For a good introduction to the topic, read this post on the “colour of bits”. The post outlines the conflicting viewpoints on information: How computer scientists can’t academically differentiate between one copy of a copyrighted piece of data and another, but the pressure from law to try to make something up regardless (e.g. DRM). It also discusses how, if you perform a reversable mathematical transformation of the bits you are fundamentally changing the data but can restore it at any moment. If you can do that, is the transformed version copyrighted too? Given that with the right transformation you can turn any sequence of bytes into any other. That means there is only one copyright holder: the universe.

My interest in the topic comes from my background in AI and thinking about the mind and consciousness. If making a recording of a song without the permission of the rightholder is illegal, what does it mean when you remember a catchy song in your mind? A lot (if not all) of what brain does is information processing, and the patterns stored in your neurons also store information. Now, clearly we don’t have full HD recordings of feature length films in our head that we can replay at will, … even if some people have photographic memory, “videographic” memory is probably even rarer. Regardless, older memories will still be degraded as new sensory input is absorbed as that’s the nature of intelligence. Full representation doesn’t scale and isn’t actually intelligent (in fact, people believe that the compression research is strongly related to AI research as it’s all to do with predicting the next bit in the bit sequence).

What I’m curious about is when does a piece of copyrighted material lose it’s copyrighted identity?

Everyone by now is familiar with MP3s for storing music. Unlike FLAC, the MP3 format is a lossy compression algorithm. Admittedly, it’s a very good algorithm that is ideal at representing audio well with a minimum of bits, but it’s still not an identical copy of the original recording. It’s only qualitatively the same to a human listener after it is decoded. What happens if you slowly decrease the bitrate though? (The bitrate is the number of bits per second you allow the algorithm to use for storing the audio). At what point does it become indistinguishable from another similar song. At what point does the representation become worse than the ability of our minds to remember the song? This is pretty low – even at 24 kbps one can make out speech (most music is distributed at 192kbps or higher these days)… however, humans are able to identify many songs just from hearing a tiny part of it. So clearly there is a fair amount processing going on in our heads to do this recognition. In other words, you can’t exactly recognise a low quality recording of a song as the original song unless you here the original first. Once you’ve heard the original, it’s easy to hear the song’s melody/rhythm in a lower quality recording.

Why is this of interest right now? I think that as we progress along a continual symbiotic interaction with technology, the more we rely on it to represent our identity. I use Evernote as my offboard memory. This is a curated collection of notes that has a lot of meaning for me and without it I’d be severely crippled in my job. The same goes with my GMail history and ability to search thousands of emails.

This is also not a new thing. People have used notebooks and filed their paper mail for hundreds of years. If someone wrote a copyrighted poem into their notebook, they are essentially breaching copyright. The difference now is that we can trivially share notebooks with essentially zero cost.

I think one of the problems with copyright is that the boundaries of where an individual starts and begins is dissolving. It’s no longer purely about our physical position and the information flow is not constrained to only our local environment and surroundings.

(Note: I wrote a quick note about similar ideas back in 2006: Multimedia copyright. Ironically for the music industry, the specific example I give there is what lead me to buy lots of alternative music!)

Boxee is a platform for media PCs based on XBMC which is free to download (they eventually plan to release a hardware appliance). Flattr is a social micropayment site, who I think have got the payment system just right (fixed monthly amount you can choose, Flattr evenly distributes that amount amongst the things you “flattr”, that way you can freely flattr things without worrying about breaking the bank).

I would like to combine the two. I have a lot of media, but I rarely watch broadcast TV. I’m not purposefully trying to avoid the media creators being paid, but:

• I want to watch shows when and where I feel like it, not at designated times.
• I don’t want to be bombarded by inane advertising that is so blatantly manipulative and in your face that it usually puts me off the products.
• I don’t want to accumulate more physical stuff by buying bits of plastic (aka DVDs)
• I hate iTunes – I wouldn’t trust it to do… well anything, except reliably have the GUI thread lock up while trying to use it (yes, on OSX as well as Windows)

Thus I resort to downloading torrents and sharing media with friends. I want to give back to the media creators, but it has to be convenient. To me, convenience is the primary factor driving piracy. I can download almost any piece of media and I can usually do it faster than it takes me to go to the shop or dvd rental store. I also don’t have to return anything or accumulate and waste physical materials.

