Category Archives: Science fiction

By Default, Far from the Spaceports, Science, Science fiction

How far away is Artificial Intelligence?

March 8, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Over the next few days, Google’s Go-playing algorithm, AlphaGo, will take on the current world Go champion, Lee Se-dol. It is an event which is being watched closely by both Go players and coders, since until very recently Go was thought to be a game intractable for machines to play competently.

I’ve worked in various ways with AI over a lot of years now, so thought it was high time I wrote about it here. Far from the Spaceports, and the in-progress follow-up By Default, have human-AI relationships at their heart. Mitnash, a thoroughly human investigator and coder, has Slate as his partner. Slate is an AI – or persona, as I prefer to use in the books – and the two work together in their struggle against high-tech crime.

International Helicopter Safety Team (IHST) workshop presentation from HeliExpo 2013

How far are we away from this? In my opinion, quite a long way. There have been huge advances in AI during my working life. This has largely been made possible by corresponding advances in the speed and capability of the hardware systems on which they run. However, creative ideas for how to code learning algorithms and pattern recognition have also come taken huge strides. Nevertheless, I don’t think we are very close to working with Slate or her fellow personas just yet.

Of course, you have to be mindful of a quote attributed to Bill Gates: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” But that said, I still think we’re some way off.

There are a lot of different, and very useful, ideas as to what constitutes intelligence, but for the purpose of this blog I am largely focusing on the abilities to learn and then detect meaningful patterns, work usefully with inconsistent or poor quality information, and communicate about all this with another individual in such a way that both parties can revise their opinions.

Part of the problem is that most people are working on a very small part of the problem, and the organisation paying them only really wants quite a specific outcome. So one team might be working on machine health monitoring and fault prediction, to improve aviation safety. Another will concentrate on whatever is needed to identify objects in photographs. Another on voice recognition. Another on being able to beat human champions at a specific game. And so on. Comparatively few are integrating all this into a single entity.

Human intelligence is also noteworthy for being able to adapt flexibly to new situations, calling for similar but not identical responses. So my guess is that Lee Se-dol probably also plays an outstanding game of chess, or Senet, or any of dozens of board games. At a guess, he could probably hold his own very well at some game he had never seen before, after a comparatively brief explanation of the rules. I have serious doubts as to whether Google’s codebase could make such a transition.

Another issue is repetition and predictability. If you’re coding a safety system, you really want to know that the same set of circumstances will lead to the same consequences. Quite apart from giving confidence to your immediate users, there is the whole matter of getting the system qualified for use. Imagine your system has failed to recommend replacement of a critical component. There has been a crash, and you are at the investigation. “Why did your system fail to recommend that the component be changed?” And you reply, “Oh, I don’t know – it says something different every time.” I can’t imagine this going down very well with the investigation committee. For the reaction of a friend, however, unpredictability is part of the fun.

We find it difficult to define what intelligence really is, or which part of our being is responsible for it. Recent comparative studies in which bird and primate intelligence are contrasted, have questioned the idea that it is seated in the cortex: birds don’t have such a thing. In the light of such basic uncertainty, corporate reluctance is understandable. It is hugely easier – and hugely more cost effective – for an organisation to say “build me a system which can identify patterns of word use by different authors” than “build me intelligent partners for my human staff.”

As someone working in a tech industry, I am keenly aware of, and excited by, the possibility of AI. How would my team carry out quality assurance for such a system? It’s often hard enough to do this for a complex but entirely rule-bound application. The challenges are immense.

But as an author, I am entirely free to suppose that all that has been done, and focus on the storytelling issues of how such a relationship would work.

Far from the Spaceports, Historical fiction, History, Scenes from a Life, Science, Science fiction

Basic elements – Communication

February 24, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Today’s basic element is communication, and thousands of years of human development has shown that this indeed is a crucial feature in building society.

Before that, though, a quick mention of some author readings for Far from the Spaceports – whether you like YouTube, Daily Motion or Vimeo, you’ll be able to find them.

