You’ve probably seen the clip by now. This slice of AI weirdness, a perfect coda to 2020, has been kicked around online like a digital hacky sack.
The Boston Dynamics androids busting a believable move present a worrying development for anyone who’s mastered “the robot” on the dance floor. In time, they’re just going to look strange and arthritic.
Joking aside, this is the first installment of a series on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the prospects for the future. I’ll be interspersing the series with articles on other topics over the next while.
I Sing the Tony Electric
“Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.”
- Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson
A short time ago I was standing in my kitchen with my iPhone and headphones, listening to Tony Bennett while cutting vegetables. I was surprised when I remembered this was not the real Tony. The organization OpenAI recently revealed a neural network called Jukebox, which generates original songs by well-known artists, complete with “rudimentary singing.” There are curated samples on the Jukebox website, and I clicked on the Tony Bennett link before proceeding into the kitchen.
The voice of sim-Tony faded in and out, with background sounds shifting from symphonic to brassy. If you focus on the sample it’s obvious there’s something wrong with it. But if you played it loudly in a neighboring room with the door closed, you could easily mistake it for the real thing. That’s sort of what happened with me; the track was good enough to fool my distracted brain while I was in the kitchen.
Bear in mind this is a completely original song constructed from start to finish by an artificial intelligence algorithm.
Returning my attention to the track, I had the weird feeling of listening to something alien trying to awaken; something that doesn’t know what a “Tony Bennett” is, but had laboured to output a soundalike based on the audio data fed into it. A ’something’ making the effort, purely through autonomous machine learning, to crawl from becoming into being.
Not that this public beta test by OpenAI offers a lot of listenable stuff. The Elton John and Frank Sinatra tracks are pretty dodgy. The orchestral Mozart track sounds like the deep learning module got drunk while rummaging through the Deutsche Grammophon catalogue. But how long will it be before the musical output sounds indistinguishable from chosen artists, with completely original lyrics and pleasing melodies? At this stage, perhaps it’s likely only a matter of refinement. A few years of machine learning may get the AI there or not. But it’s unlikely this goal will never be reached. (I’ll be returning to OpenAI’s achievements in a later article.)
My analogue-era childhood might as well be the time of trilobites. I was born in 1959, the year The Silver Beatles formed in Liverpool and the Soviets launched the first probe to impact the moon. And here I was in my kitchen, listening remotely to a computer-generated song on a device that, by itself, contains more computing power than the entire U.S. Defense establishment of the Eisenhower administration. It was then I realized how far things have gone with the simulation and automation of everything.
If I could go back in time 700 years with my smart phone, awestruck medieval villagers might worship me as a god or kill me as a devil. But with no connectivity and a dead battery, my digital pacifier might look like a piece of obsidian jewelry in the hands of some bizarrely-dressed foreigner. ‘Hey Theodoric, let’s just be on the safe side and kill this weirdo.’
With a device that does everything short of time travel, who needs to get off the couch? I have an artist friend a bit older than me, who’s something of an info-junkie. In his teens, he would sometimes pick up a rotary telephone cabled into a wall and call around to public libraries in the Vancouver area to find out which had the best collection on whatever topic had grabbed his interest. It could be anything from Cold War geopolitics to the lives of desert saints in the Near East. He would then bus over to the chosen library to read as much as he could during his spare time. Now that’s old school.
It used to be there was always a cost attached to information retrieval, if only in terms of time. Investigating a relatively obscure topic required a visit to a public or university library, or at the very least, a well-stocked bookstore. Publications were weighted down by their physical delivery systems. A book, magazine or newspaper couldn’t be accessed through a click or swipe. You had to get your ass out the door and get your grubby, meatbot hands on a matter-based copy, even if it was in the form of microfiche.
Although libraries remain vital resources, today most information safaris begin, and usually end, with the Internet. Even if money is involved in the transaction through paywalls and the like, travel time has been vaporized by microsecond retrieval from digital databases.
Today my info-junkie artist friend discovers interesting items through Facebook links. What hasn’t changed so much over the years is his art — he still paints on stretched canvases with physical brushes.
There’s no longer any problem for any of us accessing information. The contemporary problem is warding off information, if only to avoid the curse of a fractured, frantic consciousness that can barely settle on one thought before moving on to the next. What Buddhists call “monkey mind” has become the cognitive default for today’s social media followers.
THE THING IN THE BASEMENT
Artists, writers and thinkers have a habit of reaching imaginatively forward in time to give context to the present, weaving alternate realities we might want to embrace or avoid. A century ago, the poet Ezra Pound argued for the social utility of art: “The artist is the antenna of the race, the barometer and voltmeter.” In the 1960s, the Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan made the same point by fusing electronic and political metaphors: "I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”
A stronger claim was made by the German Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin in the 1930s:
“It is well known that art will often -— for example, in pictures — precede the perceptible reality by years. It was possible to see streets or rooms (in paintings) that show all sorts of fiery colours long before technology, by means of illuminated signs and other arrangements, actually set them under such a light. Whoever understands how to read these semaphores in advance not only knows about currents in the arts but also about legal codes, wars and revolutions.”
And that brings us to the blind Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges.
In Borges’ 1932 short story, The Aleph, the unnamed narrator receives a panicky phone call from his poet friend Carlos, who explains that a café owner living next door is expanding his property, threatening to demolish Carlos’ home. A pompous writer with big ambitions, Carlos is working on an epic poem, “The Earth,” which sets the entire planet to verse. He complains to the narrator that destruction of his house will destroy the source of inspiration for this magnum opus: an “Aleph” in the cellar:
“He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points….Yes, the only place on earth where all places are seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending.”
The narrator hangs up and rushes over to see the Aleph for himself. Carlos leads him down into the cellar and instructs him to lie on his back and stare into the darkness, where he sees a small "iridescent sphere,” no bigger than an inch across. Impossibly, he witnesses everything happening on Earth from all angles, without overlapping scenes or mental overload:
“I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards….”
You might say Borges’ story eerily foreshadows today’s digital avalanche. You don’t have to get off the phone to encounter an Aleph; your phone is one. And we’ve just about seen it all on our devices: a Hubble telescope deep-field shot of galaxies millions of light years away; an audio clip of a surreal U.S. presidential address; an e-mail scam from Nigeria; a potential mate on a dating site; a rare item auctioned on eBay; everything imaginable or unimaginable is there at a touch. No wonder we hold our magic rectangles so closely.
The average person now touches, swipes, and taps their phone over 2000 times a day, writes environmental journalist Bill McKibben. “A man with a phone more or less permanently affixed to his palm is partway a robot already,” he observes in his book Falter.
We love our devices. Literally. In 2011, Danish business author Martin Lindstrom enlisted 16 iPhone users between the ages of 18 and 25 to undergo MRI imaging while exposed to separate audio and video of a ringing iPhone. The study investigated whether patterns of neural activity associated with smart phone use resembled patterns associated with addiction.
According to the author, he and his research team were surprised to find a “flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member,” he wrote for The New York Times.
Lindstrom’s conclusion: “the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.”
There’s no denying that many consumers are intimately attached to their Alephs, whether they’re Apple, Android, or some other brand. But “love” is an awfully big, rubbery word. I think a better descriptor is digital Stockholm Syndrome. We embrace our little kidnappers like we once embraced friends.
Interesting comparison -- Jorge Luis Borge's 'aleph' and an iphone!