Hans Moravec is a leader in robotics research, founder of the robotics program at Carnegie Mellon University, and the author of several books, including Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.

Moravec is in firm belief that machines will acquire human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, and that by the middle part of this century, they will be our intellectual superiors.

Also, says Moravec, humans—in hopes of immortality—will soon be transformed into what he calls “ex-humans,” as they upload themselves into an entirely new breed of supercomputer that allows one to “live” forever.

This interviews was originally conducted for Britannica.com.

Generally speaking, what is a robot?

Well, there are some industry definitions that are descriptive of existing things but really, for those of us who are less passionate, it’s a machine that does what living things do.

And what was the first real robot?

If you were born before the 20th century, you’d probably want to point to clockwork mechanisms and even industrial machinery. At least those things were animate, which is a very big distinction from things that just sit there.

So the progression from simple tools to complex machines?

To a self-powered machinery—whether it’s powered by springs or water or steam. But in the 20th century something new was added, namely, a sensory detector—sensors, basically, which allowed the machine to respond to things going on outside of it in a non-trivial way. I guess with mechanical machinery you have levers and things that could sense large forces. But once there was electronics, you could have things that could respond to light or to sound or to pressure.

So the ability for these machines to take in data on the environment?

Right. So I think it’s perfectly fair to call electronically actuated industrial machinery “robots.”

And what was the original meaning of the word “robot”?

Well, “very hard work,” or basically “work,” sort of bordering on slave labor.

To switch gears a bit, why is it so difficult for computer programmers to mimic common sense, or what could be called true artificial intelligence?

Well, I know there are a lot of theories. One glaring reason is simply a matter of scale—basically, to make something like a human brain you require a million times more computing [power] than we have today; at least, for those of us who don’t work at the national labs.

At a hundred trillion calculations per second I’d say that’s almost enough computer power. And if people were doing artificial intelligence on those machines, then the criticism “it’s not working” would be valid, but actually people are not doing artificial intelligence. They’re doing physical simulation.

And in order to do artificial intelligence in robotics, I think, you need a lot of trial and error.

So I think we just have to be a little more patient and wait for the computers to come along. But meanwhile we now have computers that are powerful enough to do the job of at least small nervous systems. So my [Macintosh] G4 can do about as much computer power on my retinal scale as a guppy. So we should be able to get a sort of guppy-like performance out of our robots right now.

So when do you think we might see the first robot possessing artificial intelligence?

Well, computers are doubling in power approximately every year now, so [I think] the answer is about 30 years.

Won’t that require an exhaustive amount of human programming?

Indeed, it is a major effort to create [such a] database. The most comparable thing to date has been the building of the CYC common sense reasoning system.

And what was that?

One of the meanings is the “cyc” in sounding the word “encyclopedia.” You know that word, don’t you? [this interview was conducted for the online magazine of Encyclopaedia Britannica]

But also, you know, it sounds like psychology. And this was a project begun, I think now, 15 years ago. It was to be a 10-year project. It was started by Doug Lenat, who was a Stanford graduate, who earlier in his career had written some mathematical reasoning programs.

Later, he wrote a more abstract thing that taught about meta-concepts called HEURISCO. It figured out heuristics for reasoning programs. Then there was [the CYC] project. He was working at the MCC, a consortium of companies for computer research, including some artificial intelligence research.

That’s interesting. A particularly curious point in your book is when you talk about robots being imbued with human values and human feelings. Is this where that comes into play? Because in order for this to work effectively, we have to find a way to give them the ability to understand psychological models, human values, human feelings.

That’s right. To a first approximation, this isn’t that hard. There are in fact…all of these things that I’m talking about have all been done to various extents by generations of students, you know, in our…robotics. So there are toy versions of all of these things that I’ve been talking about. Only now, by the time of such robots they have to be done really well, and much more completely, and on a much larger scale. But in fact, you know, having a logical system that reasons about psychological variables isn’t as hard.

So there are certain cues that you read and then you incorporate them in a model—[to see] if it’s going to hit or if it’s going to give me a banana. And as you make the details richer, you get more nuances and subtleties, and that aspect of the simulation will have to be tuned up just like the physical aspect and again, there are at least toy versions of systems that interact psychologically now.

