The Joy of a First Computer

Sooner or later, I’m going to give away my age. It will probably be in this post, but I won’t give it to you explicitly. You’ll have to work for it. Anyway, does anyone aside from me remember their first computer? I remember my first computer fondly. I remember walking down the stairs of my house into my family’s wood paneled, shag carpeted, basement. I remember the sight of a salesman (or was he a technician?) proudly presenting a detailed image of a mountain lion on a strange-looking box thing. Was it a television? No, there wasn’t a remote and you couldn’t change the channel. Was it a canvas? No, it was pixelated and flashing. Was it a new kind of radio? Possibly, but who had ever heard of a radio with a television screen built into it? If you haven’t already guessed, this was the first time I had seen a computer. And I was mystified. After a while, the computer migrated upstairs and was placed in an empty room, near my brother’s bedroom and family bathroom on the north side of my house. It was placed on the floor. I soon discovered that this machine had something to offer outside animal pictures, videogames. So, I played. The one game I remember playing for hours and hours was a game called Mahjong (I don’t think the computer had any other games installed, no Internet either). I’d lay on the shag carpeting (seriously, it was all over my house, my house never left the 70’s until the early 2000’s) and play until my elbows were sufficiently carpet-burned.

Today, I wish I had done more than play games on the computer, but my interest in computing didn’t really spark into I was in my early 20’s.

I’ve searched long and hard for the exact model of the computer I so fondly remember. I can only go by its brand and by my memory of what it looked like. I think I’ve discovered the model.

I think the computer in the image above was the computer of my youth. According the image description, this is the Packard Bell Synera series. I can’t find much on this model when performing a Google search. Perhaps this isn’t the computer of my youth. Perhaps I’ll post an advertisement on Craigslist: “Wanted, memories of old computer.” I’m sure someone will respond, it is Craigslist after all.

The particular computer model doesn’t matter (though, I’d still like to know what that damn model is for certain). What matters is the feelings and memories my first computer gave me. As I mentioned, my love of computing, and technology in general, didn’t really sprout until I was in my early 20’s. However, it was with this computer, my first computer, that the seeds of this love were planted. Everything has its origins, and my love’s origin was embedded in that ancient machine.

The Old Internet of 1995…A Simpler, More Exciting Time

Every once in a while, I find myself yearning for a not-so-distant past. The past I yearn for is not the 50’s 60’s, 70’s, or 80’s. It’s the 90’s. Specifically, the mid-90’s. Why do I yearn for this year? Well, as I mentioned in an earlier post, 1995 was the year the Internet “opened” for public use. It was also a year in which a fair amount of people had access to the Internet. Not a whole lot of people, but an amount large enough to form something of a community. In 1995, the Internet was a small community populated largely by geeks, since geeks were one of the few groups in America who possessed enough inclination to actually buy and learn how to use a computer.

The Internet back in 1995 had a strange feel to it. At least, I think it did, but I’m looking at all this in hindsight. Anyway, the feel was that of an unexplored wilderness where anything was possible. The Internet was a wondrous, mysterious, and even dangerous place. It possessed the qualities I now associate with the deep web. In contrast, the Internet of today feels like a sterile office space where everything is cordoned off into its respective spaces. There’s no more mystery. Everything seems to be a known, the unknown has been all but vanquished (thankfully the unknown of the deep web is still around). So, it seems that I don’t yearn for the past so much as I yearn for that feeling of mystery, excitement, and unexplored horizons. After all, I don’t yearn for the dial-up speeds or the baseband connection. I’m glad those are gone. Though, I do feel a pang of nostalgia whenever I hear the AOL tone signaling an attempted connection to the Internet. If you’re older than 20 years of age, you know what I’m talking about.

As I mentioned above, I’m looking at this from hindsight. To add another perspective, let’s take a look at the Internet from the point-of-view of a geek from 1995. Did he have the same feeling I get whenever I remember the Internet in 1995? Probably not, or maybe he did experience the same feeling of mystery and excitement. After all, the Internet was “new” back then. Or, perhaps, the geek in 1995 yearned for the ARPANET of 1985 and before. Maybe the geek in 1995 saw his Internet as I see my, 2015, Internet: as a boring, commercial, sterile wasteland. The Internet was commercial back in 1995 and, while not as commercial as today, would have seemed as commercial to the geek in 1995 who only had the ARPANET for comparison. We all seem to long for those glory days that, perhaps, weren’t as great as we believe. 

