The Veil War

One man went above and beyond the call of duty. One man made a sacrifice that redeemed the failures of others – even though his efforts ended in failure. Perhaps, even because they ended in failure they attained a nobility that is rarely matched on this world.

Ward Brewer answered the call. He nominated me for a Shorty Award 42 times. Which is 42 times more than the next highest nominators. And infinitely more than anyone else. I want to preserve in some small way the character of the effort he made. Look on, ye mighty, and despair:

Why should @veilwar get the Shorty?

• Because he has a unique and compelling style. He makes it believable.
• Because his latest work, The Veil Wars is a great read.
• Because Stephen gets it done when it comes to writing…
• Because he asked me to and he’s a nice guy…
• Because if he doesn’t get it, someone else less deserving will.
• Because it’s the writer’s version of Green Technology.
• Because someone has to do it…
• Because the only thing for certain is death, taxes, and Veil War.
• Because anyone can be an author, but not anyone can write Veil War…
• Because Stephen made me do it…
• Because of all the writers out there, Stephen is definitely one…
• Because the last 3,000 times I’ve posted, you didn’t count them…
• Because Stephen finally offered me enough money to do it…
• Because for some odd reason, you guys aren’t counting my votes…
• Because my life is boring and I have nothing else better to do now.
• Because Stephen is the only person I actually know who is literate
• Because Stephen speaks and writes American.
• Because Stephen’s from Ohio so he needs all the help he can get
• Because I don’t have a date tonight and need something to do.
• Because Stephen gave me this cool used shirt to wear.
• Because if I do, he promised to pay off my gambling debts
• Because it’s all fun and games until someone’s eye is poked out
• Because it’s what Socrates would have done
• Because the voices inside my head tell me to…
• Because, you see there once was this girl from Nantucket…
• Because besides Doritos, it’s Wilbur’s favorite thing in the world
• Because eventually you ding-a-lings will start counting my votes
• Because this shameless voting will get me a Veil starring role
• Because I just can’t stop myself….I can’t stop…..
• Because if he gets this award, he’ll be able find the cure for acne
• Because if he gets this award he will find the cure for ringworm
• Because if I don’t the continuum will find out and that’s bad
• Because YOU STILL ARE NOT COUNTING MY VOTES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Because Stephen’s my hero and I want to be his friend.
• Because no matter where you go, that’s where you are…
• Because he’s JRR Tolkien approved….
• Because when it’s all said and done…what was I saying?
• Because the “girl from Nantucket” has a sister…
• Because I am shameless in my actions….
• Because, well, someone has to win the award, right?
• Because I forgot to get him a Christmas present.
• Because, well he may not look like much, but he’s all we’ve got…

I really love how the tone gets more and more desperate toward the end.

Thanks Ward, and I think you earned your place in the book.

Hey, kids. One of my twitter followers @blakebooks discovered the Shorty Awards for excellence in length-restricted communications when he was nominated for one. I thought, hey, that sounds cool. How can I get one? Looking over the competitive field – dominated by hack fantasy writer JK Rowling – I decided that the time had come to game the system. The #author category was a wash. But wait, what’s this? There is a #writer category! And the guy in the lead has only four nominations.

The hamster that powers brain leapt into overdrive. I’m gonna win this one, me.

So: your mission for today, should you choose to accept it: go here and nominate @veilwar for a Shorty. You need to have a Twitter account, and you need to think of something pithy and/or retarded to explain why you’re nominating me. Preferably pithy and retarded.

A Twitter follower, @DigitGeek volunteered an image he did a while back:

It doesn’t really map to the Veil War, but I thought it was cool and asked if he had more. And perhaps unsurprisingly, he did. Here’s a couple more:

Anomaly UK has a had a stellar series of posts on AI you all might find interesting: here, here, and here.

But what is “human-like intelligence”?  It seems to me that it is not all that different from what the likes of Google search or Siri do: absorb vast amounts of associations between data items, without really being systematic about what the associations mean or selective about their quality, and apply some statistical algorithm to the associations to pick the most relevant.

There must be more to it than that; for one thing, trained humans can sort of do actual proper logic, about a billion times less well than this netbook can, and there’s a lot of effectively hand-built (i.e. specifically evolved) functionality in a some selected pattern-recognition areas. But I think the general-purpose associationist mechanism is the most important from the point of view of building artificial intelligence.

…

There are good reasons to suspect that human intelligence is very close to being as good as it can get.

One is that thinking about things longer doesn’t reliably produce better conclusions. That is the point of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” (as far as I understand it; I take Gladwell to be the champion of what Neal Stephenson called “those American books where once you’re heard the title you don’t even need to read it”).

The next, related, reason is that human intelligence doesn’t scale out very well; having more people think about a problem doesn’t reliably give better answers than having just one do it.

…

The major limitation on human intelligence, particularly when it is augmented with computers as it generally is now, is how much it is wrong.  Being faster or bigger doesn’t push back the major limitation unless it can make the intelligence wrong less often, and I don’t think it would.

What I’m saying is that the major cost of human intelligence is not in the scarce resources required to execute the decision-making, but the damage caused by all the bad decisions that humans make.

The major real-world expense in obtaining high-quality human decision-makers is identifying which of the massive surplus available are actually any good.  Being able to supply vastly bigger numbers of AI candidates would not drive that cost down.

It goes on and gets more interesting from there. Read the whole thing.

I found this bit from the second post particularly enlightening:

All this relates to another long-standing issue in our corner of the blogosphere: education, signalling and credentialism. The argument is that the main purpose of higher education is not to improve the abilities of the students, but merely to indicate those students who can first get into and then endure the education system itself. The implication is that there is something very wrong with this. But one way of looking at it is that the major cost is not either producing or preparing intelligent people, but testing and safely integrating them into the system. The signalling in the education system is part of that integration cost.