[Reader-list] Alternative software???

[Are Flagan]

The below is a short, original essay intended for the reader-list discussion
on software. It implicitly makes the claim that software can never truly be
alternative, as it is simply a lifeform sustained by and within the
universality of hardware. The essay argues this view through the life and
works of Alan Turing.

The questions that immediately follow would pertain to how, or if, software
can at all be considered alternative, in the sense that it offers a critique
of the universal principles laid down by hardware.

And, secondly, if the normative and disciplining aspects of software alluded
to in the essay can in any way be countered (by alternative software) to
create another common subject, another experience of the public.

Things unfortunately got a little derailed by the usual perils of computing
(that we are all too familiar with), so I hope there will be enough pensive
flamebait in this essay/post for someone to bite ;-)

-af

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This is a work in progress. Please ask before/if distributing it beyond this
list. Thanks.

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The Forbidden Fruits of Computing

It is frequently argued in the annals of computing that software was
conceived along with hardware. Commenting on the pioneering Analytical
Engine assembled by Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace remarked that it "weaves
algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves." [1]
The industrial loom she referred to had arrived a few decades earlier,
around 1800. It took weaving instructions from linked stacks of punch cards
and wove them into an image or a pattern--in one instance even an exquisite
portrait of its namesake and inventor. Due to input methods that bypassed
the use of a machine operator, the Jacquard loom is widely considered an
early step toward the kind of automation associated with computers. What
Lovelace loosely suggested, however, appears to be of an entirely different
order. She offered a burgeoning thread where the machine would take to weave
it's own programs and not only serve as a processing unit for input through
to output, from punch cards to flowers, culture to nature, and mind to
matter. The machine would by some measure inhabit an intelligence and weave
its expressive algebraic patterns within the structure provided by the
machine. [2]

As the later history of computing has shown, this insight was latent for
almost a century while Boolean algebra and further research into the
mechanization of logic continued to evolve. It was not until 1936, the
pivotal year Lev Manovich, among others, has embraced as the birth of modern
computing, that this early realization was philosophically restated by Alan
Turing in his essay "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entsheidungsproblem." [3] The tongue-twister problem referred to posed a
succinct question of decidability: could there, at least in principle, exist
a method or process whereby all mathematical questions could be decided? To
arrive at a definitive method of decidability, in the form of an actual
answer, Turing proceeded to propose a machine, named after him, which under
the premise that all its operations reach a finite number, reflecting all
possible states, would indeed be able to operate within the limits of an
absolute decidability. In the paper, Turing immediately goes one step
further and introduces the concept of an omniscient Universal Turing Machine
that accommodates and interprets the algorithms of a myriad Turing Machines.
This is of course the enduring yet hazy distinction between hardware and
software: the universal is embodied in hardware, while a number of smaller
machines, basically virtual computers, are embodied within this as software.
They all adhere to the same universalized principles of an absolute
decidability.

Turing's interest in the topic of computing rested with larger and, in fact,
distinctly personal questions related to intelligence and consciousness.
After the premature and deeply mourned death of a friend, Christopher Morcom
in 1930, he got obsessed with how the human mind, thinking of Morcom's wits
in particular, was embodied in matter and how consciousness may be preserved
after death. To this end, he first embarked on a study of quantum mechanics,
but a subsequent shift toward probability theory and eventually the Turing
Machine leads to the absolving solution found in computers. Life evolves,
and as such it can never be contained inside a finite horizon; it cannot be
preserved within a distinct singularity of presence. By letting mind operate
with a set limit, it could simulate itself without overstepping these
boundaries and disastrously escape the parameters of its decidability. Mind
could similarly evolve without limitations in this matter, processing any
combination of algorithms, but only against the ground of the Universal. It
would thereby obey the exact principles outlined in his treatise on
computable numbers and the Entsheidungsproblem: many Turing Machines within
a Universal Turing machine, software within hardware. What can immediately
be deduced from this (in radical shorthand and against a philosophical
backdrop) is that software emulates a finite mind with infinite
possibilities when controlled by the universal principles that enables it in
the first place.

Software, then, is a coexistent simulation of mind and machine. This dual
realization effectively introduces and describes the work continued by
Turing after the war. In 1947, Turing wrote a paper (it remained unpublished
in his lifetime) where he suggested that complex mechanical systems could
exhibit learning abilities--what we now call neural nets. He published
another seminal work in 1950, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," [4]
which introduced the renowned Turing Test, where a machine seeks to imitate
a human with the purpose of determining if the machine possesses artificial
intelligence. His actual proposal interestingly involved a blind question
and answer session where the determination of a binary choice ultimately
hinged on the interrogator's allocation of the two test-subject's sex (one
of which could be a digital computer), conjuring a somatic rather than
cognitive limit of difference. This difference was furthermore based on a
rulebook that allowed for evasive answers and encouraged attempts at deceit
when the imitation game was played. Following this trajectory, along with
the parallel hardware developments of electronic switches and transistors,
we have essentially retraced the birth of modern computing and the
speculative exams to see if it could sustain itself, as life in death, and
flourish without support, as mind in matter.

