Daily Archives: March 13, 2016

One funeral at a time

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This morning’s Observer column:

Science advances, said the great German physicist Max Planck, “one funeral at a time”. Actually, this is a paraphrase of what he really said, which was: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” But you get the drift.

I always think of Planck’s aphorism whenever moral panic breaks out over the supposedly dizzying pace of technological change…

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So what’s with Eddie Redmayne and his camera?

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Semiotics isn’t my thing, but I’d really like to know what’s going on in this full-page ad in the Financial Times.

Eddit_redmayne_w_Rolleiflex

On the face of it it’s an advertisement for an Omega wristwatch. But if so, what is Eddie Redmayne doing with a lovely 1960s Rolleiflex 2.8E?

Redmayne_Rolleiflex_detail

Is it because he’s a photography buff (plausible because a good many celebs have been snapped in the past wielding Rollei twin-lens reflexes)? Or is there some kind of subliminal message — for example that the Omega Globemaster watch belongs in the same category of superb analog engineering as the Rolleiflex?

Turns out that I’m not the only photography buff to spot the image. There’s a lively thread here which, among other things, contains some plaintive cries for someone to design a digital back for the Rollei, like has been done for the Hasselblad 500. But it isn’t going to happen, alas. Creating a digital back for the Hass was relatively straightforward, because it always had a separate, detachable back which held the film, so you could keep the camera body and just change the back. The Hasselblad CFV-50c doesn’t come cheap, though — it retails at ~£7,000. The watch is cheaper.

Implications of AlphaGo’s victory

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Many and varied, I guess, and there will be lots of fevered speculation. But I liked this summary by Quartz’s Gideon Lichfield:

“It’s not a human move.”

What shocked the grandmasters watching Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top Go players, lose to a computer on Thursday was not that the computer won, but how it won. A pivotal move by AlphaGo, a project of Google AI subsidiary DeepMind, was so unexpected, so at odds with 2,500 years of Go history and wisdom, that some thought it must be a glitch.

Lee’s third game against AlphaGo is this Saturday. Even if man recovers to beat the machine, what we will remember is that moment of bewilderment. Go is much more complex than chess; to play it, as DeepMind’s CEO explained, AlphaGo needs the computer equivalent of intuition. And as Sedol discovered, that intuition is not of the human kind.

A classic fear about AI is that the machines we build to serve us will destroy us instead, not because they become sentient and malicious, but because they devise unforeseen and catastrophic ways to reach the goals we set them. Worse, if they do become sentient and malicious, then—like Ava, the android in the movie Ex Machina—we may not even realize until it’s too late, because the way they think will be unrecognizable to us. What we call common sense and logic will be revealed as small-minded prejudices, baked in by aeons of biological and social evolution, which trap us in a tiny corner of the possible intellectual universe.

But there is a rosier view: that the machines, sentient or not, could help us break our intellectual bonds and see solutions—whether to Go, or to bigger problems—that we couldn’t imagine otherwise. “So beautiful,” as one grandmaster said of AlphaGo’s game. “So beautiful.”