The Uncanny Valley vs. The Focus Grouped Persona

Something occurred to me after listening to a few clips of Mint Romney over the last few days. In each he seemed to be hitting exactly the wrong emotional note, even though he was doubtless getting the lines his advisers had programmed him to say completely right. In one case, he sounded like the guy in High School who was desperate to be popular, but who was never going to be, while in another, he sounded like someone who believes he is superior lecturing you on some point he thinks obvious. To me he seems the Republican version of Al Gore. Alike in that Al Gore allowed his advisors to so control everything of his presentation and message, to script every gesture and expression, that he could no longer relate to the personna that he was presenting at all - though he did not forget his lines, delivered them woodenly perhaps, but never missed them completely. People could detect that his internal emotions were simply never agreeing with what he was presenting. I suddenly found myself wondering what the Uncanny Valley really is. It doesn't seem likely to be a way of keeping us away from androids, and bad computer animation, rather it might be something actually useful. It's a way of detecting when the inner emotional state isn't agreeing with the presentation. This would indicate the person has a hidden agenda, though one can't exactly pin down what it might be. Safer just to ooze away from this person, since you can't figure out what they are up to. Lifelike animation, and androids are hitting the exact same microscopic woodenness that people following a script with a hidden agenda have.

Scandal

The idea of scandal and how society responds to scandal has changed a great deal in the past few decades. Up until the sixties, people exerted a great deal of effort to prevent anything from becoming public. The worst thing imaginable in a 19th century novel, would be for people to find out and talk about whatever affair or liaison was driving the plot. No one must know, if they do know, they must be persuaded not to speak of the matter under any circumstances. What actually happened is almost beside the point, what really scares the characters is that others might find out and talk. This will cause scandal, and they will be ruined. I believe that, before the sixties, this would have been the prevailing view. It did not so much matter what happened, what mattered was whether people knew and spoke about the matter... If they did, one was ruined, if not, the problem did not actually exist.

Various large organizations, most notably the Catholic Church, did not make this transition gracefully. Also one finds a moment in most government cover-ups and scandals where people seem to believe that they are operating under the old rules. If only they can stop people from talking, then there will actually not be a problem - that is, it's not the illegal or scandalous activity that's the problem, the problem is that people are talking about it.

With the modern outlook being so clear, and apparently self-evident: that everything must be immediately made public, it's not the scandal that causes the damage, it's the cover-up... it is difficult to remember or even conceive that people ever thought differently. Why would they have been so determined to keep people from speaking about scandals and foibles publicly, but not so very concerned with stopping the activities themselves? I wondered for a few moments before an idea occurred to me - they are trying to keep conflict inside the society to an absolute minimum. One might think of society as a collection of individuals making their own individual choices, some of these choices perhaps not the best. This idea is not cohesive enough if the society believes itself under threat, however. Then it must enforce a social order, and act to stamp out conflict, and situations which threaten to cause conflict.

I lived in Seattle for several years and jogged through an older part of town. I noticed that the large, attractive older homes had no driveways, they did, however, have alleys in the back. Why would this be? I suddenly realized that respectable people would enter and be received in special rooms, kept presentable just for this purpose, while workmen, servants and others less respectable would enter through the alley. Garbage, and other things not to be mentioned, will be remove through the alley. If the master of the house has been indulging in a late night revelry at the brothels down in Pioneer square, perhaps he will enter through the back, so as not to disrupt the harmonious and respectable facade which fronts the street. There is no problem with him going to the brothels, as long as it does not disrupt the facade of the house, which the family has painstakingly constructed to present to the world. In this society, essentially everyone would know which door was the correct door for them to enter. They would keep themselves sorted according to respectability, and their less agreeable aspects would remain behind a screen in the alley.

The collision between the modern outlook and this older world would be undermining to both. The older world is a world in which people keep themselves sorted by social standing automatically, and in which all manner of actions can be tolerated so long as they stay behind a socially contrived screen. This older world puts great energy into indoctrinating social values so that people will automatically sort themselves by class, and so avoid confrontation. It places contrived social screens around all manner of behavior, at least for men, and so enables tolerating this behavior and avoids conflict. This society goes to great lengths to maintain a facade of harmony and order, whether this exists in reality or not. Was this older society under some sort of threat? Something which required it to repress internal conflicts in order to direct all its energies toward external difficulties? It does not seem to be this so much from what knowledge of history I possess. This older society seems to need to mobilize a great part of its resources and day to day social interactions in order to maintain its structure, its hierarchy of classes and genders, groups of higher and lower status, groups of outsiders and insiders. It seems archaic, blind and rigid, something to be thrown off at the soonest possible occasion. Yet the modern outlook has its strange blind spots as well, strange artifacts of vision like marketing and branding, the narrative, (a figure of modern speech which might uncharitably be called a lie), and many other strange artifacts obscuring clear sight. Just for an example, consider child care. Because people are willing to provide this service for free, at least for their own children, the market sees this as having a very low, or possibly no real value. People who try to sell this service are in competition with people providing it for free - it must not be very valuable... But if it is not done with at least some attention and care, you will end up with a population which is essentially unemployable. This is certainly of considerable economic value, but the market, by its very design, cannot price this service correctly. Modern society has perhaps dispensed with a considerable part of the social control and social enforcement, and replaced it with people who are trained to respond to market forces. When faced with difficulties, people are told that they need to consider their personal brand and make sure that they advertise and promote it in ways the market finds agreeable. A strange sort of social pressure this...

