Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
What would an artificial intelligence dream about?
We may have just found out.
An AI development company called Nested Minds is working on creating increasingly sophisticated deep learning networks modeled on the connectivity of the human brain, and especially the brain's ability to form links between disparate ideas and images -- something that is a significant part of the creative process, and also seems to account for a lot of dream content. Their project, called "Huxley," has generated some pretty amazing and provocative pieces. On their home page, they describe their project this way:
Nested Minds unites an interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists, mathematicians, developers, social scientists, and entrepreneurs with over 100 years of combined experience building predictive analytics and machine learning models across multiple industries... We designed Huxley, an AI artist who takes concepts rooted in human language and translates them into provocative and daring imagery redefining the boundaries of imagination.
What Huxley excels at is what we would describe in humans as free association. For example, the word "keyboard" prompted Huxley to come up with an image of a zebra; the link, presumably, was keyboard > black and white > zebra. A bass guitar generated a fish; bass has both meanings (although pronounced differently). While this may seem to be a rudimentary sort of punning, it's not so different from what happens during a long, rambling conversation. I can remember my younger son and I talking and at some point trying to figure out how we got where we ended up, backtracking every link and reconstructing the whole causal chain -- Doctor Who > time travel > wormholes > astronomy > Galileo > the Inquisition > Monty Python > King Arthur > Camelot > Cornwall etc.
What I find absolutely fascinating is that Nested Minds turned Huxley loose on a song -- a new release from Duran Duran called "Invisible."
The result is weird, surreal, beautiful, and a little disturbing. (The song is pretty awesome, too.) Watch it and see what you think:
"When you look at Huxley, this is the sort of first new generation of this type of intelligence, but that will grow and be useful in many, many other fields," singer/keyboardist Nick Rhodes said, in an interview in ITV. "It's incredible new technology because before AI has been more mathematical, this one's actually more arts based. It does actually dream and think in different ways... I think we've always viewed technology as something that we can use that can really help us. We're not intimidated by it... And if you can use it to enhance your toolkit for what you're doing, I think that's fantastic."
Huxley was given two things -- the lyrics, and video clips of the band singing, and with those two inputs it created the entire video. And while some of the associations you can fathom (such as the keyboard and the bass guitar), others are obscure and/or complex enough to resist parsing.
"They just took those images of us all singing and put them into the program," said band member Roger Taylor. "And it came out with these incredible kind of ghostly images which kind of blew me away."
Is this creativity -- I mean, of course, on the part of Huxley, not of its creators nor of Duran Duran themselves? I don't think you can call it anything other than that. To me, a large part of creativity is novelty; when we say, "wow, that was really creative," we often mean, "I would never have come up with that." There has to be some technical skill too, of course. Depicting that novel connection in a vivid manner requires that you have significant ability in your chosen medium, whether it's writing, music, art, or any other creative endeavor. But simple technical skill isn't enough. That spark -- that melding of ideas, words, or images in a unique way -- is absolutely essential, or what you have is no more than a rehashing (however well executed) of what you've seen other people do.
It's true in science, too, isn't it? A really groundbreaking discovery occurs because someone put data together in such a way as to generate an insight no one else had. As just one of many examples, take Fred Vine's and Drummond Matthews's development of the model of plate tectonics, using data from magnetic traces on the ocean floor, the geology of mountain ranges on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the prehistoric animal fossils that had been dug up in Africa and South America, and the presence of active volcanoes along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. We'd had all of that information prior to Vine and Matthews; but they were the first to have the insight to put the pieces together, and what they came up with revolutionized the whole field of geology.
That's creativity.
But back to Huxley. What I find most amazing about this is that this is the first attempt at a music video created entirely by an artificial intelligence, so the creative output can only be expected to improve over time. What will Huxley, or something like it, be creating in ten years? Fifty years? A century?
I think we creative types better hold onto our hats, because my guess is that we're seeing something humanity has never seen before -- the creative output of a non-human intelligence. And what it can teach us about our own creativity might be only the first step into what is truly uncharted territory.
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Saber-toothed tigers. Giant ground sloths. Mastodons and woolly mammoths. Enormous birds like the elephant bird and the moa. North American camels, hippos, and rhinos. Glyptodons, an armadillo relative as big as a Volkswagen Beetle with an enormous spiked club on the end of their tail.
What do they all have in common? Besides being huge and cool?
They all went extinct, and all around the same time -- around 14,000 years ago. Remnant populations persisted a while longer in some cases (there was a small herd of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Aleutians only four thousand years ago, for example), but these animals went from being the major fauna of North America, South America, Eurasia, and Australia to being completely gone in an astonishingly short time.
