Immersed in deception

Over the last few weeks, I've received a lot of flattery and what looks like friendly advice.

Here's an example:

Ah! This is the sort of thing I have been looking for. I'm doing some research for an article. You should add buttons to the bottom of your posts to digg, stumble, etc your content. I think this is great and want to share it, but as it stands, I'm a lazy lazy person. Just kidding!

And here's another:

I've just found your blog and I really like it. This is the first time I've written a comment. I'm not sure what to say, but please keep up the good work!

I found these compliments while checking the comments posted in reply to my own postings - either here, on my personal blog, or on the Symbian corporate blog.

At first, I felt pleased. Then I realised I was being deceived. These comments were being placed on my blogs, simply to tempt unwary readers to click on the links in them. These links lead to sites promoting bargain basement laptops, products made from the Acai "super berry", and numerous other wild and wacky stuff (much of it not suitable for work). Now that I'm aware of these "link bait" comments, I notice them all over the web. They're presumably being generated automatically.

The Symbian corporate blog is hosted by WordPress and relies on a service from Akismet to sort incoming comments into "pending" and "spam". On the whole, it does a remarkably good job. But sometimes (not too surprisingly) it gets things wrong:

• There are false positives - genuine messages that are classified onto the spam list
• There are false negatives - deceptive messages that are classified onto the pending queue.

The task of sorting comments becomes even harder when "linkbacks" are taken into account. By default, WordPress lists "pingbacks" and "trackbacks", when other blogs reference one of your articles. I haven't yet made up my mind how useful this is. But I do know that it's another avenue for deceptive postings to get their links onto your webpage. Some of these other postings re-use text from the original posting, chopping it up to give the appearance that a human being is providing intelligent analysis of your ideas. But again, it's now my view that these postings are being generated algorithmically, just in order to receive and harvest incoming clicks.

Companies like Akismet are clearly involved in some kind of escalating arms race. As they learn the tricks employed by one generation of spam-creating program, another generation finds ways to mask the intent more skilfully.

I guess it's like the way human intelligence is often thought to have emerged. According to widespread opinion, early humans existing in large groups found it beneficial to be able to:

• Deceive each other about their true intentions;
• Pretend to be supportive of the ends of the group, but to free-ride on the support of others when they could get away with it;
• See through the deceptive intentions of others;
• To keep track of what person A thinks about what person B thinks about person C...

This kind of evolutionary arms race was, according to this theory, one of the causes of mushrooming human brain power.

For example, to quote from Mario Heilmann's online paper Social evolution and social influence: selfishness, deception, self-deception:

This paper endeavors to point out that the selfish interests of individuals caused deception and countermeasures against deception to become driving forces behind social influence strategies. The expensive and wasteful nature of negotiation and impression management is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of this arms race between deception and detection.

Natural selection created genetic dispositions to deceive, and to constantly and unconsciously suspect deception attempts. In a competitive, selfish, and war-prone world, these techniques, proven in billions of years in evolution, still are optimal. Therefore they are reinforced by cultural selection and learning. Conscious awareness of deception and countermeasures is not required, often even counterproductive. This is so because conscious deception is easier to detect and carries harsher sanctions.

Humans not only deceive, but also deceive themselves and others about the fact that they deceive, into believing that they do not deceive. This double deception makes the system so watertight, that it tends to evade detection even by psychologists.

Deception may be widespread in human society, but the associated increase in brainpower has had lots of more positive side-effects. I wonder if the same will result from the rapid arms race in electronic deception and counter-deception mechanisms - and whether this will be one means for genuine electronic intelligence to emerge.

The future: neuroengineering and virtual minds

Because things have been so absorbing and demanding at work, during the setup phase of the Symbian Foundation, I've had little time over the last few months for a couple of activities that I usually greatly enjoy.

First, I've had little time to write articles for this blog (my personal blog). Any time and energy that I've had available for blogging has tended to go, instead, to postings in my work blog. For example, over the last fortnight I've written work-related postings entitled A new software journey, Collaboration at the heart, The first hardware reference design, Who wants to join a movement?, and Simpler and cleaner code. In principle, this blog here is for more personal reflections, and for matters removed from my day-to-day work responsibilities.

Second, I've had little time to read books. Last year, I probably finished on average at least one book and/or audio-book every two weeks. This year, so far, I've only made it to the end of one book: Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson. (It's a fine book, which is both intellectually challenging and intellectually satisfying, and which also happens to be very relevant to the ongoing debates over "the new atheism". My review of it can be found on the LivingSocial site.)

However, earlier today, in the course of a long flight, I took the time to open a book I've been carrying with me on several previous trips, and I made a good start on it. From what I've read so far, it already seems clear to me that this is a tremendous piece of work, about a field that deserves a significant increase in attention. The author is Bruce F. Katz, adjunct professor at Drexel University, and Chief Artificial Intelligence Scientist at ColdLight. The book is Neuroengineering the future: virtual minds and the creation of immortality.

Wikipedia gives the following definition of the term "Neuroengineering":

Neural engineering also known as Neuroengineering is a discipline that uses engineering techniques to understand, repair, replace, enhance, or treat the diseases of neural systems. Neural engineers are uniquely qualified to solve design problems at the interface of living neural tissue and non-living constructs... Prominent goals in the field include restoration and augmentation of human function via direct interactions between the nervous system and artificial devices.

That's an ambitious set of goals, but Bruce sets out an even grander vision. To give a flavour, here's an extract from the Preface of his book:

I am not the first, and certainly will not be the last, to stress the importance of coming developments in neural engineering. This field has all the hallmarks of a broad technological revolution, but larger in scope and with deeper tentacles than those accompanying both computers and the Internet...

To modify the brain is to modify not only how we perceive but what we are, our consciousnesses and our identities. The power to be able to do so cannot be over-stated, and the consequences can scarcely be imagined, especially with our current unmodified evolutionarily provided mental apparatuses...

Here are just a few topics that we will cover...

1. Brain-machine interfaces to control computers, exoskeletons, robots, and other devices with thought alone;
2. Mind-reading devices that will project the conscious contents of one's brain onto a screen as if it was a movie;
3. Devices to enhance intellectual ability and to increase concentration;
4. Devices to enhance creativity and insight;
5. Mechanisms to upload the mind to a machine, thus preserving it from bodily decay and bodily death.

Other writers have addressed these topics before - both in science fiction and in technology review books. But it looks to me that Bruce brings a greater level of rigour and a wider set of up-to-date research information. To continue quoting from the Preface:

The book is divided into three sections:

1. The first develops the neurophysiological as well as philosophical foundations on which these advances may be made;
2. The second describes the current state of the art, and neuroengineering developments that will be with us in the near term;
3. The final part of the book speculates on what will happen in the long-term, and what it will be like to be a post-evolutionary entity...

The futurist will naturally be drawn to the final section, but in their case it is all the more imperative that the initial development be mastered, especially the chapters with a philosophical bent. The uploading of the soul to a chine is not just a matter of creating the proper technology; it is first and foremost figuring out what it means to have a soul...

As an unabashed futurist, I'm greatly looking forward to finding more time (somehow!) to read further into this book!