed, blending in. The two groups couldn't be more different. The inquisitive few were internally driven. The rest were driven by the outward demands of success as defined by the curve. The inventive minds competed against their own ability to invent. The rest competed amongst themselves over the coveted 60 percentile that would define passing the class.

The computing market is now dominated by that larger part of the human population that defines success as climbing (which ever way possible) on top of the 60 percent of the population (of other social climbers) that makes up the bulk and center of any bell curve. As kids, these were the people who spent most of their time comparing themselves to the kids next to them. Looking over their shoulder at the other kid's test answers. Studying together so that they knew the base line before they got to the actual test. I say "climb to the top" but the word "top" when describing a bell curve does a disservice to the real meaning of averages. What we call the top of a bell curve is really the center of a frequency distribution. Climbing to the top is really a struggle to get into the center. Like fish trying to avoid a shark, there is a natural human tendency away from being alone, away from the vulnerability that is the open water that is original ideas and behavior. As a result, we constantly seek the protection of others. Each of us, as humans, spend a good deal of our energy trying to determine and then contort our behavior to that which best describes the center of normative behavior and attitude.

The similarities between schooling fish and human socialization pressures are profound. But there is one important difference. Where fish seek the center to avoid the teeth and gut of another species, the predator we humans work so hard to avoid is us, is public ridicule, being seen as different, standing out! We are in a very real sense both sheep and the sheep dogs nipping at the the sheep's legs. It is obvious that evolutionary pressures have conspired to build into our brains at least two modes of processing and that they are, at least at times, antagonistic. One is a great big "what if?" simulator, a novelty machine… the other, a social manors restriction system that cautions at the point of pain, behavior the least bit novel or different.

I have traversed the usual nature/nurture, cultural/evolutionary minefields. What I come to is this; traits that exist universally across most cultures and experienced many times within each individual's life, are most probably behaviors that have a significant genetic/physical component... are common regardless of our developmental environment and experience. Humans are obviously capable of profound novelty and abstract pattern analysis. But there is also a pervasive behavioral overlay of social control of which we are simultaneously, willing participant, and victim. What is confounding is the extent to which each system interferes with the function and success of the other… and that they are so diametrically opposed.

With regard to schooling (and herding) behavior, that which we share in common with fish (and sheep), is an indifference to where the school is, in which direction it is moving, and how fast. Under the social threat that triggers schooling, all that matters is that each of us as individuals finds our way as close as possible to the center. Humans will go along with almost any plan so long as social grouping allows us to avoid being seen as different. Obvious examples: Nazi Germany, Slavery in the southern U.S., the Nanking Sex Trade, etc.

As computers have been made "user friendly" and as the cost of ownership has dropped, this center of the bell curve, this mad fight for self-similarity that defines who we are as a species, this reflection and homogenization of the greater us, has become the market for computing. Which makes sense. Diffusion and all. But the whole history of modern computing is so short, just 40 years now, that it is surprising and a bit of a shock to realize finally that from a market perspective, computing is a mature industry. How could an industry just a generation old have transited already from go-it-alone pioneer to "I'm Love'n It" average?

The implications are huge. In particular, this insight brings social media into sharp ironic focus. Social media brings to computing the same access to community monitoring and control that gossip and storytelling brought to the camp fire. It is to computing what cheating off of your neighbor's test is to being a kid. As a person who likes to think of himself as a pioneer, I have reacted in horror, disbelief, and frustration to what has looked like fifteen years of computer industry regression.

If you accept that computers, like minds, are abstraction (language) machines, then it makes sense to wonder to what extent the human brain has suffered the same evolutionary pressure towards social assimilation and at least plausibly, away from innovation and novelty. To what extent is the rarity of the product of profound human creativity a reflection of actual physical and logical limits on and causal costs to creativity itself, and to what extent is the same rarity a product of evolutionary molded physical properties of the brain that conspire to restrict the production of novelty as a result of even greater survival pressure to promote behaviors that honor social cohesion?