What caused their demise?
This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is The End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals, by Ross MacPhee, which considers the question, and looks at various scenarios -- human overhunting, introduced disease, climatic shifts, catastrophes like meteor strikes or nearby supernova explosions. Seeing how fast things can change is sobering, especially given that we are currently in the Sixth Great Extinction -- a recent paper said that current extinction rates are about the same as they were during the height of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction 66 million years ago, which wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a great many other species at the same time.
Along the way we get to see beautiful depictions of these bizarre animals by artist Peter Schouten, giving us a glimpse of what this continent's wildlife would have looked like only fifteen thousand years ago. It's a fascinating glimpse into a lost world, and an object lesson to the people currently creating our global environmental policy -- we're no more immune to the consequences of environmental devastation as the ground sloths and glyptodons were.
[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]
I'm back from the writers' retreat in Arkansas, wherein I got to schmooze with my publisher and other fiction writers, and generally enjoy being around like-minded folks. I'll be back with a new Skeptophilia post on Monday, but I wanted to do a short announcement today that we've got a new feature...
You'll get to hear me doing some musing on topics from profound to silly (most of the first ones are silly, for what it's worth), just like I do every day here at Skepto. We'll try to have a new one up every other Thursday; for now, we've got five videos up as a starter. If you like them -- and we very much hope you do -- leave us a thumbs-up and/or subscribe to our channel. As with the blog, if you have any suggestions for topics you'd like me to cover, drop me an email.
Now toddle over to YouTube and check us out. Hope they cheer up your day. See you for real in a couple of days!
After eight years of Skeptophilia, it's hard for me to run into a paranormal or cryptozoological claim I haven't heard of before. But that's exactly what happened yesterday, when I visited the delightfully loopy feature on Ranker called "Graveyard Shift."
The article tells us about a creature that got its start in California, but apparently is gaining ground all over the United States. They're called the "Fresno Nightcrawlers," which would make an outstanding name for a sports team. In an article called "Fresno Nightcrawlers Are Terrorizing the Dark, and They're Spreading Far From California," Laura Allan tells us about these strange beings, a "few feet tall," that appear to be nothing much more than a pair of legs and a head.
Here's a still from a YouTube video that purports to be a pair of Fresno Nightcrawlers:
As usual, this video was taken using the videocamera's "AutoBlur" function, also useful when filming ghosts, Bigfoot, aliens, and the Loch Ness Monster. Here's one of the videos that is supposedly of Nightcrawlers:
Laura Allan says that they've never been encountered in person -- they've only been seen on video footage (the one the still came from was a CCTV that a homeowner had set up in an attempt to catch a thief). She writes:
Much video footage of cryptids is easily debunked by video analysis, but the weird thing about the nightcrawlers is that the videos seem to be legit. As goofy and awkward as these mysterious creatures may appear, faking them would prove to be a difficult task. So, then, what exactly are we seeing here?...
Of course, the biggest prevailing theory is that all of this is just some sort of hoax. The creatures do look rather silly and awkward, and like they may be some sort of puppet rather than actually alive. While it's never been proven either way, the videos were weird enough to get the attention of one TV show called Fact or Faked, and they set out to examine the video.
First, they examined the creatures themselves, and soon figured out that they were indeed only a few feet tall, as had been previously reported. Then they went out looking for the creatures, but were unable to find them. Then they tried to recreate the video with many different known hoax techniques. All their attempts to recreate the footage was met with failure. In the end, they decided that the footage would be very difficult to fake, if not impossible, and that the video footage was authentic.
I have to admit that the video gave me a bit of a chill, but that's only because I was reminded of M. R. James's incredibly scary short story "O, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad." (The link provided has the entire story, which I will suggest you not read at night when you're alone in the house. You have been warned.) So despite the fact that the Nightcrawlers look like walking bedsheets -- in fact, because they do -- it gave me a visceral shudder when I watched the video.
Even so, I'm a little doubtful about all of this. In this day of digital video editing software, "impossible to fake" has almost become a contradiction in terms. And as far as the creepiness factor, for me that was at least partly offset by the fact that besides M. R. James's terrifying monster, I was also reminded of the Wrong Trousers from Wallace & Gromit.
Okay, the Nightcrawlers are taller and skinnier, but the principle is the same.
Anyhow, it was fun running into a cryptid -- or whatever they're claiming it is -- that I'd never heard of before, but it's perhaps unsurprising that I'm less than impressed. I keep hoping one of these will turn out to be true -- just because I'm a skeptic doesn't mean I'm blind to the coolness factor of there being some weird, unexplained entity out there, beyond what science has yet encountered.
