multijimbo

watching in hindsight (again): Colossus the Forbin Project

•14 May 2023 • 1 Comment

A few years ago, I wrote about a 1970 movie I find myself coming back to from time to time, Colossus the Forbin Project. What struck me today was not the naïveté of the creators of Colossus and Guardin, but rather the prescience of the movie, and the books it’s taken from, in setting forth the emergence of new properties.

In the movie, this emergence comes at the beginning; the extent to which Colossus begins almost immediately to exceed the expectations of its human creators, amazingly without causing panic. This is the theme that drives the movie, that Colossus is more that was was created, and the humans never catch up to how Colossus is growing.

One key moment of this emergence of capabilities is the moment that Colossus makes use of the tools available to it, to enforce its demands. And when Colossus decides not to answer.

The reason this struck home with me today is the almost constant speculation in the news and commentary about the unexpected emergent properties of our current artificial intelligence systems, as well as the speculation about the danger of continued development.

I will admit that I don’t see the development stopping or even slowing down. As has become obvious, we humans can be short sighted in our thinking, chasing the shiny at the expense of running into the road, into oncoming traffic.

But I suspect we’ll continue to experience unexpected emergent properties of the systems we develop, and this should also not surprise us. We are creating systems where we understand the basic shape of the system, but the details of the system are beyond the ability of our human minds to contain. I suspect the systems we build will continue to surprise us, and we should not be surprised by those surprises.

Another interesting aspect of this is that we saw this possibility, decades ago. Runaway robots, Colossus, Hal and all the others, they were Cassandras of sorts, ghosts from the dark corners of our imaginations, perhaps now brought to life by our hands. Interesting, isn’t it, the extent to which we don’t pay attentions to our own stories.

Posted in bizarre and random things

A random collection of moments

•30 April 2023 • 2 Comments

Some long time ago, measured by where it sits on the list of collected things, I wrote down the sentence, ‘a user guide is an admission of failure.’ I can see what I meant by this. Devices have become much easier to use, going back to the original iPod with its scroll wheel.

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague not so recently, about how students learning to code don’t understand file structures, because they never needed to. They don’t need to organize themselves; they can just search and they will find.

What implications does this observation about user guides have for education? I’m not sure, but education is full of user guides: textbooks, lecture notes, problem sheets, all can be thought of as user guides to particular areas of knowledge. But I don’t think this is the right visualization.

Rather, I think that the textbook or the lecture notes or the problem sheets are the devices rather than the user guides to those devices. So in this interpretation, the lack of a user guide translates to having a well structured textbook.

Bob the cat has developed the habit of walking across my keyboard and sitting on the papers on my desk when he wants a bit of attention. I of course indulge him, scratches under the chin.

It takes time and effort, and a lot of thought, to write a good textbook. I’ve written one, on Hyperbolic Geometry, and like potato chips, it’s hard to write just one 😉 And so part of what is on the list of things to think about is, what might be the next one.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life, mathematics

the parable of the oak and the willow

•23 April 2023 • 1 Comment

There is an old story, which I might be misremembering. An oak tree and a willow tree, who had grown up next to each other, were having a conversation. The oak was glorying in the strength of its trunk and its branches, claiming that it could withstand the strongest of storms. The willow extolled the virtues of flexibility, of rolling with the strength of the storm rather than fighting it directly.

When the storm came, as storms always do, the oak found itself broken, where as the willow, aside from losing some leaves and smaller of its branches, remained standing.

I have a lot of sympathy for this parable. I’m not sure of the strength of its horticultural veracity, but I’ve always found it to make a certain kind of sense. It’s come to mind recently, I suppose, because of the storms, physical and cultural, that are currently swirling around. (I think perhaps I watch too much news.)

Beyond that, my aikido practice is much more willow-like than oak-like. Falling like a tree is not a good way to fall, for instance. And as I get older, the idea of using strength rather than technique and movement and flexibility becomes less attractive over time.