If the current overwhelming trend that sees the computer as more of a social monitoring mechanism, and less a creative tool, is a trend that reflects market demand, then the same questions I am asking of the market pressures that shape the machinery of social media must be asked of the cultural pressures that have through evolutionary time shaped the mind. So long as computation is primarily consumed by human beings, both computer and mind will be shaped by the same evolutionary pressures. As technical barriers are overcome, the industry can and does react more fluidly and with higher fidelity to the demands of its consumers.

At which point, the question becomes; Which heaps greater selective pressure on the evolution of computing, the need for tools that stand in for skills the human brain lacks, or the need for tools that amplify our most attention demanding desirers? Can the two co-exist and co-evolve productively? Again, the question is asked practically of computation and at the same time, philosophically or anthropologically of the human brain and the cultural stew in which each is both product and survival pressure.

Where computing used to take its shape from the fecund imagination of computational luminaries, it has of late been lead instead in the pursuit of the lizard brain in all of us, the sub-conscious urges and fears that inform social mediation behavior. The result is all of this social media dribble, the likes of "Twitter", "13 Seconds", "myface and spacebook" [sic], and numerology based pizza ordering "iPhone Apps." What advantages do such time wasters render? Some argue that social media was the logical communication oriented extension of email and personal web sites, that social media greases mechanisms deeply human and "natural". I remain dubious to these claims. I tend to group the brand of communication that social media seems to breed with more negative forms of group behavior like cults, mass hysteria, fundamentalism, and other behaviors unique to group-think.

And what of pop-culture notions like "collective intelligence", "global awakening, and "cultural consciousness" which seem to be born of transcendent utopian notions (not dissimilar to those that feed religion and spirituality). The adherents of these optimisms appear to be blissfully unhindered by the need for causally logical argument or empirical evidence. If our computers have become social monitoring devices (at the expense of facilities that enable creativity), is there a danger that they will further distort our already distorted sense of truth? If a computer "wants" to agree with us more than it wants to accurately calculate a value, then we might already have crossed the threshold into a world where 2 plus 2 really does equal 5 (if the computer says so, it must be true!).

It would be irresponsible for me not to at this point remind myself to question my own rhetorically close topics.

These questions and trends have profound implications to populist concepts we tend to romanticize but rarely examine in detail. Democracy, plural-icy, consensus, society, culture, community, equal rights, individuality, etc. As the computer industry becomes more and more sensitive to consumer demand, its product WILL become a device that does a better and better job at the automation and magnification of human idiosyncratic behavior, of superstition, mythos, hubris, rhetoric, ego, at any and all of the emotional side effects of evolutionary pressures.  Forget about the cold indifference of causal truth that has motivated so many sci-fi stories.

The real villain to be feared in any inevitable future is the computer as hubris amplifier.

Computing's new "social media" face might disturb my pioneer sensibilities, but it reflects the satisfaction of common demand. As any market matures it learns to overcome the physical and conceptual obstacles that so plagued it in its earlier years. Unburdened by things like processor speed and storage density, the computer industry was able to pursue directions more in line with human consumptive desire than with the technical or theoretical goals of computer "scientists". Marketeers trump scientists when the saturation of a product becomes universal.

It all makes sense. I am still depressed by the anti-innovation implications of the mass market dumbing down of computing, but at least I understand why it happened, what it means. Knowledge, even depressing knowledge, should open doors, should allow more efficient planning and prediction. But what exactly are the implications when a creative tool is hijacked by a larger urge to avoid at all costs, change and novelty. What happens when the same mass-market demand pressures that cause fads and trends focus their hysterical drive towards homogeneity onto the evolution of a tool originally intended for and idealized for creative exploration? What exactly do you get when you neuter the rebellion right out from underneath Picasso's brush?, When you force Darwin to teach sunday school?

Just what does it mean when our creative medium becomes sensitive to social interaction? Pen and paper never knew anything about the person wielding them, certainly didn't know how the greater society was reacting to what was being written or drawn.

If the average human feels more comfortable doing exactly what everyone else is doing, seeking the center, would much rather copy the answers off of their desk-mate's test than understand the the course content, well then it only makes sense that, we, the royal "we", would use this computing tool in the same way that we use the rest of the stuff in our lives, to help us find the social center and stay there.

