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Jordan Pollack Answers AI And IP Questions
from the learning-from-the-leaders dept.
How do you justify your expectations? (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward
For the past 40 years, AI has just been 10 years or so away.It's still just 10 years or so away.
It's not getting any closer.
How do you justify any degree of optimism about the future of AI at this point? What makes now fundamentally different from anytime in the past 40 years?
It is funny, this is the same question I asked Marvin Minsky, the father of AI, at ALife 5 in Japan. He attacked every modern approach, including neural nets, fuzzy logic, evolutionary algorithms, and so on for over an hour, suggesting that his student's (Winston's) thesis should have been the paradigm of the field! I asked, "If AI sucks so much, why are you still in the field after 40 years?"
Hypocrite! Here I am, still in the field after 20 years! As soon as I've convinced myself one approach to AI is too slow, I find another, leaving quietly without attacking the friends I've made. AI is a big wide open field with a lot of smart people trying different things. (Savage attacks by insiders exiting are the worst thing in science, such as Bar Hillel's attack on Machine Translation in the 60's. Forty Years later, MT is "cool" again, in this month's issue of Wired.)
So I can say that, from my perspective as having worked on many different approaches to AI, writing problem space search algorithms for solving puzzles will not result in a general problem solver. Automating predicate logic won't make a computer equivalent to a philosopher. A computer can't do natural language any better than Eliza, without an internal need to communicate to survive and a large blessing of custom hardware. Neural nets are great function approximators with good mathematical results on limited kinds of learning, but we can't set 12 weights to get what we want, let alone 10 billion weights. And even though simple nonlinear systems give off chaos and fractals, Kolmogorov's law tells us simple systems are still simple. Evolution is one path to complexity, but most genetic algorithms simply search a finite search space and optimize a fixed goal.
So I'm locally pessimistic but globally optimistic! Who said AI is 10 years away? It's here now, in limited forms, yielding a lot of economic value, as your mouse clickstream is datamined so the ads which pop up are for things you might actually buy. But the SF ideal of a humanoid robot like Commander Data is centuries away.
I hold the view that any system which responds to its environment in a conditional way based on some internal state, even a thermostat, has a bit of intelligence. Immune systems, ecologies, and economies design things and solve problems. Every computer program you write has a bit of intelligence captured in it. The problem is, real AI of the sort you are alluding to is an organization which might be realizable as a 10 billion line program or a 10 billion weight dynamical neural system, and no human software engineering team can write autonomous code which is more than 10-100 million lines. Even Windows is just DOS with wallpaper, and big applications always require a human in the loop, selecting subprograms from menus or command lines.
Since 1994, we've been working on how to automatically evolve physical symbol systems which would have 10 billion unique moving parts, what we call "Biologically Complex" systems. When I say "We," it is because everything I do is in collaboration with my Ph.D students! A 10 Billion Line program is an absurd goal obviously, but it drives our research to focus in on the process of growth itself, rather than on what shortcuts we can accomplish by hand. We look at co-evolution, which involves machine learners training each other, and on questions of what kinds of substrates for computing could provide a universe of functionality while being constrained in a way which reduces the size or dimensionality of the search space. This constraint is called inductive bias. We seek minimal inductive bias systems, in which the human hints, or "gradient engineering" tricks are fully explicit. (Sevan Ficici, Richard Watson) We still work on neural nets and fractals as a substrate, and have made some progress in understanding how they work (Ofer Melnik, Simon Levy).
It's been more than five years, and while we are not even at the million line mark yet, I am still optimistic and haven't given up on co-evolution to move to a new field. I think that my lab has made progress in understanding why Hillis's sorting networks and Tesauro's Backgammon player were such breakthroughs and where they were limited. (Hugue Juille, Alan Blair). I think we have begun to understand the nature of mediocrity as an attractor in educational systems and how to change the utility functions to avoid collusion, and apply this to human learning (Elizabeth Sklar). We have become more applied, bring co-evolution to the Internet and to robotics, replicating and extending the beautiful results of Karl Sims from 1994 (Pablo Funes, Greg Hornby, Hod Lipson). All the work is available to study at the laboratory's Web site.
AI and ethics. (Score:5, Interesting) by kwsNI
What do you say to the people that feel it is unethical to try to create "intelligence"?I take this as a shorter version of the longer religious question the editor thankfully didn't select. I've talked to myrabbi, perhaps one of the great theologians around today. Even though I am an atheist, he thinks I am on a spiritual quest to understand [God as] the principles of the universe which allow self-organization of life as a chemical process far from equilibrium which dissipates energy and creates structure that exploits emergent properties of physics. Can a spiritual quest be unethical? I suggest that people with this question read Three Scientists and Their God, by Robert Wright, or watch the Morris documentary "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control".
A second ethical question, besides usurping God's rights, is how can you take funding from national and military agencies like NSF, Darpa and ONR? For the past 50 years at least, they have been the seed capital for the science behind most of the technological progress I know about. With the venture capital economy, that curiosity-based seed function may be privatized, if some of the big VC funds dedicate 10% for long range science, and the ethical question of whether you are doing something for public good or private gain begins to dominate over the religious and military questions. That is the same question many scientists and Linux hackers ask themselves daily: Can I do good and make money without a conflict of interest?
Turing award. (Score:5, Funny) by V.
Do we win something if we can fool him into answering a computer-generated question? ;)It has always been the case that limiting the range of dialog leads to more successful masquerading. In our CEL online educational game, for example, the only interactions between players are the actual plays, which enables artificial agents to be accepted as game partners.
