September 11th, 2009
I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to announce this, but it’s finally sorted – I’ve just signed my first book deal! My Generative Art book will be on real and virtual shelves sometime next year. Contrary to reports it will be published by the lovely folks at Manning Publications, not the equally nice folks at Apress (as they rather prematurely announced).
It’s been over three months since I was first invited to pitch an idea, and has taken a lot of negotiation to get a contract I was happy with. But rather groovily I have managed to get consent to release a significant portion of the book under a Creative Commons license, so some chapters can be reproduced and distributed as widely as the winds will carry them. This means I will be able to publish large extracts here as we get closer to publication, as will anyone else who wants to.
Already I’ve got a list of people I need to thank for getting my idea this far, but I’ll save it for the book. But to those who know who you are; cheers to you, you and especially you, I feed on your enthusiasm.
Watch this space, and my twitter, for further updates.
Posted in culture, generative art, generative art book, literature, old media, open source, tech, writing |
May 22nd, 2009
“It’s true: Since the 1980s, it has been possible – in principle – to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically, by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they persist?”
Manfred shrugs. “You tell me. Conservativism?”
Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. “Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must be coercive – it does, after all, command.”
- Charles Stross Accelerando 2005
We cling to our concept of free will like blood. Declaring one is without free will is akin to admitting you don’t have a sense of humour, it is effectively saying you aren’t human. For what are we without free will – robots; actors; performing monkeys?
Philosophy has wrestled with free will vs determinism for as long as there has been philosophy. In more recent times science has pitched in on the debate too. Physiologist Ben Libet, who died in 2007, conducted a number of experiments in the 1970s on the timing of neural events. His measurements demonstrated that when the decision to perform an action is made, the beginnings of the action occur before the corresponding activity in the consciousness centre of the brain. These findings seem to suggest that the conscious mind, the area we regard as our decision making centre, is actually nothing of the the sort. It is subconscious processes that make all our decisions; the only role of the consciousness is to retrospectively justify these decisions to ourselves.
Our sense of free will, if Libet’s experiments are to be believed, is nothing more than an illusion. It is just another bi-product of our massively over-sized brains. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox in quantum mechanics seems to back up this conclusion, I burbled excitedly about this realisation in a post two years ago. But even if we had something more accessible than conceptual psychology or quantum mechanics to prove this point, would we ever be able to accept it?
My answer: who gives a toss? We are certainly the only animal who believes in, or cares about such a concept. The dog I questioned on the matter was very clearly disinterested in the subject, and I suspect his may be the right attitude. Does it really matter whether we have free will, or only the illusion of it? Our actions will still be the same either way. Whether we have a strong grip upon the rudder of destiny, or we are just socks thrown around in the washing machine of chance, our lives will still be the same – messy, chaotic and surprising.
Believing in free will is akin to believing in God. We are welcome to do so, but it’s probably ever-so-slightly nutty of us. If the concept makes us feel better about ourselves, and we can pretend we are more important than all the other bundles of matter in the cosmos, it doesn’t cost us anything, and it doesn’t do us any harm, does it?
Um, yes, I think it probably does do a lot of harm. But that’s another post.
Posted in bad science, culture, literature, philosophy, universal automatism, zen |
April 17th, 2009
Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee’s travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he’s never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot – although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.
In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.
Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.
- Charles Stross Accelerando 2005
Accelerando is the new Neuromancer, in that our real world is becoming more like the fiction every time I re-read it.
The nine short stories that make up the book are published under a Creative Commons license, so there are various versions of it available for free online. You can even get it for the iPhone.
Posted in agalmics, culture, literature, open source, philosophy, tech |
November 3rd, 2008
“Mathematics and prophecy: Kearney had known instantly that the two gestures were linked, but he couldn’t say how. Then, waiting for a train to King’s Cross the following morning, he identified a relationship between the flutter of cards falling in a quiet room and the flutter of changing destinations on the mechanical indicator boards at the railway station. This similarity rested, he was willing to admit, on a metaphor (for while a cast of the Tarot was – or seemed – random, the sequence of destinations was – or seemed – determined): but on the basis of it he decided to set out immediately on a series of journeys suggested by the fall of the cards. A few simple rules would determine the direction of each journey, but – in honour of the metaphor, perhaps – they would always be made by train.
He tried to explain this to Inge.
‘Events we describe as random often aren’t,’ he said, watching her hands shuffle and deal, shuffle and deal. ‘They’re only unpredictable.’ He was anxious she should understand the distinction.”
Light – M. John Harrison 2002
An entirely deterministic universe does not have to be a boring one. And even if we had to accept we were without free will, it wouldn’t mean our lives would be without surprises.
There is an anthropological twist to the concept of unpredictability. Just because we cannot predict the future, it doesn’t mean that the future is unknowable. It just means it is unknowable by us, at our present level of intelligence. If Moore’s Law were to eventually give us the processing power to accurately model our entire universe, the future wouldn’t be something we’d have to speculate upon, it would be something we could calculate.
Posted in culture, literature, philosophy, universal automatism |
July 2nd, 2008
The F-word, in the right context (or more accurately, the wrong context), can be comedy gold. But use it in a GCSE exam paper and it is worth two marks out of possible 27. This is the guideline set by chief examiner Peter Buckroyd.
The exam was GCSE English, the question was “Describe the room you are sitting in”. The answer given was “Fuck off”.
To gain minimum marks in English, students must demonstrate “some simple sequencing of ideas” and “some words in appropriate order”. The phrase had achieved this, according to Mr Buckroyd.
The chief examiner, who is responsible for standards in exams taken by 780,000 candidates and for training for 3,000 examiners, told The Times: “It would be wicked to give it zero, because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for – like conveying some meaning and some spelling.
“It’s better than someone that doesn’t write anything at all. It shows more skills than somebody who leaves the page blank.”
…
“If it had had an exclamation mark it would have got a little bit more because it would have been showing a little bit of skill,” Mr Buckroyd said.
(thanks to Cultural Snow)
Posted in culture, literature, philosophy, society |
rss feed
