New Music Favorites - January 12, 2013

Here are my latest music choices that I've been listening to over the last few days, to which have been specifically helpful in increasing my concentration:

The Tunnel - Magnetmus

 

We (All) Search - Magnetmus

Psyk - Magnetmus

 

Cosmosis - Gift of the Gods

 

Hallucinogen - LSD

 

Imperial March Piano Duo

 

Mozart Symphony 40 Piano Duo

 

Mozart - "Dies Irae"

Blog Update January 11, 2012

I've been posting up on a lot of science and tech news lately. Mostly because they are of my primary interest, but I have intended this blog to be designated to be more broad and personal as I mentioned in my first blog post. And so I have been left with the dilemma whether to create a separate blog specifically targeted/tailored/dedicated purely to jut sci+tech findings, and retaining this one for my own general personal expressions which will just include my everyday experiences, or whether to continue as I am now, synthesizing and merging it all into one.

The problem it seems then, is separating out all the posts that are of sci-tech relevance and moving them into a new blog. Then again, even those posts seem to have a piece of personal relevance and value to me which I can't really separate out. By moving out the posts, they will become less personal and will just become regurgitated, "retweeted" news findings, which to me doesn't sound all that exciting.

I think I may have a solution, I will need to re-do all the labels on each post so that they can be categorized accordingly i.e. category 1 = 'Personal Stuff', category 2 = 'Science & Tech', category 3 = 'Favorite Music', category 4 = 'Diet & Nutrition'...etc I'll give that a try and see how that goes.

The Truth on Innovation and Eureka Moments

This topic has been increasingly important and valuable to me. I have always wondered what the secrets to innovative new ideas and creativity are, how they are formed, what the underlying processes are that give rise to such, so that they can be replicated, and its power harnessed for our own benefit, and what kind of effects these have on our collective species as a whole.

First off, I want to post this video, it's a TED Talk by Matt Ridley, called 'When Ideas Have Sex':

What I find intriguing is how the rate of innovations have increased exponentially over time since the moment our ancestors created the first tools. In the example given in his talk, stone tools hardly changed in design for about 1 million years (1.5 million to half a million years ago). Homo Erectus had essentially used the same tool for 30,000 generations. There were some changes, but not as much as the biological changes of those who used them. In other words, no new innovations whatsoever. Today however, the opposite case is true, and Matt uses the humble computer mouse as a perfect example, which pretty much goes obsolete in less than a year.

What's more intriguing is the fact that hardly anyone knows how to make a computer mouse, and how we've gone from something as simple as a tool made of stone using only one material, from something of far greater design complexity, using all sorts of sophisticated materials.

Matt makes the case of increasing specialization of skills, which have contributed to this using the example of how much more efficient it would be for one man making an axe, and another man making a spear, compared to the generalist approach of each man making both an axe and a spear. We have grown as a culture to focus on specializing on different subset areas, starting as early as gender roles where men would go out to hunt and females to look after the young, all the way to nations producing one thing and another nation producing another to which they then trade and both benefit from this transaction.

By having this kind of system it seems, we can actually improve the way we make things, which creates further momentum for increased specialization, leading to increased exchange hence, the birth of innovation.

And what is more shocking is that the opposite case can be observed in regards to exchange - if you cut off trade from one group of people to another, this will in effect hinder technological progress and in fact throw it into reverse, experiencing a regress / decline of innovation (the case of the Tasmanian islanders gives as a powerful example of this phenomenon).

Matt also highlights the importance of having a large population size to maintain innovation, declaring that it requires millions of people just to be able to produce a computer mouse today, just from drilling the oil to turn to plastic, creating electronic components; designers, engineers, and scientists working in the material and computer sciences, all the way to the farmers producing the food needed to sustain the people working in those higher sectors. A really mind-boggling process.

So to summarize, it takes specialization, exchange, and the power of numbers, as the key main / general ingredients to spark and drive innovation.

How relevant is this to us on an individual level in this day and age?

