Hat’s off to IBM for what could be a milestone in building faster computers. They are making great progress with Silicon Nanophotonics – moving data using light pulses. This technology could speed up current wired chips by a factor of 100, bringing supercomputer power to your … desktop computer.
Kurzweil is smiling about this, and this is yet another indication we are likely to have conscious computers by about 2020. Then, everything is going to change in ways we cannot even imagine.
OK, it’s time to start getting excited about several events I’ll attend in 2008 – China SES in Xiamen, The Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and the Web 2.0 Conference from WebGuild in Silicon Valley. More about China later as I start to plan that trip with my two table tennis pals, one of whom was born in Beijing. Here’s a great recap of Rand Fishkin‘s experiences last year at this conference.
CES Las Vegas is the world’s most super gigantic humongous computer show. Bill Gates is the keynote this year.
There will be amazing new product launches and thousands of exhibitors hawking the latest and greatest electronic gadgetry. I expect at least a few new amazing Google phones based on Android SDK and literally thousands of neat new gadgets for hands on investigation. Hopefully Scoble and Podtech will host another Bloghaus at the Bellagio. I’d read about CES Bloghaus 2007 last year and it really sounded like the happening place to hang out during the conference as a gathering point and 24/7 watering hole for bloggers.
I’m already getting a lot of emails and some phone calls about setting up press appointments with the CES Exhibitors. For many this is the key place to build the buzz for new product launches. I’ll hope to report on the neatest things I see in travel and tourism as well as anything amazing that really stands out.
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.
Ray Kurzweil is one of the most exciting thinkers anywhere, and unlike some “futurist advocates” of the past he’s distinguished himself in several fields relevant to those he speaks about. He’s producing a film based on his book “The Singularity is Near” that will take the form of a narrative storyline featuring cyberterror, nanotechnology, and virtual beings and also a documentary with interviews featuring many leading thinkers about the future of technology. See the Singularity website for more.
Ironically the early misguided optimism about AI has led even some early AI pioneers to scoff at the notion we are near the brink of conscious computing. Yet a lot of evidence now suggests we are near reaching the capability of creating consciousness in machines.
First, the IBM Blue Brain project is within about 8 years of a good working model of the brain. They are not claiming to seek “consciousness” with the model – rather they are focusing on brain and disease research – but I see no reason to think they won’t soon attain a conscious computer as the machine approaches the number of connections we have in our own brains.
Second, the computational power of computers is approaching that of a human brain. Kurzweil discusses this at great length in “The Singularity is Near”, noting that exponentially improving processing and memory capacity will soon lead to plenty of power in computers to replicate human thinking patterns.
Third, the explosion in profitability for massively parallel computing power – such as that used by Google and Microsoft – will fuel innovation for many years to come.
The question of “Do you believe in a technological singularity” needs to be replaced with “what are we going to do when the singularity happens?”
Hey, I’ve written a lot more about the Singularity , because I think it’s the biggest thing to hit humanity since….ummmm…. the advent of humanity?
2008 is shaping up to be a big travel year and I’m dreading lugging my Dell 8.2 pounder around (not to mention it’s old and sucky) so it’s time to shop for something lighter. I have a good laptop backpack but even with that I notice my back gets really sore if I lug it around for a conference day. However I like to live blog sessions so I like to have the laptop available. Some conferences, like SES, do an amazing job of providing computers in press room and in lobbies, but it’s still best to have one on hand at all times. Hmmm – I really should look into Treo keyboard interfaces as well.
Mark Kyrnin at About.com had a nice little article that helped, especially this breakdown of relative size and weight for the various notebook and laptop classifications (not sure where he got those):
Ultraportable: <11″ x <10″ x <1.3″ @ <4 pounds
Thin and light: 11-14″ x <11″ x 1-1.5″ @ 5-7 poundsDesktop Replacement: >15″ x >11″ x >1.5″ @ 7+ pounds
Luggables: >18” x >13” x >1.5” @ 12+ pounds
Looks like I’ll be OK with a “thin and light” in the lower weight range.
Fred Wilson’s got a fascinating post about his history of investments over at Union Square Ventures. Of course he’s got every reason to post his results, which appear to be exceptional although he has left out a key factor in his little analysis, which is time. I note over there:
Fred, these are impressive results and to my understanding much better than average VC returns, which are negative, right? Don Dodge posted min-analysis some time ago where he wound up concluding there was a lot more VC failure than is normally thought.
There are elite guys like you and Jeff Clavier who “beat the averages”, but isn’t “making money” with startups an unrealistic expectation, since those VCs and companies that succeed are still around to talk, but those who fail are not blogging about the burgers they now flip to pay the bills?
I’m also noting that without “time” as a factor the return is not meaningful. 3x is easy….if you use a 15 year horizon!
At a very modest annual return of 7.33% one would expect to triple an investment in 15 years. A 10% return will leave you with 4.5x your initial investment in that same time frame. More dramatically, if time is not a factor then I’m happy to guarantee you a return of, say, a million percent. It’ll just take a while.
This isn’t to suggest Fred isn’t a great investor because I think he is the exception to the normal rule in Venture Capital, which are low returns. After I wrote about Don Dodge’s suggestion that average VC returns appear to be negative Jeff Clavier also suggested in a blog comment here that only the top 25% of VC firms are averaging positive returns, and this really shook up my understanding of things.
Tim Berners-Lee, the closest thing we have to an “inventor” of the web as we know it today, is calling for more integrated, broad studies of the internet rather than the mostly piecemeal academic work being done now. He’s right. The internet is arguablly the most profound change in human communication in history, and it’s just getting started. As social networking explodes into the dominant socializing mechanism for humans we are experiencing many new opportunities and many challenges, especially as the online environments create new relationships between people, generations, and cultures.
Universities would be well advised to heed this call from Berners-Lee and offer more “web centric” courses, but more importantly academics should be spending a lot more time studying the complex, changing structure of the web. The technical aspects of the internet are fairly well studied in commercial circles. The sociological side is poorly/rarely studied in academia and the commercial sector is still struggling to understand the implications of the massive shift of human activity online.
February 2009 is the date for the mandatory transition to digital TV. Here is a great website to answer a lot of questions folks may have about this major transition in broadcasting and hardware technologies.
I’m still undecided about whether this will be a bang or a whimper. Marketing efforts, Cable and Satellite have made many households “digital already” so by 2009 there may not be enough old TVs to matter much – they can install the digital to analog boxes and will be off to the races.
Center Networks is reviewing yet another DiggEsque application called, in what has got to be one of the most questionable rebranding efforts of the year: Propeller . Propeller started life as the Netscape ranking site that was very similar to Digg and designed to compete with it. That effort having failed, it appears Propeller is an attempt to rebrand things such that they can take another shot at Digg.
I’m having a lot of trouble understanding “the point” in what seem like similar approaches to the same challenge, which is getting people to *participate* very actively in story selection and commentary. Rather than “we’ll build a site and they’ll come to it” approach I want to see dramatic improvements to portable identities. MyBlogLog is the closest thing to what I think is the clear “right answer” here. Basically, what I want is for every online person to have an identity. I want to see that identity when they visit my websites and I want to see that identity when I am visiting a site they’ve also visited recently (or maybe … visited ever). One interesting extension that might come out of this would be a superior “vote by your feet” ranking system where pages at which many people spent a lot of time would have more authority, and when this was combined with tags and comments by the visitors you’d have a fairly robust system for ranking sites.
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
Joe Duck 