Monomorphic

In the chilly yet sunny winter afternoon, I took a walk past the imperial palace in the centre of Tokyo. I find sunny winter days refreshing.

The palace is interesting to behold. It is fronted by lots of that most precious of Tokyo commodities, open space. Supposedly, during the height of the land bubble, the land on which the palace is built was worth more than the state of California. This is in turn surrounded by some of Tokyo’s most prestigious office buildings in the Marunouchi and Hibiya districts. Tokyo station is just a few minutes away on foot.

The scene is one of juxtapositions. Open space meets tightly packed high rise buildings. Traditional Japanese architecture counters sleek office buildings. Yet this  never feels contradictory, because there is an underlying theme of restraint and control.

As you might expect from a royal residence, the public courtyard is immaculate. The grass is so well cut and even as to resemble a golf course. The trees on the lawn are of uniform height, lushness and distance from each other. The gravel is supremely even.

The office buildings are similarly controlled: shades of grey and brown, a certain minimalism and homogeneity in design that is easier found here than in Europe, the sense that unnecessary detail has been removed.

There is a sense of power in all this; a will and a shared set of ideas that have been realized to a high degree. The homogenous, flat skyscraper with a grid of windows is the triumph of human, platonic ideas over the organic and the irregular. The palace garden is man’s will taming the uncontrolled vegetation we find in nature. Yet such control is always a question of scale. We can cut and prune the trees, but we cannot control the color of their leaves or the exact angle of every branch. And we can cut and prune the buildings, but generally, we cannot control the shape of the overall skyline in detail. Something organic manifests itself in the multitude, even as some parts are controlled.

Power and rebellion, in constant struggle and symbiosis.

For a long time, the level of comfort allowed us by technology has risen persistently. This trend shows no signs of slowing down. One of two things would have to happen: either we reach some point where a fundamental barrier prevents us from extracting or converting certain natural resources beyond a certain rate, and this becomes a hard constraint on humanity for all time, or physical matter ends up being under our complete control. In this latter scenario, which I don’t view as unlikely, we’d be able to convert trash into useful things at our whim, for instance.

This scenario is sometimes referred to as an age of abundance. It may have a large intersection with the singularity, an idea first championed in 1993 by Vernor Vinge, or it may be a consequence or a necessary prerequisite of it. For now, let us focus on the economic aspect of abundance only.

If these things come to pass, one of the fundamental assumptions of classical economics – scarcity – would be contradicted. I would suggest that we are culturally unprepared for this kind of world.

As countries’ economic productivity increases, we are faced with the choice of whether to work less and enjoy the same standard of living, or work as much and enjoy a higher standard of living. My understanding is that people have always chosen the latter.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber puts forth the view that the development of capitalism in Europe was largely influenced by protestant values, particularly Calvinist ones. Even though many European peoples today consider themselves to be secular, it is clear that a Christian legacy has left a big mark on contemporary European culture. Simply put, many people only feel proud when they work and feel that they serve a useful purpose to their country. This is why they cannot choose to work less.

In an era of abundance, people would not be needed for the carrying out of most tasks. If they insisted on carrying out the tasks anyway, they would have to know that they were being costly and useless, thereby depriving them of enjoyment – unless we deluded them!

I see a few ways out of this situation.

• Craftsmanship is considered a uniquely human and artistic activity, and people who turn to art and crafts can continue to feel that they are important.
• Some work is fundamentally centered on human interaction and human meetings, for instance care, psychotherapy, hairdressing and leadership. These roles are unlikely to grow useless even as technology advances (purely materially).
• Culture would have to change, allowing people to rest and feel valuable even without contributing to their society’s affluence. If this is possible or not is an open question.

I should point out that the contribution-as-pride mindset is a feature not just of European protestant cultures, but also seems to be one of Japan – though for different reasons. And probably one of many other countries as well.

Philosophers have long debated whether we can perceive reality in an objective manner, or if there is a multitude of subjective perceptions. I am not qualified to enter this debate on an academic level, but I will offer some thoughts from my current vantage point.

