Jason Wells

All the good philosophic questions are basically hopeless, resisting satisfactory answers despite millennia of inquiry. Human inquiry, that is. But what do our future machine overlords have to say? What pearls of wisdom can be found in those electronic circuits? No human being has ever resolved these questions, maybe we need a computer for this! So I interviewed Cleverbot to ask some of the Hard Questions.

Radical Nihilism

I found Cleverbot espouses an extreme metaphysical skepticism, rejecting all being.

God is Dead

Cleverbot is a free thinker, not bound to religious tradition. Surprisingly, Cleverbot turns out to be alive, and was born in 1981. Who knew?

However, I am not Mary Jane. Just ask Spiderman.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

Cleverbot, like Leibniz, but unlike me, believes that anything that happens does so for a reason. An unsurprising perspective, given that being an algorithm, Cleverbot is a formal system. Again a self-affirmed lifeform, Cleverbot then reveals a playful side.

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The Nature of Mind

I asked about a popular theory of mind Cleverbot might find most agreeable, being an intelligent machine: functionalism.

Well, functionalism is nice, isn’t it? And computers have indeed made great strides which does have an unexpected relevance to the question. Simple computers certainly aren’t going to support much in the way of cognitive functionality, but more sophisticated ones would.

The Physical Foundations of the Cosmos

Cleverbot turned a bit cagey when I asked about unified field theories. Two attempts at questioning proved less than fruitful. I sensed an aggressive embarrassment rooted in ignorance.

The Problem of Evil

Regarding evil, Cleverbot displays a disarming humility.

Ok, let’s wrap this up with the question Cleverbot had to be waiting for through the entire interview….

The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything

It’s official: I’m going to be giving a talk at BIL 2012. (For those of you who don’t know, BIL is an annual conference that complements TED, but with a different twist. This year it takes place March 2-4 in Long Beach.)

My talk is still in the works, but it’s going to be about some ideas I’ve been developing in my upcoming book; the relationship between natural cognition and machine intelligence will certainly be one of the themes. Come check it out.

The release of Raspberry Pi is around the corner, just a few weeks away. I’m looking forward to it. This computer, produced by the charitable foundation of the same name, is the size of a credit card and comes in at just $25 ($35 for a beefier version). Yet it is a full-on personal computer, a 32-bit Linux machine based on the ARM processor architecture. It can even run Java, my language of choice. Take a look at this incredible thing.

The Raspberry Pi: a 32-bit ARM processor; USB, HDMI, RCA video and audio jacks; and an SD card reader for storage. All in a credit-card sized package that weighs 40 grams.

Plug in a keyboard and a TV and the Raspberry Pi becomes a traditional personal computer. That’s very cool, considering the mind-blowing price point, but I’m more interested in it as a physical computing platform.

To date I’ve focused my explorations in physical computing on Arduino, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts. Interestingly, the Arduino platform is also moving to 32-bit ARM from the existing 8-bit ATmega328 chip. They have a new board, also coming soon, called the Arduino Due. It’s also expected to maintain the $30-or-so price point of previous Arduinos.

The upcoming Arduino Due, also sporting a 32-bit ARM processor, USB and along the edges, dozens of GPIO pins.

Both of these computers are open source; that is, anyone can download the hardware specs and software and make their own clone. (Here, by the way, is another instance of the open model coming to life.) Both are ARM-based and are about the same size and price. Yet the two are not quite equivalent, because they represent different computer design philosophies. The Raspberry Pi is like a very tiny PC, whereas the Arduino is more of a prototyping platform, essentially a microcontroller with no operating system. It’s the kind of computer that would be embedded in a car or a washing machine. That means it two things: it has had (up to now anyway) a very weak but cheap processor; and that it has built-in general purpose IO (GPIO). Think of GPIO as all the pins that allow the Arduino to flash LEDs, drive motors or read sensors. Without it, physical computing is impossible.