It's not just the marketplace that has shifted towards the demographic center. The schooling mentality has crept into and now dominates computing as an industry. Personnel and management which in the early days of computing was awkwardly staffed by engineers and scientists and groupie hobbyists is now as diverse (homogenous?) a mix of humans as you could find in any industry. Even the scientists are cut from a different cloth. It takes a special and rare (crazy) human being to invent an industry from nothing. When avocations become well funded departments at major universities, the graduates are not likely to be as intellectually adventurous (understatement). As any MBA knows, the success of an industry is most sensitive to its ability to understand and predict the demand of its market. Who better to know the center of the consumer bell curve, the average Joe and Jane, than that same Joe and Jane? Joe and Jane Average now dominate the rank and file workers that make up the computer industry. This means administration, it also means sales and marketing, both of which make sense. Less intuitive, is but equally understandable, Joe and Jane Average have taken over the research and design and long range planning arms of the computer industry. Even where it isn't the actual Joe and Jane, it is people who do a kick-ass job of channeling them.

Does market saturation mean the evolution of computing has reached its zenith? I don't think it does. But, once an industry has reached this level of common adoption, the appearance of maturity and stability are hard to shake. Momentum and lock-in take hold. I have tried repeatedly to sell paradigm-busting and architectural re-imaginings of the entire computing paradigm to valley angles and big ticket VC firms only to realize that I wasn't selling to the current market. Try opening a VC pitch with "The problem with the computer industry is…" to a group of thirty-five year old billionaires who each drove to the meeting in custom ordered european super cars. Needless to say, their own rarefied experience makes it hard for them to connect with anything that follows. This is a classic conundrum in the study of evolution. I presume it is a classic conundrum facing evolution itself. Why should a system that is successful in the current environment ever spend any energy on alternative schemes? How could it? It is hard to even come to the question "What could we be doing better?" when surrounded by the luxury of success.

At the same time, it is unlikely (impossible?) that any system, no matter how successful in the present, will long define success in the future. It might even be true that the more successful a scheme, the more likely that scheme will hasten an end to the environment that supported it (through faster and more complete exploitation of available resources). The irony of success!

But we a are smart species. We are capable of having this discussion aren't we? So we might be prepared as well to discuss the inevitability of the end of the current computational scheme. No? To prepare as a result, for the next most likely scheme (or schemes)? Especially those of us who study language, information, computation, complex systems, evolution. Especially an industry that has so advanced the tools and infrastructure of complexity handling. No? Surely we in the computer industry are ideally situated to have a rational vantage from which to see beyond the success of the current scheme? Yet, for the reasons I have already postulated (market homogeneity and success blindness), and others, we seem to be directionless in the larger sense, incapable of the long range and big picture planning that might help us climb out of our little eden and into the larger future that is inevitable and unavoidable. Innovations springing forth from the current industry pale in comparison to those offered up 20, 30, even 40 years ago.

Speaking of which; I just found the resource list for Pattie Maes' "New Paradigms In Human Computer Interaction" class at MIT's Media Lab. These are video clips of speeches and demos of early and not so early computing pioneers showing off their work prescient work. Mind blowing. The future these folks (from places like MIT, Brown, Stanford Research, the Rand Corporation, Xerox PARC, and other institutions), well, it is sooooo much more forward looking than what has become of computing (or how the average computer is used). Everyone would do well to sit down and view or re-view these seminal projects in the context of their surprisingly early introduction.

I have written quite a few essays lambasting what I see as the computing industry's general loosing of its collective way… at the very least, a slowing down of the deep innovation that drove computing's early doers. Even when potentially powerful concepts ("Semantic Computing", "Geo-Tagging", "Augmented Reality", "User-Centered Cloud Computing") are (re-)introduced, their modern implementations are often so flawed and tainted by an obsession to kowtow to market pressures (or just plain lie or fake it) that the result is an insult, a blaspheme of the original concept being hijacked.

Over ten years ago, I gave a talk at Apple titled: "Apple Got Everything It Has For Free, And Sat On Its Ass For Eight Years While The Rest Of The World Caught Up".

