More evidence “Eugene Goostman” isn’t an artificial-intelligence milestone. (Doug Aamoth/TIME)
Why no Apple Maps at WWDC? (Ingrid Lundgren/TechCrunch)
Samsung is supposedly building a folding tablet. (Andrew Grush/Android Authority)
Microsoft’s working on new sensors and gestures for Windows Phone. (Kevin C. Tofel/Gigaom)
iOS 8 plays catch-up with Android features. (Ron Amadeo/Ars Technica)
Netflix to end ISP-blaming messages. (Janko Roettgers/Gigaom)
I swear I’m not trying to be a wet blanket. But I’m reading lots of giddy reaction to the news that a chatbot is the first software to pass the Turing Test–the notion, first proposed by legendary mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, which posits that computers will have achieved intelligence when one of them is capable of convincing humans that it’s a real person. And I’m not convinced that what just happened is a defining moment for either computers or humans.
Traditionally, a computer will have passed the Turing Test when it fools 30 percent of the judges who converse with it into thinking it’s human. The chatbot in question was devised by Vladimir Veselov, a Russian living in the U.S., and Eugene Demchenko, a Ukrainian living in Russia. It duped 33 percent of the judges of a contest held by the University of Reading in the UK into thinking that it was man rather than machine.
Or, to be more precise, that it was boy rather than machine–a 13-year-old Ukrainian kid named Eugene Goostman. The creators of the chatbot, which has been around since 2001, dramatically simplified the challenge they were tackling by building software which posed as a youngster who isn’t entirely proficient in English.
I haven’t seen any transcripts of the conversations which convinced the judges that Eugene was flesh and blood. But RT Today published an “interview” with Eugene. If this is as good as the chatbot’s artificial intelligence gets, I’m not astounded. And if I’d been a judge, I can’t imagine that I would have been snookered.
A sample:
RT: Do you work?
EG: I am only 13, so I’m attending school so far.
RT: What do you study?
EG: Is it “the third degree”? I’m not going to answer such a provocative question!
RT: Do you like science?
EG: I wouldn’t want to be a scientist – in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. So that, science is unfair thing a-priori.
RT: Do you have any heroes?
EG: No, I haven’t any heroes! How could you imagine such a trash! Wonna ask me something more?
Even if you don’t expect a Ukrainian teenager speaking in English to be the most dazzling of conversationalists, this comes off as laughably crude and synthetic. It seems to deflect questions it can’t parse by refusing to answer them or shiftily parroting back a snippet–just like the Eliza programs I wrote in BASIC on a TRS-80 computer when I was in high-school.
So I wonder: If this is the first software to pass the Turing Test, is it possible that the victory had less to do with Eugene being a brilliant work of computer science–and more to do with some of the human judges in this particular competition being a bit thick-witted?
Exclusive Technologizer visualization of likely appearance of Apple wearable device
And then at some point someone trustworthy reports that the new Apple product really is on its way within the forseeable future. That’s when it’s reasonable to assume that it’s not a mass hallucination or a hoax.
The cycle happened with the iPhone and iPad. And now it’s happened with the wearable gizmo that everybody calls the iWatch.
John Paczkowski of Re/code, who’s on my exceedingly short list of reporters whose Apple scuttlebutt I reflexively believe to be true, says that Apple is planning to ship a wearable device in October. He doesn’t have a lot of detail beyond that, but does say–although it scarcely needs saying–that said device will hook into the HealthKit fitness platform which Apple announced during its WWDC keynote.
Yuichiro Kanematsu of Nikkei Asian Review is also reporting that the wearable will arrive in October, and provides some more color–although as is often the case with stories about unannounced Apple products, it isn’t always clear where the reporting stops and the speculation starts:
Though the details of services have yet to be released, specs for the new product are being finalized, according to industry sources. It will likely use a curved organic light-emitting diode (OLED) touchscreen and collect health-related data, such as calorie consumption, sleep activity, blood glucose and blood oxygen levels. It will also allow users to read messages sent by smartphones.
Apple appears confident of the new product. According to a parts manufacturer, it plans monthly commercial output of about 3-5 million units, which exceeds the total global sales of watch-like devices last year.
I’m not convinced that everything in Kanematsu’s piece is automatically accurate. For instance, that “likely” gives me pause, in part because it’s not clear whether it’s Kanematsu’s sources who are deeming the tidbits that follow to be probable, or whether it’s Kanematsu’s own guess. And it isn’t even clear which of the tidbits the “likely” applies to.
