I am lazily entertaining the idea of writing a (slightly trolling) article which would use Russian fairy tales as a proof that the Singularity has already come and gone. Koschei the Immortal was a remotely-controlled cyborg [obviously, the needle in the well-hidden egg was its core chip located in a distant cloud]. Baba Yaga was a posthuman messing with the biotechnology [house on chicken legs] and antigravitation transport [flying mortar]. As heartwarming souvenirs from the glorious past, she kept some random artifacts (the ball of yarn which could unwind to a certain location [GPS device], the food-making [food-printing] tablecloth, the magic apple that rolled over a plate and revealed [the output from well-hidden remote webcams] the world's miracles etc). Eventually she donated these artifacts to the uncouth savages just for the fun of it. Three-(5,7,12)-headed dragon might have been a self-repairing biorobot, which is why one had to cut off all its heads at once. And so on, and so on 

The last encouragement for such article might have been this great site: http://atom.singularity2050.com/ One just can't help playing the advocatus diaboli to offset the happy extrapolation spree.
d:)dfdfdf
dfd

Re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness

I used to assign SF works to one of the two broad categories, loosely labeled "fun reading" and "food for thought".

"Fun reading", for me, includes many of the space operas, a.k.a SF fairy tales: quick page-turners, full of awesome glitter and breath-taking adventures, but once you are beyond the last page and yet another impossible world begins to fade in your imagination, the details of the story get quickly forgotten.

"Food for thought" might be quite a hard reading, not done overnight. But these stories tend to stick around, often for years. They tackle issues which don't get easily solved, or for which the solutions appear to be quite unsatisfactory, and / or these issues look plausible enough to make a permanent dint in the reader's mind. One well-known example: dystopias. One more is when the depicted worlds are only slightly different from the world we are used to, but the nature of the difference touches the very fundament which we have always assumed intact.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, to me, is one of the rare books that manages to combine an easy-to-follow narrative with a deep story behind it.

It rethinks one of the most basic phenomena in the human civilization: the gender, by showing a world where "static" gender, in our definition, does not exist: its inhabitants periodically become either male or female, depending on the subtle circumstances normally beyond their control. For the most part of their lives though, they are neutral and neither engaged nor interested in one of the most profound drives of our own civilization: sex.

Other than that, Gethen, the world described by Le Guin, is not at all dissimilar from ours. It has a traditional empire-like state and a more modern ("efficient", as they say) totalitarian regime. There are several religions, which aren't completely unlike the ones we have. They have creation myths and the legends about love and vendetta. People could love or hate each other, get rich, get poor, take revenge, be an adventurer or a home-sitter. Everything is the same, only the gender-related issues - family, attitude to relationships, child-rearing - are quite different. No gender dualism, no weaker or stronger sex, no sticker to put on a newly born child. Also, the Ice Age on Gethen hasn't ended yet, and the inhabitants had to deal with it for millennia.

The book follows a story of the first envoy of the interplanetary society, the Ekumen, who tries to include this strange world into the broader community of other human worlds. Half of the narrative is from his perspective, another half is from the perspective of the local person that happened to be closely involved, so there is a discovery process going on from two sides.

The premise is that all the human worlds were once created by some proto-demiurg civilization, and that civilization also took the liberty to tamper with human genetics in a number of different ways. Gethen, though, is unique in their gender curiosity. From their own perspective, the inhabitants of all the other worlds seem to be perverts: forever stuck in one gender, like animals on their own planet, by the way.

(Which also made me wonder, what if the tables were turned? What if it was the human society which was unique in their "gender rigidness" as an experiment? Did Le Guin considered such possibility?)

I am not going to retell the whole story here, it deserves to be read and re-read. What amazes me is that the book, even though it was written quite some time ago, doesn't feel outdated (which is an achievement in SF land). Also, the level of detail is quite high. And most importantly, the characters behave in such a way that it's possible to empathize with them. Strange as it is, that world seems to work. And then it's easy to ask oneself, what would be changed in our world under such conditions? How much of our history, philosophy and whole culture would've been changed beyond recognition? How should people feel when they are oscillating between two extremities at a whim of a chance?

I do wonder if anyone would soon dare to make a movie out of it. Showing the whole society of not-quite-men-or-women without making it either a caricature or an abstract concept is a big challenge. But hey, isn't it what the SF is (or should be) about: imagining something that is improbable, but not impossible?

Scary future, cool future, or both - on Firefall and Jean le Flambeur

Recently, I have read Blindsight + Echopraxia (a.k.a. Firefall) by Peter Watts, on one side, and The Quantum Thief + The Fractal Prince (a.k.a Jean le Flambeur) by Hashi Rajanemi, on another. (Not that I had both books on different sides simultaneously, of course - I wish I could!)

