Innovation in Software

Many years ago I ran FreeBSD on pretty much every system I touched. I loved it. The lack of political polarisation that touches the GNU/Linux community combined with the power of Unix under the hood sucked me in.

I even, almost infamously, had a rant about another operating system I now use daily. I was a zealot. I am ashamed of my attitude in that email – my only excuse is that I was still quite young, a rather naive and opinionated 26 year old.

Today, I use exclusively OS X, and occasionally boot up a virtual Windows instance to test code on MS code. I have a terminal open nearly all the time and often dive down to the Unix goodness, but more often than not the bulk of my work is in the browser, text editor, IDE or Mail app.

Why then, I was asked the other day, do I not just ditch Apple and get a Linux (or even BSD), machine to work with? The bulk of my work (except for iPhone application development) would continue as before.

My answer is very simple: carpenters don’t build lathes.

To explain, let’s first go back to that rant I had about OS X. About a month later, I ordered my first Apple laptop – an iBook G4 – and was very happy with it. What happened in that month?

I realised when shopping around, I needed to check out the chipsets used for WiFi in each laptop because FreeBSD wireless support was pretty hit-and-miss back then. I also needed to understand the graphics chip-set because I’d need to compile X if I wanted to run a graphical desktop environment. I then realised I’d need to assess pretty much every feature in terms of hardware compatibility to make a purchasing decision. And then, on receipt of my new laptop I would have to spend a few hours doing all the compiling and fixing, and I would then need to do this work every few months as part of an upgrade cycle.

Yes, I’d get the power and flexibility of my own tailored operating system environment, but isn’t that a lot of work?

I recalled a few months previously a friend was playing with his new smart phone. It was running Symbian and he seemed to be doing lots of prodding and poking with it. Enquiring what he was doing, he said he was “doing some maintenance” to keep it in working order. Hang on, was he effectively sysadmin’ing his phone? “Yes, I suppose”, came the reply. When you have to do systems administration work on your phone, your phone is no longer a tool to assist with your work, it is an object of work in itself.

It was this insight when thinking about my operating system choices that directed me to OS X: I wanted the power of Unix, sure, but I wanted it to just work. I wanted to be able to get on with my work, the laptop and operating system as tools rather than objects of work themselves.

This small insight has made my life a great deal easier, and still dictates not using any other operating system. Some of my peers see it as weakness (even more point to my original rant above), but I see it as spending my time doing the things I love.

And it’s also an insight I think that as developers we forget: are we developing tools that assist with objectives, or tools that are objects of work themselves. Are we building interfaces and suggesting business logic that means our customers spend time managing the behaviour to fit around them? If so, why?

In the last few weeks I’ve seen some really interesting “reductions” in functionality that aim to make tools more directly useful, rather than requiring some administration.

Take for example, the role of authentication. You need to “contain” all of your customer’s “stuff” in a way that is linked to their “account”. So we have user registration, user profiles, account activations, password resets, etc. Seems like a lot of stuff. Are we sure we need it?

Take for example, Posterous. Their home page explains it all:

All you need to do is email stuff to post@posterous.com and you’re up and running. No signup, no captchas, no password strength indicators unless you want to add them. You’re a person capturing stuff – why do you need to admin yet another web application?

BootStrap UK (which is worthy of an article in its own right as a concept), needs accounts but has a simpler registration system: just follow @bootstrapuk on Twitter and they’ll follow you and direct message you a password. Done.

There are other examples out there as well, sometimes using software to help break out “lathe obsession” elsewhere in society. One iPhone app I’ve seen reviewed gets the banking system to work around the customer, rather than demand the customer head into a branch to suit the banking system. Brilliant.

We often spend too much time trying to work out how a customers will need to behave around our application, rather than how we need to get out of the way and let our customers use what we produce in order to do their thing. In every customer we need to start seeing the carpenter more, and assume they – perhaps unlike many of us developers – don’t like tinkering with lathes for its own sake.

It seems I’m not the only person slightly bemused by the reaction to Steve Jobs’ revelation he had a liver transplant.

