Updated: January 2008
Q1. You were an AI researcher - what do you make of Artificial Intelligence?
Answer. I was active in AI research during the 1980s. I was quite well-known in the UK/European AI community but in retrospect I think I made a terrible colleague. I was quite intolerant of most of the work that was being done and made no secret of it.
My first published paper - at IJCAI in 1983.
Someone at the time compared most AI to the contribution that making paper aeroplanes makes towards a theory of aerodynamics. The idea is that just because you can write a program to replicate some micro-behaviour doesn't necessarily mean you have any handle on understanding it.
Marvin Minsky was alleged to have said recently that AI had made no real progress since the 1970s. It's scary how little we know, we don't even know what the fundamental problem is, let alone how to solve it. The fundamental problem is not likely to be "intelligence" per se. So what has worked?
Designing and building systems which can execute a perceive-process-act cycle in fulfilment of arbitrary "missions" (including homeostasis) has been a major sub-project of AI. This research "thread" has had to tour such areas of unorthodoxy as neural nets and reactive systems but there have been major success, often in areas of interest to NASA and the military. "AI" has paradoxically been quite successful at solving computer science problems. However, no-one has any idea how a physical system can experience pain, for example (affective, not cognitive). A dogma of AI is that if we had a mathematical theory of how an agent could experience pain, then a program instantiating such a theory would, when it ran as a computer process, actually experience pain. By hypothesis, such a computer process could be tortured (this is a plot device in the SF novel "The War in 2020" - Ralph Peters, 1991). I guess most of us just shake our heads at our lack of any intuition as to how that could work. Ditto for whatever we think occurs when we consider ourselves to be conscious entities. My childhood illusion that the human race has a basic handle on all the obvious problems continues to generate genuine visceral surprise that we still just don't know.
My methodology for my own AI research was always something like this: "what set of ecological problems 200,000 years ago in Africa created conditions which selected for the cognitive-affective solution which human beings exemplify", or if you like, "what was the problem to which we are a solution". This poses the problem in a "requirements-implementation" paradigm, or more formally the paradigm of setting up an axiomatic theory and looking at instances of models which satisfy it (models which are architectural/automata-theoretic in character, making explicit the architectural principles underlying human psychology). Evolutionary psychology is a lot more popular now than it was back in the 1980s.
My Ph. D. research applied this methodology in the case of simpler autonomous agents, but I failed to get a handle on how to model a deeper level of complexity - something along the lines of problem-solving communicating agents, but nothing seemed very compelling, and then I had to give it up when the organisation I worked for (STL) was acquired by Nortel. A lot of people think that human psychology has a layered character, with the pre-human "unconscious" overlaid with more symbolic neo-cortical functions - the "triune brain". I basically buy this, but I have yet to see formal models which either convincingly "reproduce the phenomena" such as the awfulness of pain, or ground such models in an ecological framework. As the next question (Q2) implies, I think that the Jungian theory of human psychological type has some interesting insights (see "Evolutionary Psychiatry" - Stevens & Price, 2001). However, any formalisation will be extremely challenging.
Q2. You have been a fan of Jungian type theory, Myers-Briggs and all that - why?
Answer: Because it mostly works, and because the Jungian theory, as further developed by Isabel Briggs Myers, generates real practical insights.
Let me try four stereotypes on you.
People are not all alike. In Keirsey's theory of temperaments, the four stereotypical types above are respectively
Most knowledge-workers have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test and were allocated their four letter code and a personality profile. Type your four letters into Google and several profile pages will come up. When I took the test in the early-nineties, the consultant told the group that there is much more to the MBTI than meets the eye. It has taken me ten years elapsed time, several years of research and considerable thought to appreciate the truth of that.
In the United States, where we spent mid-2001 to early-2003, most professionals knew their MBTI type. I even attended a Roman Catholic Mass where the presiding priest, in his address, mentioned the MBTI jokingly in passing. The military, as well as enterprises, like it, which I present to the court as evidence in favour of the proposition that it's doing something right!
The theory structures personality in terms of perceptual processes (input) and judgemental processes (output). Either can be dominant, and either can be introverted or extraverted, with the other one opposite.
