It’s pouring

After a ridiculously awful day yesterday, I began the trip back to my dad’s house, where I was bringing some belongings so that they may be shipped to California when I move. It was one of those days where absolutely everything went wrong and I seriously debated even going home because I thought that something might happen on the way there. Sure enough, I got a speeding ticket. He got three of us at once. I begged and pleaded with the officer; I knew that I had elected to take the driver improvement course within the last 12 months and so I couldn’t take it again, which meant I was going to get points on my license. Well, the officer, being the big, bad-ass, right-out-of-training hotshot that he was, gave me the ticket. I now have three points on my license and my insurance is sure to go up.

The day’s only saving grace was that the evening was spent with long-time friends. To quote God Of Wine by Third Eye Blind, “She takes a drink and then she waits, the alcohol, it permeates, and soon the cells give way, and cancels out the day.”

Jaguar (OS X.2) → Panther (OS X.3)

I absolutely cannot wait for the upgrade. There are a zillion new features in Panther, but if I had to choose just one to keep, it would be Exposé:

Exposé offers three jaw-dropping new ways to work: instantly see all open windows, instantly see all open windows within a single application and instantly see all things on the desktop. With a quick flick of the mouse or a press of a key, Exposé zippily animates window scaling, while preserving the contents, including transparency. Oh, and one more thing. Exposé refreshes windows while they’re moving or small, so you can keep an eye on long tasks.

You have to see this thing in action; it is truly brilliant and something I’m going to use to death. A lot of you that read this site have seen my computer in person and know that I always have countless programs open — this is a godsend. To check it out, start the keynote stream and skip ahead to 17:35. You can also view a demo on the Exposé website (click the “try it out” picture on the left), though I recommend watching it on the keynote as it gives you a better sense of what’s going on.

All of this says nothing about the other new features in Panther that I particularly care about, including:

• Upgraded Mail.app (threaded messages!)
• All-new Finder
• FileVault (auto-encryption of user directories)

The list goes on and on. I can’t wait. *drool*

WWDC 2003

Apple’s Worlwide Developers Conference got underway this morning. The most anticipated part of the conference is obviously the keynote address being given, as I type this, by Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs. Unfortunately, I’m unable to watch this as there is no Apple store close to Gainesville and UF isn’t one of the universities participating in the satellite feed. However, Apple is going to offer the entire keynote as a QuickTime stream after the presentation is over. Woo hoo!

The biggest news from the keynote will undoubtedly be the announcement of the newest OS, Panther (OS X v10.3). Apparently it will be offered as a $129 upgrade by the end of the year. The arrival of the Power Mac G5, featuring a next-generation processor from IBM — the 64-bit PowerPC 970 — will likely be a very hot topic as well. Another major subject will be that of Apple’s browser, Safari, whose first non-beta release (1.0 v85) will be available for download later today. I can’t wait! You can follow these announcements and all of the others in real-time, at MacCentral, where live updates of the keynote are available.

It’s going to be really nice when I move to the Bay Area. I’ll be a stone’s throw from all of these big companies and conferences and instead of reading/watching/salivating, I’ll actually be participating (and probably still salivating).

New Harry Potter book

I swear, a day hasn’t gone by in the last week that at least one of my friends hasn’t e-mailed/called/IM’d me about the new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. For those not in the know, the book comes out tomorrow, err, tonight at midnight. I placed my Amazon order a few months ago under the premise that the book would be in my hands on June 21st. I’m kind of scared that the book won’t be here on time though; Amazon says it was just shipped out today with standard shipping. However, the tracking for the package (which just became available) says that it was shipped on the 15th, but offers little information beyond that (e.g., no estimated delivery date). Fingers are crossed. The book arrived as promised; time to dive in!

