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Voice interfaces and the future of literacy

Posted by Shai Shapira on March 16, 2018
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Cognition, Software, Technology. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

I recently found (through High Scalability) a very interesting interview with Brian Roemmele, an experienced engineer and advocate of “Voice First” – the idea that voice is going to be the primary means for people to communicate with technology in the future. The interview is fascinating and somewhat strange; most of all, it brings to mind an old article I’ve read in the past by Ryan Britt about how Star Wars seems to describe a post-literate society – That is, their society seems to rely on voice and hologram technologies to such a point that almost no character is ever seen reading anything, and there are interesting ideas about how non-literacy (or post-literacy, in that case; i.e a society where literacy is known and has existed, but has been willingly abandoned by at least the majority of population) might explain some strange elements of the movies’ plot. Is it possible that Roemmele’s ideas are taking us in the same, post-literate direction?

(You can listen to the interview here, or read the main points in the High Scalability article. Britt’s article seems to have been taken off the web, maybe to encourage people to buy his book instead; there is a follow-up article here. Also, while preparing to write this post, I found what appears to be another article suggesting the same idea already in 1998, by David Lance Goines)

First, a few words about how I see Roemmele’s idea of Voice First. It seems extremely foreign to me, and I am obviously not in the target audience of what he describes; However, I’m open to the possibility that I am the minority, and what he says might be more relevant for most people. Is it true that “Anyone trying to type has to first put it in a voice in their head before typing”? I certainly type faster than I speak. I certainly don’t spend ninety percent of my time sifting and sorting Google results (and not just because I use DuckDuckGo instead), and when I hear that when he touched an iPhone for the first time, “little hairs went up on my back” – I can only conclude that he and I are very different people.
From my perspective, his advocacy for voice seems to hinge on three basic principles: efficiency of text-based lookup compared to menu-based lookup (it’s quicker to say “text Brian” than to find a texting app and choose who to text), efficiency of voice as an input device compared to a smartphone virtual keyboard, and the promise of AI. For me, the first one is basically the same command line concept we’ve had long ago – he even mentions it as an example of an obsolete system, but really, what he’s suggesting is a voice-based, AI-powered command line. Which is fine, since someone like me indeed still uses command line occasionally – that’s why an important part of being a Windows user is learning to use the Win+R shortcut. I never use the Windows start menu – any program I have that’s more than one click away, I open by writing its name on Win+R. As for the second point – I’ve disliked smartphone virtual keyboards from the first day I saw them. We certainly need a better input system. Personally I’m skeptical about voice being this system, but whatever. And as for the third – I’m becoming more AI-skeptic every day, and that’s too big a topic for this post. If you want to bet on the AI bubble as being the future, good luck.

But let’s return to our topic. He clearly represents more people than I do. My way of using a computer is tightly connected to my being a programmer and a gamer; I can see that people who are neither of those things do tend to have a taste more similar to his. So is it true that voice is the future, and will it bring the post-literate, Star Wars-like society? This point is not mentioned in the interview, but I think Roemmele’s vision leaves very little need for literacy. He says we’ll still be looking at screens occasionally, but it will be rare. So I think we should really stop and think about why people started reading and writing, why they still do it now, and why should they do it in the future.

The main, if not only, incentive to read, is to have access to more information. In the pre-voice-interface world, our only way of getting human-made information without that human being physically next to us and talking, was to read. We would read books, newspapers, and websites, and thus get information. Books and newspapers have been gradually shifting to digital screens in the past few years, meaning that replacing screens with voice interfaces can make almost all of our reading optional. At that point, how strong will the incentive be to learn to read? We can only guess. You might think it’s exaggerated to imagine a return to illiteracy, but it’s important to realize how much of a guess that is – this voice-first future will truly be a new situation.

Because remember, we cannot think about this using ourselves as an example – we might look at ourselves and feel like we (for the sake of argument) use voice interfaces and audio books, yet still want to read occasionally. But we’ve already learned to read, and we did that when we had a strong incentive to do so. What happens with the first generation that has audio books already before they can read? They will not have as much of an incentive to learn reading. They will not need reading to get the information. Will reading still be useful to them in the long term? I absolutely think so. But will that be enough to convince them to go through the hard work required to learn reading?