So, communication. It’s fair to say that as a species we have been quite obsessive in extending the scope and accuracy of our attempts to communicate. What began as an immediate interpersonal exchange has grown in range, variety, and diversity over the years. Nowadays, many people find themselves disoriented and frustrated when they cannot, virtually instantaneously, access the information they want.

Wind back to the Late Bronze Age, and things were very different. The majority of people stayed within a short distance of their birthplace, and had direct contact only with the towns and villages in the neighbourhood. There were exceptions, and we do know that some people were well-travelled. Messengers, envoys, scribes, and traders would all be acquainted with a much wider scale of vision.

An army commander or religious leader might be called upon to travel to, or describe, remote locations, and the accuracy with which they could do this might make a world of difference to the outcome. We have topographical records and route lists from the ancient world, itemising the important features of a strange land, and how to navigate from the familiar into the unknown. And “travellers’ tales”, with vivid and usually speculative descriptions of other lands, have been a favourite story-teller’s ploy throughout history. I sometimes wonder if this accounts for today’s popularity of science fiction and fantasy – with so few unknown places left on the planet we know, we are easily persuaded to look into other realms.

There was, essentially, no way to send a message to some distant place other than making a physical journey, either in person or by proxy. On a battlefield, some orders might be signalled by horns or other instruments, or by flags and banners, but the intent had to be simple and easily understood. Right through until the modern era, the dust and confusion of battlefields has led to endless confusion and lost opportunities. On the political scale, the various empires of the ancient world struggled to keep a balance between the expansionist mindset of rulers, and the sheer practical difficulty of keeping hold of territories once acquired. The Persian empire – which would be swept away by Alexander the Great – had a complex and largely effective system of messengers and roads, but an independently-minded ruler of a remote city-state would still enjoy a very large degree of freedom.

It is hard for us to comprehend just how vast the world has seemed throughout history, if you think in terms of sending a message. Less than a century ago, some of my family members were posted to Singapore for a time. The rest of the family treated the event as though it was a permanent goodbye. True, there was surface mail, but it was extremely slow, and erratic at best. So it was safest to assume that this could be a one-way journey. Fast forward to 2015, and I was able to use my mobile phone to call my parents in England, from a hotel room near Delhi, India, to make sure that they had made a safe transition from place to another. The worst problem I faced was that the connection was a bit crackly.

Moving on again, into the time of Far from the Spaceports, we have again lost the possibility of talking real-time to people. Even when the Apollo spacecraft were going to our moon, we had to learn to get used to about a second and a half lag in the signal. As we go further out, the lag gets longer, as signals travel at the speed of light back from the craft. When the New Horizons probe was passing Pluto and sending images back, the signal lag was about 4 1/2 hours. The corresponding time for Voyager, much further out again, is about 18 hours. Even the relatively modest distances that Mitnash and Slate have travelled out to the asteroid belt mean that they have somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 hour delay each way, depending on the relative positions in their orbits. It can take an hour for Mit to get an answer to a simple query.

How will we readjust to a lifestyle where almost instant communication is no longer possible? It’s a strange middling position between our present day, when we can chat in real time without hindrance to a person anywhere in the world, and where we were before radio, when carrying a message to another country could take weeks or months. It is clearly a limitation that science fiction film makers find frustrating.

Cover - Rocannon's World — Cover – Rocannon’s World

The universe of Star Trek, while acknowledging that physically going from place to place takes time, tends to show instantaneous real-time chat between the ships concerned and the headquarters back on Earth. For Trek geeks, there is a lot of online chatter about how this might happen, most of which seems to me to simply push the problem around without solving it. The basic idea that moving objects takes time, but moving information happens without delay, seems to go back (at least in fiction) to Ursula LeGuin’s Rocannon’s World, when Rocannon sends an instantaneous message back to Earth with the coordinates of the enemy base: “They can send death at once, but life is slower…” (it’s a fine book, and well worth reading for lots of reasons).

Mitnash and Slate, however, work within the constraints of what we know. I have not assumed that some extraordinary scientific breakthrough will change all this just yet (though I aware of, and intrigued by, current ideas for using quantum mechanical entangling to send instantaneous signals). So their world is one that has to manage with chat lag – and this affects their personal relationships as well as the simple acquisition of information. What kind of friendship and intimacy is possible when every communication is frustrated by long gaps? People – and I suppose artificial intelligences – can handle enforced separation for long periods of time and remain loyal to each other. But what about situations where you can almost have a conversation, but not quite?

