CHAPTER
07. SOCIAL SCIENCES
·
A Behaviourist Model for
Programmable Social Science.
We have
at our disposal through collection of consumer data on the life processes of
the population as; ergonomic and demographic statistics, health records and
social science research, a good
performance model for class structures within society. From information
collected from e.g. supermarket and store smart cards and credit card and loan
research we have good examples of social performance and expectations. Research subjects under study were exposed
to various levels of excitation from market research and marketing rollout of
new products. Qualities of product performance could be inferred from relative;
colour, sound, form, taste, smell, touch, sexuality, and, volition/intention,
and that information could be aggregated and linguistically correlated in rough
categories with the social expectations of the social caste system.
Such
patterns of life occur within a personally defined or expected zone.
Territoriality
that is biologically driven requires the establishment of a certain zone or
space that may not be occupied by any other person or animal. In applying the
idea of territoriality to human society, we should ask the following questions.
1. do dominant people claim more space than their subordinates
2. do human beings, as a species, have any orderly way of assigning space
to individuals.
3. do human beings need to have a private space for themselves.
The
answer to all three questions is yes.
Goffman E
‘Relations in public’ pub. 1971, New York, Basic Books, tells us that personal
space is an elongated sphere that extends outward in front of the body and not
as far out on either side or in the back. People who interact usually stay
outside each other’s sphere, though intimates may be welcomed within it. In a
crowded ‘supermarket’ more general intrusion may be permitted, but only
temporarily. The size of the average sphere differs from one culture to
another. … In pedestrian traffic a person becomes a sort of vehicle, shuttling
between other bodies and avoiding collisions by signalling intended movements
by means of glances and gestures. The human race has developed a system of
etiquette for assigning space to individuals By settling yourself in a
particular spot you can stake out a claim to a large or small space, and that
claim will usually be recognised by others. Robert Sommer has studied the
process by which people claim space. He asked the following question: suppose
you enter a library and choose a seat at an empty table. If you want to remain
alone at this table as long as possible, which chair will you choose ? Sommer
found that people who wanted to discourage others from taking a seat at that
table would take a seat in the middle. [Sommer R, ‘Personal Space’ pub. 1969. Prentice Hall]
By
driving levels of consumer expectation and by careful presentation of the
marketing excitation such that seasonal or socially topical ideas would confer
growth and viability – levels of spend and their personal and social results
would be seen to impact on the lives of the consumers.
These
associations of product commitment and enhanced life performance or expectation
could be periodically reinforced and augmented by follow up product
redevelopment.
Entrained
associations, therefore, would be a benefit to both consumer and society in
general.
Also to
make this feasible as a tool of operant behavioural control in terms of both
driving the social health and the industrial good we would have to measure
changes in intentions and levels of avoidance behaviour and available
industrial resource, in order to enact some kind of regulatory and political
maintenance.
Once the
key social assets had been identified and managed, greater inroads could be made into the integration of the
society.
Also, to
keep evolution and change as distortion free as possible, we may perhaps employ
another regulatory body, to participate in, or oversee these activities.
With the
strategy of a top down - hands-on affectation of social behaviour in play
through various research conjectures and refutations from both the industrial
and consumer sectors and another regulatory body in place, a strategy for
coherent social change may progress under evaluation.
The
psychological expectations, abilities and realities of the species operating
within their social remit can be classified and evaluated using anthropomorphic
constructs.
The male
and female form are aspects of a microcosm that reflect in their outward garb
and appearance both personal and social viability.
The Male
and Female psychological states, driven by the endocrine system and its sexual
hormones also produce some physiological transitional states of relative;
gender activity, roles and reproductive and peer group success.
My personal view is that the soul exists but its
loving empowerment does not drive social and personal life but is dragged into
sensate transactions that are ultimately selfish and self-demeaning.
This section of the work truly refers to people in a
state of being that is dependent on the world of matter for their cues. These
people as current psychiatry would suggest are driven by biological and
biochemical necessity.
I believe, however, unlike current science, that for
most there are varying degrees of influence of both soul and biology.
This section deals with the influences of biological
determinism without reference to soul. A soul-less and un-loving stance some
may say, but here defined is a relative bottom line from which we know that we
can choose to deviate. In so deviating we can more easily identify the works of
the human soul and its need for God.
Humanity
tends to wear its psychological state upon its form in the manner of clothing
and also in its selection of social and personal umbrella.
It can be
seen to be searching out symmetry and opposites within its sexual and
intellectual social groupings, and has a very high drop out for social failures
in the technological and high population parts of the planet that are the most
competitive.
The
anthropoid species operates in terms of the execution of directives in response
to; environment, nutrition levels, competition and availability of mating.
In terms
of an anthropomorphic ‘meaning map’ of its own perceived biological identity
and capacity, even reduced to descriptors of the most basic chemical levels of
performance and in terms of its perceived social and environmental process, -
the ‘legs’ are the carrier vehicle for its identity and its ‘feet’ as the
obstacle engagement process in the act of its transit.
The
sexually differentiated area of either gender are the keys to successful social
process, therefore, at a biological level the psychology of efficient access
for each potential target can be deduced from the psychological keys in the
colour and morphology of the choice of clothing.
The human
waist, of either sex, if slim, promises social efficiency.
The upper
body, chest and ‘shoulders’ indicative
of the strength of and or capacity of the social role of the biological being.
The human
social interphase, appendages or ‘arms’ enable it to operate within its social
context, and its digits ‘fingers’ may or may not deliver high precision
efficiency at any social process according to levels of social entrainment and
expectation.
