>Science Fiction: “Manna: Two Visions of Humanity’s Future”

Recently I have read several articles on robots and machines that are taking more and more jobs humans are doing today. For example Wired had a long article on future of robots. Then there is Baxter the friendly robot that can be easily trained for simple manufacturing tasks.  Thinking of taking robotics to the extreme, I have been wondering what the nature of work and society will be in the future,  a future in which machines can make everything. This is how I stumbled on this book.

“Manna” is a short novel that describes two possible worlds that can result when robots take over making everything. The book is interesting, mostly because of the descriptions of two possible versions of a future world. It is borderline SF story, with some political overtones.

In the first world, people’s work is controlled by software – that’s right, management is replaced by a program called Manna. In the story, everything starts when fast food restaurants begin use Manna  to control everything the workers are doing. People are guided via voice commands spoken into the headphones they wear while working. Since this software improves profitability of business so much that it becomes widely adopted.

Wide adoption of Manna eliminates management jobs first. But  eventually, even the low skill jobs are taken over by machines still guided by Manna. Consequently, more and more people cannot find any work. Such people are kept in “welfare towns”, where they can live out their live with basic necessities provided by the government, but they can never leave.

The other world is referred to as the “Australia Project”. This one is more utopian. Here the labor of robots is equally shared by all citizens. Since robots can manufacture everything the only real cost to anything is the energy required to make something, so every citizen of the Australia Project is granted an allowance  units of energy which covers his or her needs. This system makes sure that everyone has all the basic necessities of life, and then can pursue whatever else interests him.

For larger projects (for example space travel) many citizens can pull their energy resource together and have the robots build what is necessary.

One technology used by citizens of the Australia Project are computer body implants that allow instant communication with others, and instant access to world’s information and entertainment. Think Google Glass on steroids.

Although, I found both possibilities somewhat farfetched, it still is interesting to think what the world will be like in the near future as the robotic technology evolves further.

>Non Fiction: “Elliptic Tales”

This book is a popular book about Elliptic curves. But, even though it is a popular book, it is still a math book – with formulas and proofs. As any math book, this book became harder as it went along. In fact by the time I got to the last couple of chapters, I started skimming the proofs – I did not have the gumption to spent the time and deeply understand them.

The expressed goal of the authors of Elliptic Tales was to explain enough mathematics so that the reader could in the end understand the BSD Conjecture.  I think I sort understood it while I was reading the end of the book, but I would have hard time explaining it now.

However, despite these difficulties, there were large sections of this book that were very enjoyable to read. The early history of elliptic functions, for example, which goes back to the Greeks. I liked the chapters on projective geometry and how it was used to extend ranges of elliptic functions. I have never studied projective geometry and so all this was mysterious and new to me.

It is possible that I will come back and re-read sections of this book at some time in the future – mainly because there are some cryptographic algorithms based on elliptic functions and I’d like to be able to understand them better.

Technical Reading

Over past few months I have been reading a number of technical books on programming. Here are three that are real good, in no particular order:

• Effective Java by Joshua Bloch. This is a nice reference book, in which the author covers some useful patterns and heuristics  for writing Java code. You don’t necessarily need to read this book cover to cover. you can read the interesting chapters – as they as mostly self contained.
• Dependency Injection by Dhanji R. Prasanna. Dependency injection is one of those simple ideas (originally called “Inversion of Control” by Martin Fowler) on how within a running program object are constructed.  The idea is not to have to build dependencies by hand coding them, but by having them constructed  automatically.  This idea turns out to be surprisingly powerful and this book explores how dependency injection can be used. Maybe the best thing about the book is that it contains tons of examples using Guice and the Spring Framework.
• GWT In Action  by Robert Hanson and Adam Tacy. This book covers the details of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). This toolkit allows the programmer to write code in Java, but then it compiles the code that will run in the browser to Javascript. I liked this book because it contains a lot of examples that you can work through. Learning by doing works better for me.

Funny aside – I wrote a review of a book on the Spring Framework long time ago. Turned out that particular book was not that good.

>Non-fiction: “Everything and More”

I learned about this book, by David Forster Wallace, from reading essays in the Neal Stephenson book. The description sounded very interesting – a history of the concept of “infinity” (a favorite topic of mine). Plus, David Foster Wallace was a famous writer, deeply admired by many, and I have never read any of his books.

As expected, the book started with the discussion of Zeno’s Paradox. These paradoxes deal with the infinitely small – since Zeno ask how can an arrow move anywhere, since it first have to go half way, and to get to half way point  it has to get to one quarter way point and so on. So it’s path becomes an infinite sum of infinitely small distances.

The other kind of infinity is the large one. The discussion of this one eventually lead to the work of Georg Cantor on transfinite numbers.

Although the topic of the book is fascinating, and the author clearly mastered the subject, the style of the writing got in the way. So much so I gave up after about 100 pages. What I found most annoying was when David Foster Wallace made up his own abbreviations for random terms and used these throughout the text. In fact early on he a had a two page glossary of these and you needed to refer to them constantly.

But he did not stick to this initial list. He kept creating more abbreviations as he went along. After while this became too distracting to read. I gave up when I came to a section where he referred to Galileo Galilei as “GG”.

>Non-fiction: “Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing”

This book is a collection of essays and short pieces – some fiction, but most non-fiction – by Neal Stephenson. Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite SF writers of present day, as you can tell from the books of his that I have read recently (REAMDE, Anathem and others).

The collection includes magazine articles, short fiction pieces and  interviews that were conducted on Slashdot and for Salon online magazine.

The topics of the essays vary wildly. In the very first one, titled “Arsebestos” the author explains why he now writes while slowly walking on a treadmill. Turns out sitting on your “arse” is not that healthy.  Another, rather long essay, discusses the metaphysics of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, who along with Isaac Newton invented Calculus. It turns out that a lot Leibniz’s metaphysics contain the seeds of very modern ideas that we find in today’s physics. I won’t attempt to explain it here. However, it is clear that Neal Stephenson read about all this while gathering material for his Baroque Cycle series of books (I never finished reading  those).

One of the longer essays was published in Wired Magazine back in the 1990s. It described his trip around the world following the construction of an communications cable that since then became part of the internet.  To me that article dragged for a little too long.

Included in the collection is an introduction that Neal Stephenson wrote to a book by David Foster Wallace called “Everything and More“. This is a book about mathematics and more precisely about the history of infinity. From this introduction it sounded interesting. I will need to check it out.

The last essay in the collection turned out to be one of my favorites. It’s titled “Why I Am a Bad Correspondent“.  Briefly, Neal Stephenson says, there is only so much time to write fiction, that’s what he wants to do and that’s how he can reach most readers. All else is a distraction.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Clay Shirky on the Future of Education

Here is a nice long essay by Clay Shirky on the challenge the MOOC (Massively Open Online Courses) present to the structure of our current universities. I have been taking occasional courses on Udacity and Coursera, and I find these course really good.

Clay Shirky is a media professor at NYU and he writes a lot of good stuff on the possible consequences of technology.