With our growing use of social network mediums on the internet, to the use of smartphones and other information communication devices, we as a species are at a point where we are more connected to everyone else than ever before. And it seems that if we want to experience greater innovation and progress it's vital that we do not disconnect ourselves from these powerful mediums, especially when we are in the day and age where we need more solutions to our growing global socio-economic problems. In fact we need more connections, more interaction, and more exposure to easily accessible information mediums. We can't just sit in silence watching the world go by.

We need to work together as a collective, where each of us are focused on one specialized skill, so that we can get better at it, and we must be more willing to exchange our knowledge, experience, and ideas more than ever, so that we can benefit globally altogether. I don't think this should  rule out the need for 'generalists' entirely however, for I believe they do serve a vital role too, as system engineers and project managers with sound understanding and experience of how to connect together all the key component fields to make them work properly -- this can be seen as a kind of 'specialization' in a sense.

Now, the next piece to the puzzle can be seen in this next video, entitled 'Where Good Ideas Come From' by Steven Johnson:

It's actually a take on the notion of "Eureka" moments, suggesting that the phenomenon doesn't actually occur in the way imagine. As he put it in his own words:

"One pattern that I call the slow hunch, that breakthrough ideas always never come on a moment of great insight in a sudden stroke of inspiration."

"Most important ideas take a long time to evolve and they spend a long time dormant in the background."

"It isn't until the idea has had 2 or 3 years, sometimes 10 or 20 years to mature, that it suddenly becomes accessible to you and useful to you in a certain way."

"And this is partially because good ideas come from the collision between smaller hunches so that they form something bigger than themselves."

 This realization is actually fairly profound. Ideas require an "incubation period", and they need to collide or "mate" with other ideas, so to speak. And this goes back again to highlighting the importance of making connections with groups of people, sharing / exchanging ideas in order for innovations to flourish. This is also reflected in our own brains needing time to form new neuronal connections that will lead to that "breakthrough" moment.

As Isaac Newton once wrote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." coming to mean that all great "AHA!" events don't come from a simple apple dropping on the head, but developed on from an earlier body of work that our predecessors have left off. And this is certainly the case with the field of science, as it is with technological innovations. This it seems, is the real "Eureka".

Robot Musicians and Composers

Haven't wrote here for some time (again) as I'm *busy* with several other priority task functions the likes of which shall not be entertained here.

In this post I want to mention about something that's been on my mind for a few days now. It's about AI and its role in music performances and compositions. Here is a compilation of what I've discovered to date:

Robot trumpet player:

Robotic music playing system by Intel:

 

Robot violinist:

 

 

Robot pianist:

Robot band:

Festo Soundmachine:

...And probably much more floating around on YT.

Unfortunately however, while these robotic systems are indeed impressive, they only appear to play what they have been pre-programmed to play, and are no more than sophisticated forms of playback devices. In other words, they cannot create their own, "original" musical compositions.

The good news is that we're in luck. There are AI / computer programs out there that do have the capability of seemingly doing just that, by taking advantage of principles in music theory, and taking "inspiration" from various existing musical pieces and their styles to be "remade" via its algorithms, and in the process, creating entirely new styles and melodies. When you hear of news like this (Iamus, a computer cluster), and this (Emily Howell, a program by David Cope), it pretty much leaves us with less doubt that this really is indeed the case. Another interesting find is WolframTones, which can generate an almost infinite array of possible compositions in Midi. While it might not be able create a piece of Beethoven, the output may yet have sound application as background music for 2D platform games (pun intended).

And even though all of those are, as of yet, still primitive in its capabilities, it will only be a matter of time before they are able to replicate what we do so passionately: be able to play a piece of Beethoven, Chopin, Bach, Mozart, or any great musical genius's piece, with feeling, with ability to vary tempo/speed, and volume/percussion/intensity in an appropriate manner. They will play a piece in not just one, but also multiple interpretations, with slight variation in the notes played, where they can be influenced by whatever sensory input they receive: flash a variety of colors through its visual sensors, vary the temperature of its environment, allow it to 'feel' and 'taste' the quality of air flowing in its chemical and pressure receptors...and the next time it plays the piece, they will play a new variation of it; we could say then that it had been "inspired" by such "experiences". Goodness knows what results would be generated from this kind of approach.