I guess it’s all in a person’s perspective. Perhaps the Internet will morph into an even larger sterile, commercial environment 10 years from now, and I’ll long for the glory days of 2015. Heh, it’s a funny thought.

Ten years ago, I couldn’t imagine the Internet getting much bigger. Over those ten years, I’ve witnessed it grow. And right now, I can’t imagine the Internet getting much bigger. Perhaps I ought to learn from my past misconceptions about the Internet. The Internet is a constantly shifting, moving, expanding, growing life-form. It’s difficult to say in advance what will become of this life-form. I think the one sure thing about the Internet is growth. It will grow and grow and grow with no clear end in sight, barring a nuclear war.

With all this in mind, let’s keep an open mind about our current Internet and its future. There’s still much that can happen. Not everything that will be invented has been invented. It’s up to us, the citizens of the present transitioning into the future, to create and innovate. There’s still plenty of mystery and excitement to be had. We just need to look past all that commercial crap and, while that’s kind of hard to do these days, it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

So, go forth and run on wires of glass and electric fire!

Supercomputers: The Deity just Waiting to Happen

The increasingly prevalent electronic technology in first-world and developing nations brings with it far-reaching, enormous, and even unseen consequences. An enormous and yet to be fully recognized consequence of all this technology is integration. You know that old expression, “Everything is connected”, well, it seems that people have taken that expression a bit too literally. Everything is connected and not just in the sense that everything influences everything else. Computers, smartphones, tablets, iPads, reading tablets, remote servers, nodes, networks, etc. are all connected in at most eight different ways. No phone is an island and all roads lead to phone. Since we have all this connectivity going on, along with the blessed always-on WIFI connectivity, is it too much to speculate that a supercomputer could come along and take command of all these devices? Perhaps the Supercomputer is already here and looks down, benevolently, upon us lowly net-runners. Let’s hope, indeed, that this new God is benevolent, lest our information be given to those who should do us harm.

Okay, that’s enough waxing poetic. Time for some analysis. Supercomputers are already here and they are “super” only when compared to contemporary processors. Supercomputer is, thus, a relative term as a computer is only “super” within its own context. A Commodore 64 isn’t “super” when compared to a Dell Inspiron Desktop computer with a 4th Generation Intel Core i7 Processor. But the Commodore 64 was a supercomputer when compared to its forerunner, the Commodore VIC-20.

What I mean by “supercomputer” is a computer that has clearly outclassed its contemporaries in processing power AND has sovereignty over an entire network of connected devices. When I say “network”, imagine a network as large as the Internet. Think of it as a God-machine. And if this God-machine isn’t already here, it’s coming to a future near you.

The supercomputer pictured above is the Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Lab. Within its architecture, it possesses 250,000 processors all connected by high-speed optical network. Does this supercomputer fit my definition of a God-machine? To a degree, it does. The Blue Gene/P is designed to have a processing power that can reach into petaFLOPS. FLOPS is an acronym for Floating-point Operations Per Second. And petaFLOPS is at least 10^15 Floating-point operations per second. Therefore, Blue Gene/P can process over 10^15 floating-point operations per second. It’s also one of the most power-efficient supercomputers in existence.

So, the processing power does meet the requirement of being a God-machine (and there are supercomputers out there that have an even greater processing power), but is the Blue Gene/P sovereign over an Internet-like network of computers? No. At least no one has yet confirmed whether it does have sovereignty over any such network.

Voluntary sovereignty (“voluntary” meaning the clients on the network consent to being subordinated to the supercomputer) is a serious ethics consideration. An even greater ethics consideration is involuntary sovereignty over a network as large as the Internet. That’s scandal material right there. My guess, and this is just a guess, is that there are computers out there that do possess involuntary sovereignty over millions of clients connected to the Internet.

Now, if my guess is correct and these computers do have the processing power of supercomputers, it would mean the God-machines are already here. The only question remaining is just how far and how deep the hands of the God-machine reach? That’s something to which I can’t even venture a guess, so I’ll leave it up to you.

For our sake, I hope the God’s are benevolent.

