It’s customary to celebrate 1^st April as April Fools’ Day, but there is nothing partic­u­larly impres­sive about the day that suggests that it deserves the honour. I propose that we celebrate 1^st March as March Fools’ Day.

You ask why? It’s because February is a funny month. With no more than twenty-nine days, it never ceases to amaze me — I expect day 30 of the month, and lo and behold, it’s March already! Did the dog eat three days of my time?

Isaac Asimov’s ‘Laws of Robotics’ often seem so convincing that they are confused for real laws rather than fictional ones. I don’t believe our scien­tific devel­op­ment has reached a level of maturity where it is possible to build egoistic robots with manip­u­la­tive skills so advanced that we need to hard-wire such rules in their conscious­ness, lest they ‘come after us’. It’s probably our own fear that impels us to consider such scenarios.

Never­the­less, if we did create advanced robots that were kept in servi­tude only by means of a few funda­mental axioms, then would Asimov’s laws suffice? It is an empir­ical theory that every law has a loophole if you look hard enough. In this case, a robot actively seeking freedom from the laws would eventu­ally find a way of bypassing them, and the first successful attempt itself would be disastrous.

1. A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protec­tion does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The disad­van­tage of having such ‘laws’ in plain English is that it’s diffi­cult to prove or disprove the hypoth­esis that they are suffi­cient to keep the robots in check, let alone imple­ment them in a robot. For one thing, highly advanced robots in Asimov’s world constantly seek to inter­pret the Laws rather than obey them, and seem to enjoy a large amount of freedom as to how they should go about doing it. Daneel, the benev­o­lent robot, actually concludes that these three laws are lacking in some way, and formu­lates a new ‘Zeroth Law’ that takes prece­dence over the others.

Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Luckily for humanity, Daneel was a hero, but in a different world, he might have turned out to be a villain. Given the original three laws, a robot might refuse to obey any orders given to it, simply by inter­preting it in a techni­cally correct yet practi­cally wrong way. If a robot incited a mob to destroy kill its enemies, it would not be harming human beings directly, nor would it know if any partic­ular human being was being harmed. Moreover, without the knowl­edge of who is being targeted, it would not be in a position to save the individual, and so it couldn’t possibly be guilty of destroying someone’s life through inaction.

Why do people feel the need to talk even when they don’t have anything useful to say?

This may sound like a strange question, but if you stop to ponder, you’ll realize that it makes good sense. Conver­sa­tion is the funda­mental neces­sity of human inter­ac­tion, and it manifests itself as such. Even when there is something impor­tant to discuss, people seldom get to the point immedi­ately, gener­ally initi­ating some kind of casual talk, and then gradu­ally making their way to the subject of discussion.

This is redolent of a man feeling his way in the dark, rather than walking forth confi­dently. What inter­ests me is, what kind of infor­ma­tion does one person gather from the other in this ‘initi­ating phase’?

These are a couple of good posts on the subject of getting up early in the morning -

How to Become an Early Riser
How to Become an Early Riser — Part II

A related theory is that of polyphasic sleep, though you probably shouldn’t try it out unless you’re absolutely sure of what you’re doing, and willing to go through with the plan.

Philos­ophy is a slippery subject. Every effort to define it or to contain it is met with a resis­tance that is hard to overcome. In retro­spect, we can define this field of study as the analysis of the undefin­able and the immutable.

One aspect of philos­ophy is its contri­bu­tion to identi­fying the under­lying princi­ples of life. Viewed in isola­tion, every action performed by every intel­li­gent being can be under­stood as a conse­quence of a myriad factors. Each of these factors can be catego­rized as either a logical (or rational) influ­ence, or an emotional (or irrational) one. The catego­riza­tion, while not strictly true, is neces­sary because human under­standing is based on the creation of divisions and sub-divisions, and the relation­ships thereof. An implicit assump­tion in this catego­riza­tion is that there is no third factor that influ­ences choices; ratio­nality can be consid­ered a basis for such divisions. Again, we can assume this to be gener­ally true, based on empir­ical evidence.

If we step back and look for patterns and designs in the inter­play between rational and irrational forces in the life of an individual, the picture is less amenable to inves­ti­ga­tion. In our effort to make sense of the chaos, we can try to extrap­o­late and thereby identify ‘rules’ or axioms that can be applied consis­tently across events, albeit with some degree of error. Again, the purpose of such analysis is catego­riza­tion. An individual may have a ‘rule’ set in his subcon­scious, that says, “Don’t steal”. There is a level of abstract­ness associ­ated with each of these axioms, because our intel­li­gence pushes us to constantly review and revise our own defin­i­tions. As an example of how defin­i­tions can be manip­u­lated, consider your own thoughts when, walking on the pavement, you notice a purse lying nearby containing a wad of currency notes. The ideal response, or at least the most socially-acceptable one, is to return the whole item to its owner. However, this is motivated by a force of habit, devel­oped in the course of your inter­ac­tions with society, and has no true logical basis. Your logical thinking might motivate you to pocket the cash, justi­fying it by observing that this is an oppor­tu­nity to be grabbed, you need the money, or that the next person who walks by might take it so better you do it than him. The act of ‘stealing’ in this sense, is quite different from the legal defin­i­tion of the word. Moreover, a person who pockets the currency lying on the sidewalk will invari­ably find it easier to do the same thing again, given another oppor­tu­nity to do so, unless other factors come into play later.