This is just one simplistic example of such a system attempting to replicate our own neural processes and how we come about in expressing "feeling" when playing a piece of music and most certainly additional layers of complexity can be scaled to achieve greater effect. Though of course we still expect to have limits as to how far we can do this, considering how complex our human brains are and we are far off from replicating the effect we get from say, as an exaggerated example, when we're madly in love with someone, to which many great artists of the past have been known to have demonstrated elevated levels of creativity under such circumstances.

I one day envision a point when we would have such advanced AI musicians churning out at hyper-speed, the most human-like, ingeniously-formulated compositions, each new composition as chillingly exhilarating, and emotionally captivating, as those made by the great musical geniuses of the past, if not far more each time, and creating an endless stream of what can be made possible in the universe of music, if not saturating all the musical possibilities that could ever be conceived...we could almost go far as to say that music itself then had experienced a singularity event.

When AI Meets Politics, and Typical Luddite Themes

So, just today, I was remembering an old computer game I used to play, called Empire Earth (the very first version). 

One particular campaign that left its imprint on me was the Novaya Russian one, where an artificial intelligent machine overlord takes over an empire that its previous dictator had built and left off.

Its designated identity: Grigor II.

My exposure to this game in particular was probably the single most strongest influence in forming my interest about the future, advanced technology, and AI robotics, that is - outside movies like Star Wars, iRobot, A.I., Terminator, etc, and sci-fi TV series like Star Trek.

Even though the game is fairly old (graphics are primitive and the game itself is not as popular as other RTS games) I thought I'd take time to put together some of my favorite cinematic scenes from it into a "fan vid" (wanted to do this for a while now) for the topic of this blog post in particular, which I will be addressing.

It's not difficult to find the typical "Luddite" theme where robots rebel against either their creator and or ultimately humanity itself. Normally it's shown in a very typically negative way, one that's almost seemingly very narrow in perspective, and naive. One could almost consider it "speciesism" mentality.

For instance, with the video of Grigor II as an example, it's somewhat kind of assuming that that's what such, if not all, highly intelligent machines will eventually and ultimately conclude if it were in power - to kill off large numbers of humans with their "cold logic" as if that were the ONLY logical option, which I highly doubt. I find it quite irrational as 1. my own logic cannot see the logic in this (why not "assimilate" them instead like the Borg?)  2. there are other potential outcomes (what about benevolent AI,  where their logic leads them to conclude otherwise) 3. we simply do not know what these advanced AI's will have in mind, what goals they will eventually set and execute. We are simply bound by the limitations of our own human-based imaginations after all.

Here's another typical scenario, and one that I recently found. It's a rap satire (made by 'The Juice News') of a project I've been acquainted with since 2008, called 'The Venus Project'. In the satire video, it outlines the vision of using supercomputers to manage our planetary resources and economy, but presents the supercomputer as some sort of AI robot called 'VAL-T 9000' (wherever that came from), claiming to be "a fully rational intelligent cyber being" that eventually concludes humanity to be the source of the problem hence must ultimately be exterminated. One cannot help but be left with a typical 'palm-face' reaction.


While all of these examples may just be for entertainment value, I do ask why this single most negative perspective is so dominant and pervasive in society? I might go as far as to suggest that it seems to stem from possibly a dark hidden part of our psyche that inevitably WANTS to see this scenario happening, considering we're so obsessed with all other gloom-and-doom scenarios, with a twisted desire to see some sort of mass apocalyptic calamity...maybe to bring some excitement to our dull and monotone lives and wake us up from the sterile state of familiarity? (hint: 2012 End of the World hype that never came true?).

