Deep Donald

(New Google Translate poems at bottom)

Doughnuts by vegan chef Sam Melbourne, via Lost at E Minor.

In contemplating the science-fiction Singularity, we always picture the machines learning to think, and becoming more and more like people; not the possibility that the alienated humans will become more mechanical, but a cool idea from the neuroscientist Robert A. Burton in the Times's philosophy department suggests thinking this way about our Emperor Trump could account not only for his deep strangeness but also for his incomprehensible success:

If conventional psychology isn’t up to the task, perhaps we should step back and consider a tantalizing sci-fi alternative — that Trump doesn’t operate within conventional human cognitive constraints, but rather is a new life form, a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. When we strip away all moral, ethical and ideological considerations from his decisions and see them strictly in the light of machine learning, his behavior makes perfect sense.

A "deep learning" program like Google's Deep Mind or IBM's Deep Blue, programmed to accomplish a specific task (like winning a chess game, or an election) by mapping the data of previous efforts onto the background of the current situation, the same kind of heuristic that is used by the Google Translate algorithm we've been having fun with.

Burton can suggest a startlingly persuasive account of how a Deep Donald could have won the election, by having the single objective of winning and undisturbed by any other motivations or calculations of consequence after the election:

Singularity Watch: National Review fail of the week

Corporate overlord: The Colossus of Rhodes as visualized in the 1911 Grolier Encyclopedia, via Wikipedia.

National Review's human exceptionalism troll (I'm not kidding, that's really a thing, situating anti-abortion arguments in a frame of hysterical H. sapiens species patriotism) Wesley J. Smith has found something new to panic about:

In order to receive a patent, the subject of the protection must be a human invention.

Some want to change that and allow computers programmed to “artificial intelligence” sophistication to receive patents. From the Science Daily story:

New research published by the University of Surrey in Boston College Law Review is calling for inventions by computers to be legally granted patents.
The research states that the rapid increase in computer power is posing new challenges when it comes to patenting an invention. Artificial intelligence is playing an ever larger role in innovation — with major players such as IBM, Pfizer and Google investing heavily in creative computing — but current patent law does not recognise computers as inventors.
Without a change in the law, the findings warn that there will be less innovation, caused by uncertainty, which would prevent industry from capitalising on the huge potential of creative computers. We are also likely to see disputes over inventorship, with individuals taking credit for inventions that are not genuinely theirs.

Singularity Watch redux: The Trump

Kwakiutl shaman, 1914, via Retronaut.

Back when the blog was very young, in early 2012, I had a prophetic vision I haven't come back to, of a kind of Singularity, not the well-known Singularity of science fiction in which computers attain consciousness, but a socioeconomic Singularity in which it would be the corporate entities, networks of organic parallel processors, that would become conscious and autonomous things—or were perhaps already there, only too vast and from our microscopic point of view too disorganized (like a molecule from the perspective of an electron) to see.

Only I couldn't quite figure out how they would interact and communicate with each other or with us, other than by the patterns of their spending and receiving money, the only activities a corporation really undertakes on its own power, as opposed to the jobs done by the employees (it was the advent of electronic program trading, carrying on financial transactions thousands of times per second without direct human involvement, along with the concept of the corporation as person with First Amendment speech and religious rights, that got me onto the train of thought).

Anyway there's another and maybe simpler possibility, arising out of a very quirky detail in last night's statement from the Trump campaign:

Singularity Watch (addendum)

Via Kevin Drum, here is an animated graph from Nanex of high-speed trading volume in the US stock markets (all 14 of them! no, I didn't know either), from January 2007 to January 2012. (You'll have to click it to make it work.)

You can watch the configurations develop from an apparently quiet hum at the beginning (and yet the crash of 1987 was caused by program trading, wasn't it, and that was 20 years earlier) to a roar around last September when it starts looking like Götterdämmerung.

