Monthly Archives: May 2013

Human Operating System 3.0

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“It felt like I was watching people from a different planet.” Our ancestors 100 000 years ago were so similar to us, if you managed to restrain them long enough to cut their hair and put clothes on them, they would blend in with the crowd. Yet they were utterly alien to us, and we to them, even though we were their children. It is about to happen again.

I wrote about this in summer 2005, and it may still be the most important thing I have written. But various things have happened since then, and I have decided to write about this again from the start.

There is a lot to be said about this topic. It changes everything. Things that seemed absurd will make sense if one “gets” this, and things that seems to make sense to ordinary people will seem absurd.

Although this topic has probably not been expressed this way by anyone else, the topic itself has been introduced into human history again and again in various forms, and is an important part of all the world’s high cultures.

***

I am talking about the upgrade of the human psyche, the software that runs on our brain. And not just the business applications, like learning a new language or another skill. Rather, I talk about the “human operating system”, the fundamental way in which we relate to the world, the way we think and feel about life, the universe and everything.

In the past, we did not have computers. Therefore we could not make this analogy. It is just an analogy, perhaps even a metaphor. The human brain is not a computer in the sense that we know them today, the blocks on our desks. But it has certain elements in common with them. There is a physical structure that serves as a basis for an information structure. The physical structure is the hardware, which corresponds to the brain. The information structure is the software, which corresponds to the psyche, or the mind and the subconscious. The most basic part of the software is the operating system. When you turn on a computer and use it, the operating system is active in the background and interprets every input, conveys every output. It decides the format in which information is stored and retrieved at the most basic level. We also have this in our psyche, but we do not have a name for it.

***

The “human operating system” has come in two main versions that we know of. The human brain has been largely unchanged in size and shape for something like 200 000 years. (It has shrunk just a little the past 10 000 years, or so I read.) But for most of the time, humans were Not Like Us. They had no culture, probably because they had no language. They made hand axes of stone, which they probably learned to make by watching. There was nearly no variation or improvement on these for several thousand generations. The Neanderthals, which parted ways with us about 600 000 years ago, made roughly similar axes.

Somewhere around 90 000 years ago, we start seeing some weird stuff happening here and there in Africa. Egg shells are collected on a string. Stone with a strong pigment has been scraped. Thousands of years later, elsewhere in Africa, fishing nets show up for a while, and elaborate bone tools. Elsewhere again, rare stone is freighted across long distances, implying some kind of long-distance barter. Somewhere between 65 000 and 40 000 years ago, it all suddenly seems to come together in an explosion of creativity. Cave art, sculptures, new tools and weapons that were both more efficient and elaborately decorated. Intricate ritual burial that speak of a spiritual tradition. While not as refined as later civilization, these tribes were fundamentally similar to us, compared to their ancestors who were utterly alien.

The change happened so suddenly and totally, it seems from our remote distance as if every human on Earth suddenly one day changed from the old version to the new, or else died. It probably did not literally happen that fast, but it happened faster than anyone has been able to track, and none of the old humans have survived even in the most remote parts of the world.

I refer to the stone hand-axe time as Human Operating System version 1, and the later use of speech, art and imagination as H.O.S. version 2. This is not controversial, although the naming is original. The controversial part is version 3, which I claim has been in beta for several thousand years, and is slated to replace the current mind as completely and irreversibly as the Ice Age revolution replaced the world of hand-axes and grunting.

The Human Operating System version 3 is basically what we now call Higher Consciousness. I believe certain people in our past have had this to a high degree. Those who saw them and listened to them realized that they were deeply different, but could not understand them. So they tried to emulate them and explain them using the tools of H.O.S. v 2, somewhat similar to how the last Neanderthals copied imperfectly some of the new inventions brought by their African cousins before they disappeared.

They may have been “beta testers” of a new mind that one day will utterly replace the old, like it happened once before, consigning to oblivion the old way of being human.

And there’s a mighty judgment coming … but I may be wrong.
You see, you hear these funny voices, in the Tower of Song.
-Leonard Cohen.

Google: Blurry targeting

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“The evidence will be stored in my digital camera forever.” If this is how you imagine Google, you may not have looked very closely.

For years now, Google has offered a wide range of services to the Internet users for free. They have been able to afford this because advertisers are willing to pay for small, unobtrusive ads associated with many Google services. These advertisements are supposed to be “targeted” so that the people who see them are the people more likely to respond to them.

