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October 1, 2008

Does Google Make Us Dumber or Smarter?

For the next chapter in the debate sparked by Nicholas Carr's article in The Atlantic entitled, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," see this retort from Damon Darlin in The New York Times.  We need to have the same debate about invention automation technology: will it replace human inventors or enable them to become better at inventing?

Posted by Robert at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)
category: Human Creativity

September 27, 2008

Vernor Vinge on the Future of Human-Machine Intelligence

Posted by Robert at 8:29 PM | Comments (0)
category: Human Creativity

July 26, 2008

Forgetful? Just Upgrade Your Memory

Have you ever referred to Google's search engine as your "backup memory"? Clive Thompson calls it his "outboard brain." Both metaphors are apt. Forget the name of that Japanese restaurant that opened last year down the street? No worries. It's just a few keystrokes away. The director of your favorite movie? Just as easy. I've reached the point where if I forget the meaning of a word while at my desk I'll look up the definition online rather than reach a few feet further for a hardbound dictionary, and not just because I'm lazy - the former has finally become faster than the latter.

Someday it may be possible to have a chip implanted in your skull which will achieve the same effect. We shouldn't, however, make too much of the difference between internal and external memory enhancements (as Andy Clark argues eloquently in Natural-Born Cyborgs). Both kinds of upgrade enhance our recall and influence our behavior. Admit it - you've looked up a fact on Google while on a phone call and inserted that fact into the conversation without confessing to the ruse. To an external observer, there is no difference between a sharper you and the same old you with a high-speed Internet connection.

One you come to rely on the ready availability of technological memory boosters, you may become less inclined to expend energy memorizing facts, just as books reduced the incentive for people to memorize Homer's Iliad. After all, anything you forget is within arm's reach. Clive Thompson, in the article mentioned above, points to a study by neuroscientist Ian Robertson which found evidence of this trend: fewer than 40 percent of respondents to a survey could remember a relative's birthday, while 87 percent of people over 50 could do so.

Inventors who harness invention-automation technology experience similar effects on their inventive abilities. A novice engineer can effectively boost his inventive skill level to equal that of a more experienced inventor by using automated tools which can explore pathways he would not otherwise have considered. Experienced designers can relegate the low-level details of design to software, just as we relegate fact-finding to search engines. The result: human inventors whose creativity has been augmented by computers, with no chip implant required.

Posted by Robert at 6:57 PM
category: Human Creativity

February 3, 2006

The Spark of Co-Creation

In his new book Spark, John Winsor and 16 others discuss "co-creation," in which companies work collaboratively with their customers to create and improve their products and services. In other words, it is a collaboratively-written book about collaboration.

I see a parallel here between collaboration of businesses and their customers in "co-creation," and the "collaboration" of software and its users in interactive evolutionary computation.

Posted by Robert at 2:01 PM | Comments (0)
category: Human Creativity | Technology Industry

July 19, 2005

Is it harder to think in the abstract than in specifics?

Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. "Instapundit") criticizes Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind for encouraging people, perhaps indirectly, to seek out "holistic" and "right-brain" approaches to problems that will be appealing because they seem "easier than those tiresome traditional linear approaches with all their steps, increments, and well, work." Reynolds cautions that:

[G]enius . . . has more to do with perspiration than inspiration. And while our workplaces may be too unfriendly to right brain thinking, they're a lot friendlier than they used to be. . . . In fact, it's arguable that most business management could benefit from a more traditional approach to balance sheets and bottom lines: More thinking inside the Income Statement, and less effort to think "outside the box."

I think part of Reynolds' criticism stems from a problem with Pink's distinction between "logical" and "holistic" modes of thought. I've said before that I think Pink's analysis is insightful and well worth reading, but this distinction has limitations.

Consider instead a different distinction, that between thinking at different levels of abstraction (see previous posting). Imagine an engineer faced with the problem of designing an electronic calculator. She might start with low-level electronic components, such as resistors and capacitors, and attempt to combine them together into a calculator. This would require a detailed understanding of circuit design at a low level of abstraction (i.e., a high level of specificity).

If, however, the engineer had available existing components for adding, multiplying, and performing other arithmetic functions, she could design a calculator by combining those existing components together. She might not need to know anything about the internal guts (e.g., resistors and capacitors) of the components she used. This would require an understanding of circuit design at a higher level of abstraction.

Finally, if the engineer had access to an existing electronic calculator, she would not need to know anything about circuit design. But imagine that she programs the calculator to not only perform arithmetic, but also to solve equations. This would require a yet more abstract understanding of mathematics and programming.

Is it any "harder" or "easier" to solve problems at any one of these levels of abstraction than at the other? Yes, but only in the sense that it is easier to make an existing calculator add 2+2 than it is to design from scratch a calculator for adding 2+2.

But that is comparing apples and oranges. Once the calculator exists, it poses problems at a higher level of abstraction that are just as complex in their own right as the problems that existed at the lower level of abstraction before the calculator was built. Science and engineering are fractal in this way; there is no loss in resolution as you move among layers of abstraction.

