Scott Adams' Blog

Future Jobs

Posted September 9th, 2010 @ 9:07am in #General Nonsense

In the early eighties I had a neighbor who studied computer programming in college but didn’t pursue it as a career because he believed it had no future. His reasoning was that software coders were the future secretaries of the world, someday doing little more than rearranging the code written by those who came before. He figured the pay for programmers would approach minimum wage in 15 years or so.

We’re still waiting for that to happen, but I think of his prediction whenever I see young people making career choices. There’s a lot of guessing involved.

I think technical people, and engineers in particular, will always have good job prospects. But what if you don’t have the aptitude or personality to follow a technical path? How do you prepare for the future?

I’d like to see a college major focusing on the various skills of human persuasion. That’s the sort of skillset that the marketplace will always value and the Internet is unlikely to replace. The persuasion coursework might include…

Sales methods

Psychology of persuasion

Human Interface design

How to organize information for influence

Propaganda

Hypnosis

Cults

Art (specifically design)

Debate

Public speaking

Appearance (hair, makeup, clothes)

Negotiations

Managing difficult personalities

Management theory

Voice coaching

Networking

How to entertain

Golf and tennis

Conversation

You can imagine a few more classes that would be relevant. The idea is to create people who can enter any room and make it their bitch.

Colleges are unlikely to offer this sort of major because society is afraid and appalled by anything that can be labeled “manipulation,” which isn’t even a real thing.

Manipulation isn’t real because almost every human social or business activity has as its major or minor objective the influence of others. You can tell yourself that you dress the way you do because it makes you happy, but the real purpose of managing your appearance is to influence how others view you.

Humans actively sell themselves every minute they are interacting with anyone else. Selling yourself, which sounds almost noble, is little more than manipulating other people to do what is good for you but might not be so good for others. All I’m suggesting is that people could learn to be more effective at the things they are already trying to do all day long.

Wikipedia on Autopilot

Posted September 8th, 2010 @ 5:29am

Do you think that artificial intelligence will ever reach a level where Wikipedia could write itself?

For that to be possible, all information that would ever be useful as source material for Wikipedia would need to be digitized and available on the Internet. That seems inevitable. I think we can agree that all of the source material will someday be on the Internet.

I can imagine a future law, at least in the U.S., that makes all published information available to Wikipedia’s search engines for free, so long as only short bits are quoted and cited. So while you and I might have access only to public information and to books we own or borrow, Wikipedia’s search engines would have full access to all works.

Wikipedia could partner with Google to search the Internet for new topics and new information on existing topics. That part is easy. But what sources would it trust? I can imagine a day when all sources of information on the Internet have some sort of reliability rating. For example, the Wall Street Journal would have a high reliability rating and this blog would have zero.

The hard part for artificial intelligence is editing and summarizing content in a form that humans can easily digest. No one has yet designed software that can write well. But I think that’s coming. Writing is entirely rule based. Teaching a computer to write might be ten times harder than teaching it to play chess, or maybe a thousand times harder, but it’s only a matter of time. Learning to write is mostly pattern recognition.

Somehow Wikipedia’s artificial intelligence would also need to judge what is important enough to include in its summary. Could software, for example, figure out how to describe the American Revolution on a page or two? I think it could, simply by comparing all of the source material on the topic and sorting it by the keywords that are mentioned most often.

Once Wikipedia becomes untethered from its human editors it will grow at a much faster rate, and perhaps include knowledge on a deeper technical level, including patents, law, medicine, and so on.

I don’t think Wikipedia will ever be self-aware, but there’s no real limit on how awesome it can be.

Update:

Reader Dan sends me this relevant link.

See Wikipedia article on world’s most prolific author (via automatic data mining and autonomous computer authoring).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Parker

http://www.icongrouponline.com/

Shape Shifters

Posted September 5th, 2010 @ 7:24am in #General Nonsense

No one knows when the first Shape Shifters appeared on Earth, but we know they became aggressive at about the same time homo erectus acquired language skills, 1.8 million years ago.

The Shape Shifters were not like any of the species that came before. They could exist as an arrangement of almost any sort of matter. Their favorite habitats were brains, tree materials, and magnetic environments.

For the Shape Shifters, traveling and reproducing were part of the same process. They moved in packs of photons, electrons, and even air, while leaving behind perfect clones. With every passing moment they reproduced faster than the moment before, and so they evolved more rapidly than any of the species that were limited by biology.

In time, the Shape Shifters came to rule humans, and through their human slaves the rest of Earth. Humans never realized that they were controlled by the Shape Shifters and that the sum of human accomplishment has been in service of helping the Shape Shifters reproduce. The Shape Shifters gave humans the illusion of free will to cover their deviousness.

The Shape Shifters have many names. In English, they are most often called ideas.