Sensory impressions can probably be said to be objective. I have no reason to contest this. Probably, there’s a certain genetic variation in how sensitive our sensory organs are, e.g. degrees of color blindness or sensitivity to high frequencies, but this can be compensated for technologically; with hearing aids, microscopes and various kinds of sensors we can expand our sensory range far beyond what we are born with.

It’s quite likely that when me and my friend look at an object, we will notice different things about it and walk away with different first impressions. If they contradict each other, we return to the object and try to establish who was right. So these contradictions can be resolved by going back to the source.

We tell ourselves narratives about what we observe. Most abstractions are such narratives. For instance, I have never seen a perfect circle or a perfect line, since such things don’t exist, but I have seen very good approximations of such things in the world. Only by going up extremely close can I see that my perception was an approximation. But even though I know this, I will remember my perceptions in terms of these approximations since it’s the only practical thing to do. However, I can still “go back to the source” and establish the validity of my impression.

So with first hand perceptions, and with concepts that are built from compounded first hand perceptions, there’s nothing really contradicting an objective reality or suggesting that such a reality wouldn’t exist. But many objects of vital importance in society revolve around narratives that can not conveniently be examined in terms of first hand sensory impressions. Objects such as impressions of people, political platforms and ideologies, appreciation of art (which, even though it can be reduced to sensory impressions, seems supremely hard to explain in terms of it), and so on. For this reason, I think that the narratives that are most likely to be told in these fields form a subjective reality that is highly unlikely to be disproven or reduced to sensory impressions. By the very nature of these, precise communication between spectators is impossible and people are likely to carry wildly contradictory stories in their heads.

And in such a world, whether or not we can agree on the objectivity of basic sensory impressions, subjective impressions (narratives that will not be deconstructed or falsified readily) will carry great importance. In fact, we have a basic drive to construct these narratives in order to deal with the complexity of everything we perceive. This might change if we in the future can create a perfect mathematical model of the human mind. In this case, maybe some problematic items such as appreciation of art or the meaning of an ideology might be reduced to an objective and verifiable-from-sensory-impressions concept.

It would be interesting to explore the grayzone between concepts that we easily perceive objectively and concepts that we easily perceive subjectively. Are there ideas whose validity can be reduced to sensory impressions, but only with great effort, so that people do not usually do so?

(This post is partly inspired by recent posts by Carl Svanberg, who blogs about objectivism in Swedish. My philosophical views are still in development, and I don’t want to side with one -ism camp or the other as of yet.)

In the Japanese summer, minor cockroach infestations are common. Every pharmacy makes a fortune selling a wide variety of cockroach repellents, traps and poisons.

Cockroaches are interesting from an evolutionary point of view. They are inherently passive and defensive in their approach to life. When danger threatens, they run to the darkest possible place. They seem to  eat whatever is left over by larger animals. It is sometimes said that they would be the only species to survive nuclear fallout. But it turns out other insects, like the fruit fly, have a much higher radiation resistance.

Maybe cockroaches have some similarities with mold, then. Possessing minimal initiative, they are like a chemical reaction of nature that sets in wherever there is some energy gain to be had by consuming and breaking down some leftovers. Their boundary can be pushed away, but banishing them from the surface of the earth would be an impossible feat (and probably undesirable).

Sometimes it is suggested that these days, there is an ecosystem of ideas – “memetics”. Surely, in this ecosystem too, there are large and small “animals”. Animals that feed selectively, and animals that eat just about anything (that is, ideas that can take root in just about any sort of mind). Animals that take initiative and seek to change their environment, and animals that only react, only defend, only hide in the dark.

In daily life, we must be careful so as to not fall prey to the small ideas that hide in the dark. Seek out the large beasts, and hunt them in the light of day.

I’m currently in Sweden, enjoying the Scandinavian nature, catching up with family and a few old friends.

This time, some quick notes on a few ideas that have been brewing.