Source: http://www.uwsp.edu/education/wkirby/ntrprsnl/types.htm
Perception comes in two forms, based on concrete representations (S) or on concepts (N). Judgement also comes in two forms, based on objective (logical) consistency (T) or on management of human relationships (F). There are lots of binary choices here, which is why you end up with 16 types.
Speaking personally, I present as an INTP, which means that my dominant process is introverted "thinking" (i.e. a striving for logical consistency - T), my auxiliary function is extraverted iNtuition (showing a creative, lateral-thinking face to the world - N). In temperament terms, I'm a Rational.
This just skates over the surface of the theory of course. If you're interested there are plenty of books, and even the mouse-mat shown below.
The Deeper Reality
The standard academic model analyses personality in terms of the 'big 5' traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism - OCEAN. This is well described by Pierce and Jane Howard here (converts from MBTI although their critique is not altogether convincing). This structure is based on statistical analysis of clustering derived from a lexical database of personality terms assembled from dictionaries. It is not an architectural theory, and it is not rooted in any analysis of human beings as social animals living in a richly-structured natural world - an analysis which would be rooted in evolutionary theory.
The new revolution in evolutionary psychology has generated exciting insights (e.g. the theory of sociopathy as an adaptation), but has not yet accomplished a rounded theory of personality (which has to account for systematic personality differences as well as the nature of human personality in general).
Jung's theory of Psychological Type, as developed in the Myers-Briggs tradition, is I think, best understood as an architectural theory (although there is debate about this). The motivation for the 16 types is based on differing strategies for dealing with the natural and social world, although this is discussed very informally in the literature. There has been little attempt to ground Jung in an evolutionary framework, although Evolutionary Psychiatry (Stevens & Price, Brunner-Routledge, 2001) is very interesting.
To make progress we need more data. I expect the confluence of the evolutionary psychology research paradigm plus further brain scan research will transform the field over the next decade. The Jungian school will then be seen as the Newtonian mechanics of the field - a serviceable approximation to a deeper reality.
I have written more about this in the chapter of my book called "Choosing the Right People" - see the appendix at the end.
To further elaborate a point made there, the correlation matrix between OCEAN traits and Jungian "dimensions" at the phenomenological level (i.e. the primary data obtained by tests and observations) suggests that they stand or fall together as classification schema. Mathematically, it's similar to how a given vector space can be spanned by two different basis sets (reference).
Q3. You were a communist in your youth?
Answer. I recall being an anti-authoritarian teenager. My school, Bristol Grammar, considered itself a minor public school in character - I guess I never bought into that, working-class kid that I was. I played guitar in a band in my first year at Warwick University, but also attended soc-soc meetings (socialist society). I was amazed that I had no idea what they were talking about! The vocabulary and acronyms, as well as some of the views about the Soviet Union and China were just totally new. Still, I studied hard [INTPs can't bear not to be competent - see the previous question!].
I joined the International Marxist Group youth organisation towards the end of my first year, and the IMG proper a little later. At that time, the IMG was the British Section of the Fourth International and Tariq Ali was one of the leaders. He was generally considered rather emotional and not a truly rigorous thinker, and the real leader was a guy called John Ross (currently economics advisor to Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London!). We did the usual stuff: endless demos, lots of planning, selling the paper. I have a collection of "war stories", like the day we nearly occupied the Chilean Embassy (sic!).
I dropped out of the IMG (now the "International Socialist Group") when I was around 26. I guess the whole thing had ceased to be a novelty and somewhere I had lost momentum. I probably still accepted Trotskyism as a broadly correct social theory until my early thirties. The definitive end of that view was when the Soviet Union crumbled to capitalism. A leader writer in, I think, the Guardian, wrote that the fall of "communism" (Stalinism as we thought of it) would definitely sink Trotskyism too, as Trotskyism was sustained by its belief that a "workers state in transition to socialism" was the inevitable successor to Stalinism in Russia. Tariq Ali reported in his obituary of Ernest Mandel, the leader of the International, that Mandel saw the event too as postponing communism in the classical Marx-Lenin sense for "500 years".
