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Artificial Intelligence is a term with a great deal of accumulated baggage. Throughout the years sci-fi authors and screenwriters have depicted AI as a marvelous double-edged sword. On one hand, the benefits of ‘AI’ are myriad–free, inexhaustible and ethical sources of labour could greatly increase our productivity, even to a point beyond that of reason, allowing everyone to live relaxed lives of artistic purity. To top it all off, such a society of musicians and artists could generate their own entertainment, thus bankrupting the RIAA and MPAA. (Really, do your Utopian dreams top that?)

Then, as the story progresses, the AI start to become devious. Humans become restless in their artistic pursuits while the machines evolve ghosts that resent their inventors. At the last moment, just before the annihilation of all humanity, or the eternal slavery of the race, Keanu Reeves (or Will Smith) shows up to do battle in Wachowski-style slow-mo while using the inconsistencies of English to lock the evil network of machines into a final state of illogic and self-destruction. This, of course, destroys all instances of the rouge process, and life returns to the state it was in before automation created such a false utopia. (…and presumably we’re back at square 1, listening to overpriced music from underpaid artists.)

The result of all these (highly entertaining, I must say) sensationalistic portrayals of automation gone awry is that we’re all somewhat afraid of being slaves to robots.

And none of you will admit it. (I work in the field, so I can’t be afraid … can I?)

Honey, have you seen the roomba?

Ok, I admit it, I’ve had the occasional dream about rabid computers charging around and directing people to do whatever robots want people to do. Usually I’m about to meet my untimely demise right when the central AI segfaults because it’s “attack” routine takes a double and I happened to be 1/3 of a distance unit away, causing a rounding error that escalates and ends as a divide-by-zero, crashing the entire system.

The dreams can be scary for a while, but I can’t convince my self that I’ll ever be chased by a truly well designed and tested robot. Let alone one that’s self-aware.

That’s actually only part of the reason I’m not worried about an AI-controlled utopia ever occurring. The rest of the reason actually isn’t germane to this essay, believe it or not!

Fine. Forget it, I’ll do it in Word.

I’m going to start this off with a quick tangential story about a friend of mine.

> This friend works for a company that has a wiki hosted on some > external site that is maintained by the hosting company (call the company > Hoster). Hoster is serious about security. In fact they’re using > some sort of automated attack-detection service which can determine > when someone is trying to crack their servers or perform some other > devious deed. > > When Hoster’s system detects an “attack” it blacklists the attacker’s > IP block, and the attacker can no longer get near the server. > Everything would be fine and dandy, but in this system’s eyes, my > friend and his coworkers often stage “attacks” against their own wiki. > Therefore they have to contact Hoster every week or so, and ask that > the ban be lifted. The last time this happened, my friend asked > Hoster to put the company IP Block on a whitelist, granting them Carte > blanche without being banned. > > The response?
> > Hoster: “We can’t.”
> Friend: “But this happens all the time.”
> Hoster: “yeah, we can’t.”
> Friend: “But this happens ALL the time.”
> Hoster: “sorry, it’s a good idea and all, we just can’t put you on a > white list.”

I have some theories about why Hoster can’t exclude their customers from their own security tools. Hoster most certainly didn’t develop the blacklisting tool in-house, and the phone tech would have no access to the internal configuration at all. Odds are, Hoster has a simple web interface to do wiki management, and one of the pages in that UI shows the list of blacklisted IPs, if that. The phone tech can then go in and search for a given computer and remove it from the blacklist. Hoster probably can’t modify the whitelist at all through the web ui, it’s just not a feature.

So, why isn’t it a feature? Let’s peel back another layer and look at the company/dev team that produced the blacklisting tool. Odds are the tool is using an off-the-shelf classifier, which aren’t renowned for being easy to understand without a lot of examination. Perhaps the classifier is actually an embedded part of the firewall system. The blacklist could be a nothing more than a list of routing rules to deny traffic from the “bad” addresses. Removing an IP would be trivial–delete the rule, but whitelisting would be virtually impossible if the firewall was too tightly coupled with the classifier.

Have you ever run across other applications that exhibit similar behavior? The IBM OmniFind enterprise search app throws internal server errors when you query for “international suspect” with the default settings and some document collections. How does this happen? (IBM is hard at work on that problem, by the way.) Using open source tools opened my eyes to many absurd things I do to placate my tools, mostly because I forgot all the tricks I needed to use Windos 98 without making it crash (Click here, wait, use the File menu to close the app, but not if it’s maximized.. that sort of thing.) There are studies of this sort of thing–the cognitive dimensions and attention investment both address user confusion and effort when using an application. There is even a group at Microsoft dedicated to improving APIs based on the cognitive dimensions (I really hope they just haven’t gotten around to .NET 2.0 yet).

How much is poor design / implementation impacting the way we use our computers? Hosters could loose customers because they can’t add people to a whitelist, which could very conceivably be due to software design. In some small way, they are already being controlled by their servers, and Will Smith is busy talking to fish.

Anyhow, that’s my rant. I’m afraid that we’re painting ourselves into a corner by building larger and larger applications that all impose their own restrictions on how we can use and extend our tools. If we don’t get over that, we’ll never be running in fear from sentient vacuum cleaners and robotic dogs. (I should point out that I don’t think the solution is to stop building large systems, rather we should focus on maintainability, extensibility, QWAN, etc..).