
"We need a pony. And the moon on a stick. By next Thursday." - cstross
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/06/we-need-a-pony-and-the-moon-on.html
======
drzaiusapelord
I think in the future people will be perplexed by how sci-fi during this
period was absolutely obsessed by the so-called singularity. Its a current
fad, accepted by many, but not backed up by anything substantial like a lot of
fads from the past. Its a little embarrassing to read some sharp thinkers from
the 1970s who fell into cheap counter-culture concepts like astrological signs
or shammy Indian gurus or shoddy California-style Buddhism, that often has
little or nothing to do with the Buddhavacana source materials.

It really surprises me that we think there's a realistic path to the
singularity and that we obsessed about it. Human-like AI is a dead field, or
at least dead as far we can tell. We're not even sure how to build it because
conceptually we don't even have a grasp on consciousness or cognition.

Then there's the false assumption that we can get to this level before doing
things like, say, solving all mental health issues and that it can magically
be scaled to super-human speeds. For all we know cognition happens at a
certain speed and any attempts past that are troublesome. Look at how easily
we suffer from mania and other issues when our natural limiters go haywire.

Singularity prediction is almost a cargo cult. Its weird that so many take it
seriously.

~~~
cstross
Singularity prediction isn't even taken seriously by most formerly-intrigued
SF writers these days. (Go google Ramez Naam on the subject. Or me. Or Cory
Doctorow.) Best we can probably hope for is better intelligence
augmentation/amplification than we've got now.

The reason it's popular is that it plays to some deep eschatological anxieties
shared by many people -- and it strikes resonant echoes with Christian
millennialism, making it an easy memetic poisoned chalice for anyone who has
consciously rejected knee-jerk Christian doctrine but not actually re-
evaluated _all_ their composite assumptions and beliefs to drink from.

~~~
JamesArgo
>Singularity prediction isn't even taken seriously by most formerly-intrigued
SF writers these days.

Becoming a science fiction cliche does not reduce the probability of an event
occurring.

Edit: retracting the following:

>The reason it's popular is that it plays to some deep eschatological
anxieties shared by many people.

This is probably true, but that's not an argument against the feasibility of
AI or the extent of its implications. You're saying, "These projections
"rhyme" with those of a low-status group, therefore they can't be true."

~~~
JulianMorrison
And may increase it.

The entire low level ongoing effort to build a flying car (Terrafugia, Moller,
etc) is basically driven by no market and no common sense, but a whole lot of
Jetsons.

~~~
BrandonMarc
At least Terrafugia has a functioning prototype (i.e. it actually flies,
rather than a 36-inch tethered hover), as well as orders.

A separate effort which actually makes a bit more sense and has more of a
market is the iTec Maverick [1] - more of a flying dune buggy using a parasail
as the "wing", but targeting a wholly different market (the Transition is
aimed at wealthy pilots in wealthy countries with streets, airports, etc,
whereas the Maverick is - in part - aimed at villagers living in remote
jungles, far removed from civilization).

\--------------------

[1] [http://mavericklsa.com/](http://mavericklsa.com/)

------
cafard
Almost 40 years ago, some kid jumped up in the front row of an audience and
squirted Ronald Reagan with a squirt gun--water only, no injury inflicted.
After the Secret Service tackled him, cuffed him, and took him off for
psychiatric evaluation, they started to inquire among persons who had
previously known him.

One was an acquaintance of mine, who had lived down the hall from the kid in a
college dorm. As he recounted it, the conversation went in part like this:

Secret Service guys: Did he seem like the sort of person who would do
something like this? Acquaintance: No, really pretty serious. Now, _I_ might
think it was funny to do something like that. [Smiles, chuckles.] SSg:
[Silence, no smiles, no chuckles]

Let's face it, they aren't paid to have a sense of humor.

~~~
keithpeter
Ford survived _two_ assassination attempts. In both cases, the assailants were
able to get close, but no bullets fired. Regan survived an actual attack -
shots fired and one bullet stopped. The assailant was seen in the waiting
guests visibly nervous, abrupt and aggressive. The 'special agent' (the ones
with guns who travel with the president) got in the way to block further
shots.

I suspect it is a bit _edgy_ being the one just behind the president...

------
rquantz
And lest we forget, reliably identifying sarcasm on the internet is pretty
hard even for humans who have all the requisite cultural knowledge. Unless the
secret service can turn on the twitterer's webcam and observe their facial
expression while they type, this really is a no go.

And we all know _that_ could never happen.

~~~
bodski
I think what will happen is for any given target a weighting will be inferred,
giving the likelihood of that person being sarcastic or joking.

