Hello 
I'm Siobhan Curran/Kisa Naumova, and this is my weblog. I tend to write about stuff like crossdressing, Macs, code, cats, wine and Second Life, but in general it's just an ongoing conversation about all sorts of stuff. If you'd like to know a little bit more about what this all is, I recommend starting on this page which has a little bit of info on who I am, and what I'm trying to do — or you could dive into my five years worth of archives if you like.
Otherwise, feel free to close this box and explore...
Deep Shit
Game Over: Kasparov And The Machine
Every now and again, Auntie Beeb spews forth something truly remarkable. I've been sat, glue to the screen all the way through Game Over: Kasparov And The Machine. Four things have sprung to my mind...
Did IBM cheat?
They certainly came off the worst in that documentary. An air of smugness surround all of the staff that were involved in the project — and you (or more specicifally, I) just couldn't help waving a flag for The Last Hope of Humanity. There was a sense, in all of the documentary (perhaps) that there was more to the whole affair than just Man vs Machine — there was a sense that this was East vs West. That the point was to show Western technological superiority...
...perhaps. Or perhas I'm reading too much into it
Either way, I don't think that the film-makers' opinion over the question of IBM's integrity was in any doubt, considering the constant references to...
The Turk. Nope, can't say that I was in too much confusion as to the intent of the documentary.
The constant references to The Turk (which I first came across via the medium of Air India's inflight radio programmes incidently — I alternated between a documentary about it, the 30,000 feet high Chicken Korma, and an endless loop of "New York, New York") left me with conclusion that, according to Vikram Jayanti, IBM did cheat:
BBC Four: Kasparov clearly believes that IBM cheated in some way. How much credence do you give his theory?
VJ: I don't think it really matters what I believe but there's a huge body of opinion in chess that Deep Blue made two moves that could not have been made by a computer.
This is a prime moment to suggest that it would be a great thing indeed, if I could provide a link here to some MPEG so that I could share this programme with everyone.
Dear BBC : I know you're "testing" this with 5,000 lucky chosen ones guys — but do you really need convincing that the rest of us wouldn't like to be able to do this?!
And finally, and I can't stress this enough ... computers will never be intelligent
Maybe "intelligent" is the wrong word to use — as confoundly geeky people often try to insist to me that computers are already "intelligent" (although crashing just before you hit 'save' is not necessarily a sign of "intelligence" — merely a sign of evil ). Let's use the word "conscious" instead:
Computers will never be conscious
And, I cite Searle's Chinese Box as my main defence, but I back it up by the complete abnoxiousness of Professor Kevin Warwick
An androgynous etc.
To my thinking, the problem with Searle's Chinese Box argument is that we don't really know why it doesn't apply to us. In fact, sometimes it seems that the argument applies to human beings all too well. When I speak to my parents on the phone, it seems they're reading from exactly the same symbol book as last week. Equally, tell someone you're a transvestite for the first time and plenty of people seem to be searching an empty book for what they're supposed to say next...
Until we know how our own sentience comes about from a bunch of loosely-neurons, we ought to be very careful about pronouncing mad-made intelligence impossible. To quote that great theorist Arthur C. Clarke, "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Besides, for all we know 'Siobhan Curran' is a chinaman, sitting in a box in Leeds, reading a symbol book and responding blindly to our comments. 
Ah, but I didn't say "man-made intelligence" did I though? I said "computers"
The thing that always strikes me about this area of thought, is how humans tend to perceive their own brains in terms of what the current technology happens to be.
Which is why the example of the Turk above is quite relevant — at the time it was made, the height of technology was clockwork. Which is why people were quite willing to believe that it could make judgements — after all, the brain is just like a big clockwork mechanism right?
I think that what bugs me about the whole issue of AI, is that the limelight tends to fall on our (so wonderfully put by my androgynous friend above) "egocentric twats" — people who latch onto society's yearning for the stuff they've been promised by the Sci Fi of their youth in order to fuel their research budget.
It wouldn't surprise me if Kevin Warwick annouced plans to build a flying car...
...
But, just to go off on one for a second ... Computers bore me. fifty-odd years they've been around, and they haven't done anything interesting since 1984. Most of the developers working their arses off these days, seem to just be trying to open-sourcely ape what comes out of Redmond or Cupertino.
Don't give me the GIMP — persuade Adobe to make Photoshop free.
Granted, the boxes that have invaded our homes have become fitter, happier, and more productive each and every year — but they're still the same boxes that used to take up whole rooms.
(There's a photograph of my Father, taken about twenty years ago, sat on the red leather of a Kray — I wonder sometimes, if it amuses him that now I've got about twenty times the processing power in a perforated aluminium box on my desk. I imagine that it would amuse him less if he knew what I used that aluminium box for...)
Sorry, losing the plot there. Basically, I don't think (all hail the belief system! ) that we can replicate ourselves in silicon. And I don't really think we should try.
I think we should say, to all the Kevin Warwicks of the world, "Oi, Warwick, NO! You are not a cyborg — you're a sad old man with a chip in his arm that can turn the lights on."
And then, once we've clear that out of our systems, we should look at what we really want computers to do for us, and realise that they're quite capable of doing that already.
What we want computers to do for us, is spot patterns in our everyday lives, and take the hassle out of it for us. And let's face it, computers haven't exactly taken the hassle out of anything since Windows 3.0 — all they've done is a more stress to the vast majority of people, and pass control of our lives into the hands of a few sad, lonely men.
...
