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16 June 2012

Beyond future shock

Filed under: alienation, books, change, chaos, futurist, Humanity Plus, rejuveneering, robots, Singularity, UKH+ — David Wood @ 3:10 pm

They predicted the “electronic frontier” of the Internet, Prozac, YouTube, cloning, home-schooling, the self-induced paralysis of too many choices, instant celebrities, and the end of blue-collar manufacturing. Not bad for 1970.

That’s the summary, with the benefit of four decades of hindsight, given by Fast Company writer Greg Lindsay, of the forecasts made in the 1970 bestseller “Future Shock” by husband-and-wife authors Alvin and Heidi Toffler.

As Lindsay comments,

Published in 1970, Future Shock made its author Alvin Toffler – a former student radical, welder, newspaper report and Fortune editor – a household name. Written with his wife (and uncredited co-author), Heidi Toffler, the book was The World Is Flat of its day, selling 6 million copies and single-handedly inventing futurism…

“Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time”, the pair wrote.

And quoting Deborah Westphal, the managing partner of Toffler Associates, in an interview at an event marking the 40th anniversary of the publication of Future Shock, Lindsay notes the following:

In Future Shock, the Tofflers hammered home the point that technology, culture, and even life itself was evolving too fast for governments, policy-makers and regulators to keep up. Forty years on, that message hasn’t changed. “The government needs to understand the dependencies and the convergence of networks through information,” says Westphal. “And there still needs to be some studies done around rates of change and the synchronization of these systems. Business, government, and organizational structures need to be looked at and redone. We’ve built much of the world economy on an industrial model, and that model doesn’t work in an information-centric society. That’s probably the greatest challenge we still face -understanding the old rules don’t apply for the future.”

Earlier this week, another book was published, that also draws on Future Shock for inspiration.  Again, the authors are a husband-and-wife team, Parag and Ayesha Khanna.  And again, the book looks set to redefine key aspects of the futurist endeavour.

This new book is entitled “Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization“.  The Khannas refer early on to the insights expressed by the Tofflers in Future Shock:

The Tofflers’ most fundamental insight was that the pace of change has become as important as the content of change… The term Future Shock was thus meant to capture our intense anxiety in the face of technology’s seeming ability to accelerate time. In this sense, technology’s true impact isn’t just physical or economic, but social and psychological as well.

One simple but important example follows:

Technologies such as mobile phones can make us feel empowered, but also make us vulnerable to new pathologies like nomophobia – the fear of being away from one’s mobile phone. Fifty-eight percent of millennials would rather give up their sense of smell than their mobile phone.

As befits the theme of speed, the book is a fast read. I downloaded it onto my Kindle on the day of its publication, and have already read it all the way through twice. It’s short, but condensed. The text contains many striking turns of phrase, loaded with several layers of meaning, which repay several rethinks. That’s the best kind of sound-bite.

Despite its short length, there are too many big themes in the book for me to properly summarise them here. The book portrays an optimistic vision, alongside a series of challenges and risks. As illustrations, let me pick out a selection of phrases, to convey some of the flavour:

The cross-pollination of leading-edge sectors such as information technology, biotechnology, pervasive computing, robotics, neuroscience, and nanotechnology spells the end of certain turf wars over nomenclature. It is neither the “Bio Age” nor the “Nano Age” nor the “Neuro Age”, but the hybrid of all of these at the same time…

Our own relationship to technology is moving beyond the instrumental to the existential. There is an accelerating centripetal dance between what technologies are doing outside us and inside us. Externally, technology no longer simply processes our instructions on a one-way street. Instead, it increasingly provides intelligent feedback. Internally, we are moving beyond using technology only to dominate nature towards making ourselves the template for technology, integrating technologies within ourselves physically. We don’t just use technology; we absorb it…

The Hybrid Age is the transition period between the Information Age and the moment of Singularity (when machine surpass human intelligence) that inventor Ray Kurzweil estimates we may reach by 2040 (perhaps sooner). The Hybrid Age is a liminal phase in which we cross the threshold toward a new mode of arranging global society…

You may continue to live your life without understanding the implications of the still-distant Singularity, but you should not underestimate how quickly we are accelerating into the Hybrid Age – nor delay in managing this transition yourself…