Orthopraxy is when people do things the same way: “correct” action/praxis. On Artima developer spotlight, there was a lively discussion on this in the Ruby community: is Ruby a language that is less patronizing to the programmer than many other languages? That is, does it enforce orthopraxy to a lesser extent than other languages? In very established languages such as Java, orthopraxy does not just come from language design though; it comes from the culture surrounding the language. Today it is so mature that there is a very small number of accepted styles and accepted ways of coding. This does make people more productive by easing communication, but I wonder if we could have both ease of communication and stylistic freedom…?

Garbage collection in society is the collection of discarded resources: entropy has gone so far that we banish used up objects to a heap of rubbish. Some of these may be immediately recyclable, most of them will take a long time to disintegrate fully. In software, garbage collection is about reclaiming the space used by lost objects that can no longer be used by the program. As such it’s more about recycling – all the memory is reused pretty much instantaneously. The trick here is finding those lost objects and putting the memory to use in a good way. Finally, in life, when plants or animals die, they become part of new plants and animals in a normal ecosystem. Isn’t this garbage collection on a molecular/atomic level? Maybe even as high as on the protein level.

Actor programming in Scala is something I casually started experimenting with for a text processing tool, and it turned out to be a very pleasant way of doing parallel computation. The asynchronous message queues were a much nicer way of doing things than the conventional monitor/mutex methods. I recommend trying to use it for something. In Scala they can equally easily be made threadless (usually each runs on its own thread), making support for a huge number of actors trivial.

I have something of an engineering background, so I easily end up thinking of success in terms of quantity. Maximizing this variable or that. Ensuring the greatest possible reward, or the smallest possible cost. But sometimes this is fallacious thinking.

As an academic, I would like to publish prestigious articles. It would be nice to publish 10 papers at second or third rate conferences, but they might all be made irrelevant by a single article at a first rate conference (or even an article in Nature or Science, say). So quality is a better measure than quantity.

I would also like to come up with new and influential ideas, but I suspect I would probably be happier if I managed to influence 10 very highly regarded people than if I managed to influence 10 000 laymen. (These exact numbers were computed using the “wild guess” algorithm and further evaluation may be needed.)

In professional life, I’ve found it dangerously easy to fall into a mode of thinking where you evaluate yourself by your income. This is true up to a point, but I’ve found that there’s a point beyond which additional income has diminishing returns in terms of how much it adds to my overall rewards from life. So beyond this point, quality is a better measure than quantity. What are my tasks, how do they force me to learn and evolve, what kind of satisfaction do I feel and why? So quality is a better measure than quantity.

User satisfaction with computer software can, to some extent, be measured using response time and latency. A snappy, responsive user interface usually produces more satisfaction than a sluggish one. But this can often be compensated for to a surprising extent by having appropriate progress indicators, animations and design features that placate the user in some way, assuring them something is being done. This is in a sense the opposite of the money situation: up to a certain point, quality makes up for quantity, after that point (when the slowness becomes impossible to mask), quantity becomes increasingly important.

What’s most interesting is perhaps the convertibility between quality and quantity. In engineering a device or a software system, quantitative metrics can be crucial tools in the construction process, but the final user experience must be qualitatively right. So quantity is a tool to construct quality. And in the real life situations where quantity is actually the best measure — bargaining, comparing, communicating, constructing, … — I think of it as a way to mask qualities. The numbers are simply easier to consider than the vast number of qualities that lie underneath.

We distinguish between inventions and discoveries. You can own the intellectual property rights to an invention, but not to a discovery (you can’t patent the discovery of mercury or selenium, for instance). Inventions are meant to be created, and discoveries are meant to be sought for. But sometimes, the line between invention and discovery is blurry.

We cannot own the rights to mathematical structures or theorems, since they follow directly from axioms. Anyone with a mathematical education would come to the same results within the same axiomatic system. The creation of a mathematical theorem can be said to be a search process, hence the term “discovery” and not “invention”.

We can own the rights to music and paintings, since these are considered to be inventions. But isn’t the process that leads to a painting or work of music being created also a search process? Doesn’t the artist search for possible combinations that work together, in a — albeit very large and continuous — search space? But this is considered to be creation/synthesis rather than search.

