Singularity Sunrise

Singularity Sighting in Slate

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, conference travel and start of the year busyness has cut into my blogging time. I'm hopeful that things are settling down a bit now and I'll have more time for blogging. I noticed this article in Slate during my morning browsing, it notes our sorry track record for predicting the future and speculates about the future of the internet, something of interest to those who consider it more than a passing fad. For our particular focus on the rise of the technological singularity, the very last paragraph is noteworthy:

In the realm of outlandish predictions, I feel more comfortable with the extreme optimists. Ray Kurzweil—the acclaimed technologist who in 1990 correctly predicted that a computer would beat the best human chess player by the end of the decade—believes that humans will soon "transcend biology." He says we're on the cusp of "the singularity"—a point when technology will have advanced so far that human beings will essentially become immortal. It's hard to believe. But Kurzweil's predictions are based on current trends, and nothing about them seems really impossible. I doubt the singularity is just around the corner. But, hey, maybe he's right.

This is a fairly predictable piece, nothing really new here, but I did want to point out the singularity sighting, as it appears to be largely positive.

Google Spoofs Singularity in April Fools Joke

Google has not let us down with their annual April Fool's Joke. This year they spoofed the singularity and AI, offering a new service that sounds rather remarkable:

Research group switches on world's first "artificial intelligence" tasked-array system.

For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.

Since then progress has been rapid, and tonight we're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions. It's an exciting moment that we're determined to build upon by coming to understand more fully what CADIE's emergence might mean, for Google and for our users. So although CADIE technology will be rolled out with the caution befitting any advance of this magnitude, in the months to come users can expect to notice her influence on various google.com properties. Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.

These are merely the first steps onto what will doubtless prove a long and difficult road. Considerable bugs remain in CADIE'S programming, and considerable development clearly is called for. But we can't imagine a more important journey for Google to have undertaken.

For more information about CADIE see this monograph, and follow CADIE's progress via her YouTube channel and blog.

Thank you Google for bringing a smile to the face of singulatarians everywhere.

Pervasive Clouds

The age of pervasive computing may be accelerated by the age of cloud computing (BBC News -   How to live your life on a cloud):

Bill Thompson is happy to have the future of the net in his hand. "When I'm asked to give a talk about technology I like to pull out my iPod Touch, wave it at the crowd and point out that 'in the future' it will be a supercomputer with parallel processors and terabytes of storage." Well, it seems the future has arrived rather earlier than I imagined, as a new service called "Oosah" has just started offering a terabyte of storage for the iPhone/Touch "in the palm of your hand". On closer investigation it seems that it is not ripping the case apart to install some cool new quantum-effect anti-matter memory that has just emerged from the labs, which is a shame. Instead it has a website that gives your phone access to remote data when you're on the move and lets you copy files back and forward. As long as you've got a signal or a wireless connection you'll be able to play music, watch photos and read documents as if they were local.

Outboard Minds and other Google Trends

In this edition of The Edge a group of well-known thinkers ponders the question (originally posed in the July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly): Is Google Making Us Stupid? This excerpt of essays focuses our thoughts on how we are using technology and how technology is changing the way we live, think and work.

Defining Cyberspace

The Pentagon has redefined cyberspace to better fit the military missions of the 21st Century (Danger Room - 26 Years After Gibson, Pentagon Defines 'Cyberspace'):

"More than two decades after novelist William Gibson coined the term cyberspace as a 'consensual hallucination' of data... the Pentagon has come up with its own definition," Inside Defense reports.  "A May 12 'for official use only' memo signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England... offers a 28-word meaning for the term." It is decidedly "less poetic" than Gibson's.  It is different from previous military definitions.  And it doesn't exactly square with how the Air Force's new "Cyberspace Command" sees this emerging battlefield.

Cyberspace, England writes, is “a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers.”

Well, there you go, cyberspace is the global network of interconnected hardware and software which the modern military stands ready to defend and/or attack. What have they omitted from their definition? The wetware - the human mind.

MS Brain Monitors

The corporate world is striving for greater efficiency by closely monitoring employees (techdirt - Microsoft Seeks Patent On Monitoring Employees' Brains):

theodp writes "A just-published Microsoft patent application for Monitoring Group Activities describes how a company or the government can determine if employees are not meeting their project deadlines through the use of detection components comprised of 'one or more physiological or environmental sensors to detect at least one of heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement, facial movements, facial expressions, and blood pressure.' Yikes."

I think that corporations that want to treat their employees like robots should hire robots instead. People should be treated like people, even in an age of accelerated change.

Singularity Summit

I'm not going to the Singularity Summit at Stanford on Saturday, May 13, 2006, but if I lived in California I'm sure I would. The speakers include: Steve Jurvetson, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Douglas R. Hofstadter, K. Eric Drexler, Max More, Christine L. Peterson, John Smart, Cory Doctorow, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky and Tyler Emerson. The conference is being organized by the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University, and co-sponsored by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and KurzweilAI.net.