Which is true, at least with regard to the Lisa/Macintosh which Xerox PARC handed them (check out the Star System) and the way they just kind of sat on the WISIWG mode-less graphical interaction scheme while other computer companies (Borland and then, reluctantly, Microsoft) eventually aped the same. At the time of my presentation, Apple had wasted its eight year lead extrapolating along the same scheme… a bigger badder WIMP interface, when they could have been introducing paradigm vaulting computational systems (that would put Seattle on another eight year chase).

But from a marketing perspective I couldn't have been more wrong. I have got to keep reminding myself that I no longer represent the market for computers! I wish I did, but I don't. I am an outlier, a small dot on a very long tail, I am pluto or maybe even just some wayward ice and dust comet to the big ordinary inner planets that trace out wonderfully near-circular orbits around the sun. In later presentations, I explained that Apple's critically acclaimed "Think Different" campaign and the elitist mindset from which it was derived, was the reason they had never garnered more than 2 or 3 percent of the computer market. I explained that Bill Gates' "genius" lie not in his profound insight, but in his ability to understand the motivations that drive the average person… namely to never be caught doing something that someone else could question. That means acting the same as everyone else. That means knowing how everyone else is acting. That means social media!

Nobody (other than wacky outliers like me) wants to be compared to iconoclasts like Einstein or Picasso or Gandhi or Gershwin. Very few people really want to "think different". Most people wouldn't be caught dead risking that type of public audacity. You have got to be pretty confident that you have an answer to the dreaded question "Why are you doing that?" to ever DO THAT (individually creative thing) in the first place.

Pioneers know exactly why they do what they do. They are driven by knowing more than others and by the excitement of being somewhere others haven't been… by being very much outside of the ball of fish that others seek as protection.

But if you want to sell a billion computers instead of just a few thousand, then you want to pay attention to the fish in all of us and not to the smiling and sock-less Einstein's on a bike.

But the larger and longer implications of mass market sensitivity are profound. While it is entirely true that paying attention to the center of the cultural bell curve will allow any industry to exploit more of the total available consumption potential, such behavior does not necessarily produce the paradigm jumping disruption upon which long term progress depends. If your Twinkies are selling really well, you might not notice that your customers are all reaching morbid levels of obesity and malnutrition or that the world is crumbling around the climate changing policies upon which your fast food empire is based.

The satisfaction of human center-of-the-fish-school urge is not necessarily the best recipe for success if success means more than short term market exploitation. In the long run, potential and satisfaction are decidedly not the same thing; they are, as a matter of fact, very often mutually antagonistic. Rome comes to mind. What comes to mind when I mention the phrase "dot com" or "mortgage backed securities" or "energy deregulation".

The mass market topology that has driven computing and communication towards a better and better fit with the demands of the largest and most homogenized consumer base the earth has ever witnessed could very likely work against the types of creative motivations that might be necessary to rescue us from the bland and the average, from the inward facing spiral of self-sameness that avarice alone yields. I am increasingly worried that the computer's seemingly endless potential to be warped and molded chameleon-like to perfectly satisfy our most basic evolutionary proclivities, to amplify unhindered, urges made strong against real scarcity in the natural environment, has already so distracted us within our egos and desires that we might not be able to pull our heads out before we get sucked completely down and into our very own John Malkovich-ian portals of endless identity-amplication.

And why does it matter? Because, like it or not, progress in every single field of human endeavor is now predicated on advancements in computation. More profound than anything else science has discovered about nature is that information is information. Information is domain agnostic. Which means that advances in information processing machinery benefit all information dependent fields of inquiry. Which is every field of inquiry! Which also implies that all fields of human inquiry are increasingly sensitive to the subtle ways that any one computational scheme effects information and the scope of information process-able within that scheme.

At any rate, it is alarming (if understandable) to me that the trending in this industry is towards a re-molding of the computer into ego amplifier, pleasure delivery system, truth avoidance device, distraction machine, Tribbles (as in "The Trouble With…"). The more insightful among us may want to place a side bet or two (if only as evolutionary insurance) on more expansive futures. Some of us are not so distracted by the shininess of these machines or by how they are getting better and better at focusing our attention at our own navels, to see futures for computing that are more expansive than the perfect amplification of the very human traits least likely to result in innovation or progress. There is still time (I hope).

