Rep. Rush Holt

USA Today reports:

Two weeks after Watson trounced two Jeopardy! champions during a man-vs.-machine match, Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., beat the computer during a technology exhibition practice game.

“I was proud to hold my own with Watson,” Holt said of his win Monday night. “More importantly, I was proud to join IBM and other members of Congress to highlight the importance of science and math education and research and development.”

The games were meant to emphasize the importance of technology in global competitiveness for American businesses, as well as a need for more focus on math and science education.

It wasn’t Holt’s first time providing answers in the form of a question: The physicist has won Jeopardy! five times in the past.

In the first round, Holt won $6,600; Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-La., earned $1,000; and Watson made $6,200. No one actually received money for the games.

[Continues at USA Today]

Here is another (controversial) chapter from my book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on me, look at The Memory Hole.

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The tattooed numbers on the forearms of people held and killed in Nazi concentration camps have become a chilling symbol of hatred. Victims were stamped with the indelible number in a dehumanizing effort to keep track of them like widgets in the supply chain.

These numbers obviously weren’t chosen at random. They were part of a coded system, with each number tracked as the unlucky person who bore it was moved through the system.

Edwin Black made headlines in 2001 when his painstakingly researched book, IBM and the Holocaust, showed that IBM machines were used to automate the “Final Solution” and the jackbooted takeover of Europe. Worse, he showed that the top levels of the company either knew or willfully turned a blind eye.

A year and a half after that book gave Big Blue a black eye, the author made more startling discoveries. IBM equipment was on-site at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Furthermore:

Thanks to the new discoveries, researchers can now trace how Hollerith numbers assigned to inmates evolved into the horrific tattooed numbers so symbolic of the Nazi era. (Herman Hollerith was the German American who first automated US census information in the late 19th century and founded the company that became IBM. Hollerith’s name became synonymous with the machines and the Nazi “departments” that operated them.) In one case, records show, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz in August 1943 and was assigned a characteristic five digit IBM Hollerith number, 44673. The number was part of a custom punch-card system devised by IBM to track prisoners in all Nazi concentration camps, including the slave labor at Auschwitz. Later in the summer of 1943, the Polish timber merchant’s same five-digit Hollerith number, 44673, was tattooed on his forearm. Eventually, during the summer of 1943, all non- Germans at Auschwitz were similarly tattooed.

The Hollerith numbering system was soon scrapped at Auschwitz because so many inmates
died. Eventually, the Nazis developed their own haphazard system.

Reference: Black, Edwin. “The IBM Link to Auschwitz.” Village Voice, 9 Oct 2002.

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Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know in the next 50 days
under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

While IBM is using the world’s fourth-fastest supercomputer, the same supercomputer is also being used by the Blue Brain project at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. (The head of the project notes the difficulty in “recreating the three-dimensional structure of the brain in a 2-D piece of silicon… It’s not a brain. It’s more of a computer processor that has some of the accelerated parallel computing that the brain has.”)

Meanwhile IBM still hopes “to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging.”

With rapidly accelerating advances in supercomputer architectures, can a simulated human brain be far off?

This week, IBM scientists and their university partners announced a breakthrough in cognitive computing research: the simulation of a brain the size of a cat’s. Using 144 terabytes of RAM and almost 150,000 processors, scientists were able to model a neural cortex with 1 billion simulated neurons and 10 billion synaptic connections. The researchers have subsequently been awarded $16.1 million for completion of phase 0 of DARPA’s SYNAPSE project. The goal of SYNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics), according to DARPA, is “to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels.” In layman’s terms, their goal is to put simulated brains onto microchips.

Sleep easy tonight dogs, for tomorrow...

While a disembodied brain on a microchip is itself interesting as an object of study, the real question is: what happens when this brain is embodied? The unstated intention of the SYNAPSE project is the embodiment of simulated mammalian brains into robots. Before we lose ourselves to rapturous visions of snuggly pet purrbots, we should consider the possible range of behaviors of not only the feline brain, but of mammalian-size brains in general. Cats are predators, as well, after all. The brain controls an animal’s body and behavior, and much of its function would be superfluous to a robotic replica (presumably, for example, these robots would not able to mate and multiply). If individual behaviors can be added and removed willy-nilly, then any given mammalian behavior could be isolated and reproduced onto a microchip. Feline predation is just one possibility, and a scary one at that. Imagine hordes of 14ft-tall steel tigers rampaging through your suburban neighborhood, programmed with insatiable hunger and an instinctual urge to maul and devour bipeds (did I mention that robots can be carnivorous?).

The presentation of this cortical simulation as the equivalent of a feline brain lends an aspect of cutesyness to the project, but this cutesyness, of course, is just a facade. It allows us to envision it as something benign. Right now, there’s no harm in a disembodied brain with no behaviors sitting on a hard drive in Livermore, CA, being trained to distinguish images of corporate logos to the awe of of fawning scientists. But what happens when they let the cat out of the bag (sorry)? Such a virtual brain could be trained with any given set of potentially distasteful behaviors and embodied in a machine of practically limitless size and strength. This is a DARPA project, after all, and as much as we might want snuggly purrbots, we should be aware that what we might get is marauding swarms of giant predatory killbots.

Joe McFall

Joe McFall received his undergraduate degree in Linguistic Anthropology from Emory University in 1998, and went on to receive two Masters degrees, in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, from the University of Georgia in 2005 and 2007. He holds a lifetime interest in culture and counterculture, fringe science, paranormal, alternate history and conspiracy theory. He works as a software developer and lives in Atlanta, GA. He is also, alongside our buddies Raymond Wiley and Austin Gandy, one of the hosts of Disinformation: The Podcast, Disinformation World News, and Out There Radio.