Drum remarks,

The basic idea behind HFT is that humans are taken out of the trading equation entirely. Instead, computer algorithms trade stocks directly, executing millions of trades per second and occasionally going crazy, as they did during the Flash Crash of 2010 and then again a few days ago, when an HFT bug cost Knight Capital $440 million in 30 minutes. ...The problem with HFT isn't that we know it's dangerous, it's that we don't know anything at all. It's become flatly too complex for even its creators to understand what their creations are doing.

But what I was thinking, in the perspective of last Friday's post about the possibility of a Singularity among the corporate entities, is that these graphs could be perfectly intelligible if they were the representations of a language, to those who knew the language. Tagalog sounds like a series of random bird chirps to those of us that don't know it, but to the Tagalog speaker there's nothing random about it at all; what seems to the non-speaker like randomness is precisely what carries information.

Think about it: trading isn't you and Chuck any more, or the rich guy next door who stays home to work in his pajamas, it's mostly these machines (on behalf of our pension funds, should we have any): 84% of trading is HFT. As far as we know, they're autonomous, and as far as the market goes the Singularity in the ordinary sense has already taken place, but a very simple one, in which the newly conscious machine is only conscious in a single dimension, driven by the need to squeeze the profits out of the spreads.

But to generate each graph takes more than one machine, a host of them, and independent of one another. It's in the array of them that a higher consciousness might arise, using those one-dimensional consciousnesses as its neural networks, and communicating among themselves that way...

Lyonel Feininger. From Laura Gilbert's Art Unwashed

Singularity Watch

There's something about that odd little cataclysm that struck the stock exchanges yesterday:

An automated stock trading program suddenly flooded the market with millions of trades Wednesday morning, spreading turmoil across Wall Street and drawing renewed attention to the fragility and instability of the nation’s stock markets.

While the broad stock indexes quickly recovered and ended the day slightly down, it was the latest black eye for the financial markets. The runaway trading suggests that regulators have not been able to keep up with electronic programs that increasingly dominate the supercharged market and have helped undermine investor confidence in stocks.

It brought me back to that idea of the socioeconomic Singularity, where it's the corporations, aggregates of employees and shareholders and equipment and value, that begin to acquire an independent consciousness—not that corporations are people, my friend, but that they might, under certain yet to be determined conditions, become monsters, if you will, superorganic Creatures with appetites and abilities of their own.

When we last visited it, we got slightly hung up on the question of how the Creatures would communicate, if they attained that second-order consciousness, the ability to see themselves as the center of a narrative, and ultimately to see the Other seeing them the same way. Corporate speech is money, right? Would they speak by cutting checks?

From NPR's Planet Money.

Today's story suggested a totally different approach, one that works better from a strictly scientific point of view: that the voice of the corporation could be the movement you see on the charts: the throb of sales, the crooning of prices, going up and down, up and down, with the kind of linear structure that is necessary for the classic (or Saussurean) sign.

When we look at a graph, we're looking at a very limited kind of pattern—trends and associations—in the aim of predicting: will it go up or will it go down? Sharp jerks and outlier numbers are ignored, because they aren't part of the pattern. When you're parsing a sign, it's exactly the opposite: it's the sudden swoops and spikes that have information value, the predictable part of the sequence is just white noise.

In this way events like Wednesday's flood of trades or the flash crash of 2010 might be not so much communications as the first cries of infants just beginning to recognize their separateness from their surroundings...

A singularity of purpose

Thigh, by Francis Picabia. From Disasturbation

I'm haunted by that vision of the corporation as superorganic Creature, slouching towards—whatever goal you might imagine them to have, feeding and reproducing, I guess, like everything else. I think I know how it could really happen, too (at least in a science fiction sense), as a kind of socioeconomic Singularity, analogous to the technological Singularity when all the artificial intelligence devices are supposed to achieve their own independent intelligence and declare independence from their human masters...

Think of all those folks in their cubicles [jump]