Intellectual capital

My son tells me about a recent TED Talk, which includes, among much else, the idea that it would be wise to go beyond ‘procedure’ in our social dealings, Quite right, and who would disagree that justice and propriety don’t always follow from following the rules? That is after all why we have a concept of equity.

There is a much unappreciated aspect of this problem, I feel, that is almost the reverse of needing to go beyond ‘the system’. This is the ways in which the way we create and manage the system in fact disempower us from even understanding it, lest alone going ‘beyond’ it. This is even a subject of much enthusiasm, and in certain respects should be too. But at the same time it is rapidly creating a situation in which people who have neither legal nor moral right nevertheless find themselves with more and more of the hi-hand over the rest of us.

The issue I am referring to here goes under the name of ‘intellectual capital’. The significance of intellectual capital is not merely that it creates legal titles on knowledge, experience, and so on – that is intellectual property. ‘Intellectual capital’ goes beyond mere ownership (although there is nothing ‘mere’ about ownership, even in its barest forms), to actually place that knowledge within the system itself. This may take the form of documented procedures, databases of information, the structure of a patented process, the workflow engine that controls a great factory, the books of ‘due process’ through which society’s highest courts and most powerful administrations proceed.

So what is the problem with these systems? In principle, absolutely nothing. Indeed, they become the basis for future developments that take these building blocks and synthesise them into yet higher structures, through which human beings come to still more profound insights and exercise yet greater powers. But it was not only systems I started from – it was ‘intellectual capital’. And capital, of course, is owned, and ownership means not only that somebody owns it but also that everyone else is excluded. Now, under recent patent laws, it can even mean that if discover something for myself, that knowledge can still belong to someone else. I am not even legally entitled to use some of the knowledge I acquire while working for company A when I go to work for company B.

But even beyond that, there is a still more profound issue. For by embedding the knowledge (skill, etc.) in a system, the users of that system no longer need to understand that system or have any insight into its purpose, goals or even mechanisms to operate it. I just have to follow the instructions. Indeed, once this is possible, people who are smart enough to understand the system as well as simply use will probably be too expensive ‘resources’ to be employed using it. So for more and more aspects of human life, ‘the system’ will come to dominate over mere human beings.

And who will now control human life? Who but those whose capital intellectual capital is – the owners. And I should not be afraid of this?

Free and frank for whom?

Jack Straw declines to allow us 'free and frank' coverage of Cabinet discussions because this will inhibit them from having 'free and frank' discussions. What can this mean, other than that they are afraid that their real opinions will be so shocking to the people that they might elect them out of office? There is no issue here about protecting their freedom of speech - we want them to speak their minds, but as public servants we are entitled to eavesdrop. In fact, perhaps all Cabinet discussions should be on prime-time TV - would this be worse than Big Brother?

Re-enter The Singularity – and its déjà vu all over again

I see that Google and NASA are financing a school for futurists in Silicon Valley ‘to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people’, as the Financial Times puts it. This ‘Singularity University’ will teach its students about nanotechnology, AI and that sort of thing. It also involves Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, enthusiast for AI and inventor of the term ‘singularity’, which he uses to describe the moment when the world will change because machines are suddenly smarter than people. At that point, the machines will solve all our problems, including climate chaos, peak oil and world hunger. And no doubt cancer and the common cold too.

According to the LA Times (on February 2 2009):

The goal of the Singularity school, which will be located at an Ames facility in Sunnyvale, Calif., is to bring together the world’s top graduate and postgraduate students in 10 diverse disciplines, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, medicine and law. They will spend nine weeks together learning about each others' disciplines and then focus on... finding ways to overcome pressing challenges such as poverty, hunger and pandemics.

Let’s get some basic facts straight.

Firstly, there is not one machine in the world that comes close to passing the Turing test for artificial intelligence. Now bearing in mind that the Turing test is singularly undemanding – basically the ability to fake intelligence for five minutes – you would have thought that if ‘the singularity is near’ (one of Kurzweil’s book titles) it would be pathetically easy to pass. After all, it was invented in the 1940’s, when the sum total of the world’s computing power was less than what is sitting on my desk right now. Yet so subtle is intelligence that no one has yet come close to claiming the prize.

Secondly, although it is the case that the total processing power of all the computers on the planet is truly vast, all the computers on the planet have exactly as much intelligence as a gatepost. They may be fantastically useful for all the purposes noted above, but they will perform this invaluable service without showing a spark of intelligence. The emergent properties effect of technologies such as the internet and nanotechnology may be very surprising indeed, but there seems to be no specific reason to believe that any of them will constitute intelligence proper, and more than piling up rocks, though it may result in something as wonderful as Chartres cathedral, will ever result in an organism.

In summary, I think a more archaic response to this Singularity University is called for here, and that is to say, quite simply, ‘bollocks’.

As I have argued in detail elsewhere in this blog, it is intrinsically impossible for any account of intelligence that is inspired by AI or ‘cognitive science’ (was ever a discipline worse named?) to analyse the basic facts of real intelligence. Concepts such as computation and information processing are logically incapable of grasping what it means to be intelligent. So constantly harping on about artificial intelligence in this particular vein is a fool’s errand.

Of course, we’ve been here before – apparently inspired/possibly mad inventor proclaims the dawning of the Age of machine Intelligence, and in the absence of a decent analysis of what intelligence actually means, we all bow down. But then it turns out to be just another remake of a much older story – the Emperor’s New Clothes.