The dominant paradigm to explain global change in the Hybrid Age will be geotechnnology. Technology’s role in shaping and reshaping the prevailing order, and accelerating change between orders, forces us to rethink the intellectual hegemony of geopolitics and geoeconomics…

It is geotechnology that is the underlying driver of both: Mastery in the leading technology sectors of any era determines who leads in geoeconomics and dominates in geopolitics…

The shift towards a geotechnology paradigm forces us to jettison centuries of foundational assumptions of geopolitics. The first is our view on scale: “Bigger is better” is no longer necessarily true. Size can be as much a liability as an asset…

We live and die by our Technik, the capacity to harness emerging technologies to improve our circumstances…

We will increasingly differentiate societies on the basis not of their regime type or income, but of their capacity to harness technology. Societies that continuously upgrade their Technik will thrive…

Meeting the grand challenge of improving equity on a crowded planet requires spreading Technik more than it requires spreading democracy…

And there’s lots more, applying the above themes to education, healthcare, “better than new” prosthetics, longevity and rejuvenation, 3D printing, digital currencies, personal entrepreneurship and workforce transformation, the diffusion of authority, the rise of smart cities and their empowered “city-zens”, augmented reality and enhanced personal avatars, robots and “avoiding robopocalypse”, and the prospect for a forthcoming “Pax Technologica”.

It makes me breathless just remembering all these themes – and how they time and again circle back on each other.

Footnote: Readers who are in the vicinity of London next Saturday (23rd June) are encouraged to attend the London Futurist / Humanity+ UK event “Hybrid Reality, with Ayesha Khanna”. Click on the links for more information.

29 July 2011

Towards a mind-stretching weekend in New York

Filed under: AGI, futurist, leadership, nanotechnology, robots, Singularity — David Wood @ 9:19 pm

I’ve attended the annual Singularity Summit twice before – in 2008 and in 2009.  I’ve just registered to attend the 2011 event, which is taking place in New York on 15th-16th October.  Here’s why.

On both previous occasions, the summits featured presentations that gave me a great deal to think about, on arguably some of the most significant topics in human history.  These topics include the potential emergence, within the lifetimes of many people alive today, of:

  • Artificial intelligence which far exceeds the capabilities of even the smartest group of humans
  • Robots which far exceed the dexterity, balance, speed, strength, and sensory powers of even the best human athletes, sportspeople, or soldiers
  • Super-small nanobots which can enter the human body and effect far more thorough repairs and enhancements – to both body and mind – than even the best current medical techniques.

True, at the previous events, there were some poor presentations too – which is probably inevitable given the risky cutting-edge nature of the topics being covered.  But the better presentations far outweighed the worse ones.

And as well as the presentations, I greatly enjoyed the networking with the unusual mix of attendees – people who had taken the time to explore many of the fascinating hinterlands of modern technology trends.  If someone is open-minded enough to give serious thought to the ideas listed above, they’re often open-minded enough to entertain lots of other unconventional ideas too.  I frequently found myself in disagreement with these attendees, but the debate was deeply refreshing.

Take a look at the list of confirmed speakers so far: which of these people would you most like to bounce ideas off?

The summit registration page is now open.  As I type these words, that page states that the cost of tickets is going to increase after 31 July.  That’s an argument for registering sooner rather than later.

To provide more information, here’s a copy of the press release for the event:

Singularity Summit 2011 in New York City to Explore Watson Victory in Jeopardy

New York, NY This October 15-16th in New York City, a TED-style conference gathering innovators from science, industry, and the public will discuss IBM’s ‘Watson’ computer and other exciting developments in emerging technologies. Keynote speakers at Singularity Summit 2011 include Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings and famed futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. After losing to an IBM computer in Jeopardy!, Jennings wrote, “Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of ‘thinking’ machines. ‘Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.”

In February, Watson defeated two human champions in Jeopardy!, the game show famous for its mind-bending trivia questions. Surprising millions of TV viewers, Watson took down champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter for the $1 million first prize. Facing defeat on the final show, competitor Ken Jennings jokingly wrote in parentheses on his last answer: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” Besides Watson, the Singularity Summit 2011 will feature speakers on robotics, nanotechnology, biotechnology, futurism, and other cutting-edge technologies, and is the only conference to focus on the technological Singularity.

