Theology has an ungodly image. Neither science, art nor philosophy, it would seem to stand alone in human thought as the systemised application of logic to the illogical. What knowledge can there be of God when no god has ever been observed by two people in the same way?
That’s a secular take which is both unfair and justified. The proper study of man is man, and people and gods have been inescapably intermingled since the creation of Creation. Among the candidates for differentiating us from other creatures, religion has as strong a case as any. It deserves careful, deep examination. An atheist may look at the universe and say “Бога нет”, but if they look at humanity, they’ll see thousands.
Yet traditional theology is resolutely incapable of convergence - actual, non-metaphorical wars are fought over the smallest points of theological difference, and without the possibility of disproof, no point can ever be considered settled. At its deepest point, science has the same caveat, but pragmatically you can build a bridge or a transistor with science that anyone, believer or skeptic, can use with equal efficacy. Theology’s syntheses are largely incompatible with each other, theologians can decorate cathedrals but it's engineering that keeps the rain off.
It would be facile to make the same argument about AI, even though its early years have seen much theology and little effective engineering. That’s not my case. Rather, I think that when both AI and theology do as science has done and escape the black hole at the heart of their respective galaxies, they will find much of practical - even beautiful - use.
Cosmologists now think that supermassive black holes are at the heart of nearly every galaxy, and thus must in some way be entirely central to galactic formation and development. Quite a role for objects most famed for complete obliteration. Science’s black hole is logic which, per Gödel, destroys certainty. Yet science, and the intellectual apacetime of mathematics which forms its framework, assumes that certainty may be approached and much good will come by taking the journey even if the destination is unreachable. Theology’s black hole is God; AI’s is intelligence. Galaxies of bright, fertile ideas can form around them, even as those supermassive central singularities remain an inadvisable or impossible destinations to actually visit.
Leaving God and intelligence to one side, then [1], what can theology and AI see in each other? Theology’s great spiral arms are formed of such stuff as the relations between the creator and the created, the rights and obligations one to the other, paths to transcendence and the proper order of life among ourselves in a world that contains other semtience besides ourselves. These are no small matters. AI contains many of the same concerns, but with us as the creators. Assuming, as I do, that regardless of the internal nature of intelligence we shall one day create entities capable of unexpected insight and reasoned discourse around those insights, of synthesising new abstractions and building on them, then they will have a certain power and ability to change our world and our thoughts. What is the proper way of dealing with that? What of us do we want in them, and what do we want them not to be? How will they interact among themselves - what rules can we set, and how should they be enforced, if they can at all? What will they think of us, and what heed will we be paid? What journey do we wish to take with them, or for them to take without us?
There is a growing and exciting field of ethics in AI. It is largely led by engineers in the service of those who have grown very rich and powerful through data; the headline “AI”s (the quotes are necessary) are fed on advertising and business technology dollars. Experience tells use that tech companies are no more prone to exhibiting ethics as emergent behaviour than any other large authoritarian regime; in my opinion, although I don’t doubt the bona fides of those who work in developing AI ethics within companies or with their money, the motivation of such companies in supporting this work is at least partially informed by the perceived necessity of heading off regulation or legal minefields in the future. If regulators or legislators may be headed off more efficiently through other means, then ethical AI will not be prioritised over quarterly profits. Nothing ever is.
There is much admirable work outside the walls of Google and IBM; departments and centres of excellence within academia are springing up, albeit with strong tropisms for industry involvement. But actual ethicists are outnumbered by technologists; if this is to be the unformed void from which the creator appears, what attributes will its creations absorb?
But if you want to find a field where ethics talks to humans in the round, then theology is it. Religion remains a huge component of society and politics, however distorted, and it always claims an ethical underpinning - again, as unethical as others may consider the tenets. A theological approach to AI will bring many more angles to society’s appreciation of the tasks ahead, many, doubtless, as fiery and unwholesome as their godly precedents. Those angles will, however, be valuable, for as long as we will have to coexist en masse with a cohort of independent, puissant, created beings. You can write a best-selling book called ‘The Soul Of A New Machine’, and everyone instantly grasps the concept regardless of what, if any, agreement exists about soul nature. Theology has the language we need and already know.
A theological approach, then, can tap into a vast pre-programmed set of ethical tools with which everyone on the planet is equipped [3]. In return - and this is a more personal wish - theologians of questing mind will find AI provides what theology has badly lacked, a laboratory in which different ideas and theologies can be tested on communities of intelligent creatures designed for the task … if that in itself is ethical, a question full of paradox just begging for debate. But if AI progresses, then it will be a class of question that theologians cannot ignore [2] .
AI needs to be informed by theology because that is the only field of human intellect to consistently examine the relationship between the creator and the created when both are aware of the other. Theology needs to be informed by AI because it is the only field of engineering where awareness of abstracts and their relation to reality will exist outside ourselves; it objectifies intellect and free will, whatever they may be, and renders them open to new, pragmatic study and insights that thousands of years of debate have strived to achieve with indifferent results. Each is the other's telescope.
For both fields, a new journey towards the unachievable is on offer.
---------------
[1] - The idea of a secular theology would seem to be a paradox; however, I would argue that since there is no agreement as to the nature of God among theologians across faiths, and that God is either extremely abstract, overtly metaphoric, or entirely absent in some otherwise very religious traditions, viz the more rarefied Buddhist traditions and mid-church Anglicanism, it’s not much of a stretch.