BTW, the Turing Award is an annual lifetime achievement award in computer science, which has gone to people like John Backus for his eloquent apology for Fortran when he should have given us APL and LISP. The Turing Test is the name given to Alan Turing's proposal for testing for successful AI. Given that we don't deny airplanes fly, I think if AI ever flies, we won't question it. So I propose using the Louis Armstrong Test, his answer to the question "What is jazz?"
How should an amateur get started working on AI? (Score:5,Interesting) by Henry House
It seems to me that a significant problem holding back the development of AI is that few non-professionals grok AI well enough to offer any contribution to the AI and open-source communities. What do you suggest that I, as a person interested in both AI and open source, do about this? What are the professionals in the AI field doing about this?Reading is fundamental.
Frankenstein (Score:5, Interesting) by Borealis
For a long time there has been a fear of a Frankenstein being incarnated with AI. Movies like The Matrix and the recent essay by Bill Joy both express worries that AI (in the form of self replicating robots with some AI agenda) can possibly overcome us if we are not careful. Personally I have always considered the idea rather outlandish, but I'm wondering what an actual expert thinks about the idea.Do you believe that there is any foundation for worry? If so, what areas should we concentrate on to be sure to avoid any problems? If not, what are the limiting factors that prevent an "evil" AI?
AI doesn't kill People. AI might make guns smart enough to sense the weight or handsize of the user, preventing children from killing each other. Everything ever invented is capable of good or evil. Evil arises most often when masses of humans are denied fundamental rights. The Evil Rate and Unemployment Rate are closely linked.
I read Bill Joy's article in Wired last month. And I loved the Unabomber's excerpt because it is based on some of the best Philip Dick paranoid Science Fiction, like: Vulcan's Hammer, We Can Build You, and the Simulacrum. There is a lot of SF on the Golem question and one of my favorites is Marge Piercy's He, She, and It , which proposes a moratorium on AI inside humanoid robots. You can have smart software on the Web, and human looking idiobots, but you can't put real AI inside human looking robots, or you have to pay the price.
My lab is indeed working on self-replicating robotics and were worried for a split second about getting the fetal brain tissue reaction when our paper comes out shortly. We can now envision the "third bootstrap", after precision manufacturing and computation, where machines make the machines which make themselves, just as machine tools are used to make more machine tools, and computers compile their own programs. But the replication loop is quite a sophisticated automatic manufacturing process, which requires a large industrial infrastructure, and a lot of liability insurance. So far, no VC's, Saudi Princes, or government agencies have offered the necessary $500M first round of financing for fullyautomateddesign.com.
It would be wrong of me to say leave my frankenbots alone, and go after frankenfoods and frankenano. I think Joe Weizenbaum's book should be required reading, because every few years somebody else comes up with the idea of inserting computers inside animal bodies, so that the first act of any war will be to exterminate all nonhuman life forms. But I do think we have to worry more about large scale industrial and agricultural processes which are allowed to externalize their by-products affecting the environment, than we need worry about robotic ice-9. We will die quicker from e-mail spam caused by viral marketing customer acquisition schemes or from global warming and ozone depletion triggering major climactic change, red tide or another pollutant taking out fish from the food chain, or even from people throwing away old EGA screens and 386 motherboards in landfills, poisoning the aquifers. I promise that for every robot we build, there will be another robot to recycle it when its job is complete.
Anyhow, IMO Joy's angst must reflect the Sun setting on any instruction set architecture besides x86, but that's a different discussion. Talk to me about the ethics, when your very own open source movement leads to the inevitability of an Intel instruction set monopoly by providing a useful alternative to Microsoft :)
Questions based on your academic path (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward
The way to the field of AI isn't always extremely clear. What type of background do they expect? Is it mostly a researching position or is it treated like a normal job with normal goals? Are there any classes or subjects or schools you recommend to make it into the AI field? Also, how exactly did you get into the field? How did AI intrigue you into what you do now, despite all the controversy to create an intelligence that could possibly be considered a "god" compared to the human existence? Very interesting to say the least, and something I'm interested in.There is no AI business field to speak of which is differentiated from the general software business. Most companies which were "AI companies" in an earlier generation of university spin-offs for Lisp Machines, and Expert Systems Shells, failed miserably. Venture Capitalists won't fall into the same sinkhole twice. There are industrial process control companies which use refined bits of AI, e.g. in visual inspection of manufacturing processes, and Neural Network companies, like HNC, who have changed business plans and are now "pattern-recognition e-commerce security." companies. The Speech recognition industry has condensed into one company. Web- based AI means search engines and Language Engines. Ask Jeeves and Google and Direct Hit and many others may use bits of AI and adaptive technologies in their system.
Jobs in AI are just like software jobs everywhere: chain you to a workstation and make you work out boring details in exchange for salary and very little equity. But find a great graduate program in computer science, and you will likely find fun and exciting work for no salary and no equity! And you have to be great at both real and discrete mathematics as well as a natural born programming genius.
As for me, I started programming computers in APL as a freshman in college, and because it was such a high level language and I didn't sleep much, I wrote an awful lot of code in a few years. I was naturally drawn to building heuristic puzzle solvers, game players, and logical theorem provers. Before I met my wife, friends thought I was in love with computers. After working at IBM, I went to graduate school in Urbana and worked with David Waltz on LISP hacking, natural language processing, and reinvented neural networks, which were censored from the AI curriculum of the early 80's. I came to the limit of what could be done with neural networks for intelligence by 1988, and at Ohio State University, started looking at fractals and chaos as a source for generativity. Unfortunately, interesting behavior requires lots of levels and lots of parameters, which is why we started looking at evolution for selecting and adjusting lots of parameters, a focus since I've been at Brandeis.
While there is a lot of detailed work and dead ends, the search for
mechanical intelligence is one of the great unsolved problems, which is
in some way deeply equivalent to questions on the origin of life, human
language, morphogenesis, child development, and human cultural and economic
change. John
Casti's book is a great place to start reading about these big problems.
Human brain - AI connection - is there? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you think that a greater understanding of the human brain and how intelligence has emerged in us is crucial to the creation of AI, or do you think that the two are unconnected? Will a greater understanding of memory and thought aid in development, or will AI be different enough so that such knowledge isn't required?Also, what do you think about the potential of the models used today to attempt to achieve a working AI? Do you think that the models themselves (e.g. the neural net model) are correct and have the potential to produce an AI given enough power and configuration, or do you think that our current models are just a stepping stone along the way to a better model which is required for success?
Obviously there are clear medicinal benefits to brain research. And the study of any real biological system leads to interesting metaphors which can be the basis for a novel computational model. But I think it is unlikely that research into the biology of the brain is crucial to understanding cognition or replicating intelligence. It's like studying the width of wires in integrated circuits of a computer. Even if you get the whole wiring diagram for a computer, it still tells you little about the programs running on it. I think understanding the brain is a problem which is underestimated. I heard 25,000 scientists attend the annual Neurosciences meeting, three times the largest ever interested in AI. It could be called the Mandelsciences meeting, and different labs compete to describe what they find in those little windows on the Mandelbrot set! But I have a lot of friends who are neuroscientists, and I can be just as facetious about linguistics.
Seriously, I believe we have to understand and replicate the processes which lead to the development of the brain and its behavior, not replicate the mammalian brain itself.
The second part of your question "how intelligence has emerged in us" can be interpreted as a more interesting direction. Here, there is a lot of opportunity to relate human intelligence as animal intelligence plus a little more. The fields of evolutionary epistemology, adaptive behavior, and computational neuroethology are quite interesting. It is a great question to understand cognition as it appears in other animals, insects, worms, and even bacterial colonies. The basic principles of multicellular cooperation are more important than the millions of specific adaptations of the human brain.
As for models question, it is sort of like asking whether a chair is built out of metal, wood, plastic, rubber, or cardboard. It doesn't matter, as long as it are strong enough. The organization of molecules has to provide a surface and a normal force at the right height for sitting. As for the organization of 10 billion things which might make an AI? Doesn't matter if it is c, java, lisp, neurons, or tightly coupled markovian 2nd order polynomial fuzzy sets. Will it stand, or collapse under its own weight?
most likely path? (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward
Dr Jordan:Do you think that AI is more likely to arise as the result of explicit efforts to create an intelligent system by programmers, or by evolution of artificial life entities? Or on the third hand, do you think efforts like Cog (training the machine like a child, with a long, human aided learning process) will be the first to create a thinking machine?
We are taking the second path, seeking the principles for self-organization so we can harness them to create and invent forms of organization.. There is a 4th path you don't mention, which is the terminator/Truenames hypothesis, that AI will simply arise among the powerful router machines of the internet. How would we recognize coherent behavior arising in telecom infrastructure if it didn't wake up talking English? I think a SETI for coherent intentional behavior emerging out of the infrastructure would be a fun project to do for the people worrying about risks to the information infrastructure.
Software Market & Open Source (Score:5, Insightful) by Breace
In your 'hyperbook' about your idea of a software market I noticed that you say that Open Source evangelists should support your movement because it will be (quote) A way for your next team to be rewarded for their creative work if it turns into Sendmail, Apache, or Linux.I assume (from reading other parts) that you are talking about a monetary reward. My question is (and this is not meant as a flame by any means), do you really think that that's what the Open Source community is after, after all? Do you think that people like Torvalds or RMS are unhappy for not being rewarded enough?
If the OS community doesn't care about monetary rewards, is there
an other benefit in having your proposed Software Market?
According to economic theory, utility is what motivates you to make decisions in your own self interest. Simple games, like the prisoner's dilemma, rationalize utility with numeric values to illustrate the concept, but it isn't money at all. If someone behaves in an unpredictable way, we must have our definition of their utility wrong.
There are plenty of motivations for writing open source code, including the challenge and the feeling of altruism, both of which have utility. A lot of people may write open source for credit in the community, which also has utility. If RMS was a radical advocate of anonymity who wrote the GPL so you couldn't put your name on the source code because it promoted the glorification of the individual, participating might provide less utility.
Why not Write a Screensaver? (Score:5, Interesting) by peteshaw
First of all, it is indeed an honor to pester a big name scientist with my puny little questions! Hopefully I will not arouse angst with the simplicity of my perceptions. Aha! I toss my Wheaties on Mount Olympus and hope to see golden flakes drift down from the sky!I have always thought that distributed computing naturally lends itself to large scale AI problems, specifically your Neural Networks and Dynamical Systems work. I am thinking specifically of the SETI@home project, and the distributed.net projects. Have you thought about, or to your knowledge has anyone thought about harnessing the power of collective geekdom for sort of a brute force approach to neural networks. I don't know how NN normally work, but it seems that you could write a very small, lightweight client, and embed it into a screen saver a'la SETI@home. This SS would really be really a simple client 'node'. You could then add some cute graphics like a picture of a human brain and some brightly colored synapses or what have you.