I do realize that such devastating scenarios shouldn't be ruled off from the list of possibilities (to ignore that and simply be overly optimistic, believing with absolute conviction that the future will truly be bright and flowery... would be equally irrational and delusional), though it would be nice to see more positive perspectives being shown out there, highlighting more of the possible advantages of becoming something beyond human for once, or simply showcasing a more balanced perspective consisting of all possibilities from both sides of the spectrum.

This post will raise another key point and questions before I forget - about the role of AI becoming some sort of alternative to human leaders.

Do you want an AI President as your future leader? Image Source

Will there ever be a time one day where we will build a fully-functioning AI with the ability to act as an alternative to human politicians? Even becoming elected as a kind of Prime Minister or taking on a Presidential role in the future? The ultimate arbiter for all humanity's disputes/problems?

Can we make them so that they can only compute out truly the best decisions regarding policies and social management by what scientific data we feed them and ensure that such decisions do not lead to detrimental harm to humans?

Can they successfully interact with other politicians/will they get along with people?

Will they be merely machine boxes with a robotic voice churning out answers or take on humanoid form with great level of physical dexterity?

Can they be made to compose moving speeches to persuade and captivate the hearts and minds of the people, exploiting on their psychological weaknesses/loopholes (taking advantage of the personality-cult phenomenon)?

Will the masses even come to accept such a thing? (I am highly skeptical of the likelihood)

Can we make them so that they perform far more effectively than our humanly elected candidates to the point that re-election becomes irrelevant?

Will that lead then to the end of "democracy" (as if that's inherently a bad thing)?

These are all daunting questions to ponder about, and many more.

Human Brain Project

 Another interesting find. The Human Brain Project (HBP) is now being initiated in the European Union.

The aim: simulating the human brain inside a supercomputer. A very exciting project.

Once completed, its potential applications are beyond enormous, from developing new cures to illnesses/diseases, new ways of solving computational problems, that and much more than I can conceive right now.

I could almost envision one day when these new thinking machines become the norm where everyone would have one in their homes as a household computer, or better yet, fitted into something as portable and miniaturized as a smartphone.

Here's their opening video presentation:
Here's a short excerpt of the transcript:

"100 billion neurons, connected by 100,000 billion synapses. The human brain is the most complex machine we know of, and the most mysterious one."

"We face huge issues in neuroscience, to understand how the pieces of the brain fit and work together.

We face huge issues in medicine, to understand how to objectively diagnose and treat brain diseases."

"This is a big big challenge. It'll have an enormous impact on the health of the aged."

"European researchers propose a radically new approach to study the human mind. Their idea is simple. To simulate a complete human brain in a supercomputer."

"We have a giant intellectual problem to solve here."

"As a scientist, I mean it is really the, central project for brain science."

"And that could revolutionize computing the way we do it today."

"The Human Brain Project brings together hundreds of scientists from leading European research institutions. It is one of the most ambitious neuroscience projects in the world."

"What we are proposing is to establish a radically new foundation, to explore and understand the brain, its diseases, and to use that knowledge, to build new computing technologies."

"The project is coordinated by EPFL located in Lausanne, Switzerland. The researchers will systematically study neurons, the building blocks of the brain. They will collect and consolidate all the biological data produced by scientists around the world. They will integrate this knowledge into a massive simulation running on a supercomputer. The result will be the most accurate model of the human brain ever produced."

 To end off, I'll post this TED Talk by Henry Markram on the work that's being done. Near the end of the middle there's a really awesome visual simulation of one particular brain and how it sees a rose. Totally mind-blowing stuff.

We WILL Become Gods, According to Physicist, Richard Seed

A chilling speech by Richard Seed (physicist and human cloning researcher) taken from 'TechnoCalyps - Part II - Preparing for the Singularity':

"We are going to become Gods, period. If you don't like it, get off. You don't have to contribute, you don't have to participate but if you are going to interfere with me becoming a God, you're going to have trouble. There'll be warfare."