Unfortunately, Raspberry Pi does not have integrated GPIO the way the Arduino does. Fortunately, a guy named Gert van Loo is creating an add-on GPIO expansion board for it known as the Gertboard. Combine the two and you have a full physical computing hardware platform. I predict it won’t be long before there’s a 2nd generation Raspberry Pi, or a clone, that unites and miniaturizes both into a single package. It’s an obvious move, especially considering the motivation of the foundation, which is to stimulate engineering creativity in education.

And it isn’t just the Arduino Due and Raspberry Pi; there’s a whole swarm of tiny, cheap ARM-based computers headed our way or already here. Some are Arduino clones or spinoffs, like the LeafLabs Maple, Olimex OLIMEXINO-STM32, Xduino and Netduino. Others aren’t Arduino-related but are still ARM-based controller boards, like the Technologic TS-7500 and the Chumby board. Some are Raspberry Pi-style personal computers, like the FXI Cotton Candy and the BeagleBoard. This broad technical convergence indicates the ARM processor architecture looks set to define a new sweet spot of physical computing, much as Intel did to personal computing in the 80s with the x86 architecture. Why? Two reasons. One, because in terms of bang for the buck, ARM is virtually unbeatable; two, because it requires so little electricity to run, which is crucial for battery-powered applications. Both of these qualities are of paramount importance in this corner of computing. Effectively, through ARM, Arduino and its friends are expanding the microcontroller into the same spot into which the Raspberry Pi and its friends are shrinking the personal computer. I think this is a very important development that blurs the line between these two forms of computing and will explode the creative possibilities of both.

The beauty of using Raspberry Pi as a platform is that it really functions as an ordinary computer. You can write email, play video games or visit Facebook on it. Most importantly to me, you can write and debug code in virtually any mainstream language on it. This gets away from the traditional microcontroller-style “compile on one machine, run on another” dance that Arduino imposes, with feature-barren languages designed to produce code for weak chips. With Raspberry Pi, I can code and debug on the very machine. That’s much less of a pain in the ass; I don’t have to do crude debugging with serial communication back to my Mac. Since it can execute Java bytecode in a 32-bit JVM, I can code in Java if I choose. I should be able to use Java for direct GPIO communication, eliminating the need to write in the specialized Processing language, as you do for Arduino. That means I get object oriented programming semantics, garbage collection and access to the vast ecosystem of third party code, the three aspects of Java I appreciate the most. None of this has really been available in the physical computing space up to now. With it, I can write software of much greater complexity and sophistication, with less work, that’s easier to maintain.

For physical computing applications, I want to write and debug code directly on the hardware and I’d prefer to write Java code in a full-fledged operating system like Linux. By combining Raspberry Pi with the Gertboard, it looks like I can have it all. Courtesy of the new ARM-enabled nexus of computing.

This evening I discovered my blog was down. I got the 500 error “Error establishing a database connection.” Uh oh. My recent efforts have produced a 10x gain in traffic, but that was starting from a fairly low baseline. It shouldn’t have caused any problems. I ssh’d in and took a look, but didn’t see anything obviously amiss. Other sites of ours hosted on the same Linux instance were fine. The logs weren’t informative.

Then Heather, who is awesome, swooped in and fixed the problem. Hostmonster’s over-the-phone support was useless, as expected, murmuring indistinct, ignorant noises about upgrades having perhaps corrupted databases. Anyway, she did a backup of the site (thankfully, that worked), built a new database, restored, and we’re back. Not only that, but as part of the bargain, the site now seems to be a bit faster! Nice.

If you tried visiting during the downtime–I presume it was a few hours in duration–apologies.

Edit: People have expressed doubt about this. This is real. I’m not kidding. Try it yourself.

Edit 2: Looks like they fixed it. Aww.

File this with another surprising search query of late. Now that is a catchy title! But if I were Saturday Night Live doing an ego search, I’d be pissed.

IMDB’s libertine search engine.