That was an interesting experience. Both authors mentioned that their books did not come out lightly. Both authors have put a lot of effort into their creations, providing many impressive details for their stories, and appear to be qualified to describe what they chose to. But the impression left by their work is quite different. From my, very personal and possibly biased, point of view, Peter Watts' books create one of the gloomiest near-future visions I've got acquainted with recently (which does not make these books less interesting to read, but they do describe the world quite dreary to live in). Hannu Rajanemi, on the other side, paints the picture of the world which seems to be quite fascinating (some parts of it, at least). Where his books might lack in depth, they try to compensate it by describing what could be defined as "poetry of existence". From that point of view, it's a space opera all right.

Rajanemi attempts to describe postsingularity/post human world by trying to imagine how much of the humanity would remain in it. I would list Roger Zelazny and Charles Stross as predecessors for (some aspects of) his style. I thought about Rajanemi first as Alastair Reynolds Lite, too. And perhaps Anthony Burgess, because Rajanemi also uses a few Russian words as labels for some of the concepts, and it makes a lot of sense from the native Russian speaker point of view. For example, he calls the gigantic agglomerates of conjoined minds Sobornost, which is a very special word, up to date used mostly in the religious context, to describe the concept of "togetherness" ("sobor" is a congregation of many Orthodox entities which becomes a legislative power for and because of those who joined in). Using this term in the new context of post-singularity feels like adding a bit of unexpected depth to the narrative. Calling the computronium superbrains gubernyas is a bit funny ("gubernya" is the old word for province), but it helps a bit to keep things consistent. I am not sure about the etymology of the term gogol, which he uses to describe the mind-copies. It can be associated either with a name of one particular company or with Nikolay Gogol, the Russian/Ukrainian writer who gave birth to a tale about a guy buying "the dead souls" (essentially passports of the peasants who have died but weren't yet reported as such, so not the souls themselves, but very shallow copies of them). I haven't researched what Rajanemi himself says about his terminology but I wouldn't be surprised if he chose this word as a homage to that story. A biggest grumble which I could have for Jean le Flambeur series is that the protagonists don't always seem convincingly real to care much for - they appear to be more like characters in a colorful cartoon or 3D-rendered scene rather than the creations of flesh and blood - though as post-singular beings, they are supposed to be anything but, except perhaps the Earth inhabitants (the book doesn't dwell much on the gory details). Nevertheless, the narrative is still elaborate enough to hold the readers' attention during the span of the book, and leave them willing for more.

Going back to Watts, I'd mention Stanislav Lem as his possible predecessor (The Invincible feels like a close call). I could imagine that some movie director would be able to do to Watts' works what Tarkovsky has done to Lem's Solaris, but that would have been a tough ordeal. Watts debunks most of the assumptions both about what being a human could be like and about the importance of humanity and human knowledge per se. Rajanemi builds his intricately colored sand castles in the rarely used, but well-kept sandbox, or perhaps, on the quiet seashore; Watts tries to build a fortress while the roaring ocean keeps throwing lumps of white foam and splashes of brine at his work, eventually gives up, stays to watch how his creation melts, overcome by some barely understood eerie forces of nature and invites the reader to appreciate the view. It is quite disheartening: concepts like friendship, love, conscience and ultimately the self-awareness itself appear to not be necessary to move forward there. More to say, they happen to be getting in the way of progress, which is all about getting more knowledge over the world and being able to change it at will. There come super-efficient humanoid predators, super-adaptive and super-intelligent grey mold and people who become zombies, cyborgs, uploaded pot plants or something that no longer has human reactions at all. Who said that the ultimate goal of the evolution was creating a human being? No one. We might stay behind as "baseline humans" while the further progress takes off without us. We might temporarily surge to certain heights, build efficient energy sources and create what we'd think represents a post-scarcity society, only to see it destroyed as by the first unexpected knocking from the outside world, which - surprise, surprise - neither plays by our rules nor cares much for them.

I wonder if the actually existing humanity gets much say in what its future should look like, but it's not unreasonable to start enumerating and reviewing the options. Which is why good SF makes a lot of sense to read. Even if some books seem to say "Look how scary, but cool the future could be" while the others go in the direction of "Look how cool, but scary the future could be". We need both fears and hopes in order to have a meaningful life, don't we?

On Blindsight (contains spoilers)

One of the many ways you can classify the books is whether they distract you from thinking or encourage you to think about something. Blindsight by Peter Watts, to me, falls in the second category.

There is that old discussion of what is intelligence about. Peter Watts tries to imagine intelligence without sentience - a thinking entity without an I that does the thinking. Blindsight, among other things, refers to that concept of an I which could be seen as an illusion distracting the individual from efficient acting. This reminded me of I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter which I've read recently. It has a different claim: that the possession of an I concept, even though it doesn't physically relate to anything, is the prerequisite of calling a being intelligent in the first place. I have to admit that it's pretty difficult to imagine intelligence without sentience, and such existence appears pretty dull to whatever I call "me". Nevertheless, it's an interesting possibility, and not being able to imagine something properly doesn't mean that it could never be true.

