Ntuple Indemnity

I’ve spent the better portion of the week playing Spore. Strictly speaking, one doesn’t finish the game—once your species has developed as far as it can as a spacefaring civilization, you can keep on playing for as long as you like—but sometime on Wednesday night, I completed the “42” achievement for discovering the secret at the centre of the galaxy, which is the closest thing the game has to an ultimate goal. In the true spirit of Battlestar Galactica I have yet to find Earth, though I am assured that it exists, and that you can destroy it.

In case you couldn’t tell, Spore is rather fantastic. Will Wright couldn’t have been more correct when he said (to paraphrase) that there’s a great unexplored gulf between the massive multiplayer online game à la World of Warcraft and the joy of the classic single-player experience where you, you get to be the star of the show without any interference from the addicts, cheaters, and generally rude malcontents who dominate computer game culture on the Internet. So here you have a game of a scope that could only be satisfactorily populated by the freshness, diversity, and sheer staggering quantity of user-generated content in the shared online space—but the territory of the playground itself is yours and yours alone. It’s like Animal Crossing, but more so.

There are some design flaws, many of which are fertile ground for future bloodletting sessions at the hands of Electronic Arts (aka expansion packs), but I want to get the elementary what-works-what-doesn’t criticism out of the way quickly so I can talk about more stimulating topics like user-driven storytelling and everyone’s favourite weasel word(s), intelligent design.

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This week’s selection: The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (2006) by Marvin Minsky.

In brief: In The Emotion Machine, AI pioneer Marvin Minsky presents his theories on the “big-picture” questions pertaining to the human mind—emotions, consciousness, common sense—in plain English and easy-to-follow diagrams, but one wonders if he goes too far in distilling his ideas for a layman’s audience, at the cost of the specificity and rigour that readers from a more technical background may demand. Minsky’s most insightful philosophical premises appear as corollaries and implications, and beg for further development. Nevertheless, the book fulfills its purpose as an expressly non-technical overview of how one might develop models for decomposing higher-order thought into manageable representations.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Emotion Machine, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Red Mars (1992) by Kim Stanley Robinson.

In brief: Robinson’s exhaustive (and often exhausting) treatment of Martian colonization is one of those uncommon novels that is far more fascinating when people sit around arguing about issues than when they actually do anything to move the plot forward. The result is a tale that flaunts its intelligence and attention to scientific detail through and through, but bores as often as it stimulates. Read it for the gorgeous landscapes and its lucid presentation of the terraforming debate, but be warned that the characters never exhibit enough agency to be interesting.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Red Mars, keep reading below.)

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Last Wednesday, I delivered a brief talk for the U of A Debate Society about policy issues in outer space. It was arguably out of my depth, but don’t tell anybody. I did, at one point, assert something that I didn’t have time to defend: that the Outer Space Treaty’s prohibition on sovereign claims in space precludes the protection of property rights (and that the major oversight of the space treaties of the 1960s, in general, was a failure to predict that non-state actors might one day play a significant role beyond our blue marble).

For a more lucid explanation than what I can offer, I recommend Jonathan Card’s article in today’s edition of The Space Review (“Space property rights and the 3:10 to Yuma”):

I’m a very simple man, and here’s my simple understanding of property law: say I’m a solar-farmer on the moon, just selling my electrical output to them city-folk across the ridge at the spaceport. Pirates, who’ve mutinied against the captain of their spaceship, land on my farm, kill my sons, rape my daughters, and take over my collector to recharge their batteries, becoming their new illicit base to spread their range of plundering and villainy. Who shoots them? If it’s the government, then I have property rights; if it’s me, then I might as well fly my own flag and call my 40 acres “Cardopolis”, a petty king of a petty city-state; if it’s nobody, this scenario will surely come to pass. Every advance in transportation has led to equivalent advances in piracy and I don’t expect space travel to be much different.

In essence, what Card argues is that the protection of any permanent private settlement is going to necessitate sovereign law enforcement de facto, if not de jure. Considering the tremendous influence piracy had on the economic affairs of the rising European empires (yes, I’ve been reading Niall Ferguson’s Empire and Peter Earle’s The Pirate Wars), I think the claim has some basis in history. The appeal of Card’s article, however, is its basis in the Hollywood western.

Astrophysicist/novelist Alan Lightman delivered a reportedly eloquent keynote address at the University’s Art & Science Symposium yesterday. I regretfully did not attend—a tremendous mistake, I gather, as Lightman’s talk concerned precisely my field of interest.

I have long held the twin opinions that rejection of or apathy towards rational scientific thought is the single greatest threat to the survival of human society (yes, Virginia, all human society), but without the creative manifestation of the imaginative faculties, we have nothing to live for. It is always heartening to see a lucid defence of the scientific and artistic pursuits from someone who recognizes that one cannot happen at the exclusion of the other.

Now I’ll need to read his books.