Mukhtar Must Wait for Tahrir

Libya has seized the world stage from Egypt as it see-saws dramatically between Gaddafi and the rebels. I am glued to Al Jazeera English around the clock, which most recently has been showing footage of the triumphant rebels firing into the air after retaking the city of Ajdabiya. But my optimism knows limits.

Libya, like Yemen, has a tribal society. The lack of unity or state institutions that can compete with traditional loyalties suggests a serious risk of chaos dominating the scene for a long time to come. The rebel leadership in Benghazi is struggling to cope with the burdens of responsibility. They are effectively cut off from rebel enclaves in the west and it is not clear whether the latter would follow Benghazi if given the chance.

Gaddafi meanwhile has tenaciously burnished his well-deserved reputation as a Machiavellian monster. He has succeeded in clinging to power in the face of a powerful upsurge against him. But although his tactics have halted the flow of defections, they have also united the Arab League and the international community against him. It is truly remarkable to see the Arab League, many of whose constituents are struggling to quash their own liberation movements, speak on behalf of a foreign intervention led by Western powers in another Arab oil state.

The ripples of the Libyan intervention have traveled widely. In Russia it has sparked a rift between Putin and Medvedev. Putin said the UNSC resolution was like "medieval calls for crusades" and Medvedev called these remarks "unacceptable". Ambivalence has pervaded the anti-intervention coalition of nations, including Turkey and Germany.

The intervention arrived in the nick of time as was made clear by pictures of a column of smoldering tanks with their gun turrets pointed at the large civilian population of Benghazi. Turkey had argued for a delay to make room for negotiations with Gaddafi. That would have been an unmitigated disaster. It was thanks to the no-drive zone, the mandate for a robust intervention from the air, that civilian populations across Libya have averted decimation, for the time being.

The Obama administration has done much good in its caution and reluctance. It is important that the responsibility for Libya remains unequivocally with the Libyans, for several reasons. Iraq demonstrated that liberty must flow from within. Moreover, the US should not own Libya's successes and failures.

Libya and Yemen, even if they oust their long-time dictators, are not structurally capable of achieving the progress that is emerging in Tunisia and Egypt. Nor do the Libyan rebels seem to want outside help in building state institutions, for the time being. Unfortunately they will struggle for years to come.

The main hope lies with Egypt. Right now the only Arab states that can be turned to in the promotion of liberty are small Persian Gulf nations like Qatar and UAE. Nevertheless Qatar's Al Jazeera is one of the seminal strands of the Arab Spring. Imagine adding Egypt's powerful voice and weight? Egypt is the most populous Arab nation, has a strong military, and has long been a cultural and intellectual center. Thus the aspirations of Libya's colonial freedom fighter Omar Muktar (who was born near Tobruk!) depends on the progress realized by Tahrir Square.

Watson and Niche Intelligence

Congratulations are due to David Ferrucci and his team at IBM for pulling off an impressive (and probably ultimately lucrative) computational feat creating a machine that outstrips humans at Jeopardy. As I watched the final game on Wednesday, while impressed with some of the nuances the computer navigated, I rooted vainly for the human contestants. It has been 14 years since the last publicly touted milestone in AI development when Deep Blue outgunned Gary Kasparov in chess. As in the previous episode, the implications are not yet clear.

Contestants on Jeopardy, in order to answer a question, must press their buzzer before anyone else, but after a signal light turns on. Those who jump the gun are penalized by disabling their buzzer for a quarter of a second. Watson has no eyes or ears, so it cannot see the signal. Instead, it receives an electronic signal and it physically presses the buzzer using a rudimentary finger made from a magnetic coil. The system is able to actuate reliably with a lighting reflex time (I have seen both millisecond or microsecond reported) that consistently beats its human opponents.

Watson also gets special treatment for the delivery of the questions. They are delivered electronically like an email or a tweet and thus Watson, which like all computers can read exceptionally fast, is busily searching its databases and scoring its answers using 2880 parallel processes while the question is read out loud to the other contestants.

Watson does have a mouth and it says quirky things like 'Lets finish off Chicks Dig Me'. But behind this facade, how does it decide when to speak? I doubt it is using speech recognition. After all, IBM recently announced a deal to combine Watson technology with speech recognition technology from Nuance. So there must be a human (traitor!) signaling Watson when it is time to select the next question.

These handicaps illustrate that the scope of artificial intelligence is still quite narrow. Indeed I believe the next decade will continue to see impressive and useful developments in "niche intelligence." Most of us enjoy the benefits of Google and GPS navigation on a daily basis. In fact, I believe the most impressive artificial intelligence in the world is not Watson but the Google search engine. Just because it processors and other silicon bits are distributed globally rather than crammed into a room-sized rack of computers, does that make it any less of a 'computer'? In one sense Google is more human in that its cells are constantly being created and eliminated.

