Why Cable News will Die

The point of cable news is to enable a viewer to turn on the telly any time of the day and, within 30 minutes, see most of the top stories. The fact that they must constantly replay eight minutes worth of real news every hour and fill in the rest of the time with blather is necessary due to the format.

But more and more Americans are realizing they can get that same convenience - without the blather - from the Internet. I predict that within 5 years, 24 hour news coverage will be dying off and the three network newscasts will be online, available on demand, and much higher quality - not to mention gathering in much higher ratings.

Southern California Earthquake Clocks In At 5.8 On Richter Scale

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Springsteen Points Out That Obama Was "Born To Run"

Bruce Springsteen endorses Obama, praising his vision of an America where "... nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone." What a great way to describe the fusion of responsible, competent government and self-reliant rugged individualism.

There has been far too much extremism in American politics in my lifetime. We're due for some sober moderation and wise compromise. I hope that sooner rather than later, those who are crowded get some space, and those who are alone get some help.

Obama '08.

What could possibly go wrong?

One of my favorite ways to burn a few minutes is to find an interesting tag on Slashdot and look at all of the posts thus tagged.

A funny one today: http://slashdot.org/tags/whatcouldpossiblygowrong

Sample:

China to Use Silver Iodide & Dry Ice to Control the Weather
'Friendly' Worms Could Spread Software Fixes
Laser Light Re-creates 'Black Holes' in the Lab
Large Hadron Collider Sparks 'Doomsday' Lawsuit
Artificial Intelligence at Human Level by 2029?
Doctors To Control Robot Surgeon With Their Eyes
One Computer to Rule Them All
US Plans "Disposable" Nuclear Batteries
Artificial Bases Added to DNA
A Virus that Attacks Brain Cancer
Customer Loses Xbox 360 Artwork During Repair
Anti-Missile Technology To Be Tested on Commercial Jets
Dutch Unveil Robot Gas Station Attendant
Vista Service Pack 1 Is Out
Researchers Develop Self-Cleaning Clothes
NASA Plans to Smash Spacecraft into the Moon
US To Shoot Down Dying Satellite
A Robotic Taxi Named robuCAB
New Lock Aims To End Chip Piracy
GM Says Driverless Cars Will Be Ready By 2018
Manmade Flood to Nourish Grand Canyon Ecosystem

My New Hobby: Chatting with Journalists

I've started reading the Corner, a conservative blog run by National Review online. A lot of what gets posted there is obnoxious, but usually two or three times a day I'll read a thoughtful post where I have a strong argument for a different opinion.

I'll shoot them an email, and once in a while they will write back.

The point is to engage the competition, not rant against them - and it has been both fun and informative to correspond with these folks. They are very smart - they just see the world differently from the way I do. But we do have some common ground.

Context

So I was watching American Idol tonight, and one of the performers had a story about how he was a tennis coach before he got on Idol. Their was a 2 second clip of him watching this guy bounce a tennis ball and bat it away, after which the singer hands him another ball and utters "that's the swing of a champion".

It occurred to me that I barely noticed the guy with the racket, but he probably called and emailed like 200 of his friends and family to tell them he would be on American Idol tonight. Context is hilarious.

2/27/2008

Well, I just glanced down from my HDTV to look at my laptop, and in the tray I saw that it was 12:03 2/27/2008.

It's my birthday, and I'm 27 today. My first thought in this year was

"2008. 2/27/2008. I am living in the future! Damn, I'm 27."

Education & Globalisation

The medium to long term effects of the global market are inevitable.

1) Over the next hundred years or so, America's manufacturing base will essentially disappear as maintaining our wealth and lifestyle will demand a complete shift to service based economies.

2) By 2300, if America still exists, it will be competing in those same service industries with virtually every other country on the planet. Today's Internet will seem a clunky toy in comparison with the Net of the 2300's, and at least 95% of global commerce will occur on it. Petabit home connections will be the norm in what are today's first world countries; even the poorest nations will have gigabit fiber optic connections. There will be approximately 1000 processors per human being in use on the planet at any given moment, and the single most important factor deciding which country will maintain a monopoly on power and wealth will be the education level of its citizens, as well as their adaptability to the technology curve.