As more and more data about us is collected, about what we say/type vs. what
we actually do, this has the potential to become more accurate over time.

Facial and voice-tone analysis, analysis of our peers' responses to what we
say/write, analysis of our actual movements/purchases compared to what we
say/write ("I'm _so_ going along to that Nickelback concert at the
weekend...!") etc., combined with leading brains in stats and ML lead me to
think this problem could be tractable to some extent in the future. Scary :-/

If something like this comes to be, and is deployed 'wholesale', it has the
potential to influence our behaviour, and over generations, alter our
definition of 'sarcasm' by what we are able to get away with saying.
Insidious!

That said I hope Charlie is right and that humans can game the system
significantly that it is a non-starter.

~~~
rquantz
I'm upvoting this because of the extent to which it illustrates my point. Or,
conversely, the extent to which it plays along with my point. My head hurts.

------
js2
I come from a family with a dry sort of sarcasm that we deploy often. My
sister and I were having a conversation the other day when it slipped into
sarcasm and we proceeded to go back and forth till one of us said something
serious. Or so the other thought. Eventually neither of us could tell.

My daughter (13) observing this suddenly chimed in: "I think you're caught in
a sarcasm trap."

She claims to have invented the term on the spot.

My 13 year old knows it's sometimes not possible for humans to detect sarcasm,
much less a computer program. It's a shame that the secret service doesn't
too.

(I would venture to say that more people struggle with sarcasm than not. It
often requires shared culture/experience to detect if it's not delivered in an
obvious tone.)

~~~
mcguire
The ability to reliably identify sarcasm, with a low false-positive rate but
even with a very high false-negative rate, would likely save the Secret
Service a significant amount of money and a _very_ significant amount of bad
press.

Also, your daughter is much more perceptive than the vast majority of the
people I know.

------
kator
My favorite NLP/Computer Language problem:

    
    
      Moe: Hey is Curly back from Vacation yet?
    
      Larry: I saw a Red Lamborghini in the parking lot.
    
      Moe: Cool
    

We all assume Curly now drives a Red Lamborghini meanwhile most computer
language systems would be lost at the inference here. Children learn this
trick early computers are very challenged to understand these sorts of
language challenges.

~~~
dave809
I didn't make that inference, I figured Larry was avoiding the question.

NLP is hard

~~~
drbawb
I actually made the inference, but then rejected the hypothesis. It seemed
unrealistic to me that Curly would own a Red Lamborghini.

An AI could form _a number of_ inferences and then use a knowledge base to
choose a likely candidate. In fact: I feel like IBM's Watson gave us a little
preview of what an AI's "thought process" might be like.

------
andyjohnson0
According to this [1] BBC News article from last year, a French company called
Spotter [2] offers an analytics tool that they claim can identify sarcasm in
web and social media comments. Supports multiple languages to 80% accuracy.
I've no idea if it works and their site is rather light on detail.

[1]
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23160583](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23160583)

[2] [http://spotter.com/](http://spotter.com/)

~~~
vog
It would be interesting to know how this algorithm behaved on fundamentalist
texts. (see Poe's law,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law))

------
snowwrestler
HN (and similar tech-oriented forums) often host outraged discussions of
government over-reactions.

They also host excited discussions of linguistic technologies like Siri or
Watson.

Here we have a government agency attempting to push the envelope of technology
in hopes of reducing their over-reactions. Seems like the sort of thing that
would be greeted warmly but, nope, apparently not.

~~~
javajosh
Ah, but therein lies the (too often hidden) assumption behind the angst: we
don't want law-enforcement to scale. It should take a human to destroy a human
life. It should take a human to violate another human's privacy. Government,
with it's monopoly on force, has the _capability_ of doing these things at
it's whim, but we are fundamentally opposed to treating these actions as
"productivity" and the use of computers as "productivity enhancements" in
those contexts.

So, while the minor impulse (reduce overreach) is right, the major impulse
(automated justice) is still very wrong.

------
louthy
Origin of the phrase: Moon on a stick

"phrase used widely by teenagers and young adults in the mid 90s as it was
made popular by the comedy geniuses Stew Lee & Richard Herring. they used it
mostly in the second series of their hit tv & radio show 'Fist of Fun'.[1] It
means basically to want everything, if you want the moon on a stick then you
want everything, including things you can't have."[2]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERDUbAv8Qz0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERDUbAv8Qz0)

[2]
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=moon%20on%20a...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=moon%20on%20a%20stick)

~~~
Brakenshire
If you like this sort of thing, you might want to try out Stewart Lee's Comedy
Vehicle:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUDh_IErT4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUDh_IErT4)

------
tormeh
On the other hand, handing out huge wads of cash in the hope that the
recipient will do the impossible may not be likely to be directly successful,
but it often has interesting results. I wonder what they will discover. I just
hope that it won't be classified.