I am, however, officially assuming henceforth that Apple plans to unveil a wearable device this fall. Almost everything about the product remains mysterious, but even just feeling confident that it’s fact rather than fantasy is a big deal.
Any interesting photograph is more interesting still–or at least far more evocative of a particular era–if it happens to be a Polaroid.
That’s my deeply-held belief, anyhow–which is why I’ve blogged in the past about Polaroid images of John F. Kennedy and the Apple-1 computer. (I also told the story of Polaroid’s SX-70 camera in the longest article I’ve ever written about anything.)
And now my Facebook friend Michael Gross–who made the world a much better place as the art director of National Lampoon in its golden age and then as a movie producer–has used his feed to share some vintage Polaroids taken on the set of Ghostbusters, on which he worked as an associate producer. (Among other things, he contributed the movie’s unforgettable logo.)
Michael was nice enough to let me borrow his Facebook photo of the Polaroid photos, which show stars Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Rick Moranis, and Ernie Hudson. Here they are:
All four snapshots are great, but the one of Murray–well, it may be one of the best photos of Bill Murray I’ve ever seen. Which is saying a lot.
Ghostbusters was released thirty years ago last Sunday; back when it was made, a Polaroid camera was an utterly indispensable tool for moviemakers who needed to document their work as it was going on. (Michael says these particular pictures were continuity shots for the wardrobe department.) Even if many of them didn’t get saved, there must be an awful lot of Hollywood Polaroids which survive. Wouldn’t they make an incredible coffee-table book?
Xiaomi, smartphone maker on the rise. (Brad Stone/Businessweek)
iOS 8 can scan your credit cards. (Jordan Kahn/9to5Mac)
Once again, Atari is back. (Nick Wingfield/The New York Times)
Recently on Facebook, my friend, nerd extraordinaire Esther Schindler, shared a photograph of herself wearing an old T-shirt and challenged her followers to identify it:
Either you have no idea what that image means, or you know exactly what it is.
It’s the torso, rolled-up sleeves and folded arms of Peter Norton, the man who was once synonymous with PC utility software, on a vintage shirt produced to promote one of his products. I found seeing him again–even without his own head–to be a surprisingly Proustian experience.
Norton was a mainframe and minicomputer programmer who bought an IBM PC soon after its 1981 release and published an enormously successful suite of software tools, the Norton Utilities, in 1982. Its killer app: UnErase, which could recover lost files back before trashcan-style deletion let you change your mind after getting rid of a file.
Norton’s empire grew to include multiple software products, articles (including a long-running PC Magazine column), and books. He was everywhere that PCs were. And then, in 1990, he sold Peter Norton Computing to Symantec, which made the Norton line of software even more successful.
After the sale, Peter Norton himself retained a high profile as a living symbol of PC maintenance; his personal brand was so powerful that it transcended his actual involvement in products which bore his name. (In the 1990s, a friend of mine wrote a book with Norton: By then, I gathered, writing a book with Peter Norton involved…well, pretty much writing a book.)
And all along, that image of a thoughtful-looking computer nerd with crossed arms was instantly recognizable. Here it is in an early incarnation, on a best-selling 1985 tome which Wikipedia informs me was known as the “pink shirt book.”
Both the formality of the necktie and the rolled-up sleeves of the classic Norton pose are meaningful. He was a pro, but he was also ready to get to work on whatever ailed your computer.
Here, on a Norton manual cover, is the folded-arm Norton as he’s remained burned into my brain all these years. (I’d forgotten that he didn’t wear glasses all along, at least when posing for photographs: Once he did, it added to his authoritative air.)
And here, in an image which I find vaguely unsettling, is a folded-arm, pink-shirt Norton in a very early (1991) ad for Norton AntiVirus, which eventually became the best-known Norton-branded product:
Esther, who seems to have done a better job of holding onto interesting computer-industry tchotchkes than I have, still has her Peter Norton Mug:
As the image below, which I borrowed from this blog post, shows, cross-armed Norton was not only iconic, but also a computer icon. (Don’t hold me to this, but I could swear that at least one version of the Norton Utilities sported an interface featuring an animated version of Peter.)
