Category Archives: Science & Technology

Consciousness as an internal dialog between your brain and … your brain.

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One clear thing to me about humans is that we exaggerate the implications of the fact we think about things. I’d argue that most reasonable models of human intellect and consciousness should assume that 1) consciousness has evolved over a long period from non-conscious thought in non-human organisms. 2) other animals are conscious and at least some other animal types are self-aware. 3) It is likely that conscious thinking has a fully mechanistic explanations.

I’m wondering about the following fairly simple model of consciousness:

1) Brain as large computing mechanism

2) Brain has many regions, each with great computational power

3) Through learning, esp. language learning and language practice, the brain begins to carry on “conversations” between the regions.

4) As the conversational feedback explodes, we call it “conscious thought”.

….. and then maybe I’m just talking to myself way too much…

Google Phone almost here

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Rediff is reporting that the Google Phone is coming within weeks. I’m skeptical it’ll be available that soon but I think this is a brilliant play for Google, striking at the hot iPhone market with a device I’m guessing will be similar, a bit better due to lessons learned from the iPhone, and cheaper. With Google’s branding power and very positive tech vibe they’ll be selling these as fast as they can produce them and if they provide the most robust connectivity they’ll beat the iPhone handily over time.

My price point? I’ve been wondering about this. My Treo 650 pisses me off about every time I use it, but I hate to trash that little investment. Examples of Treo deficiencies are the endless loop after synching which I just experienced this morning after loading my Google Party Pictures and now fear I’ll have every synch, a cumbersome proprietary desktop system, shitty modem capabilities, and a screen that is too small to use comfortably for browsing. In my view the key enhancement Google could bring would be a larger screen than the iPhone, though the iPhone screen is “large enough” to browse and view movies comfortably. But at $500 I’m keeping the Treo another year or so because applications like Google maps in Java give me “iPhone like” capabilities on the Treo, which I put to good use in the Silicon Valley traffic and road nightmare. At least California has very good signage. New Jersey could learn a lot from Caltrans.  However if Google can get down into the $350 range it’ll be hard to pass and at $250 I’d be in for sure, so go Google Phone go!   In any case I’ll be happy to switch away from Sprint which in rural Oregon is shorthand for “no connectivity”, not to mention the roaming I’m worried about while I was in the heart of silicon valley.   Hey sprint, can you hear me yet saying “I can’t hear you!”

Marissa Mayer on intersection of strong AI and search

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Marissa Mayer of Google gave today’s Keynote conversation. It’s no wonder Google does such wonders when people like this are in charge. I did get a chance to ask about the intersection of search and AI and got a fantastic answer – she thinks they will intersect, and this could happen within about ten years. Also interesting was that she said they are now seeing things that “look like intelligence” emerging from the search algorithms. This is not thought, but she indictated that it’s possible to have thought like processes emerge in this fashion rather than with the massive computational approaches that were popular several years ago. This is consistent with Kurzweil’s notion that it’ll be massive parallel processing and not massive supercomputing that will probably bring the mechanical mind “to life” within the next decade or so. I’m glad Marissa Mayer seems to agree and I hope this is a focus for Google in the future (I got the idea it’s not a focus now).

I had a chance to ask Matt Cutts of Google engineering fame the same question yesterday and he was not as optimistic, thinking that it could take another 50 years to get conscious computing. But Matt correctly noted that Marissa would be more optimistic than he was because his Master’s program at University of North Carolina was lacking in much AI content due to the AI skepticism of the architect of that program.

Larry Page’s recent remarks suggesting that a viable human thinking algorithm may appear fairly soon are more in line with Marissa’s optimistic view that within a decade we could see mature, conscious, artificial intellects. The staggering implications of conscious computing are lost on many people in computing for reasons I simply don’t understand, but I think are related to the current focus on computing science as an engineering and calculation paradigm rather than a biological one. As the brain is reverse engineered and we begin to enhance neurons with forms of programming it seems reasonable to assume things are going to get … very interesting very fast.

Google Phone coming in 2008

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Computer World says that Google may market an iPhonesque mobile device next year.  I bet it’ll be great.    I wrote an article over at the TechDirt Insight Community about this a few months ago (before the news from Computerworld – I didn’t realize Google had a phone project in the hopper already).

Here’s what I wrote over there in response to an insight community issue:

Google is in a spectacular position to launch a mobile device for many reasons, here are three:

1) Branding power.   Google is already verb “to search online” and could become a noun with the “Google” handheld broadband/phone/pda.