One very symbolic moment in the interview is when Roemmele asks “Who uses mice anymore?”. I think the mouse, in many ways, is a small example of the same process at work here. The mouse is significantly more efficient than the touchscreen, but the touchscreen has one advantage – it’s intuitive. The mouse, when using it for the first time, is not efficient; In the hands of an experienced user, it becomes significantly more efficient, compared to the touchscreen, which stays mediocre no matter how much you use it. Sounds familiar? This is exactly how writing works. It is not intuitive, and requires a lot of practice to master; but once mastered, it provides huge benefits over voice (which is more intuitive). If people really don’t use the mouse anymore (and by the way, don’t they? I haven’t really seen people like that, but I’m sure he knows the market more than I do. Might also be related to the fact that I am not located in the USA, which seems to be the early adopter for most of these tech trends) because they prefer the short term benefit of an intuitive interface, then can we really expect them to spend difficult hours learning to read and write, when they can just listen to audio books?

So bottom line – if Roemmele’s thesis is correct, I would think it is a very real possibility that our current (or very near future) rate of global literacy is going to be a historical peak; it will only go down from there. Not that literacy will disappear from the world completely, but it will no longer be the near-universal skill it is today. I’m not a fan of “those horrible younger generations” kinds of pessimism – as far as I’m concerned, a transition to post-literacy will be fascinating. I think it will be a bad decision for those who do it, but I have no reason to complain. If that really happens, I’ll fully enjoy my ability to demonstrate reading and writing as a party trick to my future grandchildren’s friends. I doubt if they’ll be too impressed, but who knows.

And some advice for you readers – if the world is going in a post literate direction, I strongly recommend you go against the trend. Not because literacy is some sort of magical wonder world as some people like to describe it, but it’s just a useful skill, even in a world of audio books. I admit I haven’t given much of a chance for audio books because I cannot even start this strange experience of reading a book at someone else’s pace. Even as a computer interface, it seems absurd to me to return to the command line – Roemmele’s vision seems to imply that we abandoned the command line because we don’t want to read and write too much, but I have a very different way of seeing things – we (mostly) abandoned command line because it’s a one dimentional medium. You can only read or write one thing at a time, even more so with voice than with text. On a screen we can get much more information at the same time, and be more efficient.

And finally, I’ve mentioned David Krakauer’s concept of competitive and complementary cognitive atrifacts before, and I think it’s relevant here as well – always prefer technologies that improve your intelligence rather than technologies that compete with it. Text, computer mice, keyboards, long division and maps – these are all technologies that not only help you, but you can understand them and learn to internalize them without depending on some company to provide your thinking for you. With your digital assistant – I hope you’ll enjoy this life where you can suddenly forget how to turn off the lights in your house (actual story from the interview). Or to use the Star Wars analogy – where you can be completely unaware of a dark lord taking over your republic[1].

[1] Or something along those lines. I admit I have very limited knowledge of the Star Wars universe.

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Video games and the blessing of failure

Posted by Shai Shapira on February 3, 2018
Posted in: Games, Morals. Leave a comment

Lately I’ve been asked to recommend a good computer game for an educational institute aimed at a teenage audience, which brings me to a topic I’ve always been planning to write about – the potential of video games, and games in general, for self improvement. The game I ended up recommending is OpenTTD, but many of these things would be true for many other games.

Gaming does not seem to enjoy a very good reputation these days; civilized people are usually expected to have a preference, maybe a “good taste”, in interests such as books, film or music; but games are a guilty pleasure at best. Few people would consider them on the same level as those “higher culture” interests. However, what games don’t give you in social status, they give you in character. Because games provide you with an extremely important gift, one of the most important gifts you can get in a modern, comfortable life: the gift of failure.

Failure also does not enjoy a very high status these days. Not many people participate in activities that include failure; when you go to meet friends in a restaurant, you cannot fail. You might enjoy more or less, but failure is generally not a possible result. Nor in going to see a movie, taking a walk, jogging or dancing. Some of these things you can do better or worse, but that is for you to decide; no declaration of failure awaits you. This does not seem to be a coincidence – whenever I have tried to introduce gaming to non-gamers, the immediate aversion came from the presence of failure. As soon as a “game over” message (or its equivalent) showed up, the non-gamer immediately lost interest. “It’s too stressful”, “I’m not good at this kind of things”, and so on.

