Joe Duck

Have Blog. Will Travel.

Mashup Camp and Convergence08

Looking forward to two upcoming conferences - Mashup Camp and the very first Convergence 08 conference.

Mashup Camps have been coming to Mountain View for over two years, bringing great startups for their product launches as well as lively discussions about innovations and new products to help the mashup community. There also will be mashup experts from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and many more key players. Programmable Web has the best coverage of the Mashup topic.

Convergence will have even more provocative content as the first conference to address the intersection of four technologies likely to shape the world in extraordinary ways: Nanotechnology, Biological technologies (gene splicing, stem cells, DNS mapping, life extension) , Information technologies (internet and computing) and Cognitive technologies. This last would, I think, broadly include everything from brain enhancing drugs and devices to artificial intelligence. AI is the most exciting category for me, and I remain convinced that we’ll see conscious computers within about 20 years - hopefully and very possibly less. Conscious computing is likely to change the entire planetary game to such a degree it’s nearly impossible to predict what will happen *after that*, which is one of the issues that will be discussed at the conference.

My main concern is that proponents and predictions keep things real and this does not become a sort of brainstorming session for half-baked ideas and ideologies.

After millions of years of very slow biological evolution we’ve now entered a new age where technology is likely to eclipse most and probably all of our human abilities. Even that fairly obvious idea - which simply is an extension of current developments - leaves many people skeptical, cold to the idea, or even antagonistic about the changes that are coming. Like it or not … we are all in this together and it’s best to keep it that way as much as possible.

November 7, 2008 Posted by JoeDuck | Artificial Intelligence, Globalization, Web 2.0, blue brain, internet, mashup, mashupcamp2, mashupcamp6, mashups, technology | , , , , , , , , | No Comments

Computer Reads Minds, World Yawns

One of the fun parts of hanging out in the technology world is getting a good sense of the next big thing before folks really tune into how significant the next big thing will be.   I remember about 12 years back -  in the early days of the commercial internet - when it became clear to me that a huge shift was happening that would send virtually everybody online.   No amount of explaining or describing or showing people cool stuff could get most people to understand the massive transition they were about to experience.    As with so many technological innovations, the commercial internet had to be experienced by people at their own pace - often a painfully slow pace if you were watching this happen.   Few who loudly proclaimed their luddite pride ten years ago would admit this today - most are using email and internet, often with the same enthusiasm as the relatively small number of super early adopters in the tech and commercial communities who helped make it all happen. 

I did want to note why I’m talking about “commercial” internet vs “internet”.    Contrary to what is often claimed the internet is a pretty old structure, begun by the military after WWII and then adopted by academia where it pretty munch languished for about 30 years.    I would argue that cheap computing and ISP and online services (thank you Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, more) then combined with graphical browsing (thank you Marc Andreessen and Mosaic friends) to create the backbone of the current “commercial internet” that has exploded onto the global scene as the key communication medium of all time. 

So, what is the *next* big thing?    Why, conscious computing of course!   And it’s not just *big* like the internet.    It’s super duper gigantic and earth shaking, and it’s coming soon to a planet very near us all.   Experts disagree about *when* conscious computing will happen, though I think very few who are paying much attention would suggest we won’t have it within 50 years.  However many experts, and I think the body of current projects such as Blue Brain, suggest that we will have conscious computers that exceed human intelligence within 20 years and perhaps even 10.    What happens *after* a machine becomes conscious is quite a new thought ballgame and it is very hard to speculate about how that machine will evolve and perhaps more importantly how they will view other machines and …. us.    Will the conscious machines get smarter slowly or almost explosively fast, surpassing all of humanity within months or even minutes of first attaining consciousness?

A simple way of understanding what many AI researchers are talking about in this respect is to simply recognize that the conscious machine is likely to be “recursively self improving” which means it will be able to build and/or program better versions of itself soon after consciousness, probably in something analogous to the way we humans improve our intellects and skills but much, much faster.   Humans pull this off as well.  I’m proud to say my wife and I have managed to create and program two impressive organic intellects who are now able to program themselves and we love them dearly.   However we were constrained by human organic evolution, so took us many years to do this.    Artificial intellects will likely be able to reproduce quite a bit faster and more effectively (no offense to any of you expectant parents intended).

Ironically for me, several of my favorite programming experts do not seem to conscious computing as something we can expect to happen anytime soon.   I’ve puzzled over this because they certainly know the mechanics better than I, but I remain convinced that they are putting too much faith - sometimes literally - into the idea that humans are somehow … fundamentally different …. from other physical manifestations of the world.    I’m confident we are not all that different, and in that light consciousness is probably best viewed more as a sort of tangential aspect of our lives than a key component. 

And speaking of tangents, this whole post was going to be about this Carnagie Mellon AI project where the computer was reading people’s minds.   Simple words, yes, but still a rudimentary form of  mind reading based on EEG output:  http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/May/may29_brainmeaning.shtml

 

June 23, 2008 Posted by JoeDuck | Artificial Intelligence, Science & Technology, blue brain | , , , | No Comments

Of Rats and Men: Rat brains, Blue Brains, and the coming AI age.

SEED magazine reports on the Blue Brain, which IMHO is the most likely project to attain machine-based self consciousness.  This in turn will change everything completely and usher in a new era that will bring more change to humanity than any previous event in history.

“The column has been built and it runs,” Markram says. “Now we just have to scale it up.” Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. “If we build this brain right, it will do everything,” Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? “When I say everything, I mean everything,” he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.

As I’ve noted many times before I believe that machine consciousness will bring profound changes to humanity which will be hugely positive.   Now, we allocate resources very ineffectively.   Conscious computers will be able to do vastly superior resource allocations and staggering design improvements. These alone will likely resolve all global resource issues such as energy, food, and water.   It’s not as clear if the AI age will bring a resolution to problems that have as a a core cause our human defects.   Health, Education should benefit enormously but some of the human thinking that creates war, intolerance, crime and suicide will persist and it will resist the improvements. 

 However the abundance that the AI age will bring to the world should allow us to manage many of these human problems much more effectively. 

Markram:  “What is holding us back now are the computers.”  
Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data - about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers. 
Energy consumption is another huge problem …. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion …. But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he’ll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.

This 10 year estimate is even more optimistic than Ray Kurzweil’s but in the same league.    Although most of the computer programmers I know strongly reject this view, I think it’s also possible that AI could emerge with very limited human intervention from the massive parallel processing environments such as Google’s search server farm of hundreds of thousands of connected machines.    Consciousness and human intelligence, if it is as overrated as I believe, is best seen as something of a byproduct of simpler, evolutionarily derived mental processes and other mental activities.  As the number of interconnections in machines approaches the number we have in our brains (again we bump into a 10-20 year time frame), and machines are programmed with current routines to do the same mental tasks we do, I’ll be very surprised if machine consciousness will require more than a modest level of additional tweaking of the type they have already started at Blue Brain. 

So, I’m not buying my laptop a birthday cake quite yet, but remain cautiously optimistic about the end of the world as we know it.   

March 7, 2008 Posted by JoeDuck | Artificial Intelligence, Science & Technology, blue brain, science, technology | , , | 4 Comments