[2] - They can and will, of course. One of the curses of theology is outlawing the awkward question. Bona fide theologians, however, feel guilty on this point.
[3] - It can be argued that this is merely the application of existing fields, such as the philosophy or anthropology of religion. There is some truth in that. But applied and theoretical science and maths are often very different beasts, and ‘applied theology’ is already claimed by religion, so I feel that this chimera deserves a hearing at least before being stuffed into a pigeonhole already equipped with its own monstrous bird.
Friday, 22 December 2017
Monday, 27 June 2016
Brexit - time for a coalition of the sane
The markets are collapsing, our allies are discussing their future without us in the EU, and the UK political scene is totally discredited.
There is no end in sight to this. Party politics has spectacularly failed. Not only do the Leave campaigners now admit that they lied and have no plan, but say that this was all OK - and, as we can see every hour, they continue to have nothing further to add than to deny reality.
The democratic mandate of the referendum is questionable, constitutionally and practically. It was obtained by deceit.
Power vacuums during times of crisis are profoundly dangerous.
Two political groups have some authority left - the Lib Dems, who have little influence, and the SNP, with no MPs south of the border. But their Scottish MPs are full UK MPs, and it is the full UK which faces the crisis.
The House of Commons must assert its sovereignty.
The SNP must build a coalition of MPs from all parties who are prepared to save the nation. This coalition must say that there will be no assertion of Article 50 until a meaningful post-Brexit economic and political plan, in conjunction with the EU, has been set out - and that there is a time limit on this, after which, should such a plan not be forthcoming, the referendum result will be set aside. There will have to be a general election either way at this point, giving the political hierarchies time to rebuild themselves in a less febrile environment and decide what their policies will be before presenting the nation with, one hopes, options showing us the respect as citizens we must demand. from them.
During this period, the SNP must commit to acting for the UK as a whole and not push for an early independence referendum. (I am in favour of Scottish independence but, unless it is absolutely unavoidable, it should happen in calmer times than these.)
This will be a very hard path to follow, but has the benefit of being a plan with definite outcomes and definite timescales. If there is any substantial alternative other than to wait and see how far the ship will sink before we have to swim for it - I am unaware what that might be.
A coalition of the sane is the only way forward.
Friday, 12 February 2016
Fixing The Algorithm
In the wake of \the Tweetstorm caused by Twitter's quasi-introduction of its algorithmic timeline, - with entirely foreseeable consequences - I took a quick spin around the various services at Goodwins Central which already enhance my life through automated decisions made on my data. There are lots of them: Facebook, eBay, Amazon, and more Google AIs than you can shake a broomstick at.
They are all terrible. Terrible in different ways, to be sure: the shopping stuff assumes because I've searched for or bought something, I must want more like it' Google Now assumes I work a 9-5 and commute between home and office, and am fixated by stock prices and the news headlines. Facebook... ah, who knows what Facebook thinks. But I miss most of the things my pals say unless I tell it to show me most recent, a setting I can't make stick. I want to know the news that isn't making the news yet. And when I've searched for something, I either don't buy it or I do - either way, I've moved on with my life.
But the algorithms have nothing else to go on, so they go on going on, like toddlers who think because something was good to say or do just now, it'll be better and better the more they repeat it.
The law wisely if tiresomely forbids infanticide. Algorithms lack this protection and so, merely tiresomely, live in clouds beyond our reach. Because they know and I know and you know what we'd do to them if we could reach in there.
You know how it is. You have to use the same stuff I do. None of us likes it. These services have taken on the responsibility of running our lives, and they have become essential. They are proud to do this and be this; their marketing crows about it to excess. They have become our representatives in cyberspace, providing - and crucially regulating - access and actions.
And they are all run on an an authoritarian dictatorship model. You cannot tell them what to do; they might choose to do something you like or they may not, but you cannot do that which they deny, and you must do that which they compel.
It's all extremely corporate, and this is how companies work of course, internally and externally. You don't get a vote on corporate strategy; whether you work for a place or if you use its services. The boss knows best. If they don't, then there are various forms of codified coups available, but you'll never see a CEO leave because customers or employees have voted them out.
The only people who exert control on companies from outside are the shareholders, the VCs. And they want to see numbers, they want ROI, they want blood and growth, quarter by quarter. It doesn't matter how. Twitter is no good unless it is becoming Facebook - the idea that it could be perfectly fine just being Twitter, with numbers naturally smaller than Facebook and a service set circumscribed to doing one thing well, is inadmissible. Facebook is huge. It has algorithms. Therefore...
It doesn't matter that Twitter and Facebook are actually doing very different jobs; in the eyes of Wall Street they are both 'social media' and only one can win at it. (The real media is just as bad: half the time I go on telly or the radio, it's to talk about Apple v Google in one form or another. But Google's an advertising company and Apple is a manufacturer, I say: nope, they're both 'tech'. The fact that in a sane world they'd be as symbiotic as Ford and Ogilvy is not on the radar.)
You see how it works. It is no bloody good for anyone, of course, but authoritarian dictatorships rarely survive because they're good for people, they survive through instinctive and relentless control.