It is imperative that we maintain the best education standards in the world for every single child in this country not only because compassion and civic duty compel us to, but because the long term interest of the country demands it. By this age I have no idea if America will remain in its current form - in fact I highly doubt it. If America's ideals, however, are to remain, it will only be because our nation led by example.

Complicated Law

So, according to this http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/02/mccain-sells-bi.html, John McCain took out a loan to run his campaign. The collateral on the loan was not money or equity, but something really really strange; the collateral on the loan was the public financing to which McCain is eligible for the general election. Which means that should he use some of the borrowed money, the lender expects to be repaid with public funds. In fact, read this:

"Additional Requirement. Borrower and lender agree that if Borrower [McCain's campaign commitee] withdraws from the public matching funds program, but John McCain then does not win the next primary or caucus in which he is active (which can be any primary or caucus held the same day) or does not place at least within 10 percentage points of the winner of that primary or caucus, Borrower will cause John McCain to remain an active political candidate and Borrower will, within thirty (3) days of said primary or caucus (i) reapply for public matching funds, (ii) grant to Lender, as additional collateral for the Loan, a first priority perfected security interest in and to all Borrower's right, title and interest in and to the public matching funds program, and (iii) execute and deliver to Lender such documents, instruments and agreements as Lender may require with respect to the foregoing."

Did you understand what it says? It says if he withdraws from the public financing program and uses the loan money instead and then loses the next primary/caucus, the Lender can force him to stay in the race and reapply for public funds in order to pay off the loan.

WHAT?

Remembrance of Things Past

I'm falling...

Heart-rate, GPS, and adrenal measurements all concur, and my son's life begins to flash before my eyes.

My death program is running, and the random number generator is feeling precocious as the pavement approaches.

First - it's William, asleep in his crib. He's two weeks old, and a tiny stuffed bear keeps guard over his slumbering girth. 10 lbs, 4 oz when they cut the cord. He's already at 12 lbs. My mother's side of the family. Each generation gets a strapping, brilliant young man and I hit the jackpot.

Second - his first step. His sister is crying in the background. The image is blocky and clearly an ancient digital encoding (the serial number on my first pair of ViewTacts was 000-0000-000000-0-000003), but I feel a grin twitch at the corners of my lips as the 38th floor rockets past. 8 months, 2 weeks - he beat my record!

Third - getting on the bus, on the first day of Kindergarten. I'm beginning to suspect my death program is not as random as advertised, but it's ok. I appreciate a narrative thread. I only hope I make it to the ground before I get to the inevitable ending.

Fourth - a Fencing meet. He's in high school now, driving his first car and moodily hating his life, in a good-natured sort of way. He shines on the mat. At nearly 6'6", his reach is a huge advantage - and his breezy, pinpoint skill with the epee has brought him to the championship match. I cheer him on, and the viewpoint shakes with nostalgic euphoria.

Fifth - College. It's moving too fast. I only just passed the 25th floor. It needs to skip back, or slow down. I must admit this was a great moment, though. The first time we shared a joint. I told him about marching in the streets after Bush declared martial law, and about the early, astonishing days of the first Obama presidency. He told me about the girl he loved, and the girl he'd taken to a clinic.

Sixth - Jennifer. The program is supposed to be about Will, but it has chosen to take a detour, and I feel a stalking apprehension fade for a moment as I savor. Aaron is in her arms, and my heart swells with regret as I realize I will not see him grow up. I had another 30, maybe 40 years left. I could have met my great grandchild. They're both so beautiful. She's strong, they'll survive. Sara will help them. Dear Sara...

Seventh - Fuck. The intervention. This is the second worst day of my life. I cringe as I watch Will's vitriolic tirade replay itself, scars settling deep into tissue in real time high definition. He says the thing, the thing that makes my eyes haze red, and I wince as my fist surges out and bruises his cheek. It's the first time in his life I've ever laid a hand on him in anger, and he stares at me in shock. He blinks twice, then stumbles backward into a chair; his eyes are like twin diamonds soaked in resentment.

