Last night I checked out the Long Now Foundations newest seminar. The events speaker was Leinad Zeraus the author of Daemon . It was a really interesting and fascinating talk on the world of bots. I took about 8 pages of notes and will summarize them-but can’t wait to read the book. I also couldn’t ask my questions as I didn’t know you had to jot them down on a card which I never found.
Summary of notes:
Zeraus a software guy, developing enterprise software, started talking about how we – the world – is in pursuit of one goal, hyperefficency. This is partly driven by corporations and their traditional behavior to squeeze every penny out of every worker, piece of data or equipment. We are always trimming the fat, which is there for one reason – to protect when times get rough. W/out the fat, there is no protection.
Being big brained isn’t a guarantee to success (parasites are the small brained yet they dominate) – Our perseverance to achieve ubiquitous uniformity, chasing efficiency and in turn the creation and development of bots.
Bots are designed to complete three parts of the biological building blocks found in the human world- Search, Retrieve, and Act (SRA) and with bots, we take these attempts and try to achieve them w/in the digital world via creating/unleashing bots. Also, there is a Strong vs Weak AI component to the story of bots. Strong, or general, AI, isn’t used to describe bots. Bots are rather part of weak, or narrow AI, where their functions are “not intended to match or exceed the capabilities of human beings.
Zeraus expands on this limitations – he brings in the example of how the most advanced research and programming today is found within the gaming world – online gaming. Within this field, both programmers and players are trying to devise ways to have the PC play on their own, without the need of a human and only will intervene when necessary. This involves tricking the bots within the online game – ex: Second Life – to in thinking its a human reacting on the other end, when in fact its just another bot. They act in stealth mode, the scary part of the whole bot research field.
Later, Zeraus went on to talk about how our interaction online is tracked and stored – as storage is almost free today, our foot/finger prints on the internet creates a sort of ‘pollution’ which we don’t think is a dangerous thing. But 10 yrs from now, when we take that data and mine it, we can get a very clear picture of online users. What happens if this falls into the wrong hands. Foreign governments? ID thieves. Remember, you are your data. Once your data is compromised/stolen, you are now fully effected.
In his conclusions and Q&A, Zeraus spoke about how we can get away from this anonymous actor – bots. To do so, we would need to create a darknet, a newly created internet, solely built on actual people, who prove who they are to gain access and whose actions are stored to be evaluated over time, giving a user a rating for others to gauge or measure trust with. This idea is nice, however, I had two questions which I couldn’t ask
1) What happens to the old internet? Is it left open to become a ‘black market’?
2) What happens in those countries which limit or ban the use of the internet? By forcing everyone to open up and prove their identity, they are also inviting those governments to crack down, remove, jail or kill those who have broken the law.
The talk was great, and the book looks even better.