And right now, that control is being expressed by brain-dead algorithms that get in the way of the very things the companies ostensibly want to provide for us; on the grounds they'll drive 'engagement' and 'exposure' and advertising. And they're doing it in the most personal, ways, tampering with how we communicate, how we interact, how we learn from and educate our friends. I don't really care that Amazon assumes because I've bought some audio patch leads and read about Tarantino breaking a priceless antique guitar I must want to buy a new guitar myself; it's a waste of its time and my bandwidth, but it doesn't stop me searching for socks. If Twitter doesn't show me the things I want to see, which are surprising things or the things my friends have been surprised by, then it does matter. Algorithms don't like surprises.
We have no say in this. You can't argue with an algorithm. You can, however, tell it what to do.
What we need is control, something that scales, something a billion of us can do, whether we[re technical or not, whether we use phones or PCs or whatever. We need a good old fashioned control panel where we can say - do not mix this data with that. Do not prioritise this sort of data event over that. Do let me know if something from here happens.
All this has to be is a file that sits on the Internet somewhere safe and which is accessible to anything, with permission. It has to be in a standard format, and the only thing in the world that can change it has to be you, and it has to tell you who looks at it and when, but anything that proposes to use or filter your personal data can only do so if it reads that file first and agrees to act on it. It's a bit like robots.txt, but for people - it's terms and conditions, but for them when they want to use us.
Sounds only fair to me.
This presupposes we have a language that can describe personal data, and what algorithms do with it, in ways that people can understand and use. That doesn't really exist yet, but by Toutatis it should. Deciding how we want to control our personal data and the algorithms that use it is a very necessary step to take, for without it we lack the basic tools to express our anger and frustration - and desires and joy - to the companies that think they know these things better than we do.
It will also provide a vocabulary for regulators and lawmakers, should they ever decide to use them.
That done, the tools to effect our retaking of control will be trivially cheap and easy to implement, and their use by companies made effectively compulsory.
It'll be introducing a small level of democracy into the dictatorships. \They'll find it shocking, annoying and a terrible intrusion into their affairs, and I can live with that, but who knows - actually doing what customers want may yet turn out OK after all.
(It becomes even more fun if you apply such ideas to actual politics and real governments, turning the whole electoral concept on its head, but that's for another time...)
They are all terrible. Terrible in different ways, to be sure: the shopping stuff assumes because I've searched for or bought something, I must want more like it' Google Now assumes I work a 9-5 and commute between home and office, and am fixated by stock prices and the news headlines. Facebook... ah, who knows what Facebook thinks. But I miss most of the things my pals say unless I tell it to show me most recent, a setting I can't make stick. I want to know the news that isn't making the news yet. And when I've searched for something, I either don't buy it or I do - either way, I've moved on with my life.
But the algorithms have nothing else to go on, so they go on going on, like toddlers who think because something was good to say or do just now, it'll be better and better the more they repeat it.
The law wisely if tiresomely forbids infanticide. Algorithms lack this protection and so, merely tiresomely, live in clouds beyond our reach. Because they know and I know and you know what we'd do to them if we could reach in there.
You know how it is. You have to use the same stuff I do. None of us likes it. These services have taken on the responsibility of running our lives, and they have become essential. They are proud to do this and be this; their marketing crows about it to excess. They have become our representatives in cyberspace, providing - and crucially regulating - access and actions.
And they are all run on an an authoritarian dictatorship model. You cannot tell them what to do; they might choose to do something you like or they may not, but you cannot do that which they deny, and you must do that which they compel.
It's all extremely corporate, and this is how companies work of course, internally and externally. You don't get a vote on corporate strategy; whether you work for a place or if you use its services. The boss knows best. If they don't, then there are various forms of codified coups available, but you'll never see a CEO leave because customers or employees have voted them out.
The only people who exert control on companies from outside are the shareholders, the VCs. And they want to see numbers, they want ROI, they want blood and growth, quarter by quarter. It doesn't matter how. Twitter is no good unless it is becoming Facebook - the idea that it could be perfectly fine just being Twitter, with numbers naturally smaller than Facebook and a service set circumscribed to doing one thing well, is inadmissible. Facebook is huge. It has algorithms. Therefore...
It doesn't matter that Twitter and Facebook are actually doing very different jobs; in the eyes of Wall Street they are both 'social media' and only one can win at it. (The real media is just as bad: half the time I go on telly or the radio, it's to talk about Apple v Google in one form or another. But Google's an advertising company and Apple is a manufacturer, I say: nope, they're both 'tech'. The fact that in a sane world they'd be as symbiotic as Ford and Ogilvy is not on the radar.)
You see how it works. It is no bloody good for anyone, of course, but authoritarian dictatorships rarely survive because they're good for people, they survive through instinctive and relentless control.
And right now, that control is being expressed by brain-dead algorithms that get in the way of the very things the companies ostensibly want to provide for us; on the grounds they'll drive 'engagement' and 'exposure' and advertising. And they're doing it in the most personal, ways, tampering with how we communicate, how we interact, how we learn from and educate our friends. I don't really care that Amazon assumes because I've bought some audio patch leads and read about Tarantino breaking a priceless antique guitar I must want to buy a new guitar myself; it's a waste of its time and my bandwidth, but it doesn't stop me searching for socks. If Twitter doesn't show me the things I want to see, which are surprising things or the things my friends have been surprised by, then it does matter. Algorithms don't like surprises.