Electronic Ghosts from the Past

Recently, I reset my voicemail password so I could access a function on my phone I hadn’t been able to access for many years, my voicemail. By “many years”, I mean seven years. A millennium in Internet years. When I accessed my voicemail, I was greeted by an electronic voice that proceeded to read out a timestamp on the earliest voicemail. It read “Your message from (---) --- ---- sent Wednesday, September 21, 2008 at 4:31 pm”, then proceeded to play the recorded voicemail. I had voicemail messages from old friends (who were kids at the time), school counselors, people who I have since forgotten, unknown people, and more. Some of the more fascinating, and creepier, messages consisted of unintelligible voices in the background, cloaked in electronic noise. Fortunately enough for my own sanity, the messages ended around the year 2010. I don’t know what happened to the messages that occurred after 2010. Maybe people decided to stop leaving me voicemail since I never got back to them. Anyway, I had around 20 recorded messages stored in my voicemail box. All have been deleted (or were they?). Are they truly gone?

This was an eerie experience to say the least. It was like listening to ghosts from my past, all perfectly recorded, stored, preserved, and transmitted via electronic signal. This incident reminded me of a common phenomenon in the tech world. It’s fairly common for old answering machines and phone lines to operate years after the associated business or organization has gone defunct. If you’re lucky, or not so lucky, you can hear a playback message when you call a number of a no-longer existing organization. The playback message is always creepy, no matter the content. There is a strong association with death, with the message, since the message was once used by a “living” organization. Since the organization is defunct, it’s like hearing a voice from a corpse. Perhaps now you understand why I found my old voicemail messages disturbing, if you didn’t before. Perhaps, too, this blog will go inactive one day and I can visit it again, many years from now, to peek at the works and writings of my past self. Technology will have preserved it all in fine detail. I can only hope that I won’t be too critical of my past writings.

Truly, the majority of people on planet earth have left at least some kind of digital footprint on the Internet. Most people don’t care about these footprints (likely because they don’t think about them). Other people, for various reasons, hope to wash away any footprints they have left. This is next to impossible. Your digital footprints have left behind digital dirt that will remain even after the most intense of scrubbings. It’s almost as if the Law of Conservation applies to data: though data may change its form, it will never cease to exist. My voicemail messages may still exist, in some form or other. Perhaps they are in the “recycle bin” of Verizon’s servers. Perhaps someone else may have kept copies of my voicemail messages. That wouldn’t be surprising, though I can only pity the person who has to sift through my voicemail messages. I don’t even like listening to them.

Is there any information archive more reliable than the Internet and the servers which are its foundation? Even when the power is out, the data lives on in long-term persistent storage. So be mindful of what you put, or where you visit, on the web. Anyone may have enemies and its best to not give your enemies any kind of advantage over you, be mindful for this reason. And be especially mindful for this reason : What you produce will be your legacy, for better or for worse, so be sure you leave a lasting and good legacy.

The Technocratic Elite and The Future They Hold in their Hands

Imagine you are living in a city that receives all of its hot water from one boiler room, run by one man who possesses exclusive knowledge on how to run the boilers. Now, you can imagine that this man has quite a bit of power. The city needs hot water and the boiler man is the only person who can supply the water, thanks to the knowledge that only he possess. This man is known as a technocrat. His technical abilities have lifted him above, and separated him from, his fellow man. He is a member of the elite and all people, if they are to receive the benefits only he can provide, must work to please him. And that is the future we are walking into.

Technical ability is one of those skills that has been widely prized throughout history. Those people who possessed technical ability in useful disciplines often were handsomely rewarded for their services. Blacksmiths in the middle ages commanded a high price for their services thanks to the usefulness of their craft. Merchants and artisans during the Renaissance were invaluable thanks to their business savvy minds. Today, plumbers, electricians, and tradesman are valued members of society thanks to their own technical abilities. While various technical abilities are still prized today, there are few technical abilities more valued today than technical ability in computing and mechanical engineering. But, to keep fully with the spirit of this blog, I just want to focus on technical ability in computing.

The use and ubiquity of computers has grown exponentially since the introduction of the first operating system over 60 years ago. Just 25 years ago, computers occupied most business places, offices, government buildings, organizations, and homes. Now, in 2015, computers have a hold so tight on first-world civilizations that we can’t imagine our lives without them. Just about every piece of electronic equipment we have has some sort of computing device built-in. They are in our cars, televisions, phones, tablets, microwaves, dishwashers, stoves, ovens, washing machines, cash registers, home-heating systems, entertainment systems, game consoles, etc.  You can find computers where you least expect them. I smoked an e-cigarette for a short while only to learn later that it too had a small built-in processor, which, quite frankly, blew my mind. It was at that time that I fully appreciated how far and how deep computers have spread and dove.