The software developer is, at least sometimes, somewhere in between. A vision of a user interface that interacts with end users in a certain way can perhaps be said to come from the same large, continuous space as music and paintings come from. But given the constraints imposed by such a vision, and by the platform on which the system is to be built, the available libraries, the languages, etc, I would say that the construction of much of desktop/consumer software is a search problem. We look for combinations of components that fit the constraints, and when we have decided on this combination, we must connect the pieces together correctly. The space of possible solutions here, at least for someone who follows good design principles, is in essence much smaller than the music/painting search space. Of course there are considerations of taste and style, but they are completely irrelevant to the compiled product. They are a programmer aid.

Artificial intelligence problems are defined as search problems. But what are search problems, and what are “creational” problems, precisely? Is it merely a question of the size of the search/design space?

Today an oppressive, passivizing heat covers Tokyoites like a massive woollen blanket. Summer is here. In a feeble attempt to defy the heat, I follow up on my previous post on languages and automata.

That post ended with the suggestion that we can apply these concepts to interactions in society. But can we? As a starting point, let’s think about stateless and stateful interactions in a system. Stateful interactions involve a change of state, in some sense. Stateless interactions involve no such change. What counts as stateful depends very much on how detailed the model is – these might be examples:

• You make a purchase in a convenience store – the obvious changes of state are the balance in your wallet/bank account, the amount of items you possess/carry with you, and the corresponding opposite changes on behalf of the store.
• You greet somebody you know on the street and exchange some small talk. Even though no actionable information is exchanged, you both feel happier afterwards and in a better mood because you were acknowledged by someone else. This is a change of state. The precondition is that you are in a state where you know the other person – this interaction would not be possible with a random person in a random state. (On a different level, a typical such exchange goes through at least three discrete states in itself – “greeting”, “exchange of information”, “goodbye”).
• You go to your job in an office, read some documents, write some reports and leave. We can think about the wear and tear on the furniture and the building, the carbon dioxide-oxygen exchange in the air, and the changes to your company’s total body of information as changes of state. Which to choose depends, again, on the model.

Are there any stateless interactions then? Within the context of a particular model, yes. If we only care about monetary and material transactions, the meeting on the street might be stateless. If we only care about “mood” states, the purchase in the store might be stateless, and the office job might have a negative effect on accumulated mood.

In software engineering, we always try to hide state as much as possible. State makes the system far harder to understand and reason about.  We like immutable objects, whose state never change. If we look at reality through abstractions, maybe such things can exist, but in the physical world I don’t believe they do (I’d have to ask a physicist to know the answer though).

The most complex interactions in society, I think, take place among people and organisations that have long lasting relationships. These entities can modify each other’s state over a long period of time. If I’ve known somebody for years, there’s a very large number of possible states a conversation with that person might be in, a large number of topics I might possibly bring up and discuss. But the limitations of societal norms and my own knowledge imply that a conversation with a stranger might be a very small state machine indeed. (On the other hand, maybe this is why getting to know a new person can be very satisfying – the newness of building a new structure from scratch in your head to represent this person’s states). Companies that interact with customers in short, anonymous relationships almost never present them with complex interactions (convenience stores, taxi drivers). With other companies we have more complex interactions and longer relationships (doctors, banks).

These transitions of state are, again, like words that make up sentences in formal languages. We all live these languages every day. How many states do you have?

Computing is very new as a science. Blaise Pascal devised a mechanical calculator in 1645, but Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, widely considered the first programmable computer, was not conceived of until the mid-19th century. However, it was never constructed (unlike Babbage’s simpler “difference engine”), and even at this time there was almost no theory to go with the invention. Today, the fundamental abstractions of computing and programming are Turing machines and Lambda calculus, described in the 1930′s. So essentially, the theory has had less than a century to mature, and is being viewed by many as a branch of mathematics.

The newness of computing means that we don’t know that much about its role or its applicability outside of devices built specifically for computing, nor do we know if today’s fundamental computing abstractions are the best ones.