We have no say in this. You can't argue with an algorithm. You can, however, tell it what to do.
What we need is control, something that scales, something a billion of us can do, whether we[re technical or not, whether we use phones or PCs or whatever. We need a good old fashioned control panel where we can say - do not mix this data with that. Do not prioritise this sort of data event over that. Do let me know if something from here happens.
All this has to be is a file that sits on the Internet somewhere safe and which is accessible to anything, with permission. It has to be in a standard format, and the only thing in the world that can change it has to be you, and it has to tell you who looks at it and when, but anything that proposes to use or filter your personal data can only do so if it reads that file first and agrees to act on it. It's a bit like robots.txt, but for people - it's terms and conditions, but for them when they want to use us.
Sounds only fair to me.
This presupposes we have a language that can describe personal data, and what algorithms do with it, in ways that people can understand and use. That doesn't really exist yet, but by Toutatis it should. Deciding how we want to control our personal data and the algorithms that use it is a very necessary step to take, for without it we lack the basic tools to express our anger and frustration - and desires and joy - to the companies that think they know these things better than we do.
It will also provide a vocabulary for regulators and lawmakers, should they ever decide to use them.
That done, the tools to effect our retaking of control will be trivially cheap and easy to implement, and their use by companies made effectively compulsory.
It'll be introducing a small level of democracy into the dictatorships. \They'll find it shocking, annoying and a terrible intrusion into their affairs, and I can live with that, but who knows - actually doing what customers want may yet turn out OK after all.
(It becomes even more fun if you apply such ideas to actual politics and real governments, turning the whole electoral concept on its head, but that's for another time...)
Monday, 18 January 2016
A question of protocol and crime
The online world is constantly throwing up new challenges. Here's my latest.
Somewhere in France, a young man - I assume- has just signed up to a Francophone Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan site. Yes, such places continue to exist. He has chosen 'Rupert Giles' as his identity, and - again, I assume - also created a Gmail account for his alter ego. My final assumption is that this email address is very similar to my own, as this best explains the sudden flood of notification emails from the site that have appeared, and continue to appear, in my inbox.
(For those who don't know, 'Buffy' was a popular TV entertainment at the end of the last century concerning the adventures of a young woman in an American school who finds herself caught up in a paranormal battle between good and evil. Rupert Giles was a teacher at that school who was her mentor and guide in matters magical; his character was of an upper-middle class Englishman of some sagacity - or at least, the American vision of same. Having ;no interest in the affairs of schoolgirls and/or vampires, I paid little attention to the show at the time, although certain of my peers were entranced.)
Hence my problem. I do not want my inbox filled with writing about the fascinations of people I don't know, let alone in a language I have to work to read, about a show I found jejune twenty years ago. I want these to stopl I believe this is a reasonable desire.
But. I do not know my electronic namesake's real name, let alone his real email, to ask him to stop.
Here are my options.
1. Ignore it all, and wait for it to die out.
2. Set up a filter and get Google to do the ignoring for me
3. Get my own account on the forum and attempt to make contact that way
1 and 2 are the obvious, sensible options. But these things go on for a long time, and I presume m'sieur Giles would rather not have his activities logged with a random stranger. Often, intense personal relationships spring up in public forums like this one, and he has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
(Last month, another Rupert G_______ , of Florida, gave my email address instead of his to Domino's Pizza, and for a couple of weeks I got all his delivery notifications. I learned where he lived, his girlfriend's name, something of his working life patterns, his favourite toppings and more besides: enough, in fact, to contact him at his office and get him to rectify matters. In the past, I have been electronically mistaken for Rupert Grint by Malaysian Harry Potter fangirls, and received the most astounding communications which I had to delete immediately for fear of falling foul of Operation Yewtree. These are deep and dangerous waters.)
3 is also sensible, but my French is execrable and Google Translate is not that good for interactive sites. Could I present a credible, or even comprehensible, case for my concerns?
There is a fourth option, or rather a range of options. The forum's security is poor - I have already received in plain text the user ID and password for the account. I could go in and change the notification email setting.
Or I could pose as some demonic possessor from the dark worlds depicted in the show, and mess with my counterpart's head.
I'm not much taken with that last one, to be honest. It's fun to contemplate, and from my doppelgänger's profile he's a rather self-important and supercilious young man (with terrible taste in music, given the evidence in his password) of the sort it is truly delightful to tease, but it would be - as they say - a dick move. The Internet has enough cruel trolling, and I have no wish to add to that sad calculus.
So, I'm most tempted by the email reset. He's not getting his notifications anyway, and assuming he notices this at some point he'll be able to fix the problem easily enough.
It;'s a shame that move would be illegal. You can't use other people's credentials to access their accounts, even if you acquired them blamelessly.I may even be breaking the law by reading the messages his chosen form sends me.
I don't want to break the law; I do want my heavy-metal-lite Buffy anglophile fanboy to enjoy his online choices without reference to me. This is a problem that's happened before and will happen again, I'm sure to many other people.
What to do?
Somewhere in France, a young man - I assume- has just signed up to a Francophone Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan site. Yes, such places continue to exist. He has chosen 'Rupert Giles' as his identity, and - again, I assume - also created a Gmail account for his alter ego. My final assumption is that this email address is very similar to my own, as this best explains the sudden flood of notification emails from the site that have appeared, and continue to appear, in my inbox.