What does all this mean? It means technical ability reigns supreme in the hands of the technocrats.

But what is a technocracy? In the opening paragraph of this post, I called the boiler man a technocrat because he had possession of useful and exclusive knowledge. However, he’s only a technocrat in an unofficial, but important, meaning of the term. The traditional definition of a technocracy is as follows: A technocracy is a system of  government that is controlled by a group of elite technical experts. The idea of a technocracy first emerged in the early 1900’s. The original idea was to have scientists and engineers replace business people and politicians in governing society. Sounds good, right? Well, I’m not hear to argue about the merits of a technocracy. Instead, I want to focus on the technocrats themselves and the hold they have over most people in our high-tech civilization.

In the United States, we don’t have a technocracy by law. We have a Constitutional Republic with representatives that are elected by their voters. A technocracy doesn’t work that way. Instead, the lead technicians assume social and governmental control over the populace by virtue of their ability. Technocrats are intended to be benevolent dictators who know what’s best for the common man and are to act in the common man’s best interests.

To reiterate, a technocracy is a system of government controlled by elite technical experts. The United States doesn’t have a technocracy, or does it? As mentioned above, the United States isn’t a technocracy by law. Instead, I’ll argue that it is a technocracy by fact.

Think about it. We are absolutely dependent on our technological devices. Most people would be severely lost without their personal gadgets and gizmos. Our technology has, on one had, greatly improved people’s standard of living. On the other hand, it has made most people incapable of living without it. You could almost say that most people are “ruled” by technology. And who rules the technology? Who designs it, implements it, and understands it? The technocrats (and boiler man) of course. Thanks to our sophisticated technology, we live in a de facto technocracy! The technology that we depend upon has elevated the technocratic class to a god-like status.

What a disappointment if you aren’t a technocrat! If you are a technocrat, it’s a pretty good deal to say the least.

Is this a sorry state of affairs? Not necessarily provided our technocratic overlords are a kind and benevolent bunch. But if you aren’t comfortable with this state of affairs and can’t stand the thought of being at the “mercy” of the technocrats, you can always improve your own technical abilities. That is the route I have chosen and I don’t see myself regretting it. Technology is here to stay. What matters now is whether you choose to understand it or leave that responsibility to the technocrats.

Website Aesthetics

Does anyone else dislike the so-called “modern” aesthetics of some websites? To see what I mean, just look at squarespace. These websites are going for the sleek, simple, “no borders” look. And while the goal of the modern layout is to offer a sleek and smooth experience, it only seems to offer a confusing mish-mash of web content.

I’m just glad most sites have stuck with the a more traditional web-style. Don’t get me wrong, I do like some modern web aesthetics. Just look at my blog. It’s a combination of old and new web-styles (To see an example of the old, just look at cyber.eserver.org). When editing the HTML/CSS of my blog, I do my best to take the best aspects of both the old and new styles, and integrate the two in order to make my blog both functional and stylish. Websites that use the “modern” style exclusively seem to be going for style at the expense of function. And it’s questionable whether they’ve even achieved style.

Anyway, this will be a short post. I just wanted to give my two cents on the matter.

Postscript: Here’s another site which I think successfully melds old and new web-styles.

Programming a Ghost

The worth of anything can be measured by its tendency to inspire thought. In other words, if it can make me think, then it has to be good! Fair enough, right? Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is one of the few anime that has provoked a good deal of thought in me. In fact, no other anime has inspired me to think about such worthwhile topics like consciousness, perception, metaphysics, artificial intelligence, programming etc. Lately, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has brought yet another idea to my mind: the idea of the ghost. For those unfamiliar with the series, a person’s personality, thoughts, behaviors, attitudes, ideas, etc. is referred to as the person’s ghost. In a nutshell, a person’s ghost is their conscious (I’ll use the words “ghost” and “conscious” interchangeably in this post). The ghost is one of the most referenced themes in the series. The plot continuously relates to the ghost and a lot of speculation is made by the characters about the ghost. It’s even speculated that a ghost can be created, or emerge, from self-modifying and self-improving artificial intelligence.

So, can a ghost be programmed or emerge from an existing program? Before we can determine this, we must know how we determine the existence of a ghost in a person. Well, it’s pretty obvious that people have a conscious right? We see a person, we hear them talk, we listen to them as they express themselves, we observe them as their ideas, opinions, and attitudes change. It’s pretty clear that people are conscious. People are even conscious of themselves. They are self-aware. Can a program become self-aware?