Actually, there was a system built here—the program was called “Oz.” The creatures living in Oz were called “woggles.” They were rendered on a screen as sort of egg-shaped things with big eyes, and they could interact with each other in the three-dimensional world, and there would, in fact, be attractions and dislikes, and those would register in the way the eyes moved—the way they looked, and you know—the way the pupils changed. And then the woggles would respond to each other. So if this one woggle gave another woggle a dirty look, then there would be variables corresponding to fear and anger and the like, and all of those things which would adjust according to some formulas. And then, depending on the state of the woggle, it would then react and send out vibes. So you could have two that would suddenly hate each other or like each other.

So CYC was going to provide common sense for expert systems. A medical diagnosis system, you know, given the symptoms of a rusty bicycle prescribed an antibiotic. And that’s because it doesn’t know what a bicycle is or a person or rust or anything. It doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Well, what if it had facts about that…knew that bicycles don’t get, you know, skin infections and humans don’t rust, and antibiotics are only appropriate for living things and so on. Then it could just add that into its reasoning. And, in fact, would eliminate, you know, a solution like the simple expert system can come up with. So the way you start to do that, according to Lenat, is you take statements in an encyclopedia and then you break them down.

So, you know, Napoleon was imprisoned on Elba. Well, what’s a Napoleon?

Napoleon is a man.

What’s a man?

A man, you know, is a living thing, and a man has two arms and a head.

Eventually you can work it down to very primitive concepts. Like when you put an object on top of another object, then the first object is underneath the second object. And they figured it would be several million assertions—several million logical sentences when they were done. And they had a team of half a dozen knowledge engineers working day after day.

Is that work still happening?

Well, sort of…it wasn’t as successful as they hoped it would be. But it was still a decent first try.

What was unsuccessful about it or less successful than they would have liked?

Well, the idea was that eventually there would be enough knowledge in the system that the thing could interpret statements without having humans package [things] for it. So it would basically be able to read books, you know, and extend its knowledge, and it certainly never reached that state. And even its basic understanding of anything is so limited that you can play with versions of the system and it can still make really stupid mistakes unless you follow the script.

You’ve gotten some strong reactions to the book and especially to the more futuristic aspects of it. And the part that scares a lot of people is the idea of robots becoming able to think for themselves and outsmart us, and be physically more adaptable than us. In your book, you see them first automating human tasks, and then sort of a period of prosperity where many things are mechanized and perhaps people are more free to pursue their own pleasure or self-actualization, to put it in psychological terms. Then, you basically predict that down the road what this would lead to is, we would give way as a species to robots and that they would essentially be our progeny. Not in the way…similar, but different, in that they would be children of our minds.

Yes, you summarized it quite well.

Okay. And it seems like while reading your book one has an immediate, visceral reaction like: “Oh, well…no! Why would we want that?“

But you seem to have a very different take in terms of it being a natural or even desirable progression.

Well, I was thinking about it [for a] really long [time], and the earlier stage in the evolution of that position was in my previous book where I had…

…that was in Mind Children?

Yeah. I had that outcome, but I also had a whole chapter sort of entitled “Grandfather Clause” devoted to the idea…well, we can’t beat them, but we can probably join them, so there’s the proposal that we can augment ourselves to become as smart as they are, to keep up with how smart they’re becoming.

You call that “Xs,” [ex-humans] right, in this book?

Well, here they’re…the Xs, frankly, are mostly just robots. I mean, there may be a few human beings that sort of tag along as junior partners.

But in the first book it was sort of…it had a bigger role for converted people. But now…I really think that that’s not going to do much and that’s not going to work. It’s like taking an oxcart, and replacing the wooden wheels with rubber tires, and the ox with a motor, and the tiller with a steering wheel—and building a car. You’re still going to have a pretty lousy car because of the legacy of the oxcart that you kind of carry with you when you make these incremental changes. You’re much better off going to a drawing board and designing a car that’s a car from the ground up. Even though you want to retain the most important parts of the oxcart, like the ability to move along flat ground, but you only retain the parts that are really worth retaining. So, I think it’s like that.

You see it as a basic evolutionary transition.

Our offspring…we should design them like any product—to be as good as possible and not try to retain things from the past simply for reasons of nostalgia.

THE CHINESE ARE VERY SECRETIVE ABOUT THINGS WHEN THEY GO WRONG. You can't just go online or read a paper to find out what happened with this gloriously wrong-looking demolition in Chengdu. I heard a man was injured by debris, for example, but there seemed to be no way to confirm or disprove this. The site was fenced and there were multiple sentries posted throughout the day to keep people out, so this was taken at around 4am, using only the ambient light of Chengdu that reflects nicely off the ever-present canopy of mostly industrial smog.

