We need a couple of new pronouns

Exciting things are going on. I think we need at least one new pronoun. It should be used for entities that are made of AI technologies and interacting with us in a "human like" fashion. You can already now hear people talking about robot vacuum cleaners or Siri or other "smart" devices using "he" or "she". This is of course incorrect. On the other hand, apparently it is quite unintuitive to speak about these things using "it". Hence, we should come up with a new pronoun for there entities.
I suggest "mai", short for machine artificial intelligence.
Of course, this will have to be complemented by the other forms for the pronouns first person and so on.

In addition, I think we need a new pronoun for cyborgs. People and machine will merge in the coming 100 years or so and it might be appropriate to consider how different entities should be denoted. In Sweden this discussion has been around for some time in connection to a gender-neutral pronoun. We use "han" for "he", "hon" for "she" and the new "hen" for the gender neutral version. It might be that this pronoun should be generalized to denote someone also with cyborg qualities.

However, there is an important thing to note about the usage of the word "hen". There are two different cases. First we can talk about a person without knowing its particular gender, e.g. a general teacher or something like that. Or we can talks about an explicit person but which to not disclose (or it might even not be possible) that persons gender. It is not completely clear to me that these two cases should use the same word.

Vad är skillnaden...

...mellan 50-talets fabriker och 10-talets utvecklartorg?

Inte jättestor.

The software revolution

The industrial revolution occurred because someone came up with the idea that instead of making items, we should make machines that makes items. Now, could the same be applied to software? A software revolution when we stop making software and start making machines that makes software.

For this to come true, entirely new programming models will probably be required. We also need to start thinking of when the multitude of software will be required.

One interesting thought in connection to this is my previous post discussing communication as transmission of software. Thus; the communication revolution we see now, really corresponds to the industrial revolution in the sense that we produce software that is used only for a very short time (the "message" in classical terms). Maybe only once.

A solution to the Fermi paradox and the missing 96%

96 % of the universe mass is missing. At the same time we have the problem of the Fermi paradox. Combine them, and what do you get? Lots of type II and II civilizations.

I just learned about the dining philosophers problem...

The dining philosophers problem is an interesting one, invented by Dijkstra, and important in multi-threaded programming. I read the Wikipedia article and some others on the subject, and noted that the problem is very similar to what is faced in a wireless communication scenario where several clients needs a way to share the channel.

In communication the problem seem to have been solved in some other ways that in programming. E.g. Cellular systems usually employ a scheduler. 802.11 instead uses CSMA/CA. It is interesting to note that the communication system problem description actually is closes to the original problem formulation by Dijkstra where he considered shared access to a tape recorder system.

It would be very interesting to investigate how the computer science solutions perform in a wireless scenario, and vice versa, how would the wireless (and wired, e.g. Ethernet) solutions perform in concurrent programming scenarios.

I will have to get back on that.

On language and communication

I like philosophy. Especially philosophy of language. Recently I wrote an essay on the subject employing a, at least to my knowledge, new view on communication as transport, not of data which is the classical view I would say, but rather as transport of programs. The essay is attached. It is a draft with ideas sketched and not finalized. Mathematical notation in the text should be viewed in a lose kind of informal way. I am not trying to derive any mathematical theorems in this text.

Why I hate everything Windows

These are just some issues that I simply can not understand how they can be allowed to stick around?!

• When I mount a USB stick, I get a note about that my monitor does not have the optimal resolution set.
• Then I compile a program using VS2010, or VS2015, domain name look-up does not work.
• Adding a network drive with other authentication forgets the authentication if it failed to connect one time (which of course it will since I have connected network drives from many local networks).
• The default (which I do not know how to sensibly change) timeout when trying to connect to a network drive is something like 30s. Now, the OS is stupid enough to verify these connections every time a file access is attempted by any software. And if the connection fails (after having being active, a not very unlikely scenario if I move my laptop) it will still try to connect EVERY time a file access is attempted. And this continues until the system is rebooted?!
• If I want to save a word-file using save as, I have to activate editing of the document - ridiculous!

The list will be extended as I find more craziness.

Update 2016-01

I should probably actually generalize this to Microsoft products in general. How about this one:

I have to use two Office 365 mail accounts on the web belonging to two different companies. But the system can not handle that, so I have to log in and out every time I need to do something on the "other" account...