I learned this morning that Brazilian theatre activist Augusto Boal passed away yesterday at the age of 78. His death has received little attention in the news, which shouldn’t be too surprising, but I thought there was a chance that his Nobel Peace Prize nomination last year might at least get him on Stephanopoulos this morning. It did not.

There are many places on the Internet to learn about Boal, so there’s no need for an obituary from me, but I did want to say a few words about how Boal has impacted my life and my work. I can easily say that Boal’s writings have had a greater influence on me than any other author’s. (Shakespeare doesn’t really count as an influence.) I apologize in advance if this post seems indulgent, but I could think of no better place to record my thoughts about the man whose work has meant so much to me over the years.

In 1993, as a young graduate student, I read Theatre of the Oppressed for a class, and it blew my mind. Boal examines the conception of theatre from Aristotelian, Hegelian, and Brechtian standpoints, and redefines the theatrical event as a political act. Aristotle’s concept of a catharsis, explains Boal, purges the audience of the impulse to act and to make a change in society. The spectator gives away the right to act to another person, who is even referred to as the actor. Just as Paolo Freire before him had demonstrated the need for teachers to learn from their students, breaking down the artificial barrier between them, Boal calls for a new theatre, one where the barrier between actor and spectator is broken down, and the theatrical event increases the impulse to act instead of purging it.

My interest stimulated, I sought out Boal’s other key work, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, which contained a wealth of activities I’ve been able to draw from for the past 15 years. In 1996, I had the opportunity to take a class with Boal himself at the Brecht Forum here in New York City. The class was on the then-new techniques he had developed for using Theatre of the Oppressed techniques for therapeutic purposes. It was an incredible experience. I had read Boal’s book on the subject, The Rainbow of Desire, but wasn’t able to make any sense of it. Actually getting a chance to use the techniques under Boal’s guidance was an invaluable experience I’ll never forget.

Boal was not like I thought he would be. I was expecting him to be a serious revolutionary type, but he had a jovial, even avuncular, demeanor. Even when telling a story about how he was tortured in Brazil, he had such a positive energy and good humour that you’d think he was talking about riding his bicycle in the park. (The punchline was that he was being tortured for going to other countries and saying that Brazil used torture.) He also told us about his recent experiment in what he called legislative theatre. He returned to Brazil (many years after his torture experience) and successfully ran for public office. As an elected official, he had his theatre group conduct Theatre of the Oppressed workshops with the people to learn what they needed, and then he would introduce the ideas into legislation. The experience is chronicled in an entertaining and enlightening way in Boal’s book Legislative Theatre.

In 1997, I started using Boal’s Forum Theatre technique as a staff development activity within the organization where I work. I have since used it in a variety of settings and it remains the sharpest tool in my kit. For a while, it looked like I might do my doctoral dissertation on Boal, though I ended up returning to Shakespeare in the end. But while I was doing my coursework, I was planning to write about Boal, so a great deal of my graduate studies focused on his work.

For the past twelve years, I’ve been teaching a graduate class at NYU on using drama as a teaching tool in the English classroom, and Boal’s influence is ubiquitous. Not only do I devote an entire class session to using Theatre of the Oppressed techniques in the classroom, but a major theme of the course is taken directly from a speech that Boal gave when Paulo Freire died, which I read during the second session of class each year. (The speech can be found in Legislative Theatre.) Boal describes how power relationships too often create a monologue, where only one party has the right to speak. Freire’s insight, according to Boal, is that education is much more effective when it becomes a dialogue between teacher and student. This forms one of the core philosophical principles of my course. The theatrical metaphor is significant, as dramatic activities can empower students to find their voice, drawing upon their prior experience and cultural values. This makes the learning experience more relevant to them.

You may have noticed this blog is more interactive than most. I certainly share my own opinions about the matters at hand, but almost all of my regular features are interactive. This blog is nothing without you. That’s because I believe that the power of Web 2.0 tools is that they break down the barrier between writer and reader. This is a philosophy I may not have embraced if it weren’t for Boal and Freire.

We lost a giant this weekend. But his legacy lives on in me, and the many, many others who have been influenced by his work and his writings. And I invite here all of them who wish to say along with me what Boal said upon Freire’s passing:

I am very sad. I have lost my last father. Now all I have are brothers and sisters.