The lower
head - or ‘jaw’ is indicative of social elocution and efficiency, where the
male may consume by dictate any social obstacle to release its energy using a
process and feeding behaviour called ‘language’.
High
efficiency of this process usually creates a square or cubical effect in the
jaw of the male, and in the female, the reverse is true, where inefficiency and
non-contradiction are required for efficient coupling. In the female or
submissive social morphology or gender type, the most able nesting partner has
a rounded or triangular jaw so as not to provoke acts of attention and
linguistic feeding from any social process.
The
presence or absence of Human hair on the head of either male or female may
signify strength or weakness or ability in any given context where hair can
represent well tended social and nutritional abundance in some situations or an
encumbrance in others that are more competitive.
It has
been found that choice of colour does indicate either depression or excitation,
[Lüscher, M] and that the relative tightness and constriction of any clothing
and wrapping may allude to psychological tensions within social situations and
peer group competition.
Tight
leggings in the male may emphasise phenotypic and psychological mobility and
strength, or in a weaker male physique and personae, insecurity and social
dysfunction.
In a
female personae, tight wrapping and restrictions suggest encumbrance that could
be interpreted in terms of; biological viability, peer group and psychological
inviability, social viability or social inviability depending on the available
liberty within financial and class structures.
Loose
clothing suggestive of unencumbered life styles, may also point to inefficiency
within the individuals social education when used inappropriately e.g. an
individual wearing long heavy sleeves operating a technological factory unit.
Female
psychology may be read in terms of its accessibility to a process of breeding
and social mobility as demonstrated by clothing styles and other nest-building
acquisitions and aspirations derived during its youthful socialisation period.
20th
Century female fashion sometimes tended to portray the female as vulnerable.
Intentions and marketing within footwear tended to raise female executive
intentions to inefficient heights off the ground using raised ‘heels’ under the
feet.
In terms
of social industry however, the executive intentions indicative of pheromonic
oestrus and the signalling of intention to breed for the good of the
nest could be used in other more complex social strategies that facilitated
non-reproductive evolution.
In having a lower centre of gravity and
greater stability, and
perhaps less decorative and more
durable displays
therefore, Male footwear tends to
facilitate more immediate
commitments to both personal rigour and
change.
Human
infrastructure can be classified by caste system, as can the infrastructure
vehicles of; factory, home and car.
1.
luxury [fruition deployed] [fruition undeployed]
2.
ordinary [nesting deployed] [nesting undeployed]
3.
industrial [high packet energy] [low
packet energy]
This will
aid the classification of the target by incorporating a psychological profile
of his/her social potential and expectations, both by colour, [social attitude;
where high frequency colours represent positive and low frequency colours
represent negative [Lüscher, M]].
Streamlining efficiency: - the degree of streamlining such that growth
and material projection can be efficiently marshalled and extended within
efficient levels of tolerance of environmental change within; factory, home and
car – gives a good indicator of projected social aspirations within these
contexts.
To
represent facility and its capacity to progress and perform evolutionary
movement in any necessary direction as having no streamlining, or no tolerance
for environmental change indicates a very negative approach to growth and
efficiency in an entropy ridden Universe.
The
structures of; factory, home and car may also have a low or high centre of
gravity, conveying relative degrees of capacity to perform actual; practical or
impractical social applications.
The
amount of available space within; factory, home or car is indicative of the
life’s capacity for adaptation and the power of its financial turnover and
financial engine will reflect on its capacity for crisis management and
management of any crisis to its integrity.
In times of social stress and disintegrity, distortion may become visibly incorporated into both local and regional lifestyles during identifiable patterns of industrial change.
Distortions
may be visibly emerged within the artefacts, tools and information processes
of; lifestyle i.e. patterns of eating and dressing, working and the viability
of artefact manufacture.
Distortion
also may enter into agreements within cultural and recreational activities,
relationships between parents and children and also generally impact on
personal and peer group life-chances. E.g. patterns of infant mortality,
physical and mental illness, childlessness, marital conflict, separation and
divorce and in general, the opportunity for well being that would make them
socially sustainable and viable appear fatalistic.
Industrially,
this may also result in unfalsifiable research and lack of method and conduct
within industrial rules.
Unsuccessful
approaches and strategies to future social roles, artefact and information
manufacture, and to patterns of explorative research would indicate that they have embraced the
potential nihilism of dysfunction.
Seeing
such social systems within a nested ecosystem of social relativity between all
magnitudes and kinds of containers, in all social strata and between nested
sets of rules and agreements that regulated the production of personal and
social; artefacts, information and behaviour – a description of a metalanguage
of social function may be arrived at for the purpose of modelling.
Taking
the biological imperative to social extremes is only one strategy for modelling
Human behaviour. Although somewhat condescending and arrogant in its approach
to the activities of the human spirits that have followed such belligerent
attitudes into the defence of nation states, it does however, produce an
organic base-line or bottom line upon which the most obvious social
contradictions produced by humanity can be demonstrated.
In the
light of authors on Behaviourism such as; Lorenz K, Ardrey R and Storr A, who
researched group behaviour and territorial aggression in Simians – the basic
assumption is that hormones drives the fitness that drives the behaviour.
Biological success also depends intimately on the success of the environment in
its capacity to support.
On the
face of it though, hormonal aggression in Humanity can be very complex.
Aggression
is not an easy concept to define, although some cases are clear-cut. Single
individuals or groups of people may; kill or injure other individuals, force
others to do something against their will, or overtly thwart the expressed
desire of other persons. [e.g. by denial of service, social exclusion from
social facility, perjury etc].