(For those who don't know, 'Buffy' was a popular TV entertainment at the end of the last century concerning the adventures of a young woman in an American school who finds herself caught up in a paranormal battle between good and evil. Rupert Giles was a teacher at that school who was her mentor and guide in matters magical; his character was of an upper-middle class Englishman of some sagacity - or at least, the American vision of same. Having ;no interest in the affairs of schoolgirls and/or vampires, I paid little attention to the show at the time, although certain of my peers were entranced.)
Hence my problem. I do not want my inbox filled with writing about the fascinations of people I don't know, let alone in a language I have to work to read, about a show I found jejune twenty years ago. I want these to stopl I believe this is a reasonable desire.
But. I do not know my electronic namesake's real name, let alone his real email, to ask him to stop.
Here are my options.
1. Ignore it all, and wait for it to die out.
2. Set up a filter and get Google to do the ignoring for me
3. Get my own account on the forum and attempt to make contact that way
1 and 2 are the obvious, sensible options. But these things go on for a long time, and I presume m'sieur Giles would rather not have his activities logged with a random stranger. Often, intense personal relationships spring up in public forums like this one, and he has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
(Last month, another Rupert G_______ , of Florida, gave my email address instead of his to Domino's Pizza, and for a couple of weeks I got all his delivery notifications. I learned where he lived, his girlfriend's name, something of his working life patterns, his favourite toppings and more besides: enough, in fact, to contact him at his office and get him to rectify matters. In the past, I have been electronically mistaken for Rupert Grint by Malaysian Harry Potter fangirls, and received the most astounding communications which I had to delete immediately for fear of falling foul of Operation Yewtree. These are deep and dangerous waters.)
3 is also sensible, but my French is execrable and Google Translate is not that good for interactive sites. Could I present a credible, or even comprehensible, case for my concerns?
There is a fourth option, or rather a range of options. The forum's security is poor - I have already received in plain text the user ID and password for the account. I could go in and change the notification email setting.
Or I could pose as some demonic possessor from the dark worlds depicted in the show, and mess with my counterpart's head.
I'm not much taken with that last one, to be honest. It's fun to contemplate, and from my doppelgänger's profile he's a rather self-important and supercilious young man (with terrible taste in music, given the evidence in his password) of the sort it is truly delightful to tease, but it would be - as they say - a dick move. The Internet has enough cruel trolling, and I have no wish to add to that sad calculus.
So, I'm most tempted by the email reset. He's not getting his notifications anyway, and assuming he notices this at some point he'll be able to fix the problem easily enough.
It;'s a shame that move would be illegal. You can't use other people's credentials to access their accounts, even if you acquired them blamelessly.I may even be breaking the law by reading the messages his chosen form sends me.
I don't want to break the law; I do want my heavy-metal-lite Buffy anglophile fanboy to enjoy his online choices without reference to me. This is a problem that's happened before and will happen again, I'm sure to many other people.
What to do?
Tuesday, 9 June 2015
Hams cram bands with TV Pi in the sky
 |
It's TV, Jim, but not as we know it |
To get radiating you have to be a licensed ham and ask for access rights, and Ofcom warns that it may take the bands back if there are problems or someone else fancies them. Still, tests are already under way with digital TV that uses a fraction of the bandwidth of the stuff you get from Aunty. In a special edition of the British Amateur Television Club newsletter, BATC reports that using a combination of Raspberry Pis and open hardware and software, full-motion colour TV has been reliably sent and received over hundreds of kilometres using less than one-tenth of the airwaves needed for a channel of old-style analogue telly. Called RB-TV - reduced bandwidth television - it's based on existing DTV standards, but with much lower symbol rates, a job that's not as simple as just picking a lower sample rate for your MP3 compression.
While hams worldwide have dozens of bands available to them, from longwave to microwaves, most are either too crowded or too small for TV or broadband data. Those with room are all UHF and above, which is intrinsically short-range - although there are a few terrestrial repeating stations for TV. The new bands at 70.5 and 146 MHz have the potential for longer ranges, and there's talk of getting the new low-bandwidth TV stuff onto lower frequencies still.
The new bands have come about because existing commercial and government users have migrated to new digital systems (with varying amounts of competence) elsewhere on the spectrum - people like the gas board, the AA and the plod - although north of the border there are still some legacy users which mean the Scots can't get at the 70.5 MHz chunk just yet. Also, some bits of the coast near Ireland and France can't play with 146 MHz for fear of upsetting the less well-endowed neighbours.
With the great British public now thoroughly saturated with UHF digital TV and broadband wireless data, there's no obvious commercial use for the old frequencies. Below about 150 MHz, antennas are too big and propagation too variable to make them palatable. Indeed, large chunks of the VHF spectrum between 30 and 60 MHz haven't been reallocated since the BBC closed down 405 line telly in 1985, and with nobody lining up to claim the FM analogue broadcast band it's looking like analogue switch-off there can be delayed indefinitely.
So, the hams get to play - and get to develop new ideas that, although they too have no obvious commercial benefit, may still end up being useful outside the hobby. And if not, it'll still be damn good geeky fun.
