Imagine a machine that can not only understand what you say, but
can act on it; one that actually learns through experience, and
knows you well enough to anticipate your needs.
Now further imagine that this voice-interactive machine will
appear as an avatar – an on-screen image resembling your favorite
movie character or loved one. On command, it will materialize on any TV screen and computer
monitor in your home, or on display screens in your car radio and
cell phone, addressing you by name and asking, “How can I help
you.”
Poised at the cutting edge of this fast growing industry, Fair
Isaac’s Robert Hecht-Nielsen believes his company will soon market
a machine called Chancellor that could bring the vision of true
conversational machines closer to reality.
“We see Chancellor as a small, cylindrical device, several of
which can be placed around the home,” says Hecht-Nielsen. It is
wireless and gets its power from the Internet. In addition to
handling daily family tasks, such as answering phones, making
appointments, and maintaining schedules, this futuristic device
also becomes a portal to the world of automated commerce.”
Unlike most artificial intelligence systems, the Fair Isaac
machine does not use algorithms or software, or adhere to standard
grammar rules. Instead, it utilizes computer simulations of brain
tissues which enable it to process information and acquire
knowledge similar to the way that we do; and it communicates using
perfect human speech. (cont.)
If anyone’s cut out to build intelligent machines, it’s Steve
Omohundro, President of AI Company Self-Aware systems. He’s worn
the hats of scientist, university professor, software architect,
and author, giving him a solid intellectual foundation. But, it’s
all tempered by a spiritual core. He embraces practices that
encourage him to journey inward for guidance, creativity, and
transformation, and has participated in numerous workshops where he
plays the role of teacher and life coach. If an AI is running the
show one day, I for one could only hope that kind of compassion and
humanity be built in!
A few weeks ago I had the pleasant opportunity to interview
Steve (full audio transcript here). He began
our phone chat with an explanation of what artificial intelligence
is, and the consequences of a self-improving AI:
Omohundro: It’s a discipline where we try and understand the
fundamental nature of human intelligence and build machines which
can solve the same kinds of problems that people can. The
particular approach to artificial intelligence that my company is
taking is to try and build systems that understand their own
behavior and watch themselves as they work and solve problems;
notice what things are working well and which things aren’t working
well, and then change themselves, improve themselves, so that they
work better.
Sounds good, right? We’ll only have to build version 1.0, and
the program will take it from there.
Omohundro: When a human programmer just writes a program, he
understands what he wants it to do, and sometimes there are bugs,
but basically the system behaves the way you expect it to. When you
have a system that can change itself, basically it writes its own
program, then you may understand the first version of it, but
unless you’ve done a lot of analysis, it may change itself into
something that you no longer understand. And so, these systems are
quite a bit more unpredictable than the kinds of software we’ve
been used to, so it’s very powerful, but there’s also potential
dangers.
Recently Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute created
an artificial intelligence program to run within the platform of
Second Life. The researchers are studying the interactions that
occur with real people through
their avatars. The RPI students created
the program to maneuver the avatar and understand some fairly
straight forward questions, asked in English.
Operators of Second Life don’t seem concerned about
synthetic agents lurking in their world. John Lester, Boston
operations manager for Linden Lab, said the San Francisco-based
company sees a fascinating opportunity for AI to evolve. “I think
the real future for this is when people take these AI-controlled
avatars and let them free in ‘Second Life,’” Lester said, ” ... let
them randomly walk the grid.”
With AI characters within a grid of tens of thousands of active
users the social experimentation is nearly limitless. Social
scientists can examine certain behaviors and even provoke them
through the AI interface. Most interesting is if the AI can
recognize and then smoothly translate languages the program could
create cultural bridges and even examine cultural behavior
proclivities.
A couple of newsworthy piece have gotten me to thinking about
the Beatles’ hit song, “It’s getting better all the time.”
The two articles that triggered the connection to the
songs’ lyrics are both related to rapidly emerging field of
artificial intelligence and I think the saying “getting better all
the time” is a phrase we all need to keep in mind as we move into
the future.
At a minimum this suggests that artifical intelligence will
become an even more integral component in a host of daily
activities, including customer service, computer games and
educational software, than it already is. Imagine, for instance, if
an educational computer system could tell if a child was confused
about a certain concept in biology and then reexplain it to him or
her in a way that the child could understand. This compelling
future is on the way because such computers are, in fact, “getting
better all the time.” (cont.)
For the better part of two decades Peter
Voss has been hard at work developing what he hopes will be the
world’s first funtional Artificial
General Intelligence (AGI). His company, Adaptive AI, believes that with
the right amount of man-power this goal is well within reach, and
far earlier than you may think is possible.
