I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PJ HARVEY-Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. (2000).  

When this disc came out it was greeted with rounds of praise.  And it’s easy to see why.  It’s a mature album and it seems very New York City (or, perhaps, more specifically, it seems very Patti Smith–“Good Fortune” practically has Smith singing–I mean the way she says “Little Italy” could have been sampled from Smith).

And after the somewhat wispy Is This Desire and the stopgap Dance Hall at Louse Point, it was great to hear PJ back in full swing. These songs are stripped down (but not raw like her early albums) and most of them pack a punch.  And I just read this quite from PJ  in Q Magazine:

I want this album to sing and fly and be full of reverb and lush layers of melody. I want it to be my beautiful, sumptuous, lovely piece of work.

And it is.  It’s very commercially successful. And it was commercially successful without compromising herself.

“Big Exit” and “Good Fortune” are wonderful rockers, catchy without being predictable.  “A Place Called Home” continues in this vein, with a somewhat slower, moodier piece.  It also exhibits some of her higher register (in the bridge), but for the most part she sings in the deep voice she’s been known for (Uh Huh Her came next, and then she switched over to the higher pitch on White Chalk).

“One Line” even made it on the Gilmore Girls (paragons of good musical taste).

“Beautiful Feeling” is a slow brooding number.  Typically, I find that I don’t like these songs from PJ, but this one is fantastic.  It’s followed by the noisy “The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore” which is very dark lyrically.

Midway through the disc, we get a surprise Thom York from Radiohead sings the lead vocals on “This Mess We’re In” (PJ does backing vocals) and it shows that Yorke sounds great doing anything.  It’s a great song.  “You Said Something” is the first real upbeat moment on the disc, with some nice acoustic guitars.  And it’s followed by the absolutely rocker, “Kamikaze” which harkens to some of the noisier aspects from her earlier records (especially her screaming vocals).

The back half of many PJ albums seem to lose momentum, but not this one: “This is Love” is another great single, catchy with some simple but cool sounding guitars.

“Horses in My Dreams” is one of long (5 minute), slow numbers.  It is a kind of languid piece, which I admit I don’t like all that much.  (I find that PJ’s slow pieces aren’t dynamic enough).  But the album closer “We Float” (at 6 minutes, I think the longest track she’s done) is the kind of moody piece that Harvey does right.  There’s some simple drums and piano that comprise the verses, but when she gets to the chorus, the song perks up with her gorgeous singing “We Float.”

Confusingly, the whole album seems like it is more from the “City” than the “Sea” (“We Float” being the exception), but that’s okay.  It’s a wonderful album and the start of another great decade for PJ.

[READ: late March 2011] discussing The Turing Test

Occasionally things converge in my reading life. And sometimes things converge rapidly.  I had just read an article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker that discussed machines becoming (or surpassing) humans.  The timing of this coincides somewhat with the appearance of Watson on Jeopardy! so it’s not entirely surprising to see it.  Watson proved to be very good on Jeopardy!, but that seems mostly because it can buzz in more quickly.  The real test for a computer’s “humanity” is what has been termed “The Turing Test.”

Gopnik’s summary of the Turing Test:

If a program could consistently counterfeit human language in an ongoing exchange, then, many theorists have argued, the threshold of language would have been crossed, and there would be no need for more games to conquer. This is the famous “Turing test,” named for Alan Turing.

The next night I read a story by Ryan Boudinot (in The Littlest Hitler).  The story is not current at all, and yet he also mentions the Turing test.

The third article is another book review.  The subtitle is “What will happen when computers become smarter than people?”  Again, given everything that’s happening in the world technology-wise, it’s not a total surprise, and yet the items are all quite different and it was interesting to read them all so close together.

ADAM GOPNIK-‘Get Smart” (New Yorker, April 4, 2011)

Ostensibly, Gopnik’s article is book review.  He talks about Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything and Stephen Baker’s Final Jeopardy: Man vs Machine and the Quest to Know Everything and Brian Christian’s “The Most Human Human.”   But really this article is about much more than that.

Gopnik’s story begins on a personal note at the Franklin Institute with a machine that could beat (or tie) you at tic tac toe every time.  His mother, a logician and linguist said that the machine wasn’t smart, it was just programmed to do a simple task.  But, his mother said, if that machine could talk, well, that would change everything.

Then came Deep Blue and now Watson.  Have computers matched us yet?   This brings up the Turing Test.  At this point, these computers don’t actually think, they can just look up things faster than we can.

This leads to Gopnik discussing Google Translate. I love Google Translate.  It doesn’t make pretty sentences, but it conveys enough to get the message across.  Although Gopnik is right to say that the translations are “tilted, weird or just plain wrong.”  And yet, we rely on it (and so much more) from machines that he suggests that perhaps we have already given over more of our humanity than we realize.   He postulates that:

We place the communicative element of language above the propositional and argumentative element not because it matters more but because it’s all that’s left to us.

Most chilling of all, he wonders if it really matters if they can pass a Turing Test once they’re strapping up into chairs and preparing to take over.

RYAN BOUDINOT-“Written by Machines” (The Littlest Hitler, 2006)

This story is about a computer programmer who goes rogue. His team had been working on a language recognition program.  It was able to choose the correct word (if given context) 93% of the time.  But that 7% was crazy off: choosing the word “house” instead of the word “stomach.”  It turns out that a rogue programmer (who was fired for looking at more porn than the HR department allowed) was responsible for some of that error (he had put in a deliberate bug).

But when he left the company, he took the coding and had been working on a program that accidentally creates poetry which the narrator thinks is better than poetry that he’s read.  A debate arises about whether this programming can pass the Turing Test (and it is suggested that it would).

Although not as sinister as Gopnik’s, this story ends with the computer’s poetry reaching a critical level of success.

ALEX HUTCHINSON-“Intelligence Deficit” (The Walrus, April 2011)

This article in The Walrus is another book review.  This time it’s of Robert J. Sawyer’s WWW Series: Wake, Watch, Wonder.

This series of books looks at the near future when the machines take over.  It never mentions the Turing Test by name, but then I gather neither does Sawyer.  (He seems to call the same event the “technological singularity” which he says is set for autumn 2012).

My coworker and I were remarking that we had never heard of Sawyer, even though he has won numerous sci-fi awards.  No idea what that means, but it is kind of interesting.

The article opens by talking about the Lifeboat Foundation of Minden Nevada which exists to create a Friendly AI.  The Friendly AI will combat the unavoidable creation of an insurgent AI machine (their current coffers stand at $2,010).

Hutchinson makes these stories sound quite compelling.  He explains that Sawyer writes in a very real world scenario and that with a few tweaks of what we know, everything he writes about could be very real today.  (He’s a details man and an ideas man).

Hutchinson himself works with nanotechnology, so he has an interesting perspective on the coming AI revolution (as for nanobots taking over the world–he loses no sleep over that).   Sawyer agrees somewhat. In a 2000 Globe article he wrote that the benefits of nanotechnology outweigh the risks, but that risks of a super AI make it too dangerous to pursue.

Hutchinson concludes that the series is wonderful and relevant to contemporary society.

——-

Of course, jokes about computers taking over abound everywhere, so it’s not like any of this material is “new” in terms of mass culture, it was just interesting that these three items should appear to me all around the same time.