So, my idea is, to set up a trust of some sort, which creates a plugin to be added to Boxee, this in turn flattrs the media that you watch. This trust would then be responsible for passing the payment on to the initial creators. The difficult part is getting the money to the creators, but you could allow for creators to claim content and/or only seek the creator when a certain threshold of money has been assigned to that piece of content.

Flattr also allows anonymous flattrs, so it’d hopefully protect people from being singled out for piracy while the law catches up with digital reality. Besides, you could also allow people to just flattr episodes they are fond of, so that there is no evidence of whether it’s just a fan or someone who “illegally” downloaded the show.

This got me thinking…

Since I’m working on NetEmpathy, which is currently focussed on analysing the sentiment of tweets, the meaning within tweets (when it exists) is very high. There’s little space for superfluous flowery text when you only have 140 characters.

Myq mentioned how academic papers are a lot like this now. The meaning is highly compressed, particularly in scientific papers. You’ve got to summarise past research, state your method so that it’s reproducible, analyse the results, etc. All in a half a dozen pages. This wasn’t always the case though. In the past academic papers would be long works which meandered their way to the point. Part of this might have to do with the amount of preexisting knowledge present in society, i.e. earlier on there was less global scientific knowledge available, so to adequately cover the background of a subject wasn’t a major difficulty and they could spend more time philosophising. That’s a topic for another post though…

What I was interested is how densely information is packed. Is this increasing?

My immediate thoughts were: text compression! and measure the entropy!.

Basically, information theory dictates that text that contains less information can be represented in fewer bytes. This is why it’s possible to create lossless compression. You assign frequent symbols to be represented by smaller ones. For example, because ‘the’ is one of the most common English words, you might replace it with ’1′ (and crudely, you could replace ’1′ with ‘the’ so that you could still use ’1′ normally). This way, you’ve reduced the size of that symbol by two thirds without loss of information. Obviously this wouldn’t improve your compression factor and a spreadsheet full of numbers though.

A guy called Douglas Biber has apparently already investigated this information content historically, but from a more linguistic and manual investigation.

What I’d like to do one day is examine the compression factors of early scientific journals, recent journals, tweets, txt messages, wikipedia, etc. and see just how the theoretical information content has changed, if at all.

Another project for when I’m independently wealthy.

Things like racism or sexism, or over-generalising on a class of people is one of the more socially inappropriate things you can do. However, depending on how your logic system works, it’s not an entirely unreasonable method of thinking (the word “unreasonable” chosen purposefully) – and for any other subject, where the things being reasoned about are not humans, we wouldn’t particularly care. In fact, certain subjects like religion and spirituality are held to less strict standards of reasoning… there’s actually more defense in being racist/sexist then being a practitioner of certain religions. Perhaps this is why these occasionally go hand in hand[1].

So what do I actually mean by this? I’m going to use two methods of reasoning, deduction and induction, and then explain them in terms of uncertain truth. Nothing in this world is ultimately absolute[2] and so it behooves us to include probabilistic uncertainty in to any conclusion or relationship within our logic set.

Deduction can be summarised as inferring the specific from the general. e.g.

Note that obviously there are exceptions to the starting generalisation (1) of four-legged cats. Poor Aristotle could have been in a car accident and had a leg amputated making (2) a false conclusion. That’s where the probability and uncertain truth comes in…

Here we’ll use two parts to truth values (TVs), strength and confidence[3]. The first, strength, is how often the relationship holds true. E.g. with strength 0.9 for the we’d expect approximately 90% of cats we saw to have four legs. Confidence however, indicates how sure we are of the strength. The exact semantics of confidence are not important for the current discussion, but basically if the confidence is low then we’re not very sure about the number of legs cats have – perhaps because we haven’t seen many.

On the other hand induction is used to infer the general from the specific. e.g.

In other words, if, within all our experience, all cats we’ve seen have four legs it’s sensible to assume all cats do. With such a small sample size of only 3 cats, and without any other background knowledge (like animals of a particular species generally all have the same number of legs) we’d generally not afford much confidence in the result of this deduction[5].