But it applies elsewhere as well. It can be applied for instance to teaching. The oak stands and says, this is my way and this is the way, and requires students to do as they do. The willow is more flexible, more adaptable to the individual student. Or so goes one interpretation.

I contemplate this parable particularly at times when I feel more oak-like than willow-like. Because there is an easiness to being oak-like; I will stand here and I will be, and I will let the winds whistle through my branches and leaves.

I find there to be a theoretical, hypothetical attraction to the way of the willow, but it does require more effort to move and be flexible than it does to stand in glorious ignorance of the world. And some days, it’s just hard to move, and it’s hard to move in response to the world. But still, the parable I think holds a clue to something more. The quest continues.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, education and university life

Eastercon 2023 diary – day three

•9 April 2023 • Leave a Comment

The formal duties for the day are done; the Milford panel has been panelled and we sold more copies of the Eclectic Dreams anthology today, though I will be taking a few home tomorrow.

I will keep coming back to this point, but it’s good to see people. That said, there is one topic that keeps coming up in conversation, which is that engaging and interacting with large groups of people takes a remarkable amount of energy.

This is something I’m used from teaching, and the occasional feeling of dragging the class through the journey from blissful ignorance to understanding, but just interacting takes a lot of energy. Meeting new people, remembering names and context, fitting them into the growing context of the community, takes more energy than I’d remembered.

This is perhaps because in the Before Times, it was just a cost that we didn’t think about; I dealt with people every day, new and old, and I never thought to put a cost on it, because it was just part of what the days involved.

But the calculation is different now, if only because it is more explicit. And the question I’ve been asking myself today is, how to build that cost into future considerations. I like people, at least as much as any extroverted introvert likes people (namely, until we don’t).

In my work life, and my aikido life both, the group of people I deal with is constrained, mainly people I already know and work with (or throw around, respectively), and I don’t do much in the way of Eastercon people. So something to think through.

Posted in bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

Eastercon 2023 diary – day 2

•8 April 2023 • Leave a Comment

I’d intended on writing from Eastercon on each of its days, but alas got distracted by seeing old friends and making new friends, and fell down on day one. We’ll see how the rest of the weekend goes.

But here we are in day two, and it’s going well. The sun is shining, the panels are humming and I’m currently sitting in the Room of Buying and Selling with a small pile of copies of Eclectic Dreams.

This is an anthology of stories (which I was pleased to co-edit, with Pete Sutton and Liz Williams) that have passed through the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference. We had the formal book event yesterday afternoon, and should you not be at Eastercon, you can order your copy via the links contained HERE (so get your copy today!).

Beyond that, being here reminds me of this sprawling community of science fiction and fantasy that I’m a part of. I’ll admit that sitting here in the Room of Buying and Selling, the temptation to buy yet more books for the already over-burdened shelves at home is exceptionally tempting.

More than that are the people. Going to panels and listening to others talking about things they know and things that excite them, evening conversations in the bar, and catching up with people is good for the soul.

The hosts of the Deadline City podcast often talk about the necessity of filling the well, and that’s part of Eastercon does for me. I experience the same refilling in other parts of my life, with aikido summer school and the occasional math conference, and I do love the energy of being in the midst of so many like minded folk.

Posted in bizarre and random things, Uncategorized, writing ephemera

reading in hindsight: Jokester by Isaac Asimov

•2 April 2023 • 1 Comment

I like dipping back into the (personally) distant past and seeing what stories from those days have to say to us today. I picked up Jokester by Isaac Asimov earlier today; the core idea of it had stuck with me since I read it the first time, because I enjoyed the twist, but it was a smaller aspect of the story that caught my attention.

To add a bit of context, the news over the past few weeks and months have been filled with stories about ChatGPT3 and its cousins, and the impact that they might have on education (where I spend a chunk of my days), among other fields.

