Stultitia Delenda Est

You’re in the future!

So via Don Boudreaux, I come to learn that this year is the 200th anniversary of the Luddite movement. Would that the intervening two centuries had weened society of its hatred of technology.

Remember kids: a vote for Ludditism is a vote for poverty, violence, darkness, and starvation. So next time you encounter a Primitivist or other species of Neo-Luddite (haven’t met one since college, myself), strip them naked and leave them in the woods. If all goes according to plan, they’ll either thank you just before they’re set upon by wolves, or they’ll repent and be shown the error of their ways.

Win-win, as far as I’m concerned.

Lesser species of Luddites should be inflicted with ironic, rather than fatal, lessons. Anti-Vax types can be exposed to the Spanish Flu and receive treatment only if they admit that vaccines are a Good Thing. Anti-GMO crew will be gathered together and periodically starved on a random schedule. Etc.

Further Dantean punishments are left as an exercise to the reader.

How do you know you’re living in the future? When News outlets (well, it’s Salon, so “News” outlet) ask why, in the wake of a major disaster, they aren’t using more robots in the relief effort. From the article:

Japan employs more robots than any other country. With high-tech robots replacing manpower in every industry from car manufacturing to sumo wrestling, life on the archipelago must seem entirely automated at times. They’re even developing humanoid robots. So why are human beings manually pouring water over the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant?

The answer? Well, it’s pretty hard to deploy robots to disaster areas, especially when the local infrastructure is destroyed, and general purpose, commercial-grade S&R robots are a few years out still. (See the Big Dog, which will probably be deployed in warzones first, but could have excellent search-and-rescue applications.)

So where are the robots in the Japan disaster? Unfortunately, they’re still a few years away. Alas, earthquakes don’t wait for our prototypes to become production ready.

(Many thanks for the link my awesome mother, who blogs as over at 46 Degrees North.)

Sorry for the radio silence the past few days. I return bearing some awesome news. Yesterday was Match Day for medical students all over the country, which is the special day when tens of thousands of hyper-achieving, Type-A kids find out where they’re going to do their Residencies and, as a result, the next three to four years of their lives.

I’m happy to announce that my girlfriend Annie (who is brilliant and a rockstar) got matched to her first choice and, as a result, will be doing her residency in Pediatrics at Seattle Children’s Hospital. It’s one of the best Peds programs in the country and I am, needless to say, incredibly proud of her.

I’m also insanely happy that she’ll be here in Seattle for the next few years, rather than in the howling wilds way out in the back of beyond (read: Madison, WI.)

Update: Terminology changed to avoid confusion and to undo some of the cardiac damage that I gave my friend Heather, who apparently had a heart attack reading the first version of this post.

A little something to get you started on a rainy Monday morning.

DJ Shadow, “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt”

In my uncompleted (and probably unlamented) Masters Thesis, I talk a lot about Avatars and digital identity. One of the critical questions I raised was what happens at the point where Avatars start beating the Turing test. What happens when you meet someone online, someone that has a presence and a face and a personality, but they turn out not to be a person at all, but a piece of software.

I want to introduce you to someone. She’s 16 years old, 5’2″ tall, and a worrying slight 93 pounds. She’s got a two and a half octave range and likes singing dance and pop tunes. Oh, and she’s pure virtual. Her name is Hatsune Miku:

You’d think being a clever fiction wrought in software would be an impact to a pop diva’s career, but it hasn’t stopped Hatsune from earning a huge fanbase (as seen in the video). This legion includes some diehard fankids that love her so much that they’ll send death threats to writers for even the smallest of perceived slights. Apparently pointing out that Hatsune Miku’s schoolgirl getup is a wee bit on the revealing side is a capital offense.

Let me walk that one back by you. There are people in the world who love a piece of software so much that they’re willing to threaten death to a real live human being for pointing out that said software is depicted as wearing fetish-y schoolgirl clothes.

So what happens when an Avatar passes the Turing Test?

Now I’m not suggesting that Hatsune Miku could pass the proper Turing test by tricking an interlocuter into thinking she was human. But she’s done something close enough by tricking some of her fans into thinking that she has honor that is worthy of defending. By murder (or at least by death threats) if necessary.

I would like to submit that when Avatars do start passing the Turing test, we’ll see a lot more of this. Once software (and robots for that matter) walk out the far side of the Uncanny Valley, weird shit’s gonna start happening in the human psyche. Human beings are intensely social and not terribly picky about how we defend our “in group.” Once that “in group” starts including virtual members, well, shit’s gonna get a little weird. And let’s face it, once digital beings start tricking our neural circuits into recognizing them as “One of Us”, then those digital beings will start ending up in families, friend circles, romantic relationships, etc.