But escaping failure can only get you so far. Our everyday activities might not include failure; but eventually, our lives will encounter it. If we are not used to it at that point, failure might devastate us. Our business collapsed? We lost a job? We were rejected by the university? I’ve seen many people unaccustomed to failue, who were caught completely off-guard by things like this. And this is the first advantage of games, and the most general one – even the simplest of games, including the kind of “shoot other people” games that many people imagine when they think about games (this is not the type of game I advocate, although they do also have much more depth than most people appreciate), will give you a constant knowledge of failure[1].

Does that sound unattractive? Keep reading then. Because failure is only one side of the coin. Failure is not only a catastrophe we need to prepare for; it can also be the source of the greatest joy. Light cannot exist without darkness; Good cannot exist without bad; and without failure, we cannot have one of the most important and pleasant things in life: success.

I don’t want to repeat too much of the critisism of the “everybody is a winner” approach gone too far[2], as many others have done that already; I’ll just say that an approach to life that does not include any way for you to succeed, or win, in something you had a chance of failing, is a recipe for an unsatisfying life. Why is it that people enjoy so much the feeling of fake-shooting a fake-person on their tv screen, even when these people have no interest in violence or weapons in real life? You can have many guesses, but I (as someone with experience in fake-shooting) have little doubt – the reason that succeeding in these games is such a sweet feeling, so difficult to find otherwise in daily life, is that they are difficult. When we know we can easily fail, the feeling of success becomes real. This is because the game is unforgiving – it will not give us any discounts for being tired, for being “almost right”, for being nice; the game is endlessly cold and objective. If we did well, we’ll succeed; if we did not, we fail.

And this is the real value of games – they give us the benefits of real-life challenges, but without the danger. Outside the context of a game, failure can have serious consequences; and in our modern society, even reaching the point of facing a challenge might take a lot of time and preparation. Games allow us to face challenges in comfort and safety; not as a replacement for real-life challenges, but as an introduction and practice for them.

And it’s not only the general feeling of failure and success that games prepare us for. What I’ve said so far is true for almost any kind of games, but I don’t recommend playing too much of the most common games. Because games can also choose which kind of challenges to offer – and the right challenges can teach us things that would be very hard to learn otherwise.

Strategy and management games, such as Civilization, Europa Universalis, Cities: Skylines, and many others, bring us into a whole new world with a whole new way of thinking. The most striking one is resource management – I’ve been shocked occasionally by how some non-gamers are perplexed by things that for a strategy gamer are obvious. A strategy gamer learns very quickly that the most basic concept is sacrificing some objectives in favor of more important ones; we need to do or allow some things we do not want, becuse in the bigger picture, in the long term, it will pay off. Outside of games, where else do we encounter this kind of thinking? Seems like not enough. And this is just one of counless examples – A single playthrough of Europa Universalis IV will probably give you a better understanding of world history than a full university course. I’ve seen architects who consider Cities: Skylines to be superior to their own university education in urbanistics. Games are the perfect platform for learning – in a game you do not only absorb information; you must internalize it and act by it – the difference between success and failure depends on it. And what starts in the game, will eventually be an education for life.

[1] There are some exceptions: I wonder if the recent expansion of what some critics jokingly (but quite accurately) call “walking simulators” is basically a way to sell “games” to people who are afraid of failure.

[2] Just to clarify: there are definitely good sides to this approach, and an ultra-competitive environment is usually not good; a healthy balance is the ideal.

Introducing: Civilization 5 Superintelligence mod

Posted by Shai Shapira on January 6, 2018
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Games, Technology. Tagged: , . Leave a comment

After being quietly online for a while, my most recent project is now officially published – the Superintelligence mod for Sid Meier’s Civilization 5. Check it out here (for basic Civ 5) or here (if you have the Brave New World expansion).

If you don’t know what any of those words mean, check out a news report here. hopefully I’ll get to writing more about my reflections on the project in a few days.