Nostalgia

It is strange to me how people believe that, in the time when they were children, everything was right with the world. Men were men, government worked, people only slept with socially approved partners, all was rosy in the land. At some point in the 50's, or in my case the 60's, paradise was evidently to be found on Earth, but ever since, an inexorable decay has afflicted the nation, and everything has made it's inexorable progress straight to hell.

I myself do not remember particularly enjoying childhood. I remember a fellow who was even more shut-off, rigid, and defensive in some ways than he is now. A fellow who was incredibly impatient to do and hear all those things that you can only do - when you are older. I remember moments that still seem almost perversely humiliating and embarrassing, such as loosing a fight, and hiding under a trailer crying in rage and humiliation, only to have the fellow who beat me, and everybody else in the neighborhood, come over to feel sorry for me and ask me whether I was all right. Things simply could not have been any worse as far as I was concerned. I remember another moment in second grade. I saw a group of boys from my class all fighting another kid, I had no idea who he was. I joined in of course. It was just being part of the crowd, the pack, exciting, something different, like when the fire alarm went off and you got to go outside. The unfortunate recipient of our mob attack acquitted himself quite well everyone agreed. It was only many years later, when that image of the moment appeared in my mind that I realized - the kid's Hispanic... and I was in an all white school... that's what we were fighting about. I had no idea at the time, none whatsoever. I don't remember seeing him again after that day. All these sorts moments return to me at odd times, afflict me with defensiveness, hostility, humiliation as though they were present at this moment. Where is the rosy glow to be found?

Usury

Usury is a sin because, in a zero growth economy, people with money to lend would end up owning everything in the space of two or three generations. Traditional cultures are all based on an idea of zero growth. Agriculture is the source of essentially all wealth, and this has a constant output in these societies. There might be good years and bad years, but overall harvests move up and down around the average, so wealth remains constant. Merchants, (the people with money that could be lent), are almost always regarded as the lowest people in the society, only one step above peasants. To a traditional society, they would be the most disruptive class of all, for they will always be trying to increase their wealth, and, in a zero growth society, this will always come at the expense of some other group. The idea that merchants could be the dominant group in society appeared as Europe expanded out into the rest of the world, and actual growth became possible, even if only at the expense of other societies. At this point earning money by lending money was no longer a certain way to ruin, and a threat to social order; it was a way to make expansion even faster.

CEO's vs. AI's

I read a bit online about the CEO of netflix Reed Hastings being seduced by the high share price of his firm into a number of ruinous mis-calculations, and I thought, that's right, I remember thinking that AI's would probably be better than human CEO's in most circumstances. An AI would most likely not be another Steve Jobs, creating a couple of new industries, and replacing the PC with a device you can put in your pocket and make phone calls on, but most companies aren't like Apple. The average company, by my thinking, exists in sort of a steady state. It can probably be described by a set of rules. When this gets too much, sell this and buy that... When expenses are too high, lay-off people, and focus on the most profitable products... And so on. These are the sort of tasks that AI's excel at. The sudden blooming or crash of the share price won't bamboozle an AI at all. It will simply be another factor that can be optimized according to the AI's rule set. In the true excellence of the modern world, it should be possible to lay-off most CEO's and simply return value to the share holders - something CEO's are always claiming to do when they undertake some activity that would lead to you or I being prosecuted for fraud.

