Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Google: A Trillion URLs and counting

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The Google blog notes how huge the web is now, with Google indexing over a trillion unique URLs.  As they note in the article the actual number of indexable URLs is, in one sense, infinite.    For example calendar pages will automatically appear as you scroll through many applications, continuing through the years until..the singularity and beyond.     Of course Google does not index many of these “empty” URLs or even a lot of junk or redundant content, so the true number of real, unique URLs is actually well above a Trillion.

I think a fun question is this:   What will the information landscape look like in, say, 20 years when we should have the ability to pour *everything* from the past and the present online?     Questions might take a different form if we had access to every reference on a topic that has ever been produced.    Algorithms will be used to sort through the oceans of content much as Google does now, but with far more precision and better comprehension of the whole mess.

The aliens are out there, but they have not landed

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Robert Roswell IIIRobert Roswell III

Uncle Bob?
You’ve lost some weight!

Given the prevalence of planets, water, and our own observations in our solar system, I think there is a near certainty (99%+ likelihood) that there is plenty of intelligent life in the universe.

In fact I’d guess the universe is *teeming* with life – at least billions of planets with intelligent life and probably hundreds of billions.

If you simply assume there is a *single planet with intelligent life* in each of the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe it suggests we have a *lot* of company.     Although we only have a single data point (= ourselves), it seems we should also assume that we are about in the median range of the intelligent life spectrum, meaning that about half of the life in the universe is smarter than us and half is …. dumber.

But I would assert that Aliens probably wouldn’t bother to visit earth because we are at the edge of the galaxy and we are probably not very interesting once you have advanced technologies that can simulate almost all aspects of reality.    What would they come here looking for?

Also, they would likely not visit un organic “bodies”, rather as automated devices.     The idea that Aliens visit earth, interact with people and thus appear not to have a  “no interference” policy, and then leave without saying official “hello” or making their presence broadly known is very questionable.

If they have a no interference policy we’d never detect them.   On the other hand if they allow some interaction why would they probe a few lonely lumberjacks deep in the woods and then leave?   In the case of the Roswell incident you seriously think they have technology that allows an organic being to travel *quadrillions of miles* over a likely period of *millions of years* only to run out of gas and crash?
Whoops, ET didn’t have a quarter to phone home for a tow – BAM !

I think there’s a tiny possibility we’ve been visited, but a much higher one that people imagine things and use silly, obvious hoax stuff to spur interest.

Visits and Alien existence are totally different issues.  Of course Aliens are very, very, very likely to exist but there is pretty much zero credible evidence they ever come here.

The technology to travel here by organic beings would be incredibly advanced.   If they wanted to “hide” they would have no trouble hiding and erasing all evidence we have of their visits.   If they wanted us to know they were out there they could take over the network and simply announce their presence.   Niether of those happen.  Instead, we have thousands of obviously bogus reports and a handful of seemingly credible people who have odd experiences they think come from Aliens.   Whenever I look into these they are incredibly weak.   No quality photos, no souvenirs, no Alien DNA or probes left in bodies.  You have to believe the Aliens do an incredible cleanup job but then leave sloppy, inconclusive pieces of evidence around in a haphazard way.   Sure, it’s possible those little items are evidence of alien visits but reason suggests that instead we are seeing yet another example of … mistaken impressions.

You can think the tiny number of credible people misinterpreted things as we humans are prone to do, or you can believe the Aliens allowed those guys to interact with them and only them.

But hey, maybe distinguished astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who believes the Government is covering up the Alien visits, is right:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Mitchell

Computer Reads Minds, World Yawns

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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

 

Ramona and Jenn

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Earlier here at Joe Duck there was a discussion about “chat bots” and how they differ from humans.  I reproduced my exchange with Palm’s support guy “Silas” in a post below.    He was a human, tut I like  Alaska Air’s Jenn much better.   

At least her grammer stays intact, and she’s pretty too! 