Now that we know how to determine whether someone has a ghost, can we tell whether a machine has a ghost? Enter the Turing test. A Turing test measures a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent human behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. To pass a Turing test, a machine must convince a person that it is human at least 30% of the time in a series of five minute rounds. Has a machine ever passed a Turing test by exhibiting intelligent human behavior? Most machines are quite primitive in their ability to act in an intelligent manner (compared to an intelligent human). Then again, most people don’t act in a reasonably intelligent manner (compared to an intelligent human). Therefore, most machines will perform in ways indistinguishable from that of most humans. Defining intelligent human behavior is another ordeal altogether, but I trust the people who implement Turing Test’s to know what they are doing. Okay, now that we’ve got that resolved. The answer to the aforementioned question is “Yes”, a machine has passed a Turing test.

So, a machine can appear to be a person by appearing to have a ghost, a conscious. It should be noted that appearing to have a ghost and actually having a ghost are too completely different things. However, the fact that a machine can appear to have a ghost makes it indistinguishable from actually having a ghost. Let us note that the machine appeared to have a ghost during a Turing test. Turing tests are made up of many, five minute rounds. I’m sure the machine would be less likely to appear to have a ghost if the rounds were longer or if the questions became more complex or if the environment were altogether different. Additionally, appearance is subjective. The machine could appear to be human to one person and non-human to another person. Additionally still, it is important to how we define what a reasonably intelligent person would do in a certain situation. Context matters.

All in all, even considering my reservations about the Turing test, the fact that a machine has passed the Turing test is a great feat in programming and, perhaps, we are well on our way to seeing the emergence of a ghost within a machine. But, for a moment, let us consider how difficult it would be to program a human consciousness.

A comparison may be made between basic brain activity and basic computer functions. The brain is made up of roughly 40 billions interneurons. Neurons are a lot like on/off switches. They require just the right amount and kind of chemical signal before they “fire” their electric charge down the axon to the axon terminal. And that’s all basic brain activity is, just an enormous series of neurons getting triggered and releasing their chemicals which, when performed en masse, form human thought. Basic computer functions work much the same way. The most basic machine language is known as binary. Binary is just a long sequence of 1’s and 0’s. The 1’s represent “on” and the 0’s represent “off”. They either “fire” or they don’t “fire”. See where I’m going with this? The most basic machine language seems to mimic the most basic brain function. Since this basic brain function, performed in aggregate, form the human conscious, does that mean a sophisticated enough binary could form a conscious equivalent to a human’s?

Let’s say that my comparison above holds weight, what would it take to program a conscious? Well, the code would likely need to be similar to that of the human brain. It would need to be sequential, self-modifying, and a little illogical. Would simply programming a personality using 40 billion lines of code work? Will the code become self-aware? That’s hard, if not impossible, to tell. Could the code be programmed to continually expand itself by incorporating new data into its structure? Self-modifying code is already possible, but could a code continually self-modify to same extent as a human brain? Would all this self-modification lead to the emergence of a ghost? Possibly, but, sadly, we may never know.

Due to the limits of human perception, we may never be able to tell whether a machine truly possesses a conscious or whether a machine is self-aware. Yes, we can use Turing Tests ad infinitum and the machine may always convince the human that it is a human, instead of a machine, but, as mentioned earlier, this doesn’t mean that the machine has a conscious. It just means that the machine is sophisticated enough to trick a human, and that’s it.

Though we may never know for certain whether a machine has a ghost, we may still highly suspect it. Electronic computers have come a long way since their appearance on the scene in 1942. And some computers are now sophisticated enough to convince a human that they do have a ghost, even though they may not have one. Yes, I just admitted that I think the machine that passed the Turing Test may have a conscious. Indeed, who’s to say the machine’s we currently rely upon don’t already have ghosts? After all, we as humans can’t really know whether a machine is truly conscious of itself. But, nevertheless, it’s quite fun to speculate on. I predict that, as the years go on, machines will convince us that they are conscious of themselves. What then? The political, social, and economic repercussions would be enormous. But I won’t talk about that now. For now, let’s just humble ourselves with the fact that we may never know whether a machine is conscious. If its any comfort, you can look forward to the possibility that, if machines do develop consciousness, it will happen in the near future. The future is always closer than you think.

All in all, just something to think about.