I started using MS-DOS PCs on a regular basis in 1991, and that’s when I became a user of Norton software. I was particularly fond of Disk Doctor, which repaired corrupted hard drives; and Disk Editor, which let you view and edit the data on your disk byte-by-byte. I used both of them more than once to recover from disaster, back when hard disks crashed a lot more often than they do today. I also swore by NCACHE and Speed Disk, two utilities which were superior to their Microsoft equivalents.
No disrespect meant to later, Windows-based Norton products–they’ve rescued my computer on more than one occasion–but for me, the golden age of Peter Norton’s software was when it was mostly DOS-based, lightning fast, and let you dig deeply into your computer. When Norton software switched to Windows, along with the entire utility industry, it got more bloated and tended to go after a larger, more consumery, less nerdy audience. It had less to do with the programs which Peter Norton himself had begun writing in the early 1980s. It felt less real.
Still, even in the Windows age, the crossed-arm Norton was so famous that I remembered it as appearing on all his software products and books.
Not so. Poking around the Web, I found images of him just sort of standing there (in a pink shirt), leaning on computers, hanging out with co-authors, brandishing toolboxes and hourglasses, wearing a stethoscope, and performing magic tricks with gears. And, on one particularly entertaining package, garbed in a garage-style uniform with a “Peter” label, working on a humongous floppy disk jacked up in the air.
That bottom row shows boxes dating from the turn of the century, when Symantec doubled down on Peter Norton imagery–right before it permanently removed the man altogether from product packaging in 2001. It was the end of an era, even though I’m not sure if anyone noticed at the time.
Why did Norton products no longer carry pictures of their founder? I don’t know. Maybe Symantec did extensive market testing before it made the move; maybe not.
But these later-era packages, with photos of happy, confident computer users rather than a problem-solving computer geek, hint at the company’s thinking.
I don’t care what the rationale was: Depicting someone other than Peter Norton on a Norton box was like Planters decorating a can of nuts with an anthropomorphic legume who wasn’t Mr. Peanut.
Today, Norton is probably still the best-known name in utility software; it’s even used on products for iOS and Android. But Symantec has completely disassociated the brand from Peter. Just as nobody remembers anything about Duncan Hines other than that he licensed his name to a cake-mix company, it’s possible–maybe even dead certain–that most people who use Norton products don’t have a clue who Peter Norton is.
Here’s the current Norton Utilities package, which seems particularly interested in reminding us that Symantec is the company behind Norton:
I’m glad that the Norton Utilities still exist–they even include modern versions of some of the programs I once loved, such as Disk Doctor. But so much has changed about PCs that it’s tough to remember how essential early versions of the package were. Creating a really good data-recovery program is not the road to fame and riches that it was in the 1980s.
Of course, an awful lot of people who buy Norton products these days never see a box at all. Shrinkwrapped software of the sort which once brought Peter Norton glory is largely a thing of the past; Symantec has migrated much of its line to a downloadable, subscription-based model.
Bottom line: If there’s a young Peter Norton out there today, he’s not going to become famous by appearing on utility-software boxes sold in retail stores.
As for Peter Norton himself, he may have been synonymous with PC utilities, but they weren’t his sole obsession. After selling Peter Norton Computing to Symantec, he went on to spend a sizable chunk of his loot on philanthropy and collecting modern art, two entirely admirable pursuits. I met him a few years ago when we were on a panel together, had a pleasant chat, and got the sense that he was perfectly happy not to be the guy on the software box anymore.
And yes, meeting Peter Norton did feel a little like encountering Betty Crocker or Mr. Clean in person. I hope I had the presence of mind to thank him for all the times he saved my bacon…
Barnes & Noble partners with Samsung for a new Nook tablet. (Darrell Etherington/TechCrunch)
New Apple ad spotlights health. (Philip Elmer-DeWitt, TechCrunch)
Sprint and T-Mobile are hashing out a merger. (David Gelles and Michael De La Merced/New York Times)
A book bound in human skin. (Alexis Madrigal/The Atlantic)
Xbox One getting 45 new apps this fall. (Xbox Wire)
iOS 8 can put apps on the lock screen based on your location. (Juli Clover/MacRumors)
Apple is getting more open–and more confident. (Craig Hockenberry/Furbo.org)
The New York Times offers all the opinion you can read for $1.50 a week. (Andrew Rosenthal/New York Times)
Netflix tries a message blaming your ISP for crummy video. (Jacob Kastrenakes/The Verge)
Back in 2012, I wrote a feature about Kickstarter–the site which kickstarted the crowdfunding phenomenon–for TIME. (Here the article is, lurking behind a paywall.)
