Are we ready for the rise of the robots?

I have recently read in different journals the rise of robots, and how they can actually be our substitutes in our jobs. In a society in which we need to work in order to have money to live, this can come as a scary prospect. Robots will do the things we can do and we no longer will have the minimum income necessary to live. 

It shouldn’t be so. The initial idea behind giving the work to robots was for humans not to have to do it. For us to be freer. But our society is not ready for that. 

I have also read about some proposals for giving basic income to everyone. I completely agree with that. In the case where no work would be necessary, other than creative work, I would even go further. Not only basic income, but equal income. A world where technology could do the basic things for our survival, inequality would only make a few to be the masters and the rest just slaves. Well, it sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In Chomsky’s “Requiem for the American Dream” we can see how inequality is increasing in our modern world, in particular in US. US, a country where the health system is private. Of course, I’m talking about a first world society. The rest of the world are just slaves of the first world’s countries. But even to think that our health is a matter of profit and not of basic rights in a supposedly first world country makes you think how our society works. 

A world with only creative works is a world where each individual is free to choose their path. The structure of the society has to be in such a way that each one can achieve their maximum potential. But also it must be a society that allows laziness. It should be oneself who decides to do a meaningful job or not. But then, those who contribute more to society would feel the need to take more and create inequality. 

Our ethics towards work has to change then. Education is a key factor: how to educate people to be free? Foucault rises the problem of our education being tailored to the goal of maintaining the same structures of power. If the structure of power is based on a work-based society, we won’t be free from this vicious circle. 

My opinion is that the more the knowledge, the freer one is. Education comes in all ways, not only knowledge, but also on values and behavior. We need cultivate but also compassionate people. It is not important to contribute, but at least not to destroy others peoples opportunities. Unfortunately, that’s we always have been doing since we are known to be in this planet. 

A technological advanced society needs an ethics based on science, I think. And it is not about the scientific method, but about the values that make science advance: honesty and curiosity. First of all, being honest with yourself. And that means a great level of self-knowledge and retrospection. Being critical about what other people say or believe, so that we are not slaves of other people’s ideas, and, thus, being vulnerable against power gathering in elites. 

The existentialists, even though their lives were not exemplar, got it right. Be free, try to experience as much as possible, be responsible of your own acts, be an active part of your life, not a passive being. We have to have a more advanced society, far from sin culture, and towards individualism, but, at the same time, towards a social-communist structure. Otherwise, we would be either slaves from the rich people, or be eliminated by robots. 

Yes, being eliminated by robots could be another outcome of the rise of robots. We have to give human-like ethics to our robots, otherwise they will arrive to the right conclusion that we are the vermin of the planet. Either that, or become a better society. 

Our society is not ready for non-work society, much less for a society with robots that are conscious. We can wait but, as always, I think we will first get into it, and then adapt on the whim. There will be chaos, and possibly our own destruction. I hope we don’t go that far.

Quantum music

It is not surprising that I was interested in this article in MIT Technology Review. Those who usually read this blog are used to my posts about arts related to science. With a particular interest in music. 

So, this work, by Karl Svozil, a theoretical physicist at the University of Technology in Vienna and his pal Volkmar Putz, got my attention. Basically, each note in a composition would have a probability of being heard, depending on the person who listens to it, and the time they listen to it. 

The music itself would be written with probabilities for each note, and, supposedly, it would be played all together, but each person would have a different experience about it. 

Don’t be surprised by science influencing music. From the beginning of music, it was closely connected to mathematics. And modern science has inspired compositors such as Xenakis. 

I am not sure how this kind of composition could be performed in the raw way it is described, but I thought it would be easy enough to create a computer program that would simulate it. 

I used Ken Schutte’s programs to make one myself with notes with different probabilities in each step. Here you have the program, and here you have one of the realisations of it.

I hope you enjoy the experience.

Voyager 1 and 2 duet

This beautiful piece is made from data from the Voyager 1 and 2, mixed in a duet, by Domenico Vicinanza. Here you have more information. Via Microsiervos. 

Eugene Goostman passed the Turing test

With the occasion of the anniversary of the death of Alan Turing, the University of Reading decided to set up an experiment where some chatbots were tested to see if they passed the Turing test. 

In the early 50s, Turing proposed a test to see if a program reproduced human behaviour. The test is simply to chat with said program and with humans and then decides which is the person and which is the computer program. If the program convinces to more than 30% of judges that they are conversing with a person, for 5 minutes, this program is said to have passed the Turing test. 

This year, Eugene Goostman, a chatbot created by Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko, is said to have passed this test. It is said to have been the first piece of software to have passed the test but, as they comment in this article, it is not actually true. Some other programs already passed the test. The difference is in the amount of conversations involved in the tests. Eugene Goostman fooled 33% of judges out of 300 total conversations we maintained with them. 

It simulated to be a Ukrainian 13 years old boy, and that is one of the reasons he passed the test. It didn´t know some things, and it didn´t have good English grammar either. 