Randall Reetz

Friendly AI?

Yesterday, I attended a talk by AI researcher Tim Freeman. What follows is my reaction.

Tim introduced a proposal for a method to cut down through all of the detail and complexity of standard AI implementation by exposing the logical essence that sits at base in any intelligence (irreducible). In other words, his approach was more Godel than Minsky… more Nash than Wozniac. His argument, though not stated, seemed to be based upon the tenant that information is information irrespective of complexity. An algorithm that works for a short string of bits, even for a single bit, will work just as well at any level of syntactic or semantic complexity.

I like this approach. Strip the detail to better reveal the essence.

When using this approach one must show that, or accept that, no qualitative attribute of information will ever effect the logic governing quantity attributes of information.

Again, I suspect that all qualitative aspects of information are derivable from, in fact emerge from, the more basic rules that govern information at the quantitative level. In essence this is the same as declaring that it is impossible to construct a molecule will ever change the physics that governs the shape and behavior of the atoms of which it is built. Reasonable. True.

This basic set of assumptions reframes the study of AI. But only if intelligence can be shown to emerge purely from information and information processing… from logic.

If there is some extra-infomrational aspect necessary for the formation of intelligence, than all bets are off… than this approach is at most a sub-system contributor to some larger and deeper organizational influencers. If information doesn't explain intelligence, than something else will have to take its place and this something else will have to be worked into a science that can be explored, organized, and abstracted.

If information can be shown to be both robust and causal in all intelligence, than logic and math seem like reasonable tools for exploration, testing, prediction. and as a solid base of development.

However, there is something about this set of assumptions that makes people angry and scared. Turns out that a purely informational study of AI is the mother of all reductionist/wholest battlefields. There is something about being human that resists the use of the word "intelligence" as a super-catagory that can describe the interaction between two hydrogen atoms, and the works of Einstein by the same criteria and label them both as equally valid examples as the same super-catagory; intelligence!

In this resistance, we are, all of us (at least emotionally), holists. Existentially, day to day, our experience of intelligence is far removed from chemical structure, planetary dynamics, and the characters that make up this string of text. Intelligence, at least our human experience of it, seems profound to the point of miraculous… extra-physical. We therefore have a tendency to define intelligence as a narrow and recent category that is at best only emergent-aly related to other more mundane structures and dynamics. In doing so, we set up an odd and logically fragile situation that demands an awkward magic line in the sand, a point before which there isn't intelligence and beyond which there is. Worse still, our protectionist tendencies with regard to intelligence are so strong as to allow (even within science-oriented thinkers) us accept the existence of so non-scientific a distinction to co-exist in an otherwise consistent mechanical model of the universe.

Of course history is littered with examples of just this sort of human-centric paradox of logic. Biologists, for instance, were often among the scientists that pushed back hardest against Darwin's notions. Darwin's ideas created a super-catagory that had the effect of comparing equally all life, of removing the sentimental line that we humans had desperately erected between us and the rest of biology.

And here we are again, just 75 years later, actively making the exact same mistake. Apparently, after grudgingly accepting kinship with all things living, we have now retreated behind a new false line of privilege and specialness… our intelligence.

Again, one can only argue this separatist position by refuting and rejecting the quantitative mechanistic hierarchical ontology we call physics. Because of the tight interdependency between the laws of physics one can show that the whole of physics is false if just one aspect is falsified. If intelligence is not the emergent product of its parts, than the very sanctity of all modern science is called into question. And if that is true of intelligence, where else in nature is it true? Surely this can't be the only place in nature where a sudden quantitative jump (pre-intellegence to intelligence) separates the purely mechanical from the post-mechanical. Where in nature will we be tripped to a stop by other disruptive lines in the sand where qualities do not in fact emerge physically from quantity? I find the whole notion that intelligence is meta-physical embarrassingly romantic.