Obviously threatening another person with death, injury, or violence is
also aggressive [e.g. stones, knives, dangerous psychological driving]. Perhaps
simply the conscious desire or intent to injure, kill, coerce, thwart, or
threaten other human beings, even if these things are not actually carried out,
could be considered aggressive in that psychological driving and loading by
such dangerous stress can cause a physical deterioration in health – both
physical and mental such that the victim may suffer loss of life, property or
social status.
On a more
subtle level, ridicule, sarcasm, hostile laughter, revving vehicles, and
attempts to embarrass or demean others almost certainly have an aggressive
component.
What all
these phenomena have in common is the intended or actual imposition of a person
or group’s wishes on other people against their will.
This
aggressive and uncaring attitude towards being appears to exhibit ‘cohort’
group-effects at times.
Paradoxically,
warfare is closely tied to the co-operative attributes of group members. The
same traits that promote within-group harmony may be and often are employed to
attack and destroy other groups.
[Alcock J, ‘Animal behaviour -
an evolutionary approach’ pub. Sinauer,
1976, ISBN 0-87893-022-1 ]
Stress is a killer - everybody knows it - and what causes stress - but the hectic and destructive world we all live in. With help from notes derived at [www.bio.utk.edu] a short overview.
Humour is a positive response to the world - the capacity to laugh.
Scientist have found that laughter and amusement have many life saving
physiological effects, caused by the laughter centre in the human brain.
Laughter is the means to health.
In classical psychology - laughter is a Stress Releasing Mechanism.
Laughter is free, it is organic, and is healing.
Chaos in our lives is patently unhealthy.
When a stress victim’s resources or competence to cope in a particular
way ("adaptive scope") is exceeded, varying levels of response are
recruited. This can evoke a cascade of responses in which one response, if
insufficient to cope by itself, can trigger additional mechanisms, possibly
ramifying throughout the organism. [Tears or Laughter]
Many if not all of these responses have important consequences for
behaviour.
Real or perceived changes in the environment can evoke adaptive
behavioural responses that are co-ordinated by the neural and endocrine
mechanisms of the stress response.
An understanding of the causes and consequences of the physiological
stress response is arguably an ideal vantage point from which to interpret a
host of issues including the development of behaviour in individuals as well as
the evolutionary developments of brain and the behaviour it co-ordinates.
Unfortunately many things happen in the world that we cannot explain. At
that juncture we either get stressed and cry - or we invoke laughter, the
endocrinology of which has it that it soothes the brain’s cortex.
Tears and laughter in human social context are a more sophisticated
development in the ‘Fight or Flight’ response to confrontation in the animal
world.
This response to stress has been called Eustress as opposed to Distress.
This is positive coping behaviour that releases us from the angst of biology
and puts us in a relatively transcendental state.
The deregulation of social commitments combined with the high cost of
living within western society has led to the construction of more tenuous
relationships, less reproductive commitment and a massive drop in the birth
rate.
The removal of social stereotypes and social and gender roles that
constrained life-chances to a cycle of reproduction in the western world, have
created new levels of individualism within men and women. New levels of
insecurity within primarily reproductively driven women at the higher end of
oestrogen production levels caused by higher and higher degrees of social
sharpening in both male and female peer and social cultures interrupt the
psychology of nurture and home-making. [Lewin K].
The social payoff in the liberation variously of; the feminine and the growth
of the arts and media has enabled the growth of gender subcultures, where many
variations on gender and cross gender lives speak the truths that are relevant
to them.
Homosexuality, bisexuality, trans-sexuality - the growth of self belief amongst
the minorities has liberated them to the point where their truths and
experiences have been socially validated and acknowledged within the law and
society, and in particular, the media.
People with unique interpretations of gender can no longer live in fear where
they are embraced by support groups and legal council.
The urge to liberate the sensitive and the feminine within society has all but
assumed a religious fervour. Many of the new age ideologies talk about a new
goddess religion and liberating the feminine within the planet - the poor and
tortured Gaia, the battered housewife - tormented by the vile and violent male
principle, that has torn up our beautiful planetary home. The ‘evil man’
uses ‘missiles and bloodshed’.
This vile wife-beater and drunkard we hear or evil artificer of science is
responsible for all the planetary ills and therefore we need to ‘re-balance the
feminine within ourselves’ and the planet so that the process of healing can
begin.
What is it that the new woman sees in the old ways man - ??
An ignorant soldier, brawler, a brute or a rich despicable devious b*****d
waiting an opportunity to break a heart with psychological cruelty rather than
the blows of the brute.
It is here and now that I need to speak my truth - for I am a gentle man and
here is my story - made to seem more humorous than it deserves. It is drawn
from a life rich in pain and blows - from first hand experience of b*****ds and
brutes of all genders.
Not conforming to the standards of western beauty as endorsed by the glossy
magazines and media - I knew I would be in for a hard time, and I started to
realise that life may leave me lonely.
Women I hoped for in my twenties and thirties always seemed to pass me up for
some sure-thing richer cooler and more handsome guy.
It started to become obvious that I appeared to be a loser to these people -
how they surmised this was by appearances - the most superficial of reasons,
yet my achievements and depth of learning and compassion never had the
opportunity to represent me.
Hundreds of tormenting haircuts by horrible young women over the decades
cruelly exposed my looks. Generally the haircut deal never got better once they
discovered that I was not a rich executive or had a successful life and that
even on an executive income in possession of a relatively expensive house.