Responding to Watson’s victory, leading computer scientist Ray Kurzweil said, “Watson is a stunning example of the growing ability of computers to successfully invade this supposedly unique attribute of human intelligence.” In Kurzweil’s view, the combination of language understanding and pattern recognition that Watson displays would make its descendants “far superior to a human”. Kurzweil is known for predicting computers whose conversations will be indistinguishable from people by 2029.

Beyond artificial intelligence, the Singularity Summit will also focus on high-tech and where it is going. Economist Tyler Cowen will examine the economic impacts of emerging technologies. Cowen argued in his recent book The Great Stagnation that modern society is on a technological plateau where “a lot of our major innovations are springing up in sectors where a lot of work is done by machines, not by human beings.” Tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, who sits on the board of directors of Facebook, will share his thoughts on innovation and jumpstarting the economy.

Other speakers include MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, Allen Brain Institute chief scientist Christof Koch, co-founder of Skype Jaan Tallinn, robotics professors James McLurkin and Robin Murphy, Bionic Builders host Casey Pieretti, the MIT Media Lab’s Riley Crane, MIT polymath Alexander Wissner-Gross, filmmaker and television personality Jason Silva, and Singularity Institute artificial intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky.

7 May 2011

Workers beware: the robots are coming

Filed under: books, challenge, disruption, Economics, futurist, robots — David Wood @ 9:07 pm

What’s your reaction to the suggestion that, at some stage in the next 10-30 years, you will lose your job to a robot?

Here, by the word “robot”, I’m using shorthand for “automation” – a mixture of improvements in hardware and software. The suggestion is that automation will continue to improve until it reaches the stage when it is cheaper for your employer to use computers and/or robots to do your job, than it is to continue employing you. This change has happened in the past with all manner of manual and/or repetitive work. Could it happen to you?

People typically have one of three reactions to this suggestion:

  1. “My job is too complex, too difficult, too human-intense, etc, for a robot to be able to do it in the foreseeable future. I don’t need to worry.”
  2. “My present job may indeed be outsourced to robots, but over the same time period, new kinds of job will be created, and I’ll be able to do one of these instead. I don’t need to worry.”
  3. “When the time comes that robots can do all the kinds of work that I can do, better than me, we’ll be living in an economy of plenty. I won’t actually need to work – I’ll be happy to enjoy lots more leisure time. I don’t need to worry.”

Don’t need to worry? Think again. That’s effectively the message in Martin Ford’s 2009 book “The lights in the tunnel“. (If you haven’t heard of that book, perhaps it’s because the title is a touch obscure. After all, who wants to read about “lights in a tunnel”?)

The subtitle gives a better flavour of the content: “Automation, accelerating technology, and the economy of the future“. And right at the top of the front cover, there’s yet another subtitle: “A journey to the economic landscape of the coming decades“. But neither of these subtitles conveys the challenge which the book actually addresses. This is a book that points out real problems with increasing automation:

  • Automation will cause increasing numbers of people to lose their current jobs
  • Accelerating automation will mean that robots can quickly become able to do more jobs – their ability to improve and learn will far outpace that of human workers – so the proportion of people who are unemployed will grow and grow
  • Without proper employment, a large proportion of consumers will be deprived of income, and will therefore lack the spending power which is necessary for the continuing vibrancy of the economy
  • Even as technology improves, the economy will stagnate, with disastrous consequences
  • This is likely to happen long before technologies such as nanotech have reached their full potential – so that any ideas of us existing at that time in an economy of plenty are flawed.

Although the author could have chosen a better title for his book, the contents are well argued, and easy to read. They deserve a much wider hearing.  They underscore the important theme that the process of ongoing technological improvement is far from being an inevitable positive.

There are essentially two core threads to the book:

  • A statement of the problem – this effectively highlights issues with each of the reactions 1-3 listed earlier;
  • Some tentative ideas for a possible solution.