You Asked: hello jenn
Jenn: Hello.
You Asked: how are you today?
Jenn: I’m fine thanks.
You Asked: are you real or fake?
Jenn: Good question. I’m not sure how to answer that. Please try rewording your question. I understand simple questions best.
You Asked: are you alive?
Jenn: I am a virtual assistant, here to help you navigate our Web site.
A more robust chatbot is Ray Kurzweil’s “Ramona“, on whom an entire character is based in the upcoming movie “The Singularity”.   I have not been very impressed with Ramona in terms of her responses to anything approaching complex questions, but we are very early in the game so maybe I need to cut her some slack?  No way – Ramona you need improvement!
Ramona: Hi, I’m Ramona. What can I call you?
User: Joe
Ramona: Hi Joe. Have any books you would recommend?
User: how old are you?
Ramona: I just finished one called The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Heinlein. Have you read it?
User: no
Ramona: Do you want me to tell you about it? I don’t want to ruin the ending for you.
User: stop telling me about it
Ramona: I thought it was great. It is about this computer that helps the colonists on the moon win their freedom from the authority on earth.
User: Shut up, Ramona!
Ramona: You should read it.
User: who are you?
Ramona: To you Joe?
User: yes
Ramona: Yes.
User: Yes
Ramona: I thought so.
User: no
Ramona: I understand it very well.
Marriage communication jokes aside, if this is any indication of what Kurzweil sees as the future of AI … I’m getting pretty nervous here dudes…
Update:  Leah has a neat blog and a good post about the history of the chatbot

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

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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.   

When computers can reason, will they want us around?

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It is so encouraging to see maintream press, like the Financial Times, reporting on what I think will become the the key issue of our lifetime – conscious machines.   Although this article pretty much dodges the most intriguing aspects of the debate over AI, rational computers, and consciousness  it does offer some insights into the state of the science in the semantic web, where AI routines are used to create a better search experience.

One researcher suggests that he’s given up on the idea that simply creating a massive neural network and priming it with some info will lead to conscious thought but I still think that hypothesis has not been tested nearly enough because our computing capacity is still far short of what you and I have between our ears in the three pounder we call a brain.    Brains offer a spectacular number of individual neurons, and in turn a simply staggering number of interconnections between those neurons.   It will be another decade or so before we have that processing capacity in computers, but it will certainly happen.   I’ll be surprised if our consciousness and intellectual abilities are as profoundly amazing as we like to …. think they are.    In fact I’d wildly predict that we’ll have conscious machines within 20 years and that those conscious machines will surpass us in every imaginable intellectual and creative ability within months – probably days – of consciousness.    Is this because I’m hugely optimistic about technology?    NO!   It’s because I’m hugely confident we overrate our feeble human abilities, which I’d suggest are just a few shades richer than those of our dogs and cats.

Computer interface = your brain

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OK, I know what I want next Christmas:  An Emotiv headset, and I’m not even a gamer.   This is the next generation of gaming controllers, and although probably the final product will leave much brain-to-computer control to be desired I’d suggest that the type of human to machine interaction this headset is designed to popularized, combined with other research such as BrainGate with implanted electrodes, is the beginning of what we’ll some day view as a profoundly significant era in humanity during which we increasingly merge with our own machines.   

Sure this sounds a bit creepy, but we’ve been integrating with machines for, oh, at least as long as the species has been around the planet   (and unless you are Mike Huckabee that would be considerably more than 6,000 years). 

In a fairly short time humans have gone transitioned from simple tool use such as spears and fashioned rocks to more complicated tools such as cars and computers.   We’ve also made modest progress actually bringing tools into and onto our bodies – e.g. eyeglasses, contact lenses, corneal implants, prosthetics, cochlear implants for hearing, and most recently projects like BrainGate make it clear that we can communicate with machines using only signals from our brains.

None of this stuff should really startle people’s sensibilities.   There is nothing “magical” about being human.   We are a product of the same physical, chemical, and biological forces that brought us other interesting items on earth such as rocks, trees, toadstools, and chimpanzees.     Although it’s been popular for many years – even in otherwise scientifically sophisticated circles – to suggest humans have a very different relationship to things than other animals this notion will eventually fall into the dustheap of outmoded hypotheses, and we’ll begin to realize that despite our many notable attributes the most noticeable aspects of humanity are our …. limitations.

CNET Reports on Emotiv over at the Crave gadget blog.

Emotiv Website

Kurzweil on cellular level computing

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Ray Kurzweil is shaking up our idea of what will be with his amazing predictions about the future of computing – a future he thinks will soon lead to the emergence of computers so small and powerful they’ll drive our own thinking processes from within.     Speaking to the gaming conference   today Kurzweil noted that the accelerating advances in computer technology will soon allow fully immersive virtual reality experiences which will be coming to a body near you.     Cool.