~~~
arethuza
I can certainly imagine automated disinformation techniques - or as Neal
Stephenson described it in _Anathem_ : "Artificial Inanity".

~~~
logfromblammo
What book was it that posited an automated system for the retroactive logical
justification of predetermined conclusions back to reasonable-sounding
premises? That was Adams's _Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency_, right? A
program called Anthem?

That would also be a plausible spinoff.

------
phkahler
My daughter has been identifying sarcasm since she was 5 or 6 years old. At 8
she's really good at it. While non-trivial for machines, this problem is not
really as advanced for people as it may seem.

~~~
Torn
Non-trivial for machines? That's a massive understatement.

(Or were you being sarcastic?)

~~~
j03w
I think he's Aussie so that's normal.

------
mmmooo
Anyone care to guesstimate how many assassination plots could have been
prevented if just read the assailants public twitter feed in which he or she
outlined, in plain english, his/her intentions to perform said act?

Somehow I feel like the people that are serious about this level of criminal
activity, and capable of actually accomplishing it, aren't first announcing
their intentions on twitter.

~~~
VLM
Thought experiment:

As a culture we've been pretty effective lately at electing miserable
disappointing failures to public office. This seems a relatively
uncontroversial observation, and note I'm careful not to name any names so as
to not appear biased toward one side or the other of the one coin we've been
dealt.

Precondition 2 is everyone has social media accounts where they say stuff no
one cares about, constantly. The CB radio of this decade.

Precondition 3 is anyone planning an assassination is smart enough to self
censor and say nothing about the entire topic.

Given the above preconditions, the only rational conclusion is 99.9% of the
population will continually be whining and complaining, and you can focus your
attentions on the 0.1% who are at least considering doing something bad enough
to self censor.

So the thought experiment is Obama comes to visit a city and the guy who gets
a SS visit is the only guy in the whole city who's not rambling on in social
media about "Kenya" or "Can't believe I wasted my vote on him" or writing
racial slurs or "he broke every campaign promise" or whatever.

~~~
cstross
Disagree. As a culture _we have developed public offices that are structured
to prevent anyone who might be elected with a mandate to effect change from
doing so_. The iron law of bureaucracy applies: after the first generation
most of the staff of any organization see their job not as pursuing the
mission statement of the org but as preserving their own jobs. Attempts to
_change_ things generate resistance from within because, hey, jobs might be
threatened. Hell, political candidates who might challenge their party's
ability to win future elections by accomplishing change (which might be
unwelcome to some elements of the voting -- or election-buying -- public or
oligaarchs) are weeded out before they get a chance to run for office.

The "disappointing" incumbent is merely a printed-paper face on the front of a
machine. Which some loons choose to use for target practice. Resulting in the
existence of a vast reactionary bureaucracy dedicated to extirpating threats
to printed-paper faces.

~~~
mcguire
Do you by any chance know any elected officials or career civil servants?

------
JacobAldridge
Funnily enough, I once sponsored a Booth at a convention for presidential
assassins.

------
3am
This article rubbed me the wrong way. The Secret Service is trying to improve
their methods in an open, competitive way. Maybe they don't have to perfectly
solve sarcasm recognition to reduce their false positive rates.

And let me add that anyone that's stupid enough to try to troll/game this
system deserves all the consequences of their actions.

edit: Remembering Bayes: Given a threat on someone the SS is charged w/
protecting, what is the probability it is not actionable?

------
kndyry
The original SOW, if anyone's interested:
[https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=fb2ca11b7d9ca8c61e5ee6d8ae...](https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=fb2ca11b7d9ca8c61e5ee6d8ae69ad4d)

~~~
chillingeffect
Thanks for that. It's always great to see more of the original concept than
any columnist's hyperfocused version of it.

It seems "Ability to sarcasm and false positives" is just one of the large
list of 22 reqs. The list also includes:

• Compatibility with Internet Explorer 8;

~~~
ph0rque
> Compatibility with Internet Explorer 8

That was sarcasm.

~~~
smileysteve
Winner!

------
Zarkonnen
Reminds me of the Twitter Joke Trial incident:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Joke_Trial](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Joke_Trial)

Also, self-linkingly, the problem is that people don't tend to broadcast their
violent intentions very reliably:

[http://zarkonnen.com/terrorists_on_twitter/](http://zarkonnen.com/terrorists_on_twitter/)

------
pjc50
For use of language to circumvent government filtering, see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_10_Mythical_Creatures_%28...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_10_Mythical_Creatures_%28Internet_meme%29)

(I suppose that's timely with the Tianamen Square anniversary)

------
skizm
Poe's Law says this is pretty much impossible. It is tough enough for humans
to tell sarcasm. How are we going to get machines to do it well.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law)

~~~
jdbernard
I would just like to point out that there are many things that are hard for
humans to do but easy for machines (cars drive much faster then humans can
run, for example). So that argument alone is not persuasive.