“Personally, I would be surprised if it’s more than ten years
before we have human level, or effective AGI, and I think it could be quite a bit less than
that, as little as five years,” predicts Voss in his recent
audio interview with Future Blogger.
Any such breakthrough would indeed be a game changer,
transforming almost every existing industry. Voss is particularly
excited about just this sort of cascade.
“AGI will allow us to accelerate nanotech development, medical
research, that will allow us to deal much better with all
sorts of problems, of course disease and aging, but also just
reduce the cost of production of all sorts of goods and foods very
dramatically and also helped with environmental issues so there
will be a snowballing effect started by AGI development,” he argues, then qualifies as any
careful futurist should, “In terms of what will happen and in what
year and what chain of events, I have no way of really putting any
more numbers on that.
“Once we have machines that are as smart as humans and we can
employ them to help us develop other technologies I think things
will happen quite quickly. ... You can do a lot of simulations but
ultimately they have to be tested in real humans and that takes
time. So it’s very difficult to predict the interaction between
those various dynamics.”
When asked if he sees this as an industry that can produce a
trillion dollar
company inside of 10 years, Voss’ unhesitating response is a
simple, “Yes.”
Since the dawn of humanity and the advent of civilized life,
humans have depended on technology to carry them into the future.
Now, from genetics to artificial intelligence to nanotechnology,
science is on the brink of extraordinary mega-revolutions that will
soon change how we view human life.
In the pre-industrial age, raw materials were locally grown,
chopped, or quarried, then produced by local craftsmen, and
consumed by local villagers. The Industrial Revolution and the
creation of the assembly line changed all that. Consumer goods
could now be mass produced and distributed worldwide. Today, a
global civilization tied together by trade is rising, which
economists believe will one day turn Earth into a “global
village.”
Today’s information technologies enable businesses to produce
goods and services more efficiently. With the Internet, ideas are
shared instantly worldwide allowing employees to work away from the
office. This is producing a series of development stages that
futurists believe will revolutionize our commerce world.
The first stage of this revolution was the formation of
international corporations that outsource production to where it is
cheapest, such as clothes designed in the U.S. and stitched
together in Mexico. The second stage was the creation of
multinational firms that distribute design teams across the globe
to wherever the talent lies.
The third stage focuses on design and manufacture; for example,
electronic firms now buy all the parts from different companies and
just add packaging to the finished product. The fourth stage,
expected to advance rapidly in the next decade, allows
three-dimensional objects to be emailed and printed on any
inkjet-based printer. This enables consumers to build products
themselves, without labor costs. (cont.)
Moderator Jonas Lamis just asked the distinguished AI Panel what they would advise the new Obama administration to do if, by chance, each was appointed national CTO?
Google’s Peter Norvig: First advice, “Don’t choose me.” (Audience laughs.) Most important advice is to do what the President-Elect is already doing. #1: Believe in reality. The next thing is to invest in R&D. It’s important to re-establish the United States as a leader there. We’ve slipped over the last 8 years or so interms of funding research.
Steve Omohundro: Imprtant to use tech to make better decisions in our society. This is a huge opportunity for aggregating beliefs and desires of voters. Through semantic consensus we could better express nuances. The bailout is the perfect example – 99 to 1 against bailout, ended up passing it. Morphing as we speak… Potential pathways as we move to the future – now a smattering of diff orgs – better to have country-wide analysis of this future pathway.
“A futurist is someone who can take a look at a strip-mall and
experience instinctual fear.”
Exemplifying that role is Mac Tonnies, a futurist
and sci-fi author who enjoys exploring everything from
post-humanity to the paranormal. Armed with zingers like the quote
at top and a keen sense of wit, Mac enjoys walking the line between reality and science
fiction, much like contemporary Vernor Vinge (who
also happens to be featured on the site
today).
“A futurist’s job is to live in the future, to experience it,”
points out Mac, “That can sometimes make the present a lonely
place, but it can also make it exhilarating.”
Tonnies’ imagination stretches far indeed, frequently frolicking
into the realm of outer space:
“We’re already seeing some exciting new thinking about
democratized space travel,” say Tonnies, “for example: this could
lead to a large-scale colonization of space and, ultimately, the
effective end of the nation-state. As William Burroughs said,
‘we’re here to go.’ I’d personally like to see humanity become a
space-faring species.”
Tonnies’ most recent book,
After the Martian Apocalypse , focuses on intelligence on Mars.
So, I asked him, “Where are all the extra terrestrials?”