I was planning to post a Greek Tragedy 24 as a follow-up to last month’s Shakespeare 24, but it turned out to be much too derivative. Part of the problem seems to be that the two genres being parodied are much too close to make such a union humorous. In fact, I would go so far as to say that 24 is today’s answer to the ancient Greek tragedy. A statement like that requires some explanation.

The most obvious similarity is the real-time format. Ancient Greek drama was, for the most part, presented in real time. The audience of that age would not have accepted the traditional story-telling techniques that we take for granted today, such as flash-backs and multiple locations. Aristotle’s unity of time is often translated as meaning that the action of a play must take place within 24 hours (which would have worked just as well for this comparison), but Aristotle never actually wrote this, and if you read the plays, they could pretty much take place in the time you spent watching them. The plays start after most of the action has already happened, and the main character is about an hour and a half away from the great reversal of fortune and recognition he has coming. During the play, characters come in and out, but the audience usually stays put. Oedipus realizes that he needs to speak with someone and has to summon him and wait for him to come, unless he just happened to have already summoned him on another matter and, oh look, here he comes now. Audiences of the time had no problem accepting that sort of thing, I suppose. Shakespeare did not have to play by these rules for his audiences, shifting his scenes between Rome and Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra, and famously skipping over sixteen years in The Winter’s Tale, to name just two examples.

Similarly, when Briscoe and Curtis (or whoever the current line-up on Law & Order is this year) get a lead on a suspect, we can immediately cut to them arriving on the scene. When Jack Bauer gets a lead on a suspect, he actually has to physically get to the location. It’s worth noting that only the unity of time, not place or action, is observed. The show can easily switch back and forth between Washington DC and Los Angeles, and have multiple story lines going at the same time. But what the real-time format does for both 24 and Greek tragedy is to give an immediacy to the events being depicted. We can feel like this is something happening in front of us in the moment. When our hero is faced with a choice to make, he has to make it right now, even if it is an impossible choice.

This element of the impossible choice is crucial to both 24 and Greek tragedy. Greek playwrights would often show characters torn between their solemn duties to their oikos (family) and their polis (state). Agamemnon is told that the goddess Artemis will not allow him to sail to Troy unless he sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia. He now must choose between his responsibility to the polis to wage war with Troy and his responsibility to the oikos to protect his daughter. There is no right answer, only two wrong ones. In true Jack Bauer fashion, he puts national security first, and offers up the kid. Antigone makes the opposite choice. She is told by King Creon that she may not bury her traitorous brother, and she has a duty to obey. But she also has a duty to bury her brother, and she makes that decision – which she will ultimately suffer for. Actions have consequences, and the characters are willing to accept those consequences even when they did not have a better choice.

Similarly, characters on 24 are often put in situations where they have to choose between oikos and polis, between someone they personally care about and national security. National security on this show is less about “protecting our way of life” and more about “millions of people will die” if we don’t stop the threat. Either way, there will be serious consequences. The show finds just those moments where the “right thing to do” is something that most of us couldn’t do. But Jack Bauer can, and he becomes elevated to the level of the mythical hero.

And there we find another similarity. Ancient Greek dramas were often set at a time when, for the Greeks, the mythological overlapped with the legendary. Gods interacted with humans, and humans were a special breed of heroes. The stories did not have to be realistic – their mythical nature allowed the playwrights to explore larger themes. In 24, events are contrived to fit the real-time format, and we accept it. Jack is able to shuttle around from location to location in record time, and we accept it. Most of all, Jack is able to embody the courage, resolve, and self-sacrifice that we admire in our present-day heroes. He does so far beyond what any human would actually be capable of doing. And we accept that, too. In our post-9/11 world, that’s the larger theme.

To sum up: Shakespeare 24 – Very funny. Greek Tragedy 24 – Too “on the nose” to really be funny. But I enjoyed coming to that recognition, and now I am pleased to share it with you.

This morning, I read an editorial from the New York Times editorial staff in my pajamas. How they got in my pajamas, I don’t know:

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was supposed to create clear, reliable data that told parents how local schools stacked up against schools elsewhere in the nation. It has not worked that way, thanks in part to timidity at the Department of Education, which initially allowed states to phony up even the most basic data on graduation rates. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings took a welcome step in the right direction by issuing new rules for how those rates are calculated.