The book looks backwards in history, as well as forwards to the future. For example, it includes interesting short commentaries on both Marx and Keynes. One of the most significant backward glances considers the case of the Luddites – the early 19th century manufacturing workers in the UK who feared that their livelihoods would be displaced by factory automation. Doesn’t history show us that such fears are groundless? Didn’t the Luddites (and their descendants) in due course find new kinds of employment? Didn’t automation create new kinds of work, at the same time as it destroyed some existing kinds of work? And won’t that continue to happen?

Well, it’s a matter of pace.  One of most striking pictures in the book is a rough sketch of the variation over time of the comparative ability of computers and humans to perform routine jobs:

As Martin Ford explains:

I’ve chosen an arbitrary point on the graph to indicate the year 1812. After that year, we can reasonably assume that human capability continued to rise quite steeply until we reach modern times. The steep part of the graph reflects dramatic improvements to our overall living conditions in the world’s more advanced countries:

  • Vastly improved nutrition, public health, and environmental regulations have allowed us to remain relatively free from disease and reach our full biological potential
  • Investment in literacy and in primary and secondary education, as well as access to college and advanced education for some workers, has greatly increased overall capability
  • A generally richer and more varied existence, including easy access to books, media, new technologies and the ability to travel long distances, has probably had a positive impact on our ability to comprehend and deal with complex issues.

A free download of the entire book is available from the author’s website.  I’ll leave it to you to evaluate the author’s arguments for why the two curves in this sketch have the shape that they do.  To my mind, these arguments have a lot of merit.

The point where these two curves cross – potentially a few decades into the future – will represent a new kind of transition point for the economy – perhaps the mother of all economic disruptions.  Yes, there will still be some new jobs created.  Indeed, in a blogpost last year, “Accelerating automation and the future of work“, I listed 20 new occupations that people could be doing in the next 20 years:

  1. Body part maker
  2. Nano-medic
  3. Pharmer of genetically engineered crops and livestock
  4. Old age wellness manager/consultant
  5. Memory augmentation surgeon
  6. ‘New science’ ethicist
  7. Space pilots, tour guides and architects
  8. Vertical farmers
  9. Climate change reversal specialist
  10. Quarantine enforcer
  11. Weather modification police
  12. Virtual lawyer
  13. Avatar manager / devotees / virtual teachers
  14. Alternative vehicle developers
  15. Narrowcasters
  16. Waste data handler
  17. Virtual clutter organiser
  18. Time broker / Time bank trader
  19. Social ‘networking’ worker
  20. Personal branders

However, the lifetimes of these jobs (before they too can be handled by improved robots) will shrink and shrink.  For a less esoteric example, consider the likely fate of a relatively new profession, radiology.  As Martin Ford explains:

A radiologist is a medical doctor who specializes in interpreting images generated by various medical scanning technologies. Before the advent of modern computer technology, radiologists focused exclusively on X-rays. This has now been expanded to include all types of medical imaging, including CT scans, PET scans, mammograms, etc.

To become a radiologist you need to attend college for four years, and then medical school for another four. That is followed by another five years of internship and residency, and often even more specialized training after that. Radiology is one of the most popular specialties for newly minted doctors because it offers relatively high pay and regular work hours; radiologists generally don’t need to work weekends or handle emergencies.

In spite of the radiologist’s training requirement of at least thirteen additional years beyond high school, it is conceptually quite easy to envision this job being automated. The primary focus of the job is to analyze and evaluate visual images. Furthermore, the parameters of each image are highly defined since they are often coming directly from a computerized scanning device. Visual pattern recognition software is a rapidly developing field that has already produced significant results…

Radiology is already subject to significant offshoring to India and other places. It is a simple matter to transmit digital scans to an overseas location for analysis. Indian doctors earn as little as 10 percent of what American radiologists are paid… Automation will often come rapidly on the heels of offshoring, especially if the job focuses purely on technical analysis with little need for human interaction. Currently, U.S. demand for radiologists continues to expand because of the increase in use of diagnostic scans such as mammograms. However, this seems likely to slow as automation and offshoring advance and become bigger players in the future. The graduating medical students who are now rushing into radiology for its high pay and relative freedom from the annoyances of dealing with actual patients may eventually come to question the wisdom of their decision…

Radiologists are far from being the only “high-skill” occupation that is under risk from this trend.  Jobs which involve a high degree of “expert system” knowledge will come under threat from increasingly expert AI systems.  Jobs which involve listening to human speech will come under threat from increasingly accurate voice recognition systems.  And so on.