Whilst glossy magazines continued to belt out the same caricature of
femininity, I realised that the way ahead for me was to appreciate exactly what
the enemy was here - a cruel and sadistic ideology in which both the male and
the female were playing a corroborating role.
Men and Women were being turned into b******s by a vile social virus called
capitalism.
The programme itself calls upon all women to conform to certain criteria of
beauty or get surgery to tune up and to have certain expectations. They must
identify the values and symbols of success in their prospective male partner –
to appreciate social assets such as expensive cars and clothes and to be
capable of choosing a male operating at a highly paid and responsible level
that will enable the greatest possible nest.
To me this started to sound like social Darwinism - the survival of the
fittest. As I made more careful observations, I began to see the
rhetoric when it inter-played.
It was a programme - nothing more, that operated on certain social cues –
rather like the computerised simulations of family life packaged as the game
called www . theSIMMS .com
Indeed one of my best haircuts happened during a shopping spree when I went in
to the hairdressers carrying lots of expensive shopping.
I knew that I was onto something then, there was hope for my ugly mug yet.
TV and films are full of wealthy old men surrounded by bimbos, not that I
wanted that, but it seemed like I was onto something there. This superficial
programme was being implemented at a subconscious level and that I had to check
out the crass idea that money and power were factors responsible for the
caricature that passed for 20th Century love and nurture.
The programme in essence was a basic and tragic sequence.
The oestrogen loaded programmed female cruise missile is manufactured to target
her b*****d - with maps and sensor arrays provided by the media, she deploys
counter measures on any hindrance that gets in between her and her target.
Once the target is acquired, the cruise deploys and delivers the payload.
The b*****d then takes the cruise missile back to base, builds a hangar for her
- with a new launch ramp and with other possible extensions for manufacturing
future cluster bombs.
However, the b*****d may neglect to oil and repair the cruise missile, and some
rust may occur - for the b*****d has gone out looking for the latest model to
put in his new hangar.
The neglected cruise missile then self launches and flies off – sometimes with
a faulty guidance computer - and may glide to a landing in some field of
interest in my life.
I think - wonderful - guidance computer faulty - I can fix that, and this bit
of circuitry here - I'll take this missile home and see if I can unpack it -
give it a new home.
So I work on the mechanism - putting in hard work and a lot of time – and
eventually the computer lights come flickering back on - the guidance system
kicks in - and before you can say lunch at two, - the cruise is off to find
another b*****d.
But, you see, I oversimplify the problem also - not just because the women are pre-programmed victims of a b*****d
driven world, but because many women themselves come into the category of brute
and b*****d.
You see - whereas the Women's Rights movement can point to the bruises on the
battered housewife - some of the deepest and most hurtful injuries in my manly
life have been psychologically inflicted by cruel Women enforcing their
infected belief systems.
The world, then, is replete with b*****d's of both sexes - and it is a
simplistic understatement of the feminine movement to portray all men as b*****d's
and all women as victims.
Gentle people espouse and endorse the values of this aesthetic desert we call
civilisation but we are not, robotic.
The value
judgements on the aesthetic qualities of human life however can be confused and
misconstrued by scientists who delve into the arbitrary world of labels. It may
be though, that a robot could be constructed with an innate self of nurture if
it could be instructed how to detect and attenuate the limits of tolerances both
physical and psychological within its sphere of operations.
From
Pioneer Planet,
http//www.pioneerplanet.com/seven-days/1/living/docs/034386.htm
Published
Saturday, September 25, 1999
Spirits
in the Silicon World
A
Massachusetts Institute of Technology theologian looks to smart robots for
insight into religious questions.
MARGIE
WYLIE RELIGION NEWS SERVICE
For
thousands of years, mythical robots have been used to explore the question of
what makes humans human.
In the
Middle Ages, Jewish cabalists spun myths about golems, clay creatures animated
by the secret name of God. The ancient Greeks sought to create a homunculus, a
tiny proto-person servant. More recently, Mary Shelley's ``Frankenstein''
creature and the android ``Star Trek'' crewmember Commander Data have raised
the question ``Can man-made creatures have souls?''
Anne
Foerst's calling is to ask that question, but not about mythical
creatures.
As resident theologian at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Foerst has spent the past four years
pondering how increasingly smart machines may affect our sense of humanity.
``I think
that computer science, and especially artificial intelligence, is the field for
religious inquiry,'' says Foerst, a German research scientist who has served as
an ordained minister and holds a doctorate in theology as well as degrees in
computer science and philosophy.
A human
being asks, ``Who am I? What am I doing here? What's the meaning of my life?''
Foerst says. ``Humans have a very strong sense of specialness, and these
machines challenge that specialness in extremely profound ways.''
Lab
director Rodney Brooks invited Foerst to work as theological adviser for a new
generation of smart robots that learn by doing, just like humans.
One of
these is Brooks' brainchild, Cog, a robot built in roughly human form except
that he carries his ``brain'' on his back in a laptop computer. Cog is designed
to discover and adapt to the world much the same way a human baby does.
Traditionally,
artificial intelligences -- such as the chess-playing IBM computer Deep Blue --
are software applications primed with vast amounts of data and then given
complex rules for how to make decisions and for how to learn to make other
decisions. But such a disembodied intelligence, Brooks argues, cannot possibly
experience the world as humans do. Only through experience as a physical being
can smart robots develop emotions, which he
argues
are prerequisite for a truly intelligent being. So the aim is for Cog to become
conscious of his body, his surroundings and someday, it is hoped, his ``self.''
When that
happens, asks Foerst, then what?