Turing foresaw that in 2000 we would be able to create computer programs capable of fooling people making them think that they were human. Is that actually a sign of intelligence? Well, it is not. The program doesn´t think for itself. It´s made of algorithms and data to create the illusion that it is human, but it doesn´t think as humans do. 

This news reminded me of the TWINKIES project. Do Twinkies pass the Turing test? The answer if hilarious.

From Supersymmetry to Schoenberg

Professor James Gates on Supersymmetry. The talk starts at around minute 12. He goes from symmetry concepts to the music of Arnold Schoenberg. What I found most interesting is the finding about doing calculus by means of graphs, or by coding the operations into binary code. They transform equations into what they called Adinkramat. Simply genius.

Quantum theory and information theory (again)

In a previous post we already talked about the relationship between quantum theory and information theory. In it, we saw how Lluís Masanes and collaborators derived quantum mechanics from a few postulates based on the properties that a unit of information should have. 

Today, I came across with two different articles that explore this relationship. In the first one, Stephanie Wehner and Esther Hanggi from the National University of Singapore’s Center for Quantum Technology, showed us that the uncertainty principle is intimately related to the second law of thermodynamics. (Note that thermodynamics are intrinsically related to information theory.) In particular, they saw how by loosening the uncertainty principle, they got more useful energy/information out of the system than they put into it thus violating the second law of thermodynamics. Since the violation of the second law is incompatible with the physics we know, this means that our ability to calculate the state of a particle with infinite accuracy (the uncertainty principle) is forbidden by the second law. Note that thermodynamics is related to the macroscopic state of a system, whereas quantum mechanics is related to its microstates. 

The second article I found interesting states that macroscopic systems cannot be quantum in nature, that is, we do not observe a superposition of states in the macroscopic world, but one only state. The author, Bolotin, states that the solution of the Schrodinger equation is just unsolvable for macroscopic objects. Bolotin says that the problem of solving Schrodinger equation is NP hard, and he shows, making a few calculations, that the computation time to solve this equation for a macroscopic state will either exceed the time of the universe, or the computation speed should be higher than the Plank time, where no state makes sense.

So the question here is, how does the universe compute its state? How does it go from quantum to macroscopic? 

I think the answer to that question goes again to the field of computational mechanics. In their article, Shalizi and Moore explain how Nature can be described in different levels of detail. They show how macroscopic states can have a higher predictability efficiency than the dynamics of their corresponding microstates. It all falls to information theory again. It their article, they define emergency of one description from the other, that is, a coarse grained version of the microstates, but with higher prediction efficiency than the other. 

It seems to me that the universe describes itself in only one way, it is only the way we look at it that separates between the different levels of description. As Shalizi and Moore put it: “for every question we ask It, Nature has a definite answer; but Nature has no preferred questions.”

How does the Little Prince sound?

In their work, Hannah Davis at New York University and Saif Mohammad at the National Research Council Canada have developed a computer program that translates the emotions shown in a novel into a piece of music.
See here for further explanations, and check here for listening to the novels they analyzed.

Isn't it cool?

The art of Fejes József

There was an online challenge, of writing a piece of code that uses a colour for each pixel . And here you have the result: 

 

  

An amazing and beautiful work by the Hungarian programmer Fejes József. Via: New Scientist.

A review of "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"

I think the most interesting way (at least for me) of learning about the Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems is by reading Douglas Hofstadter´s book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". 

Both content and form are carefully chosen, in such a way that you are introduced to very difficult concepts in a, let´s say, artistical way. And of course it is completely intentional. The structure of the book is, as it has been said, a counterpoint between Dialogues and Chapters.

The author makes a explicit analogue of Bach´s music in his book. And, I think, it shows the universality of the concepts he wants to show.

As a fugue, he first shows the main themes, and masterly proceeds to makes variations of it. He presents the concept of recursivity and isomorphism from an artistic point of view. He presents what he calls a "strange loop" in terms of music and painting. As he defines them it is a phenomenon that occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves rightback where we started. You can find this in Bach´s music and in Escher paintings. 

He also explains that implicit in the concept of Strange Loops is the concept of infinity, and the conflict between the finite and the infinite in Bach´s and Escher´s works.

He introduces the main theme as the so-called Epimenides paradox, or liar paradox. Epimenides was a Cretan who made one immortal statement: "All Cretans are liars." What can be said about that statement? It is true or false? 

Godel´s idea was to use mathematical reasoning in exploring mathematical reasoning itself, and came up with the conclusion that "All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions.

Hofstadter masterly shows the importance of strange loops in Gödel´s proof of his theorem. Once a formal system ask about its consistency and completeness, it cannot reach a conclusion. The equivalent of Epimenides paradox in mathematics it´s "This statement of number theory does not have any proof". Whereas the Epimenides statement creates a paradox since it is neither true nor false, the Gödel sentence is unprovable (inside its own formalization) but true. 