This works well enough in the case of simple search. If you search for “credit cards”, there is a good chance that the major financing companies and you may have a common interest in the matter, for the time being. Of course, your interest in the matter could be entirely theoretical, but on a larger scale it makes sense to match up search results and advertisements like this.

If Google knows a little bit more about you, they can be even more useful. For instance if you search for “flowers”, your friendly neighborhood florist may want to provide their services, but this would require some knowledge of where you are. If Google is allowed to keep track of where you are – not necessarily to the square foot, but the square mile at least – they could let your local florist advertise rather than one in a different city.

Gmail, another free service from Google, is also financed this way. By showing ads related to the text in your mail, they get money from advertisers and you get a chance to buy something relevant, or at least become aware that it exists. This worries some people, who don’t like that robots are reading their mail. But there is no actual reading involved: The system simply responds mechanically to words in the mail. For instance, when I discussed the author Orson Scott Card with a friend, Gmail started showing ads for credit cards. Card=card!

For the most part, however, I find that the ads are utterly random. For instance, 99.9% of my mail is in English, but almost all the ads are in Norwegian. They seem to be based on the location of my Internet Service Provider and nothing more. I could of course be an exception; perhaps someone at Google has set some kind of flag at my account. But the opposite seems more likely: People see an ad that interests them and thinks it is tailor-made for them, but it is actually just made for ordinary people and they are ordinary people. This is known as the “Forer effect” or “subjective validation”, if you want to read up on it.

There is a certain sense of paranoia, or at least of reason for paranoia, when people speculate that Google will show ads for condoms on their mobile phone when they are on their way to a date. There is no reason to think we are getting anywhere close to that. I have been feeding Google all the information I reasonably could since I discovered them, surely enough to write a biography in several tomes (and a few novels perhaps) but there is no sign that they are using any of that. The location of my Internet Service Provider, my gender (possibly, although I think they default to male if you log on anonymously) and the occasional keyword in the text, but usually just the ISP, which they can extract automatically from my IP address.

Not to make light of the IP address. If they were to target their random customer in Norway with ads for things that can only be bought in America, or in China or India for that matter (far more populous nations than the USA), the ads would be wasted or have entertainment value at best. When showing ads for Norwegian companies, there is at least some theoretical chance that the ad may click. Although this has never happened in all these years. I have only responded positively to two ads, none of which were Norwegian, and only one led to a sale. For the most part the ads either pass by or evoke a mild response of disgust. But then I am not exactly normal. More about that all the time, I guess.

The conclusion so far is that the “targeted advertisements” from Google have a long, long way to go. You may have heard about the retail chain that started sending a young woman ads for baby stuff before she had told her parents that she was pregnant. The fact that I have only ever heard of this one story makes me wonder whether there is even a causal connection at all, or just incidental.

For instance: After buying wedding presents to two of my friends on Amazon, some months passed and I started getting hints about baby stuff from them. Which normally would have been a great idea, I suppose, if I intended to continue giving them gifts, and if they were normal. But even my friends tend to not be entirely normal, and so here too. The point is, if I were a woman and pregnant when the baby recommendations came in, I might have freaked out as well, even though the causal link was actually Not Like That.

As it is, Google at least is far, far, far away from the stalker fantasies of some of its detractors. It is so far away from stalking that it is just barely useful.

Help! I’m being monetized!

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Just a hunch, but I think a certain older software company has a hard time adjusting to a new generation of customers. Just saying.

Microsoft is running a smear campaign against Google, accusing them of providing free services just to earn money from spying on you, basically. Which is not too far off, but they go too far when they imply that you pay for this. In one sequence, they use the verb “monetize” correctly, but illustrate it with money flying out of your pocket. This is a way of thinking that should have died during the Bronze Age. I will show you why. Follow me to ancient Mesopotamia, where humankind discovered Trade.

Local barter with people you knew has existed since before the dawn of history. Young Neanderthal males brought with them extra stone axes when they left home looking for a wife. But almost 6000 years ago, someone discovered that you could smelt copper and tin together and get bronze, which was much easier to make into weapons and tools than stone, hard enough to do the same work, and could be recycled over and over. There was just one problem: Tin and copper were only rarely found together. Usually there was stormy seas, high mountains or dreadful deserts between them. What to do?

Someone came up with a genius plan: They brought copper with them from a place where it was plentiful and therefore cheap, and bartered it against tin in a place where tin was common but copper was rare. This way they left every time with more than they started with, and this practice caused them to get rich without actually digging in the mines. I am sure there were envious people at the time reacting much like Microsoft does today: These guys get rich from other people’s work! It just ain’t fair! But the practice continued, because people on both ends of the trade caravan ended up with more bronze than they could have had alone. Everyone was better off.