But what looks like an old bedsheet really isn't doing it for me.
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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you. Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend. It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.
In the ongoing effort by a particular cadre of über-Christians to emphasize one or two tenets of their faith and pretty much ignore the rest of it, we have the case of a worker for the Social Security Administration who has said he would rather be fired than watch a seventeen-minute video on respecting diversity (particularly with respect to LGBT individuals) in the workplace.
David Hall, of Tolono, Illinois, has worked for the SSA for fourteen years. This year, supervisors have required all employees to watch a training video on LGBT inclusion as part of a drive to decrease workplace harassment and increase tolerance and respect. Hall, however, has refused, and claims he's being discriminated against because he's a Christian. "I think this is an issue they are prepared to go to the mat with," Hall said, "but I’m not going to give up my faith or compromise my beliefs just to go along and get along. I don’t believe God wants me to do that."
A few things about this particular case stand out. First, Hall is claiming discrimination, even though the SSA is requiring everyone to watch the video. If Hall, as a devout Christian, had been singled out to watch the video, he might have a case to claim he was being targeted. In this case, however, it's hard to see how he's being discriminated against, given that the definition of discrimination is "the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex."
[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]
A more important point arises when you consider why the video is being mandated. Remember that the video is not saying (1) being gay is moral; (2) Christian ethical codes are wrong; or (3) you should all run out and have gay sex right now. What it's saying is that we should treat people with kindness, tolerance, and respect whether or not we are like them or agree with them. Sorta like what you read in the following quotes:
Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. -- Ephesians 4:32
If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. -- 1 John 4:20-21
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. -- Matthew 6:14-15
But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. -- Luke 6:35-36
And, most strikingly:
Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing. We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. -- 1 Thessalonians 5:11-13
Oh, and the whole "judge not, lest ye be judged" thing. That, too.
In fact, have you noticed that the bible has a lot more passages about being kind to others than it does about condemning homosexuals? Funny thing, that.
Because that's the most annoying part of this whole emphasis on LGBT individuals being sinners; it requires you to pretend that a substantial fraction of the bible doesn't exist. Besides the fact that there is a great deal more emphasis in the bible on treating people compassionately than there is on the sinfulness of homosexuality, there are a whole slew of other things besides being gay that are considered sins (in fact, some are worse than sins, they're "abominations") and that Christians today pretty much ignore. Eating shellfish, working (even collecting firewood) on the Sabbath, wearing clothing made of two different kinds of thread sewn together, men trimming their beards, having tattoos, and women speaking in church are a few that come to mind without even trying hard. Oh, and the fact that no one born of a "forbidden marriage" -- and their descendants, to the tenth generation -- is to be allowed in church (Deuteronomy 23:2).
And then there's "biblical marriage." Such as the provision requiring young women who were raped to marry their rapist (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), a verse that allows men who conquer other nations to keep any virgins as concubines (Numbers 31:17-18), a rule that when a man dies, his wife must marry his brother (Genesis 38:8-10), prohibitions against marrying outside of your tribe (Deuteronomy 7:3) , and so many instances of deity-blessed polygamy that I won't even try to name them.
So don't even start with any bullshit about the biblical definition of marriage being "one man and one woman."
The bottom line is that here we have this guy who has been given divine revelation that he's not supposed to watch a diversity in the workplace video because to do so would make him naughty in god's sight, while he apparently doesn't give a damn about most of the things in the bible that god supposedly does prohibit. It's more and more looking like he's using the bible as justification for a lawsuit and his own bigoted inclinations rather than because there's been any real infringement on his right to practice his religion.
The most frustrating thing for me about all of this is that this is the same subset of Christians who accuse us atheists of having wishy-washy morality. Just yesterday, I saw a comment on Facebook (apropos of the ongoing foolishness about having "In God We Trust" on police vehicles) that said, "Don't give in! Atheists only whine about their rights being trampled because they don't have the moral backbone to know what is right." Myself, I'm much more comfortable with someone whose moral code comes from careful consideration than one whose sense of right and wrong was determined by cherry-picking verses they like from their favorite religious text -- and ignoring the rest of it into non-existence.
Every once in a while, I'll run into a story that just gives me the shudders, despite my generally rationalistic approach. All this does, of course, is to highlight a truism about the human condition; when it comes to a fight between logic and emotion, emotion usually wins. We like to flatter ourselves, and think that our highly-developed prefrontal cortices make us smarter than our non-human cousins, but when it comes to a real throw-down match between the parts of the brain, I'm putting my money on the limbic system every time -- the part of the brain that, along with the hypothalamus, governs the "four F's" of behavior: feeding, fighting, flight, and... mating.