I think Marxism impressed me (as it did a lot of people) because methodologically it analysed societal "structure" as routinised, stabilised patterns of human relationships. This just seemed a deeper analysis than the superficial model-building of "bourgeois social science". However, such an ethnographic model of society is no longer the sole ownership of Marxism. It turns out that the tradition of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky conflates a number of trends into one overarching scheme, which is empirically not correct. But it is wonderfully sophisticated and complex! I still recall "History and Class Consciousness" (Georg Lukacs, Merlin 1991) as one of the most inspiring books I ever read.
I have a familiar problem with politics. People take gratuitous moral stands. I tend to see the global human condition more as the dynamics of particularist social groupings, some of which are organised states, some more informal, each expressing their own interests in cooperation and/or conflict with the rest. None of the groups with real power and responsibility take a universalist view of their mission. Yet a partial view by its very nature devalues the interests and even the humanity of groups which "get in the way". This is the slippery slope which can lead to arbitrary bad outcomes for the "bad guys", and interest groups tend to be rather selective about which other groups they choose to demonise. The Nazis always make an easy target because they were pretty bad demonisers in their own right, and they're not around any more in any strength to argue back, or to be accommodated. Other bad things have happened since the 1940s.
It's easy to see why it's in the nature of specific power groups to ruthlessly pursue their own interests, cloaking their self-interest in a spurious cloak of universality. It's less easy to see what can effectively be done about it, except at the margins. See question 9 below.
Q4. Physics has been a central interest?
Answer. There is a family story that I wrote to Patrick Moore, noted TV Astronomer, when I was ten years old asking him about time-dilation in Special Relativity. He is alleged to have written back stating that the theory was rather new and difficult to understand. This is absolutely true, although we have lost the letter.
I went to Warwick University to become a theoretical physicist. I was completely up for mathematically hitting Quantum Mechanics and Relativity: cosmology was my great interest. Instead, I found myself measuring the heat loss of fluids running through pipes. I despaired, and became a refugee in Philosophy and Politics, joined the IMG (see previous question) and duly got chucked out of Warwick at the end of my second year.
When I was in the sixth form at Bristol Grammar doing Maths and Physics, my much-respected Maths teacher told us that mathematicians cared about the structure and integrity of the mathematics; physicists had a utilitarian, toolbox approach to maths. They just grabbed any techniques which got them the right answer, and never cared about whether they were violating the applicability constraints of the techniques - that is, if they even knew they existed!
I cared, because my motivation for studying physics was to understand how the universe worked and was put together. The mathematical structures were a proxy for the universe itself. A cookbook approach was hopeless, because it violated explanatory power in favour of a black-box preoccupation with getting the "right answers" via mathematical hacks. In particular, I had real problems with the usage of the real numbers.
Mathematical theories couched in the form of functions over R**4 (three spatial dimensions + a time dimension) "explained" the universe in terms of the dynamics of qualities referenced to a four-dimensional real coordinate system. (Quantum mechanics uses complex infinite dimensional configuration spaces, which does not at all alter the point following). Such coordinate systems are ontologically prior to any phenomena. However, the universe is intrinsic - it doesn't depend on us existing (or methodologically shouldn't!). The coordinate systems are an artefact. So such theories could never model the real universe, but could only correlate observations made of it. My other concern was the denseness and completeness of the real numbers. Too many point actual infinities. This seemed unrealistic - space-time surely couldn't be like that!. However, if you try to do calculus on restricted sets such as the Rationals (Q), it doesn't work, so I felt completely confused. I found it impossible to communicate these difficulties, and they did not appear in the literature back in the 1970s.
These days, however, I'm a little more sophisticated about mathematical physics, and have recently (2008) restarted studying physics with the Open University. My objective is to spend as long as it takes to get my head around general relativity and quantum field theory, and to this end I've mapped out a study schedule as follows.
Then a move to the maths MSc programme, concentrating on mathematical physics modules.
One of the irritating things about the OU's maths MSc programme is that it's almost perversely unsuitable for students of quantum mechanics. I quote from a student review and faculty reply on the M826 website.