The aspect of Jokester that caught my attention was the core fact of the existence of the Grand Masters, such as Grand Master Meyerhof who drives the action in this story. This core fact is that there is a subtlety and a skill required to appropriately frame a question for a computer such as Multivac.

Or for ChatGPT3. I’ve not done a lot of playing around with it directly, but I know folk who have spent more time than perhaps is entirely wise. One thing that’s come out of my conversations with them, and the reading I’ve been able to do, is that, the output can depend a lot on how the question for such Large Language Models is framed.

And this brought me back to Grand Master Meyerhof; not actually the questions he asked, as interesting as they are, but that the skill of the dozen or so Grand Masters was to be able to frame the question.

Thinking of Large Language Models and their impact on education, just to focus attention, it seems that this provides a bit of direction for us to work to work with. These tools are not going away; the main question for us is, how to use them and more even than that, how to use them well.

I’m reminded here of the toolmaker koan, a novel by John McLoughlin, that I haven’t read for a long long time. But it does contain the basic question, is it always the case that a civilization will develop tools before it develops the ability to use them, and this strikes me as where we are at the moment.

We have developed some awesome and mighty tools. Perhaps these tools won’t allow us to answer Grand Master Meyerhof’s question as Multivac was able to, but they do pose this question for us. Will we have or develop the wisdom to use them well? Or won’t we? We will soon find out.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

Moby Dick as a metaphor

•12 March 2023 • Leave a Comment

Every couple of years, I go back and read Moby Dick. I first read as a university student, and I’ll admit that the first time through was something of a slog. But as I’ve gone through and through again, it’s begun to grow on me.

Moby Dick contains many things that we can view as metaphor; we’ve become familiar of the great white whale as the elusive object of obsession. For me, the great white whale is often a research question, one of the questions on the LIST, which recedes every time I make an attempt.

I haven’t thought too deeply about the metaphor, beyond trying to prevent myself from becoming a mathematical Ahab. I don’t know for instance where Queequeg makes an appearance in this metaphor, or Ismael. But I do often have Starbucks whispering in my ear, advising me, persuading me to spend time on the questions on which I can make some progress, despite the howls of protest from Ahab and his old questions.

The metaphor of Moby Dick also works for aikido and writing. The things to do, the voice of obsession, the dissenting voice and Ismael at the end holding on to the coffin so carefully made and carved by Queequeg.

But this leads me down another line of inquiry (enquiry?) entirely. (In the balance, probably a bit more enquiry than inquiry.) Would Melville be surprised at the metaphors we pull out from his story? Would he be surprised at how Moby Dick and Ahab have become part of the imagery we use and the descriptions we give?

I don’t actually know. I hope he would be appreciative. But I do know, as do we all, that we each read things into stories and novels that the author may not have intended. And that’s just part of the way of things.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics, writing ephemera

fiction

•26 February 2023 • 3 Comments

On the one hand, fiction is an integral part of our lives, and impossible to imagine without. For all of recorded human history and beyond, we have told stories around the fire to keep our worries occupied and our minds warm.

The bookshelves around the house are full of fiction, and I enjoy exploring its pages. Some contain stories I want to explore again and again, Gilgamesh comes to mind and Dune, and some are stories through which once was sufficient. At least so far.

But on the other hand, fiction is a strange thing. I’m wandering far afield here, but is it really the case that human experience is so thin that we require stories beyond that experience?

I wonder some times what might happen when we do encounter an alien race, extraterrestrials, that don’t understand the concept of fiction. I’m sure that people have written variants of this story, and if you have recommendations for what I should read, please let me know.

But from this, we can spiral into speculation, about what that first encounter might be like. Their lack of comprehension, our lack of comprehension at their lack of comprehension. And so, what’s the story.

Can there exist a race that doesn’t tell stories, that doesn’t so exercise their imagination? And more importantly, would we want to be friends with such a race? Trading partners perhaps, but we would have to answer the question, how much do our stories mean to us?

And I think our answer would have to be, quite a lot really. Everything perhaps.

