Smallhouse Log

Palm Sunday

"So if you've got a lot of love to give, and you don't know who to give it to, I'mma turn out the lights, suck this cigarette, and sing a song about you. This one's for you."

I like provolone.

That's how it's spelled on the package.

Saturday
"A good rule of thumb is to pretend like you were going to wear pants, and then just fail to put them on." -NoPantsDay.com

That's right, yo, it's official. No. Pants. Day. You so know I'm all over that like a vegan on hummus. It'd the first Friday of May, for anyone else who's interested.

Certain individuals might also notice that things are becoming a little different around here. Well, most of you should recognise a few obvious *cough*returnof*cough*imageflips*cough* changes, but there are, I assure you, other ones. Timy solutions to small problems that have been not bugging me that much, but which I might as well fix while I'm mucking about.

We actually cleaned up the room, too.

No, for reals. Which brings me to my next point: Anyone not already familiar with Gizoogle needs to become so quicklizzle fo' shizzle.

WORD.

later that day
"Briefly describe it in the blanket below." -a psych study at the DRL

In other news, I totally fixed some problems with the link pages, as well as updated some of them. Rock on, me.

Also, I just noticed how appropriate the obligatory song lyric at the beginning of the last post was. I put it there for the "just to hear somebody say...." bit, actually. Serendipity.

Yes, well, back to real work. And by 'back to' I mean 'time to start doing'.

Monday, Finals Week
"Watching Johnny Depp movies will not help you pass finals week. It might get you through finals week, but you will not pass." - Nancy, 03/06/2005

"You'd build a robot, give it a tongue so it could talk, just to hear somebody say, 'It'll be OK.'"

So I've been getting complaints about the quality of my procrastination recently; that is to say, there are those, among whom might exist certain individuals with a greater-than-moderate amount of influence over me, who are of a belief that I have not posted enough recently.

I say ye "Fie!" I posted only a week ago. I've gone longer in silence than that. Bah.

So the crushing weight of Artificial Intelligence projects and studying I will do today is a nice tie-in to something I've been meaning to talk about. The other day, in class, Ms. Levow was discussing various problems of machine speech laerning, including grammatical atrocities commited by the input base. An exact quote was "They were produced by a person, so they should be an acceptable string." This struck me as an odd sort of discrimination; are humans inherently superior to computers? What would you call such a discrimination? 'Humanism' and 'Naturalism' are both already meaningful, as is, from different tack, 'Autism'. What, then? Organicism? Carbonism?

Moreover, lately I've been engrossed in reading Brian Herbert's Dune prequils regarding the war of humanity to free itself from the 'thinking machines'. In these books, someone had given their AI systems too much power, and they had immediately taken over first that world, then most others, and played an antagonistic role towards humanity. More questions are raised by this, of course. Are computer 'scientists' (hey, folks, I know a misnomer when I see one) going to bring about the end of the world? Will AI ever reach the advanced levels experienced in so much science fiction; could we ever actually create artificial sentience, and if so, what is to prevent it from becoming malevolent or antagonistic? (I know some people would say that computers are already antagonistic, but that's beside the point.)

In this discusson, the distinction between artificial intelligence and artificial sentience is critical. Intelligent systems are already common; they analyse data and make decisions, some of them are capable of learning. They are not, however, conscious, not what we typically mean when we say 'self-aware'. They have no sense of anything that is not hard-coded or inputted into them; they follow imperitives according to their programming. This is not to say that they do not have an awareness of themselves at all, or that they lack any sense of self-preservation; both can be programmed into the system. Take, for example, a learning system that modifies itself based on new input: it knows what and where it is, and can change itself. Take, for example, clever viruses: They are coded to hide and reproduce, propogating themselves, keeping themselves, as it were, 'alive'. Now, neither system cares about either motivation; they simply do what is in their nature until they are stopped.

Artificial sentience, on the other hand, is a scary thing. This is where almost all 'robot horror' scifi draws its core from. 2001: A Space Odyssey, that I, Robot movie, and many more. By giving something like a computer free will, the gates are opened for whole new possibilities, and it is human fascination with the horrible that does the rest.

Which leads to other questions. Is it possible to have a being possed of free will, but not of a soul? Do the two go hand-in-hand? Would a sentient computer be capable of faith? Would they become like us, knowing good from evil, having been forced by their creators to partake of that damning fruit whose story we are all familiar with?

Is it in us, as humans, to create creatures after our own image?

....

"I am immortal, I have inside me blood of kings."

I had wished also to discuss the nature of discrimination today, but I think I've said enough things for now. I do, after all, have work to do.

And this time, I don't mean arson.

Monday, Ninth Week

The Internets hold much that is beautiful, and much that is horrible. I was taking some time to read Tricky's blog, and one thing he had to say just struck me as being remarkably true and beautiful: "If the truth behind a painting could be captured in an essay, why paint?"

Subsequently, I went to the comments section to remark upon it. Now, the comments on Tricky's blog have ads at the bottom, by where you type new comments in, and one of them caught my eye. The link read, in bold, "Aborting Gay Babies" and undernead that, "Are you still pro-choice?"

Now I'm no fan of abortion -to be concise, I see it as stright-up killing of human beings- but what. is. this?! What kind of horrible, twisted person thinks up things like this? Granted, I did not click the link, but I am disgusted nonetheless. For all I know, this may be a legitimate social issue, but can anyone give me a good reason for it to be treated so crassly? I doubt there is one.

Unfortunately, that wasn't even the first horrible thing of the day. Czech this out. A girl's picture ganked from her senior yearbook because she's wearing a tuxedo. That's not even deviant behavior, and makes for a lot nicer a picture than some girls' senior photos I've seen. It doesn't matter that she IS a lesbian; this is a matter of personal freedom and flagrant abuse of authority. Bah!

In much happier news, my birthday present for Tori was very well received, and I had a pleasant, if not restful, time out in the suburbs. While I was there, the cutest thing happened, as well. It had been the case that Ellie would say "Tick-tock!" and Aunt Jomari would say "Mommy loves you!" Jomari would say "Tick-tock!" to Ellie, though, Ellie would also say, "Mommy loves you!" Aunt Jomari had, we were told, been trying unsuccessfully to get her to respond with "Ellie loves you!" At some point during dinner, someone said "Tick-tock", and Ellie immediately said, "Ellie loves you!" Then this whole thing was explained, and Ellie went around the entire table saying "Tick-tock!" to everyone,and getting the appropriate responese. It was adorable.

I don't have anything funny to end with; I just want to go do my homework now.

Saturday

On my way to the suburbs for Tori's birthday party, I met a homeless woman, Peggy. We aited together at the Garfield green line for the train, and we talked until she had to get off at Bronzeville/IIT. She asked about school, and Tori, and my family. She talked about her own son, who goes to school at 52nd and Ellis, and chided me for not getting good grades. We talked about the lack of Christian spirit in Hyde Park.

For some reason, talking with Peggy, more than anything else that's happened recently, has assured me that the world is still a good place.