Stories

Whatever happened to… The Wisdom of Crowds?

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Future social historians looking back at the web cult – which met in San Francisco this week for a $3,000-a-head “summit” – may wonder what made them tick. Scholars could do worse than examine their superstitions. We’ll bet that lurking on the bookshelf of almost every “delegate” was a copy of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. It’s as ubiquitous as Erik Von Daniken books were in the 1970s.

In Silicon Valley this year, “collective intelligence” is the mandatory piece of psycho-babble necessary to open a Venture Capitalist’s cheque book. Surowiecki’s faith in prediction markets appears unshakeable. Writing in Slate three years ago, in an attempt to save Admiral Poindexter’s “Terror Casino” – punters were invited to bet on the probability of state leaders being assassinated, for example – Mystic Jim begged for understanding:

“Even when traders are not necessarily experts, their collective judgment is often remarkably accurate because markets are efficient at uncovering and aggregating diverse pieces of information. And it doesn’t seem to matter much what markets are being used to predict.”

“Whether the outcome depends on irrational actors (box-office results), animal behavior (horse races), a blend of irrational and rational motives (elections), or a seemingly random interaction between weather and soil (orange-juice crops), market predictions often outperform those of even the best-informed expert. Given that, it’s reasonable to think a prediction market might add something to our understanding of the future of the Middle East.”

A heart-warming fable, then, for a population robbed of their pensions, and beset by uncertainty after the dot.com bubble. Suroweicki failed to mention however that experts are regularly outperformed by chimps, or dartboards – but no one talks about “The Wisdom of Chimps”.

This week however the people spoke – and the markets failed.

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Peter Jenner: Big labels are fucked, and DRM is dead

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Few people know the music industry better than Peter Jenner. Pink Floyd’s first manager, who subsequently managed Syd Barrett’s solo career, Jenner has also looked after T.Rex, The Clash, Ian Dury, Disposable Heroes and Billy Bragg – who he manages today. He’s also secretary general of the International Music Managers Forum. And he doesn’t pull … Read more

With Horizon, the BBC abandons science

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creepy

BBC TV’s venerable science flagship, Horizon, has had a rough ride as it tries to gain a new audience. It’s been accused of “dumbing down”. That’s nothing new – it’s a criticism often leveled at it during its 42 year life.

But instead of re-examing its approach, the series’ producers have taken the bold step of abandoning science altogether. This week’s film, “Human v2.0”, could have been made for the Bravo Channel by the Church of Scientology. The subject at hand – augmenting the brain with machinery – was potentially promising, and the underlying question – “what makes a human?” – is as fascinating as ever. Nor is the field short of distinguished scientists, such as Roger Penrose, or philosophers, such as Mary Midgley, who’ve made strong contributions.

Yet Horizon unearthed four cranks who believed that thanks to computers, mankind was on the verge of transcending the physical altogether, and creating “God” like machines.

“To those in the know,” intoned the narrator, “this moment has a name.” (We warned you it was cult-like, but it gets worse).

It’s not hard to find cranks – the BBC could just as readily have found advocates of the view that the earth rests on a ring of turtles – and in science, yesterday’s heresy often becomes today’s orthodoxy. But it gets there through a well-established rigorous process – not through unsupported assertions, confusions, and errors a five-year old could unpick.

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The mobile web: 2.0 into one doesn’t go

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Hoping some Californian magic pixie dust might fall upon the sleepy world of telephony, the Symbian Smartphone Show organisers devoted an afternoon of presentations to the topic of “Social Media”. Would Web 2.0 make it to the phone?

It had a bit of your Dad at the Disco about it, and even Symbian’s no-nonsense research VP, David Wood, had been caught up in the excitement.

In his briefing notes, David posited that “in Web 2.0, the network itself has intelligence, rather than just being a bit-pipe for pre-cooked information”. When previously rational people start to attribute agency and purpose to inanimate objects, it’s a warning sign – as my lampshade reminded me this morning.

In the end, we didn’t get the culture clash we expected, and by the end of the afternoon it seemed apparent that the mobile world needed “Web 2.0” quite a lot less than the Californian web cultists needed to go mobile.

And as the clock-ticked towards 5pm – hometime! – a rare consensus appeared to emerge: network integrity and security should not be compromised by script kiddies who’d just discovered the CPAN Perl archive; most ‘user generated content’ wasn’t going to interest anyone; a blanket of pervasive HSDPA-speed 3G beats looking for an insecure Wi-Fi hotspot; and PCs were dumb, because you didn’t have them with you, and they didn’t know where they were.

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Now you know: Blogging is ‘un-Christian’

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Blathering on blogs is un-Christian, an Evangelical church has warned.

“Blogging has become a socially accepted practice – just as are dating seriously too young, underage drinking and general misbehaving,” notes the monthly of the Reformed Church of God, Ambassador Youth.