Now on Twitter

Posted by Shai Shapira on December 30, 2017
Posted in: Blog. Leave a comment

It happened – I’ve finally opened a Twitter account. The blog will stay the place where I write serious things I want to say, but if you want to see in real time some things I find interesting, especially things from obscure sources and non-English languages – follow me on Twitter. I would have preferred otherwise, I don’t think these social media platforms really offer us anything we could not do otherwise, but I guess that’s where most people want to read their content these days.

Enjoy!

Thoughts on Guy Deutscher and training to think better

Posted by Shai Shapira on December 27, 2017
Posted in: Cognition, Languages. 4 Comments

I’ve recently finished a second reading of Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass“. While seemingly a simple popular science book, I consider it to be a very important text to read, and I see potential in what it says that I’m not even sure the author himself sees with me (more on that later).

I assume “spoilers” are not an issue for a popular science book, so let me start by giving away the point of the book – it studies the effects our languages have on the way we think, but not in the magical hand-waving style associated with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but in an objective, empirical way, based on the principle that some languages force us to be aware of some information and some don’t. For programmers this should be quite clear – every programming language (for the most part) can theoretically do the same things, but unlike the idealist, hippy-ish linguistics professors described by Deutscher, programmers are notorious in their love for describing why their language is just *better* at doing *better* things; not because it’s impossible to do them in another language, but because the grammar of some languages encourages different actions compared to others. Like most things in programming, no one says it better than Joel Spolsky – check out his classic “Making Wrong Code Look Wrong“.

My only problem with Deutscher’s book is that he did not go far enough. He gives two fascinating examples of his thesis, color perception and space orientation: people who speak languages with more distinct words for colors naturaly train themselves to notice the differences between those colors; and people who speak languages where cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) are used for orientation rather than personal directions (right, left, forward, backward) have to develop a sort of “inner compass” – a strong ability to recognize cardinal directions using any hints in the environment around them (this exists only in a tiny handful of small tribal languages, in case you were puzzled). These are both fascinating examples, but the problem is that he does not give any more.

In some sense, I suspect that this is an example of the difference between scientist and engineer. Deutscher, as a linguist, wants to study the world. He laments the loss of small tribal langauges that will deprive us of the ability to discover more such unique ways of viewing the world. I, meanwhile, as an engineer, consider the existence of tribes with such ideas to be a fun curiosity, but I see no reason to limit myself to existing languages. Rather than ask what kind of differences exist between different usages of language, I want to ask: what differences can exist? Can we change our language in a way that makes us more likely to understand some things?

Personally, I’ve been experimenting with these things for many years, already before my first encounter with Deutscher’s book. I’ve always aimed at using the most specific color words possible, and still feel a slight cringe when I hear, for example, someone describe olive, peach or lilac colors as green, orange or purple respectively. I’ve made concious attempts to use cardinal directions in navigating around the world (admittedly, the arrival of smartphones and their tempting GPS navigation systems was a setback for that project. I should really be less lazy). But I believe the potential exists far beyond that.

Not long ago, I heard a researcher named David Krakauer on Sam Harris’s podcast. He spoke of a concept called cognitive artifacts: some ideas, like the invention of writing or our current number system, can change the way we think so drastically that it opens new doors for us, improves our intelligence. This is a serious oversimplification and I strongly recommend listening to the actual podcast, but the point is – the linguistic differences Deutscher describes fit very well into Krakauer’s concept of cognitive artifacts. When we consider “the sky is black” to be a wrong sentence compared to “the sky is blue”, we force our mind to be more attentive to colors. When we consider the number 427 to be composed of 4*100 + 2*10 + 7, we force our mind to think in a way that makes arithmetic much easier than if we thought about it as CDXXVII (meaning, 500 – 100 + 10 + 10 + 5 + 1 + 1). And the big question for me is: what can we do next? As I’ve said before, I don’t want to stop at studying the existing world like Deutscher; I want to think about what we can change to bring even bigger revolutions. What will be the next writing, the next number system?