Earthrise, from the Moon, taken from Apollo 8 (NASA)

Extract, Far from the Spaceports, Historical fiction, History, Science, Science fiction

Basic elements – Food

February 3, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Cover - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe — Cover – The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Here’s the next in the Basic Elements series – this time looking at food. Life needs food – human life just as much as any other kind of life. And for a great deal of humanity’s existence, finding an adequate supply of food has dominated communal needs. Douglas Adams, with his usual flair for insight, wrote of the three phases of every major Galactic civilisation, characterised by the questions “how can we eat?“, “why do we eat?“, and finally, “where shall we have lunch?“. Many readers will probably think of themselves in the third phase, but it’s worth remembering that a huge number of people on Earth are still struggling at phase one.

After the glaciers of the last ice age retreated, about 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer groups followed the milder weather back north, resettling tracts of land which had been their distant ancestors’ homes long before. They followed not just the warmth, but also the herds and flocks as they migrated, and the seasonal yield of trees and bushes. Small migrant groups could eat off the land tolerably well, so long as they were willing to keep on the move, and retained a good pragmatic understanding of seasonal changes. They were self-sufficient.

The spread of farming through Europe - Eupedia — The spread of farming through Europe – Eupedia

Then farming came along, spreading across Europe from south east to north west. Farming communities have to stay put, not just season to season but also year to year. Fixed territory, and its ongoing fertility, become crucial. Our remote ancestors must have seen a clear advantage in this way of life, partly no doubt because it could support much greater populations, but it also brought risk. A bad year can signal disaster – and it is no longer possible just to follow the herds elsewhere. Your communal wealth can no longer easily be moved, and a good parcel of land somewhere nearby has probably already been settled. Either you stay put, and try to wait out the famine, or you go to war.

But another corollary of settled communities is that they typically have a surplus of some things – and a surplus can be traded for whatever you lack. So you hedge, accepting that you cannot grow or produce some goods, and relying on your neighbours who can. You grow less dependent on your immediate fields to give everything you need, but more dependent on the resources of a wider area.

The historical fiction I write is set in a place and time where the dependence on other places has not become too firmly fixed. Kephrath and her sister towns certainly make use of trade links, but for bulk supplies are largely self-sufficient. Four towns together, and their hinterland, can manage.

The process of increasing specialisation of any one place, and increasing dependence on an ever larger area, has continued largely uninterrupted ever since. In both World War 1 and 2, arguably the biggest threat to the United Kingdom was the U-boat blockade cutting the nation off from resource supplies. There were great efforts to boost the domestic food supply, but a modern nation at war needs a whole array of raw materials which come from many sources – coal, oil, iron ore, rubber, exotic trace minerals, and so on. Without convoys bringing these in, the most abundant supply of food would still have lost the war.

Looking into the future, different authors have predicted different outcomes. In his Foundation series, Asimov reckoned that the trend of reliance on ever bigger areas would continue unchecked. Trantor, the capital planet of his Galactic Empire, grew no food at all, and depended on the agricultural wealth of multiple nearby star systems – an Achilles heel which was to prove fatal. Star Trek, on the other hand, assumes a technological solution in which energy can be converted into food from information templates in a replicator. The only thing you now need is an energy source – such a world is effectively reverting all the way back to hunter-gatherers foraging for supplies as they travel.

The solar system of Far from the Spaceports is more like Asimov’s model, though of course vastly smaller in scale. There are no food replicators or protein resequencers. None of the settlement domes has hinterlands of lush fields able to grow local crops. The best that can be done out in the Scilly Isles of the asteroid belt is hydroponic farming – small scale and energy hungry. Otherwise there’s imported goods, whether carried in fresh or (more compactly) freeze-dried. Or – perhaps amusingly but, I think, credibly – there are very small scale livestock solutions.