But that is not how the book begins. It begins with a story of a human who doesn't have empathy, due to an operation he endured as a child. He isn't even sure whether he can truly understand anything or whether he is just a human version of Chinese room - the construct which can provide correct answers to the outside queries without being able to explain what those answers could mean. The protagonist's disability became a blessing in disguise, turning him into an ideal "translator" between narrow specialists and the ordinary humans. He does it by tuning to the body language of those he translates from. Almost everything is seen through his eyes and told through his voice.

The protagonist has a dramatic past, including botched relationship and sad childhood memories. He sails back and forth between now and then during the narrative. Somehow, it made me think that perhaps our unhappiness is partially responsible for defining what we are. ("If we are not in pain, then we are not alive" - that's how the story begins). One side remark: notable that the author goes for describing a "traditional" relationship, while claiming that this kind of relationships already became old-style; I guess making a different choice here would be immensely more daunting task - after all, we, the readers, are still merely humans mostly living in the "real" world.

The world described by Watts - sometime in the future - doesn't feel warm and cuddly. For once, it has vampires, which are the product of genetic (re-)engineering, are said to be way more intelligent than any human but get a seizure whenever they see anything resembling a cross. (That last part doesn't make much sense from the rational point of view, but we have to take it as a given). They are held on drugs which both restrain them from their natural tendency to hunt warm-blooded human beings and help to overcome the cross impediment. The reason they exist is because people want problem-solvers smarter than them who would still not be machines. One of those vampires is heading the mission the protagonist is part of.

Also, there is a technocratic version of Paradise called "Heaven", where people can dream off the rest of their lives in the self-designed VR worlds. It's not uploading into the cloud: destroying the body also destroys the Heaven inhabitant. The protagonist's mother, whom he always calls by her first name, has left for that world. The protagonist's father is one of the few people on Earth who still do work (he is busy with planetary security). Those who choose "to not be a parasite" often become cyborgs, changing their minds and bodies. (Examples present in the mission crew). There is a bit of sad irony to realize that those who chooses to work do nothing else but benefit those parasites, but who wouldn't care, as long as it boosts their dopamine and serotonin levels. (Speaking about happiness).

The storyline is exponential: it starts slowly and then accelerates. An idea falls into the gravity field of the narrative, gets enshrouded by flesh and blood on the way, and eventually explodes due to overheating, leaving some charred remains in the aftermath. The non-sentient and superintelligent aliens, an advanced version of cosmic ants, are inhabiting a scary-looking artifact, devoid of any sense of beauty, but capable of almost anything. They cannot communicate with humans because there is nothing to communicate about. They can conjure "a collective I", but it's nothing but Chinese room to us. There isn't any individual on the other side. Every alien being is nothing but an efficient autonomous agent / data storage unit. The little crew of the human spaceship goes through lot of pain to get to that truth. The vampire storyline also has a resolving point, a bit rough if you ask me. Many questions are answered in the end, but not all of them, and the end itself feels rather a prolonged pause than a real conclusion. (There is a second book by Watts which seems to be playing in the same world, but I am not yet sure whether it's a sequel, a prequel or an alternate reality).

Unwelcome as that world appears, the book is worth reading, not only for that question about the nature of intelligence that it poses, but also for the insights into psychology of human interaction (the little isolated crew in stressful conditions being a suitable playground for that). I would rather not to provide more plot details, it's better to read the story.

But if human conscience, and culture with it, is a mere blindsight, and it would be possible to have a civilization of selfless intelligent beings, what would be their drive to move forward? The survival instinct alone? How did the ants arrive at the designs for their homes and are they ever going to improve them? I guess humanity needs a couple million years of sentience to answer these questions.

It could've been interesting to create a language learning program that would determine one's active vocabulary (e.g. based on one's contributions to the social networks and/or public chat transcripts - suppose for simplicity that privacy issues could be solved here somehow), compile more or less close analog in the target language and craft the study path based on that. Of course, such approach might have missed the point of expanding one's horizons with learning a new language. But it might also encourage the learners to use the new language sooner and more efficiently if they could do so without deviating too much from their original identity.

On the other hand, getting the proper feel for the language without living in the country where that language is spoken might be too challenging for a human being. How many languages would it be even possible to learn properly and what is the price for that? I don't know about any strictly scientific studies in this area.

Personally, I often feel that my English is either dry as winter leaves or rough like a cartoon drawing (or both), and my Dutch dwells on the pre-teen level, which results in a personality switch every time I switch the language.

I wonder how many other seasoned ESL speakers have similar experiences? It might only be the thing for those who, like me, started actively using another language relatively late.

It is great that the modern tools (like online translation) help to reduce language barriers, but could these barriers one day disappear completely? So many misunderstandings, from personal to country level, might go away then. (One hopes...) Would it be possible for a human both preserve their own identity and easily "map" it into any other language / culture?

Of course, there is more to the game than just language (Le Ton Beau de Marot by Hofstadter is explaining that much better than I ever could), but one has to start somewhere.

#heatwave

No, Eurydice did not turn away.