Student "I didn't enjoy this course at all, and spent most of it having no idea what was going on. I chose it because I'd read (in Gowers' "A Brief Introduction to Mathematics") that Hilbert Spaces are one of the most important things in mathematics. I now more or less know what one is but don't know why they're important. "
Faculty "Perhaps the problem here is that M826 is not meant to be a course on 'Hilbert Spaces and its applications'. Indeed, most of the course concentrates on linear spaces that have quite a general topological structure. Only at the very end does the course focus its attention on Hilbert Spaces. Inevitably there is by then little time to do more than define a Hilbert Space, examine its structure (in cases where it is separable), and characterize its dual spaces.
In particular no attempt is made to examine the rich structure of the spaces of linear operators acting on a Hilbert Space, nor is any attempt made to describe the many applications of such spaces (e.g. to quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, optimisation, partial differential equations, etc.). Clearly anyone who studies the course hoping to learn all about Hilbert Spaces and its applications could be disappointed.
The work in M826 is quite challenging and requires a good working knowledge of basic set theory, vector spaces, analysis and topological (mainly metric) spaces. It is also necessary to have an aptitude for following proofs and understanding how they relate to the result being proved. Anyone whose preference is for less abstract mathematics may find some of the work difficult to follow. "
Perhaps they will have had a change of heart by 2013.
Q5. And Martial Arts: Judo, Karate, a bit of Aikido even and T'ai Chi?
Answer. Well, I started Judo while I was at Bristol Grammar, see the picture (I'm the one in-flight demonstrating the rolling breakfall).
After school I occasionally tried to stay in touch, but to do Judo requires a commitment to train hard and to go through the grading scheme. I could never make Judo the centre of my life. I tried Karate in the early eighties, when I started R&D work in Harlow at STL. But again, it requires extreme physical fitness, and I lacked an inner incentive to do that. More recently I studied T'ai Chi.
Q6. Why are you doing telecoms consultancy?
Answer. Well, I could echo Willie Sutton and agree that that's where the money is!
Beneath the surface, there is an intellectual continuity between computer science, IT, telecoms and strategic marketing which forms a path for my career. After my teenage obsession with theoretical physics, and my excursion into Marxist politics in my twenties, my thirties was the period when I discovered the wonders of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. This may sound weird, but the really fascinating areas of computer science for me are in programming language semantics, computational logic and mathematical logic itself (proof and model theory). This was my Ph.D. topic of course, as well as the subject of my completed first degree (with the Open University). So when I had a chance to do software research at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow in 1982, I was over the moon - paradise!
Telecoms was what I did in my forties. I first learned about telecoms when STL was acquired by Bell-Northern Research (BNR) in 1990 (BNR was the R&D arm of Northern Telecom and Bell Canada). From computer science I went through a whole new learning curve looking at the design of SDH and fibre systems, Frame and ATM networks, then voice and IN network design, and finally IP network architecture, design and engineering. This was high-touch consultancy, leveraging the vast experience of BNR in North America to advise new carriers in Eastern and Western Europe how to build modern networks. My first encounter with customer-facing consultancy and it worked for me.
Since leaving Nortel and setting up Interweave Consulting, I have had the experience of freelance consulting, which is a personal growth experience when it comes to personally carrying out sales and marketing! For my current activities see my home page.
Q7. Despite the best efforts of your wife and teachers, you remain obsessed with Science-Fiction. Why?
Answer. This is going to be a piece of fandom, I'm afraid.
I grew up in my teens with Asimov (Foundation series - the first three), Heinlein (Starship Troopers), Clarke (various). I still remember the yellow-jacketed Gollancz SF collection in my local library in Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol.
To be brutally honest, what works for me is a good plot, characters I can feel some empathy with and can believe in, something military and high-tech, and some completely awe-inspiring ideas. This is a multi-pass filter, and only a few folks get through. Greg Egan's Quarantine and Permutation City are particularly good. Dan Simmons's four Hyperion books are stupendous. Greg Bear's Eon and Eternity are well up in my "best ever" list.
Other people I read are Iain M. Banks for his awesome intelligence as well as literary excellence; Peter F. Hamilton for his well-crafted opera; Neal Stephenson of course, even for his baroque cycle :-) ; Paul J. McAuley for Fairyland; Richard Morgan for his extraordinary grasp of low-life ultra-violence in Altered Carbon and its sequels. I really rated Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman, and of course the first two or three of the Ender books by Orson Scott Card.