“Now, Mister Mitnash, were you wanting the chicken or the fish tonight?”

I hesitated, not being very sure. She laughed.

“No point spending too long deciding. It’s all guinea-pig anyway. I just prepare them a mite differently and you’d never know they’re the same animal. And it’s what you’ve been having everywhere else on Scilly.”

“Truly?”

“To be sure. Tell me now, where did you eat when you arrived on St Mary’s?”

“Taji’s.”

“And what did you have? His Venusian azure duck wrap?”

I nodded, and she carried on, “So did you honestly think he pays to ship real duck all the way out from Earth? Just to cook it and put it in a wrap? No, Mister Mitnash, all his menu is actually guinea-pig, but he’s very good at disguising it. For just me here, I only need one male and half a dozen females. Taji has three males and thirty females. Or something like that. So now, would you like the chicken or the fish?”

I thought about it and wondered if it would make much difference.

“I should like the chicken tonight, Mrs Riley.”

That’s it until next time!

Far from the Spaceports, Historical fiction, History, Science, Science fiction

Basic elements – Energy

January 19, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Campfire image - The Guardian — Campfire

Today’s element is energy – a simple word that contains a wide variety of meanings. Long ago, energy meant simply getting enough heat to keep a human community warm through winter. Although humans may well have originated from Africa, they scattered across the face of the Earth at an early stage. A Russian paper just this week in Science strongly suggests that humans were hunting well north of the Arctic Circle around 45,000 years ago – seems we can adapt ourselves to all manner of inhospitable climates!

But as time went by, energy meant other things. We needed energy not just to keep warm or cook food, but also for metal work. The required temperatures steadily rose – around 1000° C or so for copper and bronze, or about 1500° for iron. And as well as that, we wanted energy to extend the day length by giving light to continue tasks past sunset – increasingly important the further we strayed from the equator. All this energy had to come from somewhere, and human societies devoted an increasing proportion of their time to extracting the raw materials – wood, coal, oil and so on, all ultimately from long-dead living things. And at different times and places we have also derived energy from the effort of animals and slaves, the movements of water or wind, steam, the sun, chemical and radioactive changes in matter, and so on.

All of these things have an impact on the environment. We often think about the impact of manufacturing use – like England’s New Forest being cut down to provide raw material for the Royal Navy – but simple generation of energy soaks up a very large amount. We switched from wood to coal here in England partly because it is a more efficient source of heat, but partly also because we were burning trees way faster than they could grow, and were running short of them. Here’s a visual way of looking at our use of energy – this chart tells us that the consumption per person of energy for all purposes is over 100 times what it was for our remote ancestors. When you also factor in the huge numerical increase in the human population, it is clear that we are extremely energy hungry.

Changes in energy use through time - Western Oregon University data — Changes in energy use through time

My historical novels are set about half way along this chart – energy was being used for all kinds of purposes, but could be met largely from local sources without need for major imports. Environmental impact was largely for other reasons – for example the hill country of Canaan used to be heavily wooded, but almost all of it was cleared in the early Iron Age to make way for larger settlements.

It’s no secret that managing our demand for energy, and the consequences of that demand in terms of unwanted heat, pollution, exhaustion of natural resources, and so on, is a major problem facing us today. Not only that, but the volumes of raw materials we need, and the limited parts of the earth’s surface which hold them, mean that large parts of our transport network have to be given over just to transporting energy-making materials.

City lights and starry nights - photo by Tim Peake - space.com — City lights and starry nights – photo by Tim Peake

When you look out into space, and the speculative colonisation of the solar system of Far from the Spaceports, we face a different set of problems, By now, we are all used to the sight of solar panels capturing the sun’s radiation and powering probes and satellites. But as you travel further away from the sun, the quantity of light drops off rapidly. At the orbit of Mars, there is rather less than half the intensity as there is close to Earth. At Jupiter, there is less than 4%. At Pluto’s closest approach, the figure is under 0.1%.