She followed Orpheus, and the path

Was quivering with light, and flickering

With the motifs that crave to take the wing

When time looks back, as if it wants to stay.

But Cerberus, the stubborn Hades' guard,

Three ugly heads, each darker than the night,

He met that gaze and grinned, and trode behind.

The singer rose into the blazing day,

Where sun was painting the horizon blue.

(They say, that word was not invented yet,

And thus, all days were either white or grey.)

He glanced once more into the gaping cave,

To see her coming near, if all was true.

Like an obsidian trident could've fled,

The hound darted in between instead.

The song was over. Neither his cittern

Nor hazy form of Eurydice could

Have time to move, so quickly all was set 

When Cerberus retreated, dragging back

The quivering, but now voiceless rag -

The payment was complete, he was content.

She cried, but who was there to take that call?

The wailing cry of madness sans relief,

Of happiness, pulled from behind the feet,

Of everything, that makes the soul bleed.

And till this day, we think that was a slave

Of Dionysus, scared by the deed,

And blame the wine and lust that take their toll

Of bards and poets from this dusty ball.

She lives till now, a Muse of suicide.

The finest poets would not see her glide,

The door appears, the dog with triple smile,

It's over quickly, barely in time

To throw the latest gaze and leave behind 

A name, another stone to sing and shine

For nonchalant mankind.

Reading about crypto made me think that we might store the reality in our memory using one-way hashing, which is why it's easy to recognise the usual surroundings, but difficult to remember them in details.

A side thought: if someone or something doesn't fit the patterns we already have for the similar objects, and didn't happen to grab our attention specifically, then there is a big chance that this person or object won't get registered in the memory at all, simply because it would be too expensive to apply the hashing to the new object. This might explain why people don't notice the little changes around them, too.

Not sure about the hardware, but for the modern software (be it an application or a website) that has been around for more than five years or so, it feels absolutely true:

"As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face — miles and miles of face — of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole."

(C) Isaac Asimov, The Last Question.

Песню последней встречи
Сонно бормочет тень.
Глядясь в уходящий день,
Отлетает вечер.

На небе Млечный
Путь еще не зажгли.
В комнате ожиданий
Спят отбывающие с Земли
На чемоданах воспоминаний.

I have to confess that I rather dislike the modern attitude of adding "girl" to the words describing activities in supposedly "male" domain, that girl programmer, girl scientist or girl whatever. Why emphasize gender? One of the best Russian poets of the XX century, Marina Tsvetaeva, has never called herself "a poetess" and was fiercely opposing those who tried calling her that, preferring the generic term: a poet. And what was good enough for a poet, should be good enough for an engineer, a scientist or a jet pilot. Isn't it?

Cosmic savages?

Imagine a prehistoric tribe of savages, who only recently became brave enough to get for themselves a fire that falls from heavens, bring it into their cave and domesticate. When it's cold and dark outside, they all huddle together around their helpful but dangerous protector, humming their proto-songs, fixing their proto-clothes and probably munching their proto-processed food until most of the tribe falls asleep and only the guards would spend their shift watching over the fire, lest it died or tried to spread too far around.

Now imagine that this tribe begins to be interested in establishing contacts with another tribes. May be they hope to kick the other tribe out of their territory and take their women and stocked mammoths, may be they are afraid that the other tribe would do the same thing to themselves, or may be they are just curious to meet new friends - who knows? In any case, how are they going to look for the new tribe? What would they be looking for?

I can only guess how the savages might think, but I guess that they would probably be looking for an inhabited cave (may be larger and cleaner than their own) with a fire in it (may be larger and mightier than their own). So any time they pick up some fire in the distance, they might send some scouts to find out, if there is any tribe gathered around this only possible source of energy.

Next question, what if somewhere nearby there is a little village where much more advanced civilization lives? (Let's not think how come that the more advanced civilization would not try to bring the savage one to their own level, if only for their own security, by tricking them into selling their savage freedom in exchange for cheap drugs and filling up the lowest possible niche in that other society, being simultaneously a recognized sore spot and a symbol of spiritual simplicity, etc). 

This other civilisation, in any case, doesn't need to live near an open fire. They have their fires far away, called electrostations (nuclear or otherwise) and although some people have still work in shifts to watch over the big fire, lest it died or spread out, the majority of these more advanced people gets the energy via almost invisible wires and uses it to power their TV sets, microwave ovens, refrigerators and other devices without which no true civilisation is ever thinkable of.

Imagine a savage scout entering such village at night, when all lamps are out. He (or she, may be it's a matriarchal society) would see strange forms which are impossible to place, occasionally here and there some tiny fires which seem to be too little to warm up anybody, no half-eaten carcasses lying around, no caves with entrances covered by bear- or tiger-skins, no people gathered around a shaman humming some story about afterlife, nothing at all. Only darkness and those spooky lights.

I can suggest that such scout would later tell, "I have come to some dark places. It looks like they take the majority of the territory around us. It's nothing there we could recognize. We might be utterly alone all the way to the end of the world." - end of the world being how far they can go and return before running out of food.