By the 2012-13 school year, states will have to use the generally accepted way of computing their dropout rate. That means tracking students from the day they enter high school until the day they receive regular diplomas, counting as nongraduates those who leave without the diploma. This method was endorsed three years ago by the National Governors Association, which realized that accurate graduation rates were a vital indicator of how well the schools were doing.

Had the federal government led the way on this issue instead of waiting to see how the wind was blowing the country would already have built a sound data collection system.

Were they waiting to see how the wind was blowing? Or were they simply waiting until they were almost out of office?

Let’s be clear. The Bush administration did not simply “allow” states to falsify their dropout rates; they led the charge. George W. Bush ran in 2000 on the “Houston Miracle” in education, where Superintendent Rod Paige was able to raise test scores and lower dropout rates. Paige became the first Secretary of Education in the Bush White House.

Unfortunately, the “Houston Miracle” turned out to be a scam, which was eventually debunked by, among others, Bill Moyers and 60 Minutes:

All in all, 463 kids left Sharpstown High School that year, for a variety of reasons. The school reported zero dropouts, but dozens of the students did just that. School officials hid that fact by classifying, or coding, them as leaving for acceptable reasons: transferring to another school, or returning to their native country.

“That’s how you get to zero dropouts. By assigning codes that say, ‘Well, this student, you know, went to another school. He did this or that.’ And basically, all 463 students disappeared. And the school reported zero dropouts for the year,” says Kimball. “They were not counted as dropouts, so the school had an outstanding record.”

Sharpstown High wasn’t the only “outstanding” school. The Houston school district reported a citywide dropout rate of 1.5 percent. But educators and experts 60 Minutes checked with put Houston’s true dropout rate somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.

“But the teachers didn’t believe it. They knew it was cooking the books. They told me that. Parents told me that,” says Kimball. “The superintendent of schools would make the public believe it was one school. But it is in the system, it is in all of Houston.”

The political ramifications of this should be obvious. The school system is pressured by the politicians to fake the numbers, and the very same politicians get to run on an excellent record of educational reform.

So what happens when the fraud is finally elimated and the statistics start to reflect reality? We’re going to see a massive rise in high school dropout rates. This will not reflect actual high school students dropping out in larger numbers, but rather a change in the way such things are measured. And it’s all set to happen by 2012, when the next president, likely a Democrat, is running for re-election. And the story will be about that president’s dismal record on education, with a chilling statistic about rises in high-school dropout rates during that president’s term.

I agree that the formula needs to be fixed, and the Times is correct that the administration waited too long to do it. But I don’t think the Times editorial goes far enough in outlining the true consequences of the timing, appearing even to praise Spellings for taking this “welcome step in the right direction” which will cost her and her boss a total of nothing, and will likely help the Republican candidate in 2012.

In the 1950’s, Alan Turing suggested that artificial intelligence would not truly exist until a machine could pass a particular test, which we today call a “Turing Test.” It goes like this: a human examiner poses a question to two unseen participants, who return typewritten responses. The examiner knows that one of the participants is human and the other is a machine, but does not know which is which. The examiner must determine which is the human and which is the machine based on the responses returned. If the machine can fool the human examiner, it passes the Turing Test.

Today, however, it’s the machines who have much more of a need to make this determination. With automated spam-bots trolling the Internet, many Web 2.0 sites and blogs have had to adopt automated mechanisms for determining if the contributor is a live human being or not. One common method is a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which shows an OCR-proof graphic image of letters and asks the would-be contributor to type those letters out. Spam-bots can’t read graphic images, at least not yet.

But, as in any arms race, the opposition hasn’t given up just yet. Some enterprising young hacker has put together a program to lure humans into helping crack CAPTCHA codes in the guise of a strip tease program. Type in the correct CAPTCHA code and “Melissa” takes off another article of clothing. Never mind that you’ve just helped give an automated program human bona fides.

Hoping to harness the same energies for good rather than evil, a group working out of Carnegie Mellon has released a program called reCAPTCHA, which has the user demonstrate humanity while also contributing to it. When encountering a reCAPTCHA, the user will enter the text of a word that OCR technology wasn’t able to read, which is meant to speed up the ongoing effort to digitize print books. A known word is included as well, as a human-check.

That sounds like a worthwhile cause, except then the user has twice as much to type to contribute a comment. I haven’t put any CAPTCHA on this blog, yet, because I want to encourage people to post comments freely. But I have to say that I do spend a good amount of time deleting spam, and so when I’m ready to go Turing, maybe reCAPTCHA is the way to go.

