Posts Tagged ‘ARPANET’
“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future”*…
… but maybe not as hard as it once was. While multi-agent artificial intelligence was first used in the sixties, advances in technology have made it an extremely sophisticated modeling– and prediction– tool. As Derek Beres explains, it can be a powerfully-accurate prediction engine… and it can potentially also be an equally powerful tool for manipulation…
The debate over free will is ancient, yet data don’t lie — and we have been giving tech companies access to our deepest secrets… We like to believe we’re not predictable, but that’s simply not true…
Multi-agent artificial intelligence (MAAI) is predictive modeling at its most advanced. It has been used for years to create digital societies that mimic real ones with stunningly accurate results. In an age of big data, there exists more information about our habits — political, social, fiscal — than ever before. As we feed them information on a daily basis, their ability to predict the future is getting better.
[And] given the current political climate around the planet… MAAI will most certainly be put to insidious means. With in-depth knowledge comes plenty of opportunities for exploitation and manipulation, no deepfake required. The intelligence might be artificial, but the target audience most certainly is not…
Move over deepfakes; multi-agent artificial intelligence is poised to manipulate your mind: “Can AI simulations predict the future?,” from @derekberes at @bigthink.
[Image above: source]
* Niels Bohr
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As we analyze augury, we might note that today is National Computer Security Day. It was inaugurated by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1988, shortly after an attack on ARPANET (the forerunner of the internet as we know it) that damaged several of the connected machines. Meant to call attention to the need for constant need for attention to security, it’s a great day to change all of one’s passwords.
“Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible”*…
As Charlie Wood explains, physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers, arguing that the future of computing lies in exploiting the universe’s complex physical behaviors…
… When it comes to conventional machine learning, computer scientists have discovered that bigger is better. Stuffing a neural network with more artificial neurons — nodes that store numerical values — improves its ability to tell a dachshund from a Dalmatian, or to succeed at myriad other pattern recognition tasks. Truly tremendous neural networks can pull off unnervingly human undertakings like composing essays and creating illustrations. With more computational muscle, even grander feats may become possible. This potential has motivated a multitude of efforts to develop more powerful and efficient methods of computation.
[Cornell’s Peter McMahon] and a band of like-minded physicists champion an unorthodox approach: Get the universe to crunch the numbers for us. “Many physical systems can naturally do some computation way more efficiently or faster than a computer can,” McMahon said. He cites wind tunnels: When engineers design a plane, they might digitize the blueprints and spend hours on a supercomputer simulating how air flows around the wings. Or they can stick the vehicle in a wind tunnel and see if it flies. From a computational perspective, the wind tunnel instantly “calculates” how wings interact with air.
A wind tunnel is a single-minded machine; it simulates aerodynamics. Researchers like McMahon are after an apparatus that can learn to do anything — a system that can adapt its behavior through trial and error to acquire any new ability, such as classifying handwritten digits or distinguishing one spoken vowel from another. Recent work has shown that physical systems like waves of light, networks of superconductors and branching streams of electrons can all learn.
“We are reinventing not just the hardware,” said Benjamin Scellier, a mathematician at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in Switzerland who helped design a new physical learning algorithm, but “also the whole computing paradigm.”…
Computing at the largest scale? “How to Make the Universe Think for Us,” from @walkingthedot in @QuantaMagazine.
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As we think big, we might send well-connected birthday greetings to Leonard Kleinrock; he was born on this date in 1934. A computer scientist, he made several foundational contributions the field, in particular to the theoretical foundations of data communication in computer networking. Perhaps most notably, he was central to the development of ARPANET (which essentially grew up to be the internet); his graduate students at UCLA were instrumental in developing the communication protocols for internetworking that made that possible.
“In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution”*…
(Roughly) Daily is headed into its traditional Holiday hibernation; regular service will begin again very early in the New Year.
It seems appropriate (especially given the travails of this past year) to end the year on a positive and optimistic note, with a post celebrating an extraordinary accomplishment– Science magazine‘s (thus, the AAAS‘) “Breakthrough of the Year” for 2021…
In his 1972 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, American biochemist Christian Anfinsen laid out a vision: One day it would be possible, he said, to predict the 3D structure of any protein merely from its sequence of amino acid building blocks. With hundreds of thousands of proteins in the human body alone, such an advance would have vast applications, offering insights into basic biology and revealing promising new drug targets. Now, after nearly 50 years, researchers have shown that artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software can churn out accurate protein structures by the thousands—an advance that realizes Anfinsen’s dream and is Science’s 2021 Breakthrough of the Year.
AI-powered predictions show proteins finding their shapes: the full story: “Protein structures for all.”
And read Nature‘s profile of the scientist behind the breakthrough: “John Jumper: Protein predictor.”
* E. O. Wilson
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As we celebrate science, we might send well-connected birthday greetings to Robert Elliot Kahn; he was born on this date in 1938. An electrical engineer and computer scientist, he and his co-creator, Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet. Later, he and Vint, along with fellow computer scientists Lawrence Roberts, Paul Baran, and Leonard Kleinrock, built the ARPANET, the first network to successfully link computers around the country.
Kahn has won the Turing Award, the National Medal of Technology, and the Presidential Medal Of Freedom, among many, many other awards and honors.
“Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events”*…
Dr. Leonard Kleinrock poses beside the processor in the UCLA lab where the first ARPANET message was sent
The first message transmitted over ARPANET, the pioneering Pentagon-funded data-sharing network, late in the evening on October 29, 1969, was incomplete due to a technical error. UCLA graduate student Charley Kline was testing a “host to host” connection across the nascent network to a machine at SRI in Menlo Park, California, and things seemed to be going well–until SRI’s machine, operated by Bill Duvall, crashed partway through the transmission, meaning the only letters received from the attempted “login” were “lo.”
Kline thought little of the event at the time, but it’s since become the stuff of legend and poetic reinterpretation. “As in, lo and behold!” ARPANET developer and early internet icon Leonard Kleinrock says, grinning as he recounts the story in the 2016 Werner Herzog documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World. Others have interpreted the truncated transmission as “a stuttered hello”; one camp argues it was a prescient “LOL.”
It’s a staple of tech hagiography to inject history’s banal realities with monumental foresight and noble intentions; Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated as much recently, when he claimed Facebook was founded in response to the Iraq War, rather than to rate the attractiveness of Harvard women. It’s understandable to wish that ARPANET’s inaugural message, too, had offered a bit more gravity, given all that the network and its eventual successor, the internet, hath wrought upon the world. But perhaps the most enduring truth of the internet is that so many of its foundational moments and decisive turning points—from Kline’s “lo” to Zuckerberg’s late-night coding sessions producing a service for “dumb fucks” at Harvard—emerged from ad hoc actions and experiments undertaken with little sense of foresight or posterity. In this respect, the inaugural “lo” was entirely apt…
Fifty years after the first successful (or, successful enough) transmission across the ARPANET, we’ve effectively terraformed the planet into a giant computer founded on the ARPANET’s architecture. The messages transmitted across it have certainly become more complex, but the illusion that its ad-hoc infrastructure developed in a political vacuum has become harder and harder to maintain. That illusion has been pierced since 2016, but the myth that seems poised to replace it—that technology can in fact automate away bias and politics itself—is no less insidious.
The vapidity of the first ARPANET message is a reminder of the fallacy of this kind of apolitical, monumental storytelling about technology’s harms and benefits. Few isolated events in the development of the internet were as heroic as we may imagine, or as nefarious as we may fear. But even the most ad hoc of these events occurred in a particular ideological context. What is the result of ignoring or blithely denying that context? Lo and behold: It looks a lot like 2019.
Half a century after the first ARPANET message, pop culture still views connectivity as disconnected from the political worldview that produced it. The always-illuminating Ingrid Burrington argues that that’s a problem: “How We Misremember the Internet’s Origins.”
“Is everyone who lives in Ignorance like you?” asked Milo.
“Much worse,” he said longingly. “But I don’t live here. I’m from a place very far away called Context.”
― The Phantom Tollbooth
* All the King’s Men
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As we ruminate on roots, we might send carefully-coded birthday greetings to Gordon Eubanks; he was born on this date in 1946. A microcomputer pioneer, he earned his PhD studying under Garry Kildall, who founded Digital Research; his dissertation was BASIC-E, a compiler designed for Kildall’s CP/M operating system. In 1981, after DR lost the IBM operating system contract to Microsoft (per yesterday’s almanac entry), Eubanks joined DR to create new programming languages. He soon came to doubt DR’s viability, and left to join Symantec, where he helped develop Q & A, an integrated database and wordprocessor with natural language query. He rose through Symantec’s ranks to become it’s President and CEO. Later he became president and CEO of Oblix, a silicon valley startup that creates software for web security (acquired by Oracle in 2005).
“I think I’ve created a brand and a business”*…
Independent Studio Services, or ISS as it’s known in Hollywood, is one of the leading prop houses serving the motion picture and film community. Producers rely on it to fit sets with every manor of physical item, each authentically evocative of the scene being shot. Most of those items– from sideboards to side arms– are “commercially-anonymous”… that’s to say, not overtly branded. But increasingly over the last several years, via product placement, branded goods– the Heineken that James Bond drinks in Skyfall, the Coke cups in front of each American Idol judge– are slipping into the spotlight.
Still, there are lots of situations in which producers need a “branded” item that isn’t real:
“We’re trained to see brands, so when you don’t it’s almost jarring,” says Michael Bertolina of ISS. “But the network won’t use a brand if it interferes with an advertising deal they have or if it’s not used for its intended use. So instead of covering it with tape or running into a legal nightmare, we create these brands that are fictional.”
Given the normalcy of brands, prop houses like ISS base their fake products on them. Bertolina says the prop version gets modified to the point where it won’t impede on anyone’s intellectual property, “just like private label cereal boxes versus something from Kellogg’s.” So Leonard on Community reviews “Let’s” instead of Lay’s, or Ben Harmon drinks “Haberkern” on American Horror Story last season instead of Heineken.
“Our owner’s name is Gregg Bilson, so you’ll find Bilson cigarettes all over TV,” Bertolina adds. “If you watched Justified on FX, [Mags Bennett] ran a shop and had a rack of cigarettes behind her head all the time. They’re all Bilson.”
More on brands-that-aren’t at CoCreate.
* “I don’t think I am an actress. I think I’ve created a brand and a business.” – Pamela Anderson
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As we switch to generics, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet as we know it, became an actual network. Initial test login characters had been sent on October 29 of that year from a ULCA computer to a computer at SRI in Menlo Park, CA, which were then permanently connected on November 21 through early routers (small packet-switching computers then called Interface Message Processors). With the addition of nodes U.C. Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah on this date, the “remote binary” configuration became a true network. By December 1971 ARPANET linked 23 host computers to each other; today there are over 900 million host computers connected to the internet– and over 2.4 Billion internet users worldwide.
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