The funny question: what if we are the savages and whatever we now call the dark matter is the infrastructure of some super-civilisation which we can't ever comprehend?

So far, we tried to find the tribes dwelling near the fires of big stars, just like us. But what if there are only the super-civilisations around, and they no longer have to dwell near stars, just as we no longer have to dwell near the open fire, because it would be too risky?

In that case, naturally, taking into account how more advanced that other civilisation must be compared to us, we'll probably spend aeons before ever finding out, all this time possibly being watched ourselves without ever noticing it.

This is completely speculative idea, but so is dark matter at the moment :)

So much for dark matter, as seen from science fiction prospective!

Babylon 5, Vorlons and their riddles

One of random thoughts due to (re)-watching Babylon 5 (very decent SF series, thanks to Michael Straczynski, the author, keeping true to his policy of "no cute robots or kids" and having the arc of the whole story prior to starting the project - very recommended for those who are into this type of stories).

In the series, there are different alien races represented, some of them "good", the others "evil" (the notions of "good" and "evil" prove to be somewhat fluid). One of the most cryptic races are the Vorlons, who are always wearing space suits, looking like little moving fortresses, can take any appearance depending on who sees them (but would rather not to), do not talk a lot and when they do, it takes a while to understand what they actually meant to say. Every phrase sounds like a prophecy and most of the time the characters (and those watching them) are left to wait until time decodes the messages.

It may well be, that the Vorlons were speaking so little, and then always in riddles, because they haven't been supposed to be using spoken language while communicating with their own kind. From the series it follows that they were using some sort of telepathy to convey information not only between themselves, but also to those who were "enhanced" by them (like Lita, a human telepath; the human telepaths story, by the way, seem to be at least partially borrowed from Alfred Bester's book "The Demolished Man" and one of main human telepathic characters in B5 is also called Bester). Also, even the way the Vorlons looked doesn't suggest that they even had any organs capable of producing speech (which may be one of the real reasons for them always wearing space suits outside of their own quarters).

Therefore, when they used any language, they were literally struggling with the foreign media. Very clever of Straczynski to make the species who do not normally use language talking in riddles... one can imagine that if they were conveying information to each other directly, and if they all shared common source or generic knowledge (some Vorlon Wikipedia everybody could tap into?..), then almost the only issues they might be willing to communicate to each other would be their feelings and points of view. How else to describe the feelings but via metaphors? But how can the other understand, if they don't feel what you feel, and you are not accustomed to describing your thoughts?

Of course, Vorlons are imaginary subjects living in imaginary world, but one might start wondering, what would become of humanity if we will ever acquire ability to communicate with each other bypassing slow http speech protocol? Would we also, in the end, forget how to use speech properly? Would we have to translate old literature individually for every person, depending on his, her or _its_ neuron structure? Would there be any individualities left at all if everybody will always be connected to everybody, or the humanity will change into a sort of humanhill, superintelligent only as a whole?

In English: "feeling blue" and "black dog"; in Russian: "green ennui" (тоска зеленая). What if the same book in different languages spawns different feelings, due to the different color perceptions of the readers - even if we assume 100% identical "to the letter" translation? (If one can talk about identical translation in this case at all)

It might be interesting to map the unconscious perception of the same text (e.g. from the colors mentioned in it and their associations) across different languages and see if that has any influence on how the book is received...

Speaking about positive associations: in Russian the word for "red" (красный) is also an ancient form of the word "beautiful" (прекрасный). "Красна девица" (literally: "red maiden") is a set fairy-tale phrase meaning "beautiful damsel". So everything which is "red" for a Russian speaker might unconsciously be perceived as positive, being associated with beauty. ("Light-blue" (голубой) has in fact several associations  - some of them I won't elaborate upon - but none of them is linked with sadness at all.)

Positive aura of red in Russian is also spread on other red-like colors: "малиновый звон" (crimson ring/jingle, literally in fact "raspberry ring" because the word is derived from the raspberry color) is an expression describing the sound of many church bells around the time when the sun rises or sets (yes, there is a special expression for that) and is supposed to bring into mind the image of peace and tranquillity all over the world. I am sure every language has such very special phrases which can be explained, but not directly translated. 

On the other hand, when you are called "white-handed" in Russian, you are accused of being too lazy (or at least, too cherry-picking).

The question is, in view of all that, is there any hope that one day two people speaking different languages and living in different parts of the world, would be able to understand each other fully, due to some arcane technology? As far as I can see, not without being able to place oneself in the other's mind... In any case: passive understanding of new or alien concepts, without any additional effort, seems to be very unlikely...

Robots, robots...

Just imagine what sort of trouble might household robots bring to the real life, when they will be ubiquitous, connected to Internet and (very possibly) some of them running under Windows. Therefore, virus-prone. (Even if Windows will die under the layers of dust, some other OS might somehow become a virus farm).