I’m caught up in a few other books at the moment and didn’t feel like reading through the entire series again to reacclimate myself to the goings-on at Hogwarts. I’ve found some great summaries for each book and have listed them below. If you haven’t read these books you are genuinely missing out.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Justin’s leaving; time to renovate

Anyone who reads this site regularly knows that I hate my apartment complex. Enter reason #23541: new carpeting. Some of you are probably thinking, “Hey, he’s getting new carpet, what the hell is he complaining about?” Well, here’s the problem. I’ve been here for what will be three years in August and my carpet has looked like shit since day one. Now, they’re telling me that 30 days before I move out, I have to move everything out of my room (to where? I have no clue), basically give up my apartment for a day, and then move everything back in. Then, about a month later, I have to do all of this again, and for what, to enjoy my new carpet for < a month? I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t sit too well with me. It doesn’t end there as the new carpet is only a small part of the $7 million renovation. That’s right, they’re fixing just about everything, and again, right before I leave this place for good. I hope to god that the network isn’t being fixed as that might really put me over the edge. I’ve already decided that I might just pee in the corners of my room the day I move out and blame it on the dog that Clarissa will be bringing back here in a couple of weeks. If I was denied decent carpet for three years, then the next tenant should suffer the same — it builds character.

The Death of IE

I’m sure that most of you have heard the news by now: Microsoft will not be releasing any further versions of IE/Mac — it’s dead. While this doesn’t directly affect me as I never really used IE in Windows or Mac OS X, and it was never available for Linux, it is still a big deal. The decision from Microsoft to discontinue IE/Mac was due in part to the fact that Apple is now delivering its own browser, Safari, and also because Microsoft actually intends to get rid of the browser (or at least the idea of the web browser) from Windows as well. The ever-poignant Zeldman writes:

We know that, after spending billions of dollars to defeat all competitors and to absolutely, positively own the desktop browsing space, Microsoft as a corporation is no longer interested in web browsers.

We know that, on the Windows side, it will eventually release something that accesses web content, but that “something” will be part of an operating system - one which won’t be available until 2005, and won’t be widely used before 2007. We don’t know if the part of the upcoming OS that formats web pages will be more or less compliant with W3C recommendations than what we have now. Neither do we know if the OS components that handle web browsing will support CSS3 and other specifications that will emerge during the long years ahead in which Microsoft offers no new browser.

Microsoft has said that there won’t be a new IE for Windows until 2005 and that it won’t be a standalone product — it will require their new OS, Longhorn. Given that typical Windows users take 2-3 years to migrate en masse to a new OS, we are looking at 2007 before 80-85% of the web browser market will have moved to something new. In the interim, they’re left to use a crippled year-2000 browser riddled with security bugs and standards-compliancy problems. The bigger problem is that web developers will have to continue to build sites around this buggy browser rather than building toward W3C standards — at least until 2007 — and perhaps even beyond then depending on how well MS’s browser conforms to the standards.

However, the end user isn’t helpless, because as I’ve said from what seems like the beginning of time, you aren’t left to use this browser. There are so many browsers that are smaller, faster, and simply more practical than IE (enter Mozilla, Opera, and Netscape). Just because your computer shipped with a little blue “e” icon on the desktop doesn’t mean that that’s your only choice.

I told myself that I wasn’t going to comment on all the hoopla surrounding this latest MS development, but I couldn’t resist. I realize that most people don’t see the bigger picture and that even if they vaguely did, they wouldn’t care. I understand this and it’s not my intention, nor has it ever been, to lambast those that choose to turn the other cheek. But, the fact remains that the majority of web users out there are being forced to use crappy software. By forced, I mean to say that they simply know no better. Daily, people complain to me about pop-up ads, spyware, and a host of other nocuous things that tend to sprout up on their machines. To each and everyone one of these people, be them friends, family, or strangers, I tell them all the same thing: stop using IE (to be fair, I usually don’t stop there and tend to go off on why Windows sucks and how Linux is better — now it’s Mac OS X that I most strongly advocate — but hell, it’s all Unix!). It isn’t that hard to move to another browser. In fact, it’s mindless if you ask me, and would be an automatic decision were I being bombarded with all of that crap. If you don’t like all the junk running on your computer, then do something about it. Most of the time this advice falls on deaf ears and the same people complain to me again two months later about the same problems. To these people there isn’t too much to say. They obviously enjoy being a gaping security hole. No, it must be that they like the ads for horse-sex that take over their screens. Come to think of it, they probably just like the game you get to play. You know the one: there are a lot of windows that keep popping up and you have to try to close them as quickly as possible because if you don’t then even more will pop up. Hey, to each his own.