As Hofstadter concludes, Gödel’s Theorem shows that there are fundamental limitations to consistent formal systems with self-images. In particular, it cannot proves its own consistency. 

It has been used to prove that we cannot compute the human mind, because we would be incomplete. There is the argument against this of humans not being consistent, so we could be inconsistent Turing machines, and therefore computable. Read more about the computability of the mind and the Gödel´s theorems here.

 

I must say that it is not an easy book to read. You have to pay a lot of attention to it. But it is worth reading. 

As a mathematical representation of one of Bach´s compositions, here you have the "Crab canon", from his Musical Offering, with which Hofstadter starts his book. 

Quantum mechanics derived from information and computation

In their recently published paper entitled 'Existence Of An Information Unit As A Postulate Of Quantum Theory', Lluís Masanes and collaborators have derived quantum mechanics from a few postulates based on the properties that a unit of information has. 

The main idea is that information exists, and it comes in fundamental units. From the properties of this information units, called gbits, or general bits, they derive quantum mechanics. 

The main properties of this information units are: 1. Continuous reversibility, that is, for any system, and for every pair of pure states one can in principle engineer a time-continuous reversible dynamics which brings one state to the other. 2. Tomographic locality, or the possibility of constructing the state of a composite system from the simple states that form it. 3. No simultaneous encoding. It means that each gbit encodes an only information unit. 

And that's all. They find that the only generalized probability theory that is compatible with these postulates is quantum theory. They do not say what information is. They only say the requirements this information unit should have in order to derive quantum mechanics. 

This approach gives a computational point of view of the Universe. According to the authors “Any physical process can be simulated with a suitably programmed general purpose simulator.” If that's true, we could be living in a simulation. 

Full article here.

Brain to brain interface

The future is almost here. I have read in Science Daily that researchers at the University of Washington have developed an interface that directly communicates two brains. In particular, one of the subjects controlled the movement of the right hand of the other person through internet. 

Of course, the technology is in its infancy, and both subjects have to be willing to do the experiment. One cannot control other person's motions without the previous consent of the other. It is far away yet but, wouldn't it be interesting to share one's experiences with others just by connecting your brains? I think people would be more understanding about other's people's feelings. 

You can check the whole article here.

Are we living in a simulation?

I was reading the other day about the Simulation Argument here. I found it very interesting.

 The question raised is: are we living in a simulation?

The concept was popularised by the film The Matrix. Are we living in a virtual world? The Simulation Argument states: One of these are true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

The argument is very simple: if there is any stage when humanity can simulate the human mind, and a lot of people are dedicated to simulate human beings, it is very probable that we are a simulation.

There are many subtleties about this postulate. The first question would be: can we simulate a human mind? If we assume that our minds are only the result of our physical substrate, then, in theory, we could do that. I say in theory because the technological problems of simulating all our neurons and their interactions would be very difficult.

But, for the sake of the argument, let´s say that we can simulate a human brain. Then, what about the universe in which it is immersed? We should simulate it too in order for that mind not to realise it is not a human being. That seems a little bit difficult. In the first place we should know everything about our universe. Could we create a different universe that looks like ours without knowing our own?

Well, the question of the universe is important if we want to create a human mind that is free in its own universe. We could just create a life sequence where the individual thinks he or she is free, but that in fact is deterministic.

It that sense, there are different kind of simulations: the life of this person is completely simulated, or only their psychology is simulated, and they are actually free; you can simulate a population, instead of only one person, both with freedom or without it. In a free simulation with a population their minds would interact and could “discover” their world as we do, that is, creating an objective reality that is made of all the common things they experience. They could develop a science in their world.

But, would they realise they are simulations? Let´s go back to the simulation of the universe. Could we simulate our universe? There are different positions: some people like Wolfram believe that we are just an algorithm, a Cellular Automata, which rules we do not know yet. But, knowing those rules and the initial conditions, we would be able to simulate our universe. However, other people think that it is not possible (see my post “What does the Universe know?”). Would we reach a point where we find the “flaws” of The Matrix?

This also creates a problem for those who think about the simulation of specific lives, such as Einstein´s life, or Napoleon´s life, etc. The Simulation Argument would give the opportunity of having a holyday by living the life of some important person in History. For that we should know, as we said, the rules and initial conditions of the universe.

If the rules were known, the initial conditions could be calculated by an optimization method, by knowing the state of the universe at one point. That is not so “difficult”: we could use the holographic principle and measure the state of the universe in its boundary only.

And that is only if the universe is deterministic. What if it is not so? Could we simulate our History? Perhaps we would be able to create Histories that look alike, but with different details (like in The Foundation series, by Asimov). Or perhaps not.

The Simulation Argument raises a lot of questions, that I think are very important. The main one is: can a human mind be simulated? Well, since I believe that we are only a bunch of atoms (or quarks, or whatever), I think that “in theory” that could be possible. Only we do not have the technology necessary to do so. Then, would it be ethic? That is another question.

More questions come to my mind, but I think I will leave it there. I hope you found it interesting too.