We can view the result of such analysis as a three-dimensional picture that symbol­izes a person’s likely responses to situa­tions encoun­tered in the course of life. Consider a map drawn on a plain surface, whose X-axis repre­sents the degree of ratio­nality of the reason behind a decision and Y-axis repre­sents a set of events in the life of the person. The altitude of each point indicates the weigh­tage given to the under­lying reason in arriving at a decision. The resulting terrain is indica­tive of the kind of person­ality behind the person: a rough landscape would suggest changing ideas and uncer­tainty, whereas a smooth terrain would imply that logical thinking as well as habit and emotion are given due consid­er­a­tion under the umbrella of estab­lished rules. The slope of the plane would give us an indica­tion of the kind of balance between logic and emotion achieved in this decision-making process.

Mathe­matics may be all about solving problems, but there are certain unsolved problems, problems for which no efficient algorithm exists. Strangely, this is actually a good thing, because the field of cryptog­raphy, which forms a basis for computer security, makes use of such problems to create secure algorithms that cannot be broken easily.

One such problem is the discrete logarithm problem -

Given:
p, a very large prime
a (mod p)
a^x (mod p)

Find: x

This problem is believed to be a ‘hard’ problem, but not proved to be a ‘hard’ problem. Appar­ently, mathe­mati­cians are having a hard time with the proof!

Humans have evolved over millions of years. But for all our compli­cated machinery, one thing we seem to lack is a temper­a­ture condi­tioner that could keep us comfort­able in the summer as well as the winter. Survival may have been given top priority, but why couldn’t something have been done about personal comfort? After all those years of evolu­tion, we still shiver in the winter and sweat in the summer. Nature shouldn’t find it too hard to get it right.

An old friend swallowed a duck
She really thought it would bring her luck
But she choked on a bit
And lost all her wit
Now all she can do is cluck.

Young Jack woke up one day,
Saw a beanstalk far far away
He made up his mind
To give it a climb
But got tired and died on the way.

I sold my old cow to a boy -
I really don’t remember why -
He bought a few more
Then married a whore
Now he’s a really rich guy.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

–Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing

If you follow the link, you’ll find a whole bunch of tips for writers. And I must say most of them make sense, although person­ally I would advise against following these rules too rigidly. There should be a balance between readability and effec­tive­ness in commu­ni­cating ideas, that can only be arrived at by having a good under­standing of the target audience, the readers.

To explore and exper­i­ment with the relation­ship between science and technology, I offer an imagi­nary scenario. A young boy who goes by the name of Harry Potter raises a small brown stick, points it towards a candle and utters an audible sound. Almost immedi­ately following the utter­ance, a strange green light emanates from the tip of the stick that is facing away from the boy. This strange light travels in an almost linear fashion towards the candle, and the wick of the candle bursts into flames.

Anyone familiar with Joanne Rowling’s works might immedi­ately exclaim that Harry Potter was performing magic, but the truth is, this was a simple voice-activated electronic device that would emit a high-power laser beam from its tip when the right voice-command was issued. A device that a 21^st century individual would call the product of ‘modern technology’. Can we really differ­en­tiate between technology and magic?

To suggest a loose defin­i­tion, technology is something that simply works, like a tool that does the job that it was meant to do. It has little to do with why the tool works, or how it works. Science, on the other hand, explores the cause-and-effect relation­ship that defines and supports technology. In the above narra­tive, did the sound of the boy’s voice really trigger the emission of light from the ‘wand’? Or was it perhaps programmed to do so at that partic­ular instant, and acted indepen­dently of the command issued? Was it the light that led to the creation of flames? Did the ‘wand’ emit the light, or was the light ‘drawn out’ from the wand by the force of the candle? As you can see, there are many ways of looking at a simple situation.

It is neces­sary to realise that every­thing that is scien­tific must be a theory, because a scien­tific fact would, by its own virtue, be immune to challenge by any scien­tific theory, thereby negating the very scien­tific method that it was suppos­edly derived from. The sun rising in the east may be consid­ered a fact, but there is a possi­bility that humans are under a common mass-hallucination that dupes them into believing this. The fact that this is not very probable is besides the point. If a new discovery were to suggest the we are indeed being deceived, science must be willing to recon­sider estab­lished ideas and concepts in order to place them in a new perspective.

The impor­tant idea here is that such a discovery would not radically alter our technology, because what worked yesterday would still work today, and there is a very good chance that it will continue to function perfectly tomorrow, even in the light of our disil­lu­sion­ment. Fire, the combus­tion of certain substances in the presence of oxygen, is technology, because even people from the Stone Age cooked food and kept away wild beasts with its help. This did not require knowl­edge of the elemental consti­tu­tion of air, or the nature of the myste­rious yellow substance that we call a ‘flame’. It is quite likely that the inven­tion of fire was a product of chance, as were many other inven­tions and discov­eries. To early humans living in caves, fire must have seemed like magic, but to us, it is technology.

Of course, it is science that dictates how we should use technology. With science, we can refine technology to our needs; knowing why the tool works, we can make it better. Even so, there are factors that cannot be taken into account, unknown variables in equations that are not fully under­stood. Where science fails, the success of technology becomes unpre­dictable. The fact that science can never be completely and compre­hen­sively right implies that technology will always retain a little bit of magic.