Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Engineering’s Grand Challenges

Posted on by
6

The National Academy of Engineering has suggested a list of the world’s greatest and most important engineering challenges, and it looks pretty comprehensive to me.   If we can solve all these problems we’ll really be taking life on earth up a few notches and kicking some globally sustainable problematic butt.   

I hope they add a priority and ROI component here.    My feeling is that reverse engineering of the brain will lead to general Artificial Intelligence and very rapid solutions to most if not all analytical problems.   Thus I’d like to see us devote, say, 1/100th of what we are poised to squander failing to solve CO2 problems to AI research.     But even if we forego that notion it’s questionable to spend in engineering as we currently do, especially on huge military technologies of questionable effectiveness.

 Here are the Grand Challenges for engineering as determined by a committe of the National Academy of Engineering:

  • Make solar energy economical
  • Provide energy from fusion
  • Develop carbon sequestration methods
  • Manage the nitrogen cycle
  • Provide access to clean water
  • Restore and improve urban infrastructure
  • Advance health informatics
  • Engineer better medicines
  • Reverse-engineer the brain
  • Prevent nuclear terror
  • Secure cyberspace
  • Enhance virtual reality
  • Advance personalized learning
  • Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

Gutenberg + 550 years = Our ADDd Internet

Posted on by
1

John Naughton, writing in the Guardian, has a nice piece about the reading revolution inspired by Gutenberg and the uncertain future of our online equivalents to the books we have held dear for several centuries. 

Studies are noting how fleeting our attention has become, especially in our young folks.   In terms of “total enlightenment” I actually favor the quick skim to the in-depth read because I believe retention is better for the short bits of information as well as better for the “key concepts” that you get quickly from surfing on a topic.  

Thus if I read a carefully crafted work I’ll be moderately informed but then lose most of the information over the years, where if I jump around to 20 sources I’ll be similarly well-informed but will retain it better.

All that said, I’d agree with internet critics who suggest we may be losing our ability – to the extent it was ever there – to quietly and deeply reflect on topics.    Also I’d agree we don’t know the consequences of this shift, though from the national dialog about politics, religion, and other things I’d say we aren’t really falling back or making much progress.   We are a modestly contemplative primate, and we can’t escape that fate regardless of how we input the information.

Bluetooth prosthetics for US soldier

Posted on by
1

A Double amputee will walk again thanks to bluetooth enabled prosthetic legs which can walk naturally in part thanks to using the wireless signals.   News report.   

I find it frustrating that  people are on the one hand very comfortable supporting great technologies like this for those with disabilities, but as soon as somebody suggests we should also use technology to enhance our own “normal” and feeble abilities people seem to get worried and object.       There will be an inevitable trend to enhancing out lives using technologies we place in our bodies, and this is nothing to fear.   We’ve used *external* technologies for many years (e.g. specatacles) and many people already use many internal high tech devices (heart stints).   

So, bring on the brain chips!

LEDs in Contact Lenses? Cool!

Posted on by
Reply

Technology continues to blur the line between our bodies and helpful gadgets.  CNET reports that the University of Washington is experimenting with embedding LEDs into contact lenses, a step in the direction of creating vision correcting contact lenses.  

In his powerful book “The Singularity is Near”, Ray Kurzweil notes how powerfully the technologies involved with Nanotechnology, Robotics, and Genetics will enhance our understanding of the way our human attributes work to create  awareness, intelligence, and consciousness. 

Conscious Computers and Friendly vs Unfriendly AI

Posted on by
2

As I’ve noted here in posts about AI many times I think we are within 15 years – probably fewer – of the most profound change in technology and humanity ever to hit the planet.   This will be the advent of conscious computers which we can reasonably expect to surpass us in all thinking and organizational skills within a very short time – probably months or even days of becoming conscious.    

Some AI folks believe that strong AI machinery will require a somewhat lengthy learning period, much like human intellects require, before becoming highly functional but I think the process will be very fast after consciousness happens.  In my opinion it is easy to exaggerate the significance of the intellectual complexity that comes from massive numbers of redundant, mostly simple processes.  Unlike humans, computer intelligences will grow extremly fast as soon as they “choose” that approach.   Initially those choices to expand will be programmed in by the human AI programmer, but it seems logical to assume that as computers design their own replacements they will continue to give the next generation “motivation”.     You don’t even need to assume it’ll happen in this proactive way though.   In a world with various forms of intelligences those that value their own survival will tend to increase in number simply through basic mathematical/evolutionary processes as those that do not value survival as highly simply are more likely to drop off the scene.

So, my cousin asked me today, why would a machine care much if at all about human welfare?    My gut says they will, and I think this is based on watching how humans care so much for their animals and even inanimate objects.    Also I think it’s important to note how crappily we take care of our fellow humans.    We consistently choose fighting and selfishness over harmonious existence. 

So I say give the computers a shot at making the world a better place!  

Are you biased?

Posted on by
2

My friend Marvin dropped in today on his way down to California and we were discussing artificial intelligence.    Like most of my programming pals he’s much more skeptical than I am about how soon we’ll have conscious computing, but they are also far more knowlegeable about the difficulty of programming complex routines, let alone consciousness.    Of course, they are not nearly as pretty as Google uber-Engineer Marissa Mayer who estimated 10-15 years, so I’m going with her estimate.  

I’m still trying to decide if programmers are viewing things too narrowly by generally assuming that the circumstances required for conscious thought are so very profoundly complex that engineering for them will be nearly impossible.   I prefer the idea that simply having brain-equivalent speedy and massive computational power is going to push machines very close to consciousness after (relatively) simple routines are developed that will create conversations within those systems.  