As a matter of fact, we’re starting to see all of that happening now already. (Cf: A man marries an avatar. Or a resort where gamers can spend a weekend with their virtual girlfriends [see the video below]. More generally see most of the bleeding edge parts of Otaku culture)

But Hitsune Miku represents the first time an Avatar has been parlayed into a public persona. And even though she’s very clearly not flesh-and-blood, she has enough of the important parts of a human personality to trick some of those who are open to it. And trick them well enough that they take real umbrage when someone insults her. Even to the point of sending death threats.

All of which makes more pressing and (I think) more interesting the question of what happens when something like Hitsune Miku does pass the Turing test and, in doing so, makes the mental leap from being something to being someone.

Once again, welcome to the future.

Updated: Apparently I have an aphasia or something, because there were some major homophone issues in the first version of this post. Updated after proof-reading by the wonderful and talented Ann.

Let me start this post by strongly suggesting you skip it and just go listen to Johnny High Ground‘s “Slow News Day“. It says this better than I’m about to, and with more humor and less vitriol.

In the gym today, the sole TV was turned to CNN’s coverage of the Earthquake in Japan. Just as I was getting on the treadmill, coverage switched over to Wolf Blitzer. He had, as his guest, Ichiro Fujisaki, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States. Blitzer opened the segment by asking the ambassador if there was any chance of a nuclear meltdown at one of the nuclear facilities that had been damaged by the earthquake and later suffered an explosion at one of the reactor buildings. The ambassador replied that no, there wasn’t. That the situation had been concerning, but that the reactor was stabilized and the risk was minimal.

Wolf Blitzer then proceeded to reiterate and ask in essence, the same question. The Ambassador responded similarly. What ensued was a several minute debacle with Wolf prying and prying trying to insinuate that there was some great risk from the reactor, even at one point calling into question how current the Ambassador’s information was. (He was being updated hourly, he said.) He then cut away to “Homeland Security Correspondent” who proceeded to call into question, citing sources she didn’t name, the Ambassador’s statement. (Some brief work with the Googles tells me that it was probably Jeanne Meserve, but I didn’t catch her name during the report.)

Wolf took this at face value, asserted that there was “mixed reports”, and proceeded to once again try to get the Ambassador to talk about the grave situation at the nuclear facility.

I came away from the several minute conversation absolutely disgusted. When given access to a statesman from a country suffering a horrible tragedy, Wolf Blitzer could think of nothing better to do then go looking for more bodies, more danger, and more extravagant headlines. All of this, of course, was interspersed with several reminders (I counted four in maybe 15 minutes of coverage) of how many had died, always followed by a reminder that the deathtoll is expected to climb. (“Could be as much as 1800! 9500 missing!”) It almost sounded gleeful.

So many questions they could be asking, about responses, about relief efforts, about social effects, about expected government and private responses, and they chose to spent 15 minutes digging for more blood and more bodies.

Disgusting.

So if you’re looking for a bunch of carnage-seeking ghouls, then tune in to CNN. A lot more sane, insightful, and compassionate coverage has been coming from Al Jazeera’s English-language affiliate, AJE. Their coverage on some topics is pretty wonky, but on this they’ve done a superlative job.

In the meantime, if you’re looking to help, I strongly recommend donating to the Red Cross or other reputable charitable organization. Amazon.com has put a Red Cross link up on their front page, which makes it easy to donate as much as you feel you can spare. It works through Amazon payments, so it’s easy and secure. I already had Amazon Payments set up, so I think donating took me all of a minute.

Disclosure Notice.

I’ve been grooving like hell to this tune today. It’s a Bassnectar remix of Ellie Goulding’s “Lights”.

Found via the inimitable Giles Bowkett.

Discipline must come through liberty…We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute or as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself, and can, therefore, regulate his own conduct when it shall be necessary to follow some rule of life.

-Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method as quoted in Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use

I love that opening sentence. “Discipline must come through liberty.” That is so true and so eloquently stated. The only sure path towards self-control, self-mastery, and self-responsibility is through the exercise of our freedom. Human beings are radically free, and it’s only through that freedom that we can truly cultivate the responsibility that must accompany such liberty.

I’ll have more to say about Sullum’s book when I’m done with it (I’m maybe a dozen pages from the end), but I had to share that quote.

Why I support nuclear power:

…one kilogram of coal can power a light bulb for four days, one kilogram of methane for six days and one kilogram of the carbon-free uranium for a remarkable 140 years.

Source.

The whole article is well worth a read, and makes a compelling case that turning off lights for Earth Hour misses the point entirely. We should be celebrating our technological achievement, rather than spending an hour shivering contritely in the dark.

Admittedly, the author’s preaching to my particular choir, but I think it’s a very clear articulation of why technology matters and should be celebrated.