A story this week out of Brazil highlights the third "F" -- which stands for the flight response. It could also stand for "fear," because that's what usually motivates an animal running away. The story, which comes out of the town of São Gonçalo de Campos, near Feira de Santana, in the state of Bahia, is about a rather terrifying cryptid that has been sighted more than once in local neighborhoods.
Even the government officials are taking it seriously. Apparently, for the last two weeks there's been a curfew in the town; no one is to be outside after 9 PM. It started when a man identified only as "Pingo" described seeing a five-foot-tall black monster, which ran at him; Pingo turned and fled, escaping (he said) only by the narrowest of margins. At first, the other villagers made fun of him -- until others had similar encounters. Locals are calling it a "werewolf."
All of this would have been nothing more than another tale of "I saw something real, really I did" if it hadn't been for the footage captured on a home security camera. Watch it for yourself:
Here's a still:
Okay, yes, I know. There are no such things as werewolves. There's no reason why this couldn't have been faked. It probably is a guy in dark clothes jumping around in front of the homeowner's security camera, in order to keep the whole scare going. Who knows? Maybe it's even "Pingo," who dreamed the story up to have his fifteen minutes (or in this case, more like two weeks) of fame.
But I have to admit that watching this video gave me some very irrational shudders right up the spine. There's something about the way the creature moved that just doesn't look... human. I'm probably being suggestible, I realize that; our fight-or-flight responses have been programmed through millions of years of evolution to shriek at us, whenever we see a shadowy shape in the dark, "DEAR GOD IT'S A PREDATOR RUN FOR YOUR LIFE OR YOU WILL BE MESSILY DEVOURED." The chances of it being anything other than a hoaxing human are very small.
Even so, if I lived in São Gonçalo de Campos, I would definitely abide by the curfew. I probably would also deadbolt my doors shut at night. Maybe it is only Pingo playing a prank; that's what my prefrontal cortex is telling me. But if I lived anywhere near where this thing had been seen, my limbic system would outshout my prefrontal cortex without even breaking a sweat.
I've made the point more than once in this blog that we skeptics have a hard enough time counteracting the built-in errors -- things like confirmation bias, dart-thrower's bias, and the inherent inaccuracies of our brains and perceptual apparatus. The last thing we need are people out there, callously and deliberately creating convincing fakes.
The latest in this long string of liars came to my attention because of a video link that popped up on Facebook. The individual who posted it headed it with the caption, "And you think angels aren't real!" Underneath, another poster had responded, "I don't see how this could possibly have been faked." So, naturally, I had to take a look... and so do you. So take two minutes and watch the whole thing. [Link: Is he SUPERMAN or an ARCHANGEL?]
Pretty wild, eh? If you watched it till the end, you might have noticed that they even got the angle of the shadows right -- as the truck bears down on the cyclist, the shadow turns and lengthens at just about the angle I'd expect.
Now that's what I call attention to detail.
So, why, then, don't I believe it's real?
Let's leave aside my usual objections that "there is no evidence that the world works this way." Let's just take what information we have from the video.
First, there is no reason to claim that this would be "impossible to fake." All you have to do is go to any recent action/adventure movie and consider how easy (albeit not cheap) it is to create completely convincing special effects. This one -- with shadowy figures disappearing and rematerializing -- would not be difficult at all to a sufficiently skilled video technician.
Second, did you notice the little spinning logo in the lower left? This is the logo for the owner of the YouTube channel that posted it -- a fellow who goes by the name Cybert9. So I took a moment to check out other videos he'd posted, and they included:
So I think we have a little problem with source credibility, here.
Then, we have the Chinese characters in the upper right. Notice those? I don't read or speak Chinese, so I'm going on second-hand information, but I found that the characters read "Zhu Xian."
Which is the name of a Chinese video production company that specializes in video games.
So, apparently, what we have here is a clip from a promotional video that was taken out of the original context, and launched into the repost network by someone who claimed that it was real. I'm not saying that Cybert9 was the one who perpetrated the original hoax; it may well be that he was somewhere further down the line, and was taken in like all of the other millions of people who have watched this video. (There are three versions of the "archangel video" that I found on YouTube, and together they have gotten well over two million total hits. And while a few commenters seemed to be of the opinion that it was fake, a good many posted comments like, "Wow! How can this not have been on the news?" and "It looks real to me. I believe it.")
The whole thing just pisses me off, because, as I said, it's not like there aren't a hundred natural reasons that people believe crazy stuff. My job as a skeptical writer and critical thinking teacher is hard enough, thanks. So, to the person who started this hoax, I have only one further thing to say:
