Why else would Steve Jobs have called his phone product iPhone if not for some kind of semantic suggestion of the phone-entity being a personage? Was the i more than a brand follow-on from iMac branding?
How soon will a smartphone or cloud-connected, Machine Learning-empowered personal device be looked at as a personage, not as a gadget or inanimate object? When would you feel it necessary to acknowledge someone’s phone as a personality in a conversation.
Your are in the middle of a conversation with a friend, your friend makes a wildly exaggerated statement about her favorite basketball team. Your phone makes a polite “Ahem!” and proceeds to give you the statistical facts. Later you retune the phones “smart ass” settings to only show these facts as personal notifications; but you don’t turn off its listening feature.
Animate: verb
Verb
1 — bring to life
2 — give the appearance of movement using animation techniques
Adjective
1 — alive or having life
Bringing something to life (or amateur Frankensteining)
Let’s look at a selection of attributes of life applied to a current smartphone.
- responsiveness to the environment
- growth + change
- ability to reproduce
- have a metabolism and breathe
- maintain homeostasis
- being made out of cells
- passing traits onto offspring
Sometimes it helps to exaggerate in order to create contrast, to lift our gaze above the trees. If silicon became sufficiently complex to simulate the universe then how can you say that the simulated earth and life, including humans, is any different than our apparent embodiment as humans; these corporeal beings and lives, we believe to have solidity and persistence.
Perhaps we all live in a simulated universe like an elaborate video game; a played concept but a wellspring for ideas nonetheless. The idea was featured in The Matrix where (spoiler alert) a character knows well that he is simulated and that the steak he is eating is simulated but the simulation is so good for him, he would rather consume the simulation than the bland fare and sensations of ‘real life’ outside The Matrix.
This is the opposite position of the Buddha who looks at the wheel of life and decides to exit the wheel of re-incarnation with an exit upon his death into a non-recurring (or infinite) life state. He was done with addictive simulations. Unlike us, the Buddha does not choose a new birth, a new family, her gender, and karmic self-judgment born of confusion but exits the loop. But what did this being exit into? And why would anyone aspire to such a heaven? Maybe he sensed the release of non-duality (the I that he perceived as his personage not existing) and was led to freedom by being able to feel the lure of non-egoistic joy in jhanas? (jhanas are ecstatic states experienced by some meditators as they move deeper into their practice, said to be non addicting wholesome states that are reportedly ‘better than sex’).
Could a smartphone personage or a cloud-based entity reproduce or meet other conditions of life?
Let’s contemplate a few of these elements of ‘aliveness’ or responsiveness to the environment:
Responsiveness is a strong suit for a current smartphone. Its sensors bristle in ways that go beyond capabilities of humans in some ways, but in many ways are also deficient relative to my body/mind:
Touch: My phone (a Pixel 2 XL) has ‘skin’ on one surface, the LCD screen and may have a fingerprint sensor on the rear and a squeeze sensor on the sides. But it has no idea about touches on the rear surface or the relative meaning of being clutched at different pressures or vectors, or that its skin is being touched semantically. Compare the hyper sensitive skin surfaces and sub-dermal senses of a human with the multi-touch LCD surface — the phone knows the number of fingers touching it and can interpret some limited moves such as a pinch, two nodes moving together. But imagine how much information is missing relative to warm hands versus cold, slap versus caress, the comfort of a parents touch, the rough versus smooth, a fly landing on your skin touching just one villus hair. Skin is our largest organ. Phones are far from simulating the capability of this extraordinary living exo-layer.
Sight: the phone can see out of its rear camera or out of a front camera. These eyes are like those of the untamable wolf who cannot read human eyes; unlike a dog whose socialization is based on its, almost unique amongst mammals, ability to read the exquisitely nuanced eye expressions of humans.
Samsung and Apple have started to scan faces as a form of identity and rapid secure unlock. Faces and irises though apparently complex, can be mathematically encoded as a statistically meaningful hash of probability — meaning, that a person who looks like me may have a slightly different inter-eye distance and basic cranio-fascial geometry even though we are remarkably similar looking due to family resemblance (your family facial algorithm); therefore, my phone will not unlock for another person. A major portion of our cerebral cortex is devoted solely to the facial recognition task — our survival depends on this ability — it is genetically worthwhile to detect “Here’s Johnny” spousal behavior well before the bathroom scene.
Imagine a foraging penguin parent arriving back to a beach with 100,000 penguins already there and seeking to find their hungry baby. You start to get a sense of how extraordinary it is that we can discern a part of someone’s face at a crowded concert and are able to take that 3D projection (we may see the face at rest or briefly in motion) and perceive a particular face; we match this pattern to a memory even if the person’s hair color has changed or they are ten years older.
A phone can sometimes open its rear eye, sometimes its forward eye and sometimes deploy its facial scanner (LiDAR, InfraRed, iris scan). The phone can accurately scan its memory for things it is seeing right now (always slightly in the past just like our own vision) or something it saw before (a camera image stored as a snap, a photo — literally, data representing human-visible light waves). Forays into semantic intelligence exist now — Pixel 2 camera is able to scan any photo or via Assistant to observe the viewfinder and suggest semantic information from the contents of one 2D frame.
How long before your phone also looks at your temperature signature and reads heart rate to infer instantaneous states of mind? Could your phone go well beyond a Tinder swipe but tell you if the swiper had a real animal attraction from viewing your picture (but of course Tinder can’t read or transmit pheromone signals), or read tells from micro-expressions and skin temperature changes.
We assume that phones record simple snapshots and small animations at low frame rates, but what if your phone recorded 1000 or more frames per second, looking precisely at how your eyes and skin moved, how your gesture arcs uniquely define you, and how your current behavior tells your motives and intentions. Your iris is an extraordinary 3D jellyfish-like structure with elegant fluttering movements of eye-kelp, rippling within clear vitreous humor.
Movement & haptics: many humans have lost awareness of their senses and the skills of the forager and hunter, related to tides, weather, geo-positioning, sun movements, wind, danger. Our phone has movement sensors for 3D orientation, accelerometers, GPS (three or more global SatNav constellations supported in current phones), barometric pressure.
Sound & Listening — Your phone typically has three microphones and a barometric sensor. It also has valves to relieve pressure because of being IP67 or IP68 rated — waterproofness means you have to be able to balance the air pressure of air left in the phone with the air pressure outside. Squish your phone and some air may escape the valve. Take a plane ride and upon landing, your phone interior may need to take a quick inward gulp to equalize outside pressure to its innards. Ruggedized device makers tend to need to invent such capabilities for devices first, and then the best of these trickle down to the consumer devices we all carry — it is toilet water moreso than a downpour that most phones should fear.
Your phone may be listening to sound pressure patterns and waves that we call sound, as an assistant and as a music aficionado. Music recognition is a useful parlor trick with few privacy concerns. Some apps like SoundHound may employ a record-then-upload model to compare to a cloud database of tunes. Your voice saying “OK Google” or similar is a crude way of getting the attention of your phone to cut through the noise of every day life and to call a synthetic being to attention. We use this pattern for people and pets — names, mouth clicks etc.
Imagine you are asleep and deep in your mind-created world of dreams, but before going to sleep you set the intention to wake when you hear your alarm — you already know the alarm sound and are able to somehow tell your dreaming self that this is important, and awaken. You have preset a simple executive function loop in your mind and trust that it will stay on ‘watch’ but do little. An assistant ‘catch phrase’ is similar — a low cost (in processing cost of attention and in battery terms) way to capture a command.
Our human mouths are close to our ears. Other orifices and movements of the body make noise too, but the body needs to deal with the fact that your own ears hear your voice more than others do. Cover your ears and speak, to listen to your voice while you have interrupted this loop. You can see the value of the self-referential loop when you experience a tone- or volume- deaf person who cannot regulate their voice tone and volume in a pleasing or consistent way — others may hear an un-self-regulated voice as subjectively unmusical or dissonant.
On a phone your voice may be input on one of two microphones built into the phone or it may be entering via an accessory port, the soon-to-be-anachronistic 3.5mm jack (a religious debate), a digital/analog port such as USB-C or via a Bluetooth device that also has one or more microphones. The audio of the other side of the conversation may be consumed on speaker phone, and so the phone has to eliminate this as an input for its microphones. Unlike a human, the phone knows the volume and exactly what is going to emanate from its speakers but it (currently) has no idea about the acoustics of the present environment. So the DSP does its best to eliminate echo for the person at the other end using dynamic methods moment to moment.
Taste and smell: Taste and smell are qualitatively different sense media than sound, sight, touch, and movement; taste and smell involve sampling molecules. You need to literally taste (test) a sample of a substance across a wide range of sensors (on your tongue) to make basic determination of fitness and desirability of the substance and energy input offered to your homeostatic body. Current technology is nowhere close to replicating these human senses.
Smell-O-Vision was an attempt by Hans Laube to create smell-centric virtual reality on top of movies in the sixties. Not coming to a screen near you, anytime soon.