More RSS

I took it upon myself to add an RSS 2.0 feed to the site (it kind of makes sense that I would take it upon myself because it’s my website and no one’s going to do it for me  :P) . You can find a link to the feed in the menu on the left. I also spent quite a bit of time making sure that the new feed (2.0) and the older feeds (1.0 and .91) validated. The 1.0 feed validated right away, but the other two took a while. The problem had to do with the insertion of HTML (i.e., href and img tags from the posts) into the description tag of the feed. I tried removing Movable Type’s encode_xml and remove_html variables from the RSS templates, and then adding my own CDATA tags (a tag that the encode_xml subroutine inserts). The problem with this method is that it would break the validation on 2.0, but not .91, or on .91 but not 2.0, etc. Kept getting the error, “description should not contain relative URL references,” among others. Apparently, 2.0 won’t let you have relative URLs (e.g., /archives/foo.php), which is how I link to all my past entries and other things throughout the site. To make a long story not as long, I changed every instance of a relative URL throughout the site (save the menu) to a fully-qualified URL, thinking that this would alleviate my 2.0 validation problems. It didn’t. Even though there were NO instances of relative URLs throughout the feed, the validator insisted that there were. I was beginning to think that the problem was with the validator and not my feed. Chugging along, I put the remove_html and encode_xml routines back in and now, with those added and the relative URLs modified, all of the feeds validate.

Form update

I didn’t realize that the contact form would be so popular. Though the original idea was for people who didn’t know me personally to be able to contact me, it seems as if everyone is using it instead of their e-mail client to send me mail. Either way, I’ve added a subject field for you overzealous message-senders out there.

RSS, the new black

It’s been a while since I was on my news aggregator kick. I’m on it again and I’m not sure it’s going to stop this time. You might remember a couple of posts I did a while ago; one on Syndirella and another on NewsFeeder. While I did use each of these for a short time, neither of them offered everything I needed, not to mention the fact that some of my favorite sites (read: sites that I must visit each day) had no form of syndication.

This brings me to today, err, yesterday, when I started using NetNewsWire (truth be told, I messed around with it the second my PowerBook arrived but kind of forgot about it after I started getting into Safari). NNW is an RSS reader from Ranchero Software. This client does RSS right! It’s everything one could ask for in a news aggregator, including the fact that it displays the number of unread articles in my dock. I spent a good part of yesterday finding the RSS feeds for the sites that I visit daily, some of which still don’t have syndication of their own, but do have third-parties who syndicate their content (most likely unbeknownst to them). This provides me a segue into the New York Times online site, which, as we all know, is the best. Last time I really got into RSS, there was no syndication from NYT; perfectly understandable but something that really irked me. Thanks to Radio Userland (desktop weblog software) this has been remedied (thought I’m not sure they know that yet  :P).

The New York Times feeds are only available for Radio 8 users. If you haven’t got Radio yet, you can get a thirty-day free trial. If you already have Radio, you can be subscribing to fresh New York Times headlines in less than one minute.

They then list instructions on how Radio Userland users can add the NYT syndication to their Radio applications, followed by links to the various NYT channels, followed by:

Note: For people who don’t use Radio, the coffee mugs point to a page on the user’s desktop which handles subscriptions. If you’re not running Radio, the coffee mug links won’t work. Sorry.

Well, they really have nothing to be sorry for, the coffee mug links work fine with a small bit of tweaking. Each of these links is revealed as 127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/subscriptions?url= http%3A%2F%2Fpartners.userland.com%2FnytRss%2Fbooks.xml, which obviously won’t open without the local Radio client running. But, one quick glance at the address reveals that the syndicated URL is here. Remove the cruft and voila, you have partners.userland.com/nytRss/books.xml — the NYT book feed. I’ve listed the feeds from NYT that I subscribe to below; feel free to add them to your client.

Books
Business
International
Homepage
Movies
Politics
Science
Technology
Sports

I’ve also exported and uploaded my current subscription list to the website so that others may use it in their clients if so desired. You can find the list here.