So where does the sex/race/other-isms come in? Well if you haven’t worked it out yet, it’s when you use too small a sample set to do induction or you adopt generalisations from others without using your own evidence[4]. Or perhaps you do know lots of one sex that all fit your model, in that case the problem is using a single generalisation to deduct information about a new member of that sex that you know nothing about. Essentially sexism/racism is due to too large a bias towards sex/race determining an overall conclusion or understanding of the other.

I guess one thing should be clarified, the relationship between generalisation of sexism/racism. When does a generalisation turn into one of these categories. I’m not sure I really know, after all if you made generalisations about the basic anatomy of males/female or say something superficial like the colour of someone’s skin, then there wouldn’t be a whole lot of controversy there[6] but I guess it’s when you use that information to fully define everyone that falls into a category. The thing that I’m grappling with, is that, in the absence of any extra information on someone it’s sensible to use what you have to start trying to represent and understand someone new. In fact, if you didn’t, you’re demonstrating you don’t care enough about the other person to think about them at all!

And then we come to insurance brokers. They make huge generalizations. Law usually prevents them from using race as a factor, but for some reason they are still allowed to use your sex to determine the premium you’ll pay. They are also allowed to generalise on your age among many other things. In fact, pretty much the entire way the insurance industry works is through generalisations.

So what makes it okay for businesses to blatantly be sexist and ageist among many other categorical assumptions? I don’t know.

Ahem… got a little side-tracked there. Sorry…

So when is this generalization okay? If every interaction you have with people that fall into a category supports the conclusion then your confidence will increase – and you’ll have no examples of any alternative. Few people actually have such a life history to conclude this. I suspect many people who display racism or sexist tendencies probably get this strong bias from another human or information source. If it’s someone they highly respect, such as a parent, or someone who’s the social leader amongst a group, then they may adopt conclusions with high confidence without having the experience to conclude things themselves.

How can we protect against broad conclusions about people?

• By making it exceedingly difficult to increase our confidence of very broad generalizations. Realise that when making any large scale conclusion that confidence must be limited – especially when reasoning about dynamic entities like humans.
• Favour the use of more specific categories when reasoning. This can be hard, as when you don’t know someone and all you have is their apparent race and sex then any generalisations you’ve made will be your sole source of information. You can argue that this shouldn’t be the case, but any pre-consolidated knowledge you have will come to the fore until you learn more about the person to develop a more complete representation of them.

Why is it hard to change the behavior or views of people who are already displaying ism-ness?

• I guess that confidence in belief generally erodes slowly, unless presented with directly conflicting evidence. And sometimes conflicting evidence just makes people stop listening to you because it radically challenges their world view.
• Perhaps it’s physically more effort/energy to update generalisations on large groups? If you have to adjust your confidence of conclusion on a large group, then they’ll be many many connections from the neuron that potentially represents that group and the instances and associations within that group. Since the brain is massively connected, larger groups probably require more effort to shift. Think of all those tens of thousands of synapses having to reconfigure themselves or die.
• Generalisations may be self-reinforcing. While someone might not fit your generalisation, that may slightly alter your confidence in it, but not enough to completely remove it from your mind.

I hope I’ve raised some questions in the readers head. I don’t like sexism or racism, but at the same time I can (kind of) understand the logical reasoning that might lead to it and I haven’t completely resolved how it’d sit in a fully functional artificial intelligence. After all, I really don’t want OpenCog to turn into a racist bigot!

[1] I was going to link to an appropriate example here, but couldn’t easily think of one I could back up, feel free to suggest one.
[2] If people think otherwise, I suggest they study enough quantum physics or Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
[3] This is based on the simple truth value type of OpenCog.
[4] Not that accepting generalizations from others is bad thing. Everyone does it because we cannot experience everything directly.
[5] Although if your sum experience of the universe you live in is merely these three cats then you’d be very confident and not only that but induct that everything has four legs (and is a cat).
[6] Yeah yeah, I know, some people are transgendered. I’m keeping this simple okay?

It is my belief that empathy is a a prerequisite to consciousness.

I recently read Hofstadter’s I am a strange loop, whose central themes are around recursive representations of self leading to our perception of consciousness. For some, the idea that our consciousness is somewhat of an illusion might be hard to swallow – but then, quite likely, so are all the other qualia. They seem real to us, because our mind makes it real. To me, it’s not a huge hurdle to believe. I find the idea that our minds are infinitely representing themselves via self-reflection kind of beautiful in simplicity. You can get some very strange things happening when things start self-reflecting.

