Promising, but not good enough.

Long version:

Unreliable modem and/or signal. Slow speeds when connected. This weird mysterious downward spiral of speed until the 4G connection is gone.

Listen, I wanted to like it. For the amount I’m paying Comcast, I would have had home internet with true unlimited usage and a WiMAX USB modem for my laptop. I got it today a little after lunch and plugged that sucker in. And that’s when the problems started.

The modem has five little lights to indicate the signal strength similar to a mobile phone. With one exception, I could only get three lights on in a reliable manner no matter where in my house I tried. I tried it by every window, exterior wall and high place I could get to. I even tried up in the attic (my freaking hot, hot attic) which has no power receptacle. I used an extension cord. At that point I was just trying to see if I could get more than three little lights (answer: not in the attic). I finally got it to flirt with four, but that was in the garage. Not really a plausible location for placement.

So I set it up high and wired it to my wireless router. Which then precipitated a lot of f’ing around with the settings on both the modem and the router. Did I mention the documentation was a little, tiny booklet? No help at all. No problems, I’ll hop on Google and… crap.

Turns out (and I had to pull out my old rusty skills from my networking days), between the router and the modem I had not only two DHCP servers trying to duke it out, I also had the Battlin’ NATs. A quick configuration change, and all my stuff connected fine. I have to seriously wonder how Joe Average would be able to hook up his little commodity Linksys router to this thing.

After all that, getting online was straight forward. But the heartbreak continued. I went to a couple sites to test the speed of my connection. I was consistently getting between 3 and 5 Mbps. Which is good. For 2001. In comparison, I get 19-21 Mbps on my low tier Comcast connection.

Then the weirdness happened. I started getting 2 Mbps and then 1, and then nothing and I got knocked off. What was happening was I was loosing the the signal over about 45 seconds. It would be at three lights, then it would drop to two, then one, and finally I’d have no lights. After about a minute of no lights it would pop back up to 3 lights and I could connect to the Internet again.

I never did get a chance to test my VPN connection to work, since it was at that point I threw in the towel. Thankfully, there’s a 14 day trial period, but I think my little 90 minute test run is enough.

So, is there any situation where I would want to use Clear WiMAX service? Sure, if the only other service I could get was dial up.

So keep your eye here. There will be something in a couple days.

That is all.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

And yes I’ll be starting this back up shortly.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Things should start settling down in the next few days. I’m working on a new “Shit That Keeps Me Up At Night” essay and that should be up by the end of the week.

‘Nuff said.

Doesn’t get much better than that.

Artificial Intelligence

Let’s be clear here. I’m not referring to systems that act intelligent. Current parlance uses AI as a reference for anything from expert systems to adaptive networks to learning systems. At their core, these systems are simply calculators that act in a purely logical manner. They either solve problems (natural language communication, playing chess, deep simulation) through brute force –faster and more processors– or by employing a set of heuristics to arrive at a solution. Many times these “AIs” can appear quite subtle, but at their core they are still glorified pocket calculators.

To be fair, those systems are essential stepping stones. They help us refine, in an epistemological way, the dead ends, the false premises, and more importantly, the foundations of learning and intelligence.

No, what I’m talking about could perhaps be best described as Synthetic Intelligence. Deep Blue, IBM’s amazing chess playing computer, can defeat a grand-master, but no matter how incredibly it performs at no time can it ever be described as actually “thinking”. At the most basic, it’s simply iterating through nested decision trees and selecting the optimum move as described by its predefined ruleset. Deep Blue is a direct, linear descendant of the clockwork automata of the 18th century.

Conversely, SI would actually be a creation that could think. Cognition. Encountering the unfamiliar and being able to negotiate it using both deductive and inductive reasoning. But SI would be more than that. It’s a leap from Mount Epistemology into the Abyss of Ontology. Would an SI actually be?

Ultimately, the question that arises is whether an SI would be conscious. This is not just self-awareness. Quite a few animals can be described self-aware. My cats, Cecil and Beanie, could be seen as self-aware, but I doubt I could ever convince anyone they are sentient. Which at the heart of the matter is what is meant by consciousness.

Now, I plan on getting into consciousness and emergent behavior in a later post, so we’ll leave that topic for now. For this post, let’s assume that yes, in the future we will create (or be the midwife to) an SI that could be described as a sophont. In my long-winded way, I now raise the big question. The one that keeps me up at night.

When a sentient system arises, will we recognize it for what it is?

We, ourselves, are not isolated systems. We exist in a world where there are countless biological systems that are closely related. I am speaking, of course, of homo sapiens sapiens. We all have a common environment. We, barring developmental or physical impairments, all process it in the same way. We have a common experiential basis for communication. If I say the sky looks blue, you will know that I am talking about the nature of something that is experienced through the sense of sight.

Now think about an SI. It will not really be of the mundane world the way those of us in meat-space are. In fact, it will exist in the Platonic Realm more fully than we ever could. It will reside in a virtual universe where it, in and of itself, is transcendent. An SI’s environment would be the SI itself, encompassing the totally of everything it is. What would be the common experiential ground that we could meet on?

For me, this question will never be anything more than a cause of insomnia. I’m sure the people on the cutting edge of this research could answer that question far more surely than I ever could. I’m a dilettante, nothing more than a dabbler. And that’s all I’ll ever be when it comes to SI, because frankly, the math involved scares the bejesus out of me.