2) Speed of development due to corporate structure.

3) Existing prototype.
Apple’s iPhone already exists as a new standard for this type of device, effectively saving years of prototyping.   The Google device will have all this functionality PLUS better web integration (thanks to Google’s greater familiarity with online systems and also will have a LARGER touchscreen, which will ultimately determine the winner in this category because browsing ease is the greatest appeal of these devices.

Apple has hyped and branded this type of device already.   However, it will have poor initial adoption due to cost and competition from inferior but similar devices.     Google can subsidize the devices in part by letting this device Google’s mobile advertising platforms, undercutting Apple’s cost by hundreds of dollars per device.

Features and functionality:  Much like the Apple iPhone, the device would have a relatively large touchscreen interface (but larger than iPhone –  a key marketing point for the Google).  Flexible web browsing without mobile programming required for sites.   The device will provide a quality phone, high quality camera, and have PDA functionality.   Pictures, voice, and PDA functions will automatically integrate with an online control panel the user can access from the device or from any computer.   Google mail and Calendar online entries would synch with the device to allow offline mailing and calendar access.   This feature would also serve to enhance Google’s existing Calendar and mail which suffer from “only available online” challenges.

What would you do to make it a valuable addition to the Google product portfolio?

Mobile advertising is an explosive market, and without hardware control Google may lose market share to companies that have hardware advantages.   Also, for reasons stated above Google could create a superior device, thus winning both as a hardware and as an advertising provider.

Good luck Google.   As a stockholder in Yahoo I sure wish they would create this type of thing but I fear … they won’t or can’t.   Google can.

 

 

Robot Rats … acting smarter every day

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This set of experiments in the UK is helping robotic scientists create robot rats that behave a lot like real ones. It’s neat to think that this will eventually be able to use IBM’s rat brain research and make AI rat intelligences (and eventually people intelligences) that think just like the real thing. I just hope I live to see (and chat with) the human AI computers/robots.   No offense to the rat version though: “Wow, look at that freaking piece of old CHEESE!”

As AI research evolves I think it will become very clear that there is no “secret magic sauce” to animal intellect in general or to our human intellects in particular. Much of what people think makes us very special is simply due to confusing our innate human intellectual abilities (which are only modestly impressive) with the benefits of technologies that we have developed over years of learning and hundreds of years of societal evolution. Yes these technologies are a product of our collective human effort and intelligence, but it is not reasonable to assert that these are an indication of some vast level of intellectual superiority over dogs, cats, or fleas.

Rather it seems more likely that most human societies, over the past few thousand years, reached a technological tipping point where the technologies have allowed spectacular improvements in how effectively we can process information, food, shelter, transportation, etc.

Holy Crap! $19,000,000 for a space toilet?

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C’mon NASA, you don’t think you could have come up with a space toilet for, say, $18,000,000?

The space station toilet physically resembles those used on Earth, except it has leg restraints and thigh bars to keep astronauts and cosmonauts from floating away. Fans suck waste into the commode. Crew members also have individual urine funnels which are attached to hoses, and the urine is deposited into a wastewater tank.

Hmmm – I guess that urine funnel innovation was just beyond the limits of our American ingenuity.

Thank god for big taxes!

Source: China News

Blogging Revolution – off with their LINKS!

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After joining the blogging revolution last week I got excited about replacing the “A list” bloggers with “better” bloggers that I knew were out there and I knew were not getting read enough. There was enough interest that I thought maybe a bunch of us could use that tiny little blog guilotine and cut off links to the A lister sites and encourage others to do the same, replacing those links with new voices in the blogging community.

One of my favorite A listers, Robert Scoble, was admirably urging on the effort to find good new voices. To Robert’s credit he has always been a great blog community member who engages his readers and other blogs regularly.

Problem ONE has been to identify what exactly “A list” means. I thought there would be *lists* of all the A listers but there are few. Dave Winer The Technorati 100 is a good starting point though so I’m removing links to these sites (yes, I know this is not “fair”, but revolutions are a tough business:

Technorati Top 100
http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/

I’m going to be replacing them on my blog using this excellent list of Venture Capitalists who blog about technology plus some of my own picks from the past year, which I’ll profile as I add them.   The basic theme of the blogs will be technology and business.

VC Blogs:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3071

But wait, that list is from “Seeking Alpha”, an A list blog! That is not fair and not even rational!?

Revolutions are a tough, irrational business. File all complaints with the executioner via email.

To be continued….