Jonah Lehrer: The virtue of the outside perspective

Jonah Lehrer talks about the importance of the outside perspective in this video from his appearance at Poptech, describing how people "just on the outside of a domain" are often better at solving problems in that domain. Why should this be so? Paddy Harrington at Fast Company:

We have a saying at Bruce Mau Design: 'Amateurs going in, experts going out.' For a long time, we struggled to articulate the benefit of being a 'nonexpert' in a field. We often talk about 'fresh eyes' in design. When you’re working too long with anything, by definition, you can’t 'see' it anymore. It helps to get a person unfamiliar with the work to give a fresh perspective. Well, it turns out that this is a fundamental pillar of innovation: Our habits form what’s called a ventral route. It’s like a rut in a road. It gets so deep that you simply can’t get out without outside help. Using a story about InnoCentive as a starting point, Lehrer describes the paradox of expertise in that it can sometimes become an obstacle to creative problem solving:

The IdeaFestival specializes in fresh perspectives.

Wayne

No ads? No problem. The Gray Lady Levels up

Well this is interesting. Yesterday's New York Time's piece on the allure of time-sucking "stupid games" featured a stupid game embedded in the story itself. Using the space bar and arrow keys, the Asteroids-style challenge allows the reader to blast away the parts of the page she doesn't want or like. Even the advertisers were on board, according to this story at Nieman Jounalism Lab.

'Originally we thought there would be a very strong push back and people would say this is not The New York Times,' he said. 'But there’s been a lot of enthusiasm' — even from advertising, he told me. You would think of all the pixels involved on a web page, the advertising would be the last thing you would want to get rid of, especially in the journalism business. But [Multimedia producer Jon] Huang said the ad staff was on board, telling the multimedia team that if they couldn’t find cooperative clients they’d run house ads....

...[T]he game will likely be another element to help garner interest in the piece ahead of the Sunday paper. Of course, whether people are actually reading it or just trying to get a new high score while evaporating Google ads is another question. Huang said he expects most people will take the time to read the story, once they finally stop playing the game.

Going all meta, the game was a clever compliment to a story on the power of Angry Birds and Farmville to draw us into their worlds. And to be perfectly honest, I read the whole thing - before playing the game. Bad gamer.

Wayne

Human dreams of robot beings

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Appearing last year at Thrivals during the IdeaFestival, IBM's Watson pitted its synthetic circuitry against the wetware of several student volunteers and won a game of Jeopardy!. The outcome was never in doubt. Given an enormous edge in brute force calculations and an ample data set that boots when the machine runs, Watson can reference and parse more information than any human will ever call to mind when answering a question. That's because the human mind, alloyed as it is with our biology, deals with constraints that require it once in a while to transcend logic. Art, literature, theater - the urge to create, to make sense of it all - is the hallmark of human intelligence. We look for meaning, not facts.

Artificial intelligence research has long targeted robots that might be more like us. In one way it has succeeded.

The fact is machines can pass themselves off as human. They can pass the Turing test. It's been done. It could have been done at Thrivals had one or more of the kids onstage who challenged Watson been fed the answers. Given a bit of theater from Watson's creators - "no one has ever done this before!" - the audience may have been fooled. But no synthetic machine is likely to write Stanley Kuntiz's "Touch Me," or understand the existential frame of mind of Shakespeare's Hamlet as he considers wading into the ocean. And given the depth to which sarcasm and humor have penetrated popular culture to deal with the surfeit of information that machines can handle without complaint, language can only be more difficult to grasp. Feed Watson some Onion ledes and it might blow a fuse.

So in an all too human twist to this story, researchers have begun, instead, to look for intelligences unique to robots. According to "AI Robot, How Machine Intelligence is Evolving" in The Guardian last weekend, research is more or less abandoning attempts to create Turing-like creatures that can fool their human hosts.

But isn't this number-crunching rather than the emergence of a new intelligence? The machine is just performing tasks that have been programmed by the human brain. It may be able to completely outperform my brain in any computational activity but when I'm doing mathematics my brain is doing so much more than just computation. It is working subconsciously, making intuitive leaps. I'm using my imagination to create new pathways which often involve an aesthetic sensibility to arrive at a new mathematical discovery. It is this kind of activity that many of us feel is unique to the human mind and not reproducible by machines.

....[O]ne of the most striking experiments in AI is the brainchild of the director of the Sony lab in Paris, Luc Steels. He has created machines that can evolve their own language. A population of 20 robots are first placed one by one in front of a mirror and they begin to explore the shapes they can make using their bodies in the mirror. Each time they make a shape they create a new word to denote the shape. For example the robot might choose to name the action of putting the left arm in a horizontal position. Each robot creates its own unique language for its own actions.

The really exciting part is when these robots begin to interact with each other. One robot chooses a word from its lexicon and asks another robot to perform the action corresponding to that word. Of course the likelihood is that the second robot hasn't a clue. So it chooses one of its positions as a guess. If they've guessed correctly the first robot confirms this and if not shows the second robot the intended position.

In true Jeopardy! style, the better question wins. The entire article is here.

Wayne

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: "The universe is in us"

Answering a question from TIME magazine about the most astounding fact about the universe, Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson replied that it was this: the universe is in us. This brief video captures that sentiment with pictures from Cassini of Saturn and Tethys, of a rocket ascending from Cape Kennedy and of the sun - our yellow dwarf - setting on Mars. Sublime.

Wayne

The Most Astounding Fact from Max Schlickenmeyer on Vimeo.

Creativity and the "naive daring of outsiders"

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The great physicist Niels Bohr is believed to have said that "an expert is a man who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."

He wasn't being kind. What about you? Have you ever worked with someone whose view of the right course of action never deviated from what had been done before, or who took only the most deliberate steps toward a goal? Competency is important, of course. But for want of a little courage, some "experts" will miss strategies or paths that might not just compete in the marketplace - to use a business analogy - but miss the opportunity to create an entirely new market dominated by the creator.

Promoting his new book, Jonah Lehrer makes a point about innocence when tackling open ended problems. A certain phrase immediately appealed to me.

Imagination was once thought to be a single thing, separate from other kinds of cognition. The latest research suggests that this assumption is false. It turns out that we use 'creativity' as a catchall term for a variety of cognitive tools, each of which applies to particular sorts of problems and is coaxed to action in a particular way....

We tend to assume that experts are the creative geniuses in their own fields. But big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring of outsiders. For prompting creativity, few things are as important as time devoted to cross-pollination with fields outside our areas of expertise. (emphasis supplied)

I've always thought of the IdeaFestival as the place where beginners, entrepreneurs, interactive artists, college students, the curious, white color professionals, molecular biologists - you get the idea - are exposed to the widest variety of people and ideas. Arrive with an open mind and the odds of a soul-satisfying, toe-curling thought outside your area of expertise are high. And once "naive daring" has done its thing?

Work like mad. Niels Bohr also new the basics.

Wayne