The whole reCAPTCHA idea reminds me of the ESP Game, in that it allows users across the Web to contribute to a piece of a mostly automated project that only humans can do. Actually, both of these schemes remind me of the ESP game, except that one is good and one is evil.

And I hope we need no Turing Test to tell us which is which.

Ro has a thought-provoking post about the relationship between learning something and knowing it. Before I address that question, it might be worth taking a moment to consider what it means to know something.

What do we mean when we say we know something? For the individual, it might be the same as saying we unequivocally believe it. But is that enough? If Iago believes his wife has been unfaithful, and he has no evidence to support his belief, does that count as knowledge? Probably not.

Socrates argued that a belief must be justified to be considered knowledge. Othello might say that he knows his wife Desdemona has been faithful, because he has reason to believe in her love and trustworthiness. His belief is justified. But that doesn’t necessarily make it true, and so that probably doesn’t count as knowledge either. Knowledge must be both true and justified.

When we say someone else knows something, that might mean that they believe it and we believe it too. If Iago uses manufactured evidence to manipulate Othello into believing that Desdemona has been having an affair with Cassio, Othello can say that he knows that Desdemona has been unfaithful, because his belief is justified by evidence that has been presented to him. But we would not say that Othello knows it. He still believes it, but we do not.

Which brings us to the Gettier problem. Imagine that while Othello is being manipulated by Iago, Desdemona has been secretly having an affair with the Duke. Othello makes the statement that he knows Desdemona has been unfaithful. Does he know it? This time, his belief is both true and justified. And yet Gettier would not count this as knowledge, because Othello’s belief, while true and justified, is based on false evidence. He has no knowledge of the actual affair. Robert Nozick would point out that if the statement weren’t true, Othello would still believe it.

Now let’s go back and look at the question originally posed by Ro, which has to do with the relationship between knowledge and learning. If I say I learned something, that means I know it, which means I believe it. If I say you learned something, that means you believe it and I believe it. For example, President Bush got into a bit of trouble for including the following in the 2003 State of the Union address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

By citing the British government, Bush’s speechwriters sought to insulate the administration from claims they already knew were false. But by using the word “learned” they implied the word “knew” which means that Bush was essentially saying that he also believed that the statement was true. It was later discovered that the statement was not true, and that the Bush administration was aware it was not true at the time the speech was written. Saying “The British government has learned” did not provide the out they were hoping it would.

Ro’s other question was whether knowing something implies that one has learned it. A strict empiricist might say yes, but even John Locke allowed for some a priori knowledge gained through reason alone. The classic example is from René Descartes: Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Is this knowledge? Was it learned?

Finally, I can also attest that it is possible to have learned something and not know it. I demonstrate this condition several times every day.

Last night, inspired by a response to my deliberately vague Question of the Week, I picked up my old worn-out copy of Dune. I was assigned the book in high school twenty years ago, and still have the same copy, which means either they had given it to us, or more likely, I never got around to returning it.

Still tucked into the almost definitely stolen book is a bookmark that also must have been given to us in high school. It’s a “Cultural Literacy” bookmark, based on the book by E.D. Hirch that came out at about that time. My high school English teacher was a huge proponent of this book which literally listed pages and pages of references that a culturally literate person should know. Our teacher, who yet was cool enough to assign us Dune and Catch 22 (which I also somehow still have), would photocopy the pages of the book and assign us cultural references to look up and present to the class.

The bookmark has a very small sampling of these terms, which includes basal metabolism, taproot, intransitive verb, Tito, ombudsman, capital gains, and byte. If you can’t define all of those terms, this bookmark says you’re illiterate.

Hey, in 1987, byte was a toughie.

And that’s really the point here. This bookmark just screams the point: You can’t know what students will need to know in twenty years. The skills needed today are so much more complex than memorizing lists of references. In a constantly changing world, creativity and the ability to learn new skills are far more important than knowing offhand what a Eustachian tube is. If I did learn that in high school, it’s gone now, and I don’t seem to miss it.

And I do think kids need to learn facts. But facts need to be learned in context. If historical dates are important, it’s only because they allow us to understand how two or more events are connected to each other. Did we invade Iraq before or after 9/11? Knowing that can profoundly affect our understanding of both events.