Musical Robot

This morning I remembered something I had read a long time ago, in the 90's I was certain. Something about a computer that you could feed scores from Bach, for instance, and it would search for patterns and create works that were reasonably close to the same style. You could feed the program an Indonesian folk tune, and it would spit out a rendition of how Bach might have treated the melody. I remember downloading midi files that were produced by the program. The files were utterly mechanical, but a machine encoding of a real score would be too, I reasoned. This led me to wonder where the music as such actually appeared. I've made attempts at classical guitar from time to time, and it seems that you must make some sort of feeling, or heart sense of the score. Something that assumes a human sort of emotion on the part of the creator. So one senses, if the music turned like this it would have to feel this way. You put this sense of how human emotions would work into the score, so that maybe the music as such was actually from the performer rather than the composer. This morning, it occurred to me that this emotional structure is a pattern as well, and so it should be possible to analyze and reproduce in the same manner as Bach's style. I wondered if anyone had done anything more with this music composing program since. It seems that it is now possible to imitate the external surface of all human productions, (art, science, math, conversation, etc.), with increasing perfection. The inner experience of seeing, feeling, playing perhaps eludes, but how much substance does this have?

(I discovered the program through the miracle of Google in one not particularly good search. It was called Experiments in Musical Intelligence or EMI, and created by David Cope. A link to an article about it on the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/11/science/undiscovered-bach-no-a-computer-wrote-it.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm ).

Two videos I thought were something

Stupidly I thought all the strings were sampled when I first listened to this band on the KEXP in studio performance. Probably just some guy with a bunch of pedals and loops or something. And the vocals seemed that sort of alterna-cute that I've been growing to loath the last few years. Listened to the whole show, however, and decided that they were inarguably good. Jotted the name of the band down on a scrap of paper so I could get a look on YouTube and this is what I found. Now, I admit that violin girl had me pretty much transfixed the first time I watched the video, but the music grows on me more and more. I even see the goodness of the vocals. It all works together and isn't just another copy of god knows how many alterna-bands.




I particularly like this video. The way that they have used the old, grainy, washed out VCR footage, and cut it to make it follow the feeling of the songs seems really excellent to me. The girl throws off such a vibe - but she just doesn't move at all - ties one in knots. All really great work in the video. I wasn't sure whether I liked the song the first time I heard it, but it gets better and better as well.

Being Correct

I was dispatched to mow my brother's back lawn... It was waste high weeds, filled with pits the two dogs had dug in their incredible exuberance - in short a couple of days work to subdue. This was not a problem at all for me, as I had utterly nothing to do at the time, and needed the distraction. Utter unemployment is a kind of grinding tedium even if you imagine you have deep thoughts to think, and brilliant artistic endeavors to make mediocre attempts of. My brother has picked up and moved his family to Germany, apparently on a whim of his own. I could guess some change was needed, but I never really got the chance to ask him just what brought all this about. South Prairie Washington might be a bit of a narrow rut, and if one were ever to escape, the time would have to be now. So, off they went and it was time for us to rent the house, but the condition of the back yard was not going to be any help at all.

On the second day as I was finishing up, I found a small SUV parked out front. An older, heavyset woman got out and asked me if I could possibly show her the house. She said that she had made an appointment to see the house, but the real estate agent was twenty minutes late. I muttered something about just being a family member here to help out with the lawn, and I really shouldn't be interfering with the business side - that should be the real estate agent. Maybe she could try calling the agent again? I went on loading up the lawnmower, and finished all the last few things about.

The woman was obviously having no luck with the real estate agent. It is my nature to avoid people if I can possibly discover some pretext that would enable me to evade them - a fault I struggle with endlessly, with little evidence of progress. If I see someone who I know vaguely, the first thought-feeling thing that appears in my chest is - "Maybe I can avoid them... They might not see me if I crossed the street..." Things have been like this for as long as there has been a "me" so far as I can recall, and efforts of mine have not had any too much of an effect. So I stopped for a second, being determined to overcome my flaws, and generally filled with a determination to be a correct and generally civil person... I should at least be able to manage that much I tell myself. I took out a penny and flipped it six times in a sort of abbreviated, brain damaged version of casting the I Ching. This is something I do when I really would rather avoid something, but have the suspicion that I really should just gird my nether parts and deal with it. It doubtless makes me appear passing strange, but I simply would never come to a decision at all without some stratagem. This time I received the Hexagram Po / Splitting Apart. "Splitting Appart means ruin," and "It does not further one to undertake anything." Now, if I had not been so determined to Be Correct, I would have stopped right there, just avoided the woman, and gone on my way, even though I had the distinct impression that I was being rude and generally unhelpful. Instead, I walked over and opened up the garage and told the woman that I would show her the house.

The woman was quite talkative, she was raising horses not far from here... she would be living here with only her female friend... she would do some landscaping in the back yard and take care of everything... it was so peaceful and perfect out here. I told her that she would need to get in touch with the real estate agent and work out the details, and wished her luck with that, as it seemed the agent wasn't someone you could actually count on to show.