Just lo and behold: some 14-year-old h@ck3r bullied by more physically advanced friends, as a revenge, decides to infect the automaton servants of the hostile household. Instead of vacuum-cleaning the carpet, one of the robots suddenly tries to vacuum-clean the kids of house owner, following them everywhere. A cooking robot sprinkles the steaks with 10 times the amount of pepper (let's assume it would not know where to get the laxative). And I would not even begin what the one armed with a lawnmower could do...

First law of robototechnics you say? Yes... only it might well be that the ubiquitous robots, when they arrive, would not be produced by clean and optimally conditioned Western enterprises. Instead, some snotty underpaid kids working their wits out on sweat factories in Eastern Asia (or may be, in Africa... no, that is out of the realm of science fiction already) will bless these devices with a gift of existence. What chances will be that no corners would be cut off in the all-encompassing race for profit? I remember myself walking around the electronic expo in Hannover several years ago. It was the time when navigation devices already started to become mainstream. There was zillion of Eastern Asian shops demonstrating the products which they have essentially copied, more or less well, from somebody else's work. They didn't like their stuff to be photographed, and some of these participants were kicked out after the holders of the original gadgets recognized their offsprings behind the turbid glass... Same happens now with tablets. You can buy a 7-inch sorta-tablet for sorta-money which will sorta-work. Robots will not be an exception.

Of course, the assumptions involving the current social structure are the most error-prone. Social changes are the most difficult to predict: most of fantasy or science fiction writers would rather desribe in as many details as possible the system of fancy clans in some parallel world or the structure of the spaceship having a warp drive at its core, than to go into details of how the society would change. (Stanislaw Lem is a great counterexample). May be in the future there will be no snotty kids providing the rest of the world with cheap devices, sweets and clothing. Or may be, spreading the virus working on robots would be considered a major crime, the graviest thing anyone can do. The human society quickly adapts to prevent itself from self-destruction, and until now it managed to survive...

Nevertheless... I have to confess, imagining the vacuum-cleaning prank made me giggle. Of course, I would rather not be hunted!

Theoretically, it seems possible to run the social networks like Facebook or Twitter in a decentralized way. Much less so for financial payment providers, like Paypal.

In practice, though, only a small percentage of people are technically able to implement such network (or even just deploy), and only a small percentage within those could be able to do it without consulting Internet. Which does not render this idea very viable.

From the other side, we all already have absolutely decentralized and absolutely viable communication network: its protocol is called language. Every normally developed adult can support this network and even teach the others to support it.

Also, although many of us have never spinned wool or hacked wood, we can more or less confidently visualize how such things could be done, recognize when they are being done, and do them if in dire need.

When (if ever) the ability to make a radiotransmitter, a photocamera, or to establish a server for a social network will be like wool-spinning or wood-hacking, then the world would truly become a different place. Or so my wool-spinning-vaguely-aware mind figures.

Daemons and their powers...

I have just come across an article on New Scientist site, mentioning Maxwell daemon and its possible real-life implementation.

One thing that bothers me about it (don't I see the obvious?..):

Conceived by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867, the demon exploits the random thermal motions of the microworld. It might watch a tiny ball on a spiral staircase, waiting for it to randomly hop up a step and then slam in a barrier to stop the ball moving down again. If the demon keeps doing this the ball keeps climbing. The potential energy of the ball could then be used to drive an engine.

and regarding the implementation:

Finally, enter the demon, whose eye is a camera and brain a computer that controls the electric field. Whenever the rotor makes some progress in turning against the torque, the demon shifts the electric field so that the rotor suddenly finds itself nudged onto the top of that "step". This keeps happening, and the overall effect is to gradually climb the staircase.

As it does, the rotor gains energy. Crucially, though, the demon need pump no energy into the rotor, only information about the position of the rotor, which it uses to switch the field.

Doesn't shifting the field or slamming a barrier also mean that you make some work? You need to spend some energy to move that barrier and then to lift it again. These two movements cannot cancel each other in the real world because of friction (unless we operate in a real vacuum). Same about the shifting the electric field... Do they really mean that we can disregard friction-like effects in that case?

Regarding e-readers...

I had some other post in mind, but now I don't remember what it was, so I can at least write this one down :)

I think there are going to be the following use cases for e-readers:

•  manuals and other tech books (like the ones which can be currently read online at http://safari.oreilly.com ) - these are the books which need to be updated ASAP in case of errata, benefit a lot from having full-text search and community feedback, and many of them aren't relevant after 5 years or so. 
• Other thought regarding manuals - taking into account popular community projects like - I'll name two I had to look at recently - PHP manual or Programming Scala where community feedback essentially becomes part of the document itself - we can expect that the role of document author will be replaced by the role of project leader, who establishes the guidelines for the documentation and writes first draft, and then moderates the community feedback when necessary. It seems to be natural for a technical documentation to be that open-source.
• Now, what else can be great content for e-readers, apart from tech or other manuals? (Foreign language ones can be a good fit also, especially if e-reader also has audio capabilities). I would suggest magazines. Many of us have this situation, when we are subscribed to this and that, we are getting the glanced-paper exemplars bi-weekly or monthly, read them (or not) and discard them afterwards. Daily journals are falling under the same category.
• To the same category I'd also put so called "beach literature": the books which can be read only once, like some sort of canned conversation when you can't have one. It's a pity to spend expensive paper on those.

