Unnaturally Long Attention Span

When it’s Appropriate to Use Machine Superintelligence

I refer to Superintelligent systems as those that are considered in popular parlance to be “AI”, but go beyond the computational capabilities of the human brain.  Such as one Deep Blue chess playing system, or a web search engine, or even a pocket calculator.  These systems perform intelligent tasks, but in a very different way than a human does.  These systems can achieve high performance by taking advantage of computational or storage facilities that humans do not have in their biological arsenal.

The question that inevitably arises for AI practitioners in the process of building intelligent systems is: when should Superintelligent techniques be used?

For machine learning engineers working at a company where percentage points of classification accuracy directly translate to revenues, the right answer may be “whenever possible”.  Yet for an AI purist trying to build human-like agents the answer is “almost never”.  Russell and Norvig identified this fundamental dichotomy in their treatise on AI as the diametric goals of building systems that think like humans versus building systems that think rationally.

I’m currently working on a problem in which the best approaches that are inspired by human intutions, and hence generalize to a wide range of situations, have led performance to a plateau.  A typical machine learning expert is trained in this regard to examine their dataset and misclassification matrix, make diagnostic measurements, such as variance, bias, learning rate, and make the appropriate adjustments to either their choice of algorithm or feature set.

However, before one proceeds with these diagnostics I’d advocate another way of thinking about the problem for the practitioner concerned with both performance and generalization. One that has to do with considering information representation.

We often expect our intelligent systems to behave in response to us in a human way, but too easily forget that the representation of the world that the machine recieves is very different than the one we as humans receive.  In a sense, the machine lives in a different Universe and all of his connections to reality are gated by these artificial inputs.  The reason Stanford’s autonomous SUV Stanley was able to navigate through the Mojave desert and win the $1 million DARPA grand challenge was not due to a breakthrough in better, more human-like decision making, but a barrage of on-board sensors including 5 roof-mounted laser range finders, dual 24GHz RADARs, GPS, IMUs, all fed to a supercomputer in the trunk. It would have been a different matter entirely if Stanley was able to achieve this feat with just two cameras and two audio sensors.

A single event in objective reality is very different when projected into the human or machine experience.  A human rating movies on Netflix gets a very different psychological and phenomenological experience than he gets from classifying rows of numbers by staring at a spreadsheet of vectors, even though both acts produce the same functional result.

In cases where the representation of the Universe that a machine gets is an undersampled version of the minimal feature set that a human needs to perform the same task, the machine needs to use Superintelligence in order to achieve the same functional result. Many different information-theoretic measures can be used to test whether the input signals correspond well when it’s not obviously apparent. Besides, achieving human-like response from a machine is quite trivial with the right inputs; it’s with the wrong inputs that we have to use more sophisticated techniques.

Vocals Remover for Windows Media Player

Last week, I was looking for some software to remove the voice tracks from mp3s. There are plenty of independent audio editing programs that can filter out vocals from sound files, but I didn’t want to modify my mp3s or keep a whole ‘nother voice-stripped version of my music library. What I really wanted was just a minimal plugin for my Windows Media Player that I could enable to turn off vocals. There didn’t seem to be anything out there freely available.

So, I started hacking my own plugin, and I’m releasing it here for free download in case it could be useful for others. (Hi, Google!)

Vocals Remover is an Audio DSP plugin for Windows Media Player that cancels out the voice track in real-time so that you can sing along. It supports all major file formats (including video) and lets you adjust the amount of voice removal and gain compensation. While the plugin works pretty reliably, it can get confused on songs where the foreground singer and instrumentals are hard to tell apart.  So, don’t expect it to work well on your experimental house mix or just about anything by T-Pain.

Download
Vocals Remover for  Windows Media Player.msi (44 KB)
Requirements: WMP 11 or greater

To install, simply run the downloaded package and uninstall works in the usual way via Windows control panel.

Usage

To enable or disable, just see whether the plugin is selected in WMP.  In WMP12, this is found by right-click -> Tools -> Plugins.  There is also a properties panel in Tools > Options >Plug-ins > Audio DSP -> Properties button, where you can customize the amount of the effect to apply.  A 0.0 means the effect is effectively off and a 1.0 means the maximum amount of voice cancellation is applied.

A short demo:

The above video also features the highly recommended lyrics plugin, which in combination with the Vocals Remover, turns your PC into a hacktastic DIY karaoke box!

one large step for man

Just when you thought the U.S. had run out of countries to bomb in its search for natural resources, we go and launch our first extraterrestrial attack on the Moon. Haven’t they studied the theory of lunar blowback?

free parking

The killer app for autonomous cars is having your car automatically move and re-park itself as the meter lady approaches.