This leaves two questions:

  1. Can we look forward, as some singularitarians and radical futurists assert, to incorporating increasing technological smarts within our own human nature, allowing us in a sense to merge with the robots of the future?  In that case, a scenario of “the robots will take all our jobs” might change to “substantially enhanced humans will undertake new types of work”
  2. Alternatively, if robots do much more of the work needed within society, how will the transition be handled, to a society in which humans have much more leisure time?

I’ll return to the first of these questions in a subsequent blogpost.  Martin Ford’s book has a lot to say about the second of these questions.  And he recommends a series of ideas for consideration:

  • Without large numbers of well-paid consumers able to purchase goods, the global economy risks going into decline, at the same time as technology has radically improved
  • With fewer people working, there will be much less income tax available to governments.  Taxation will need to switch towards corporation tax and consumption taxes
  • With more people receiving handouts from the state, there’s a risk of loss of many of aspects of economic structure which previously have been thought essential
  • We need to give more thought, now, to ideas for differential state subsidy of different kinds of non-work activity – to incentivise certain kinds of activity.  That way, we’ll be ready for the increasing disturbances placed on our economy by the rise of the robots.

For further coverage of these and related ideas, see Martin Ford’s blog on the subject, http://econfuture.wordpress.com/.

15 April 2010

Accelerating automation and the future of work

Filed under: AGI, Economics, futurist, Google, politics, regulation, robots — David Wood @ 2:45 am

London is full of pleasant surprises.

Yesterday evening, I travelled to The Book Club in Shoreditch, EC2A, and made my way to the social area downstairs.  What’s your name? asked the person at the door.  I gave my name, and in return received a stick-on badge saying

Hi, I’m David.

Talk to me about the future of humanity!

I was impressed.  How do they know I like to talk to people about the future of humanity?

Then I remembered that the whole event I was attending was under the aegis of a newly formed group calling itself “Future Human“.  It was their third meeting, over the course of just a few weeks – but the first I had heard about (and decided to attend).  Everyone’s badge had the same message.  About 120 people crammed into the downstairs room – making it standing room only (since there were only around 60 seats).  Apart from the shortage of seats, the event was well run, with good use of roaming mikes from the floor.

The event started with a quick-fire entertaining presentation by author and sci-fi expert Sam Jordison.  His opening question was blunt:

What can you do that a computer can’t do?

He then listed lots of occupations from the past which technology had rendered obsolete.  Since one of my grandfathers was the village blacksmith, I found a personal resonance with this point.  It will soon be the same for many existing professions, Sam said: computers are becoming better and better at all sorts of tasks which previously would have required creative human input.  Journalism is particularly under threat.  Likewise accountancy.  And so on, and so on.

In general terms, that’s a thesis I agree with.  For example, I anticipate a time before long when human drivers will be replaced by safer robot alternatives.

I quibble with the implication that, as existing jobs are automated, there will be no jobs left for humans to do.  Instead, I see that lots of new occupations will become important.  “Shape of Jobs to Come”, a report (PDF) by Fast Future Research, describes 20 jobs that people could be doing in the next 20 years:

  1. Body part maker
  2. Nano-medic
  3. Pharmer of genetically engineered crops and livestock
  4. Old age wellness manager/consultant
  5. Memory augmentation surgeon
  6. ‘New science’ ethicist
  7. Space pilots, tour guides and architects
  8. Vertical farmers
  9. Climate change reversal specialist
  10. Quarantine enforcer
  11. Weather modification police
  12. Virtual lawyer
  13. Avatar manager / devotees / virtual teachers
  14. Alternative vehicle developers
  15. Narrowcasters
  16. Waste data handler
  17. Virtual clutter organiser
  18. Time broker / Time bank trader
  19. Social ‘networking’ worker
  20. Personal branders

(See the original report for explanations of some of these unusual occupation names!)

In other words, as technology improves to remove existing occupations, new occupations will become significant – occupations that build in unpredictable ways on top of new technology.