The caravans did not come and steal your stone axes. If you wanted to make stone axes like your ancestors had done for a hundred thousand years, you were welcome to it. And in the same way today, if you want non-targeted advertising, you are welcome to it. But I would like to point out that since non-targeted advertising is more expensive (you have to reach several times as many people to make the same sales) the extra cost is added to the product. So if Microsoft succeeds in smearing Google out of existence (good luck with that), you will help pay for it. Money will float out of your pockets, so to speak.

Going ass first into the future has always come at a cost. But at least this time nobody will hit you on the head with a bronze ax. So we live in good times. And Google is making them even better, by monetizing us all.

(Another matter is whether their targeting actually works, but that is a story for another day.)

 

REM sleep

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A very stimulating dream: This is sure to refer to REM sleep, which is important to regulate instincts. More about that below.

REM (rapid eye movements) is the name for the part of sleep where we have vivid and lifelike dreams; in fact, they may often feel “larger than life”, packed with emotional intensity.

It is thought that REM sleep fulfills two important functions. One is to integrate memories, the other is to balance instincts. Not only do people (and animals) learn more slowly without REM sleep, but they also become mentally unstable.

***

For the casual onlooker, it may seem like sleep is one continuous state of inactivity. But science has shown that sleep consists of three main types which alternate through a 90-minute cycle. (It is not actually 90 minutes for everyone, and is generally longer toward the end of the night, so you cannot reliably use the 90-minute multiplier to calculate when you will be in which sleep phase. Sorry about that.)

There are considered to be five sleep phases, which fall in these three main types, and one of these again is the most peculiar of all. That is REM sleep. Both humans and many animals have this sleep type, and one can wonder how it got started in the first place. It certainly happened long ago, because the friendly egg-laying platypus spends more time in REM than any other mammal*, and they presumably parted ways with the marsupials and us while the dinosaurs were still having a good time.

(* REM sleep in monotremes, or egg-laying mammals, is actually mixed with slow-wave sleep. Perhaps our separation of them into distinct times is more efficient. We like to think so, but no one asked the platypus.)

With electrodes on the head, it is possible to find out when people are having REM sleep, and wake them up immediately. If one does this for a few nights, people will have trouble learning, and become steadily more irrational and experience mood swings. They will begin falling asleep briefly during daytime, and at that point go directly into REM sleep (similar to what happens during narcolepsy). Hallucinations can also happen.

Similar effects happen if you take too much drugs that suppress REM sleep. The most common of these is ordinary alcohol, but also several prescription drugs have this effect, including some that are used to treat insomnia! Talk this over with competent health personnel if you can afford to. Because of such side effects, sleeping pills should be used with extreme caution, and must not be combined with alcohol at the risk of insanity and death (presumably in that order).

Because REM sleep mostly happens toward the end of the night, our use of alarm clocks mean that we start cutting down on REM before the other types. The body will compensate for this, if we keep it up, by having more REM sleep earlier in the night than before. But this only happens when (and for as long as) we have a “debt” of REM sleep. It will make sure that the REM debt does not grow beyond control, but we still have some, and it costs us.

Because we integrate memories less well, we learn more slowly than we could have if we slept longer. This is especially true for long-term memory.

Because REM regulates mood, with less sleep we will be less happy and energetic than we could have been. The exception to this is a fairly common form of depression, in which REM sleep actually makes the patient more depressed. Have this checked with a doctor or two before you try to treat yourself.

Because REM acts as a regulator of instincts, we put on more weight if we lack this sleep. The alarm clock may be one of the contributors to the so-called “obesity epidemic”. It is easy to say that people should eat less and exercise more, but when you are hungry and tired, talk is cheap.

REM also helps regulate the sex drive. It is a well known observation that men usually spend their REM sleep in a state of visible sexual arousal, even if their dream does not have any overt sexual content. (This sometimes causes misunderstandings between spouses who sleep in the same bed.) With less REM sleep, sexual distractions gain more influence over men. (I don’t yet have information on how this works for women.) Unfortunately for those with sexual dysfunctions, the lack of REM sleep increases attention but not ability.

***

REM starts as an “electric storm” near the brain stem and works its way through the primitive layers of the brain, which we share with reptiles and birds, then through the so-called “mammal brain” which we share with our furry friends. (In some animal species it stops partway through, but not in humans.) It is in these lower parts of the brain that REM regulates instincts and mood.