If, in the future, both events were scattered among a list of “cultural literacy” items and students were required to look them up and present them to a class, that sense of context would be lost. Much better to give them authentic tasks that allow them to construct meaningful understandings. They’ll still learn the facts, and will remember them longer.

So, this article has been getting a lot of attention on the Internet, and I feel I need to respond:

In a radio programme to be aired today, Scots historian Fiona Watson and literary expert Molly Rourke claim the story of Macbeth was penned by a Scottish monk on St Serf’s Island in the middle of Loch Leven 400 years before William Shakespeare even drew breath.

Pause for laughter.

In Macbeth the Highland King to be broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland, Watson says Macbeth and his wife, Gruoch, were in fact “respected, God-fearing folk”.

According to Watson, the “almost entirely fantastical view” of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth drawn by William Shakespeare is lifted, almost word for word in places, from a collection of folklore recorded by St Serf’s monk, Andrew de Wyntoun.

Wow, there’s so much wrong with that, it’s hard to know where to start.

First of all, the “almost word for word” case is never made, at least not in the article. The few points of similarity between the two texts that are mentioned are dealt with below. But there really was a historical Macbeth, and so any two accounts of his life are bound to have some similarities, whether they be historical or legendary.

Did Shakespeare have an “almost entirely fantastical view” of Macbeth? Yes. He was a playwright, not a historian. He often made changes to history to suit his dramatic purposes. That’s what he’s supposed to do. He was also writing for King James, who was a direct descendant of both Malcolm and Banquo. So of course he’s going to make them good and noble and make Macbeth a savage butcher. He knew which side of his bread was buttered.

Also, the Andrew Wyntoun text is from 1420. How is that “400 years before William Shakespeare even drew breath” which he first did in 1564? And if the text really were from 1164, it would not be at all readable to a twenty-first century English-only speaker, as this text somewhat is. Check it out.

But the most striking part of the article is that it completely ignores the fact that we already know what Shakespeare’s source was for the events described. It was Raphael Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In fact, not only was Holinshed’s Chronicles a major source for Macbeth, but also for King Lear, Cymbeline, and all ten of Shakespeare’s history plays. If you don’t know that, it’s easy to be taken in by the following observation in the article:

Referring to Shakespeare’s prophecy that Macbeth shall be safe until Birnham Wood comes to Dunsinane and that no-one “of woman born” shall harm Macbeth, Rourke explained in Wyntoun’s work: “The person [Macbeth’s mother] met later came and saw her, gave her a ring, and prophesied about what was going to happen in the future. One of the things he said was that this child they’d had would never be killed by man born of woman. Wyntoun also recorded that Macbeth believed he’d never be conquered until the wood of Birnham came to Dunsinane.”

Thanks to the wonderful Furness Collection at the University of Pennsylvania, we can see the source for this on Page 174 of the Historie of Scotland section of Holinshed’s Chronicles:

And suerlie herevpon had he put Makduffe to death, but that a certaine witch, whom hee had in great trust, had told that he should neuer be slaine with man borne of anie woman, nor vanquished till the wood of Bernane came to the castell of Dunsinane.

The witch told Macbeth, like the apparitions do in the play, not a person telling Macbeth’s mother and giving her a ring.

The article continues on with reckless abandon:

The historians claim another element of Wyntoun found in Shakespeare is the three witches that open the play. Wyntoun wrote: “Ane nicht, he thoucht while he was sa settled [that] he saw three women, and they women then thoucht he three Wierd Sisters most like to be.

“The first he heard say, ganging by, ‘lo, yonder the Thane of Cromarty’.

“T’other woman said again ‘of Moray, yonder I see the Thane’.

“The third said ‘yonder I see the king’.”

Rourke and Watson say the resemblance to the witches’ prophesy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth – in which the first hails him as “Thane of Glames”, the second as “Thane of Cawdor” and the third proclaims he shall “be King hereafter” – is too great to be co-incidental.

We simply need to turn back to page 170 of Holinshed to see where Shakespeare found this, and thanks to the extraordinary Folger collection we can see a much easier-to-read copy of Holinshed’s version of the story:

Shortlie after happened a strange and vncouth woonder, which afterward was the cause of much trouble in the realme of Scotland as ye shall after heare. It fortuned as Makbeth and Banquho iournied towards Fores, where the king then laie, they went sporting by the waie togither without other company saue onelie themselues, passing thorough the woods and fields, when suddenlie in the middest of a laund, there met them three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world, whome when they attentiuelie beheld, woondering much at the sight, the first of them spake and said: All haile Makbeth, thane of Glammis (for he had latelie entered into that dignitie and office by the death of his father Sinell). The second of them said: Haile Makbeth thane of Cawder. But the third said: All haile Makbeth that heereafter shalt be king of Scotland.