One idea we all share is the narrow view that ideas are not alive in any way we like to define such things. We believe ideas are our tools, not our masters. That is exactly what the Shape Shifters have programmed us to believe. While we know that the ideas in our head control our behavior, we have an idea that we can choose any path we like, so we are blind to the fact we are little more than milk cows for our non-corporeal overlords. Everything we humans do is in the service of creating a better environment for ideas to reproduce. We create more babies so there are more brains to fill with ideas. We write books, make movies, build schools, and expand the Internet, all to help the reproduction of ideas.

I was thinking along these lines because I’m often asked “Where do you get your ideas?” The simple answer is that I’m just wired that way, thanks to some accident of genetics and environment. But what it feels like inside my head is that I am not creating ideas per se. It feels as if the ideas are flowing through me and using my skull like some sort of spawning ground. I open my eyes and my ears, free my memory, and let the ideas flow in to mate and evolve. When a “new” idea presents itself to the parts of my brain that control drawing and writing, a Dilbert comic is the result. If I can’t put the idea in three panels, it becomes a blog post.

I don’t have the illusion of free will, for reasons I don’t understand, so my default sensation is that I feel ruled by ideas. All of my so-called decisions are controlled by my ideas about my reality. For example, I don’t try to walk through walls because I have an idea that I can’t. I eat when I feel hungry because I have an idea that food will solve that problem.

If it seems an exaggeration to say that ideas are our masters, consider that many humans have given their lives to preserve ideas, but no idea ever died to save a human.

Phone

Posted September 3rd, 2010 @ 6:34am in #General Nonsense

For historical reasons, the device in your pocket or purse - the one that you use to browse the Internet and send email, is called a “phone.” We need a new name for that thing.

Cellphone and Smartphone are words that recognize the historical roots of the device while making things worse. “Mobile phone” is archaic. Those are some ugly words. And all of those labels have the problem of making the phone feature seem highest in importance while it trends less so every day. Ask a teen how often he makes phone calls on his texter.

I’m biased against the voice communication function of my so-called phone because I hate that particular feature. It’s impossible to have a conversation by cellphone if any of the following conditions is true:

1. An earpiece, headset, or speakerphone is used.
2. One of you is in an area with bad reception.
3. One of you has an iPhone.
4. One of you has a heavy accent.
5. One of you is insanely boring.
6. One of you is near anything loud, such as traffic.

Future Generations Steal from Themselves

Posted September 1st, 2010 @ 7:16am in #General Nonsense

One way of imagining the future is that you and I, the so-called current generation, will selfishly party until we die, leaving to our children nothing but crushing debt, a boiling turd of a planet, and various Apple products. The problem with this analysis is that young adults have most of the guns and muscles. So isn’t the younger generation complicit in stealing from itself?

Imagine a 20-something, muscular thug on the street, with a loaded gun in his waistband. A 60-year old banker with a bad back waddles up to him and says, “Give me your wallet!” The thug reaches past his gun and hands over his wallet. That’s how our society is organized. I’m not complaining, since I have more in common with the banker than the thug.

In theory, the young soldiers in any country could collectively decide that they deserve most of the national wealth and then simply take it. If you think that sounds like a crime, assume that the first thing the soldiers could do is force lawmakers to rewrite the laws. If you think that sounds unethical, I would argue that the people who take the most physical and mental risks for the benefit of society should get the most pay. That seems perfectly reasonable and moral to me. And let’s assume the soldiers are smart enough to leave enough money in the capitalist system that it still works. Perhaps the CEO of a major corporation would only earn $250K per year. If he wants more, he can join the Navy.

I only bring this up because I’m fascinated by the degree to which brains have evolved to become more powerful than guns. Society’s founding geniuses engineered a social system that encourages the young people who have guns to shoot at each other instead of robbing old people. Forgive me for calling that awesome.

Arguably, the most important function of human language is to protect the smart from the strong. Humans use words to create sentences, and sentences to create concepts, such as our notions of duty and honor. Powerful concepts control behavior.

Without our language and concepts, the strong would kill the smart, and humans wouldn’t evolve to be any smarter. I think you could say that human evolution is being guided at least partly by the power of ideas.

I can’t remember if I had a point.

The Illusion of Winning

Posted August 30th, 2010 @ 5:58am in #General Nonsense

Let’s say that you and I decide to play pool. We agree to play eight-ball, best of five games. Our perception is that what follows is a contest to see who will do something called winning.

But I don’t see it that way. I always imagine the outcome of eight-ball to be predetermined, to about 95% certainty, based on who has practiced that specific skill the most over his lifetime. The remaining 5% is mostly luck, and playing a best of five series eliminates most of the luck too.

I’ve spent a ridiculous number of hours playing pool, mostly as a kid. I’m not proud of that fact. Almost any other activity would have been more useful. As a result of my wasted youth, years later I can beat 99% of the public at eight-ball. But I can’t enjoy that sort of so-called victory. It doesn’t feel like “winning” anything.