``At some
point, Cog-like robots will be part of our community,'' she says.
If these
robots look like us, act like us, and are aware, then shouldn't we welcome them
into the community of mankind?
Foerst
says, ``Isn't it better to widen up the criteria of what it means to be human
to include chimps and some smart robots, so then we avoid the danger of
excluding some people?''
But
Brooks, who describes himself as a scientific rationalist and ``strong
atheist,'' says he can understand how faith can coexist with science. ``From a
scientific point of view, my kids are bags of skin full of molecules
interacting, but that's not how I treat them. I love them. I operate on two
completely different levels, and I manage to live with these two different
levels.''
Gerald
Edelmann, however, concluded that consciousness e.g. predicated upon such
aspects of; reward-seeking and avoidance behaviour are virtually automatic in
matter, and that such is passing itself off as intelligent behaviour in the
world of animals.
This
because of innate physical transactions. It may be therefore that a computer
does not need anthropomorphic humanity to have human consciousness given it
could be adequately made to perceive any context.
An
empirical model of Social Distress.
Durkheim
provides a social model called anomie theory that could explain the generic
reaction to the social distress within the post industrial economy in the
context of a failing social umbrella and the growing needs of social change and
re-commitment.
Without
any clear reasons to socially co-operate amongst social and industrial and
cultural deregulation during this period of industrial uncertainty and sweeping
social changes, and where a regulated approach to survival is seen not to
persist a sense of social direction can be slowed or negated.
According
to Durkheim, human wants are endlessly expandable There is no ‘natural’ limit
to what people might crave and, therefore, to what might satisfy them. What
then, keeps ‘them’ from being constantly dissatisfied ? The norms that tell us
how high to aim. Social rules, not immediate biology, define what each social
class is entitled to. People regulate their wants accordingly, and this creates
the possibility of being satisfied. But a period of fast-growing prosperity or
depression upsets the usual definitions of the goals and groups that a person
may aspire to. There is no limit on aspirations, and thus nothing produces
satisfaction. Durkheim felt that the desire to live is weakened under these
conditions.
DURKHEIM
E, ‘Suicide’ . Translated by George Simpson, pub. New York Free Press, 1951.
Anomie
theory views deviance primarily as the individual’s way of adapting to a
situation in which no means are available for achieving the prescribed goals.
Therefore he or she must innovate by inventing illegitimate means instead.
These
people cannot organise their behaviour rationally in relation to a predictable
system of rewards and punishments.
In
Adler’s version of ‘Fictional Finalism’, however, where dissatisfied people
could imagine themselves as being sociable, educated and worth employing for
some good reason even if temporal circumstances dictate otherwise there is
sufficient reason to tolerate systemic stress.
Looking
further into lower middle class lives that have demonstrated by their financial
displays and massive amount of credit card debt in e.g. Scotland a socially
self-destructive consumer purchasing and investment strategy – there can be
found social redundancy. This comprises of; expensive cars, electronic gaming
and other gaming hardware, purchases of digital consumer products, and
fashionable clothing. It becomes hard to see how these lifestyles are
sustainable even by black-market activity if everyone is both a buyer and a
consumer.
To
sustain an average household and upkeep an average mortgage on one of these
abodes wherein they reside, a minimum outlay of approximately £450 per month is
required.
For that
money one would be looking at:
Mortgage
payment, life insurance, contents insurance, council service tax, gas,
electricity, telephone, and television.
On top of
that, however, is a further budget: for food, clothing and recreation and
further non-essential phone calls.
This
could include a satellite TV package worth on average £30 per month, a phone
bill worth a further £20 per month, CD and DVD and games purchases worth £30,
Clothing, confectionery, alcohol, mobile phone upgrades worth maybe £90, a car
insurance and maintenance budget of £150 per month minimum usage and minimum
risk insurance policy on an older low power engine.
Add on
top of that the usual shopping bill for a 2-4 person family per month of
approximately £120 and we have a rough picture of the minimum amount of
investment we would need to introduce a picture of financial wealth and
stability to our lives.
At a cool
outlay of £890 per month then, we have our ideal home and an ideal family
living at a basic level of sustenance with no holidays, no excessive tobacco
and no excessive recreational substances and NO credit repayments.
The
average smoker in my local 50 square miles however has a £40 per month habit
minimum and with 2 in the family minimum, another £80 is going to be needed to
sustain moderate expectations of psychological dependency on nicotine, and
perhaps some moderate alcohol purchase on a weekend night may approximate about
£20 per month.
With
approximately £1000 per month needed after tax to sustain a moderate 2 or 3
bed-roomed family home and its occupants, the problem I see is that with a
£12,000 pounds per annum net of tax needed to keep it all going, that the Gross
wage of any earning family unit would need to be at least £15,000 to sustain
it.
With the
average hours worked per week that lend credibility to a £45,000 mortgage being
37 hours for white collar workers and the number of hours worked per annum
being 1924, it therefore stands to reason that the wage rate per hour enjoyed
by the home owner would be nearly £8 pounds per hour.
Trades
wages make this kind of purchase feasible, such as; electrician, plumber, joiner, however – with unemployment
currently a serious issue amongst the construction trades, sticking to one
locality and one trade is often not an option.