For example, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem originally broke Principia Mathematica and can do the same for any sufficiently expressive formal system when you force that formal system to reason about itself. One day I’ll commit to explaining this in a post, but people write entire books about the idea to make Godel’s theorem and it’s consequences easy to understand!

And as an example of self-reflection and recursion being beautiful, I merely have to point to fractals which exhibit self-similarity at arbitrary levels of recursion. Or perhaps the recursive and repeating hallucinations induced by psychedelics give us some clue about the recursive structures within the brain.

Hofstadter also later in the book delves into slightly murky mystical waters, which I find quite entertaining and not without merit. He says that, due to us modelling of the behaviour of others, we also start representing their consciousness too. The eventual conclusion, which is explained in much greater and philosophical detail in his book, is that our “consciousness” isn’t just the sum of what’s in our head but is a holistic total of ourselves and everyone’s representation of us in their heads.

I don’t think the Turing test will really be complete until a machine can model humans as individual and make insightful comments on their motivations. Ok, so that wouldn’t formally be the Turing test any more, but I think that as a judgement of conscious intelligence, the artificial agent needs to at least be able to reflect the motivations of others and understand the representation of itself within others. Lots of recursive representations!

The development of consciousness within AI via empathy is what, in my opinion, will allow us to create friendly AI. Formal proofs won’t work due to computational irreducibility of complex systems. In an admittedly strained analogy this is similar to trying to formally prove where a toy sailboat will end up after dropping it in a river upstream. Trying to prove that it won’t get caught in an eddy before it reaches the ocean of friendliness (or perhaps if you’re pessimistic and you view the eddy as the small space of possibilities for friendly AI). Sure computers and silicon act deterministically (for the most part), but any useful intelligence will interact with an uncertain universe. It will also have to model humans out of necessity as humans are one of the primary agents on the Earth that will need to interact with… perhaps not if it becomes all-powerful but certainly initially. By modelling humans, it’s effectively empathising with our motivations and causing parts of our consciousness to be represented inside it[1].

Given that machine could increase it’s computationally capacity exponentially via Moore’s law (not to mention via potentially large investment and subsequently rapid datacenter expansion) it could eventually model many more individuals than any one human does. So if the AI had a large number of simulated human minds, which would, if accurately modelled, probably bawk at killing the original, then any actions the AI performed would likely benefit the largest number of individuals.

Or perhaps the AI would become neurotic trying to satisfy the desires and wants of conflicting opinions.

In some ways this is similar to Eliezer’s Collected Extrapolated Volition (as I remember it at least… It was a long time ago that I read it. I should do so again to see how/if it fits with what I’ve said here).

[1] People might claim that this won’t be an issue because digital minds designed from scratch will be able to box up individual representations to prevent a bleed through of beliefs. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is a tractable design for AI, even if it was desirable. AI is about efficiency of computation and representation, so these concepts and beliefs will blend. Besides, conceptual blending is quite likely a strong source of new ideas and hypotheses in the human brain.

My suggestion for both, but which would need to be implemented in somewhat different ways, would be to use a variety of lyrics sites, then use text similarity matching to work out what the actual lyrics part of the page was. For images, you could use google image search, and then return the image that was most frequent, as well as having some heuristic for preference of square images. I think that, although not perfect, this would make the the system a lot more robust against further changes.

Text similarity and overlaps is well understood as a computer science problem. It’s used by the shotgun sequencing approach for DNA sequencing… as well as variety of search and indexing problems. Hopefully I’ll release a usable library for it over the summer – I’ll call it libshotgun-lyrics

On creating something, I think you should be able to profit from your labour, but attempting to control unofficial spread of something is usually futile [1] – the big music industry would be well advised to learn something from that, except I’m sure they’ll opt to go down kicking and screaming.

I also believe that the exclusivity to charge for content should be safeguarded. Not indefinitely, and not for the ridiculous amount of 50 years after death. More like a 10th of the that, regardless of whether the author is alive. Hang on a sec, am I suggesting only 5 years to profit from your creations before it’s free for others to use? Well yes, and here’s why…

There’s been a lot of buzz on productivity and lifestyle blogs about creating things that have long term value. The idea is, you create something and then it’ll continue to bring in money long after you’ve finished work on it. This is what copyright is all about, you have licence to profit from your creations for the length of the copyright. Sounds fair enough right? It appealing because it suggests we can create something wonderful, and if enough people like it, then we can sit back and reap the rewards.