American Chopper

If you haven’t had a chance to see the Discovery Channel’s American Chopper series, I strongly suggest you check it out (Mondays at 10PM). You guys know I’m a reality-TV freak, but this show takes the cake. It’s entertainment crack. You have Paulie, the young, unassuming, happy-go-lucky motorcycle-design wizard, who, despite his best efforts, can’t seem to shake his father’s incessant nagging about his performance on the job. The father, a fairly menacing physical figure before he speaks and downright frightening (read: hilarious) when his son sets him off, seems to live for staying on his boy’s ass. He’s the type of person that, upon realizing he is wrong about something, might concede it, but not before explaining to you why he was right if you look at the situation from another angle. Above and beyond their “work” relationship lies the beauty of the show — their father-son relationship. While he’s constantly barking at Paulie, one can easily see the pride he has for him and the obvious joy he gets from being able to spend so much quality time with his son. I can’t, through words, impart to you how great this show really is. It certainly isn’t meant to be this good, and most people probably don’t get out of it what I do, but that doesn’t stop me from going on and on about it. I encourage you to check out an episode. I think you, like me, will immediately fall for this annoyingly humble, middle-of-the-road family. (Discovery, please direct payment to my PayPal account  :P).

Relative dates in Movable Type

I’ve removed the relative dates (e.g., “Posted 12 hours ago”) on the posts and have gone back to a basic date format. The reason for the change went something like this: I woke up this morning and thought, “Man, I sure would like to get rid of those damn relative dates.” The PHP code I developed for the relative dating scheme is still available to anyone who wants it; just ask (and bring me cookies).

Take that

Huey Long, the unapologetic and ridiculously powerful former governor of Louisiana, once said, “Quote me as saying that that Imperial bastard will never set foot in Louisiana, and that when I call him a son of a bitch I am not using profanity, but am referring to the circumstances of his birth,” in reaction to a threat by the head of the Ku Klux Klan in 1935 to come into the state and campaign against him (Long was the only southern governor who treated blacks as equals at the time).

I really enjoyed the quote and thought I’d share.

Human machines

Is it in the best interest of mankind to build a human machine?

That’s the topic of a paper I wrote for a “legal computing” class last semester. I’ve been asked by quite a few people for a copy and so I decided to just put it up here.

Thesis

Advancement of the species is the ultimate goal of any human civilization. As the distinction between computers and man becomes increasingly blurred, we, as a society, will be left to decide whether human, or ‘conscious’ machines can play a beneficial role in our lives. Machines with human-level intelligence will be possible in the future and they will be made. Initially, human machines will be inherently beneficial to society as they will not only push the boundaries of science and imagination, a wholly human ambition, but will also allow us to extend our lives, and may eventually lead to a mechanical immortality. Up to now, the application of ethics to machines, including programs, has been that the actions of the machine were the responsibility of the designer and/or operator. In the future, however, it seems clear that we are going to have machines whose behavior is an emergent and to some extent unforeseeable result of design and operation decisions made by many people and ultimately by other machines. It is the unforeseeable results that might very well put mankind into harm’s way.

Introduction

There are usually three stages in examining the impact of future technology: the sheer fascination of its potential to overcome age-old problems, then an acknowledgment of a new set of problems that will inevitably accompany these new technologies, followed by the realization that the only feasible and responsible path is one that can provide the promise while managing the peril. The best interests of mankind lie somewhere between the promise and the peril. The promises of a human machine are many. They would provide great opportunities for improving the material circumstances of human life. A machine with human-level intelligence can perhaps be viewed as the next step in evolution as it frees the human mind from its severe physical limitations of scope and duration.

As with most revolutionary promises, attached to it is the possibility of revolutionary peril. It has been said that artificial intelligence research makes possible the idea that humans are automata – an idea that results in a loss of autonomy or even of humanity. Some futurists suggest that once the human race brings into existence entities of higher, perhaps unlimited, intelligence, its own preservation may seem less important.

Arguments over the desirability of a technology must weigh the benefits against the risk, the promise against the peril. The peril associated with human machines could be the worst possible: extinction. As has always been the case, any given technology can be deliberately misused to the detriment of humanity, but unlike all previous technologies, machines with human (or better) intelligence might make that decision for mankind.