But only up to a point.  In the larger picture, I agree with Sam’s point that even these new jobs will quickly come under the scope of rapidly improving automation.  The lifetime of occupations will shorten and shorten.  And people will typically spend fewer hours working each week (on paid tasks).

Is this a worry? Yes, if we assume that we need to work long hours, to justify our existence, or to earn sufficient income to look after our families.  But I disagree with these assumptions. Improved technology, wisely managed, should be able to result, not just in less labour left over for humans to do, but also in great material abundance – plenty of energy, food, and other resources for everyone.  We’ll become able – at last – to spend more of our time on activities that we deeply enjoy.

The panel discussion that followed touched on many of these points. The panellists – Peter Kirwan from Wired, Victor Henning from Mendeley, and Carsten Sorensen and Jannis Kallinikos from the London School of Economics – sounded lots of notes of optimism:

  • We shouldn’t create unnecessary distinctions between “human” and “machine”.  After all, humans are kinds of machines too (“meat machines“);
  • The best kind of intelligence combines human elements and machine elements – in what Google have called “hybrid intelligence“;
  • Rather than worrying about computers displacing humans, we can envisage computers augmenting humans;
  • In case computers become troublesome, we should be able to regulate them, or even to switch them off.

Again, in general terms, these are points I agree with.  However, I believe these tasks will be much harder to accomplish than the panel implied. To that extent, I believe that the panel were too optimistic.

After all, if we can barely regulate rapidly changing financial systems, we’ll surely find it even harder to regulate rapidly changing AI systems.  Before we’ve been able to work out if such-and-such an automated system is an improvement on its predecessors, that system may have caused too many rapid irreversible changes.

Worse, there could be a hard-to-estimate “critical mass” effect.  Rapidly accumulating intelligent automation is potentially akin to accumulating nuclear material until it unexpectedly reaches an irreversible critical mass.  The resulting “super cloud” system will presumably state very convincing arguments to us, for why such and such changes in regulations make great sense.  The result could be outstandingly good – but equally, it could be outstandingly bad.

Moreover, it’s likely to prove very hard to “switch off the Internet” (or “switch off Google”).  We’ll be so dependent on the Internet that we’ll be unable to disconnect it, even though we recognise there are bad consequences,

If all of this happens in slow motion, we would be OK.  We’d be able to review it and debug it in real time.  However, the lessons from the recent economic crisis is that these changes can take place almost too quickly for human governments to intervene.  That’s why we need to ensure, ahead of time, that we have a good understanding of what’s happening.  And that’s why there should be lots more discussions of the sort that took place at Future Human last night.

The final question from the floor raised a great point: why isn’t this whole subject receiving prominence in the current UK general election debates?  My answer: It’s down to those of us who do see the coming problems to ensure that the issues get escalated appropriately.

Footnote: Regular readers will not be surprised if I point out, at this stage, that many of these same topics will be covered in the Humanity+ UK2010 event happening in Conway Hall, Holborn, London, on Saturday 24 April.  The panellists at the Future Human event were good, but I believe that the H+UK speakers will be even better!

24 December 2009

Predictions for the decade ahead

Filed under: AGI, China, climate change, collaboration, culture, Economics, Energy, green, healthcare, Humanity Plus, nanotechnology, robots, solar energy, Synthetic biology — David Wood @ 4:28 pm

Before highlighting some likely key trends for the decade ahead – the 2010′s – let’s pause a moment to review some of the most important developments of the last ten years.

  • Technologically, the 00′s were characterised by huge steps forwards with social computing (“web 2.0″) and with mobile computing (smartphones and more);
  • Geopolitically, the biggest news has been the ascent of China to becoming the world’s #2 superpower;
  • Socioeconomically, the world is reaching a deeper realisation that current patterns of consumption cannot be sustained (without major changes), and that the foundations of free-market economics are more fragile than was previously widely thought to be the case;
  • Culturally and ideologically, the threat of militant Jihad, potentially linked to dreadful weaponry, has given the world plenty to think about.