Posted in bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

reading in hindsight: The Man Who Had No Idea and chatbots

•19 February 2023 • Leave a Comment

Barry Riordan is The Man Who Had No Idea, the protagonist of this 1978 short story by Thomas M. Disch. I’d first read the story a long time ago, in a collection of short stories acquired possibly in a second hand book shop of the sort I spent a lot of time and money in when I was significantly younger.

The idea of the story (no pun intended) stuck with me, even if the details and characters (such as Mad Madeline Swain the poet and Cinderella Johnson and her love of single shoes) had slipped through the cracks of memory. The basic idea is of a world in which people need a license to engage in conversation, and the story follows Barry in his almost unsuccessful quest for his.

The story came out mind amidst all of the recent news stories and commentary about the various chatbots and the difficulties they’re having with engaging in conversation. Admittedly, they don’t have Barry’s difficulty, of not knowing how to start a conversation, but rather difficulties of a very different sort.

As much as it’s something that we as humans engage in to a quite significant extent, I think that part of what we’re seeing through these news stories is that conversation is difficult. It requires pulling together, bringing together material from many places and doing real time reflective engagement through the process.

As we go through the short story, we watch Barry get better, to the point of generating a list of ideas for poor mad Madeline, a few of which become some of her better poems. In the same way, I’m sure we’ll witness the various chatbots getting better at chatting, through I do suspect it might take somewhat longer than it took Barry.

Those who know me moderately well will know that I sometimes express some degree of surprise and dismay that we are working ever so hard to equip the machine world with the tools it needs to pull a proper Skynet, or something much deeper and even more effective.

Robot dogs that can run and climb stairs. Facial recognition. Autonomous drones and other weapon systems. Voice recognition. Applying machine learning to develop toxins unlike any seen before. Gait recognition. And how, the conversational, so that even the Turing test won’t save us.

This is an old story and one told many times. This is the story of our capacity for developing tools before or without developing the wisdom needed to use the tools effectively. And so, might the future savior of humanity be the person who can’t be emulated by a smooth talking chatbots, as our last defense against our own creations?

Posted in bizarre and random things

reflections on reflections

•12 February 2023 • Leave a Comment

Scrolling to the bottom of its homepage, I note that the first blog post I wrote is dated 10 February 2013, ten years ago this weekend. I suspect in fact that this is a bit of a artifact, in that I suspect I started drafting it then but didn’t publish it until later, and somehow the date assigned was the date the drafting started until the date the drafting finished. One piece of evidence for this is that the second post didn’t show up until nine months later, in November, and another is the first line of the piece itself.

That first piece was entitled the power of number, and it sets out the basic observation that once we start assigning numbers to things, perhaps for the purpose of ranking, then the meaning drifts into the number, at the expense of that to which the number was assigned. And over the past ten years, I have become more convinced that it’s true.

Another of those early posts was on another aspect of numbers, namely that the words we use to describe number hide the magnitude of the numbers themselves, and this also ties into the difficulty that we humans have in appreciating the scale of the very large and the very small.

There are things that I have the vague memory of putting on the various lists of things to do as part of those early posts, but which have slipped down the list, or off the list entirely, with the continuing accumulation of the ephemera of daily life, the weeds which grow quickly and sometimes hide the paths on which we walk. And so time perhaps to pull some weeds and find these hidden things, and finally work them through.

Beyond that, though, there are larger pieces of work as well. For instance, I’ve written some significant number of words on aspects of teaching, both in math and in aikido, and it’s not clear to me that the current me will agree with all of the words that past mes have written. In part, this is an inevitable consequence of gaining experience through the years, reflecting on my practice through the years, and also the reflection on the experience of the past few years and how that will have changed everything. What to keep, for instance, and what of the old to allow to be gracefully retired or abandoned.

And so I think the time has perhaps come to go back, read old pieces, and have that conversation between current me and the many past mes, though interspersed with the emergent thoughts of the days to come.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life, writing ephemera