The intense activity then spread out through the neocortex, the large layer of brain that is specific to our species. This is where it causes vivid and strange dreams, which we may be able to assemble into stories that we call dreams. The process of making sense of dreams happens mostly after we wake up from them, and we only have a short time to do so before they fade. Because dreams integrate new memories with old – older the longer we sleep in the morning – we can use them to bring up memories not easily found in other ways.

If we don’t get enough sleep on workdays, it is common to sleep in on weekends and other days off (unless you have children, pets or other living alarm clocks.)  Some people are surprised that they wake up more tired when they have slept longer: Shouldn’t they feel more rested? No, not if you have REM debt. The brain will then pay off the REM debt by spending lots of times in this state once the alarm clock doesn’t go off. But REM is hard work for the brain. It is more intense than the thinking people are able to do at work, and second only to panic attacks in its sheer use of energy. To supply this brain workout, heart and lungs work harder than usual as well: Late in the morning sees a spike in asthma attacks and heart infarct. While the deep delta-wave sleep early in the night refreshes and rejuvenates us, and the “filler” theta-wave sleep lets us rest, REM sleep actually tires us.

I hope this little overview lets you appreciate the role of the mysterious REM sleep, and perhaps go to bed a little earlier or set the alarm a little later next time!

The Sims 2: A post-singularity world

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Refrigeration and teleportation – The Sims 3 seems to be stuck in the 1990es, but with some fantastical elements. Could that happen in our future?

I have been writing a bit on my Sims 2 fanfic lately. And as usual I use the word “fanfic” very lightly. “Inspired by The Sims 2” may be more correct. But it amuses me that in my fiction worldbuilding, I have explained some of the differences between The Sims 2 and the real world with one single explanation: The technological singularity.

The concept of the technological singularity, or simply “the Singularity” among futurists, was first named by science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge, but has since gained mainstream acceptance not least thanks to Ray Kurzweil (inventor, futurist and eccentric genius, currently working with Google). Kurzweil delivers a credible defense for his hypothesis that the accumulation of information complexity increases exponentially. He sees Moore’s Law as just one phase of a much longer process, starting at the beginning of single-celled life if not before. If we plot this on a graph, we will see a line that is almost flat for billions of years, then rising slowly, then more rapidly, until a few years from now it turns vertical and goes through the roof. This point is the singularity – the time when the accumulation of information is so fast that humans as we know them will not be able to follow it.

There are basically two ideas about how the singularity will come to be: Either we develop artificial intelligences with the ability to improve themselves, and they leave us in the dust; or, we improve ourselves (most likely by merging with computer systems) beyond anything today imaginable as human. One version of the latter was described by Vinge in his novels: Human minds became connected electrotelepathically into superminds where humans (and their machines) were all nodes working seamlessly together.

***

Now back to my fiction. There, sometime in the 21st century, the Singularity has already come and gone. Steadily more fantastic inventions were made, some of which are still around. The Singularity multi-mind attracted most of the bright, creative and curious people in the world. For a while, more and more people flocked to it, and its power increased exponentially. But at some point the distance became too large: The Singularity was beyond human understanding, a “weakly godlike superintelligence” as the futurists call it, and those who were outside were not the most adventurous souls of mankind. And so the Singularity developed on its own. It fixed the climate, restored extinct species, re-knitted the web of life, reclaimed deserts. From a shining city in orbit, the Singularity looked at its work and presumably saw that it was good.

Then, on the night of Passover, they left. This event is when the new era began: AS, After Singularity. Some call it the Rapture of the Nerds, but technically most of them were already gone before that. Nobody knows what happened. Suddenly, the City in the Sky shone like many suns, and then it was gone. Some think it left for another planet or another solar system or another galaxy. Some think it traveled in time, or to another dimension. Some think it ascended to a higher plane. Some think it will come back one day. Some think it realized that life is meaningless and blew itself to atoms.

The dullards inherited the Earth: The dimwitted, the conformist, the fearful, the unimaginative and uninspired. Homo Sapiens Mundanis has locked itself in an idealized, endless 1990es where progress is both impossible and unwanted. For almost a century, life has repeated itself like this, the remnant of mankind slowly growing back in a world just beyond their comprehension, quietly maintained by vaguely humanoid robots and semi-intelligent machines. But a tiny glimmer of change is beginning: The nano-witchards consider themselves the Heirs of the Ascended, and they intend to change everything, again.