Better would be to argue that it is not only hard for humans to determine
between sarcasm and genuine speech, we have no idea of how it would be done
well. It is not a problem which is dominated by our limited abilities, it is
dominated by imperfect knowledge (the inability to know the internal thoughts
of another person). This same limitation seems to apply to any automated
solution which only had access to the public speech (text, tweet, etc.).
Therein lies the intractable difficulty.

However, consider if we had a device that could read minds. Maybe some model
is built that can accurately translate brain waves, or the input of subdermal
probes into thoughts and intentions. Then it would be much simpler to write a
program that could detect sarcasm. It might still need the physical presence
of the author, but again there may be a creative solution to that.

Just because it is hard for humans doesn't mean we can't make it easy using
our tools. That is one of the prime characteristics of our species.

~~~
skizm
My point is, for any given computer program, a human, given enough time, can
sit down with pencil+paper and figure out the output given an input.

If humans can't yet detect sarcasm accurately, that is evidence that it will
be near impossible to do it programmatically.

Edit: I'm not saying to not try. Clark's first law says we should always try
things, even the crazy stuff. (as you can tell I like my eponymous laws).

~~~
e12e
> My point is, for any given computer program, a human, given enough time, can
> sit down with pencil+paper and figure out the output given an input.

No human is ever given enough time. If you're not done in a hundred years
(tops) -- you'll never get done.

It's an interesting thought that a program that has access to a "Total
Intelligence Awareness" feed, might actually have more context than any one
human has (and can possibly have) -- and by extension be better at detecting
sarcasm.

~~~
skizm
You have missed the point it seems. The actual amount of time is irrelevant.
If a program can get an answer given some input, so can a human (given
infinite time). If a human can not get reliably get an accurate answer to
something (given infinite time), no machine can. That isn't a guess or a
hypothesis, that is just how programming works.

~~~
e12e

        >> No human is ever given enough time.
        >
        > You have missed the point it seems. The actual amount of time is
        > irrelevant. If a program can get an answer given some input, so
        > can a human (given infinite time).
    

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "a human (given infinite time)" \--
what does that mean in terms of _contrast to_ a (Turing) machine?

We do absolutely know that humans are fallible, so even if a human has enough
time, and enough paper -- there is no guarantee that a human can duplicate the
effort of a machine in following an algorithm.

You are assuming both the human and machine are given the same input (perhaps
you think of only looking at the tweet in isolation). This might be how a
human would intuitively try to determine if a given tweet is sarcastic. The
machine might be able to look at and review the authors entire corpus of
written statements, the authors movements in the past 20 years, analyse all tv
programs and other writings the author has ever referenced along with an
exhaustive study of all events in the authors life --- In short --- a human
might not have "enough time" to "figure it out with pencil and paper" _in the
same way the machine can_.

So, I agree with your initial point: If we cannot define what it means to tell
if something is sarcasm or not (do we for instance care what the author meant,
or only how the author was perceived? Can we be certain that the _author_
knows if he/she is being sarcastic?) --- then how can a we program a machine
to tell the difference?

On the other hand, if we can agree on some rules for what we might more likely
consider to be sarcastic, it isn't entirely impossible that that algorithm can
use so much data to draw its conclusions, that it would in effect be
impossible for a human to verify -- because a human doesn't have infinite
time. Or in other words: it's not inconceivable that we could create a system,
that ends up being better at telling sarcasm from honest opinion than humans
are. But it _is_ likely that such a system would come to its decision in a
very different way than a human would.

~~~
skizm
You are getting hung up on the practical. The rule that "if a program can
compute something, then so can a human" is theoretical. It has nothing to do
with how long it would actually take a human to do something. Obviously humans
make mistakes and won't live long enough to completely walk through even some
of the more basic sorting algorithms given a large enough list.

The rule is one method to determine if a program is theoretically possible or
not.

For example, writing a program to determine if a given piece of code contains
an infinite loop is impossible.

Read up on Computability and Decidability for more examples of things that are
impossible to write programs for.