Other people’s reactions include:

• He owes me more work because I’m a fan of his work
• My share portfolio is at risk because of this
• I want more shiny plastic things from Apple. This worries me they won’t be as shiny.
• He didn’t tell us something personal that we deserve to know

My reaction:

• You just had a fricking liver transplant? Wow, get well soon and don’t listen to those guys baying for your attention, you need rest, ‘k?

This isn’t about shares or gadgets or what he owes you. It’s about somebody who is seriously ill taking some time out to make sure they can live a little longer. You know “life”, that thing you take for granted? The thing that isn’t really about accumulating possessions but being able to breathe, eat, love, dream? The mob doesn’t get that – perhaps because it isn’t available to download in the App Store or listed on the Nasdaq…

And yet, somehow, this reaction is predictable. Much in the same way that sexism is alive and well in the industry, selfishness – in particular consumerist self-absorption – is rife. We are the pinnacle of consumerism. We thrive on early adopters, so we grow them. And what we grow, we reap – this is another problem we need to think about.

As a collective the consumers seem no longer to see the humanity behind technology, choosing instead to become voyeuristic onanists viewing technology almost in the form of a fetish they are addicted to. In fact, porn is a good metaphor for where we are right now: dehumanise and objectify humanity to serve a selfish need. It doesn’t matter if the lens the fetish is viewed through is that of a camera or the blogosphere, providing it’s possible to sit at screens satisfying our cravings in private.

Maybe that’s just the Catholic in me talking. The Agnostic in me thinks we can do better too, though.

Some will argue this is just the fruit of modern capitalism. All advertising in a capitalist free-market society relies on a principle of false idolatry, designed to invoke a sense of inferiority in our subconsciousness. Apple does it better than anybody else on Earth, taking their marketing cues from designer label brands.

I think we might have gone a step too far. We might need to dial it back a notch or three and re-imagine what we’re here to do. There is something pure about what we do that is beyond the gadget and the price tag, the plastic or the electronics. As Dijkstra said (and is quoted as saying on my business cards): Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Yet here we are complaining about the telescope manufacturer needing a liver transplant because all we want is more telescopes. Good. Grief.

We should be grateful for the genius behind every design decision that comes out of our great technology companies, and they should rightly be rewarded with praise – they advance society one little increment at a time. But when somebody takes time out to have a life-saving operation, there is something distasteful about a swarm of self-interested parties demanding to know where their share of the grief is going to come from.

I don’t know the answer, I don’t have the solution. All I know is that I don’t want to be part of the problem.

P.S. writing this story I was reminded of the most human thing I ever read by Jobs’: his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 which I highly recommend taking the time to read.

I have pretty standard business cards when you first look at them. The company logo, my name (no job title – such things are no-nos even for a one-man business when your head is built like mine), phone number, address, email, yadda, yadda.

The address is changing soon and so I’m about to commission some new ones from my favourite printer, and that leads me to the feature few people ever notice about them: the reverse.

The back of my business card is where I do a little of my “philosophy thing”. One person saw it and immediately thought I was a prat. Another spent 10 minutes thinking about the phrases there and came back asking me questions. Most people don’t see them. Either way, it represents a lot of me and my original hopes for the company. Some of them work a couple of years on, some don’t. So, as part of the change, this will get a revamp.

I’ve decided to make the current version available as high-res desktop images, one dark and one light. The slightly strange dimensions are due to the fact they are derived from the original 300dpi business card design used to create my actual cards.

I also appreciate that some will point out that DHH is not the first person to come out with the “best way to predict the future” quote or at the least his version is a derivative, but I like it, and DHH’s work has obviously been important to my business being a RoR shop and all that.

Enjoy, read, query, do with them as you like. I had the dark one as my laptop’s desktop wallpaper for quite a while now (hence the reason it doesn’t have a “version number” on it).

Suggestions as to what to put on the back of v2.0 are welcome via email.