Thursday, 30 April 2015
The joy and despair of Mahler on a micro
This is all sorts of wonderful. Twelve Sinclair ZX Spectrum vintage home computers, networked together to play the first bit of Mahler's First Symphony. Why? Because of a throw-away line in the original Spectrum's manual from 1982.
But I am troubled.
I taught myself programming on a ZX81, then a ZX Spectrum, and through a series of unlikely events ended up at Sinclair Research in the mid-80s. My first real job there was taking the original source code for the ZX Spectrum, which lived in a handful of largely undocumented slabs of raw Z80 mnemonics, and rebuilding it into an editable form for the ZX Spectrum 128 project. I had to rely on Ian Logan and Frank O'Hara's Complete Spectrum Rom Disassembly book, as the Sinclair documentation was about three comments and a semi-descriptive filename.
(Later, I worked for Amstrad on the Spectrums +2 and +3. I also wrote advertising copy for them. As the +3 had MIDI, I wrote that it "could play a symphony" - the boss made me take that out, over my objections, as he wasn't sure it was technically true. Thirty years on, I have been proved right. Oh yes.)
As it was for uncounted thousands of others, the Spectrum was a life-shaping slab of warm black plastic.
I am unstinting in my love.
I am also a terrible snob. While I am delighted by the Mahler project, I must question some of the decisions.
The first is the use of a Raspberry Pi as the central synchronising conductor. Some may say that the Pi is the spiritual successor to those revolutionary days of home computing, and I would not demur. Some may say that it is not only valid but essential to allow the performance and interpretation of all great works of music to adapt to their times, bridging the sensibilities of the present with the eternal genius of the creator. Of course, of course.
But what we have here is the equivalent of original instruments playing music in the original style. The Pi is hugely connected - one would say tainted - with Sinclair's great rival, Acorn Computers and its BBC Micro. Think Herbert von Karajan vs. Wilhelm Furtwängler, or Oasis vs. Blur. Having a Pi at the centre of things is like Blur reforming (oh, they have) and touring with Noel Gallagher as musical director (oh, he isn't). The Pi is a placeholder in the eternal war of Z80 vs 6502, and that must never, ever, be forgotten, let alone capitulated.
Why was the Pi even necessary? That a central synchroniser was needed - sure. Different Spectrums can run at subtly different speeds - the later models especially - and they can't keep time so well. But surely another Spectrum could waggle the virtual baton? Conductors do not keep strict tempo - a job for metronomes - and that is fine, as long as the orchestra follows.
The other is the use of modern Soectranet Ethernet adaptors. Now, these are wonderful in their own right; I saw the prototype running a Twitter client on a ZX Spectrum at the Bletchley Park Vintage Computing Fair a while ago, and rejoiced at the absurd pleasure it gave. But the Ethernet standard, 802.3, was introduced in 1983, the year after the Spectrum. Not quite anachronistic, certainly inappropriate. Why not use ZX Net, the network built into the Spectrum's own Interface 1? That would also provide the famous Sinclair-designed mass storage 'solution', the Microdrive, which nicely sidesteps the rather dull business of loading tape software into the twelve computers of the symphony.
I freely admit that these complaints are niggardly, mean and pointless. It would have meant a lot more work for the volunteers behind the project, and not one in a thousand of those attending would have cared. As it is, the project succeeded admirably in celebrating the hacker ethos, keeping history alive, and promoting the human nature of technology in an age where it can seem remote, commercial and slightly alien. Many would be more than satisfied with this.
But there is no point in being a terrible snob if one is prepared to be swayed by arguments over niggardliness, meanness and pointlessness.
There is either a right way, or there is not. I condemn these evil traducers to the burning pits of Hades, with a broken WH Smith's piano-keys cassette player, a wobbly RAM pack and an overheating regulator. for all eternity.
But I am troubled.
I taught myself programming on a ZX81, then a ZX Spectrum, and through a series of unlikely events ended up at Sinclair Research in the mid-80s. My first real job there was taking the original source code for the ZX Spectrum, which lived in a handful of largely undocumented slabs of raw Z80 mnemonics, and rebuilding it into an editable form for the ZX Spectrum 128 project. I had to rely on Ian Logan and Frank O'Hara's Complete Spectrum Rom Disassembly book, as the Sinclair documentation was about three comments and a semi-descriptive filename.
(Later, I worked for Amstrad on the Spectrums +2 and +3. I also wrote advertising copy for them. As the +3 had MIDI, I wrote that it "could play a symphony" - the boss made me take that out, over my objections, as he wasn't sure it was technically true. Thirty years on, I have been proved right. Oh yes.)
As it was for uncounted thousands of others, the Spectrum was a life-shaping slab of warm black plastic.
I am unstinting in my love.
I am also a terrible snob. While I am delighted by the Mahler project, I must question some of the decisions.
The first is the use of a Raspberry Pi as the central synchronising conductor. Some may say that the Pi is the spiritual successor to those revolutionary days of home computing, and I would not demur. Some may say that it is not only valid but essential to allow the performance and interpretation of all great works of music to adapt to their times, bridging the sensibilities of the present with the eternal genius of the creator. Of course, of course.