Juno mission to Jupiter - NASA - artist's impression — Juno mission to Jupiter

So, even with perfect capture, the area needed increases to rather ridiculous proportions as you travel further from the sun. The current record-holder for most distant spacecraft still using solar power is NASAs Juno vessel, in its closing stages of approaching Jupiter. Juno has 3 massive solar panels, with a combined area of about 50 square meters (roughly the front face of a house) which in Jupiter orbit will generate a mere 400 watts – a handful of light bulbs. The same area in Earth’s orbit would generate about 14 kilowatts. Further out – Saturn and the still more distant planets – we would have to rely on other kinds of generator since the intensity of sunlight is too weak. Or, to put the same matter a different way, the area of solar panels required would be prohibitively large. Right now, the favoured method is a nifty gadget called an RTG, which uses the heat generated by radioactive decay (quite different from a nuclear power plant, which uses the decay products themselves). The RTG units on Voyager 1 and 2 started life in 1977 at just short of 40kg (about what you might carry onto a plane), and are expected to drop below feasible operating levels by about 2025.

Basically, energy is always going to be a problem, wherever we go. The things we like, and that we like to do, are hungry for energy. Another of those top-of-the-list items, as and when we settle out among the asteroids, the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, or anywhere else, will be to secure a reliable source of energy.

Next time… food

Voyager in flight - NASA - Artist's impression — Voyager in flight

Far from the Spaceports, History, Science, Science fiction

Basic elements – Air

January 13, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Shu holding up Nut to keep her separate from Geb - http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/gods/explore/shu.html — Shu holding up Nut to keep her separate from Geb

Today’s basic element is Air. Totally necessary for life, but invisible in its natural state, air is easy to forget until you suddenly feel the lack of it. Human societies in the past have by and large recognised air by means of its effects – the refreshing breath of wind on a still day, the almost-living force in the sails of a boat, or the abrupt violence of a storm. John’s Gospel records Jesus saying, “The wind blows where it wants to. You hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going“. In ancient Egypt, the god Shu was the personified layer of air which separated earth and sky, and was one of the first two gods, along with his sister Tefnut, moisture, to be created from the breath of the original creator.

The perceived link between wind, breath, and spirituality has fascinated people for millennia. From Hebrew ruach to Taoist ch’i, the movement of air in and out of the body has often been considered to be a mirror to the mysterious movement of the divine around the things of the world.

Pollution around Delhi's India Gate - NY Times — India Gate in Delhi’s pollution

But for all these more esoteric interpretations, air has also shaped human society in very concrete ways. We cannot comfortably live too high up a mountain without generations of adaptation. We cannot survive underwater for more than a few minutes without carrying a portable air supply. Air pollution causes ill health, demoralisation, and death. The polluting agent may be visible, like the London smogs of a century ago, or Delhi or Beijing today. Or it may be invisible, like the chemical agents which still degrade London’s air quality to unacceptable levels. Allegedly, NO2 and other particulate pollutants in London alone cause several thousand additional deaths, and cost the economy billions every year. The city has a plan to systematically reduce pollution to safe quantities, but it will take some 15 years to achieve this – always assuming that the political will to do so remains. For the meantime, most global cities struggle with issues of air quality.

The “hacked” CO2 scrubber in the Apollo 13 module - hobbyspace.com — The “hacked” CO2 scrubber in the Apollo 13 module

What of the hypothetical future of Far from the Spaceports? Air in its natural state is a very scarce resource in the solar system at large. If and when we colonise other places, one of the first tasks will be to ensure adequate breathable air is available. Now, it is a routine task to remove things like carbon dioxide and monoxide from air – after all, green plants have been doing it pretty well for a long time, and imitating this is an obvious thing to do. I’m sure many of us remember the improvised CO2 scrubber that helped save the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

But any recycling tool like this relies on some sort of chemical transfer, and eventually the chemicals will need replacement. And any system is going to be less than 100% efficient, and what with occasional leakage from airlocks and other seams, the air and oxygen levels will decrease… and need replacing.

Rosetta probe image of water being discharged from comet 67P - ESA — Rosetta probe image of water being discharged from comet 67P

Fortunately, oxygen is the third most abundant element in the solar system (after hydrogen and helium). It can be found bound up in various rocks, as well as wherever water ice can be found – which as we saw last time is pretty much everywhere we look. One of the many surprises of the ESA Rosetta mission to comet 67P was the realisation that it was spewing considerable volumes of water – and hence oxygen – into space as it warmed up.

