Ive now had several people ask me what BLACK SANDS is about. In my feeble mind that constitutes an emerging trend, so its probably time to fess up. The idea for BLACK SANDS came to me while I was working on an R&D project called Insemtives, or Incentives for Semantic Annotation. Im a graphic designer by trade, although when I started out there werent any computers in design so Ive seen a lot of new technologies emerge. Ive been around long enough to start to recognise recurring patterns in those emergences. Ive found that if you see the same thing enough times, eventually you end up with a fair idea of what comes next. It is not, as they say, rocket science. Insemtives was an eye-opener though. I was invited onto the project during a chance conversation in a corridor in the Semantic Technologies Institute in Innsbruck, Austria, by a really smart researcher who needed somebody who dealt with content to join a project proposal. Id been involved with some researchers at the University of Glasgow who had been involved in developing automated image recognition algorithms and Id seen, if not totally understood, some of the limitations of that approach. Incentives had the idea of using people to do the initial grunt-work, and then let the machines take over once enough data had been tagged. The project had been created by a couple of incredibly bright ladies at STI Innsbruck, who managed to combine being exceptionally charming with being so smart it made your teeth hurt. It was one of the best written project proposals Id read, so it seemed inevitable that the European Commission would be happy to throw ten million or so Euros at it. And, very sensibly, they did. At first I felt like a complete fish out of water. Theres me, graphic designer, stuck in a room (this time in Trento, Italy) with a few dozen computer scientists, most of whom were PhDs and several of whom were full professors (and who could still drink like fish). I had to come up to speed on a few difficult concepts quickly. Fortunately the PhDs had already assumed I was an idiot but knew I had a shed-load of content from a BAFTA award winning TV series and Virtual World at my disposal, so they were prepared to cut me a little slack. (Youve probably figured by now that Insemtives was a European project and mixed people from right across the EU, most of whom spoke better English than me. I have to say it was a delight, being involved with so many different nationalities with one shared enthusiasm - the project. My favourite European joke would go something like: An Englishman, Italian, Frenchman, German, Belarusian and Romanian went out for dinner in Luxembourg and had a very nice time. The end. I should add that some of the smartest people I have ever had the privilege of working with have come from - Romania. Every time Nigel Farage open his mouth on that topic I feel the urge to kick his balls so hard hed choke on them). So what was the point of Insemtives? The underlying idea was that theres a huge amount of content out there on the web which is not, at the moment, easily readable by computers. This post, for example. Theres a lot of hidden nuance in even simple sentences or words. An esteemed French colleague (yes, he too drank like a fish) liked to use the word Java as an example. It can mean a location, a programming language or slang for coffee. Understanding which is the intention means understanding the context in which its used. In computer terms this requires a model, a structure. And fortunately (maybe!) there is such a thing. Its called a Resource Description Framework. The Wikipedia description is not too painful to read. It says: The RDF data model is similar to classic conceptual modeling approaches such as entity–relationship or class diagrams, as it is based upon the idea of making statements about resources (in particular web resources) in the form of subject–predicate–object expressions. These expressions are known as triples in RDF terminology. The subject denotes the resource, and the predicate denotes traits or aspects of the resource and expresses a relationship between the subject and the object. For example, one way to represent the notion The sky has the color blue in RDF is as the triple: a subject denoting the sky, a predicate denoting has, and an object denoting the color blue. Therefore RDF swaps object for subject that would be used in the classical notation of an entity–attribute–value model within object-oriented design; object (sky), attribute (color) and value (blue). RDF is an abstract model with several serialization formats (i.e., file formats), and so the particular way in which a resource or triple is encoded varies from format to format. So I lied! Yeah, with perfect hindsight that did actually hurt quite a bit, but worse was to come. Something called Linked Open Data Clouds. You can get a picture (literally) here: lod-cloud.net - but to give you the graphic designers interpretation. Out there, right now, there are massive databases which use those RDFs to describe data that is, now, machine readable. Colloquialisms that are machine-readable. Conversations and concepts that are machine readable. Yu can link directly to them from - anywhere. And theyre growing all the time. It turns out theyre not growing fast enough as those who actually want to make them work would like. It struck me, as a reader of many genres, that a solution to that might be easy to find. The only problem was that was it wasnt even vaguely legal. I think it finally struck me some time around midnight as I was walking the streets of Poznan in Poland. My connecting flight had gone badly wrong and Id ended up spending eight in Frankfurt airport, which started as an inconvenience and ended with me wanting to kill someone. Anyone. By the time I reached Poznan Id lost the address for the project dinner I was supposed to be attending and just needed to get out of hotels and airports. I couldnt even find a bar, so I just started walking and as I did so I tried to digest the information that Insemtives was pummelling into my by then addled brain. So much of RDF and LOD is limited by sheer compute resource. Universities eke out time on larger systems in a way thats not a problem for facilities such as Lawrence Livermore, but even they are constrained in a way that certain other, less legal facilities are not. Im talking about Botnets. Now, these have been around for a long time but apart from hacking millions of passwords nobody (apparently) seems to have tried to do anything useful with them. But what if they did? I was fascinated by various comments by Peter Norvig, who happens to hold the role of Director of Research at a small company called GOOGLE. Norvig once suggested that a short-cut to Artificial Intelligence might simply be to allow machine learning algorithms (in BLACK SANDS, cartesian genetic algorithms) access to huge amounts of data and huge amounts of computing resource and then just let them get on with it. Machine evolution, in other words. I, or more correctly Michael Learner, just figured out a way to let that happen. (And yes, Michael Learner IS Larry Page - revenge for Google Adwords!) For me at that point the lines became incredibly blurred. What defines intelligence, if framed in terms of Alan Turings imitation game? It seems to me that Turing did an incredibly good job of asking the question. Not a question about intelligence, a question about plausibility - believability. When I thought about it in those terms a whole host of new questions arose. If you want to know more about that aspect off the story, try Googling (or Siriing) the term philosophical zombie. Assume not enthusiastic researchers, assume criminal intent. What could you do with this knowledge if you really aimed to misbehave? I suspect a great deal. A new world order. There are institutions in this world which have, like Cherenkov radiation, found themselves caught both ahead of and behind this bow-wave of emerging technology. They are both predators and victims in this new high frontier, and their conflicts affect us all. Honestly, after Insemtives, any day of the week I could now point to a dozen newspaper articles and say: yes, but what if? If you look at these articles from a particular viewpoint you can only reach the conclusion that something like BLACK SANDS is just a matter of time. BLACK SANDS is a self-published novel, sort of. Its actually published through my agent, an extremely bright lady by the name of Laura West at David Higham Associates, who are in my humble opinion the best agents in London. (Evidence: The Establishment by Owen Jones goo.gl/o7O4W0 - a book that took serious guts to take on). It didnt get picked up by a publisher, which left me with the awkward feeling that publishers might be inclining to shy away from technical subjects these days. This feels odd, as much of the world is becoming so technically adept. Perhaps thats just one of the reasons Amazon is gaining ground. Im a fifty three year old bloke, and one of my greatest regrets on the high street is that I just cant find as many books to read as I once could. (I dont give a damn about football). I guess the point is this; if not exactly like BLACK SANDS, if not in London, something along these lines is going to happen soon, its inevitable. Ive seen the science, and even a dumb graphic designer like me can figure that one out. Digital technology is just now staring to challenge so many of our preconceptions, and it will affect us all soon. As another, equally brilliant lady colleague once told me: If you plan for anything, plan for change.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 20:29:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015