Discussion of Research

Artificial intelligence is broadly defined as anything that a computer does that would otherwise be considered a human trait. It is the part of computer science concerned with designing systems that exhibit the characteristics we associate with intelligence in human behavior — understanding language, learning, reasoning, solving problems, etc. While the study of artificial intelligence is one of the newest scientific and technologic disciplines, the study of intelligence is one of the oldest. For more than 2000 years, philosophers have tried to understand how seeing, learning, remembering, and reasoning could, or should, be done (Russell and Norvig, 3). The study and creation of artificial intelligence directly relates to a better ability to understand humanity. The chance to learn more about mankind, to learn what it is to be human, could be one of the most rewarding benefits of a human machine.

There seems to be an agreement that there are definite short-term benefits and long-term risks associated with a human machine. In the short-term, the benefits of increasing the intellectual power of machines will be seen as a great boon to humanity. There are already hundreds of contemporary examples of “narrow” artificial intelligence, that is, machines that can perform well-defined tasks that we regard as examples of intelligent behavior when performed by humans, including diagnosing blood cells and electrocardiograms, guiding cruise missiles, solving mathematical theorems, playing master-level games such as chess, and many others.

Technological progress in other fields will be accelerated by the arrival of human-level artificial intelligence – it is a true general-purpose technology. It enables applications in a very wide range of other fields. In particular, scientific and technological research (as well as philosophical thinking) will be done more effectively when conducted by machines that are smarter than humans. Overall, technological advancement will be increased. For at least the next 30 years, computers based on human brains will be far too useful to be suppressed. Military and economic forces alone will be enough to legitimize the advancement of the machines, not to mention the ability to relieve humans of many everyday chores. Among a slew of other things, they will become smart enough to teach children, clean up around the house, drive cars, provide sex, and help human experts in decision making. They will do most of the work that used to require humans and in doing so will create great wealth for the entire planet (de Garis).

Ray Kurzweil, a well-respected author and inventor, and perhaps the world’s most accredited futurist voice, says that one of the most exciting benefits of a human machine will be a virtual immortality. It will be possible to ‘upload’ the brain into a computer – knowledge, memories, loves, goals – an entire existence. These machines will be able to convince us that they are conscious by mastering the delicate cues that humans now use to determine consciousness in other humans (Kurzweil, “Live Forever”). It is clear that most, if not all, short-term effects are beneficial to mankind, but the long-term risks that can arise from human machines can be described as nothing less than catastrophic. Artificial intelligence is a truly revolutionary prospect because it can be expected to lead to the creation of machines with intellectual abilities that vastly surpass those of any human. It would be a mistake to conceptualize machine intelligence as a mere tool. The scenario in which machines with general-purpose intelligence are created needs to be given serious thought. Machines capable of general-purpose intelligence would have independent initiative and could make their own plans. These machines might be better viewed as persons than machines. Many of those well-versed in the field of artificial intelligence share the sentiment that if mankind can indeed create machines that exceed humans in the moral and intellectual dimensions, then it is bound to do so. It is simply seen as the next step on the evolutionary ladder. It is in agreement among most leaders of the artificial intelligence field that by 2020, a $1000 personal computer will have the processing power of the human brain – 20 million billion calculations per second. By 2030, the ability to scan the human brain and recreate its design electronically will be possible. By 2050, a $1000 worth of computing power will equal the processing power of all human brains combined (Kurzweil, “Live Forever”). The figures help to paint a very powerful picture of where humanity’s place in the intellectual food chain will be, or won’t be as it were. George Dyson, author of Darwin Among the Machines, writes, “In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines” (Joy).

Professor Hugo de Garis is caught, perhaps more than anyone else, between the promise and the peril of a human machine. He is leading a group that is designing and building the world’s first ‘artificial brain’. The ‘brain’, he says, will consist of a billion neurons within four years. Human brains have roughly 100 billion neurons (de Garis). He notes that while massive computational speed and size to do not automatically lead to massive intelligence, they are prerequisites. He not only believes that these machines could become smarter than human beings, but that they could “truly be trillions and trillions and trillions of times greater.”