Light (click for full size):

Dark (click for full size):

P.S. The French at the bottom translates roughly as: The future is not what is coming towards us, but what we are heading towards

I have been throwing a mantra around at clients in the last year:

Only 20% of software development is about writing code. The other 80% is all about communication

As an industry, we are awful at communication. I don’t mean writing reports, I mean listening. Really listening.

Guess what? The clients have noticed. I’m spending more time picking up pieces after people didn’t listen. Sometimes I look at work I’ve done myself and realise I didn’t do it so well myself. Live and learn…

This last week I was reminded of an old article I wrote here that discussed the rudeness and arrogance of some developers. A client suggest we “resume this phone call when you’re less frustrated with me”, and when I apologised and explained my frustration he simply answered “that’s fine, but I’ve had the same thing for years from my ex-wife”.

Wow.

When I realise I’ve dropped the ball, I’ve upset somebody and I’ve not known how I did it, I step back and re-evaluate myself. It would have been easy to blame the client, it would have been less challenging to just write it off as one of those things. But that doesn’t help him, and therefore I’m failing.

Stories I hear at events tell me I’m one of the few guys who will go through that process – the majority just write off the client as being at fault, and we all end up with a bad reputation.

I’m worried for the next few years this problem is going to get worse across the industry. We have more clued up people in the industry than ever before, and we are building more and more echo chambers where you hear people at events talking about Twitter as if it were as common place in people’s lives as a fridge.

Over the next few years we are going to see an influx of creators, innovators and entrepreneurs with great ideas who don’t know much (yet) about software development. I just sat down with one potential client and explained Behaviour-Driven Development at an abstract level and they were blown away by the sophistication of the philosophy. I then realised that to me this is every-day stuff, to them it’s not a million miles away from arcane magic.

We need to do a better job at explaining development to people who don’t know anything about it. We need to explain why it’s worth spending money on doing less, but that less is of a higher quality. We need to stop and listen to what they need to help build a great business. And that is key: ultimately, we are not providing a service or building a product – we are helping them build a great business.

And the only way for most of us to help them do that, is to produce great software.

And in turn, the only way to do that is to get better at the other 80% of the job we’ve been so used to ignoring until now: communication.

I expect I’m going to be talking about this a lot more over the next few years.

This morning I find that bastion of journalism Valleywag (please note sarcasm here), has decided to lay into Marissa Mayer the VP who oversees Google’s core search business. Their analysis of her comes down to this:

• She seeks publicity
• She has influence in the company at a senior level
• She dictates the style of web pages without a style guide
• She is a perfectionist over candidate selection
• She points to athletics as part of her life but her times aren’t great

And then… well, this:

“Did she really mean to invite media scrutiny of her athletic career? What’s really telling about it: In the handful of times where Mayer has competed on her own, without the backing of a billionaire ex-boyfriend and a pliant boss, she has proven to be an outright failure.

At the beginning of the piece, Mayer once again denies rumors of her impending departure from Google — rumors which Valleywag first reported. Perhaps she has realized that without Google, she’s nothing. Can you blame her for clinging to her job?”

The vindictive tone, the over-arching sense of misogynistic snobbery is just astonishing.

Let’s take another figure within the tech sector who is influential: Steve Jobs. He, for what it’s worth:

• Seeks publicity
• Has influence in the company at a senior level
• Dictates the style of some products, sometimes with a style guide, sometimes not
• Is a perfectionist over candidate selection

What about Bill Gates when he was at the helm at Microsoft? Well:

• He saught publicity
• He had complete influence in the company at a senior level
• He dictated the style of Microsoft software without a formal style guide (and it showed!)
• He was a perfectionist over candidate selection

Yet we call them symbols, heroes, geniuses even. Marissa may indeed have pointed to athletic engagement where her performance is not above-average, but is it wrong to aspire? Valleywag’s little dig by turning around Mayer’s words that “good students are good at all things” to mean she should be good at everything she does is frankly unfair.

She got picked on because – and only because – she is a woman.

I shouldn’t be surprised. This is a sector that struggles to attract and retain women. Given the tech sector now effectively runs Western civilisation, this is a problem beyond reasonable description. However, it seems that time and time again the women who get close to the top get torn down again.