Once the /.ers got their hands on such a geek toy I have no doubt you'd have the equivalent of several hundred thousand hours or more of free computer time, and who knows, maybe we could all make a brain together! I would love to think of my computer as a small cog in some vast neural network, or at least I would until Arnold Schwarzenegger got sent back in time to kill my mom. Whaddayathink, Jordan? Is this a good idea, or am I an idiot?
No, its very imaginative. You could be one of my AI grad students. But rather than focusing on neural networks, which, because of matrix multiplication, do not distribute well, people are looking at such systems for evolutionary computation. You can evolve individuals on networked workstations and collect them, or evolve populations which interact occasionally and pass dna around. Look at Tom Ray's Net Tierra project to see how it is going. My colleague Hod Lipson is developing a screensaver for our evolutionary robotics project, but release 1 will be Windows rather than Linux compatible (./sorry)
Actually, one of my early business plans for the Internet, circa the first working java browsers, was to show naughty pictures while harvesting cycles from your computer and reselling them to people needing computer time. All was needed was an assembly language interpreter in java and some interfacing. The problem is that most computationally intense problems people want to solve have large data flow requirements which conflict with the download of the naughty pictures! When I recently tried to corner the market in pig latin domain names for my new "incubator", panies.com panies.com, I didn't secure putation.com because it sounded bad. One week later I realized it was a pretty good name for a distributed computation service, but somebody else had grabbed the URL!
However, there is a critical piece missing from all these visions. intelligence is a property of an organization of computation, it is not computation itself. The problem of robotics is not the limited power of microcomputers, since we could drive any robot from a supercomputer if we knew what to write! We can get infinite cycles already, but nobody can write a coherent program bigger than 10M lines. We have figure out to use cycles towards discovery of a process of self-organization, rather than on a known software organization itself.
AI Metrics (Score:5, Interesting) by john_many_jars
I have read several coffee table science books on the subject and often find myself asking for a way to measure AI. As has been noted, AI is always elusive and is just around the corner. My question is how do you gauge how far AI has come and what is AI?For instance, what's the difference between your TRON demonstration and a highly advanced system of solving a (very specific) non-linear differential equation to find relative and (hopefully absolute) extrema in the wildly complicated space of TRON strategies? Or, is that the definition of intelligence?
This is a very hard question which I won't be able to joke my way out of. I think that system performance in specific domains can be measured, like a rating system for a game likeTRON. I think we might be able to get a measure of the generative capacity of a system in all possible environments, by capturing strings of symbols representing different actions, and looking at the grammar of behavior. In general, however, observers have an effect on their observations of computational capacity. I usually think of intelligence as a measurement, not the thing being measured, sort of like the difference between temperature and heat, or weight and mass. It could be a measurement of operational knowledge (programmed, not static in a database), or of efficient use of knowledge resources. This measurement is applied to an organization. So committees of very smart people can operate idiotically, and groups of dumb insects can be very intelligent.
My current best working definition is that intelligence is the ratio of the amount of problem-solving accomplished to the number of cycles wasted. When I say we need 10B lines of code, it is not to say that raw program size is a measure of intelligence, but to express the idea that inside that code are enough different heuristics and gizmos to solve lots of problems effectively.
And what about Freedom? (Score:5, Insightful) by Hobbex
Mr. Pollack,I read your article about "information property" and was surprised to find you dealt with the matter completely from the point of view of advancing the market. Their are those of us who would argue that the wellbeing of the market is, at most, a second order concern, and that the important issues that Information age gives rise regarding the perceived ownership of information are really about Freedom and integrity.
These issues range from the simple desire to have the right to do whatever one wants with data that one has access to, to the simple futility and danger of trying to limit to paying individuals something that by nature, mathematics, and now technology is Free. They concern the fact that our machines are now so integral in our lives that they have become a part of our identity, with our computers as the extension of ourselves into "cyberspace", and that any proposal which aims to keep the total right to control over everything in the computer away from the user is thus an invasion into our integrity, personality, and freedom.
Do you consider the economics of the market to be a greater concern than individual freedom?
This is a beautiful question, thank you. My book is exactly about freedom and rights: The freedom to sell a copy of a book you are done reading. The freedom to share in the rewards when something you design or write is in demand by millions of people. The right to own what you buy.
I see an inexorable movement towards dispossessionism, both coming from the "right," with UCITA, secured digital rights, anti-crypto-tampering in the DMCA, and ASP subscription models, and coming from the "left", with ideas that we should give our writing up into free collectivist projects.
The Internet is the beginning of Goldstein's "celestial jukebox," the encyclopedia of everything anyone has ever written, every episode of every TV show, and every song by every band. It sounds wonderful until you realize that you will have to pay per view! Bill Gates now has the money to deploy satellites which will force you to rent his word processor for $1/hour, the same rate for renting a movie. The laws on theft of satellite programs, unfortunately, as legal doctrine goes, considers decoding satellite broadcasts as theft of cable services, rather than as protected first amendment rights to receive radio broadcasts. Once secure distribution of programs on a rental basis is established, all content publishing will move inexorably into that mode to maximize profits. No more books, no more records. No more ownership. Dispossession.
The Free software movement, League for Programming Freedom, Open Source Software, on the other hand, talk idealistic young individuals out of their writing. "Contribute it towards a greater good." Be rewarded by occasional e-mails of thanks from your peers. The Free Music movement, or "let's RIP our CD's and trade MP3s through Napster" isn't as politically as economically motivated, but is also making musicians contribute their work for the greater good, at least of dormitories! Dispossession.
