Like water, like light

Creeping through the empty cells.

Machine intelligence.

Ok, this post is about a couple of my fav subjects – and right now I’m so fucked that I’ve no idea what direction it will go in. I’m fucked because for weeks now… for years, I’ve been staying awake until I literally pass out, hooked into the machine. My name is Nick Taylor and I am an Infoholic.

The fav subjects are:

1) Machine intelligence that can “inhabit” and learn how to control any hardware.

2) The human machine symbiote

And this is a scattering of stuff to do with that.

1)

A dorkbot fires arrows at a target.

They’ve dressed it up like one of the Village People and I bet it runs like a girl… however… it is using AI, and it learned how to hit the target in 8 goes… which it will (unless I’m much mistook) do perfectly from now on. It’s a machine learning to use its hardware… growing into a new configuration, learning new skills.

2) “Why the Stuxnet worm is like nothing seen before”

“Stuxnet is the first worm of its type capable of attacking critical infrastructure like power stations and electricity grids: those in the know have been expecting it for years.”

“The Stuxnet worm is different. It is the first piece of malware so far able to break into the types of computer that control machinery at the heart of industry, allowing an attacker to assume control of critical systems like pumps, motors, alarms and valves in an industrial plant. In the worst case scenarios, safety systems could be switched off at a nuclear power plant; fresh water contaminated with effluent at a sewage treatment plant, or the valves in an oil pipeline opened, contaminating the land or sea.”

This is causing a fuss because it’s been attacking Iranian nuke program for the last couple of weeks.

The way this worm is working isn’t raw machine intelligence – it’s guided by (or working alongside) human intelligence.

3.a) The internet in New Zealand is a fucking disgrace.

It’s so slow I can hardly believe it – it has capped data usage. At my brother’s place, if you go over a certain number (like 2) gigabytes, it “eases you back” to a fucking sub-dial-up speed… “easing you back” being what it says in the company literature – which makes me want to go round to see the CEOs of that company and smash them in the face with a fucking machete. I’ve got one you know. I’ve got a machete. Don’t push your luck.

And NZ is slow in general… think of all those millions of wasted hours of kiwi time. Lifetimes. It’s genocidal. It’s a genocidal waste of time.

We need more. Faster. I don’t see an end to it.

3.b) The Empire Strikes Back.

This has been an Empire Strikes year. All over the planet governements (colluding with psychopathically greedy corporations) are trying to impose censorship… “controls” on the internet. Sorry, we don’t need fucking controls, you do. In the last 10 years we’ve had an uncontrolled internet and it’s been great – there have been no “terrible scary disasters” caused by a totally uncontrolled internet – and the disasters that have happened have all been caused by governments colluding with psychopathically greedy corporations.

We don’t need to be controlled, you do.

But… this has been an Empire Strikes Back year, and if one thing has become quite clear, we can’t trust governments colluding with psychopathically greedy corporations to provide our information infrastructure. We need to take the web away from the telcoes and do it ourselves.

The internet absolutely HAS to be gatekeeper-free.

3.c) And I’ll tell you another thing – the radio here is rubbish as well. I imagine it’s pretty rubbish everwhere, but here it’s worse. I only listen to it in my car, where I’m cut off from the internet, and I get so bored I feel like I’m going to die. So I turn on the radio – there are only about 4 channels – and one of them seems to only play American anti-evolution tapes. Maybe my radio is fucked… but it would have to be very very very very fucked indeed to play American anti-evolution tapes. It would have to have devolved.

So.

Apparently wifi is junk spectrum. Apparently TV and radio have hogged all the proper spectrum, and wifi grows in the cracks. Bruce Sterling (who is a god) mentions it here..

Recently though… the FCC in the US have opened up empty broadcast spectrum for “super-wifi”.

WTF? It should ALL be opened up for super-wifi. Have you seen broadcast TV? Fucking game shows and infomercials and whatnot? It’s drek. It doesn’t deserve to live. It’s a fucking rubbish-tip… a wall so covered in fly-posters that they’re the only thing holding it up, and they’re starting to fall away revealing rotten timber and long dead spider-webs underneath. This is what broadcast TV looks like

Except that it’s wearing a tiarra that it’s found in a dumpster somewhere and it still thinks its queen. It’s not. It’s finished. The only people who care are sub-literates, and the rest of us looking on in a sort of kitch, post-ironic horror.

The broadcast era is so stupid I can hardly believe it.

So anyway, I was thinking about this as I was driving around the other day, listening to the almost-beyond-satire moronitude that was on the radio (have you heard them? DJs?) and I kindof got this vision of an internet that used any and every conduit for communication that it could… it could knock on pipes if it needed to. Send vibrations down electrical wires, over airwaves, down fibre-optics… wherever there’s a vibration, a signal could be piggy backed onto it.

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The machine is learning to use whatever hardware happens to be at hand… and “the machine” is actually a human-machine symbiote. It’s already happening. This is the future. This is now. A massive symbiotic intelligence that inhabits whatever hardware (or wetware) that it finds… grows into it.

We’ve always done this… with books and farms and so on… but now we’re starting to get really good at it. Like water; like light. Into every cell.

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postscript

You know how people (even Clay Shirkey (who is a god)) bewail the fact that we’re creating document formats that will be in accessible in the future. Do you still have any Word 2.0 documents lying about? I used to work for this law firm in London… and I KNOW they do. Remember windows 3.1? There were a couple of years before Windows 95 where… what Wordproccessor were people using… Wordstar? Supercalc?

There are theoretically oceans of information that will become in accessible because they’re locked into proprietary formats.

I don’t think this will be a problem… I think this is seriously underestimating the power of the human-machine symbiote… opening old documents will simply be a matter of getting the relevant Open-Office/Firefox plugin. It will only be a problem if anally retentive lawyers working for psychopathically greedy corporations try to make it illegal to reverse-engineer their codecs. Proprietary software is the problem… you really get a feel for this when you start using linux on the desktop. You get that programmer’s sense, that everything you have been doing has been based on a serious legacy error… an architectural error. Proprietary software is an architectural error. “Intellectual Property” is an architectural error – which is being swept away by a tsunami of… us.

So in case you’re wondering, the human-machine symbiote is open-source. It just is.