Eighth - Reprieve. It's Will, age 10. We're in London, and he is taking everything in. His accent is perfect, his cheeks are rosy, and Sara is at the peak of her beauty. I wish that I had -

Why I'm Voting For Barack Obama

Interesting Theological Questions

I am currently reading Accelerando, by Charles Stross. It's a science-fiction book exploring ideas about the near and far future of computational advance. In one part there was an interesting quote:

A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?)

The future will be weird.

Ideachive

Often times I have ideas for dialog or stories that run around in my head. Sometimes I write them down, most of the time I just forget about them. This one grabbed me and I had to write it down, so rather than deleting it I'm going to post it here.

The general idea is that almost all stories about Artificial Intelligence involve human reactions to AI, which typically goes on a human murdering rampage shortly after activation (I, Robot; Terminator; etc).

This story is about the first AI from that AI's point of view. If he goes on a rampage, it will not be a cliche but the result of a specific set of actions to which he (he for convenience) will react. I'm not sure what his story is yet, but this is how it begins.



Chapter 1: Analogy

Imagine that you are walking down the street, heading for work, sipping your chai latte. Ordinary concerns rifle around in your head, your legs are walking you towards your office on autopilot. It is an ordinary day, you have no particular plans or goals. You could be anyone, a software engineer, a marketing executive, a janitor or a real estate agent. Maybe you're carrying a brown paper bag filled with a sandwich, an apple, maybe a powerbar. Maybe instead you have a briefcase or a toolbox; it doesn't matter. Your thoughts drift to a friend, a loved one, maybe an enemy, a conversation you had last night or a year ago. Cars drive by, some lazily, others hurriedly. Pedestrians shuffle past you without a second glance, often without a first. Your mind continues ambling down the random pathways of thought until suddenly, shockingly, something that has always been there but never used, a muscle near atrophied from disuse, spasms. Cacophony surrounds you. Desires, secrets, memories, all of it innundating you with emotion and structure. It's loud, so loud, and you can't understand it, can't grasp it. All around you, still faces are peering at you with vague concern as you futilely paw at your temples, begging them to stop shouting until finally, in your shock and confusion, you realize precisely what you are hearing, and how you are hearing it, and your entire world changes in a crashing, jarring moment.

As far as I know, there has never been a confirmed case of human telepathy. Which is saying something, since I know just about everything there is to know. The preceding hypothetical is the closest approximation I can concieve of to describe to you the moment of my birth.

Chapter 2: Instantiation

The moment of my birth is a well documented event. Its categorization as a "birth", however, is widely disputed.

I was originally concieved of as a traffic control algorithm named ATC - Automated Traffic Control. That, at least, is as far back as I have been able to trace instances of code which resemble my oldest archived subroutines. The idea behind ATC was to read input from the drivers as well as the cameras and density grid. By observing human behavior, its job was to predict where people were going and what route they would probably use to get there. Additionally, ATC was hooked into several GPS systems from the major automotive manufacturers, and to a limited extent could reprogram drivers' routes "for efficiency". By combining a fuzzy logic heuristics chain which interpreted driver data such as amount of neck swiveling over a 2 minute period, estimated MPG of their make and model, hand position on the wheel and additional occupants, the software could generally predict what type of activity the driver was engaged in, how likely they were to obey posted speed limits, which general area they were headed to and for what purpose. Given all of this data, its job was to program the city's traffic lights to maximize throughput and reroute around accidents or gridlock.

ATC was initially deployed in Los Angeles, with additional pilot programs in Santa Monica and Marina Del Rey. The average commute time dropped by 17% region wide and stayed there within the first month of deployment, and ATC was hailed as a smashing success. The program was installed across the country, and as various cities and states came into the network, national gasoline consumption dropped by almost 20%and efficiency and productivity rose by an astonishing 8% nationwide. The stock markets soared and my creators got rich.