I’m sorry, I don’t buy that. If someone does that, they’re no longer really contributing to society. They’re acting as a sink for wealth, even if they choose to redistribute it later. Wouldn’t changing this affect the creation of new media and content, especially if there’s no goal of being able to sit back and wait for $’s to roll in? Well, if you look at any prolific artist… they are hardly resting after they create something, they move on to the next project. People like working on projects[2]. People motivated primarily on how to make money already and inevitably fail as artists anyway[3].

Besides, I’m not arguing that an artist can no longer profit from their creation after 5 years. I’m just saying that it’s non-exclusive. Other people are free to mash-up, remix, promote and sell your content without a license. I believe in attribution though. If you use someone’s creative work, it’s just decency to acknowledge that. Trying to pass something off as your own is just being a dick [4]. And as a result of attribution, who’s going to benefit from that? The original artist. In today’s society, I feel that the main difficulty for an artist is that we’re in a constant poverty of attention. Trying to grab that attention, even momentarily, is an epic challenge. If an artist allows other people to use their old work, then they are also allowing other people to promote them through attribution. When a random consumer comes across the remixed/altered version, this in turn brings the original artist in to consumer’s mind. That’s the real value: attention and other peoples opinion.

As an example: I’m a DJ, so I worked with a lot of official remixes of original tracks. As a result of this, I actually pay quite a lot of attention to who the remixer is – because chanves are that I’d like other remixes they’ve done. But before I got so involved in dance music, I really didn’t care who the remixer was. I’d mainly be aware of the original artist.

Now, if copyright lasts for 50 years after the authors death [5], this seems just crazy. Who profits after the author’s death? Well, certainly not the creator. I’m guessing it’s usually the family, a trust, or a company that holds it then. And after the copyright is up and people are free to start remixing and reusing the content? Well, that’s hardly beneficial for the original artist. They’re dead!

There’s a bias towards age and experience, towards older people remaining in high power positions despite incompetence (although I guess this is true of younger people too – but they rarely get put in those positions). The problem is the expectation that people can work hard and then rest once they’ve made their mark. Since the people in power, and with money, want to keep that money, they can petition and shape laws to maintain their income streams. Individual artists are not the cause of this, but record companies conglomerating their artist’s copyrights are.

Disclaimer: IANAL and this is based on my general understand of copyright. I welcome corrections on any factually incorrect or misleading stuff.

[1] Assuming you can’t completely remove it, which would be analogous to making the content completely illegal and defeat the purpose of trying to sell it. If there was a stronger spatial component to the internet, and it wasn’t so highly connected, then maybe you’d have chance of controlling it. However, that would also require draconian policies that wouldn’t fit with the nature of the net (I’m a doctor in simulating spread dynamics, trust me!).

[2] At least the people I find myself surrounded with like working on projects. For which I’m very grateful for the resulting creative energy that motivates me.

[3] Unless they’re con-artists.

[4] I’m using ‘dick’ here as a highly technical and well-defined legal concept here.

[5] 50 years after death is a common minimum – some countries go up to 80 years! Even though the universal agreement between countries is for 25 years.

• A mind from the past can become completely different from the one that committed the crime. So is it fair to punish someone in the present, when their current mind state bears as much similarity to the mind that committed the crime in the past is it does to a completely separate person?
• A body replaces most of it’s cells over the course of many years. So it’s not really someone’s body we convict, but their structure. What happens when people can upload? Supposing we can represent that structure digitally or otherwise (but in a form of easily copy-able data) what happens to the replicates of that individual? Are they convicted as well? Does it become illegal for other people to harbour that sequence of data, even if it’s in stasis and getting no processor time? (which is essentially the same as dead, but with the difference of being revivable at a moments notice)
• Continuing from the assumption that it’s the structure of a criminal we want to punish/remove from society: Since a baby is essentially derived from the fair proportion of the parent’s structure, if the parent commits a crime, then shouldn’t the child also be considered a criminal? Even though the child takes some of it’s structure from the other, hopefully non-criminal, parent, the first point seems to imply that exact similarity isn’t required.