Niche intelligence is not unlike a so-called 'idiot savant'. Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man has a remarkable facility with numbers and a photographic memory, but he is unable to function socially or in other dimensions. AI takes niche intelligence to a new extreme, performing marvelously in narrow, well-defined contexts. But at the end of the day, Watson's general intelligence is probably somewhere between an ant and a small rodent.

It will be exciting to watch as the next niche intelligences unfold and deepen the ability of computers to enhance our lives in unanticipated ways. It will be a long hard slog. Will these niches eventually expand and converge into truly intelligent entities? It is hard to say, but I thank Watson's mentors for stimulating and entertaining our minds.

Bye bye Lieberman

I am not a big fan of Lieberman. I don't think he represented the people of CT effectively post 9/11. People I know from CT (I know this is unscientific) tend to be quite liberal, the forgive and live harmoniously types. Though he was liberal on social issues he was very hawkish on the foreign policy front. May be if he supported the Health Care reform he would've done better in my eyes.
I have a lot of problem with his unconditional support of Israel and U.S. policy towards it, the Iraq war, and general support for expansion of executive power during the Bush-Cheney years. However, I can understand where he might be coming from. I admired his resolute support of Gay and abortion rights. Even more reason for me to be confused about his opposition to Health Care Reform.
I was very angry when he appeared at the RNC convention in 2008, supporting McCain. But, I do believe he was supporting a close friend with whom he shared much against an opponent he didn't know much. That shows more character than betrayal to his roots that I wanted to dismiss it as. I think I have come to accept and even admire that stunt.
I had more issues with his opposition to universal health care. Any U.S. house member who is opposed to extending the same quality care they get to everyone in the country has some major misunderstanding about public service and entitlement. I would love to call him a puppet of the insurance industry (CT is the major hub and they are constituents too) but his net worth is a measly $2M, hardly an evidence of him being in the pockets of the Insurance companies.
So, yes he should step down if he doesn't believe his principles will allow him to represent his constituents effectively. But I wouldn't vilify him. He was a man of principles even though I disagreed with him on occasions.

Kurzweil Part 2

Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism was the title of the cover article in IEEE Spectrum's December issue. I wrote about Ray Kurzweil's prognostication gaps back at the beginning of 2010, so this article for me brings some level of vindication. The former editor of Scientific American John Rennie complains that (and I quote):

• On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity.
• Most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable.
• His unambiguously correct statements are wedded to others that sound close to reality…but are also somewhat off. They're like descriptions of the world as seen through a fish-eye lens.

By his own account the would-be tech prophet reckons that in 1999 he made 108 predictions for 2009, some 102 were either entirely correct (89) or essentially correct (13); only one was just wrong. Indeed Kurzweil followed up Rennie's article with a 148 page exposition in support of these conclusions. It was entitled "Why I am so marvelous"... no just kidding.

Here are examples of rather humdrum predictions:

Cables are disappearing. Communication between components uses short-distance wireless technology. High-speed wireless communication provides access to the Web.

A $1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second.

These were things that everyone was predicting. Yes we all know that things are getting smaller, faster, cheaper and more unplugged. These were trends that were evident even to casual observers in 1999.

As an aside I would point out that the average person today owns and uses more gadget wires than they did a decade ago, thanks in large part to the proliferation of every possible kind of power adapter plug, voltage and form factor combined with the fact that we are using more gadgets than before. Have you ever kicked yourself for forgetting to pack a particular wire on a vacation or business trip?

Nonetheless, I am not going to quibble. That wireless technology has taken off is undeniable. Many of us have wireless networks in our homes and carry smart phones that allow us to remain 'plugged in' (although dead spots do abound). Demand is growing for cellular bandwidth which has prompted 4G and spectrum soul-searching at the FCC.

Sometimes Kurzweil is just plain wrong and it is frustrating that he refuses to admit it much less try to engage in some constructive analysis about why things turned out differently and what the implications of that are. He was wrong that (his analysis in parenthesis):

• The majority of text is created using speech recognition (partially correct)
  
• Language user interfaces are ubiquitous (partially correct)
  
• Business transactions often take place with an animated virtual personality (partially correct)
  
• Translating telephones are commonly used (essentially correct)
  
• Technology advances have lead to continuous economic growth (no comment)
  
• Human musicians routinely jam with cybernetic musicians (correct)
  
• The neo-Luddite movement is growing (correct)
  

One thing he has done is to inflate the number of predictions he made so as to make it near impossible to go through all of them. But I posted the definitive list of 12 predictions on this blog, which he had set apart in his book. Of these, most of them were wrong.

Kurzweil admits that the majority of all text is not created using voice recognition. But he still rates this prediction as "partially correct" since two iPhone apps were released at the end of 2009. Of these the Google Mobile app is not really relevant. Although the Dragon Mobile app has achieved popularity in the app-world, I would eat a hat of your choosing if it accounts for the majority of all text created.

He gives his translating telephone prediction a higher "essentially correct" rating. "I suppose one could argue how common its use is today". The Jibbigo iPhone app is his main argument here. Apple advertises that there are over 300,000 iPhone apps. The existence of an app does not mean it is common or routine.