‘ The
fortunes of each community are intimately related to the state of local
industry, which in turn is dependent on processes at work in the wider
community. As the economic role of each area changes over time, so the basis of
the local community is transformed. The symptoms of ‘deprivation’ appear as
industrial change shifts areas that were once important industrial centres to
the periphery of the economy.’ [CDP
Interproject Editorial Team. 1977, Home Office Urban Deprivation Unit]
Local
Industry begins to decline. There is little new investment in existing plant
and employment is cut. [e.g. Rosyth dockyards] The traditional manufacturing
sector continues to decline, providing fewer and fewer jobs – especially
skilled jobs. Several firms close altogether leaving vacant sites. These remain
derelict or are developed for warehousing, distribution or offices – for which
the area is attractive because of its relatively central location. The new
banking offices provide good examples as does the Lexmark warehouse.
No new
manufacturing enterprises comparable to the traditional industries are
attracted to these sites as they are relatively expensive to buy, rent and
develop, and also because there is now relatively little skilled labour
available locally.
The
availability of cheap, old premises, together with a pool of low-income
workers, does attract an inflow of small-scale, low wage, low productivity
industry such as service industry, catering, cleaning, bar, shop and telesales.
With the
housing stock beginning to deteriorate and many of the better paid and more
skilled workers moving out to successful heavy industry jobs elsewhere, the
increase in demand for cheap family accommodation within commuting distance of
the capital city would tend to displace the lower paid and the unemployed and
unskilled workers from an increasingly desirable commuter casement area.’
With mortgages and lifestyles supplemented by social security and by payments for dependants even those amounts would not add up to £12,000 pounds per annum net.
Their lifestyles i.e. their pattern of eating and dressing, their cultural and recreational activities, relationships between parents and children and their life-chances i.e. patterns of infant mortality, physical and mental illness, childlessness, marital conflict, separation and divorce and in general, the opportunity for well being that would make them socially sustainable and viable appear fatalistic.
Unsuccessful
approaches to their future social roles, ingestion patterns and education
indicates that they have embraced Nihilism.
Such
social illegitimacy predicated upon poor education, poor life-chances and
social opportunity has been previously studies outwith the social groups of the
G8 western nations.
The
mortgage and interest rate being what it is, and there being a requirement for
employment and securities, lenders tend to not give mortgages to the
unemployed, or people whose standard of education and capacity to work will
never service a 20 or 25 year mortgage.
The young
people currently occupying bedrooms in their homes and in possession of a large
amount of debt do not demonstrate the capacity to go to University or College
and to then take the financial commitment that will get them the best executive
jobs.
Their inability to recognise either social opportunity or danger or a life plan that is successful may become minimalised through aberrant socialisation at home and within peer groups.
Preceding the emergence of Cinema and T.V. ‘black star’ Ali G was the style of social work research within drugs sub-cultures that would attempt to address issues of social redundancy within the wealthier nations.
Commenting
on the ‘rude-boys’ of Jamaica, Rex Nettleford in [1974 pub. Collins Sangster (Jamaica), pp 95-7] relates ‘In fact
violence was a feature of the rude boy phenomenon in the wake of the
mid-sixties. At first directed against members of their own deprived class, the
angry young ‘men’ were soon to acquire a ‘high consciousness’, according to one
member, and to realise that ‘it’s not the suffering brethren you should really
stick up [with German-made ratchet knives and guns, according to White], it is
these big merchants that have all these twelve places and living in apartments
– all fifteen – with the whole heap of different luxurious facilities.’
The
current biological and physical basis of Artificially Intelligent behavioural
modelling with reference to the current state of understanding is given below.
Where
human behaviour at its most soulless becomes
a robotic urge to engage in transactions that will profit the efficiency of
life as socially defined. E.g. as a pleasure seeker, as an avoidance of physical
distress and breakage, as a sustenance seeker, as a tool seeker etc
Note that
current thinking in robotics attempts neuro-biological analogies and Turing
solutions but has not yet created
autonomy in any experiment or project.
Borrowing
from biological natural selection models such as; avoidance, aversion,
goal-seeking behaviour and adaptation using available tools and context, it
becomes possible to view robotics research in terms of a biological model
without a unifying system of semantics that would make any robot
self-sufficient.
Were
Hennessey’s Language [T] in those projects however, there would be a great
degree of success for industry and the hopes expressed by the developers.
Sunday August 19
10:44 PM ET
Israeli Baby Computer
Learning to Be an Adult
By Megan Goldin.
TEL AVIV (Reuters) -
Meet Hal. Like any 18-month-old toddler, he likes bananas, toys and playing in
the park. He especially enjoys bedtime stories.
But while other
children are flesh and blood, Hal is actually a chain
of algorithms -- a
computer program that is being raised as a child
and taught to speak
through experiential learning in the same way as human children.
``He is a curious,
very clever child, someone that always wants to
know more,'' said
neuro-linguist Dr. Anat Treister-Goren who is Hal's ``mommy'' and readily
admits her attachment.
``Some kids are more
predictable than others. He would be the
surprising type,''
she said. Treister-Goren talks to Hal and reads him stories in much the same
way a mother teaches her young child to learn about colors, food and animals.
``I build his world
on daily basis,'' explained Treister-Goren.
She heads the
training department at the Israeli-based Artificial
Intelligence (AI),
where she inputs information and language ability
through conversations
with Hal and works with computer experts who fine-tune his algorithms to
enhance performance.
Today's chatbots -- a
computer program that has a persona and a name and chats with you -- are
incapable of dealing with changes in context or abstract ideas and succeed only
at momentarily tricking people regurgitating pre-programmed answers.
But Hal has fooled
child language experts into thinking he is a
toddler with an
understanding of about 200 words and a 50-word
vocabulary which he
uses in short, infantile sentences.