At the same time, I don't think that the paper books are going to die. After all, paper book has life span which is way longer than any e-reader, and it's a medium proven by millennia of human experience. But I do think that spreading of e-readers, along with internet, might significantly reduce the amount of printed information.

At the extreme end it might be even like that (and I would quite like it to be like that): everybody can access the whole body of human knowledge either absolutely free or for some fixed rate (may be a set of rates could be available for different sets of content), and everybody could order a certain book, magazine or journal to be printed out (which would cost extra) - in case he or she wants to have a hard copy. This could be the way to get the advantage of both worlds: not wasting paper on things which are expendable, but preserving information that feels like to be preserved.

Probably, under this model, the books which are ordered often, would still be printed en masse (thus being cheaper). The danger here is that some information might never be printed unless you happen to run across it and appreciate it, and we are losing the possibility to go to a bookshop and rumble through the books, discovering what we have never seen before. We might hope that some publishing houses will still be taking the risks of ordering hard copies of the literature works which they deem interesting. We also should hope that books, as such, will not become a luxury. 

At least, I do. By the way, how many new books have you read the last month?.. ;)

Alice, where art thou?

OK, been there, done that. Just have seen "Alice in Wonderland" (still have red traces upon my nose from the polarized spectacles). And what could I say, as a summary? One word: nauseating.

Obligatory warning: if you still want to see it for yourself, be informed that the rest of this article might contain spoilers.

 First of all, there is almost nothing left of the original story, apart from some main personages and a handful of plot threads. As a compensation, there is a lot of the stuff which the author of the original book, I dare to think, would never put in himself. A Galsworthy-made-bigger-than-life kind of society; two stories melt together into one (imagine a first and a second course in one bowl);  bits and peaces of fantasy from the previous years that the public has already gobbled down, so the risk of indigestion was probably estimated as low; and on top of all,  in the afterglow of the story, a mention of the "wonderful" idea to open a business in China (with Alice and A Serious Guy peering at Maps of Real Wonderlands  - was that the idea?). Surely one had to kill a Jabberwock to get to that? Did the Chinese have some share in this franchise? 

One light spot in all this was Johnny Depp, of course. He just can't play in a boring way, and Mad Hatter is one of the roles which is almost especially tailored for Mr.Depp. So no complaints here. I can imagine that when the movie was finished he was murmuring to himself: "I was again the best actor in that bleak crowd, especially when the magic voice of Alan Rickman was not interfering with my aura". So be it.

But but but, where is the spirit of Lewis Carrol story in all this? Where is that world with the laws which are both like and unlike the laws of our own world, as if seen from more than one completely different angle at once? Where is the discretion and the subtleness, where is the reality seen as a giant playground rather than a battlefield, as we are so often learned to believe by so many other movies? (And utterly, with the one in question, too). Where are the paradoxes and the silly rhymes?

Some of that did survive, of course, but so strongly vinegared with "life-motivating" quotes and images ("It's only your choice to go to battle..." , the good white queen looking to much like a stuffed Galadriel, cherries in blossom - why don't I remember anything of that in the original books? - and some other cliches which I am too tired to mention).

Thinking about what I just wrote, I could finally summarize it thusly: the original stories written by Lewis Carrol didn't have any moral. At least, the moral was not spelled with big flashing letters on every page. In the film, it is. (I can even understand that - who would finance the movie with a high risk of being misunderstood and therefore financially unsafe? Mass culture, like a fairy tale,  has some rules to obey.)

Not sure if I will even want to watch anything Tim Burton will do after that. Especially if he will again decide to tackle the classics. I am afraid for my digestion, you know.

Avatar: the goods and the bads (IMHO and spoiler-rich)

Yesterday, I have seen the movie Avatar (IMAX version). Can't help compiling a little list of reflections on it (full of spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie, may be you don't want to read it yet :) ).

GOOD: This was the first time I ever saw the whole movie (3 hours) in 3D. Visually, it was amazing: an alien world which didn't look the same as our own and had many interesting and thought-out details - strangely-looking animals and plants, mountains flying in the sky (hello Myst and Miadzaki), the biological civilization, all inhabitants of which are connected to each other and to their planet (Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Cycle, yes?..), flying dragons of different colors and styles bonded to their masters (I have a soft spot for dragons, provided that they fly well above my head ;) ), the technological wonders - skin-thin and semi-transparent tablets which seemed to be the laptops of the future, robots which would make their counterparts from Alien, Star Wars et cetera to cry from misery, glimpses of the spaceship which looked like a bit humanized version of Matrix, definitely with more money involved... yes there WAS something to watch at. THE WHOLE THREE HOURS of very beautifully drawn world.