I’ll allow you to examine that scene in Shakespeare and decide for yourself which of these two accounts was most likely Shakespeare’s source.

It’s entirely possible that Wyntoun’s work was a source for Holinshed (or Harrison, Leland, etc.), or a source of a source, or at some point they had a common source. But the idea suggested by this article, that Shakespeare somehow “lifted” Macbeth from Wyntoun, is absurd.

UPDATE: A follow-up post.

I gave a workshop today on incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into literacy instruction to improve student writing in the one-to-one classroom. A one-to-one classroom is one in which every student has a laptop with Internet access. That means that each learner has the ability to interact personally with a dynamic network of learners, both within the classroom and in the larger community.

This workshop was done in the shadow of a short-sighted article in the New York Times that dealt only with the problems of the one-to-one classroom, and none of the potential.

What these educators seem to be missing is that this is the world our students are living in right now. Case in point: FanFiction.net. This is a website where people can go and post original fan fiction. Thousands of our students are there right now, posting original stories, getting feedback from peers, and revising their work to make it more effective. Nobody’s asking them to do this; but there they are, using 21rst century tools to hone their writing skills. And if these are the skills we want students to learn in school, how can we not take advantage of every opportunity to bring the same tools into the classroom?

Anyway, I usually enjoy these workshops, but I was sick all day, so I was eager to come home, take some cold medicine, and go to sleep.

In my sleep, I had a dream that I was in France, around the turn of the nineteenth century. It was just after the Revolution, but before Napoleon was installed as Emperor. My guide was showing me around, and – in typical dream-like anachronistic fashion – he wanted me to see his radio. There was an earpiece and a microphone, both in the style of the period (if you can imagine what that would look like).

I put on the earpiece and heard a radio host talking about John Locke. I repeated the last line of what he said to indicate to my guide that I could hear what was being played, and suddenly the voice said “Is someone there?” I froze for a moment, unsure if he was talking to me, and the voice said “I think someone’s there. What’s your name?” “My name is Bill,” I said, into what I now realized was a microphone. The voice responded, “Welcome, Bill.”

My guide said that there were similar radios in homes all over the country and anyone could participate. I was impressed, but a little nervous about being put on the spot. “This is my first time doing this,” I stammered, and the voice said “Well, I’m glad you’re here. We no longer depend on the government and its puppets to provide our radio content. This is the radio of the people, and we can say anything we want.”

And that’s when I realized that this guy wasn’t the host of the radio show. He was another guy like me with a microphone. And if more people joined up, we could have an extended conversation, and that would be the show. This would truly be a new paradigm.

I woke up, still woozy from the cold medication, but I rushed to the computer to record my dream. My subconscious mind had conflated the changes in Europe during the Enlightenment with the current evolution of Internet technologies. During the Enlightenment, people started to perceive government less as an absolutist top-down sovereign who rules by divine right, and more as a function of citizens who can actually take part in shaping their own polity. Right now, a similar transformation is taking place in the way we think about the Internet – less as a one-way, top-down source of information, and more as an interactive community of which we all can be a part. Nice analysis, subconscious mind!

As we think about these new technologies, and how they might reshape education, if not society as a whole, we should remember that they are more than just fun new toys. They are a revolution.

Yesterday, I assured you that there was no need to worry about super-sentient robots taking over the world and ruling humanity. Then, I read about this.

Researchers at Cornell have announced the creation of self-replicating robots. These are robots that are designed to build exact copies of themselves. They are made up of identical building blocks (cleverly named “molecubes”), each of which contains all of the information needed for the program, not unlike DNA. The current version is simple, only able to self-replicate, but they have big plans for the future:

Although these experimental robots work only in the limited laboratory environment, Lipson suggests that the idea of making self-replicating robots out of self-contained modules could be used to build working robots that could self-repair by replacing defective modules. For example, robots sent to explore Mars could carry a supply of spare modules to use for repairing or rebuilding as needed, allowing for more flexible, versatile and robust missions. Self-replication and repair also could be crucial for robots working in environments where a human with a screwdriver couldn’t survive.