The future, as told by de Garis, will consist of humanity split between two major ideological groups. On one side will be those who think that the creating of these super-intelligent beings is the destiny of the human species and the ultimate goal of creating the next dominant species. The other side will belong to those who believe that building these human (or better) machines will mean that mankind is accepting the risk that they may eventually decide that the human species is inferior and annoying, and might call for its extinction. It is along these lines that de Garis commented, “I’m glad to be alive now. I fear for my grandchildren. They will see the horror, and they will be destroyed by it.” He is not alone with a dire vision of mankind’s future.

Bill Joy, Chief Scientist and Corporate Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems, has spoken at length about his worries for the future of mankind. He stresses that we need to proceed with great caution as we tend to overestimate our design abilities, which, regarding human machines, could result in our extinction (Joy). Joy states that “We are creators of new technologies and stars of the imagined future, driven despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating what it may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome of what we are creating and imagining.”

Hans Moravec, the Principal Research Scientist in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, sees the future in a slightly more optimistic, but equally alarming perspective. Like most others well-versed in the field, he believes that the development of intelligent machines is an inevitable truth close at hand, and that every technical step along the way has an evolutionary counterpart likely to benefit its creators, manufacturers, and users (Moravec). He says that each advance will provide intellectual rewards, competitive advantages, increased wealth, and can make the world a better place to live. Humans will be alleviated from essential roles and tasks because intelligent machines will be able to perform them better and cheaper. The increasingly large displacement could eventually remove mankind from the equation altogether, something he claims does not alarm him because he considers the future machines mankind’s children – mankind in a more compelling and powerful form. As Moravec explains, the machines will embody humanity’s best chance for a long-term future but at the same time will also cause humanity’s decline.

The speed of the descent could be slowed, because in the same way that some biological children care for their elderly parents, so too could machines be taught to care for humans until the time comes when humankind should “bow out.” Moravec sees this as “a comfortable retirement before we fade away” (Moravec). As was stated above, a slightly more optimistic, but equally alarming perspective that still ultimately results in the extinction of the species. There are those who feel that if we can control the motivations of the artificial intellects that we design, then they could come to constitute a class of highly capable “slaves.” Pop-culture is rife with such utopian views of the future. One needs to look no further than 1977’s Star Wars, in which intelligent robots are not only a reality but refer to their human owners as “master.” On the other hand, it must be noted that even if the case for slave-like, human-preserving, intelligent machines can be made, there is still the very real possibility that they could be turned against humanity by some ‘evil’ person (Lanier). Again, a rather dystopian and scary outlook for the future; perhaps not unlike 1999’s The Matrix, where the world has been laid to waste and taken over by advanced intelligent machines.

Once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species — to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself (Joy). Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned British scientist and physicist, says, “In contrast with our intellect, computers double their performance every 18 months, so the danger is real that they could develop intelligence and take over the world” (McAuliffe). As quickly as possible, Hawking thinks that technologies need to be developed so as to allow a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than oppose it.

The interval that humans and machines will have roughly equal intelligence will be brief. The intelligence levels of a human machine will grow quickly and will be superior to human intelligence because it will combine the advantages of non-biological intelligence with the powers of human intelligence. These advantages include the fact that electric circuits are 100 million times faster than the human brain and virtually unlimited memory is available to computers. Human machines will also be capable of sharing knowledge extremely efficiently between them – much easier and quicker than humans (Kurzweil, “Ray Kurzweil Speaks…”). The brief equality between machine intelligence and human intelligence, coupled with the assured rapid progress of the former, reveals that advanced planning and diligent maintenance will be required to maintain mankind’s existence even if the effort is inherently futile. Despite all human diligence, Moravec contends that once human-level intelligence is achieved, “It is the ‘wild’ intelligences, those beyond our constraints, to whom the future belongs,” and it is to this end that most scientists and researchers agree (Moravec).

Conclusion

There is both promise and peril associated with revolutionary ideas and the concept of a human machine is certainly not exempt from this dichotomy. In fact, it might hold truer for this idea than any before it. The short-term promises of a human machine are many and exciting. The benefits are uncountable and most agree that they will be able to alleviate humans from many of the mundane duties of everyday life. In short, they will be left to do most of the work that humans are now responsible for doing. There is also the very real possibility of a virtual immortality being available to humans such that “copies” of their brains, of their existence, are actually put into a machine as they become their robotic selves. The greatest benefit of a human machine is that they, unlike anything before, can and will teach us about ourselves, about what it is to be human.