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, activist, and author of hundreds of papers and articles and more than 15 books.

“I really hope that living democracy, articulated as the broader democracy of all life, will help us transcend these polarizations and work to protect all species while defending every human right of every excluded community.”

[From the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt.] 

Read the rest [PDF; 10 pages]

With those specific things in mind, here is a cluster of material related to the underlying theory and evolving practice of the Occupy movement, highlighting adaptive and prefigurative organizing successes and casting an eye towards 2012.

read more at SELECTIONS FROM THE COALMINE >>

He’s the only truly anti-war, anti-imperialist candidate in the 2012 Presidential race, but Ron Paul’s ideas about getting rid of all environmental regulation, returning to the gold standard, rolling back civil rights, and further restricting women’s access to abortion, are all extremist.

Paul, like Rick “Oops” Perry, is another right-wing free-market zealot from Texas not worthy of holding higher public office. So what is it about Paul–his brand or his substance–that pulls support from so many parts of the political continuum?

read more at SELECTIONS FROM THE COALMINE >>

“It’s not just false hope that’s the problem, it’s hope itself…’Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency.’”

A free-ranging interview with the author of A Language Older Than Words, Welcome to the Machine, and The Culture of Make Believe about civilization, violence, activism, pacifism, reasons for optimism, and why hope is a bad thing.

A counterpoint interview about Malthusian economics and cults of catastrophism is also offered, with social historian Iain Boal, “We’re Not Doomed; That’s the Problem.”:

Many people believe, at least a little, that the end of human beings–whether by ecological disaster, the collapse of the oil economy, or nuclear extinction–is inevitable. For some, this projected collapse represents a just termination for a species they consider parasitic and pathologically unable to establish an equilibrium with the natural world and the creatures who  depend upon it. Others laments the tragedy of our fate.

But what role do faith and belief play in all of this? What if the capitalist realities of scarcity and collapse have been mistakenly interpreted as natural inevitabilities?  

>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE (PDF; 8 pages)

[From the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt.] 

People suck, and that’s my contention.
We’re a virus with shoes.
—Bill Hicks

I actually like quite a lot of people, but there’s much to recommend Hicks’ notion that people are viruses with shoes. It’s a fact that well over 40% of the human DNA chain is viral in origin, as Michael Specter writes in a fascinating New Yorker article, “Darwin’s Surprise”:

Nothing—not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died of the Spanish flu; smallpox may have killed half a billion during the twentieth century alone…

Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

One scientist interviewed for the New Yorker article, Thierry Hiedmann, contends that the mapping of the human genome project and recent findings about “endogenous retroviruses” show that genes and viruses are not, in fact, distinct entities, and that the concept of virus and humanity as enemies or combatants, rather than as co-evolutionary forces, is in error. Heidmann and others have even suggested that without viral influence, mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature and led to live birth. “These viruses made those changes possible, [and] It is quite possible that, without them, human beings would still be laying eggs.”

So the stuff of us, the meat of our matter, is partially viral in origin. What of our language, and our culture?

Well. That partially depends on whether or not you believe language shapes thought or vice-versa. Lots of smart people disagree on this particular point. On one side are those like, oh, Noam Chomsky, who say cognition and certain brain structures give rise to infinitely varying, yet universal, linguistic impulses.

On the other side there are linguistic relativists, like the curious Benjamin Lee Whorf, an amateur linguist (Darwin was an amateur biologist) and evolutionary biologist, botanist, theologian, and physicist, who in addition to linguistics, wrote about gravitation, “being,” trees, color theory, evolution, large stemmed plants, electromagnetism, dreams, and even wrote a Hopi-English dictionary.

Whorf grew to prominence and influence through his work, exploring how languages shape the habit and thought of their users.

Presume, as many linguists do, that there’s a middle ground between these two positions, and admit the possibility that language acts on people much as people act on or through language.

“A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from this infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts. The notion of the meme—coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins to illustrate the field of memetics—crystallizes this view of the communication process.

Georges Bataille similarly argued that communication was best understood from the perspective of contagion.