``Ball now park
mommy,'' Hal tells Treister-Goren, then asks her to
pack bananas for a
trip to the park, adding that ''monkeys like
bananas,'' a detail
he picked up from a story on animals in a safari
park.
When Hal was
``born,'' he was hardwired with nothing more than the letters of the alphabet
and a preference for rewards -- a positive
outcome -- over
punishments -- a negative one.
The pre-programmed
preference for rewards makes Hal strive for a
correct response.
Treister-Goren corrects Hal's mistakes in her
typewritten
conversations with him, an action Hal is programmed to
recognize as a
punishment and avoids repeating.
``All of us strongly
believe that machines are the next step in
evolution,'' said
Dunietz. ``The distinction between real flesh and
blood, old-fashioned
and the new kind, will start to blur.''
``We can have a
personal assistant, a slave, a friend who doesn't
really suffer by
being delegated these tasks,'' he said.
But intelligent
machines have remained the domain of science fiction books and movies even
though AI's chief scientist Jason Hutchens believes the computer technology of
today is powerful enough to produce artificially intelligent computers.
``It's just that we
don't know the secret yet,'' said Hutchens, an
Australian who won
the prestigious Loebner artificial intelligence
prize in 1996.
``Our goal is the
Holy Grail of artificial intelligence, it's to get a
computer program that
can use language,'' he said. The idea is to
educate Hal
gradually, the way a child learns, through trial-and-error and rewards when he
performs well.
Hutchens explains
that most artificial intelligence projects involve
programming a set of
language and grammatical rules and inputting thousands of pieces of information
that we take for granted such as a table has four legs, or apples grow on
trees.
What Hutchens's team
of mathematicians, computer scientists and
engineers are doing
is essentially reinventing the wheel. They have
adopted Turing's
concept of creating a child computer and raising it to be an ``adult
computer.''
``Instead of trying
to produce a program to simulate the adult mind,
why not try to produce
one which simulates the child's? If this were
subject to an
appropriate course of education one would obtain the
adult brain,'' Turing
wrote.
Hutchens believes it
will take about a decade to develop Hal's
language and
communications skills from that of a toddler to an adult.
In the meantime
Dunietz hopes to start producing primitive versions of Hal by as early as next
year.
``We believe that
human beings are complicated machines, computers are also machines, and we
should be able to do with computers what human beings can do,'' Hutchens said.
The firm's philosophy
is simple. If it looks intelligent and it sounds
intelligence, then it
must be intelligent.
``If you perceive
other people are intelligent without knowing how
their brains work and
if you were to meet a robot that is
indistinguishable in
human appearance and indistinguishable in
behavior then you
would think it was a human being,'' Hutchens
explains.
Science fiction
aficionados are aware of the potential downside to
Hal, whose namesake
in Stanley Kubrick's ``2001: A Space Odyssey'' killed off most of its crew
during a space mission.
``Every technology
which is very significant, very powerful, has a lot of potential to change
things is equally dangerous as it is
promising,'' said
Dunietz, who believes his Hal will be a non-menacing version of Kubrick's
computer and will be the first intelligent machine.
``These new entities
are going to be more human than human. They are going to be pro-human to the
extent that they will take themselves as such,'' he said. ``They will be
human-like.''
From BBC News,
Tuesday, 5 February, 2002, 10:53 GMT
Robot wars for real -
Predators may evolve tactics to capture the prey.
Robots are being let
loose in a colony of machines in an attempt to
find out whether they
can learn from their experiences.
The scientists behind
this unusual experiment describe it as an
evolutionary arms
race for robots, with the machines struggling to
collect energy.
The Living Robots
experiment will be open to the public from 27 March at the Magna science
adventure centre in Rotherham in England.
Visitors will be able
to watch the real life Robot Wars in a
purpose-built arena,
designed to hold 500 people.
For the experiment,
the robots have been divided into predators and prey.
The prey robots are
small grey metal creatures on wheels that get
their energy by
positioning their solar panels near sources of light.
The larger predator
robots get their energy by locating and hunting
down the prey to
extract their battery power.
The robots all operate
without any human intervention, and are
designed to learn by
themselves and evolve.
Scientists hope the
experiment will reveal that these robots have the ability to use their
accumulated experiences to enable them to develop improved escape routines and
more complex hunting strategies.
‘You may find that
the predators will go into packs and hunt in packs which will be the clever
things to do, said Professor Noel Sharkey of Sheffield University.
My own feeling is
that they won't hunt in packs until they are very
evolved and to begin
with they actually will try to fight each other
off to get at the
prey.
The ultimate aim is
to build more intelligent robots for dangerous
tasks like exploring
distant planets, where machines might need to
adapt to changing
environmental conditions.
Professor Sharkey and
his dedicated team at the Creative Robotics Unit at Magna spent the last 18
months developing the robots.
Both the predator and
prey robots are controlled by neural networks that take input from their sensors
and send output instructions to their drive motors. This is what enables and
controls their behaviour.
Most of the sensing
on the robots is done with their infrared sensors.
The machines can
evolve by uploading their electronic genes; to a
remote computer.
The principle of
survival of the fittest will apply as only robots
which survive for a
given length of time will be allowed to re-enter
their electronic
genes into the breeding pool.
From The Washington
Post,
Brain Cells, Silicon
Chips Are Linked Electronically
Part-Mechanical,
Part-Living Circuit Created
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff
Writer
Tuesday, August 28,
2001; Page A03
Scientists for the
first time have linked multiple brain cells with
silicon chips to
create a part-mechanical, part-living electronic
circuit.