Blogging “often makes the blogger feel good or makes him feel as if his opinion counts – when it is mostly mindless blather!” notes Kevin D Denee.

“People will now do and say things that should only be done in private, or, frankly, should not be said or done at all,” rues Denee.

“Propriety, decorum and decency are not elements considered on blogs. People simply blurt things out, without considering the contents or consequences.”

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Do Artificial Intelligence Chatbots look like their programmers?

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George the AI chat bot

Do pets eventually resemble their owners? Or do owners get to look like their pets? It’s heck of a conundrum – but one we might now be a little closer to solving. For the past fortnight it’s been hard to escape the animated faces of “Joan”, or “George” the graphical representations of what we’re told is a new breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence. TV and newspapers, both highbrow and lowbrow, have flocked to report on the chatterbot. You can talk to Joan (or George) – the output of the British software project Jabberwacky – and think it’s human!

Er, almost.

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The Emperor’s New AI

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“It looks like you’re trying to have a conversation with a computer – can I help?
In the early 1970s, no science show was complete without predictions of HAL-like intelligent autonomous computers by the turn of the century.

The Japanese, fearing their industrial base would collapse without a response to this omniscient technology, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into their own AI project, called Fifth Generation. They may as well have buried the money in the Pacific Ocean. Two decades later there are no intelligent robots, and “intelligent” computers are a pipe-dream.

(It was an academic coup for MIT’s Professor Marvin Minsky, a fixture on the AI slots. Minsky’s own preferred, linguistics-based approach to AI, symbolic AI, triumphed in the grants lotteries over an approach which preferred to investigate and mimic the neural functions of the brain. Minsky’s non-stop publicity campaign helped ensure his AI lab at MIT was well-rewarded while neural networks starved.)

For the past week reports have again confidently predicted intelligent computers are just around the corner. Rollo Carpenter, whose chatbot Joan won an annual AI prize for creating software that most resembles a human, predicts that computers will pass the ‘Turing Test’ by 2016. In this test, computer software fools a human interrogator by passing off as a human.

(You can spot the flaw already: to sound human isn’t a sign of intelligence. And what a pity it is that Turing is remembered more for his muddle-headed metaphysics than for his landmark work in building computational machines. It’s a bit like lauding Einstein for opposition to the theory of plate tectonics, rather than his work on relativity, or remembering Newton for his alchemy, not his theory of gravity).

But let’s have a look. A moment’s glance at the conversation of Joan, or George, is enough to show us there is no intelligence here.

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Are Google’s glory days behind it? – Colly Myers

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Colly’s prognosis was sound. In December 2008, Google announced its intention to make “social search” a significant factor in its search results – the end of the hegemony of the algorithm.
“It’s a well known aspect of man and machine systems. Complex systems with no control fall over. Every example of it you can think of falls apart. With databases, data that isn’t pruned becomes overgrown. Entropy sets in when complexity gets out of control.

“A lot of the search engines’ index is junk, and although they have a lot of clever people, they can’t prune it manually. And they have a lot of powerful technology too, but they just can’t stop it.

“We’re looking at the prospect of the end of the growth of search.”

Answers service AQA is two years old this summer, and finds itself in the happy position of not only being profitable, but something of a social phenomenon in its home country.

A book based on the service, The End Of The Question Mark is due to be published in October, drawing the questions Britons ask, and the answers AQA gives them. Not bad for a company that still has only nine full time employees.

What AQA allows you to do is text in a question and receive an answer for a quid. This might strike US readers as expensive: it’s nearly two dollars (or four days of the San Francisco Chronicle) for a few lines of text at today’s exchange rate. But Britons love texting, and arguing, and AQA’s combination of canny marketing and the quirky charm of AQA’s answers have proved to be a hit.

But where AQA particularly interests us is how its success poses a challenge to a lot of the Californian-inspired orthodoxy about search engines, and Silicon Valley’s latest hype of fetishising “amateur” content.

These are strange times indeed when an AOL web executive must defend his decision to pay former volunteers real money for their labours. Actually pay them – so they can help feed their families? The horror of it!

Founder Colly Myers had plenty to say on this, in typically no-nonsense style, when we caught up with him recently.

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Google vows to keep hoarding your porn queries

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“With so many people searching for keywords like murder, kill, suicide, etc., are we a mentally/emotionally sick nation?” writes a concerned AOLer at AOLSearchLogs.com, a forum that accompanies a searchable database of AOL user’s queries.

Another AOLer moves swiftly to quell his concerns.

“As a whole, no,” responds ‘Matthew’, with the confidence of a veterinary surgeon approaching a rabbit with a chloroform-soaked rag in his hand.

“It can only help make more complete human beings when our minds have been soothed with the information or images they want.”

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