Brooders

Find your own truth is the final book in the Secrets of Power Trilogy. I must admit, this stuff seemed much better when I was in high school (I think I read it 11 years ago).

Quick Plot Summary:

Sam is trying to find a magical way of turning his sister back to a human before she succumbs to her wendigo nature of eating humans. In doing so, he inadvertantly takes a magical stone of power, which was protecting a great evil. His Decker friend, Dodger, is exploring the Matrix with the Artificial Intelligence Morgan Le Fey, in a quest to become more than just meat that’s plugged in.

Cyberpunk elements:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Talks about how a semi-autonomous knowbot became sentient through it’s interactions with people (In this case, Dodger and Sam).
• Matrix action – Yes, descriptive (but a little weak) interaction with systems, databases and intrustion countermeasures.

Conclusions:

Following on from Never Deal with a Dragon and Choose your enemies Carefully came to a not very satisfactory end. I think the idea about AI being emergent from a system that is seeded via human randomness is an idea that has also been explored in novels like Halo and Idoru. Which kinda fits in with my current thinking on AI. Find your own truth also touches on the aspect of humanity being tied to the flesh, and that Intelligence that completely resides in systems will behave differently.

Overall, I think it had some interesting elements. However, the last two books in this trilogy really focus on magic in the awakened world. I have no doubt that Shadowrun is cyberpunk, this story definitely has some of the elements, but not in a pure sense like Halo or Neuromancer. I think adding magic into the mix really detracts from the technology side.

I don’t think it was a great read, a little hard to understand the real reason for the evil rising. I had to finish the trilogy, but if you like a bit of pulpy cyberpunk and you’ve started the trilogy, sometimes you just have to see it through.

Rating: 5/10

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that the language we know affects the way we think. Language is more than just syntax. When we communicate we do so with some shared understanding, some base of ideas that can be represented by words and phrases.

The following ideas arose as a fellow linguistics student and I started talking about cyberpunk fiction and works (the standards, Neuromancer and Bladerunner) and thoughts about communicating with Artificial Entities.

This colleague posed these questions to me:

1. What would a machine feel in a physical sense?
2. How would it’s language be constrained or influenced by it spatial awareness?
3. What common experiences and needs would we have?

When we say “how are you?”, we are usually refering to a physical or emotional state of being. So maybe, if machines don’t have the same hardware (biology versus circuit) that we can’t really expect them to emulate some aspects of human speech or emotion, because they will be crude, mathematical representations.

While this whole thing may seem a little silly, but try and explain to a child the concept of why we work: I have to go to work, to earn money, to provide food and shelter for the family, so that you can grow up (and hopefully have fun), and one day become independent.

That’s the idealogy, but maybe we should say we work as a means to an end, but a child is not going understand that either. So this concept, is difficult to describe unless the person has that shared understanding. Likewise, explaining physical requirements to support life, will mean nothing to an AI. They won’t get hungry, therefore they won’t know what that means for a humans survival. So how much is communication a function of:

1. What we know
2. What experiences we’ve had
3. Our physical self (try explaining colour to a person blind from birth)
4. What we need to do (e.g. work, eat, survive)

Probably similiar to use trying to communicate with dogs or monkeys .. our common emotions and thoughts may not be the same.

Let’s talk emotion and feelings, would a machine be able to fathom:

• Hate
• Stress
• Boredom
• Love
• Meaninglessness
• Frustration
• Pain
• etc

No ? Well, if these influence our use of language, how could software understand that perspective. Are these feelings biochemical in nature or a function of the mind? Emotions or states of being are often expressed using:

• intonation
• volume
• choice of words
• facial expression
• other body movements and gestures

All of the above can be either misinterpretted or missed.

Humans do not have perfect communication between:

• other humans
• People of different cultures
• First and Second Language speakers (E.g. Native versus an adult learned language )
• Different social status

So maybe wanting machines to talk like us is some weird form of narcissism. Not only that, they would have to know language, culture and common sense as well, if not better, than we do.

AIs wouldn’t have smell, and are limited kinds of sound or vision without millions of years of evolution. Other sensory input we use during communication, such as facial queues, body language, intonation etc could be lost, when we solely rely on syntax and words. Currently, we communicate with computers via common languages (C, Perl, Java, Assembler, etc), but there is always a translation layer such as English to code, or response (visual display, error or text) to be interpreted.

Translation can cause loss of information.

So perhaps the beginning, is an AI that can speak like a child. Try and create the inquisitive mind of a child, the endless why? why? why? and hopefully through interacting with that environment could learn to learn, as well as speak.

Ultimately, our basic needs dictate our actions. Machine don’t have the need to eat, and don’t fear dying. They will “think” different than we do, and so will communicate differently. I think this means that unless we completely understand human emotion, thought and language we will always be communicating from different common understanding. So, when we do communicate with AI, it will need to adapt to us and we will need to adapt and think like a machine, so we can meet in the middle and form new shared understanding.

I found how to run a Perl Module like a script a while back. Not sure how useful that will actually be, but it is interesting.

[perl] package SomePackage;

run unless caller;

sub run {

# Some stuff you want to execute goes here

}

sub some_method { # Do something }

sub other_method { # Do something else } [/perl]

Resources:

• Still more Perl Lightning Articles – Page 4
• Modules as Scripts – Forthcoming book “Mastering Perl” by Brian D foy

Anyway .. thought it was worth making a note of this.