In the same 1950 paper, and with considerable foresight into the
melodramatic detection of cyborgs acted out in the film Blade Runner, he
boldly predicts that by the year 2000 technology would be advanced enough to
fool an interrogator for about 5 minutes, 70 percent of the time. But before
mentally playing the part of Harrison Ford here, consider that Turing is in
actual fact talking about software within hardware, not emotive cybernetic
organisms seamlessly embodied in skin to fool us on the surface. [5] His
test of intelligence, conceived as a meeting of minds and the duplicity of a
gendered consciousness indistinguishable from that of a highly acculturated
machine capable of lying, is the programmed persuasion of software to
integrate itself into our own psychology and respond in kin. If we use Blade
Runner's seductive exam, which set up an apparatus monitoring the eye to see
if the body lied about its origins, we are well short of Turing's
predictions, but if we instead consider how software, our conversing
counterpart in the Turing Test, currently reflects and infiltrates our own
way of thinking and acting the time and percentages mentioned appear rather
conservative. [6]

Within this ultimate limit of decidability, important questions of propriety
and determination loom. Reiterating the thoughts conjured thus far: all
software is realized against the ground of a universal system as operative
incarnations of mind. The troubling conclusion must be that it subsists,
virtually if you like, under the umbrella of a mastermind, which defines the
very outer limits of its expression and offers infinite permutations of
interminable life in return. Questions of machine intelligence, importantly
entered as both the recognition and deception of the human in an either/or
scenario, appears only against the ground of purposefully ignoring the
universal mastermind, taking software at face value, and immediately
entering into the loop of its algorithms upon first considering the query.
What the Turing Test ultimately proposes for software to pass as intelligent
is that it answers all questions according to the universalized norm of a
normality, representing a common denominative being that does not depart
from the average but rather adheres to it in every aspect and defines the
nodal point of presence through these very standards. This is why any leap
from software to ideology is imperceptible. Software seeks to imitate the
collective, and therefore primarily ideological, principles that make "us"
and it renders itself intelligent in this image. What follows is of course
that proprietary software mirrors this normative state closest, being
representative of seamlessly programming a common human form of ideological
proportions into the universal machine, a dominant mind into a subservient
embodiment of operators and users.

But what happens to alternative forms and lifestyles, to the aberrant
thought and the mutated body, in a software culture explicitly designed to
preserve one powerful mindset above all others? Turing indirectly also
provided a less scientific, but equally telling, answer to this question. He
was homosexual, and after a casual affair at the liberal King's College in
Cambridge, he lived the closeted life required by puritan Britain. During
World War II, he worked for the Government Code and Cipher School at
Bletchley Park, where he famously broke the Nazi Enigma code. At this time,
he also proposed to marry a colleague, eventually calling it off with a
private admission of his sexual orientation. In 1952, following his election
to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1951, he was arrested upon
allegations of sexual relations with a younger man (Turing was 40 at the
time) and taken to court. To avoid prison, while pointedly emphasizing that
his actions should not be considered criminal, he agreed to undergo a series
of estrogen injections to tame his libido, a chemical castration diagnosed
by a cause and effect scenario prevalent at the time. And after losing
security clearance because of his, now public, homosexuality, he was
summarily dismissed from his longstanding job in the Government code unit. A
year later, on June 7, 1954, he committed suicide by eating an apple laced
with cyanide.

His final act was a poetic revenge on the life's work that ultimately
ostracized and betrayed him. The man who provided important breakthroughs in
the development of modern computing and broke the code that helped the
allies win the war was killed by a paltry logic he could not defeat. Recall
that his interest in the embodiment and preservation of mind in matter that
led to the pioneering work on Turing Machines stemmed from a lost and deeply
mourned companionship with another man. The relations Turing desired in
computing were at their inception directed at one missed individual, rather
than a generalized and disciplined body. They also spoke of a sexual
difference--subtly restated in his choice of sex to determine human
intelligence in the Turing Test--that cautiously countered the machine's
universality. Once such pensive constructs enter the very definitions
garnered here--those of our relations formed with the machine through
hardware and our proof of its intelligent humanity in software--their
universality as modes of knowledge about the life they perpetuate is called
into question. When Turing took a bite of the cyanide-laced apple, he chewed
a chunk of that encounter in the Garden of Eden, which punished curiosity
when it interfered with commands; he tarnished the purity of Snow White and
the gravity of Newton's eureka that found enlightenment through reason. In
computing, there should always be a lingering aftertaste--a protracted
mortality--that recalls the tang of sweet and bitter juices Turing must have
savored as he pondered the fruits of his work, in that final system failure.
[7]


NOTES

[1] Ada Lovelace, from the annotated notes to her translation of Luigi
Federico Menabrea, Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage,
1842. See, for example:
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Lovelace.html.

[2] Alan Turing interestingly brings up Ada Lovelace in his essay "Computing
Machinery and Intelligence." Under subheading six in the sixth chapter of
the treatise, entitled "Contrary Views on the Main Question," he refers
specifically to Lady Lovelace's objection: "Our most detailed information of
Babbage's Analytical Engine comes from a memoir by Lady Lovelace. In it she
states, 'The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It
can do whatever we know how to order it to perform' (her italics)."

[3] Alan Turing, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem." Available online at:
http://www.abelard.org/turpap2/turpap2.htm.

[4] Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Available online
at: http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm.

[5] As Turing himself notes in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence:" "No
engineer or chemist claims to be able to produce a material which is
indistinguishable from the human skin. It is possible that at some time this
might be done, but even supposing this invention available we should feel
there was little point in trying to make a 'thinking machine' more human by
dressing it up in such artificial flesh."

[6] A visit to MIT will show that the sensory and emotional aspects of the
"human" intellect are under serious development in various, still rather
crude, anthropomorphous devices. The Blade Runner test and the Turing Test
combined may be passed one day, but one may already seriously ask to what
avail.

[7] Turing biographer Andrew Hodges's excellent web site,
http://www.turing.org.uk, contains extensive information about Alan Turing
and his archives.