I just got an email off a friend this evening:
BSkyB advances HDTV launch plans
British Sky Broadcasting (BSky
announced today that it had appointed Thomson as the initial manufacturer of the set-top box for its forthcoming High-Definition Television (HDTV) service. Speaking at the DVB World conference in Dublin, BSkyB's Chief Operating Officer, Richard Freudenstein, revealed for the first time that Sky's HDTV box would feature a similar Personal Video Recorder capability to the existing Sky+ box*. Mr Freudenstein said: “More than 600,000 customers already enjoy the control and flexibility of our Sky+ product. Offering PVR capability as a standard in the HDTV arena will ensure that they can continue to enjoy these benefits in association with our highest-quality programming.”
Great. Fantastic. Super. Great.
(That reminds me, I must try again to throw stones at Jim Bowen's 'Bully' stained-glass window when I go past it in the train tomorrow)
But can I perhaps add something to that? How about "More than 600,000 customers are slightly peeved that they can't link their Sky+ boxes to their computers, so they can save their programmes onto DVD"?
(This isn't an Intellectual Property argument BTW — Sky already let me 'save' my recorded programmes onto VHS tape. What's the difference in letting me do that and letting me pull the MPEG off the Sky+ box's internal hard drive?)
...
Ack, I dunno — I'm losing the thread. I think what I'm trying to get at here is that I think we should stop chasing SciFi dreams. I think we should concentrate on getting the things we have at the moment working together properly before we start shoving chips in our arms (the ultimate in bingo wings?!) and thinking that that makes us in someway a cyborg. I think that the philosopher who recently got the UK media (recently == 2 years ago) abuzz by suggesting that The Matrix could be real, should go back and research his Berkley.
I think Professor Warwick should crawl back into whatever hole his cyborg-mutated arm dragged him out of.
And I think we should all embrace X10 technology (sorry, *nix humour here: has anyone managed to get X10 working under X11? 
) and accept that that's the limit of computer 'intelligence' — knowing what time Buffy is on, in case we miss it.
...
PS. Kris, loved the USER_AGENT. I will mind my own business in future
Besides, for all we know 'Siobhan Curran' is a chinaman, sitting in a box in Leeds, reading a symbol book and responding blindly to our commen
OK, apart from the fact that that should be Lancaster, not Leeds (I only work in Leeds) — there's a lot of truth in that, hidden just below the surface in a Weblog post that's been brewing in my mind for a long, long time.
Not ready yet though 
Siobhan! We all are in dire need of seeing some more pictures of your lovely self in pretty dresses, etc.!
Geena
"Don't give me the GIMP — persuade Adobe to make Photoshop free." — and would you like to do your freelance work for free? I think not!
But if an Adobe competitor can come up with another product cheaper and better — now that's something I don't have a problem with. That's competition, nothing wrong with that.
But what really hacks me off is people who whinge about a pay rise and then expect other people to give away their products and services for next to nothing, aaaaargh.................
Rachel
"Don't give me the GIMP — persuade Adobe to make Photoshop free." — and would you like to do your freelance work for free? I think not!
Hmm. D'ya know, I'd love to do my freelance work for free. In fact, my inability to charge people what I potentially could is legendary.
But that's not my point (and that was, on reflection, a bad example to choose) — my point is that it seems ludicrous to me to spend time reinventing the wheel. Take OpenOffice.org as another example — I appreciate the ethos of trying to undermine a Microsoft Office domination of the planet, and that to achieve some kind of inroads into its users you have to pander to its (in my mind) clumsy and quirky interface ... But wouldn't it be better to come up with something new?
Once again, I'm not sure where I'm going with this one — it was just a thought, last night. Something to do with the idea that computers seem focused (and as a result, focus their users) into a space roughly the size of an A3 page (she says, grinning at her big fuck-off monitor).
Crap — I need to go get the train. I'll see if I can make any sense of this by Skipton...
Hmmm, Siobhan mocks cyber intelligence and says computers will never be concious....
A few hours later her server dies killing her site.
Looks like someone's trying to tell you something.
<tempting-fate>Ha! But if she was that clever, she would have backed herself up first </tempting-fate>
But computers care nothing for their memories, nothing for the past, and nothing for their owners. They give so much and all they ask is respect.
nothing for their owners
'snot true — I think, deep down, Erin loves me really. After all, it was me that liberated her from a life of typesetting Blackpool hotel brochures after all.
OK, I probably owe her my MA (she features in it BTW — in the Sheep Migging film), but if it weren't got me, she wouldn't have met all you guys.
I know — theres a delicious irony in the fact that I insist that computers are non-thinking things, yet insist on calling my server a "she"...
(That reminds me, I must try again to throw stones at Jim Bowen's 'Bully' stained-glass window when I go past it in the train tomorrow)
Er... I hope this isn't too late: best check he still lives there! I heard recently that he'd moved.
You mean there's potentially someone living in a house, next to the Leeds <-> Morecambe railway line, that has stained-glass windows of Bully on them (Provided free by K-Glass I believe — I think the store just down from Stonewall still uses Jim as a mascot) hasn't thrown their own bricks through them yet?! 
A friend of mine has a PhD (or is it PHd? Can never remember) in Robotics and is a lecturer at a large university. He was asked to contribute to Robot Wars, but refused on the basis that Robot Wars was souped-up radio-controlled cars and little else.
Anyway, the news from him is that most people in the field of Robotics and research into similar fields think that Kevin Warwick is a glory seeking, egocentric twat, and that his research has leant less toward genuine needs in robotics and more towards his ego-placating, retiring-at-55 bank balance.