So acquiring an oxygen supply is not a major problem, at least for many of the locations I hypothesise in the book. But nevertheless, finding, securing and keeping fresh a reliable air supply would be near the top of the task list of the first settlers.

Next time – Light

Fantasy, Review, Science fiction

Another long time favourite

December 31, 2015 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Cover image - Hiero's Journey — Cover image – Hiero’s Journey

I’ve been away for a few days so thought I would indulge myself again with a quick blog reminiscing about a third book which I have reread multiple times since first coming across it. This one is Hiero’s Journey, which I first read on the recommendation of a friend in my mid teens. The full review is on Amazon and Goodreads; here is an extract.

My paperback copy is old and battered – I gather from other comments that the hugely more recent Kindle version has not been very well executed, so a second hand physical copy might be the best choice if you’re interested.

Review extract :

Hiero and his people combine a religious sensibility with a burgeoning scientific spirit of enquiry, at the same time as practicing a form of magic. They recognise these as three complementary approaches to the world around them, and try to integrate them all into a single coherent lifestyle. For me, this was, and remains, one of the strongest and most compelling features of Hiero’s Journey.

That’s it for 2015: here’s wishing to all readers a very good 2016…

Book promotion, Far from the Spaceports, Historical fiction, Scenes from a Life, Science fiction, The Flame Before Us

A historical offer to match the science fiction release

December 7, 2015 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Blog readers will know all about tonight’s Facebook celebration of the release of Far from the Spaceports: a Facebook launch event for Far from the Spaceports, 7pm-9pm UK time (banner below).

But alongside that I have set up Amazon countdown offers on the Kindle versions of Scenes from a Life and The Flame Before Us, so that historical fiction readers can enjoy the season too. Prices are at 99 pence / 99 cents just now, and slowly rise until getting back to normal price in a week’s time.
ScenesFromALifeCoverSmall
Cover - The Flame Before Us

Links are:

Scenes from a Life: Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com
The Flame Before Us: Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com

Facebook event banner

Enjoy!

Far from the Spaceports, Science, Science fiction

Human-machine relationships (3)

December 1, 2015 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

2014 Cricket world cup final - The Guardian — 2014 Cricket world cup final – The Guardian

Today’s topic is anticipation and context, two themes which drive a great deal of our human interactions. Even when two people don’t know each other very well, a shared context gives them an enormous head start in mutual understanding. As I started to write this, I carried out a little experiment. I typed into a Google search page “who won the cricket world cup?”, and Google correctly guessed that I was interested in the most recent one – last year – and gave me the right answer.

1968 and the musical Hair opens - BBC archive picture — 1968 and the musical Hair opens – BBC archive picture

Then I typed in “where was it played?” – a question that any human conversationalist would recognise as directly referencing the first question. Of course the Google web search engine has no such context, and the first page of suggested links included some pages on table top board games, medieval music, the date when the musical Hair was released from censorship (1968), and a song by the Dave Matthews band. Can you imagine a set of answers like that turning up in a pub conversation about cricket?

Was this a fair test? Clearly not, one might say. Yet it shows how even a hugely successful search engine can be woefully inadequate at recognising context. If we are going to think of software as intelligent, it has to be able to offer suggestions which are contextually appropriate – answers to questions, for sure, but also behavioural changes that adjust to changing situations and an awareness of what I am actually seeking. If something cannot adjust like this, we are unlikely to think of it as intelligent.

Now, all of the major players in the online world are aware of this, especially when the results are being delivered to a mobile phone where my patience level, reliability of connection, and willingness to trawl through dozens of potential matches are all pretty low. We want the system to know enough about us that we don’t have to pedantically explain the same stuff over and over again. Mobile search is going this way, and mobile route planning is already there.