Let me take a stab at using this analysis to harmonize Pink's original argument and Reynolds' criticism of it. We need to use both "logical" ("left-brain") thinking and "holistic" ("right-brain") thinking at every layer of abstraction. As Pink's Abundance, Asia, and Automation make it impossible for people in the U.S. to compete at their current level of abstraction using logical thinking alone, they will either need to use holistic thinking at that level of abstraction, or move up a level, where it will be possible for them to succeed using only logical thinking until the same forces kick in at that level at some point in the future. Then the whole game starts over again, and Pink will be able to write about the Neo-Conceptual Age and its progeny, ad infinitum.

Posted by Robert at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)
category: Human Creativity | Philosophy of Computing

July 18, 2005

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink is well worth reading if you're interested in the topics covered by this blog. Pink's argument is that holistic thinking, and a variety of skills associated with it, will become increasingly economically valuable in the coming "Conceptual Age." A relatively small portion of the book is dedicated to substantiating this claim. Most of the book focuses on describing the "six senses" -- the set of aptitudes that you will need to succeed in the Conceptual Age -- and on providing practical ways for individuals to sharpen those senses. (The six senses are Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning.)

Pink identifies three drivers of the Conceptual Age: Abundance, Asia, and Automation. He draws a useful analogy between the defeat of the iconic John Henry by an automated steam drill and the defeat of chess grand master Garry Kasparov by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. Pink concludes the analogy:

Last century, machines proved they could replace human backs. This century, new technologies are proving they can replace human left brains.

I agree. But Pink's conclusion doesn't go far enough. Artificial creativity is proving increasingly able to replace human right brains. For example, human programmers were still required to program the incarnation of Deep Blue that defeated Kasparov. Kasparov may have his revenge when Deep Blue's programmers are put out of work by a genetic algorithm that evolves winning chess playing strategies. Although we're not there yet, Moshe Sipper and his colleagues have made some great strides.

In the final analysis, my extended analogy is still consistent with Pink's general thesis -- that people will need to develop higher-level conceptual skills in the coming century to remain competitive. Deep Blue's programmers' best bet for keeping their jobs in the long term is to learn how to write genetic algorithms that produce chess-playing code, rather than continuing to fine tune their skills at writing chess-playing code itself.

Posted by Robert at 3:08 PM | Comments (0)
category: Human Creativity | Work

June 23, 2005

Who "writes" a reality TV show?

WBUR reported this morning (the same story is being covered by Reuters and others) that the Writers Guild of America (WGA) has launched a campaign to gain a labor contract for writers of reality TV shows. Reality TV producers are objecting to such a contract, in part on the basis that the people seeking a contract aren't "writers."

What's the connection between this and automated inventing? Consider the following (from the Reuters story):

Instead of writing dialogue, reality TV writers say they help craft the overall sense of story. According to the union, this includes casting, creating scenarios, conducting field interviews and guiding the postproduction process so hundreds of hours of video end up with a meaningful beginning, middle and end.

For that reason, video editors feel they are equally deserving of WGA coverage.

"These stories come together in post (-production) -- stories are pulled out by us, in collaboration of course with storytellers -- but we're in there creating stories so it's a logical conclusion to be part of the Writers Guild," said editor Donna Egan, who also is helping organize this campaign. "A lot of it is just about having basic benefits -- health and pension. We have to change the system because the system isn't going to change voluntarily."

Is someone who works on a reality TV show a "writer" because he or she creates the environment in which a reality TV show plays out? This is similar to the question whether someone who writes automatic script-writing software is the "author" of the resulting scripts, or whether someone who writes automatic machine-designing software is the "inventor" of the resulting machines.

Whatever the answer to these questions, now at least I can justify watching "Fear Factor" as a way of conducting research into automated inventing.

Posted by Robert at 8:53 AM | Comments (0)
category: Human Creativity | Work

June 17, 2005

Inventors Work Hard to be Lazy

The PHOSITA blog has a great list of quotes on invention, including the following from Agatha Christie:

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

The purpose of many inventions is to make life easier for the inventions' users. New toasters, cars, and lawn mowers make it easier for the people who use them to make toast, travel, and mow the lawn.

But the purpose of many other inventions is to make it easier for inventors to invent. An engineer might write a computer program to simulate new designs for automobile frames, thereby saving the time, money, and effort needed to build and test physical prototypes of the frames. Similarly, engineers have long invented measurement tools, ranging from calipers to electronic calculators, to make it easier to build and test their inventions more accurately.

Inventors invent such new devices to make their lives as inventors easier -- "[t]o save oneself trouble," in Christie's words. The use of such "invention-facilitating inventions" is usually transparent to the end user, who has no way to know whether his new toaster was designed by pure human ingenuity or by an automated computer program.

Invention-facilitating inventions have long been patentable. But such inventions arguably "promote the progress of useful arts" (the ultimate purpose of U.S. patent law) only indirectly, by reducing the resources (e.g., time, money, raw materials) required to invent. If this is a sufficient basis for patentability, then why not allow improvements in pure mathematics, or at least improvements in "pure software" that performs calculations more efficiently? Surely such improvements may be applied to facilitate the process of inventing.

Although I won't attempt to provide any answers to these questions here, I think that the debate over software patents is in part a debate over how direct the connection needs to be between the function performed by a computer program and some real-world ("practical" or "industrial") use for patent protection to be justified. Future improvements in automated inventing will only make resolution of this question more pressing.

Posted by Robert at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
category: Design & Engineering | Human Creativity | Software Patents