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Saturday, July 16, 2016

English as an API

Like the last post, this I am filing under "speculative"

Chat bots strip away visual UI elements in favor of natural language in a good old fashioned text box.

Seems kind of retro but, perhaps something deeper is afoot. For the longest time, we have used the phrase "getting applications to talk to each other" as a sort of business-level way of saying, "get applications to understand each others APIs and/or data structures."

Perhaps, natural language - or a controlled version of natural language - will soon become a viable way of getting applications to talk to each other. I.e. chatbots chatting with other chatbots, by sending/receiving English.

One of the big practical upshots of that - if it transpires - is that non-programmers will have a new technique for wiring up disparate applications. I.e. talk to each of them via their chat interface, then gradually get them talking to each other...

Hmmmm.



The surprising role of cloud computing in the understanding of consciousness

I am filing this one under "extremely speculative".

I think it was Douglas Hofstadter's book "I am a strange loop" that first got me thinking about the the possible roles of recursion and self-reference in understanding consciousness.

Today - for no good reason - it occurred to me that if the Radical Plasticity Theory is correct, to emulate/re-create consciousness[1] we need to create the conditions for consciousness to arise. Doing that requires arranging a computing system that can observe every aspect of itself in operation.

For most of the history of computing, we have had a layer of stuff that the software could only be dimly aware of, called the hardware.

With virtualization and cloud computing, more and more of that hardware layer is becoming, itself, software and thus, in principle, open to fine grained examination by the software running on....the software, if you see what I mean.

To take an extreme example, a unix application could today be written that introspects itself, concludes that the kernel scheduler logic should be changed, writes out the modified source code for the new kernel, re-compiles it, boots a Unix OS image based on it, and transplant itself into a process on this new kernel.

Hmmm.

[1] Emulation versus re-creation of consciousness. Not going there.