Take Kathy Sierra whose articles on usability were perhaps amongst the best written in that area, well, ever. She was helping people understand how to improve software and services in real, tangible ways. Didn’t ask for a penny for it, just did the odd speaking gig and basked in the glory the majority of us held her in. Astounding writer. Anyway, you’ll never guess what happened? Well she got death threats and the occasional suggestion she should be raped. She shut the blog down and got out of Dodge. We as an industry are worse off as a result.

Gentlemen (and it is you who I speak to specifically): what the crap are we playing at here?

I believe in equality of the sort that means that women who genuinely screw up should be called for it as much as any man and should not be put in cotton-wool environments. But to pick out women for doing things exactly the same way her male peers do (or better) and then basically using the medium of the blog to bully them because they remind you of that cheerleader who wouldn’t go to the prom with you, is quite frankly despicable.

I not only want more women to be attracted to this sector, but I think as a society we need them. Not as social media analysts, but as real entrepreneurs, managers, engineers and designers. I was foolish enough to think the Sierra episode would be a watershed moment for us as an industry. The reality is we remain far away.

It seems Valleywag has found somebody else to bully and I have a horrid feeling this is going to get more miserable and vindictive before it gets better.

I’ve been thinking more about building windmills recently.

I know quite a few musicians. Some of them are mildly successful getting regular royalty cheques and making a living. Some run nights at clubs or bars that supplements their main income, steadily building their profile. Others are failing at making money and struggling to work out what to do to fix it. The difference between them is what they hear when somebody talks about “the music business”.

The successful ones hear the word “business”, the struggling ones the word “music”.

It’s the same in the software business. We grow up as developers, loving the experience of writing code and learning how to do incredible things with nothing more than our minds and a piece of commodity hardware with a free language compiler or interpreter installed. It’s liberating, it’s creative, it’s what we decide we want to do with our lives.

Except the software business is a business. It’s there to serve client needs, not the needs of software or artistic expression. Not enough people seem to grasp that – they seem stuck in the mindset that by producing code, they’re running a software business. It’s taken me several years of running my own company to finally see this for the lie that it is.

Imagine an architect firm where all the firm produced was building designs that nobody wanted or needed. Imagine a firm that only worked on concepts that nobody had asked for, or on receiving a client brief they threw it in the bin and just did what they felt was “better”. Right now, that’s what a lot of software firms are looking like: and like that fictional architect firm, they’re going to struggle to pay the bills.

Client need, user expectation, it’s all this industry is about. It’s the main thing we should think about. We’re not in a university lab playing with data structures and algorithms any more. In the same way architecture is about understanding a brief and imagining solutions rather than drawing, so software development is about listening and understanding more than it is about writing code. Sure drawing is important to an architect, and writing code is important to a developer, but they are an output of the real job not the job itself.

I’m not arguing there isn’t a place for understanding better code, or producing beautiful projects, merely that such activities either need to take place outside of an industrial setting or should at least not conflict with the business needs. It’s OK for an architect to produce beautiful buildings that are also functional, so it’s OK for a programmer to produce beautiful code that also meets client needs: it’s just that client needs should come first on both occasions.

And if you like the idea of development as akin to architecture, or you are struggling to see the parallels, you may want to read this article written nearly two years ago. We should look to the architecture industry way more than we do right now, and we should all use Ruby way more than we do.

So, with just a couple of days of throwing ideas around, some interesting strands are coming together.

Firstly, those who are developers tend to agree with me: we’re a broken industry in need of a fix. Secondly, those who aren’t developers think I personally am broken and in need of a fix. Some think both are true.

With the private e-mail I was getting and IM chatter, I figured it would be better to produce a sandpit where anybody could get stuck in and post things up, link to articles, etc.

http://visionthing.vagueware.com is the current sandpit. We need to give this a better name and identity, but as you can see there is now a little momentum building.

You can also see that a few of us are playing with the idea of a Manifesto. It’s not enough to say what we’re angry about: we should be talking about what we want this industry to be, what we believe it is capable of, to lay a framework down to make sure we look after ourselves, our users and potentially our investors without breaking a fundamental philosophical barrier.