A couple of months later there are complaints from the neighbors that the people have five dogs shut up in the house while they are away, everything stinks and is covered with dog doo - a regular landlord's nightmare. Orders have been received from across the waters to evict them, but given the energetic nature of the agent, I wouldn't be hopeful. They had previously received some instruction to reduce the number of dogs which they were evidently fighting with some sort of legal action... And all of this has been brought about by my determination to Be Correct. My ongoing attempt to deal with the human race a bit more effectively. And I was warned this particular case was a bad idea for good measure.

I wonder at times if it were not perhaps better to avoid the human race altogether. I seem to be well constructed to do so, and the rewards of the attempt are generally nothing that one might hope for. Generally a hazard, or even more likely, a pebble falling into a pond without raising so much as a ripple. This attempt to improve and at least Be Correct seems to be a menace. It leaves me pushing up a steep hill with difficulty, and does nothing for judgement and foresight. I scarcely speak, but I am often glad that I at least had the sense not to say that, though I saw nothing wrong with saying that but a short moment before. At times I attempt to push myself in front of people and demand attention. The results range from confusing to edifying. Often, it seems that I am totally invisible, though I am standing in front of people yelling and waving my arms about. Then again, at times there is some sudden hostility for things which seem utterly harmless, at least as far as I can see. People are apparently quite favorable, as long as I do and say nothing... a thing highly recommended by the Tao Te Ching, but not seemingly a way to any success in our present world. In this world where each person must run their own marketing department, and battle to promote their own personal brand such an idea would seem quaint, if not actually fatal.

Astrology

A friend of mine once long ago gave me the nickname of "Mood" because of my impossible mood swings from friendly to hostile over some tiny nothing of a turn of phrase, something said I didn't agree with, whatever. The memory of this nickname returns to me regularly and I make a show of living it down... with a notable lack of success. I go forth with the idea that I will attempt to leave my isolate existence and associate with the human race, but one never quite knows what the heart will have in store for one when one arrives. (I call the heart the "chest" in this guise, a place of poisonous and circular turmoil, as opposed to the "heart" which would always have some idea of reaching toward the good, if doubtful on the means at times). I blame astrology for these moods. (Actually, I do nothing of the sort. They seem mine entire, to the point of laming all progress. It would be better if I did, I might be able to walk with somewhat more ease in that case). Some couple of days ago I had one of these attacks. I went out to Starbucks feeling perfectly sane on the way there, sat down, and found myself surrounded by a toxic, squishy, sticky region. People all round about were throwing off tiny, most microscopic gestures intended to get me to pay attention to them. I would simply not yield to any such underhandedness. A clear boundary would be marked, they would stay on their side, I would stay on mine, and, maybe, after a due interval had passed, and they had done sufficient penance, I would suffer them to exist. I had not an attack of this sort of mood for at least a few weeks. It was a complete surprise, and enough to remind me of my nickname.

Now, when I got home I had a look at my transiting planets, and found something, (there being so many indications and so many things that might mean this or that in Astrology one almost always will find something). That day we had Mercury conjunct natal Neptune and Saturn square natal Saturn - good enough for a heap of unpleasantness by some lights. Nothing unusual about finding some indications. When I feel my chest is burning and I simply must do something, whether a good or bad idea makes no difference, I have a look and find that Mars is square to something or other, like as not. I have no idea what to make of this. Do I have some unconscious calculation going to set my mood appropriately? I don't check these things all that often, but the indications are only of my inner moods, never of events, and so infinitely maleable.

I began to investigate Astrology some years ago. I had determined that I was utterly at a dead end and wanted some insight that would give me some guidance to whatever blind spot was holding me back. Some years earlier I had made a passing acquaintance with Astrology, and been amazed to find that the planets in the signs seemed almost like a map of my personality. I found this quite amazing at the time. I was much of the opinion that, if one found something that seemed to work, or gave insight, the correct approach was to lay out its internal logic and consequences, and not attempt to argue until you understood its inner workings. And so, at a time when I had more time than sense and no direction to steer at all, I began a fairly thorough study. I found more impediments and obstructions in my personality, many more than in my first brush with Astrology, but I only seemed to see things which I had discovered by painful trial on my own. I had ground along some painful track - and look, there it was in the chart as well. Was there insight in this, or was it only interpreted in - I still really cannot say.