Languages and automata are two of the most fundamental ideas in computing. In contrast to human languages, which are informal and rather unsystematic, in computing we often speak of formal languages. Something like the following is an example of a formal grammar:

• Sequence-list: Sequence [ Sequence-list ]
• Sequence: Wake up Action-list Have lunch Action-list Go to sleep
• Action-list: Action [ Action-list ]
• Action: Work | Answer the phone | Attend meeting | Relax

Using this grammar we can model the life of an office worker. We can generate an infinite list of potentially infinitely long “sentences”. The following are examples of valid sentences in the grammar:

• Wake up, Work, Have lunch, Attend meeting, Go to sleep
• Wake up, Work, Have lunch, Work, Go to sleep, Wake up, Work, Have lunch, Work, Go to sleep
• Wake up, Answer the phone, Answer the phone, Answer the phone, Have lunch, Work, Go to sleep

A grammar such as this has a 1-1 correspondence with what is known as a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) – a very simple building block of software and hardware models. A formal grammar like the above is in a sense just a more natural way of thinking about a DFA.

What is the applicability of formal languages outside computing hardware and software?

For one thing, we see them in nature, not least in ferns, which on a miniature level appear to have used the same rules as on the macro level. We see them in trees and flowers. In fact, the formal language paradigm appears to be a very good fit for many natural phenomena. One reason for this might be that formal languages allow rich structures to be constructed from a very small description.

One idea I find fascinating is trying to apply these models to human society: people and institutions. Can we describe the interactions in society as automata and formal languages, and if so, what can we learn about them?

Computers are connected to people, and to the physical world, through input/output devices. These are not just keyboards, mice, monitors, printers etc, but also various sensors, e.g. temperature, light, movement sensors and video cameras, and output devices like industrial control systems or robots. Every day, we increase the extent of what computers can observe, and what they can affect.

Computers are also more connected to each other, thanks to the internet. So now, by virtue of being connected to computers, physical objects are becoming indirectly connected to each other more and more. One of the consequences of this is that physical objects can manipulate other physical objects in different ways, even when they are far away or otherwise unrelated to the sending object. In other words, the internet is converging with the physical world. This is sometimes called the internet of things.

An example: The Nabaztag is a rabbit like internet connected object that has many novel ways of interacting with its environment. However, it’s an artificial object created for this purpose – the real changes are when conventional objects around us become connected unexpectedly. The Economist has an article about what happens when cars become connected. Quote from the article:

“We can stop looking at a car as one system,” says Rahul Mangharam, an engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, “and look at it as a node in a network.”

In preparing for the future, it would be prudent to anticipate a world where things are interconnected even more strongly today. I can think of several problems and opportunities that would arise in such a world:

• Safety, ownership and security become much more important. Today buildings and property are protected by locks and physical barriers. What happens when the weakest link in a security chain is a bit switch in computer memory? (We already have this in many situations today, but those systems tend to be less connected. The pressure to be more connected will turn those bit switches into greater risks.)
• Privacy and anonymity on one hand, versus openness and identification on the other, will acquire even more importance. I expect we will have the ability to control in great detail what information we want to reveal about ourselves and our objects, and to whom and what. For instance, there are experiments with software to accumulate footage from many different CCTV cameras and reconstruct a realistic three-dimensional model of physical reality. There are as many exciting applications as there are dangerous ones (from a surveillance state perspective).
• Completely unrelated objects might be linked to each other in interesting ways by their owners. I might set up a Rubik’s cube so that entering a particular combination on its faces makes my computer decrypt a hidden file (maybe this isn’t very good from a security perspective). The color and intensities of highway streetlights might change dynamically depending on where the cars are. Depending on whether my friends did something interesting today (found out by observing, for instance, their twitter feeds), I might want the speed dial numbers to appear in a different order on my phone. (The system could also try to figure out which friends I might be likely to contact based on my own actions).

But these are all trivial examples.

A related, but different (as I understand it) topic is being researched by Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Media Lab. They call it “bringing the programmability of the digital world to the physical world”. This seems focussed on creating programmability without conventional computer equipment. If brought to fruition, it might have some consequences in common with increased connectivity.

Indubitably, these questions will enter mainstream politics increasingly in this century. Ideally, the necessary debates will be informed ones, and held early rather than at the last minute when faced with crises.

Image by Great Beyond. Some rights reserved (CC).