One of the things I found fascinating as I reported the story was that Kickstarter’s founders–Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler–weren’t in love with the site’s public image, which at the time had a lot to do with the giant sums of money raised by gadget-y projects such as the Pebble smartwatch and Ouya game console.
For its founders, Kickstarter was about finding funding for creative endeavors–the more creative the better, and regardless of whether the endeavor in question required a lot of money or just a little. When they told me about its success stories they brought up small-time, deeply personal stuff like games and artisanal jam, not Pebble or Ouya. And they didn’t like people thinking of their creation as an online marketplace or a new-age form of venture capital for consumer electronics. (In fact, later that year, they tightened their rules to discourage some campaigns and announced the restrictions with a blog post titled “Kickstarter is Not a Store.”)
Fast forward to today. The site is announcing that it’s loosening up its guidelines for project creators, eliminating many of the restrictions on what a crowdfunding campaign can involve–though there are still bans on such items as weapons, medical products, pornography, hate speech, charity requests, and–go figure!–anything that’s illegal. Creators will also be able to launch campaigns without having them pre-approved by the site, a measure which will presumably help it ramp up the volume of projects. (For all of Kickstarter’s influence, it still operates on a relatively small scale by web standards–there have been a total of around 63,000 successfully funded campaigns in its first five years.)
Over at The Verge, Adrianne Jeffries has a good story on the changes. They still leave Kickstarter with a more narrowly-defined mission than its older archrival, Indiegogo; as far as I can tell, that site doesn’t explicitly ban medical products, porn, or charity campaigns, for instance. That has led to some odd undertakings over there, including a campaign for a wristband which can allegedly monitor your calorie intake, the subject of an excellent investigation by Pando Daily’s James Robinson.
Still, the new Kickstarter will embrace people beyond the “artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors [and] explorers” who it originally said it was designed to serve. And I confess to being a little nervous about the transition.
I came away from my time with the company’s creators impressed by the clarity of their vision, and their willingness to err on the side of preserving it. It was a very different story than you usually hear from the founders of venture-backed startups, who are usually under intense pressure to get as big as possible as fast as possible.
Then again, the logic of why some Kickstarter campaigns were kosher and others weren’t was always fuzzy. In the past, underwear was welcome but bath products were forbidden; social-networking software was fine but an actual social network was not. My guess is that the revised rules will simply allow a bunch of efforts which everybody (mistakenly) assumed were legit all along, and therefore won’t radically change the game.
Or so I hope. The best Kickstarter projects have always been quirky and creative–a fact which surely has something to do with the quirky, creative nature of the site itself. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it emerges from these changes still recognizable as its idiosyncratic, lovable self.
UPDATE: Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler responded to my fretting with an encouraging tweet:
@harrymccracken Don't worry! *Nothing* about our mission, focus, or weirdness has changed. This is us wanting to do those things smarter.
— Yancey Strickler (@ystrickler) June 3, 2014
In the world of computer languages, maybe the most famous program of them all is “Hello world“–the code which displays that two-word greeting. You can write it on the first day you learn a new language, and it’s often used to verify that the system is working properly.
Maybe we should formally declare Flappy Bird to be a sort of more ambitious version of “Hello world.”
Yesterday, Apple startled attendees at its WWDC keynote by announcing that a new language, Swift, would replace Objective-C as the way to write apps for iOS devices. And within hours, someone had implemented Flappy Bird in Swift. (This version is officially called FlappySwift, and I learned about it from the Twitter feed of Apple’s Chris Espinosa.)
When Flappy Bird first became wildly popular a few months ago, I assumed that it was the very definition of a flash in the pan–something which would obsess the world for a brief period, and then disappear. But even though its creator, Nguyen Ha Dong, yanked it off of Apple and Google’s app stores, it’s still burbling around in the world’s subconscious. (Of course, the yanking only served to raise the game’s profile.)
Could Flappy Bird turn out to be like Pac Man: a fad which was huge, then subsided, but never really vanished from the culture? If the children of 2024 can identify Flappy at a glance, we’ll know that the little guy isn’t going anywhere.