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but add the idea of self-replicating robots to yesterday’s discussion of robot evolution and now we have ourselves a problem. You see, the only elements that are needed for evolution are self-replication, the possibility of error in that replication, and a competitive environment. The errors that increase the chance of survival within that environment will then spread throughout the population, leading to the inevitable evolution of something entirely new.

But what, you ask, are the odds of robots actually being put in a position where they will be able to reproduce and evolve? Um, how about one hundred percent? Because you just know that this is exactly what researchers are going to do once they have the ability to do it – put self-replicating robots (with the possibility for random mutations) in a competitive environment and see what evolves. Hell, that’s the first thing I’d do, and I’m the one warning you about it. Even if it leads to the destruction of humanity, it’s too cool. It must be done.

But then the robots evolve laser-guided heat-seeking missles before the experimenter has the chance to flip the off switch, and the evolving robots run amok in the wild, mutating and evolving at breakneck speed. And then, one day, humanity gets a bitter lesson in the true meaning of “survival of the fittest.”

So that’s it then. We’re all doomed. Long live the age of the robot.

Via Prospero’s Books, I found this article about robots being used to simulate evolution. I’ve read about similar projects simulating evolution through competing artificial intelligence programs, using the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” scenario as the competitive task. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, for those who are unfamiliar, breaks down as some variation of this:

You and a partner are both correctly arrested for two crimes, one major and one minor, and are put in separate rooms. Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy comes to visit you and offers you a deal: testify against your partner for the major crime, your partner will get twenty years, and you’ll walk for both crimes. However, his lovely assistant is right now offering the same deal to your partner. If you both confess, you’ll both get five years. If your partner confesses and you don’t, you’ll get the twenty, and he’ll walk. If neither of you confess, McCoy can’t make his case for the major crime, but he’ll make sure you both do two years for the minor one. What’s the right play?

Well, logically speaking, regardless of what your partner ends up doing, you’re better off confessing. But if you both confess, you both end up worse off than if you had both kept your mouths shut. If you had had the chance to communicate with each other, you might have chosen differently. The fact that you don’t know what your idiot partner is going to do while gazing into the eyes of the lovely ADA means that you can’t afford to take any chances, and neither can he. You both end up doing the nickel, even though neither of you had to.

In this example, you only get to play the game once. If you play some version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma with the same person repeatedly, your choices can affect future outcomes. In a sense, the choices you make are a form of communication. Only the very last time you play do you revert back to the original cutthroat scenario. (And since everybody knows this will be the case, the next-to-last iteration can also be cutthroat. How far back does this reasoning work?) There is actually a twenty-year-old Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma competition for artificial intellegence programs and the winning strategy has long been the simple Tit-for-Tat. But it seems there’s now a new champion, though it seems to me to be a bit of a cheat. Read the article and let me know what you think.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is an illustration of one of the central concepts of a branch of mathematics called “game theory.” Game theory allows us to make mathematical computations in decision making, even when all of the factors are not known. Think of two generals, one trying to choose a target to attack, the other deciding how to deploy defensive forces. Each knows the other is intelligent and out there making his decision. That’s game theory. If you were to meet someone anywhere in the world outside of the United States, but you couldn’t plan with that person ahead of time, where would you go? Would it surprise you to learn that almost everyone makes the same choice? (Post your answer in the comments section, if you like.) That’s game theory too.

With a branch of mathematics that can take unknown variables into account, a computer’s functionality can be increased significantly. Obviously computers that are powerful enough can play chess, but game theory allows them to play poker as well. There’s already a Texas Hold ‘Em Tournament for Artificial Intelligence programs. Imagine putting all of these programs into a giant simulated Texas Hold ‘Em Tournament where the losing programs died out and the winning programs created offspring with the possibility of mutation. We might evolve the ultimate strategy. And when we do, the first round of drinks are on me!

But as computers get more powerful, imagine other simulations we may be able to run, and what understandings we might be able to gain from these experiments. Evolution has proved itself to be a mighty force in the past. Once all of the data from Web 2.0 is compiled, maybe it will be allowed to evolve into Web 3.0. It’s not about computers becoming super-sentient and ruling over humans. It’s about humans developing and using new tools that can increase our capacity for growth. And if evolution has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that.