The End is Nigh

Capitalism requires growth. It simply cannot exist in a steady state, and thereby it approaches its end. This arises from two causes: the first being the necessities of paying interest, and the second the inherent severity of zero sum games. Companies must return profits to their investors which are comparable to what would be earned from savings. This would be compound interest, which is an exponential. So a company's profits must be on an exponential curve, or investors will flee it for some more profitable investment. These sales will most often involve at least some increase in materials, so the consumption of environmental goods will be pushed towards an exponential curve. Any exponential curve which involves consuming matter rather than mathematics, does not go on very long, and the result of its end is rather drastic. Now, it might be argued that greater efficiencies will enable us to produce more with less, and so avoid any sort of inconvenience and unpleasantness. Indeed cars get better mileage, strand board replaces plywood for homes, (of course the trees really have all been cut down, making plywood too expensive for homes). The market finds some more efficient substitute. Yet the consumption of material is on some sort of increasing curve regardless, and the Earth is finite and fixed. At some point in the not too distant future, these curves will inevitably intersect.

The second requirement of growth for the survival of Capitalism is due to the severity of zero sum games. Growth softens this severity, it actually makes The Future. You do not need to grab whatever you can right now, you can put it off till The Future, when there will be more than enough for everyone. The Future will always have more of everything so nothing is lost by saving, or spending time on a futile job - The Future will inevitably produce much more of everything, so everyone can eventually be happy, even if they aren't right now. Without Growth The Future becomes a wil'o the wisp, a complete fantasm. Without Growth, if anyone is to have more, the food will have to be taken from someone else's mouth. Any gain is someone else's loss. (In fact, I wonder if some of the poison of present American politics is not due to stagnant incomes of the middle class gradually filtering into people's emotional response, bypassing reason. They are now fighting for the scraps and are in the emotional state one might expect). Without The Future the emotional underpinnings which make Capitalism possible disintegrate.

We might perhaps even save ourselves by using all the knowledge we have acquired by tracking every single purchase that every single person has made for their entire lives. We could perhaps use this incredible amount of information to see what will actually produced happiness, but instead we will use it for Marketing, and so hasten our own downfall.

Reading Entrails

Really now, we would be better off slaughtering a goat and reading the entrails than listening to these people. Such was my thought a couple of days ago while listening to NPR interview a list of economists. I have had this thought repeatedly since the financial crisis and occasionally before. I found it even more pointed when it occured to me that since a year or so ago economists have been saying that 2007 was the beginning of the recession. This was a boom year for those living through it, and you heard not one word to the contrary from any economists speaking at the time. It's hard to fathom how the recession could have begun so long before the crash without some of their august group noticing, particularly if the field is credited with being any sort of science. Really, we should return to reading entrails for economic prognostication - it would be more accurate.

We live in a time when every economic activity we undertake is tracked and stored in a database. This has been going on at least since the mid 90's, yet I don't think anyone has taken this data and checked the fudamental assumptions of economics. We walk into a store and make endless economic decisions. One can actually see how price is related to demand, or how increases in price cause people to substitute one item for another. Every single granular economic decision that people make has now been documented for a period of several decades, yet we cannot determine we are in a recession till several years later, or that several times the entire world's GDP is pooling in a bunch of obscure derivatives. How can this be? Since this is supposedly a science, it must be brought back into conformity with the data that is now readily available.

IBM's Watson

Well, so much for being employed to answer phones and type indeterminate nothings into some computer - Watson has me covered. Phones always freaked me out anyway - some sort of mojo with spirit voices talking to me - I actually can't make any sense out of why they are so unpleasant to me, but my god they are. At least I have been delivered from them, all thanks to Watson. Once Watson can run on something resembling standard hardware the better part of all cubicle rodents will no longer be needed. So much for my hopes for some sort of simple job that didn't involve mopping floors or stacking boxes.

Watson would be an actual AI if he were hooked up to a neural net of something like a sea slug, (which I remember reading had 200 neurons or so, easily emulated). Plug this in so that he experiences pleasure when he gets an answer right and pain when he gets an answer wrong and off he will go, a real honest to god AI.

I wondered what it would be like inside a mind of this sort, tried to visualize it. Here's what I saw: Everything is in its assigned drawer in there. Think of any fact and it is instantly there, exactly as requested, nothing more, nothing less. There would never be a moment when you half remember something, a moment when you've got a picture forming in your mind, but not clear enough to make out what you were trying to remember. Also, most likely never a picture appearing in your mind that suggests something you hadn't thought of. Metaphors would probably seem nonsensical to this mind. They make sense to us partly because our minds are filled with fragmentary pictures which immediately jump to other fragmentary pictures... while any picture which appeared in this mind would be exactly the image which it had intended to retrieve. It would make none of the arbitrary connections which are built into the very structure of our memories. Buddhists will be happy to know that Watson will still be bound to the wheel of suffering, however. I don't think any sort of self-directed mind can exist without pleasure and pain.