The Goldfish Chronicles

I’m looking forward to the scifi novel which bases its premise on spam filters and spam bots increasingly reaching artificial intelligence by passing the Turing test. It seems to me that both can be viewed as the two halves of this test and are playing out a socio-genetic algorithm to get there.

There are a few interesting areas to deal with in this vision:

1. Spam filtering isn’t only concerned with whether something sounds like a human, but rather whether it’s talking about something that the human it’s defending is interested in. To that end it’s a higher bar than a Turing test and humans will start to fail that test (to the point where the human checking their spam folder does not recognize that email as not spam). We’re probably here already.

2. People don’t generally respond to spam. So it’s a one-off Turing test rather than the ability to hold a conversation. Spam is generating believable messages, but is not parsing human text (one assumes). So you’d have to make the ‘one item of non-reality’ that you put into the system the notion that spam companies start writing IM spam to have entire converstions and going down the Eliza route.

3.  The people who do reply to spam are not the smartest. The AI that this socio-genetic loop will create will be equally not smart.

Yes it’s true… the singularity is coming, and when it arrives it will mean nothing more than our stopping caring about machine intelligence and caring more about whether the intelligence talking to us passes our bar (and our automated agent’s bar).

[PS: I’m sure all of this is in multiple novels and short stories already… there is nothing new under the sun ]

Fun times in Sweden:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8003799.stm

It’s interesting how the digital world has changed our notions of ownership. We used to have two concepts:

* An owned asset
* A rented asset

Digital came along and now my owned asset was easily copyable. It was both an asset and a template. Producers see huge reductions in costs as they no longer have to go to print as early (authors no longer writing in pen & ink up to e-books and ipods). Users are able to overcome the resourcing issue of the singleton’d asset. As a side effect that puts those who rent assets out of business as they are all about managing a resourcing issue [cf libraries], and it leads to the effect whereby every consumer is a potential producer, which devalues products for producers and the quality of production collapses. Instead of watching the multimillion Lord of the Rings movies, we get to watch the school production that we paid for via our children’s school fees [not that we’ll allow that to happen given that that production could end up in the hands of evil people]. Our society crumbles, cats and dogs etc etc and we’re all forced to make our own entertainment in whitenoise enhanced homes to stop people stealing our likeness.

The solutions that exist currently are:

*1* Block duplication. Effectively to rollback on the ‘cat out of the bag’ moment of digitizing. This is failing because a) duplication blocking mechanisms can be broken at the end user point, and b) you have to do it all the way up the chain (for example, the Wolverine movie’s leaked pre-final copy), and that’s more expensive than the old way of doing things.

*2* Eradicate ownership. I don’t own the book beside me, I merely license it from the producer. If I choose to give it up, I end that contract. If I die, nothing goes to my next of kin. Blocking duplication is a way to keep ownership eradicated, but this is the real underlying movement. I no longer own things, instead I license and am licensed to. Because of the structure of our old society, I am licensed to most of the time as things are not well defined for individuals to license out [cf: Open Source movement as a mechanism for overcoming this].

*3* Criminalize/unsocialize marketplaces. Worse than someone duplicating, is a vibrant marketplace in which duplications are shared/sold/distributed. Marketplaces are about asset movement and so they need to go. Instead licensed channels are created for licensed works to propagate.

*4* Reinvent assets. DVDs come with a poster. Or with a physical book. Or a t-shirt. This ony has value if the additional asset is more valuable than the DVD, which makes it not worthwhile selling and the film company get into the t-shirt company. This also loses out as things become more digital. Books are now digital, posters are heading digital and t-shirts are going to be digital pretty soon. Fab printers are on there way and soon much will be digital. Patterns in knitting are in this area of pain.

It’s a problem.

There are two areas of solution that interest me.

The first is in individual licensing. Megacorp own a block of value and want lots of money for it. I also a smaller version of that block of value and want to distribute it out. The net has helped us start competing on the same scale [cf ravalry etc]. Given that the ownership world is a thing of the past, the important aspect for me is that licensing needs to be a level playing field and that co-ops need to evolve themselves better to catch up with corps. We see it in some places [cf: open source, bind vs $dns, apache vs iis], but generally that’s in the free area rather than the commons producing product with a cost that is then shared back to the commons.

The second is in marketplace-with-license development. As the marketplaces grow and increase in size, having forum and agora’s in which corps, co-ops and individuals can all compete is increasingly needed.

<End Friday random diatribe/>

I’m playing at setting up a Commons dashboard within the Apache JIRA. This means needing some improvements to my plugins so that they can pretend the site is Commons specific. It’ll be nice to get custom l&fs for JIRA dashboards one day too.

The first released change is the ability to make the Search restrict itself to a set number of projects (and lets you say “Search Commons” next to it rather than “Search JIRA”):

JIRA Outlet Search Plugin