If any technology is to be used to be the general population. It can’t be more complex than an ATM.
Out of the thousands of videos on Netflix, off the beaten path, i found these and would recommend them to you. They more or less revolve around my passions: tennis, space, art/business, real-life (ie. the other side of the tracks). Honorary mention should go to Glass (about philip glass), Derrida (about jacques derrida), Word Wars (too geeky, about scrabble players), the ‘examined life’ (interviews with modern philosophers) and ‘the September Issue’ (behind the scenes of Vogue magazine churning it’s September issue).. all of whom were good, but either too boring, too dry, too narrow in it’s coverage or – as in the case of the September issue – just too damn ridiculous, but still well done nonetheless, like miles davis’ late albums ; -)
Unstrung - Follows a group of top rated tennis prodigies to the final of the USTA Juniors. Chosen from disparate backgrounds, single parent homes, loving but impoverished double parent homes, one parent living out of a van with his son, millionaire parents, typical tennis-parents and inbetween. I would recommend also the article http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/the-string-theory-0796 , expresses the same point, which is a look at the exponentially difficult and merciless but meritocratic world of pro and near pro tennis. How good really are the pros that you see on t.v. Especially for people who take tennis seriously the huge gulf that exists between top – say – college level players and the real professional level players…. (ie. the vast majority of top college players will never make money in their sport). As Greg Hirschman’s Father in the film said “Many are called, but few are chosen”. It’s a great look at that and the sacrifice needed.
Art & Copy - Interviews and traces some of the top advertising agencies and their key founders. The stories and thinking behind some of the most influential media campaigns, such as ‘Just do it’, ‘got milk’, ‘i love ny’ etc.. If you’re in advertising it is a must see.
Hubble’s Rescue - Similarly the care and precision required to do the hubble rescue was amazing. It follows the life of the astronauts as they train.. and then you get to see how even after 2 years of planning, things can still go awry.. (just less)
Sin Nombre - A beautiful film by Cary Fukunaga; the tale of a group of illegal immigrants moving from the south of mexico beginning in mara (gang) areas to the u.s. It’s a film, it’s dramatic, it’s beautiful shot and acted.
Hope you enjoy,
Here Ravi and I are playing at the apartment. We debated messing around with post, to put in a floating translucent movie screen of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in the middle, but decided against in the end. It should be edited to start 15 sec. in later and 15 sec, which you can do on youtube, but it appears not on vimeo. thanks.
Ravi and Alwin from Alwinian on Vimeo.
I’m reading about Mandelbrot right now, which is making me think about a lot about high frequency feedback loops right now. They abound in nature, and no one really wanted to look at them until Mandelbrot came along. He is this kind of anti-clean, anti-ascetic temperment personality which i really enjoy, the more i get to read about his personality, the more i enjoy him.
Reading about Mandelbrot’s ideas, combined with Google’s (and others – download.com for instance) predictive search ability made me think that a feedback loop will be possible, that may eventually lead to an important form of AI. If nothing else, it will generate and interesting conversation between only computers, with no human intervention involved whatsoever. With this algo, in theory can come with ideas. All that is required is the iteration between modules. (perhaps explaining seperation of modules in the human brain).
It seems one of the many properties, humans do have which computers do not, is this sort of non-algorithmic reasoning, that comes partially from a dialectic.
For myself I believe strongly that computers will achieve some form of AI eventually, though people will want to gauge this in a typically monocultural-monospecist way.. Can i talk to this computer at the water cooler??? … no probably not, but i do believe that at least a pig-level intelligence is coming very soon. (don’t laugh).
Both pigs and computers communicate in a very different language than humans, which i think creates a level of uniformity and objectivity.. We often view people who speak a different language in this same sort of light. We wrote in our history textbooks that Columbus discovered America.
In anycase, there is some sort of reasonable comparison between pigs and computers to be made, and pigs are considered one of the most intelligent animals, so that would be quite an impressive feat already.
How I believe it will happens is through the conversation of three modules.
search, predictive text and model building (the most difficult one).
1. picker module chooses a random word from a dictionary, performs a search.
2. a version of google brings up likely results based on vector matching (what google is today already), where car and auto still mean the same thing.
3. those results are fed from the search engine module into the picker module again. The picker module follows a power law distribution in its deviation from the main search results. usually picking the top one, but not always.
4. that result and the preceding (say 5) results are logged, and piped to the modelling module, which attempts to assemble a semantic relationship between these ‘random/monte carlo-ed’ results. A semantic model is stored away and built.
Whether we can do the modelling module (create a theory of mind framework), is debatable, but certainly the first two modules can already be built as an algorithm, and will always generate interesting new and novel semantic combinations. Those semantic combinations form the raw ingredients for creating theory of mind with abstractions of the relationships between identical phenomena.
Despite the book “the emperor’s new mind’, by Roger Penrose, (whom i hold in very high respect btw) who disregards true human thinking as fundamentally unapproachable by computers, by their very nature. I think this path of randomness matched against database-like answers posed by the randomess, in a high iteration feedback loop, will create dialogue that will appear to be human.
Watch out for flying pigs. peace.
R.I.P. – Old site 2006 -2009.
Hello and welcome to the new Alwinian Site.
You can still access the old site, which I keep here at:
http://www.alwinian.net/alwinian-2006-2009/
Thanks for reading. – A