Friendly Big Brother is Watching You

I’m actually a supporter of increased government surveillance.

My friends know that whenever I go to events, I rarely take pictures. I am the un-documentarian. And thus, I have suffered, as my episodic memory is not that great. I think the federal government should improve their tracking and satellite surveillance abilities. That way, I can have great photos and videos of myself wherever I go, 24 x 7, and never have to worry about bringing along a camera. They should also improve their internet traffic monitoring systems to snoop on my network activity, so that I never have to backup my e-mail files again. While they’re at it, monitor all my financial transactions so that they can do my taxes for me automatically every year.

If you’re reading this blog post, federal government, also consider this: After you’ve started collecting this huge database you can then create a premium level web service. Allow users to pay an annual subscription fee to log in with their federal credentials. You might even make some money off this and start paying back that deficit. I’d totally use this service as it’s much more likely for the U.S. government to be in business in the long term than Flickr or Picassa.

UPDATE: http://io9.com/5191353/what-happens-when-security-cameras-get-involved-with-matchmaking

Jarvis 1

>hi there old friend
Have we met?

The Nature of Fish

THE NATURE OF FISH

Swirling and falling down from the glimmering surface

A school of fish spiral down in synchronized dance,

Tunneling into a dark, watery abyss. White fish,

Black fish, their souls darken as they approach

The nadir, each midlessly following his

Leader, continuing the structure of

Fish rules and Fish society.

They never recognize

The Truth. There is

No control,

No will.

Icarus

This weekend, I came across an old tape backup of my old files. In the mass of outdated document formats, I came across some poems that I wrote back in high school, more than a decade ago. I’ll start posting them here.

ICARUS

You may think me foolish, or rash,
As youth are prone to disregard the advice of elders.
You say, my wings have not hardened, that I am not ready to alight.
You warn me to hold a steady course, to keep to the middle.

But, I value adventure over safety.
I long for the exhiliration of the whistling winds beneath me and the freedom of unrestrained motion.
For the chance to soar among the eagles,
I would spit in the face of danger because I realize that many never attain such an opportunity.

No, Daedalus, old man, I prefer not to choose the middle path.
I long for this chance to steal divine insight.
You see, this is much more than a flight from this wretched place, it is an emancipation.

Look, Daedalus, watch how high I can soar!
Higher, and higher, and higher, as far as my breath can sustain me.
I will reach the sun. I will go beyond the sun, into the heavens, and escape from the pull of the Earth, which is humanity’s bane.

But, what? Oh, no. It’s seems my wings have deteriorated.
Cursed Apollo. They’re playing a cruel prank on me.
Because they can’t stand mortal intruders or boys with wings.

So, I fall.
Down into the violent, freezing waters below.

I will die soon.
However, you never even knew what life was.
Life is not measured in years, but in split-seconds.

It was worth it.

Smart

Picked up this cool t-shirt when I was hanging out with my brother this weekend, which is great, because I love cute animals. I’m a smart donkey!

我有一隻小毛驢，
我從來也不騎，
有一天我心血來潮，
騎著去趕集，

我手裡拿著小皮鞭，
我心裡真得意，
不知怎麼嘩啦啦
我摔了一身泥

Come on Down!

A) The set is TINY. On TV, the cameras make the set look wide, with expansive swashes of white, bright shiny lights, and immaculate sets and prize showcases. In reality, the entire studio is the size of a high school auditorium, with drab 70’s-esque decor, folding chairs, dilapidated facades with chipping paint. Also, those trip showcases are all greenscreened, so as an audience member you just see the models standing in front of a blank wall.

B) When you watch it on TV, you just see an excited audience and with the host and the contestants being the only people on stage. However, the vibe in situ is totally different. During the show, the stage is full with 15 or so people , the producer yelling instructions, 5 massive cameras rigs shooting the stage and audience at various angles. In the crowd, we are looking up at TV monitors hanging from the ceiling showing what the camera sees. On TV, whenever you see the audience they are always in a constant state of euphoria. However, in reality, there are several long breaks between shots, when they have to set up the new games and showcases (there isn’t enough room on the stage for multiple game sets). So, most of the time the crowd is pretty mellow until the lights come back on and everyone fights to get in front of the camera.

C) Another thing that you’d miss from watching the show is that the contestant selection from the audience is not random at all. Hours before the show airs, each of the hundreds of audience members goes through an interview with a talent scout to see who’s going to be on the show. You have practically no hope of getting on the show if you are not female, humourously obese, and act as if you are on some kind of controlled substance.

In all, it was good to see “how the sausage is made.” Next time, I’ll know which drugs to take before trying to get on a TV show.