I think it might be worth just touching on a couple of the responses though, specifically those who suggest the problem is me.

OK, I’ll admit it, I’m tired. I need a break. I might not know what I really want out of life (who the heck does?), however those aren’t the problems we’re talking about.

The real problem is the abundance of froth in this industry right now, with no real substance and meaning to it. I am not condemning the entire industry – I just question the meaning of parts of it, and whether we can’t use our collective skills to do something better. This is ultimately a philosophical and political position to take, and it’s one many seem to share with me. We don’t know the details yet, but we know we want to try and hammer them out and at the end say “this is what we believe in”. I don’t expect everybody to agree with that position: a philosophy that has 100% belief isn’t a philosophy, it’s a law of nature.

We know we’re jaded and tired, but we’re jaded and tired for a reason.

As a group of geeks we hate spin, bullshit, lies, marketing speak and so on. We are an industry moving to a foundation built on those principles rather than the ones we admire: hard problems being solved with skill, and adding value to society. We want to help those with a financial interest satisfy their curiosity, but we want to encourage them to do it with the same sense of purpose that drives us to all-night hacking sessions.

I just had a niggle in my head the other day. Now we have the beginnings of a community prepared to work out how to make this industry better. We’re going to have detractors labeling one or all of as burned out as they look at that angry stare in our eyes when they explain their “social networking for lampshades” idea to us, but I feel all the better for knowing there are people who are thinking about this the way I am, and I hope they feel better too.

I have a problem with “the vision thing” in the industry at the moment. I don’t know where we’re going, or why. The technology – and our insight on how it can be applied – available to us has the ability to change the World, and instead we’re producing pointless crap and obsessing over details of page animations as if they alone will save the World.

If I hear one more wannabe-startup tell me that they plan to change the World and get rich off the back of social networking I will scream. If I see one more aggressive pitch for a site that a teenager could put together in a weekend under the guise of it being “World leading” I will hurt somebody. If I’m asked just one more time to give a quote to develop a site “a bit like eBay but with a social graph” I’m going to quit and go and be a farmer or something.

When I first got into computing, it was because of the potential of what you could do with this technology. When I first got on the Internet in 1996 I genuinely believed we were on the cusp of changing everything. An anarchic communication system where ideas could flow easily, people connect and work together to have a positive impact on society? I’ll take one of those please! Except 12 years later I think we’ve used it for mostly plastic, soulless and philosophically bankrupt ideas because “that’s where the money is”. There are exceptions, but the fact they are by definition exceptional means I feel we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.

I know I haven’t made any great personal contribution so am as guilty as anybody, but at least through efforts around BarCamp, Co-working and support of GeekUp I’m trying to get the conversation rolling. Maybe I’m just hacked off we’re moving so slowly. I know we have the collective talent so why are we all – me included – not getting on with it?

Over the next ten years we have the potential to fundamentally change the way the World works. Not just our World, but the Third World too. There are threats, opportunities, risks and rewards – not necessarily all financial – but for me the “vision thing” we should be working towards is about making people’s lives better not by trying to replace TV or other media, not by providing entertainment, but helping enhance people’s relationships – somehow providing meaning. And no, I don’t mean social networking, business networking or anything else where a friendship is defined as clicking on a “Confirm” button. I mean genuine enhancement of whatever it is we’re here to do.

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about whether I want to stay in this industry. Last week I was ready to serve out the 6-month contract I’m on at the moment and then go and do something else for a while. Over the long weekend something niggled me and I think I know what I’m going to do next. I’ll explain more in coming weeks/months, but right now I want to see if I’m alone in having the niggle.

Comments are still broken here, so maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, but I want to know what other people think of the “Big Picture”. Specifically I’m going to do one of those slightly annoying “tag things” where I point to the people whose opinions I’m genuinely interested in who will hopefully respond to this post with one of their own and then tag another five people and so on so we can try and get this conversation going. Tagging posts with “thevisionthing” with Technorati might help us keep track of where it ends up.