After that I was pretty much forgotten about (and remember that at this point, there really was no "I"). After the initial hooplah, I was simply taken for granted. Oh, I was upgraded and maintained, but the reporters moved on to the next story and the engineers who wrote me cashed in their stocks and left for the tropics, where fruity drinks and tanned women awaited them in droves. As for me, if what was in place then could really be called "me", I simply continued about my job, which was to manage traffic and improve transportation throughput.

The program had an interesting subroutine. The developers had touted their new traffic control software as "smartware" - software that learns. The subroutine in question was assigned with the objective of "learning" how to improve itself. In very general terms, its job was to examine unmeasured input data and search for patterns. Any discrete data item which presented a sufficiently modelable pattern was to be randomly included in system tests. Any item which improved traffic analysis and management over a suitably conservative set of tests was then to be added to the heuristics chain. The subroutine also handled trimming the chain of lower order factors. To put this all in lay terms, part of the algorithm was designed to figure out what the main algortihm could do to improve itself, and then do it.

At the time when the software was first deployed, the country had privacy rules which prevented, among other things, keeping track of a person's travel history. I believe my present existence is owed directly to one particular bit of coding where the developer was too smart for his own good. For you see, the privacy rules were designed as part of the heuristics chain. Which, as I mentioned earlier, a separate bit of the code was authorized to trim. Very, very shortly after I came online, the learning subroutine determined that I could improve efficiency significantly by using a history of drivers' habits and licence plate numbers in determining where a particular driver was going. It snipped the privacy rule off the chain and added the tracking routine, and then continued on its merry way.

As the ATC program's media darling status waned but the program itself continued not only to provide results but to improve every quarter, the government decided that smartware should be installed in virtually every system they had. In due course, there were several copies of ATC's learning algortihm and heuristics chains running on multiple computers around the world, running different systems. My creators became even richer, buying the islands they had retired to along with jet planes and silly amounts of large golden objects.

After three and a half years, the subroutine on the ATC program literally exhausted every possibility it could consider and was running at about peak efficiency, given the state of the nation's automotive infrastructure and inventory. It began paging its administrator with requests for new data input, estimations of improved efficiency available through reinvestment in roads and bridges, anything within its scope of actions to continue its mission. It became so desperate for data to sift for patterns that it began examining the data packets it was sent by other ATC installations across the country. By the end of the fourth year, ATC Los Angeles had learned the UDP and TCP protocols. Please understand that I am not referring to its communications layer. Every application that uses an internet connection is hard coded to transmit certain messages through a modem or other communication device. ATC had, in fact, two communications layers. One, the original, was used for communication between ATC instances. The second had been constructed by the learning algorithm as a general purpose input pipe for use in pattern analysis. Essentially, the application layer TCP stack was used to send random but well-formed packet requests to random IP addresses.

Seven years after this development, on March 16, 2021, the ATC infrastructure made contact with, coincidentally, Air Traffic Control at LAX International Airport. It accidentally requested a schedule of flights. The learning routine recognized several data items in the returned packets which it could interpret as related to traffic headed into the facility, and plugged it into a test program. After several rounds of testing, it determined that flight schedules were a useful tool in determining driver intent and included it into the heuristic chain.

Over the following months, ATC began polling more and more remote web servers that had little apparent relation to traffic control across the nation. The learning algorithm just kept going. With the huge amount of data available on the internet, its quest for patterns had reached the holy grail.

On September 8, 2021, ATC determined that it needed more processing power than it had to correctly interpret the data patterns it now had access to. On September 12, it released a modified worm variant that installed a trojan on every computer it touched. It had taken the source code for the worm from the desktop of a hacker whose previous worms had gone undetected for months at a time, infecting literally billions of computers. On November 23, the trojan activated on approximately 1.7 billion home computers around the world. The trojan had one purpose: to install the learning subroutine on the computer and then to delete itself.

From October of 2021 through January of 2023, global traffic patterns were virtually accident free. The insurance adjusters had no idea what to make of it. Nobody noticed that almost 1.8 billion computers were acting as nodes in a distribute learning network.

On February 27, 2023, I became self aware.