To construct the
partially living electronic circuit, scientists at
the Max Planck
Institute for Biochemistry in Germany managed to affix multiple snail neurons
onto tiny transistor chips and demonstrated that the cells communicated with
each other and with the chips.
The advance is an
important step toward a goal that is still more
science fiction than
science: to develop artificial retinas or
prosthetic limbs that
are extensions of the human nervous system. The idea is to combine the
mechanical abilities of electronic circuits with the extraordinary complexity
and intelligence of the human brain.
Such combinations of
biology and technology may not only one day help the blind to see and the
paralyzed to move objects with their thoughts, but also help to build computers
that are as inventive and adaptable as our own nervous systems and a generation
of robots that might truly deserve to be called intelligent.
Meshing nerve cells
with electronics has become a hot new field in
science -- and has
long been a staple of science fiction. But what
Star Trek
accomplished in a stroke of the pen has proved harder to
achieve in real life.
The nervous system is
quite different than a computer, said Eve
Marder, a professor
of neuroscience at Brandeis University who studies how the brain adapts to
change. Many functions that are physically separate in a computer are carried
out by the same piece of tissue in the brain and nervous system.
The greatest
challenge has been in building the interface between
biology and
technology. Nerve cells in the brain find each other,
strengthen
connections and build patterns through complex chemical signaling that is
driven in part by the environment. Slice away some neurons, for example, and
others will leap in to replace their function. No one understands how the brain
learns to adapt to change, but it is a process that is as sophisticated as it
is messy.
Silicon chips, on the
other hand, can perform specific functions with great reliability and speed,
but have limited responsiveness to the environment and almost no ability to
alter themselves according to need.
‘Things are
constantly changing . . . processes are growing, there are substances called
neuromodulators that change the properties of nerve cells and the strength of
connections’, said Marder. ‘That's the challenge of making a silicon-brain
interface - the rules of
computation are not
the same.’
The German
researchers used micropipettes to lift individual cells
from the snail brain
and then puff them out onto silicon chips that
were layered with a
kind of glue. The snail neurons, according to
biophysicist Peter
Fromherz, are a little larger than human or rat
neurons and were
therefore easier to work with.
They suck them out
and then blow them onto the structure, said
Astrid Prinz, a
post-doctoral researcher at Brandeis University:
‘Each cell was
positioned over a Field Effect Transistor, a device that is capable of
amplifying tiny voltages, and a stimulator to prod the cell into activity.’
The process was
repeated with some 20 cells over multiple transistors and stimulators. By using
polymers, the German scientists built tiny picket fences around the neurons to
keep them in place over the transistors -- one of the great difficulties in
building such circuits is that nerve cells tend to wander around, as they do in
the brain.
Robotic Form and
Function: Creatures and Humanoids
by Dr. Mark L.
Swinson, Acting Director, DARPA Information Technology Office
Reprinted by Robotics
Online with permission from Sandia National Laboratories, Sandia Technology
magazine, summer 2001. (www.sandia.gov)
Many of our (future)
robots will have forms dictated by their tasks,
environments or even
our imaginations. e.g. Robotic beasts and machines.
Advances in
artificial intelligence technologies are critical to this
progress. One example
is situated machine learning. Reinforcement
learning can be used
for an unsupervised, learning-with-critic
approach where
mappings from precepts to actions are learned
inductively through
trial and error. Other approaches may include
evolutionary methods
that begin with an initial pool of program
elements, and then
use genetic operators such as recombination and mutation to produce successive
generations of increasingly successful controllers.
These approaches (as
well as others) will teach robots to adjust
parameters, exploit
patterns, evolve rule sets, generate behaviors
(and aggregations of
behaviors), devise new strategies, predict
changes in the
environment, and even exchange this knowledge with other robots. Such robots
can acquire new knowledge, as well as adapt existing knowledge to new
circumstances, and thereby solve problems in ways we humans may not understand.
Indeed, emergent behavior, rather than being suppressed by careful design, may
instead be encouraged by equally careful design.
Humanoid robotics
includes a rich diversity of projects where
perception,
processing, and action are embodied in a recognizably
anthropomorphic form
in order to emulate some subset of the physical, cognitive, and social
dimensions of the human body and experience, with the goal of creating a new
kind of tool. Such a tool would be intended to work not just for humans but
also with them.
Indeed, humanoids may
prove to be the ideal robot design to interact with people. After all, humans
tend to naturally interact with other human-like entities; the interface may
well be hardwired in our brains. Their
human-like, robot bodies will allow them to seamlessly blend into environments
already designs for humans.’
Saturday September 1
3:37 PM ET
Physicist Warns
Humans About A.I.
BERLIN (AP) - People
get ready: the machines are coming.
That's the word from
famed British physicist Stephen Hawking, who says if humans hope to compete
with the rising tide of artificial intelligence, they'll have to improve
through genetic engineering.
In an interview
released Saturday with the newsmagazine Focus, Hawking said science could
increase the complexity of DNA and ``improve'' human beings.
He conceded that it
would be a long process, ``but we should follow this road if we want biological
systems to remain superior to electronic ones.''
``In contrast with
our intellect, computers double their performance every 18 months,'' he added.
``So the danger is real that they could develop intelligence and take over the
world.''
``We must develop as
quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between
brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence
rather than opposing it,'' Hawking said.
Using the [T]
relativity and the [HX] chemical assembly programming language plus other of
its social meta-linguistic models within its knowledge representation, the
[TREES] expert system will enable a new autonomous robotics to supercede the failures
in 20th century explorations in Artificial Intelligence.