(Note, most of these thoughts are me just musing on a theoretical level that is not at all pragmatic. I don’t actually believe children of criminals are also guilty)

Anyhow, there was one part that resonated with me that was related to my attempt to be open and honest about certain aspects of my life, which is unfortunately in conflict with what the law deems to be true. This particular piece is discussing a Baptist town in New York State which is fervently against this “era’s godless sins”, and how the reality was that most individuals indulged in those same sins to their holy shame, assuming that they were the only transgressors:

“How completely the annointed had commandeered collective perception became apparent when Schanck asked the closet dissenters how other people in the community felt about face cards, liquor, a smoke, and levity. Hoodwinked by suppression, each knew without a doubt that he was the sole transgressor in a saintly sea. He and he alone could not control his demons of depravity. None had the faintest inkling that he was part of a silenced near-majority.

Here was an arch lesson in the games subcultures play. reality is a mass halucination. We gauge what’s real according to what others say. And others, like us, rein in their words, caving in to timidity. Thanks to conformity enforcement and to cowardice, a little power goes a long, long way.”

Obviously that’s an extreme version of the issue I’m obtusely referring to, since within our personal groups there is openness about these things. But to go beyond that, and announce it to your work colleagues is to risk job loss. However, without facing that risk, we are buying in to the validity of those laws. I don’t suggest anyone do so, but it’s a difficult catch 22 situation to be in.

One serendipidous clash of ideas that occurred recently was me stumbling across the triangle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. For those that haven’t come across this pyramid before, it’s a frequently mentioned model for representing the psychology of human motivation. What it purports to show is that the higher level desires only really manifest once the lower needs are met. So at the very lower level we have physiological needs like breathing, water and food, and at the level above that we have the need for safety, and then social needs. In other words, it’s very hard to be concerned about whether you’ve got a date this weekend if you can’t breath right now! If you’re interested in more detail about what falls in each level, check out Wikipedia as I’m going to move on and connect this to something Bloom talks about in Global Brain…

Basically, Bloom talks about the rise of systems with ever more complexity and the sharing of information. From self-assembling molecules that pre-dated life, all the way to the internet. Bloom points to 5 or 6 characteristics of these complex adaptive systems that lead to them evolving and proliferating. Two of these characteristics are conformity enforcers and diversity generators.

Conformity enforcers are things that ensure the system maintains coherence. It’s why all our cells work together and why we kill off foreign bodies (since they don’t conform to the antigen mould expected by cells of the ‘self’) and why conservative society frowns on errant behaviour.

Diversity generators allow a system to try out new ideas, and often a certain amount of diversity is needed for a system to actually properly manifest itself. Since after all, despite our cells having essentially identical DNA, they differentiate into physiologically different forms. Likewise, in human society, we all specialise… even in the most conservative of cultures.

My hypothesis is, that the ratio of diversity to conformity in human society is related to the fulfilment of individual’s hierarchy of needs. A bias towards lower levels will lead to a pressure for conformity, whereas a large number of society’s members reaching the level of self-actualization leads to individuals following more independent and unique paths.

However, that’s all well and good, but since adaptive systems need conformity to retain coherence, many societies enforce or promote a deficiency in one of these needs, in effect inhibiting self-actualization.

For example, institutions such as religion instill a inferiority complex: e.g. you are born with original sin putting in a firm block at the ‘esteem’ level. Many others try to convince it’s practioners to refrain from sex except under particular conditions or circumstances, making it difficult to even go beyond the first physiological level without first meeting these conditions.

Sparta was one of the greatest conformity enforcing societies (see Global Brain for details) and was able to push it’s citizens to the very bottom of the triangle. They were deprived of food growing up and forced to steal (all part of the training). My hypothesis does fall down a bit (as does Maslow’s hierarchy) as the Spartans apparently did have some higher needs such as sociality and esteem met. They were essentially a big gang, and considered the people of the societies they ruled over as inferior.

Global Brain frequently compares Sparta and Athens as opposing ends of the conformity vs. diversity balance. One of the things that lead me to the hypothesis was that, in Athens – the diversity king, individuals had a wealth of choice. They could find the group they fit in best and there was plenty of potential to explore new ideas, both of which I’d consider major aspects of self-actualization.