Fascism and Communism, while they have philosophical appeal for their mimetic simplicity, have proven themselves consistently the enemies of freedom, enterprise and creativity. Ordinary people are "dispossessed" of their property, which ends up, not surprisingly, in the pockets of the promoters of the simple philosophy.
My purpose in writing License to Bill is to begin a discussion not only on a societal remedy to the microsoft problem, but to secure, as a human right, the right to own information properties I buy, rather than just being able to rent them. I especially want the right to own and sell copies of my own creations, and to own a library of other's creations, reasonably priced based on supply and demand, without fear that a change in technology will render my investments worthless..
A market is just a mechanism which humanity uses to allocate resources fairly. It is neither good nor evil.
To which I would add... (Score:5, Interesting) by joss
I also read your IP proposal, and agree with the points mentioned above.However, I also have a problem with your proposal from an economic perspective:
Property laws developed as a mechanism for optimal utilization of scarce resources. The laws and ethics for standard property make little sense when the cost of replication is $0. The market is the best mechanism for distributing scarce resources, so you propose we make all IP resources scarce so that IP behaves like other commodities and all the laws of the market apply.
We are rapidly entering a world where most wealth is held as a form of IP. Free replication of IP increases the net wealth of the planet. If everybody on earth had access to all the IP on earth, then everybody would be far richer - it's not a zero sum game. Of course, we're several decades at least from this being a viable option since we've reached a local minima. (Need equivalent to starship replicators first - nanotech...)
Artificially pretending that IP is a scarce resource will keep the lawyers, accountants, politicians in work, and will also allow some money to flow back to the creatives, but at the cost of impoverishing humanity.
I could actually see your proposal being adopted, and I can see how it will maintain capitalism as the dominant model, but I also believe that it is the most damaging economic suggestion in human history
Could you tell me why I'm wrong.
Wow! "I also believe that it is the most damaging economic suggestion in human history" Surely this is a wonderful compliment.
The history and future of money is very interesting, and one you can read about in various books, including one byMilton Friedman, and one from the Cato Institute. I think today's software houses who force upgrades on their customers are like the wildcat banks of the nineteenth century, printing up banknotes, and then declaring bankruptcy, vanishing with the deposits and setting up shop in another town.
Before money, there was simply trade in raw and polished goods. Then there was weighing and coinage. Lots of people thought coins were the real value and heartily resisted paper money. The gold and silver standards gave way, and eventually the idea that there was gold for every dollar bill was revealed as a hoax, and now "money" is simply a record in your bank's computer that there is a certain amount you are entitled to withdraw based on the amounts other banks have deposited for you. The only essential different between a rich and poor person is what the bank computers and the registrar of deeds say it is, backed by military force. And the money supply and international exchanges now somehow represents our national wealth with respect to other nations, and other nation's confidence that our banking system isn't duplicating dollars. Instead of objects of trade, money is information about potential trade.
While you might not like the idea that money is abstract and in limited supply, and you have more or less than you want, it is the soft underbelly of "Starship Economics" that Gene Roddenberry died before coming up with the backstory for how to have a non-mediocre society with unlimited replication for all.
I once invented a transporter machine for paper using public key crypto and fax technology. It would hold the source paper in a metal box, verify the copy was printed, and then destroy the original and legitimize the copy. With this system, you could fax a dollar bill to a friend! Now: is a dollar bill is just the likeness of a dollar bill on a crinkly piece of thermal paper, or the actual piece of green stuff? If Paypal can figure out how you can beam money from your palmpilot to mine, but a bug lets you keep a copy of the money, I bet their valuation would go way down.
I am simply saying that permanent use and resale licenses to changeable information (software, art, literature, music, movies) which can be traded securely, without loss or duplication, in a public market, is a form of currency.
Unlimited replication of currency just doesn't work, any more than two copies of William Shatner.
I stake the middle ground. Both the "right" copyright publishers who make currency loss through expiring keys and forced upgrades, and the "left" copyright violators who duplicate currency, will be welcome at my table when they see the light.
----------
Thanks for your interesting questions. My comments do not reflect the official position of my employer Brandeis University, the sponsors of my laboratory's research, or the companies i am involved with, Abuzz, Xilicon, or Thinmail.
Humbly yours,
Jordan Pollack
Bigname@scientist.com
P.S. you too can be a scientist thanks to mail.com:)
AI's (Score:5)
Ethics, schmethics. (Score:5)
Well, here's another viewpoint (Score:4)
To some extent you're pre-supposing a scarcity of resources. One of the major points in the explosion of technology is that this scarcity isn't continuing. I can tell you that for less total money than some of you put into your PCs, I as a musician and sound engineer (www.mp3.com/ChrisJ [mp3.com] for obligatory examples :) ) am able to produce completed work that, technically, kills a lot of stuff released by the mainstream industry throughout history, and on top of that I have access to types of tools that the engineers of the 50s and 60s and 70s would have killed for.
On top of this I have access to global distribution simply due to my using the mp3 format, which is popular and downloadable, so not even _distribution_ is an insuperable problem.
If I have access to all this for so little money, a level of production and distribution that _used_ to require not only million dollar recording studios and mastering houses but also fleets of trucks and distributors, doesn't that say something about how the rules are changing?
And if I can (through a lot of years of study and work and a certain amount of saving and buying and a lot of mad hacking of equipment) do this NOW, what does that suggest about the future prospects of indie film directors and actors and cinematographers as the technology advances to the point where essentially anything imaginable becomes 'filmable', not for billions of dollars but out of the home?