What the hell are we doing in this industry? Why do we spend so much time talking about Ajax and definitions of “Web 2.0” and virtually no time whatsoever trying to work out what people want? Is this just all an aspect of the industry being over-run by complete geeks, or is the industry lacking any sense of philosophy? Are we being over-run by ideas and concepts from the advertising industry and mass media generally, because they’re becoming more dominant in the industry? Should I turn my dev environment off and go and do something less boring instead? I just want to hear what people think.

I tag (in alphabetical order):

• Guy Dickinson
• Matt Lee
• Katie Lips
• Manoj Ranaweera
• Tom Smith

That said, if anybody else wants to respond to this – say, Hugh who sounds about as burned out right now as I feel, Seth Godin who was in the industry way before me, Guy Kawasaki who is simply on the ball constantly, or anybody shoving their feed into NorthPack – I’d love to hear about it. I have a horrible feeling this will fall flat on its face and people will simply suggest I take a holiday (probably a good point), but it’s worth a punt…

Update: we have a few responses in:

• Andy Mitchell makes my point better than I did
• Guy Dickinson broadly thinks I’m wrong
• Tom Smith feels the pain, but thinks I just need a holiday or to do something different

They all make valid points, but there is something here. Via e-mail Andy and Steve Ireland have continued the discussion a little more. I think there is something in trying to advance this a little. Stay tuned.

The way I understand it, there are two groups inside Microsoft right now: I shall refer to them (even if nobody else does) as the Old Guard and the New Guys.

The Old Guard are the guys who built Microsoft in the first place. They’re the ones that we might consider the Evil Empire. They thought about software as a means to make money in itself. IPR and tools like DRM were critical to their thinking about how software should work. They’re the ones the EU don’t like. They’re the ones we’re a bit tired of in the open source community. They want your money.

The New Kids have seen a little more of the World as it really is. They think that software is a tool to sell services, training, knowledge, and that things like IPR and DRM get in the way of incredible creative freedoms. To them being able to mix in with as many people as possible is more important than trying to make sure that Microsoft locks you in: they want to win by producing the best tools possible. They want your heart and soul, feeling your money will follow.

The Old Guard is, naturally, getting older. They’re retiring. The New Kids are getting more important. They’re rising through the ranks. They’re able to make decisions. They’re the future.

We’ve just seen another small move in the battle that the New Kids are winning.

Give them time. They’re getting it.

No matter where it happens, if somebody out there is coming up with crazy ideas in software, I get to hear about it eventually. It’s just rare I get time to write it up.

This evening I caught on to Breach Candy Group’s idea for what they call AML or ‘Aesthetics Markup Language’ and decided to talk about it pretty much straight away. This article is under the “Philosophy” category for a reason. If you’re not in for some deep thinking, move along.

Their idea is to be able to define the aesthetics of a piece of film or art in a standardised markup language so that systems may be able to perhaps generate new content of a similar aesthetic style. For example, as they say:

“Let’s start with images. We could start off with the following variables:

• movement (speed of movement = speed of change in pixels?) This could be later used to analyze some rhythm of change.

• brightness and contrast (how would this be tracked = the relationship or average of pixels in any given location on the video?)

This could also later be use to analyze things such as harmony of composition, direction of lines in the mise en scene, etc. We would have to come up with a set of principles from art history and composition and see how these could be determined in the screen etc?

• color range (this would probably have to be RGB values in the image itself). This would probably move us into the realm of things such as monochromatic color schemes, bright colors, harmonious colors, contrasting / oppositional color … ie to use some notion of color theory to provide patterns in certain styles of video etc. I’ve studied this in high school so will be fun to revisit some principles of classical painting.

So I suspect what we need to do is set up a very simple experiment / structure in place that can be developed and extended depending on need. In other words, we need to develop … AML (Aesthetics Meta Language) … a basic language structure that would describe what the variables are within any analyzed video. This language, I suspect, could be then developed into the interface between the language of aesthetics and the computer.