Which immediately brings up something BAD: the movie was a bit too long. 3 hours, it's on somewhere at the limits of focused attention (_my_ focused attention, at least).

And then another BAD but of a different tint: the movie felt long because at some point, it stopped being logical - even for a fantasy movie (and this was a fantasy movie, in the same sense as Star Wars is a fantasy movie; the technology here only plays the role of setup, but the point of the story is not to test how some _scientifical_ hypothesis can develop, but just to tell a fairy tale which took place far, far away).

I'll elaborate a bit more on that. Fantasy is a realm with very strange rules which are different from our own. But nevertheless, they are present and they should be honored. "All things have rules", according to Neil Gaiman, the author of a movie Stardust which was much lovelier as a book, in my opinion. I have felt that somewhere in the last hour of Avatar, this rule has been broken and after that, the world ceased to be real in the sense of being inpredictable. To me, it happened after the main personage has taken that mightly red dragon who nobody else could have taken, using his own dragon for this (with whom, according to the rules spelled out short before, he should have been bonded for life).

How come? If this was possible, why didn't anybody of the locals try the same trick? Didn't have the vibe? Not a single person with ambitions on the whole planet? They were not supposed to be stupid, after all.

Some other things which felt wrong:
- The pilot lady which refused to comply with the orders and flew home. How come she was not sitting together with the other three guys in the same cell? (Or even worse?) Saying "this wasn't in my contract" sounds like a bad excuse and would not save her from being court-marshalled, had such situation happened in the real life.
- How come that she could still start the plane after she obviously has been stripped of the pilot rank? This seems to be a basic security breach. Can't believe that somebody like the guy who had all that army in his command could oversee such thing. He would have been dead long time ago in this case.
- Wasn't there any winter on the whole planet? (Now OK... this is fantasy so it can happen).
- If everybody was supposed to live in harmony with each other, why did they have warriors for? Why didn't they tame the animals to use for food? (Well OK again... may be it just was more fun to hunt them after all).
- The shamanic ceremony around The Tree of Souls looked very pathetic. I have to show this movie to my 11-year-old daughter to check her feelings, but I am afraid even she would not buy it.

Well, I don't want to finish it on bad note... As a show, it was good to watch. AND it's a real FANTASY movie made with a really BIG BUDGET (no cheating!) But the problem is, this movie didn't make me think about anything else apart from its inconveniences. I awe the hard work of the people who made it (their fantasy is truly amazing), but I hope next time when somebody tries to do a similar thing, they'll pick a plot with more interesting twists.

Dependencies, dependencies...

Follow-up to the previous post...

People always have been creating works inspried by another works. After all, the books, papers and blogs are just the other modes of communication, and in the everyday communication we do react at something the others say.

Before internet era, though, things were different in the sense of how references have been maintained. If you have been writing a book, you would quote your sources. They were, in principle, localizable. Everything that has been printed has a number of attributes with which it can be more or less unambigously identified: the title, year of being printed, the name of the printing house; later, the ISBN number which is not the ideal solution, but it's fair enough solution to live with.

Therefore, if you read the book and the author is quoting his and her sources, it was always theoretically possible to locate the sources and to find out what the work has been based upon. It was not always easy (suppose the quoted source existed in one exemplar, or was not quoted directly, etc), but it was doable.

Now, we have Internet, and everything is supposed to be stored there forever.

As I write it, Internet is full of derivative work.

Most of the articles have links to the other articles, which in their turn have links to yet another articles, and so on. It's world wide web, so it's normal.

And these links are in fact as firm as the gossamer threads. May be gossamer threads are even better. Ever seen not working links? (I bet any article which exists in the web for more than one a couple of years probably has them, either directly or indirectly).

I can't stop wondering what will become of all this in several dozen years or so. Will there be a big pile of everything, to which every article that has been around long enough would be assumed to go? If somebody in 20 years would want to trace how ideas were spreading via internet, will it be possible to do? Will these sites still exist, will they still be pointing at each other? How to understand what somebody is writing about if his or her references are gone? Unless there would be a searching engine which would have a knowledge about the evolution of internet - may be it will be one more use case for Google or for some other company - temporal data mining :)

A pessimistic scenario is that, notwithstanding Internet, blogging et cetera, everything below a certain level of importance will have the same chance of getting completely into oblivion as the derivative work of earlier generations - or even a bigger one. The letter which the 8-year-old Babylonian boy would scrabble on the calfskin existed as an object, and would continue existing until purposefully destroyed or until the skin crumbles (which would take many years). The blogs which are hosted on a certain site are obliterated completely if the site closes down and nobody takes care of the content. (Theoretically, information still can exist hidden in the hard drives, but how quickly will the old hard drives be disposed of?)

I hope we will dedicate enough work in the near future to prevent the web from losing its structure with time. Keeping the dependencies will be quite difficult part of it... I am very curious how this problem will be solved. If it will be solved.