Sweetness & light

The picture above is an advertisement for Banania, a French chocolate drink made with honey and banana flour. Wikipedia compares it to Nesquik. The picture is also the October illustration in my current wall calendar. 

It can be shocking to realize how visually rich the social environment was in the past. This ad is from sometime in the early 20th century. Again, it's an advertisement, and if you bought the product and forgot about the image that moved you to do so, it would be considered to have done its job. But it's such beautiful artwork, with such care attached to it, that it can hardly be forgotten.

Next something

While the complete death of the internet due to privatization and resource scarcity might still be another decade or two off, with some parts of it yet remaining for those working in the remains of tech sector businesses or living off corporate largess in gated communities with their own intranets and internet connections, enough of the internet already sucks so that we might as well start transitioning now into rebuilding an analog culture, an alternet form of communication. What I propose is that word I just used -the alternet.

This piece, by a regular commenter on Ecosophia, boasts a neat photo of a radioteletype setup. That certainly adds some flavor. 

Moore takes a look forward at things that might arise with the demise of the internet. Of course, if the internet is dying, it's doing so slowly. You have untold millions checking their favorite apps as they walk down the street. But it is true that the medium seems to run on habit now, and arguably addiction. That seems unsustainable to me.

So maybe we will see more growth in offline culture soon. I'd like to think so. As to what this reinvigorated real world would look like, I don't know. One hopes it will have more variety.

Who knows?

In a long and thoughtful essay inspired by his work as a teacher, Julian Waldner also touches on the Turing test and its limitations.

What is fascinating about Turing’s Test is not it’s astuteness as a test for machine intelligence; I am not alone in finding it unsatisfying. The philosopher John Searle famously threw down the gauntlet against Turing’s Test with his Chinese Room thought experiment. Searle imagines a room with a man locked away inside. The man is fed statements in Chinese through a small slot in the locked door. Although the man speaks only English and does not understand a word of Chinese, he has access to a giant book of rules. This book of rules allows the man to infallibly translate the Chinese statements and produce completely flaunt Chinese responses to be fed back out of the room. This procedure allows the man to produce Chinese statements, without understanding a word of Chinese. Searle’s point is that Artificial Intelligence produces the correct response through the mindless manipulation of symbols, without understanding what those symbols mean.

Turing’s test has left something out by design. The Turing Test, like the scientific project as a whole, has simply bracketed the question of understanding or consciousness to focus instead on what can be measured: We can’t touch consciousness or see understanding, but we can distinguish between something that looks like the product of intelligence and something that doesn’t. The fascinating thing about the Turing Test is that it still functions, even seven decades later, as a definition of what Artificial Intelligence is. Whether we are talking about Google Maps giving you a route that works, Claude generating text, a Tesla navigating through a busy street, your iPhone recognizing your face, or Spotify recommending songs—the goal is always to produce the kind of outputs that intelligent minds would.

Alan Turing himself was a distinctive intellect. Even aside from being gay and suicidal, he was one of those British eccentrics who enrich the world's cultural life now and again. But it's fair to say he had blind spots as well. Left brain types in a number of fields have a tendency to reduce all mental processes to a matter of processing power. Ted Chiang's short story "Understand" depicts a man who is treated for anoxia with a drug that regenerates his neurons, and it winds up turning him superhuman. Entertaining, but dubious. The engineers and investors who have brought us LLMs often insist that if they're not engaging in actual thought now equal to or greater than humans, it's only a matter of time and technological development. But it might just be that robots are one thing and people are another.

As for students and learning, schools have been engaged in a large-scale industrial production of young minds for long enough for Charles Dickens to have noticed. In some ways that seems to have intensified. The mass of students are trained to complete set tasks at best. And doing more than that is hard, no question. No education system is perfect, and arguments about ours will no doubt continue. But at this historical juncture it's crucial to at least preserve individual thought as an ideal.

Got the time

From Clocks, a brief and picture-heavy book by Simon Fleet:

Small water-clocks were used in the Athenian Courts to limit the time a lawyer was allowed to speak. This led to those who filled the water-clocks being bribed by lawyers to fill only partially the container when rivals were pleading, and so reduce their opponents' allotted time, and the same thing used to happen in Rome under Pompey. There is a story that a Roman prisoner's life was saved by a pebble falling into a water-clock, which made the water drip so slowly that it gave extra time for some delayed evidence to arrive, which acquitted him of murder.

As Fleet notes elsewhere in the book, the timing of things down to the minute wasn't considered a necessity until the rise of the railroads in the nineteenth century. Up until that point, clocks were mostly considered a luxury. But duration, at the very least, was important in some respects, as in the Greek and Roman court systems. Perhaps it's not too surprising that the clocks of the time were sometimes used and abused in corrupt ways. Of course if you were an innocent man on trial for your life, you wouldn't object to their being a bit fallible.

Norse intensity

I just watched The Night Visitor. It's a movie from 1971. Max von Sydow plays an erstwhile farmer whose sister and brother-in-law framed him for murder years earlier. Now he's locked away in an asylum but he figures out a way to get out and back in, and he's got no compunctions about killing people for real now. It's sort of a Vincent Price role, but more physical. If von Sydow did a fraction of his own stunts then wow. Trevor Howard is a police inspector looking into the new murders and the old one. The cast includes Swedish, Danish, and British actors, and there's no real attempt to hide that.

It's all filmed in Sweden, though. Sweden in what appears to be the depths of winter. At one point you can see a bevy of swans swimming off a snowy shore. Wintry Sweden is really quite picturesque. Although I don't think I'd recommend running around everywhere in your skivvies, as von Sydow's character does through most of the movie.

Dee plus

It's interesting to see in a couple of different sources the suggestion that William Shakespeare might have based Prospero on John Dee. Prospero is the protagonist of The Tempest, a powerful magician, and also an exile. That would sort of seem to fit. 

John Dee in life was an accomplished mathematician and scientist, who also had a serious interest in the occult. The same could be said of Isaac Newton. It was less of an anomaly in Elizabeth I's time than it is in ours, when scientists are expected to be materialists only. And it just so happens we remember Newton for one thing and Dee for another.

Of course it's just something to ponder. Even if the Bard were still alive I'm not sure he could or would elucidate things.

Cyberpunk all night and party every day

I just finished reading William Gibson's Neuromancer. Not the first Gibson I've read. I'd previously read The Difference Engine, which he wrote with Bruce Sterling and which formalized steampunk fiction. Also The Peripheral. But Neuromancer is the one that kicked things off from him.

It's definitely influential. The seedy Pacific Rim setting, for one thing. The girlfriend who has herself programmed with kickass martial arts moves. Something like The Matrix movies wouldn't be imaginable without this book. A lot of synth & samples musicians have paid tribute to Neuromancer as well. 

And Silicon Valley has done their best to make this world real. Well, the villains in the book live pretty high off the digital hog. No wonder someone wants to emulate them.