Online security advice image – https://www.getsafeonline.org/

But… the flip side of that is security, or trust, if you prefer. Do you want the major online players to know so much about you that they can anticipate your every whim? Who else gets to know that much about your actions? In the debate about convenience versus privacy, many – perhaps most – people actually want convenience. Privacy is hard work: it is technically difficult and, usually, inconvenient. Lots of people can’t really be bothered, and simply trust that what they are doing is insufficiently interesting to attract the wrong kind of attention.

Which brings us to Far from the Spaceports. Mitnash and Slate are, in part, ethically motivated hackers. They have expertise in the art of cracking into someone else’s code, but they’re doing it in the interest of tackling crime rather than committing it. But it’s a fine line, and some of their actions probably cross a moral line somewhere:

“I just don’t know what the pair of them will get up to once they get in to the system. They’re going to take this a lot further than I would”…

A purist would say that what we planned to do was not exactly legal, any more than the code inspection at the relay buoy was. But then, there were not exactly any laws that applied to this situation…

But hacking aside, one of the most prominent features of the relationship between Mitnash and Slate is their ability to anticipate what each other wants next. For all the differences in their respective hardware systems, as a pair of coworkers, colleagues, and friends, they work on a rather unconscious level with each other.

As an aside, and I’ll be saying more about it later in the week, there’s a Facebook launch event for Far from the Spaceports next Monday, December 7th, 7pm-9pm UK time.

Facebook event banner

Far from the Spaceports, Science, Science fiction

Human-machine relationships (2)

November 26, 2015 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Carrying on the series about human-machine relationships, today’s topic is intimacy. I’m not proposing to talk about sex specifically – nor do I in Far from the Spaceports – but a much wider spectrum of close relationships.

In the book, Mitnash has a long term human partner back on Earth. She’s called Shayna, and we only actually meet her in one scene near the start, though she is a regular background presence throughout.

The main relationship that we see is with Slate, his working partner, who also happens to be female gendered. She has no physical form that would distinguish her from any other virtual persona, and with a bit of preparation can adapt herself to a wide range of available hardware.

So their relationship is not on the basis of bodily shape – I didn’t want to write an android book, and the difficulty of getting Slate close enough to the action to be useful is an important narrative ploy. But clearly they are a close-knit couple. As Slate comments to Mitnash about a particular data file she has intercepted,

“there’s actually more about me in the packet than Shayna.”

To which Mitnash replies,

“best not to tell her that, if you don’t mind.”

Their intimacy, the way I see it, rests on two things. Firstly, they share intense and difficult experiences together, supporting one another in them to the best of their ability. But secondly, they communicate with one another in a direct, constant and intense manner. Use of a cochlea implant and subvocal transmitter – originally simply to avoid having to speak out loud in situations where this would be awkward – means that Mitnash communicates not only what he is consciously framing in thoughts, but also a whole other level of half-framed thoughts and ideas.

“Slate, how much do I talk to you without knowing it?”

“All the time, Mit. You murmur to yourself while you’re thinking, and you subvocalise throughout the day. There’s very little about your thought life I don’t know. Or your fantasy life. You’re whispering to me almost all the time.”

“I suppose that means you know all sorts of things I have never told Shayna.”

We are clearly a very long way from this level of artificial intelligence just now. All of the major players in today’s online world have been working on this – Apple’s Siri is probably the best known, but there are many others. At the moment they are all quite gimmicky – after asking Siri what the meaning of life is, and showing your mates that you can send messages and be reminded about events, most people get bored with him (or her in some countries) and the level of interaction drops. Siri and that whole current generation of virtual assistants are just not interesting enough.

Microsoft Office Assistant - Clippy — Microsoft Office Assistant – Clippy

Sounding relational, as opposed to encyclopaedic, is a really hard problem in machine intelligence. I think most people remember with dislike Microsoft’s Office Assistant, with its cheerful chatter like, “it looks like you’re writing a letter… can I help?”. I actually thought it was a brave effort back then, but obviously I was in a minority and the whole idea was quietly dropped for another day.

The single best known benchmark for all this is the Turing test – basically you are allowed to chat without being able to see the other person, and have to decide if you are talking with a person or machine… without asking leading questions like “what are you made of?” Part of the test – certainly in the way it is conducted nowadays – is seeing how the entity at the other end deals with abrupt changes of direction in conversation, with ambiguous or poorly defined statements, and with questions where the speaker cannot possibly know the answer.