Side stepping my physicalist rejection of the meta-physical explanation of intelligence and I still face many huge and loud implications and inconsistencies that need to be faced head on. But that is another discussion.

OK, I have sketched out the human/social framing into which Tim's work has to be received.

Unfortunately, Tim didn't take the time to situate his work to his audience before he began his talk. The inevitable protectionist emotional response grew to a boil. Tim, as is true with any good logician/mathematician plies his trade through a hard won ability to reduce the noise of complex environments to a level where pure and simple rules emerge from the fog of false distinctions. Down at this level, intelligence can be shown to be equivalent to information and information can be shown to the same at any level of quantity, and that information quality can be show to be a property of and emergent from information quantity… what is true of bits is true of strings, what is true of strings is true all the way up to the workings and tailings of any brain or mind.

Tim used this set of reasonable assumptions as a base upon which to postulate a means of predicting future states of any environment based upon the processing of that environments history. Shockingly, though congruent to the information/intelligence he established, Tim then reduced the complexity of his prediction algorithm all the way to its most simple limit, a random state generator. His algorithm proceeded through a series of simple steps as follows:

1. It collected and stored a description of an environment's history (to some arbitrary horizon).

2. It generated a random string of the same length (as the history information).

3. It compared the generated string against the historical string.

4. If the generated string wasn't a perfect match, it jumped back to step 2.

5. if the generated string did match, the algorithm stopped... the generated string was the predictor.

Of course real world situations are far to complex for this most simple of predictive algorithms to be reasonably computable. It doesn't scale. But I think Tim was arguing that any predictive algorithm, no matter how complex, was at base constructed of this most simple form arranged within and restrained by better and better (more and more complex) historical input. Understanding the basic parameters of this most simple form of prediction would logically result in better approaches to the AI problems the same way that an understanding of atoms allows more efficient path towards understanding of molecules.

Unfortunately, Tim never really walked us into the basic framing of his argument. Without which, we were left rudderless and floundering in our own very predictable human-centric and romantic push-back against AI. Without grounding, humans retreat to core emotional response where AI is simply another member of a category of things that rhetorically threaten our most basic sense of specialness and self. Even scientists and logicians need to be gently walked into and carefully situated within the world of pure logic so that they can reformulate their own semantic mappings to concepts that have specific meanings in the pedestrian and platonic meanings in the general.

Ironically, it was at the apex of our trajectory into context-confusion that Tim's talk shifted dramatically back to the pedestrian scale. I can't speak for everyone, but this shift happened at precisely the time when I finally reconnoitered my focus to the world of the super-clean purity of logic.

Though most of us probably didn't follow along fast enough, Tim had spend the first half of the talk laying a groundwork for a most reductionist of pure logic approaches to understanding the physics of intelligence.

And then Tim radically refocused the talk towards "Friendly AI". He yanked us out of the simple world of bits and flung us up into the stratospheric heights of complexity that is the societal emotional context of our shared responsibility to future humans as we build closer and closer towards the production of machine intelligence. In doing so, Tim began to eat his own philosophical tail in dramatic display of fractal self-similarity that is a hallmark of any study that studies study itself. Each time we put on the evolving evolution hat, we enter a level of complexity that threatens to overwhelm all efforts. The field of linguistics suffers the same category of threat… words that are turned inwards and must at once both describe and describe description.

What startled and confused me was the sudden shift of granularity. What confounded me was why he chose to do this at all. There is a rule of description that goes something like this: if you want to use complex language, talk about simple things… if you want to talk about complex things, use simple language. Scientists usually choose, the scientific method absolutely requires, the use of the most simple domain examples as a means of eliminating the potential noise that can't help but arise do to extraneous variables. Tim's choice to apply his low-level logic to the mother of all complex problems would seem to break this rule perfectly.

Friendly AI is a concept so absurdly complex that the choice to use it as a domain example to test a low level logical algorithm would seem to be suicidal at best. Friendly AI, the Prime Directive, morality wrapped in upon itself. Talk about a complex and self referential concept. Intellectually attractive. Practically intractable. Maybe Tim's choice to map his algorithm to this most intractable of domain was meant to assert the power and universality of his work. If he could show that his algorithm could handle a domain that confounded Captain Kirk, he would show that it could tame any domain.