~~~
e12e
Yes, I'm familiar with the theory of computation, I'm just not sure it applies
to the ability to determine if a tweet is sarcasm or not. Or, put it another
way, if a human had enough time and the ability to access the amount of data a
computer system can, perhaps the human would better be able to determine if a
given tweet is sarcasm, than the same human without such help.

I do agree (with you and Pope) that sarcasm might be indeterminable in the
general case. Now, if a computer system that has superhuman domain knowledge
of the author _can_ tell if a tweet is sarcastic, but a human can not -- is
the tweet then, in fact, sarcastic? I'd say that's an open question.

------
danohuiginn
This relevant Monty Python skit is worth hoisting out of Stross' comments and
posting here:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fNvi6xG-5Y](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fNvi6xG-5Y)

from about 1:00

------
madaxe_again
What I want to know is how Charlie knows the subject line of all my client
emails ever.

------
kingtoe
Summary: "No system to monitor or control the population will work because the
entire population would obsess over gaming the system." Except no one cares
enough to game it, or ever would. _Sigh_ Another programmer who thinks that
his buddies who obsess over gaming systems represent more than .001% of the
population in question. Next.

------
e12e
> Or they could just ban sarcasm on the internet.

I think what we're all half-expecting, is that they'll define the output of
the program to be true; thereby a) ensuring the program is 100% correct, and
b) In the event of real threats (as identified by the program) have actionable
intelligence.

Almost, but not quite, the same as banning sarcasm on the Internet.

------
stcredzero
We _Homo sapiens_ were intelligently designed by an omnitrollistic god as the
ultimate act of sarcasm. It purposely designed an entity guaranteed to destroy
itself by soiling its own world and creating ravenous hegemonic super
optimizing AIs. Then it planted the fossil record as an elaborate prank.

------
milliams
This wonderful comic comes to mind every time the discussion of sarcasm comes
up
[http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=168](http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=168)

------
davidgerard
Favourite comment:

"I went to a presentation from a sentiment analysis business last year. They
were discussing how they were using it on the firehose feed of everything from
twitter. Rather than assassinations, they were more interested in marketing,
branding, and the impact on stock prices (there are apparently some
iiiiiiinteresting correlations).

The thing that entertained me was they said they had to special-case content
coming from the UK — because our levels of sarcasm/irony were skewing their
results.

I think it was the most patriotic moment of my life <sniff> ;-)"

------
sirsar
This comment thread seems like a good place to test detectors on.

------
digitalengineer
Or.. force a public ID (or FaceBook) on every Internet-user and arrest/scare
the hell out of a few teens being "sarcastic". Send the bill for the SWAT team
or something like that. That will stop most people from behaving "sarcastic"
on the social media. Did you ever try sarcasm during a conversation with the
police/TSA? Doesn't end well.

~~~
sbarre
Are you being sarcastic?

~~~
digitalengineer
Ha ha! No, I was just trying to see the world through their eyes... In their
view, wanting these functions isn't the problem. _We_ are the problem.

------
flatline
I think the most salient point was further down in a comment:

> ...the real target is the autonomous exercise of professional judgement.

------
dcalacci
shamelessly promoting work by a colleague of mine that detects sarcasm in
online product reviews:

[http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~oren/papers/sarcasmAmazonICWSM10.p...](http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~oren/papers/sarcasmAmazonICWSM10.pdf)

------
restless
In case nobody mentioned The Simpsons yet "Oh a sarcasm detector that's a
really useful invention"Comic Book Guy

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSy5mEcmgwU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSy5mEcmgwU)

------
mcv
Nice of him to provide some test data.

------
quantail
We'll bring the pony and the stick.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I was going to say, if you buy the right figurine, you can give the client a
moon-pony.

------
VLM
Never overlook the power of organizational CYA. Likely the next announcement
will be they've discovered automated sarcasm analysis of twitter feeds is, in
fact, as suspected, completely impossible. Then announcement after that one
will be a policy change to cease to analyze twitter feeds because its
impossible to triage fast enough to keep up and its all noise anyway. Then the
announcement after something tragic happens will be a steaming pile of CYA
about how the worlds best minds couldn't find a way to automate the detection
of XYZ but if our budget were only a little larger ... (never let a crisis go
to waste...)

This is beginning to read like a Stross book plot and maybe he's pissed
because yet again he's scooped where the world is getting weirder faster than
his plots are getting weird, like happened with the halting state series (as I
recall). The laundry series is still safe from this danger, at least as far as
we know...