The Flynn Effect is a
fascinating observation that average human IQ has been rising
steadily since the invention of tests that measure it. It’s
possible that it has been caused directly or indirectly by
increased access to information, technology and human networks. If
that’s the case, and the trend in human IQ is pegged to trends in
these areas, then it’s also possible that we’re about to get a heck
of a lot smarter in a very short span of time. Perhaps even
exponentially smarter.
Ray Kurzweil has
shown that technology is increasing at an exponential, or even
double-exponential rate. A
Berkeley study and a
report by IDC both have confirmed
that the amount of information on Earth is growing at an
exponential rate. It is clear that advances in communication
technology are facilitating an explosion in the rate of
communication between people, thus increasing the value of the
whole according to Metcalfe’s Network
Law .
It’s undeniable that these accelerating trends have had a
profound impact on social behavior, in particular our ability to
solve ever more complex problems. If you don’t believe me, simply
take a look at how quickly a person or a group can locate
information, bounce it off of others and output that as a rich
white paper, business strategy or more advanced technology—then
imagine how difficult that same task would have been minus the
internet, huge bodies of amassed knowledge and an environment chock
full of complex and inspirational solutions to diverse problem
sets.
Human brains are not closed systems. They are constantly
learning better ways to input, sort and output information
(ultimately this manifests as culture). In order to increase their
intelligence, they must encounter information, technology and
interact with other humans. It has been shown that children raised
sans society are beyond dysfunctional, and that humans who miss
critical periods for learning things as simple as counting from 1
to 10 or certain ways of looking at time
cannot regain those abilities once the developmental windows
close. This indicates that there is a strong relationship between
access to information + technology and human intelligence.
But just how strong is the link? Will humans get smarter faster
or is there a cut-off point after which technology and information
systems speed off into a phase place where we cannot follow?
Obviously, these are questions with far reaching consequences. The
answers will determine how we evolve, the likelihood of our
survival and/or expansion, whether AI or
IA is
the future, and if a singularity
is possible, impossible or desirable.
The more critical the human-tech-info symbiosis, the more likely
it is that the Flynn Effect will continue and translate into
exponential growth of our own intelligence parallel to these other
trends (auto-catalytically), rather than subsequently and as a
by-product of them.
To what extent are we going to let technology run our lives? I can understand wanting the Internet, a cellphone, even a bazillion-inch flat screen TV. But this latest gadget to come on the market, the iPosture, which screams at you whenever you sit in a hunched position, well, it’s just plain silly.
If you thought your parents were nagging you pretty hard at the dinner table, imagine a device that watches your every move (“beep I saw you hide your spinach in the napkin, eat it or no dessert beep“) without the ability to judge when it’s over-stretching its boundaries. Scores of children would grow up hating both the device and their parents, wishing they had received more attention from them, swearing not to raise their kids the same way.
Sure, most people won’t buy these products (at least in the near-future) since it seems so insane and counter-natural, but what about those few who will? For example, parents who think their own parenting techniques are faulty may well wish for a family butler that can help teach their children proper manners. Just imagine if Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes had his own personal assistant, or had been forced to do his homework by an ever-watching guardian…
A friend forwarded me this awesome short interview of Nova Spivack,
founder of EarthWeb in 1994 and Radar Networks in 2003 (which just
launched the much-hyped app Twine), in which he discusses
predictions for the coming year and the longer term.
Spivack’s prognostications largely focus on widespread adoption
of the semantic web. He believes the semantic web will enable the
broader web’s evolution to one big database via linked metadata,
and that Facebook is slowly becoming a search engine to compete
with Google, while Google is becoming a social network to compete
with Facebook.
In the longer term, by 2020, “[W]e will move toward an
intelligent web where the web moves from a just knowledge base to a
kind of global mind – an intelligent entity comprised of billions
of pieces of software and billions of people working together to
make some new form of intelligence that transcends human or machine
intelligence on its own.”
Spivack also points out that he disagrees with Ray
Kurzweil on the fundamental roles humans and machines will play
in the coming decades.
On command, it will materialize on any TV screen and computer
monitor in your home, or on display screens in your car radio and
cell phone, addressing you by name and asking, “How can I help
you.”
The two articles that triggered the connection to the
songs’ lyrics are both related to rapidly emerging field of
artificial intelligence and I think the saying “getting better all
the time” is a phrase we all need to keep in mind as we move into
the future.
think is possible.
sorts of problems, of course disease and aging, but also just
reduce the cost of production of all sorts of goods and foods very
dramatically and also helped with environmental issues so there
will be a snowballing effect started by 
wit, Mac enjoys walking the line between reality and science
fiction, much like contemporary 
study
To what extent are we going to let technology run our lives? I can understand wanting the Internet, a cellphone, even a