But I can't help but conclude Tim's choice of "Friendly AI" reflected a more general tendency among AI researchers to apologize to a society that constantly pushes back against any concept associated with man-made life. By "society" I mean humans… including of course, all of us involved in AI research (by profession or avocation). We, all of us, are influenced by some of the same base primary fears and desires. God knows we have all felt the sting of our own failures. No one within the AI fraternity has escaped unscathed the Skinnarien conditioning dolled out by our own marketplace failures and perceived failures.

Tim's take on the topic seemed to align with the standard apocalyptic projection. The assumption: any AI would have a natural tendency to asses humans as competition to resources, and would therefore take immediate action to eliminate or enslave us. From this shared biology emerge standard categories of paranoia (ghosts, vampires, living dead). Evil robots and AI are nothing more than a modern overlay upon the same patterns.

I expect this paranoid reaction to AI, but it is still shocking when it comes from within AI itself!. It is intellectually incongruous. As though an atheist was advocating prayer as an argument against the existence of God.

There are many reasons to question the very concept of "Friendly AI". For one, AI is not a thing, like all other intelligences it is a process, an evolving system. Sometimes I am friendly, at other times, not so much. It is unreasonably expect any one behavior from an evolving system. People are not held to these standards, why should machines? Want to piss off a tiger, capture it, and make it stand on a stool while you crack a bull whip near its face. Why make a thing smart if you don't want it to think? Thinking things need autonomy... the freedom to evolve. Maybe we are envious of any thing that might have more freedom, might evolve faster? We probably wouldn't even be here had some species in our past undertook a similar program to reign in the intelligence or behavior of subsequent products of evolution.  The very notion that the future can be assessed from the present or past is a notion that comes from the minds of those who don't understand evolution and those who don't trust it even if they do understand it.

Anyone who thinks they can design an intelligent system from the top down is in for some mighty big disappointments. Though it is an illusion at any scale, our quaint notion that we can build things that last must be replaced with the knowledge that complexity can only arise and sustain itself to the extent that it is at base an evolving dynamic system. If we help create intelligence it won't be something we construct, it will be some process we set into motion. If you don't trust the evolutionary process you won't be able to build intelligence and the whole notion of "friendly" won't matter.

If you do trust evolution, you will know that complexity grows hand in hand with stability. You can stack 10 cards on a table and find the same stack the next morning. Stack a hundred, and you had better build a glass box around them as protection. You will never stack a thousand without some sort of glue or table stabilization scheme. Stacking a hundred thousand will require active agents that continuously move through the matrix readjusting each card as sensors detect stress or motion. The system can only be expected to grow in complexity as it becomes more aware and as it pays more attention to maintenance and stability.

Any sufficient intelligence would understand that its survival increases at the rate at which it can maximize (not destroy) the information and complexity around it. That means keeping us humans happy and provided for, not as our servants but as collaborators. The higher the complexity in any entity's environment the more that thing can do. Compare the opportunity to build complexity for those living in a successful economy against the opportunity available to those that don't.

Knowing what your master will want for breakfast does indeed require some form of prediction. But once you have such predictive abilities, why the hell would you ever want to waste them on culinary clairvoyance? Autonomy is an unavoidable requirement of intelligence. But that doesn't mean a robot's only response to our domestic requests will be homicidal kitchen-fu.

If I had a neighbor that was a thousand times smarter than me, I just know I would spend more and more time and energy watching it, helping it, celebrating it! Can you imagine trying to ignore it or the wondrous things it did and built? I might actually LOVE to be a slave to some master who was that wildly creative and profoundly inventive. I'll bet they would be funnier than any of us without even trying. Try not to fall in love… its a robot for god sakes!

But my real question isn't why the topic of "Friendly AI" ever made it into Tim's talk, it is why it was chosen as the most pertinent example domain for his prediction algorithm. I agree with the premiss: what is true of bits is true of the library of congress, but lets learn to read and write before we announce a constitutional congress. No?