But what we have here is the equivalent of original instruments playing music in the original style. The Pi is hugely connected - one would say tainted - with Sinclair's great rival, Acorn Computers and its BBC Micro. Think Herbert von Karajan vs. Wilhelm Furtwängler, or Oasis vs. Blur. Having a Pi at the centre of things is like Blur reforming (oh, they have) and touring with Noel Gallagher as musical director (oh, he isn't). The Pi is a placeholder in the eternal war of Z80 vs 6502, and that must never, ever, be forgotten, let alone capitulated.
Why was the Pi even necessary? That a central synchroniser was needed - sure. Different Spectrums can run at subtly different speeds - the later models especially - and they can't keep time so well. But surely another Spectrum could waggle the virtual baton? Conductors do not keep strict tempo - a job for metronomes - and that is fine, as long as the orchestra follows.
The other is the use of modern Soectranet Ethernet adaptors. Now, these are wonderful in their own right; I saw the prototype running a Twitter client on a ZX Spectrum at the Bletchley Park Vintage Computing Fair a while ago, and rejoiced at the absurd pleasure it gave. But the Ethernet standard, 802.3, was introduced in 1983, the year after the Spectrum. Not quite anachronistic, certainly inappropriate. Why not use ZX Net, the network built into the Spectrum's own Interface 1? That would also provide the famous Sinclair-designed mass storage 'solution', the Microdrive, which nicely sidesteps the rather dull business of loading tape software into the twelve computers of the symphony.
I freely admit that these complaints are niggardly, mean and pointless. It would have meant a lot more work for the volunteers behind the project, and not one in a thousand of those attending would have cared. As it is, the project succeeded admirably in celebrating the hacker ethos, keeping history alive, and promoting the human nature of technology in an age where it can seem remote, commercial and slightly alien. Many would be more than satisfied with this.
But there is no point in being a terrible snob if one is prepared to be swayed by arguments over niggardliness, meanness and pointlessness.
There is either a right way, or there is not. I condemn these evil traducers to the burning pits of Hades, with a broken WH Smith's piano-keys cassette player, a wobbly RAM pack and an overheating regulator. for all eternity.
Sunday, 26 April 2015
The Wristwatch of the Long Now
One of the many criticisms of the Apple Watch is that it is priced as an expensive to very expensive watch, but has the expected lifetime of a smartphone. Expensive watches hold their value, not for the four or five years that Apple products hold theirs, but across generations - so is this, too, to be lost? Why don't we try and do better?
I have always been fascinated by building electronics for a very long life. I collect old radios, and have one that's getting on for eighty years old: it's in a sorry state but is very capable of being revived. Earlier radios yet - the renowned cat's whisker sets - have nothing that wears out and need no power. If kept properly, they'll work as well in five hundred years as they did on the day they were made. (Transmitters are another matter, but even so...), I once built an 'eternal' Radio 4 Longwave receiver which was as simple as possible, had no moving parts except the speaker and no electrolytic capacitors (electro-chemical components that degrade over time) and was powered by a pair of solar cells. There's always the problem of night - I couldn't get around the need for rechargeable batteries, which die quite quickly, but they can last a long time if you treat them gently. it worked perfectly well for the ten years or so I had it.
But how do you build electronics for the centuries? Moreover, why would you? There are aesthetic and cultural reasons - we value antiquities for what they tell us about our ancestors, and ourselves, as well as their intrinsic beauty. They are messages from the past, time-travellers whose value constantly renews as we discover new ways to look at them. But there are practical aspects, too; what we can learn by reassessing lhe data locked inside their fabric informs our understanding today and predicting the future. There is no reason why electronics, our premier technology, shouldn't be consciously designed for that future, to carry on that work. It would be something that didn't deny consumerism but gives it more ambiguity, new ways to consider what it is, exactly, that we're doing - even who we are.
One of the most striking projects is the Clock of the Long Now, a multi-million dollar effort to build a timepiece that will not only survive ten millennia but keep good time throughout. It's mechanical, but the problems it faces - power, maintainability, reliability, clarity of operation, independence from external resources - are the same that any Methuselah electronics has to deal with. And there are no reasons to think that any of these problems would be unanswerable - when we do decide to design for the long-term, we can do quite well. The Voyager space probes are still alive after nearly forty years in space, after all, which is a lot harsher place to live than your front room. There's just no commercial imperative.
Which is where the concept of beauty comes in. We are predisposed to find well-engineered things worth having in themselves, far more so objects that also display consummate artistry. Apple makes aesthetics one of its primary selling points, and that's worked out quite well, so it's safe to assume that there'll be a market for things that are not only beautiful and functional, but intend to hang around for hundreds of years.
What might these things be? A long-standing idea is that of the life catcher, a gizmo that records a wide variety of pictures and daily events over years, but none of the prototypes and experimental devices have been commercialised. These are probably too complex to be a good starting point for the new tradition of devices that outlive their owners I'm proposing
Any data stored over deep time is interesting. If you could look over even just your average daily ambient temperature over your lifetime, you'd find much to intrigue you. Or the loudest five minutes of audio every Christmas Day, or tiny snapshots of time spent with relatives, or how busy your WiFi is or... well, there is so much evanescent information in our lives. What would you most want to relive about your grandparents' time - or that of their grandparents?