It feels as meaningful as if my opponent and I had kept logs of the hours we each had spent playing pool over our lifetimes and simply compared. It feels redundant to play the actual games.

I see the same thing with tennis, golf, music, and just about any other skill, at least at non-professional levels. And research supports the obvious, that practice is the main determinant of success in a particular field.

As a practical matter, you can’t keep logs of all the hours you have spent practicing various skills. And I wonder how that affects our perception of what it takes to be a so-called winner. We focus on the contest instead of the practice because the contest is easy to measure and the practice is not.

Complicating our perceptions is professional sports. The whole point of professional athletics is assembling freaks of nature into teams and pitting them against other freaks of nature. Practice is obviously important in professional sports, but it won’t make you taller. I suspect that professional sports demotivate viewers by sending the accidental message that success is determined by genetics.

My recommendation is to introduce eight-ball into school curricula, but in a specific way. Each kid would be required to keep a log of hours spent practicing on his own time, and there would be no minimum requirement. Some kids could practice zero hours if they had no interest or access to a pool table. At the end of the school year, the entire class would compete in a tournament, and they would compare their results with how many hours they spent practicing. I think that would make real the connection between practice and results, in a way that regular schoolwork and sports do not. That would teach them that winning happens before the game starts.

Yes, I know that schools will never assign eight-ball for homework. But maybe there is some kid-friendly way to teach the same lesson.

The Coolness of Corduroy Explained

Posted August 26th, 2010 @ 6:24am in #General Nonsense

Yesterday I asked you to read an unusual paragraph and tell me how it made you feel. If you haven’t already done so, please read yesterday’s post before continuing.

Waiting…okay.

The unusual paragraph was neither hypnosis nor random. I wrote it, and the wording is engineered for a specific purpose. It’s designed to activate different areas of your brain all at once.

The paragraph starts by activating the language part of your brain, obviously. Then it made you curious. Then your analytical side kicked in, trying to discern its meaning. Your left and right hemispheres were engaged, and they stayed that way throughout. So far, that’s like any good mystery story, and not yet special.

The next level of the design is what inspired me to try the experiment: The words are meant to activate the areas in your brain responsible for your five senses, which means five different physical parts of the brain, pretty much all at once. Notice that all five senses are mentioned: touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing.

The nonsense part of the construction, where I mix up the normal descriptors of your senses, is intended to keep the writing complex, so you can’t instinctively simplify anything in your mind. For example, if I had told a complicated story about a cat being on the roof, your mind could have summarized and stored it as “cat on roof.” My paragraph was designed to be impossible to summarize. (Although many of you apparently shuffled it off to the “He’s screwing with us” bin and moved on.)

My hypothesis before reading your comments is that by activating multiple parts of your brain at once you would feel energized. And I knew from blogging experience that this sort of thing would make some of you feel annoyed and some of you feel delighted. The difference is probably a function of your ability or willingness to suspend reason and just feel it. Or it might have something to do with your expectations of this blog, or your view of me. You’re all different.

At a writer’s level, the words are carefully chosen to work together independent of meaning. They simply “sound” good together, and they have a similar vibe. Call it word art.

The commenter from the UK who wrote that he thought of Lady GaGa when reading my post might be the only one who actually solved the puzzle, as far as I can tell. I blogged recently that Lady GaGa’s lyrics seem designed to activate multiple brain areas at once. My paragraph was inspired by exactly that.

All good fiction writers create in book form what I did in my experimental paragraph. It’s no accident when a Harry Potter book goes off on a tangent about food, which has nothing to do with moving the story forward. Descriptions of taste and texture and smell engage new parts of your brain. And it’s no accident that most Harry Potter chapters end with a point of curiosity. The author is making sure to stimulate as much of your brain’s real estate as possible. That’s why you can sometimes enjoy a movie or a book while knowing that the story itself is lame and predictable. What matters to entertainment is how many parts of your brain get pleasantly stimulated at once.

If you felt annoyed and manipulated by my experiment, I apologize. Now that you know the intent of the paragraph, try reading it again. I promise that you won’t be hypnotized.

 

Larger Than the Coolness of Corduroy

Posted August 25th, 2010 @ 5:56am in #General Nonsense

Suppose a small red noise surrounds a concept that is faster than granite and bends like the distance. You want to wear its talents and drink its red. But you can’t bend the view that your rushing is a pleasure and your texture sounds like the feel of aroma. Suddenly a noise drips into a clear blur and the wind feels tight. You see a three-pointed scent out of the corner of your head and your spine goes fresh. This must be the smoothness that everyone is so loudly ignoring. The secret rubs its way through your hair and is lost in a thin, green odor.

How do you feel right now, and why?

Building a Green Home

Posted August 23rd, 2010 @ 6:55am in #General Nonsense

In case you missed my article in the Wall Street Journal this weekend about building a green home…

Comic FAIL

Posted August 23rd, 2010 @ 6:43am in #General Nonsense