I would humbly argue that 'consumer-grade' camcorders will eventually beat Cinemascope given enough years- and I will stubbornly argue that, given a world full of people to draw on, there is going to be a _lot_ of stuff out there more interesting than backyards and dogs. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that only through media cartels can real Art be created- and... *g* well, maybe that _is_ what some people are suggesting, but my God, such a thought!
Re:Giving up your software (Score:5)
The big error, the big oversight here is the unspoken assumption that "because you make something, you can find a market for it". That's, unfortunately, bullshit... certainly both in computer software and in music, the market is distorted by bigger players who control access to distribution and promotion. This is so obvious that people don't see it, it's taken for granted that a cartel totally dictates what you can market in these industries. Yet, it presents a nasty barrier for entry, and blocks the use of capitalism by individuals.
I do music because I like to- I like making it, I can usually pick out something of mine that about anybody would like (it varies a great deal- which is a negative, if you're a cartel: I'm not supposed to be a working artist, I'm supposed to be an easily categorisable disposable artist to be squeezed dry in a single burst of major exposure, then ditched). The thing to remember about my music freeness, determination to make _everything_ downloadable without penalty and withhold nothing, determination to cooperate with anybody who wants to use sampling and take bits of my music for their own use without compensation- is that, just maybe, I have a clearer idea of the real issues here than a lot of people who still believe there's a free market for music (or software).
As I see it- promotion is _everything_. Being known, being publically recognized, is infinitely more valuable than trying to coerce a return on particular artworks or programs- because it is the only thing that can stand against the forces of a cartel controlling the relevant industry. If you are going all business, make a little record label and hammer out good relationships with some stores and pressing houses and a studio and mastering house- guess what? You can't force the cartels to give you distribution. You are _completely_ outmatched there. It is _impossible_ to pursue a 'push' model of product distribution in the face of industry cartels- and if that's where you've put your energies, you're doomed.
If you go all 'free' you're pursuing a 'pull' model. How many really gifted Linux programmers are starving right now? By the same token I see 'free music' as the _only_ reasonable choice (even to the extent that I'll happily talk about all that and tip other people off to it- and I'm told by other people doing this that it actually works!). Instead of 'give, and depend on the gratitude of fans' being a dumb idealistic approach, it is actually the only bulletproof approach- because it is a 'pull' model. You _can't_ force people to listen to and buy your music when you're up against cartels- but no matter how outmatched you are, you can _give_ it away and if people are so happy that they want to help you, nothing can stop them! (speaking of which, did you go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ [mp3.com] and www.mp3.com/RFW [mp3.com] and download a bunch of free music yet? ;) )
I'm totally, dead serious. In some ways I'm claiming a pretty serious breakdown of capitalism, that it's not possible for an individual to push their product onto the market in the usual business sense. I _am_ claiming that. But I'm also advocating the solution, which is that in an era of such great connectivity, exposure and ability to get attention are far more valuable than the ability to get your stuff _shoved_ on people- when your horizon is as large as the world, suddenly _everyone_ is 'shoving' their crap onto you, and it all blurs and becomes totally valueless and meaningless. Truth becomes incomprehensible when people will say anything to con you ('innovation'), and in that condition the ability of some small capitalist to get their _demand_ through becomes nil. You can't out-hard-sell a planet full of cartels.
But! As Linux has shown, with this global horizon, there's the capacity for little pockets of generosity and no-strings-attached sincere stuff to get attention, even in the face of the constant deafening roar of the cartels and media. Somebody says, "Hey- didja know you can download all the source for linux and hack with it and you're _allowed_ to?". In the same spirit I say, "Didja know you can download _all_ of my songs on all my (buyable) CDs totally free and not only are you allowed to, I'm kind of passionate that you should never _have_ to cough up money for 'em?" It's partly the simple idealism of "Screw this hucksterism, I want to give stuff", but in some cases (certainly mine) there's also "Things have gone so far out of balance that now, not only do I _want_ to give stuff, but it's the only possible way to earn supporters".
And so, off I go- not only producing good music and stubbornly making it freely available, but also publically offering access to the master tapes for anyone who wants samples, and in fact on Slashdot I've repeatedly offered to let opensource programmer types record music in my studio (you get here, I can't do roadtrips) for FREE when I could legitimately charge $75 an hour, easy. I still offer that- anybody wanting should talk to me. I'm also offering free access to the Geeks In Space people. It's hard to know what more I could offer, but if I think of anything I shall offer that as well :) because (a) I get a kick out of it and like being that way, and (b) again, I see a benefit in it for me, a _social_ benefit not a coercing one. The more I can give the more valuable I become and the more likely it is that I'll keep busy, start doing more work with others, to the point where eventually I can ask $75 an hour sound engineering and it'll seem like an incredible bargain- or have 1% of music listeners buy my ($5.99) CD and have that amount to a cozy nest-egg.
But the important thing is that that doesn't come first. It can _only_ happen if I give so well that it's appreciated, if I work hard enough to be able to really offer something.
So final anti-hype- if anyone could go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ [mp3.com] and www.mp3.com/RFW [mp3.com] and give suggestions on what _more_ I can do to give something valuable to people for nothing, I'd be real pleased :) I'm starting work on a techno album which will be pretty unusual, and need to fit in some equipment building in the form of a fancy EQ for my drum sounds. More albums? Better terms for offering studio time? Do people want schematics for the equipment I'm building, or the modifications I make to the gear I have? As might be imagined I'm holding nothing back whatsoever- and like it that way. So, anything else people want?