In Bataille any human being is no more than a conduit for communicative process, a channel for ideas which pass through him/her.”If, as it appears to me, a book is communication, then the author is only a link among many readings.” The author is simply a node on a network, through which ideas pass…

Subjectivity is an illusion, one that allows us to operate comfortably in this plane of existence, but which nonetheless masks true reality, in which there is no division between subject and object: “There is no longer subject-object, but a ‘yawning gap’ between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate existence”

—Bernardo Attias, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California State University

The complicated relationship between language and its host was a major theme in the work of William S. Burroughs. When pondering the all-encompassing constancy of flux, and the role of human beings and viruses as co-evolutionary partners, and when wondering at the viral properties of language and culture, it’s worth considering the thoughts of a visionary like Burroughs, who identified as a Manichean, and who believed he was writing mythology for the space age:

“I am advancing the theory that we were not designed to remain in our present state, any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole forever,” wrote Burroughs, suggesting that what human evolution requires is actually a biological mutation away from that which one knows as human.

Burroughs always did have a way of making profane things like “Get over yourself, changeling,” and “extinction is inevitable” sound somehow like an already familiar pulp novel.

by Brian Awehali

by Stephen Bender and Brian Awehali
(from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow-The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt)

Edward L. Bernays birthed the public relations industry in the United States. His clients included General Motors, United Fruit, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the U.S. Department of State, Health, and Commerce, Samuel Goldwyn, Eleanor Roosevelt, the American Tobacco Company, and Proctor & Gamble. He directed public relations campaigns for every president from Calvin Coolidge in 1925, to Dwight Eisenhower in the late 1950s. He was, in the estimation of cultural historian Ann Douglas, the man “who orchestrated the commercialization of a culture.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE (PDF; 6 pages)

Music can do a lot of different things. There’s music to comfort you, music to make you dance, music to make the time pass easier.

And then there’s music that whacks you upside the head, assaults you, is radically unconcerned with your comfort, and comes to get inside and change you, forever.

Such was the music of Captain Beefheart, AKA Don Van Vliet (1941 – 2010), which was a heavy influence on everyone from PJ Harvey and Tom Waits to Radiohead and Merrill Garbus of Tune-yards. Beefheart’s name, he claimed, was a pun on him having “a beef in my heart with the world.” (He made other claims as to its other meanings, too, and always enjoyed toying with his interviewers.) He once told an interviewer that rock and roll was obsessed with this “4/4 momma heartbeat,” and that he was more interested in “anti-hypnotics.” During the same interview, he also said that he was interested in “breaking up the catatonic state…. and I think there is one…” Van Vliet was a trickster in the true sense; alternately and sometimes simultaneously profound and nonsensical, as deadly serious as a fart in the wind.

The music he made with others was unique: he himself knew almost no music theory, yet he consistently attracted world-class musicians (like Ry Cooder) who were willing to put up with his almost cult-like creative process. For a year prior to recording the landmark 1969 Trout Mask Replica, which consistently makes critics’ “top 100 of all-time” lists on the basis of its wide cultural influence, Van Vliet locked his fellow musicians up in a house and demanded they be in performance mode 24 hours a day. Only one person was allowed to leave the “studio,” once a week, to buy meager supplies. Pictures of the musicians at this time show gaunt, hollowed-out cheeks and a feral lysergic electricity behind the eyes.

Then they walked into a studio that was reserved for three weeks’ time, and, in about three hours’ time, recorded the avant garde “rock” album to end all such albums: a sprawling surrealist prose poem trundling along on ether and the primordial grunts of ur-bluesmen, an ecstatic and complex ode to nature and the Marvelous, all chaos and wonder. Utterly unique. [Here are three of the more accessible tracks from the album: "Moonlight On Vermont," "Veteran's Day Poppy," "Pachuco Cadaver"]

One long-time music reviewer described “Trout Mask Replica” as

about to break apart at the seams, bursting with seemingly diametric differences. The music is utterly new, yet steeped in tradition. The lyrics are non-sensical yet intellectual. The musicianship sounds spasmodic, yet is precisely disciplined. The emotions are playful yet also have a gentle sadness. Everything seems to be directed towards disorientation. The beautiful alliteration and repetition is hallucinatory. The odd time signatures and frenzied changes lend a feeling of vertigo. The tracks do not flow. The entire sound is lopsided ­with much more happening in one channel than the other if you played with the balance…While to some [Beefheart] doesn’t even seem human, he has a remarkably compassionate feeling for humanity. And his empathy for the mother earth and its critters continued through the rest of his recording career, and on to his painting career…

Here’s the Captain and his Magic Band in 1968, playing “Electricity” and “Sure ‘Nuff ‘n Yes I Do” on Cannes Beach. [Full lyrics to "Electricity" at the end of this post.]