This backstory explains many of the anomalies of The Sims 2 as relics of the Singularity or the time just before it, when technology was indistinguishable from magic. Here are some of the weirdness from The Sims 2 and its expansion packs that fall in this category:

-Robots more intelligent than the sims: These vaguely humanoid robots became plentiful during the last years before the Singularity, and did all the hard work. They can repair themselves, or failing that, each other, and are still good as new generations later. They can also produce the kits needed to create more robots, but seem to have no will to actually produce new robots themselves and take over the world.

-Aliens and saucers. The green aliens with big black eyes are not actually from another planet, although they live there now. They are a faction that parted ways with the Singularity after they had reached near-magic technology but before the final integration into a common mind. They occasionally decide to improve the gene pool of the earthlings by making men pregnant with little green babies. Why men? Nobody knows. It is uncertain whether there are female “aliens”, certainly no one has seen any.

-Werewolves, vampires, bigfoot and plantsims: Results of genetic experiments in the run-up to the Singularity. With the possible exception of Bigfoot, they are the result of highly advanced viruses that can transform humans into alternate forms. The reason for this added diversity is lost with the Singularity Exodus, but a mechanism was put in place to make the mutations reversible.

-Djinns: Djinns are holograms, created by the artificial intelligence inside the lamps. They fulfill wishes, but only three in the same area, then they need to be moved. These lamps are examples of nanotechnology, indistinguishable from magic. The resurrect-o-tron is another example, which can return a dead person to life, but not always perfectly. The djinn can also do this, and the two artifacts are probably from the same time, the last year of the Old Era.

-The Gypsies: The people known as the Gypsies are ordinary humans but are following instructions from the Singularity and are provided for by the nanomagic they serve. They distribute the lamps and use another relic from the end of the Old Era, the crystal balls that are interfaces to an information technology far superior to any that has existed before or since.

-Witches: The final gift of the Singularity was the Wand, the Cauldron and the Spellbook. A nanotechnology truly indistinguishable from magic, witchery can perform a wide range of functions, including creating copies of the artifacts themselves. Witches / wizards (known in my story collectively as witchards) do not actually understand the “magic” they use, but are convinced that by spreading the use of it, they will usher in a golden age where humans will once again regain their former intellect and creativity.

So there you have The Sims 2. Electric equipment that doesn’t need cables, toilets that don’t need plumbing, houses that raise themselves, the occasional robot, witch or vampire; but nobody realizes that the real 1990es weren’t like that, because nobody remembers that time anymore except from old TV series.

Limits of redistribution

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Redistribution of cake may seem like a good idea, but how will you redistribute the fat?

In “honor” of the international holy day of Socialism, I will write briefly again about why I am thoroughly anti-socialism.

Basically, socialism is a movement in which it is assumed that people should not need to take responsibility for their choices. But you can only do this up to a point. Even if we imagine that a society could exist where people will work just as eagerly for the common good as for their own – although no such society has ever existed – we would still only have come a short way. You can redistribute money, but you cannot for instance redistribute health, knowledge, happiness, meaning.

You can certainly redistribute health care. Those who are healthy can work and pay taxes which are then spent for medication, hospital stay, tests, surgery and so on for the sick. Indeed, if the government did not arrange for this, we ought to do it on our own accord. But this can only fix what is broken. We cannot transfer health itself. Health is something more than being repaired every time we break down. Living a healthy life is much more than that. To compare it to something else, even if you are not freezing to death, you are not necessarily warm. In the same way, even if you are not dying, you are not necessarily healthy.

If every person who had functioning legs decided to walk half an hour a day, we would not only save billions in preventable lifestyle diseases. People would also feel more energetic, their mood would improve, they would think more clearly, they would look more pleasing to the eye, and they would sleep better at night. This is not some revelation just I have had, this is solid scientific fact and ought to be in school textbooks if it isn’t there already. As you can understand, only a small part of the benefits can be transferred by taxing those who walk and using that money to patch up those who just sit there.

It is like this all around. If you don’t read good books, no amount of taxing me can give you the knowledge and insight and pleasure that I derive from reading. If you don’t meditate, no amount of taxing me can give you the peace and wisdom that should have been your birthright as a human. If you envy others, your frustration will never stop gnawing inside you. These things cannot be transferred by the state, or by any other human institution.

Redistribution is sometimes necessary, and we should have done so voluntarily. When we as a society did not, we were punished with socialism. But for the most part, redistribution is not possible. Most of life we must take responsibility for anyway, or suffer the consequences to some degree.