Thanks, but.... (Score:5)
The notion that open source advocates are "left" while IP advocates are "right" is severely misleading. The argument has got virtually nothing to do with left/right wing. The notion that there should be restrictions on copying of information is a form of protectionism. The arguments to justify IP ie "protect the creators" seem more socialist to me than the anti-IP arguments (not that there's anything inherently wrong with that). A "free market" is one in which there are no artificial barriers to entry, and the price of an article becomes the price of production. For instance, some socialist countries have laws that make it illegal for someone to do a job unless they are a member of the relevent union. These laws exist to maintain wage levels for people in those industries. IP laws which exist to protect the investment of the original creators are in some ways equivalent.
> Gene Roddenberry died before coming up with the > backstory for how to have a non-mediocre
> society with unlimited replication for all.
This takes us to the crux of the argument, which is whether there can be sufficient motivation for IP creation without IP protection. For the moment, I think the answer is no, and I believe your IP scheme is probably preferable to the status quo. However, in the long run, I think we will move to a gift economy and that this will work even better.
In richer societies, people don't work in order to survive, they work to improve their status. An advertising executive might be prepared to work 60 hours a week so he can afford a mercedes. Is it because a mercedes is so much more comfortable and faster than a Pinto - of course not, it's because of the status driving a mercedes confers on him. Once material necessities are satisified, you might think people would relax more, but they don't because status is a primary motivator.
Of course status has to be tradeable for a gift economy to be healthy, but somehow status always ends up being tradeable. IP that can be freely replicated reproduces much more effectively than proprietary IP, so we don't need to change IP laws (except patents) in order for a gift economy to develop, it'll happen naturally, and it will work better than a market economy, but the two can co-exist indefinitely.
Re:All in the same boat (Score:3)
Allow me to paraphrase:
"According to my definition of 'Property', anything I can get my hands on does not qualify as other people's property. I recognize that others do see them as property and try to respect their worldview, however, I do not and will not share that world view, and will only allow my actions to be dictated by that world view as I deem apropriate."
The ability to produce New Good Music is scarce. Once it is produced, there is no scarcity. I have no problem with hireing musicans to play music, or going to concerts etc etc. Certainly they are talented and should recieve compensation for their talents.
Yes, and how's that going to happen? Noone will pay for it if even people who don't pay benefit equally.
Yes, money is a big motivator. However it is not the only big motivator. Most people are not solely motivated by money.
Money is the most practical way to get food, clothing, and shelter.
You are assuming that there are rights to lose. What you are asking for is not rights to a piece of property but the right to dictate the actions of others. If Alice writes a poem and gives Bob a copy, Then Bob gives a copy to Carol, then how dows the Bob/carol transaction effect Alice? For alice to claim the right to stop the transaction, she is claiming the right to influence transactions between other people, that do not involve her.
The transaction affects Alice because the value of what she has produced has decreased. Ever hear of supply and demand? If there's an infinite supply, the price drops to zero. That would be fine if Alice spent $0 and zero time writing that poem. But if Alice spent the better part of a year writing that poem how can she survive if she can't get paid for it? In an ideal world, the "cost" of producing the poem in the first place would be divided among the people who benefited from it, proportionately to how much they benefited from it. Right now, the free market with IP laws are the best approximation of that we've got.
Consider software development. Thousands of man hours (of highly skilled people) go into producing your typical piece of software. Yes, there is 0 replication cost, but what about that up-front cost? Who pays for all of those developers, and the equipment that they need? I know you're going to bring up open source, but how many developers do you know who actually make money writing open source? Almost all open source developers have a day job writing closed-source software (myself included).
Does this make publishing music less profitable? Yes it does, it means CD pressers would actually have to compete with eachother. It would mean anyone who can press a CD is their competition.
Yes, it also means that content creators get zip.
Does it mean artists wont be able to make money? Hell no. They can still perform.
Explain how people who create digital media like electronica musicians, computer animators, and software developers can make money from "performances". I can already tell that for software developers you're going to say "sell support". Hint: developers don't do support. Support sellers don't need developers, and so they won't hire them.
There will always be a market for live performance. If that doesn't pay well enough, then they will either need to change how performing works (charging more, giving artists a greater cut) or...shudder...get day jobs
Oh yes, get day jobs. because those damn musicians, artists, and software developers don't provide any real value to society. If they want to create, they can do it on their own time. If they want to eat, they can go scrub some floors or something. It's just too bad that the quality of work produced will go down so much, since none of the content creators would be able to afford to do it full time... darn.
BTW, I really liked the way you totally avoided Kaa's point about contracts there.
I believe people should be rewarded for the amount of value they contribute to society. Captalism and IP laws aren't perfect, but they give a reasonable approximation of this. I'm completely open to better approximations, but I've yet to see a proposal for one that seems feasible. Your beliefs almost completely remove the ability for creators of information to be rewarded for the value they contribute to society. The only motive I can see behind your beliefs is greed: you want to be able to get content gratis (for free, as in beer). You don't seem to care if someone spent months or years working on something. I guess you just figure they're a sucker who made something you can use for free.
So what do you do for a living?
All in the same boat (Score:4)
Whoah. That paragraph alone deserves an article. Geeks, in their attempts to free themselves from society, gave away their work for free, not realizing it's almost the same thing the other side is clamoring for... nobody owns anything anymore. Isn't it a rule of engineering to mistrust extremes because the answer usually lies somwhere in the middle?
I wish we could have had an interview of you on philosophy instead of AI.. it would have been much more interesting..
Re:All in the same boat (Score:3)
Except that for the geeks, nobody owning anything == everyone owning it. Possesion is decentralized, but instead of a watering down of value an addition of value occurs. For the corporations, nobody owning anything == corporations owning everything and individuals having no rights. A very important distinction, I think.