Van Vliet turned his back on music suddenly, many years ago, after releasing one of his stronger albums, Ice Cream for Crow. He had always sculpted and painted, but he decided to devote himself fully to his painting and made an unlikely crossover and won a significant level of critical recognition for his painting.

Don Van Vliet in front of one of his paintings, 1980.

Just last week I was talking to my friend Eric about Captain Beefheart and his music. We were in a studio filled with a banjo, a drum, painted studies of the human form, some trapeze rings dangled from the ceiling, and a big theme unifying much of the art on the walls was Third Nature — nature taking back over what industry and civilization had commandeered. We’d been talking about eros, about The World, and about staying fascinated with our various pursuits when Beefheart came up. It all seemed somehow perfect. How to stay fully awake and fully alive in a sleepwalking world was the feel of it.

I was moved and affected by Don Van Vliet’s art and play, and his light in the world. His lyrics were deep and weird and full of many layers of meaning. If you don’t really know his work, I think you might be moved well by him, too. It’s not easy listening, and it does not generally comfort, but you will be rewarded if you persevere. In some cases, you’ll hear things that sound familiar because of how widely studied and copied he’s been, but keep in mind that he was making most of this music 30-40 years ago.

For those who are curious, John Peel and the BBC also did a great short documentary titled “The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart” that is available in segments on You Tube. (Part 1 of 6.)

“Electricity”

Singin through you to me; thunderbolts caught easily
Shouts the truth peacefully Eeeeeee-lec-tri-ci-teeeeeeee

High voltage man kisses night to bring the light to those who need to hide their shadow deed
Go into bright find the light and know that friends don`t mind just how you grow

midnight cowboy stains in black read all roads without a map
To free-seeking electricity (repeat) (Repeat both lines)

BONUS LINK: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band Performing “Click Clack” and “Grow Fins,” from the 1972 album, Spotlight Kid.

The L.A. Weekly did a great post, “Top 14 Reasons Why Captain Beefheart Was a True American Genius” that’s worth checking out in its entirety, but which features this gem as Reason #10:

“in the late 60s fused delta blues, beat poetics, Dada/Surrealist techniques, avant jazz, R&B & the kitchen sink into a metaphysics of the imagination that tore a giant hole in the ozone of pop-artistic possibility. Like an American Van Gogh he seemed to open up new landscapes of consciousness as much as of music.”

 

by Brian Awehali

by Winona LaDuke
(from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow-The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt)

Rethink your geography a little bit, set aside your thinking, and try to think about North America from an indigenous perspective. In doing so, what I’d like to ask is that you think about it in terms of islands in a continent.

I live on one island, White Earth reservation. It’s thirty-six miles by thirty six miles. It’s a rather medium-sized reservation, as they go in North America. That’s one island. A little bit west of me is Pine Ridge, a slightly larger reservation. Rosebud. Blackfeet. Crow. Cheyenne. Navaho. Hopi. Some of the larger islands are further north. When you go north of the fiftieth parallel in Canada, which is somewhere a little north of Edmonton, you’ll find that the majority of the population is native. 85% of the people who live north of the fiftieth parallel in Canada are native people.

How that is perhaps best reflected is in a place called Nunavut. Northwest Territories, a couple of years ago, was split into two territories. One of those territories is now called Nunavut because the people who live there are Inuit. They are the people who are the political representatives. They are the administrators of the school boards. They are the firemen. They are the doctors, the physicians. They have a form of self-governance in Nunavut where the majority of decisions are made by Inuit people. That area, Nunavut, is, including land and water, five times the size of Texas. It is a large area of land. It is the size of the Indian sub-continent.

So perhaps for that reason alone, it is important to know something more about indigenous people…

Let me talk a little bit about indigenous thinking, because I believe that is fundamental for understanding the conflicts that exist in the world today. In the world today it is not a conflict so much between the left and right, or the communists and the capitalists, so much as it is the conflict between the indigenous and the industrial.

(This far-reaching, increasingly relevant speech Winona LaDuke gave to students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh appeared in LiP: Informed Revolt and was also included in the magazine’s anthology, Tipping the Sacred Cow, now available online in PDF form.)

Read the rest [PDF; 10 pages]