Just as a small example, there is one thing I’ve always wondered – our use of the word “tree”, compared to the word “animal”. The group of organisms we include in the category “tree” is no less diverse than that in the category “animal”; however, we use both in very different ways. If I point my finger at a sycamore and tell my friend “look at the person standing next to that tree”, it would sound perfectly natural. Yet, if instead of a sycamore it would be a horse, it would sound quite strange to say “look at the person standing next to that animal”. If it’s a horse, we’ll call it a horse, not an animal; but we have no problem referring to an oak, or a eucaliptus, or even a palm, as simply a tree. What would happen if we change that? What would happen if today we stopped using the word “tree” in any context where we would not use the word “animal”?

You might say that would be to difficult, they all look so similar! But that’s exactly why you should read Deutscher’s book. It’s difficult *for us* to find north in an ordinary city environment, or to tell the difference between an oak and an ash (or not, but let’s assume you’re all city boys/girls like me), because we’re not normally required to do that; when we teach our children about the world, we show them endless books and toys that teach them “this is a dog”, “this is an elephant”, “this is a cow”, and then – “this is a tree”. Growing up like that, it seems obvious that there is a huge difference between a dog and a cheetah, but a tiny difference between a birch and a poplar; but is that really true? Recently, on a trip with friends, my friends’ infant daughter was excited to notice some pandas next to us – that was somewhat surprising, considering the fact that those were, in fact, cows; but what seems obvious to us now, with our many years of education, is not at all obvious to an infant who is still trying to make a general sense of the information presented to her. Her parents immediately laughed and corrected her, and she will probably easily understand the difference between a cow and a panda quite quickly. But what would happen if she just said those were “animals”? And her parents said the same, and her books said the same, and she was never expected to actually make the judgement of which kind of animal she was seeing? In that alternative world, I would be very surprised if people were so sharp at differentiating cows from pandas. And in an alternative world where we stop using words like “tree”, “bush”, or “flower” in any context where a more specific word can be used – we will get to know our planet’s biodiversity much more, without making any concious effort.

Again – trees and flowers are only a small example. The real challenge is in finding ideas that completely change the way we think – things like how our ways of representing words and numbers on paper was a complete revolution in our thinking. If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

Political stability, participation and rights

Posted by Shai Shapira on October 16, 2017
Posted in: Politics. Tagged: . 3 Comments

A lot of interesting debate followed my Quillette article, and I think it might be useful to elaborate on it a little bit; specifically, explain how I believe the correlation between public participation in the economy and political rights is created in practice. You can think of it as trying to answer the question “if political rights depend on economic participation, then why is Norway democratic and China authoritarian, rather than the other way around”?

First of all, it’s important to clarify that I described this as a historical trend, it’s not a law of nature. It’s certainly possible that some cases will go against the trend. But we don’t have to stop here; if we think more deeply about this theory, we might realize it’s actually stronger than it might seem at first.

The first concept I’d like to introduce here is political inertia. By default, any political structure has a strong tendency to keep existing: some people hold a lot of power in it and want to continue holding it, and many of the people who do not necessarily hold much power, are nonetheless content enough with their life to prefer stability over the uncertainty of change; these are two advantages automatically given to the maintaining the status-quo. Therefore, it’s very much possible that some political structure will be created, even with great majority support of its population, and later reach a situation where most people would have prefered a different structure if they could start over, yet still prefer to keep the current one just to avoid the dangers and uncertainty of change. Let’s call this situation “political tension” – the amount of people under a political entity who would prefer a different system than the one they live under at the given time (theoretically, we’d want to multiply this by “how strongly they would prefer that”, but that’s not really a measurable quantity).

This, in many ways, is the brilliance of free democratic elections: they allow the population to peacefully release most aspects of political tension. When a majority of the population is not happy with the government’s performance, by next elections they change it and reduce the tension, leaving (hopefully) a much smaller amount of people unhappy with the new government. This does not always work so well in practice for reasons I’ll discuss in the future, but it clearly works well; we can complain about our democracies as much as we want, but we’d have to be extremely ignorant to deny how much more peaceful and prosperous they made those parts of the world that built them well (what exactly I mean by building democracy “well” is something else I’ll discuss in the future).