Taste and smell reach our emotional being at a deep level. Sure I can vicariously enjoy images of food, but the smell of my mother’s kitchen after she cooked brown bread, that memory is not synthetically available to me via technology. Brain plasticity enables remarkable sense transmutation such as, on-skin haptic grids quickly being perceived as a form of low resolution synthetic vision for the vision impaired. Brain implants seem the only way to effectively address taste and smell data synthesis without using actual matter.
Growth and Change
While we expect our kids to grow up and evolve (relative to you and your partner) for the better, we don’t have this expectation of our current phones. In fact, regulators don’t want our phones to develop much — the nature of networks is that both UE makers and the network operators feel the need to limit the possible moves. Operator don’t want to sell a phone that started out as a pure cellular phone and later became a point-to-point walkie talkie, with no income stream to finance network infrastructure maintenance and growth.
FPGA: The field-programmable gate array has been an extraordinary advancement in chip technology. Why make a chip for a specific application such as an image-processing satellite, where you only need a few dozen of the item? The R&D and ‘tape-out’ costs of making a dedicated chip are prohibitive. With an FPGA, you build a simulation of the chip you would have built, pick an FPGA chip that is powerful and capable enough for your application, and install the simulation of the chip and then the software you want to run on the simulated chip. Such a chip can not only function as a simulated chip but some can now be re-programmed on the fly, to create a hardware simulation of a different chip.
To use a simple example, I may have shipped a device, to a warehouse or to consumers, that has a chip optimized to be a simple numeric calculator but later I reprogram the FPGA to be a scientific programmable calculator. Now I have a dedicated calculator that is substantially more powerful before, but the physical device has not changed in any way. That’s a form of evolution — not life as we might define it from a cellular perspective, but CRISPR writ large, in terms of changing the behavioral & homeostatic plan, while the machine is still running some functions.
A simpler analogy is that I might have a kitchen appliance toolkit which could be anything from a mixer to a toaster to a microwave. I choose to make a two slot toaster with the kit but two weeks later I reconfigure the kit into an espresso maker.
The acronyms SON and SDN and SDR are virtualization concepts applied to radio. SON is a self optimizing network. A simple example would be a cell tower going out of order, all the neighboring towers are signaled about the outage and temporality compensate. A technician installs a new small cell outside every second store in a mall, the nodes self-optimize. SDR is a radio defined not in components but in an FPGA like chip where the normal pieces in a radio become a programmable Lego set of parts to assemble and re-assemble. Today it is possible to buy an amateur radio transceiver the size of a small novel with fully programmable radio utilizing SDR architecture. Imagine your phone generating the antenna and filters it needs on-the-fly as it needs these elements — the software defined element can be any element of a radio, including the antenna and the casing.
Ability to reproduce
Imagine a 3D-printer that us also a flying or swimming drone. The drone works in concert with other similar machines at various scales (some large and some small). One drone refills the material for the printer drone. One cleans up spills and overflows. One drone gathers materials, one prints elements, one assembles, one repairs, one inspects. What differentiates the concerted behavior of such a swarm of drones and robots, from that of a sentient human? Two key elements come to mind — play and guidance — now you start to have the roots of reproduction.
Humans sample the DNA and chemical makeup of potential partners as they assess whether they want to reproduce — we smell various parts (and farts), we taste (kissing, nuzzling and licking), {use your imagination for more examples}, and autonomically, a sperm and an egg interface, and a female’s body coding decides whether or not to complete the process for the fertilized egg.
Sexuality, for we humans, is a gender-based procedure executed for reproductive purposes; yes, I know we do it for other reasons too, but bear with me (hard to resist that pun). Would we gender robots and phone personalities? Humans have rules regarding close genetic matches when we reproduce — this mathematical emergence suggests that computing devices too might have to worry about merging their ‘machine code’ with certain other synthetic creatures — that they too would have a genetic Achilles heel preventing close relations of like creatures.
In human rules, two distinct creatures from a similar geographic background sharing a substantial portion of their DNA, join to mix their 1.6% variance (the number is up for debate) in order to generate new forms and new ideas and to replace self-limiting-by-time lifespan behaviors.
Would we gender robots and artificially-sentient creatures? Would we self-limit their age as a time duration, as we are limited? Would we find our synthetics alien if we did not do these things? As terrifying as the mystery of death is to many of us, it is an ultimate out from suffering and boredom and repetition. Would we be a menace to the planet or auto-destruct if we lost both gender or aging, or is this path inevitable for us? Imagine a creature who has reproduced 100 times, raised the children or dropped them off in the ocean like a shark, with as much attachment as a spitter for her spittle.