It is this entirely human desire for knowledge and advancement that will ultimately lead to mankind’s demise. It is widely accepted that once human machines come into being, they will not only replicate themselves, but will also seek to make themselves smarter. They may very well devote their abilities to designing the next generation of intelligence, soon realizing that there is no practical use for their human progenitors and perhaps taking measures to get rid of them.

The best interests of mankind are certainly not found in its extinction, therefore a human machine from which extinction is a very real possibility, if not an inevitable certainty, cannot be brought to fruition if humans wish to maintain their role as the dominant earth species. Though most experts agree with this assessment and do feel that machines will eventually reign over man, they press on with their research. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan project, said the following, three months after the first atomic bombings on Nagasaki and Okinawa:

It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge and are willing to take the consequences (Joy).

It is with this idea, this notion that science must advance at all costs, that many researchers and scientists can sleep at night knowing full well the possible consequences of their work. They feel, as do I, that it is the height of arrogance to assume that humans are the final word in goodness and that if intellectually, and perhaps morally superior beings can be brought into existence, then it is the responsibility of mankind to do just that, even when the chances are high that it will remove humans from existence. Ultimately, it is not in the best interest of mankind to build a human machine, but that is not to say that it isn’t in the best interest of something, even if that something is an idea that humans might never be able to understand.

Bibliography

Garis, Hugo. “Building Gods or building Our Potential Exterminators?” http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0131.html (2 Feb. 2003). Joy, Bill. “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Wired. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html (5 Feb. 2003). Kurzweil, Ray. Interview with Sari Kalin. “Ray Kurzweil Speaks His Mind.” Darwin Online. http://www.darwinmag.com/read/120101/hal_sidebar2.html (9 Feb. 2003). Kurzweil, Ray. “Live Forever.” Psychology Today. http://www.psychologytoday.com/htdocs/prod/ptoarticle/pto-20000101-000037.asp (1 Feb. 2003). Lanier, Jaron. “One Half Of A Manifesto.” Edge. http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge74.html (8 Feb. 2003). McAuliffe, Wendy. “Hawking warns of AI world takeover.” ZDNet. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2094424,00.html (8 Feb. 2003). Moravec, Hans. “Robots, Re-Evolving Mind.” http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/robot.papers/2000/Cerebrum.htm (1 Feb. 2003). Russel, Stuart and Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1995.

Contact form

I’ve done away with all of my contact information and have opted to use a form instead. I’m using a Perl script called FormMail to handle the html -> e-mail end of it. You might remember the post titled Too much spam, in which I lauded the Hiveware Enkoder and its ability to thwart e-mail-harvesting robots through JavaScript. While this solution has worked perfectly, I also made the point in that post that I like to keep my markup as free of superfluous code as possible and it is to this end that I have decided to use a form instead. This way I’m no longer revealing all of the other information (I’m gonna hear it about the mobile phone number being removed, I just know it) and am still able to receive e-mail while keeping the naughty e-mail-sucking bots at bay. You’ll notice in the source of the contact page that there is a hidden variable called recipient to which the value “justin” is attached — “justin” is aliased to my e-mail address in the .conf file which the script reads when it is being executed — again making the e-mail bots play nice, or not at all as it were.

Poor beavers

Finding Nemo

Brilliant. Beautiful. Wow.

Toast

Last Saturday, after learning that the tanning salon at my apartment complex was now free, I got inside a “tanning bed” for the first time. The guy at the front desk asked if I’d ever been before. I said “no” and he proceeded to ask me how long I would like to go in for, to which I replied, “take me out right before I get cancer.” He suggested 12 minutes (the obvious cancer cut-off) and since I was in no position to argue, I agreed. I have to say that it was a pretty decent experience; I saw results right away and even went back again today. I’ll probably go quite a few times throughout the summer (after all, it is free). I figure that it can’t be too bad for me as I’ve lived in Florida almost all my life and have spent a very large portion of that time outside and in the water (before I came to college anyways  :P), so I probably have cancer already. Right? Right!?! Right!?!