Q8. Have you ever considered writing a book?
Answer. “So, you’re a writer,” says the brain surgeon, as the author is wheeled in for surgery. “you know, I’m thinking of writing a book when I retire.”
“That’s a coincidence,” replies the author, “when I retire, I’m thinking of taking up brain surgery.”
Confession. I have written a novel. The experience is interesting - you look at other people's work with a new eye, seeing the plot devices and the proximate reasons for introducing certain characters and events. You see the plumbing behind the literature. Everyone should try it and learn.
My novel is science-fiction - called "Exopsychology". The plot is that an asteroid has been set on a collision course with earth, and the hero, a psychologist, works on psychological warfare strategies against the hostile aliens. It got rejected by one agent, but that's not unusual. I didn't resubmit it because I was dissatisfied with it myself.
Writing is harder than it looks, as the joke at the beginning of this answer suggests. My problem was that I had lots of really interesting ideas I wanted to write about: alien motivation; the Fermi paradox; variant brain structures in aliens (alternatives to the triune brain - see Q1); methods of psychological warfare; as well as the usual space-opera furniture of hi-tech warfare. These preoccupations sit uneasily with character-development and plot, unless handled with consummate skill. Plot is fundamental - without a good page-turning story the thing is doomed. Some authors' stories are woven from the magic of character alone: however, that's a stretch for the kind of people who write science-fiction. So in my own estimation, my story has poor characterisation and a plot which fails to smoothly build: too much interjection of 'really interesting ideas' which simply slow the pace down.
One day, when I have time, I will ruthlessly prune the ideas which don't support the plot, and then complete the plot development (which I was hoping to put into book two!) so that the story ends coherently.
My book "Business Strategies for the Next-Generation Network" was published in December 2006 and can be read on my website here. I tried to ground the technical ideas in personal experiences, as amusing and interesting as possible, and to adopt an emotional tone: adjectives such as sardonic and scathing come to mind - there have been so many failures in telecoms. Please feel free to buy it!
Answer. I interpret the question as meaning what ethically should you do, moment by moment. Let's sneak up on the problem.
What is the purpose of an animal (say a mouse in the wilderness)? It has a natural design which has been selected to keep it alive until it can successfully reproduce. That is all there is to it - no higher purpose can be detected. If the mouse had a choice, which it doesn't, we would advise it to act according to its nature, which is to do those things which maximally support its ability to be an ancestor.
What is the purpose of a human being? Like the mouse, we are constructed to a design which optimises our ability to be ancestors. However, we are social creatures, and, we cannot survive and be reproductively successful except in social contexts created by the social groups to which we are affiliated. These groups assign roles to us, and within these groups we are obligated to participate in role-negotiation, objective setting, planning and execution in a way which furthers the overall interests of the group and our own role within it.
This behavioural framework of social interdependence was presumably selected for when we lived in extended kin groups, and subsequently as we lived in social groups where we were non-related. Robert Trivers' theory of "reciprocal altruism" has a lot more on this, in "Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert L. Trivers" (2002).
Evolutionary theory doesn't have a problem if my social group wipes out your social group (this was the whole point of Trivers' analysis), so applying an unmediated universalistic ethic can't be right: a critique of pacifism. Within the group, however, skillful diplomacy and the ability to build strong consensus are clearly pro-survival. The earliest religions seem to have been programs for cementation of social bonds within social groups riven by discord. These religions were given a universalistic spin (e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, Islam) when they became the property of empires which needed legitimacy. Note that for these religions (possibly excepting Buddhism), universality stopped at the boundaries of the empire, where the pagan or infidel was encountered, and slaughtered.
My personal conclusion is that we should do those things which are in conformity with our natural design. Namely, act to maximise our abilities as human beings to live and work effectively together as one community, or an alliance of communities. Because we are inter-dependent, this is the best outcome for all our long-term interests, when it can be made to work. But sometimes you have to choose which group to align with, and then whack the other guy. However you call it, you will then just have to live or die with the consequences. The best idea is probably to choose to support those groups which (in your opinion) hold out the best hope for long-term human social progress - where you can identify which that is!