When I noted that many in the AI community are now wildly optimistic about the prospects for strong AI within 10-20 years, Marvin correctly noted that people in the AI community were predicting strong AI a *long* time ago.   This led to the interesting question of “prediction bias”.    How often in history are predictions  reasonably accurate, and how do the time estimates on those accurate predictions hold up?   This would be a fun mini-research project to do sometime though obviously it would itself be subject to a lot of bias depending on how you picked the criteria, the predictors, and the predictions.

Along those bias lines this great Wikipedia article popped up showing a huge number of cognitive biases.    All of us should take a look at these and reflect on how often we fall into these irrational traps.

Joe Duck – Chinese Edition

Posted on by
6

Click HERE for my Chinese Edition.    Cool?

Actually, any web page can be auto-translated in this fashion by Google.  It’s a really cool feature though I’m guessing the translations must leave something to be desired.    My understanding is that you still need humans to pull quality meaning from one language to another.    Still, this is a huge step forward and the advent of hand held translation units, online translation, and a lot more global travel is breaking down one of the barriers to international understanding – language.

China is expected to be the world’s top travel destination by 2020 and I don’t doubt that estimate.  It is one of the reasons I’m anxious to get over there to SES China in Xiamen, the Xianglu Grand Hotel (though I’m not clear if this is the SES China venue or not), The Great Wall of China, Beijing and the Forbidden City, Hong Kong Harbor, Hong Kong, Kowloon, and much more of the amazing China Travel landscape. I want to start exploring and understanding the nation and culture that may eventually eclipse the USA in terms of global influence  (I’m not predicting that – just noting it is a possibility.  What is a certainty is that China will continue to be one of the most influential nations for some time to come).      One of the most interesting graphs I have ever seen showed the global GDP of about 1850, noting that India+China were over half the global totals, and the USA was not even in the same league.    The USA’s remarkable industrial rise since that time led us to the global economic dominance we now enjoy, but things could change … again.   I don’t see this shift in Economic dominance as a negative, rather more an inevitable balancing and levelling of an increasingly globalized playing field – the world Tom Friedman has described so well in his book “The World is Flat”. 

2045

Posted on by
13

I am SO very interested in how people are going to process the upcoming film about the Singularity as defined by Ray Kurzweil, which is a pretty awesome future for humans:  

Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence.  It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality …

And holy string cosmology, that’s not even the singularity part!   Kurzweil predicts that around 2045, after we all become superintellects, the machine intelligences will surpass the total brainpower of planet earth by so much that it’s likely most of us will simply upload into the giant intelligent machine, or some other future we can’t know because….it’s hard to think what we’d do when we are 1,000,000,000 times smarter than we are right now.

Too optimistic?    Too weird?    Maybe, but Kurzweil is arguably the best thinker out there on artificial intelligence, and unlike the past where AI overhyped and underdelivered it is now clear that at least in terms of computational power and memory storage we’ll be reaching human capabilities soon.   

So, are you ready?   

Universal Voice Translators are almost here

Posted on by
1

One of the neat futuristic gadgets in Star Trek was the universal translator, a device that would take in any language and output English.

Engadget reports that NEC says they are close to having one of these.

the firm has developed a system that can understand around 50,000 Japanese words and translate them to English text on the mobile’s display in just a second or two.

Now this is not quite Star Trek because you’d need to convert the text to voice, but that technology is here already.   This is close, and it’s just another in the long line of technological improvements we all call … home.

I see this as very fertile ground for the open handset alliance.  Just think how positively travel would be affected if the language barrier was stripped away!    Perhaps even less conflict as people would find it harder to keep from communicating during crises.

Life Sentence: Immortality

Posted on by
1

Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel are not crackpots.  

Kurzweil, among other things, was a major pioneer in speech recognition software and electronic musical instruments, from which he made a fortune.   Kurzweil still works in the music field on SONY projects, but his passion is … immortality, and he’s working hard towards that end.

Thiel has made a king’s fortune in online projects like EBAY and PayPal, but he’s got more innovative things up his sleeve.   Like Kurzweil, Theil’s looking to help fund the holy grail of humanity – immortality.

Even a few decades ago reasonable people would have considered much of the talk about a technological singularity and massive superintelligent computers to be fanciful at best and insanity at worst, but the inexorable march of technology is bringing us to within about a decade – probably two at the most – of human quality artificial intelligence.   The processing power of the human brain will be reached soon, and unless there is something more to our human intellect than one can reasonably assume we are going to be chatting intelligently with our computers fairly soon.  After that milestone is reached it is likely that it won’t be long before “recursive self improvement” by these intelligent computers will create artificial intelligences far superior to our current human intellects.  Not to worry though, because it also appears likely that improvements in medicine, brain research, and nanotechnology will allow us to enhance our bodies and intellects such that we’ll live much longer and be much smarter.

Kurzweil, in the book “The Singularity is Near”, argues that the historical exponential growth of technology shows no signs of slowing down – in fact he’s convinced the growth is speeding up.   At the current rates of increase we’ll see the same improvements over the next decades that we have seen in the past hundred years.  For Kurzweil these improvements will lead to a utopian future of no poverty, massively improved intellects, and eventually immortality as we download our brains into machines.

Sounds cool to me Ray, I’m IN!

Conde Nast on Kurzweil

More at kurzweilai.net