This doesn't have to do with anything but I have been coding in C && Java for the past 0x0c hours and I find producing syntactically correct english quite difficult;
Luckily it is more robust than C;
The definition of "AI" is fluid... (Score:4)
The best way I've heard it described is that once we have acheived something we considered a step towards AI, it no longer appears to be AI, and we change our definition to look at the next unsolved problem. There is that long range ideal of a sentient machine, but even the definition of sentience is subjective...
--
The more things change the more they stay the same (Score:5)
2000 - my nuke is nastier than your nuke
2100 - my AI is smarter than your AI
:-)
Actually, I'm not totally convinced that having more "free" software is in the same category as having more "free" beer/money. Firstly, by default all IP whether patent or copyright passes into public domain after 20 or 90 years. So in essense all ideas/thoughts are already "free" (if you take the view that copyleft is merely a time-shift into the future but looking back), just that some people want to create a little (OK, a big) profit opportunity in the short-term. Also ideas breed and mutate on themselves and thus having a pool of software that people can tinker with creates new opportunities (see GIMP and online photo lab). There is no extra cost in having 1 or a million extra people play around with ideas or information. On the other hand, anything to do with atoms is a wasting asset (depreciating, opportunity costs, dead-weight loss, etc). Having an extra 1 million people means that it ties up a lot of resources. In that sense, money is a claim on future resources and the changes in value of various classes of goods, an indication of what the larger population wants, ie signals to suppliers to invest more in certain lines of production. Creating false and/or distorting signals through funny money tinkering of the ol printing press (inflation) is thus a really bad idea (ps someone tell Greenspan to rein in the loose monetary policies). In this sense, OpenSource software is a luxury good, it can only be produced by highly skilled/education people (ie spare cash + food to put themselves through uni or self-taught) with leisure time on their hands. While it may appear rather chaotic to corporations with top-down control, perhaps it is just as efficient (or equally inefficient) as trying to charge everyone for the priviledge of access (ie supply driven rather than demand driven).
Human nature is funny sometimes, especially when people confuse price with value. Cows won't eat mouldy hay but if you put a fence around it, they are tricked into thinking it is forbidden and therefore must be "good". Thus we have a stupidity tax (not knowing where to get hold of free sources) plus an ego-tax (trusting the overhyped brand) which in the long-term, will only benefit the smart hackers. It's regretful that corporations have seized upon these little idiosyncracies of human nature (not to mention doing their damn best to reinforce it) and are making excess profits but then that is the nature of market evolution. Eventually the next generation wises up and the rules change yet again. Having AIs may tilt the balance somewhat in favor of the consumer (imagine having a guardian angel that informed you if something was a good choice or not, e.g. calories in a cake) but then the companies would come up with the devil's advocate to just be daring and try that scrumptious chocolate cake. A never ending arms race, even with AI.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
LL
Re:All in the same boat (Score:3)
Ahem. I think you meant to say it should not be property. Just because your definition of "property" does not include non-tangible stuff does not mean other people think of it the same way.
The entire concept of property exists because "Stuff" is finite and any resource that exists in "meatspace" is thus, on some level, scarece.
Yes, to some degree, but that's not the whole story. I would like you to consider two points:
(1) Let's take music. You would say that any given song is not scarce because we can replicate it at zero cost. OK. However, think about it in a different way: good music is definitely a scarce resource. Let's say I like Britney Spears
(2) Let's say copyright is abolished. However freedom of contract still remains, right? Let's say I made a song. It is mine just because I don't show it to anybody and don't let anybody to listen to it. Now I come to you and make a contract with you -- you can listen to my song, but you cannot make copies of it, cannot redistribute it, cannot broadcast it, etc. etc. I can perfectly well make such a contract and if you agree to it, it's valid. In this way, just through contracts, I can reconstruct the whole copyright law.
To avoid the problem you'll either have to radically restrict the freedom of contract (doesn't look like a good idea, does it?) or you'll have to say that as soon as I made a song it's not mine any more, I have no rights to it. And, of course, as soon as I wrote an essay, or a piece of code, or drew a picture -- I lose all rights to them. Somehow this doesn't sound appealing as well.
So, no, I don't think that the concept of IP is so "unnatural" as you make it to be. Yes, for the tangible property there is the "loss of use" argument -- if somebody takes away my car, I cannot use it any more -- which does not apply to IP. However, there is still the "create incentive to produce more" argument that is just as valid for IP as it is for traditional physical property.
Kaa
Educating the great unwashed masses (Score:5)
What scares me about this is that programmers learn early on the real meaning of GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Regrettably, in the real world, the garbage that goes in (sometimes the data, sometimes the assumptions on which the code is based) often remains unexamined. And the output is treated as gospel. In particular, with data mining, there is a crying need to educate the users of the output about the potential for errors in the input, bugs in the code and just incorrect assumptions (e.g., I bought one book in a series, I must want the rest). Data mining is a fine way to narrow down our guesses, increasing the odds that we are right. But it is not and never will be an exact science.
I found something to complain about... (Score:5)
Ah, but there is a *major* difference between a hundred dollar bill (in or out of the bank) and hundred dollars worth of software: :-)
Money has no use except as currency. (You could usa a coin as a primitive screwdriver, but that's about it...)
Software, music and other forms of "IP currency" are useful in them selves (even Britney Spears and PowerPoint, just to save you from the obvious reply
If everyone multiplies their bank account by 100, the value of those accounts is instantly divided by 100. If everyone multiplies their music collection by 100, everyone gets a hundred times more music.