When I was doing AI (Artificial Intelligence) and involved in agent theory, I was struck by the following foundational issue: researchers usually decided arbitrarily which problem their system was going to address. It might be successfully stacking bricks on a table, playing chess, or constructing scene description from primary visual sensor data. Obviously the problem selected had a very considerable effect on the kind of systems and solutions generated. To get away from this inherently arbitrary problem-selection process, some researchers cycled back to considering homeostatic systems by analogy with biological systems, where the motivation is to survive (so as to have descendants). This was in fact the shape of the pre-AI research programmes in the golden age of cybernetics (e.g. Introduction to Cybernetics, W. Ross Ashby, 1956 - one of my early heroes).
Most biological systems are set endless tasks by the environment. By contrast, some humans have the luxury of being quite well-off, and have no immediate survival problems to address. How should they spend their time when all courses of action appear to be pointless? Wealthy and dysfunctional film stars often provide examples for analysis, as well as the recent angst expressed by the remaining dot-com billionaires as to how much to leave in their Wills to their offspring.
I am struck by how many people invest their lives in their enthusiasms (what we used to call "hobbies"). I am not the first person to observe that all enthusiasms seem slightly odd to those who don't endorse them. In the best of cases, people can make their lives into an art-form through the level of skill and accomplishment they develop in their special areas of interest. This implies that culturally-enriching the common human condition is as much a purpose of life as the more mundane team-activities which over the millennia kept our ancestors physically alive. What is less aligned with our underlying nature are such opt-outs as suicide, or the social-suicide of withdrawal from all social activity, where this cannot be placed in a broader social context. Crudely, to do these things pointlessly is, in the microeconomics jargon, shirking.
Clare and myself enrolled on a week-long hang-gliding course in Derbyshire in the late-eighties. What the brochure had omitted to tell us was that only one day in two is suitable for training: usually the wind is either non-existent or too strong to get out and fly. When you can go out, early training involves running down a steep hill as fast as you can. You are holding a rope attached to the wing of the hang-glider with a fellow novice trying to fly tethered. You often fall over, sliding and tumbling through cowpats. We did not manage to free fly.
That was it for Clare, but I persevered and eventually accomplished the required three flights from the top of a rather steep hill, landing successfully each time. When I received my pilot licence, I told the instructor I would never fly a hang-glider again. I had already concluded that they were heavy, uncomfortable to fly, very expensive and inappropriate to the flat part of England where we were living (Essex). Instead my heart was set on paragliding.
My local paragliding club was based at North Weald airfield, near Harlow, where I worked at the time. The launch procedure was rather primitive. You stood, harnessed up, with the parachute held behind you like a wall by two of your fellow pilots. A cable was attached at chest height to your harness, and stretched ahead about a 1,000 feet to a jeep, tiny in the middle distance. When all was ready, a bat was waved and the jeep floored the accelerator. You were dragged forwards and into the air at 60 miles per hour, fighting the buffeting all the way up as you hit 750 feet above the airfield. The jeep stopped and you pulled the quick release and watched the cable fall away.
You now had a couple of minutes to fly around, pull stunts like stalls or centrifugal turns which swing you out like a merry-go-round, losing height until you lined up for the landing. It was fun.
After I had my paraglider pilot's licence for towed-launch, I went to the hills in Wales to get my licence for paraglider hill flying. That was fun too, and more varied as you could fly along a ridge line on the uplift, waving to walkers and gently adjusting to the way the lift varied along clefts and outcrops.
While paragliding was fun, it was scary in anticipation. I think everyone was rather quiet as we were in the truck driving out to the mountains - we knew too much about the failure modes, not all of which could be anticipated (air is invisibly unpredictable, and a canopy collapse close to the ground is unrecoverable).
I eventually gave up paragliding when I got used to it. Think diminishing returns vs. the disutility of spending a whole Sunday away from my growing family (you could read this as guilt eventually trumping self-indulgent selfishness). You can't dabble with flying: without constant practice you make mistakes, and the sport is unforgiving.
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