Something like this:

//AML: “DEBBIE DOES DALLAS”

134
12
58
22

It’s a nice idea, but they’re missing a trick. The thinking that got them to this point to me seems much more interesting.

They argue that most of the complexity we witness in the World is a repetition of simple things that go on to form complexity. This theory exists behind cellular automata, fractals and more.

Cellular automata are incredibly important in our understanding of how complexity is created out of the simplest building blocks within the Universe. Take for example the image to the left of this text. It might look like something taken from a microscope, but it’s an image created in software using a CA routine that was less than 100 lines of code, simulating “dictyostelium slime mold”. You can find out more about exactly how it was constructed at the site I got the image from.

This idea of complexity emerging from simple rules is particularly important in the field of Artificial Intelligence for reasons described in a philosophically entertaining manner in the AML article:

“Here the key question is that what algorithms could be used to model the way humans think and thus be used to guide machines to perform complex tasks. The philosophical implications of this are even more profound than getting a robot to recognize faces or clean a non-linear toilet bowl. That is, if human intelligence is, in fact, highly programmable, what then defines humans from machines? This goes two ways: machines-as-humans and humans-as-machines. In other words, AI defines rationality a certain way with certain presupposition of what logic, thinking and consciousness are and how they can be pragmatically simulated in computers. But as importantly, if we look at the concept of rationality and how it has been historically constructed, this has always presupposes a certain “image of thought” that has excluded all that would not fit into the sphere of rationality (intuitions, insanity, madness, illogic, spontaneity, absurdity ….). So how would we then understand the blurred boundaries of man and computer (as intelligent forms, which neither technically speaking are) and the human-computer assemblage that is making the old notions of rationality/humanity perhaps increasingly difficult to defend? Humans as (programmed?) repetitions: computers as programmed repetitions: natural intelligence: artificial intelligence: natural stupidity: artificial stupidity …”

Think about that for a moment. The point is not to be “correct” in the sense of making an algorithm “smart”, but make it mimic so it has the ability to be just as insane, dumb and mad as humanity. If you understand the Turing Test correctly, we will have produced an algorithm capable of passing it correctly, when we produce an AI capable of insanity, melancholy and psychopathic behaviours. Asimov’s 3 rules of robotics can not exist in a machine capable of passing a Turing Test, in other words.

This is a good development of an argument on the part of the Breach Candy Group, partly because it’s intuitively correct but also because it follows the science we have to hand quite nicely. It’s a shame then that in itself it probably undermines the need for AML on which they built on these foundations.

AML is about how a computer would process very specific values – contrast ratios, line measurements, etc. – yet they accept themselves that what they need to do is instead mimic the way a human would describe the aesthetic. No film director would talk about precise values of contrast settings or line movement, but instead would find a way to talk about colour, tone, depth, warmth, speed and so on in a much more abstract way.

In other words, to achieve what they’re hoping for they need to develop an algorithm which is able to mimic the human way of parsing film aesthetics, train it by making it “watch” films and then ask it to produce something “like” a subset of them. They’re trying to find a way through by producing a way of retaining knowledge about an aesthetic in a standard form, but as anybody who has read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” can tell you, there is much more to an aesthetic quality than how you describe it mechanically.

In fact, the point about a distinctive aesthetic quality is that whilst we know it when we see it, we all see something different and would all describe it differently. Let me try and make my point by using an image that has probably had its aesthetic qualities dissected, written about and analysed more than any other in the history of aesthetics.

The Wikipedia article on the painting has quite a detailed summary of some of the aesthetic judgements made. There are two groups these arguments can be placed: those that are algorithmic and those that are subjective.

It might be reasonable to produce in AML those that are algorithmic. They can be measured precisely – golden ratios, pyramid composition. However how exactly do you describe something as subjective as “the composition of the figure evokes an ambiguous effect: we are attracted to this mysterious woman but have to stay at a distance as if she were a divine creature” in a markup language?

I don’t have answers, only questions on this one. Interesting thoughts though. And if they can be resolved, we’d be a major step forward to understanding AI – and ourselves – much better.