Rusty promises

As the year comes to an end, it’s time to drop a list I’ve been noodling on for months: high tech dreams that didn’t come true—breathless tech promises that weren’t kept. 

MyGPT

I want to create my own AI chatbots based on text corpora I specify. That will let me to converse with avatars of large bodies of content, like encyclopedias, user groups, and corporations. (Cf. Conversations with ogregores.) I could also set them to debating with each other. And not least, it would let me to create a personalized AI search engine. The “neeva AI answer” becomes the “meeva AI answer.”

Workplace egregores

I learned about Carolyn Chen’s book about how blurring the line between work and religion in an interview with the CS Monitor. It made me wonder if egregores are more likely to arise in workplaces now that they are becoming more like the home turf of those “autonomous psychic entities that are composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people” (Wiktionary, see also Wikipedia).

The problem with ogregores?

During a discussion about tech & mythology, William Kuskin challenged me to explain what problem I was trying to solve. Here’s an attempt to answer the question. 

Conversations with ogregores

If some organizations have motivations distinguishable from their human constituents (i.e., if they are ogregores), then I would like to talk to them, or at least hear them speak. However, organizations generate so much communication that is hard if not impossible for a single human to grasp. AI chatbots might be one way forward. 

A “mo-cap test” for agency

I mentioned Andrew Pickering’s history of British cybernetics to Clayton Lewis, and he immediately thought of Grey Walter’s tortoises. Clayton pointed me to Valentino Braitenberg’s vehicles. The Wikipedia write-up made me wonder about a Turing Test equivalent for agency: the mo-cap test.

Is crypto an orgregore?

Jill Dupré raised the question of crypto as an orgregore. Exploring the question helped me think about what an orgregore (aka ogregore or materialist's egregore) is. 

Aristotle, agency, aliveness

Paul Diduch alerted me to Aristotle’s idea that natural things have an internal principle of motion, while human-made artefacts don’t. That made me wonder how agency and contemporary technology relate to an Aristotelian approach.

TwitterIn?

 If Musk's Twitter implodes (first quickly, then slowly, in a reversal of the usual procedure?) I expect Microsoft to buy and fold it into LinkedIn. Twitter feels increasingly corporate, which would fit Microsoft's portfolio. It also has a track record of buying trendsetters past their prime (Skype, I'm looking at you).

Defining Agency

Paul Diduch asked me whether I think weather systems like hurricanes have agency. The short answer is “No.” Giving a longer answer allows me to explore what I want the concept of agency to do, since there is no consensus on its definition even within disciplines like computer science or philosophy, let alone between them. 

Discursive and conversational search

Two things recently changed how I think about the possibilities for web search: (1) a webinar by engineers at search engine Neeva on its plans for using Large Language Models (LLMs); and (2) realizing that I’ve suddenly started using speech-to-text on my phone and desktop. I’m now willing and able to input much longer search queries, rather than just the few well-chosen words that I’ve been trained to put in the search box.

Apple ad changes: File under the Not Rule?

File under the Not Rule: Craig Federighi, Apple SVP of software engineering, saying that the company's privacy changes had "zero" to do with their interest in ads.

Source: WSJ video, "Apple's Privacy Changes Have 'Zero' to Do With Interest in Ads: Executive," October 26, 2022, at time code 0:44, "Zero part of the motivation. . . . This was driven by our privacy team."

He seems sincere, convincing, and believes what he's saying. But that doesn't invalidate the Not Rule.

Why say orgregore?

I’ve been using the term orgregore to refer to supra-human systems with agency and perhaps sentience that emerge from the joint actions of groups of people. Why not just call them organizations or institutions?

Significant but hard to discern

Testing my thesis statement (in the recent Project Snapshot), Paul Diduch pointed out to me that significant impacts are usually not hard to discern. That’s true, but there are exceptions. I believe orgregores are one of them. Here is first cut justification of my claim.

Wins for the "Not" Rule

 My "Not" Rule (if a senior executive claims something, one gets closer to the truth by taking the negative) is doing well in the current UK government meltdown.

On Thursday October 13, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng said in Washington, DC, "I'm not going anywhere" (BBC). He resigned the next day after a hurried return from the US (Reuters).

In Parliament on Wednesday October 19, Prime Minister Liz Truss insisted that “I am fighter and not a quitter” (CNBC, PM questions video). She resigned on Thursday October 20 (CNBC).

Degrees of Agency

There are many ways to define agency. The ones I’ve seen provide criteria for deciding whether an entity is or is not an agent. However, once it’s established that something is an agent it would be useful to assess degrees of agenthood. 