Loebner prize gold medal (http://loebner.net)

To date, nothing yet built does very well at the Turing test, despite massive improvements and changes in recent years. As I said, it is a really hard problem, and the numerous “digital assistants” already in use, succeed primarily because they are operating in a very limited domain, with a very constrained set of questions. Do I think we will get there one day? Yes indeed, but I don’t think it will be for a few years yet.

Next time… anticipation and context

Far from the Spaceports, Science, Science fiction

Human-machine relationships (1)

November 19, 2015 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

I thought for the next few blogs I’d talk a little bit about artificial intelligence, seeing as how the relationship between the human investigator Mitnash and his virtual partner Slate is at the heart of Far from the Spaceports. Quite a few years ago now I used to work in AI, though at the pattern recognition end rather than personality creation.

Cover image - Asimov 'I, Robot' (Goodreads) — Cover image – Asimov ‘I, Robot’ (Goodreads)

AI has been a key strand in science fiction for many years, long before it came anywhere near possible in reality, and there is a long history of making entirely wrong guesses. Asimov’s earlier books certainly saw a key role for AI, and his Three Laws of Robotics rapidly became a basis not only for his mobile robots but also as a framework for the way other people thought about AI. But for what you might call serious work, like managing a company or a nation, Asimov was locked into the idea that the machines would be physically huge, filling whole buildings, and would need whole squads of highly specialised operatives to make them work. The concept of virtual environments which were geographically dispersed, like a company network, or indeed the Internet as a whole, escaped him.

Output via paper - image at http://www.inventinginteractive.com/2010/09/28/space-1999/ — Output via paper – image at http://www.inventinginteractive.com/2010/09/28/space-1999/

Other writers or film makers had different blind spots. One often comes across fictional computers which are able to carry out vastly complicated calculations, analyse and direct the course of spaceships or the economies of worlds – yet output the end results of their deliberations on paper tape. It seems that the hardest things to get right are the interfaces that connect the human and machine worlds.

Often, authors have signalled the presence of artificial intelligence by means of stilted or artificial speech, failing in various ways to match human expectations. The android Data, in Star Trek, could never manage verbal contractions, so always said things like “I can not” rather than “I can’t”. This failure to attain informal speech lasted until the installation of an “emotion chip” which among other things upgraded his language faculties. Apparently verbal contractions are emotional rather than grammatical!

So I wanted to portray the relationship of Mitnash and Slate as one of normal intimacy between friends and coworkers. Each has the advantages and limitations of their particular “physiology”, and hopefully each emerges as a distinct personality. This led to a number of specific choices in the book, a couple of which I want to expand on today.

1. Slate, and the other personas, have a definite gender. Slate happens to be female, while some of the others are male. I’ve left it to readers to decide what this means, since she has no external biological indicators of gender. Some people will like the ascription of gender to machines, and no doubt some will not. There’s a sense in the book that machine gender is a relatively new advancement – Slate describes one particular persona they meet as “male, but only just”.

2. I didn’t want the baggage of clumsy language to get in the way of the relationship. So Slate is chatty, informal, but technically skilled and quirky in the way that a professional human coworker would be. Her communication is not only verbal in the strict sense, but includes a number of nonverbal noises that communicate things like satisfaction, frustration, encouragement etc – again, just like a human colleague does.

In terms of current technology we are a very long way from actually developing a persona like Slate. In recent years there have certainly been substantial breakthroughs in both hardware and software, but nothing I have yet seen persuades me that we are going to see virtual intelligences of this quality in the next decade or so. Within a century, perhaps – though this guess may be as far from the truth as guesses that others have made in the past.

Don’t forget – Far from the Spaceports is now on preorder: follow links to

Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Amazon.in
and other global Amazon sites – search by name!

Next week… the role of man-machine intimacy…

Writing Slate

Category Archives: Science fiction

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Human-machine relationships (3)

Human-machine relationships (2)

Human-machine relationships (1)

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