Every aspect of design is challenging. Electronic components - simple and complex - do not have century-designed lifetimes, and some, such as flash memory, have very limited specifications. But that's because they haven't been built that way. Power sources wear out, mechanical systems wear out, solar cells degrade, and energy harvesting harvests very little. But you can design for intermittent power, and you can make things repairable and replaceable without disrupting the integrity of the data collected. And you can set your own rules: we're conditioned to think about continuous or periodic data collection, but what if there was, say, a diamond that quietly stored energy from light and only sampled and stored data when enough had been accumulated? Interesting things are only going to happen when there's light about, after all - so if you can crack a very low energy clock that maintains a timestamp, then you've got a worthwhile system.
That very wide range of challenges makes it somewhat unimportant exactly what the first finished device will do, because there's so much to sort out. There are so many avenues to explore and we have so many marvellous new techniques in our toolbox of materials engineering. Each functional module can be developed in parallel, alongside research into form and purpose, and there will be commercial spin-offs along the way. Artists and craftspeople should find plenty of inspiration to play around with, too.
It'll be a long project and will take some dedication and support, but it's audacious enough to be worth it. The Clock Of The Long Now is funded by Jeff Bezos; Apple might like to think of the Wristwatch Of The Long Now as a very fitting complement.
Legacies can be potent.
I have always been fascinated by building electronics for a very long life. I collect old radios, and have one that's getting on for eighty years old: it's in a sorry state but is very capable of being revived. Earlier radios yet - the renowned cat's whisker sets - have nothing that wears out and need no power. If kept properly, they'll work as well in five hundred years as they did on the day they were made. (Transmitters are another matter, but even so...), I once built an 'eternal' Radio 4 Longwave receiver which was as simple as possible, had no moving parts except the speaker and no electrolytic capacitors (electro-chemical components that degrade over time) and was powered by a pair of solar cells. There's always the problem of night - I couldn't get around the need for rechargeable batteries, which die quite quickly, but they can last a long time if you treat them gently. it worked perfectly well for the ten years or so I had it.
But how do you build electronics for the centuries? Moreover, why would you? There are aesthetic and cultural reasons - we value antiquities for what they tell us about our ancestors, and ourselves, as well as their intrinsic beauty. They are messages from the past, time-travellers whose value constantly renews as we discover new ways to look at them. But there are practical aspects, too; what we can learn by reassessing lhe data locked inside their fabric informs our understanding today and predicting the future. There is no reason why electronics, our premier technology, shouldn't be consciously designed for that future, to carry on that work. It would be something that didn't deny consumerism but gives it more ambiguity, new ways to consider what it is, exactly, that we're doing - even who we are.
One of the most striking projects is the Clock of the Long Now, a multi-million dollar effort to build a timepiece that will not only survive ten millennia but keep good time throughout. It's mechanical, but the problems it faces - power, maintainability, reliability, clarity of operation, independence from external resources - are the same that any Methuselah electronics has to deal with. And there are no reasons to think that any of these problems would be unanswerable - when we do decide to design for the long-term, we can do quite well. The Voyager space probes are still alive after nearly forty years in space, after all, which is a lot harsher place to live than your front room. There's just no commercial imperative.
Which is where the concept of beauty comes in. We are predisposed to find well-engineered things worth having in themselves, far more so objects that also display consummate artistry. Apple makes aesthetics one of its primary selling points, and that's worked out quite well, so it's safe to assume that there'll be a market for things that are not only beautiful and functional, but intend to hang around for hundreds of years.
What might these things be? A long-standing idea is that of the life catcher, a gizmo that records a wide variety of pictures and daily events over years, but none of the prototypes and experimental devices have been commercialised. These are probably too complex to be a good starting point for the new tradition of devices that outlive their owners I'm proposing
Any data stored over deep time is interesting. If you could look over even just your average daily ambient temperature over your lifetime, you'd find much to intrigue you. Or the loudest five minutes of audio every Christmas Day, or tiny snapshots of time spent with relatives, or how busy your WiFi is or... well, there is so much evanescent information in our lives. What would you most want to relive about your grandparents' time - or that of their grandparents?
Every aspect of design is challenging. Electronic components - simple and complex - do not have century-designed lifetimes, and some, such as flash memory, have very limited specifications. But that's because they haven't been built that way. Power sources wear out, mechanical systems wear out, solar cells degrade, and energy harvesting harvests very little. But you can design for intermittent power, and you can make things repairable and replaceable without disrupting the integrity of the data collected. And you can set your own rules: we're conditioned to think about continuous or periodic data collection, but what if there was, say, a diamond that quietly stored energy from light and only sampled and stored data when enough had been accumulated? Interesting things are only going to happen when there's light about, after all - so if you can crack a very low energy clock that maintains a timestamp, then you've got a worthwhile system.
That very wide range of challenges makes it somewhat unimportant exactly what the first finished device will do, because there's so much to sort out. There are so many avenues to explore and we have so many marvellous new techniques in our toolbox of materials engineering. Each functional module can be developed in parallel, alongside research into form and purpose, and there will be commercial spin-offs along the way. Artists and craftspeople should find plenty of inspiration to play around with, too.
It'll be a long project and will take some dedication and support, but it's audacious enough to be worth it. The Clock Of The Long Now is funded by Jeff Bezos; Apple might like to think of the Wristwatch Of The Long Now as a very fitting complement.
Legacies can be potent.
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