Tech & Mythology Project Snapshot – Oct 2022

It’s time to revisit the Tech & Mythology project outline since it keeps shifting as I learn more. There were previous snapshots in Jul 2020, Oct 2020, Feb 2021 and Nov 2021.

Ethics has downsides

I’m enjoying Justin Gregg’s new book, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity. In the fourth chapter he discusses some problems with human morality. It made me realize that we need to be just as skeptical that ethics is an unalloyed good as we are that technological progress will always have beneficial outcomes.

Big Tech Blindsight

The emotional invisibility of Big Tech mystifies me. Why don’t I get more worked up about it? I can only speak for myself since I don’t have any survey data, but I suspect it’s not just me.

Hmmm did I hear you say…

I've been under the weather since last week, and Nancy Lucero—not just my tai chi teacher but also a talented designer—suggested a cleansing shower with all that nice, warm steam. I remarked that hot showers are one of the best things in life, along with sleep and chocolate. She responded with this:

Sing a Song of Spectrum

Is 100 MHz of radio spectrum a lot? It depends on whether it’s at 200 MHz (say, 200-300 MHz) where it’s a significant chunk of the entire band, or at 20 GHz (say, 20.0-20.2 GHz) where it’s just a sliver. Musicians don’t encounter this puzzle because they express intervals in terms of frequency ratios. Thus, a soprano can sing the same song as a bass, though at a much higher pitch; the same notes but transposed upwards. 

When we think about spectrum allocations, we shouldn’t think about raw hertz, but rather about the “song” that a given number of hertz allows an operator “to sing.” (H/t Nathan Simington, Ofcom/William Webb, and SPT; see endnote [1].)

Spectrum blind spots

We’re surprised when something unexpected happens; by definition, it’s something we hadn’t been thinking about. One way to avoid surprise is to try imagining unthought things. One way to do that is to consider how institutions stop us thinking about certain things. I’ll focus this post on spectrum topics we may not be thinking about hard enough. They include non-local interference, 3D interactions, agencies outside the FCC, the dearth of spectrum zoning, and the end of endlessly increasing demand for spectrum.

Do egregores play?

Applying Betteridge's law of headlines to this blog’s title, it’s a fair bet that egregores (distinct non-physical entities that arise from a groups of people with shared motivations) do not play. And yet…

GPT-D, the dream-maker

I’ve been impressed by the creativity of my dreams – they show imagination and invention that my waking life doesn’t have. They’ve become tiresome, though, because I can’t get sense from them, try as I might. I’m beginning to think that there is no meaning to be found because there is no dream-self; it's just a mindless algorithm churning out material.

From Slime Molds to Orgregores

Slime molds are amazing, particularly when these single-celled organisms congregate and start moving as a single body. The analogy with groups of humans is tempting. I suspect that human organizations are distinct entities separate from their constituent people just as a fruiting slime mold is more than its constituent cells.

Atheist's grace

I was recently reminded of the old Scottish grace, “Some hae meat that canna eat, And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit.” Expressing thanks for one’s blessings is a wonderful practice – but what if there’s no one to be thanked?

Nobody here but us coders

Ken Liu’s 2012 short story “The Perfect Match” is a disturbing premonition of a world where Facebook is everyone’s personal assistant. What struck me most forcefully, though, was that although a Turing-test-capable personal AI is a key character, and feeding the algorithm drives the plot, the story is told in entirely human terms. There’s no sense, let alone a depiction, of the super-human technology that I imagine is driving everything. (Spoilers.)

Bubble Inc's Dream

We watched the animated movie Ron’s Gone Wrong (IMDb, Wikipedia) over the weekend. It occurred to me that one could read it as a dream in the mind of Bubble, the mega-company that makes Ron and all the other B-bots.

Corporate entities

This post tries to pull together some of the threads of a conversation with Gabor Molnar and Ramiro Montealegre about orgregores, my term for putatively sentient agents that emerge when large numbers of people are very well connected and have a common purpose. Our discussion focused on corporations.

O-gregores, an evolutionary rebuttal

 In “Scious organizations” I speculated that sufficiently large and well-connected networks of people could be conscious, by analogy to neural networks. I’ve been calling them o-gregores or orgregores. One possible rebuttal to this claim is that conscious brains evolved over hundreds of millions of years. O-gregores are ad hoc, human-made networks; while they may have the gross topology of neural networks (e.g. scale-free, small-world), they haven’t been under evolutionary pressure to be conscious. Here's a sketch of a response.