Even in a democracy though, not everything can be changed in the elections. On the one hand, issues that are considered too important to leave to the voters, like borders, population and democracy itself; on the other hand, issues that are not important enough to have an effect on the vote. Many people might have opinions about transportation policy or government support for the arts, but votes are usually given based on more urgent things. In an authoritarian system, almost everything is unchangeable for the common people. They gather much more political tension, and therefore require much more repression to keep themselves functional.

So if political tension by itself does not necessarily guarantee political change, what does?

I’d like to suggest that this tension is itself a particular case of a wider measure – political stability. Any state needs to remain stable to survive; once enough factors reduce its stability to a low enough level – it will change. Either by revolution, seccession, invasion, or just gradual change by its current rulers.

And this is where my universal basic income article comes in. Having a state where public contribution and political participation do not match is not impossible, but it’s a less stable state. If it happens in a democracy, it’s very much possible that it will stay a democracy out of inertia – but if it becomes unstable enough, due to this or any other factors, it’s going to change, and once it starts changing (meaning inertia no longer applies), it’s very likely to change into the most stable state possible – therefore, a state where public participation and political rights do match.

So, what are these factors influencing stability? We’ve mentioned inertia, political tension, and difference between participation and rights. Looking at the world, we can guess a few more:

– Economic growth: a growing economy will naturally be more stable, as the people who are getting wealthier from it would like to continue getting wealthier. A shrinking economy will be less stable, and it’s no coincidence that some of the world’s worst conflicts tended to happen during economic crises. People who expect to become poorer have much less to lose from the uncertainty of political change.

– Ideology: While it might seem like I’m reducing people to the status of meaningless pawns with this theory, their beliefs and opinions definitely do matter here; some ideas prevalent in a society can have a large influence on its stability. Pluralism and family values are ideas that are likely to make a society more stable; Individualism or Marxism are likely to make a society less stable (just to clarify: “stable” does not mean good or bad necessarily; we’ll want a good state to be stable, and a bad state to be unstable. What “good” and “bad” means here is for you to decide).

– Ideology difference: While the previous item was about the ideologies themselves, here we add the difference in ideology between different parts of the population, and between the population and the ruling class, if there is a ruling class separate from the rest of society; as a classic example, religious differences between population and government, or between significant parts of the population, have constantly shown themselves to be sources of instability throughout history.

– Military power: As much as we might dislike it, military power is a source of stability for a country. Maintaining a righteus rule of law, or an evil, corrupt rule, or any other rule, requires the application of state violence, and we need to recognize it. The better a state is at applying this violence, the more stable it will be.

– External environment: It’s much easier for a country to have the same type of regime as its neighbors. I don’t think anyone is surprised neither at a democratization process in Serbia, for example, nor in a slide to authoritatianism in Cambodia. Both are relatively small countries, drawn to become more similar to their larger neighbors.

This is only a partial list. The point is, no country will immediately become authoritarian once it became rich from natural resources, and no country will immediately become democratic after having an industrial revolution. However, they will become less stable, and therefore more likely to change, when joined together with other sources of instability.

Norway and China were both given as counter-examples for my article; I’d argue that the Norwegian democracy has many factors contributing to its stability, including its North European environment, its relative ethnic and religious uniformity, and lack of significant revolutionary ideologies. China, likewise, has factors promoting stability, most notably its remarkable economic growth. If they reach a serious economic crisis, we’ll see: if at that point, most of their income comes from taxpayers, I’d be very surprised if we won’t eventually see a turn for democracy; hopefully in a peaceful, gradual change like what we saw (for the most part) in Taiwan and South Korea.

And one more clarification: All the above is an abstract model. It is not a scientifically proven theory and I’m fully aware of it. I offer it as food for thought, as a basis for discussion; not as an attempt to offer exact predictions. How much this abstract model actually fits reality, that’s for you to decide.

Universal Basic Income and the Threat of Tyranny

Posted by Shai Shapira on October 10, 2017
Posted in: Economy, Politics. Tagged: , . Leave a comment

My article has been published on Quillette magazine:

http://quillette.com/2017/10/09/universal-basic-income-threat-tyranny/

Basically an expansion on things I’ve said in the past (like here in Hebrew) about the political implications of universal basic income. I still think universal basic income might be the direction we’re going in, but we need to think seriously about these things before going there.