Looking ahead, the 10′s will very probably see the following major developments:

  • Nanotechnology will progress in leaps and bounds, enabling increasingly systematic control, assembling, and reprogamming of matter at the molecular level;
  • In parallel, AI (artificial intelligence) will rapidly become smarter and more pervasive, and will be manifest in increasingly intelligent robots, electronic guides, search assistants, navigators, drivers, negotiators, translators, and so on.

We can say, therefore, that the 2010′s will be the decade of nanotechnology and AI.

We’ll see the following applications of nanotechnology and AI:

  • Energy harvesting, storage, and distribution (including via smart grids) will be revolutionised;
  • Reliance on existing means of oil production will diminish, being replaced by greener energy sources, such as next-generation solar power;
  • Synthetic biology will become increasingly commonplace – newly designed living cells and organisms that have been crafted to address human, social, and environmental need;
  • Medicine will provide more and more new forms of treatment, that are less invasive and more comprehensive than before, using compounds closely tailored to the specific biological needs of individual patients;
  • Software-as-a-service, provided via next-generation cloud computing, will become more and more powerful;
  • Experience of virtual worlds – for the purposes of commerce, education, entertainment, and self-realisation – will become extraordinarily rich and stimulating;
  • Individuals who can make wise use of these technological developments will end up significantly cognitively enhanced.

In the world of politics, we’ll see more leaders who combine toughness with openness and a collaborative spirit.  The awkward international institutions from the 00′s will either reform themselves, or will be superseded and surpassed by newer, more informal, more robust and effective institutions, that draw a lot of inspiration from emerging best practice in open source and social networking.

But perhaps the most important change is one I haven’t mentioned yet.  It’s a growing change of attitude, towards the question of the role in technology in enabling fuller human potential.

Instead of people decrying “technical fixes” and “loss of nature”, we’ll increasingly hear widespread praise for what can be accomplished by thoughtful development and deployment of technology.  As technology is seen to be able to provide unprecedented levels of health, vitality, creativity, longevity, autonomy, and all-round experience, society will demand a reprioritisation of resource allocation.  Previous sacrosanct cultural norms will fall under intense scrutiny, and many age-old beliefs and practices will fade away.  Young and old alike will move to embrace these more positive and constructive attitudes towards technology, human progress, and a radical reconsideration of how human potential can be fulfilled.

By the way, there’s a name for this mental attitude.  It’s “transhumanism”, often abbreviated H+.

My conclusion, therefore, is that the 2010′s will be the decade of nanotechnology, AI, and H+.

As for the question of which countries (or regions) will play the role of superpowers in 2020: it’s too early to say.

Footnote: Of course, there are major possible risks from the deployment of nanotechnology and AI, as well as major possible benefits.  Discussion of how to realise the benefits without falling foul of the risks will be a major feature of public discourse in the decade ahead.

7 March 2009

The China Brain project and the future of industry

Filed under: AGI, China, robots — David Wood @ 8:15 pm

An intriguing note popped up on my Twitter feed a couple of hours ago. It was from James Clement, owner and manager at Betterhumans LLC:

with U.S. economy hurting, AI programs may move to China to work with Hugo de Garis. He sees house robots as biggest industry in 20 – 30 yrs

And slightly earlier:

de Garis has already received 10.5 million RMB for the China Brain Project. Basically 10k’s of neural nets for Minsky style “society of mind”

James is attending the AGI-09 conference in Artificial General Intelligence, which is taking place at Arlington, Virginia.

Casting my eye over the schedule for this conference, I admit to a big pang of envy that I’m not attending!

As James says, one of the most significant talks there could be the one by Hugo de Garis. The schedule has a link to a PDF authored in October last year. Here’s a couple of extracts from the paper:

The “China Brain Project”, based at Xiamen University, is a 4 year (2008-2011), 10.5 million RMB, 20 person, research project to design and build China’s first artificial brain (AB). An artificial brain is defined here to be a “network of (evolved neural) networks”, where each neural net(work) module performs some simple task (e.g. recognizes someone’s face, lifts an arm of a robot, etc), somewhat similar to Minsky’s idea of a “society of mind”, i.e. where large numbers of unintelligent “agents” link up to create an intelligent “society of agents”. 10,000s of these neural net modules are evolved rapidly, one at a time, in special (FPGA based) hardware and then downloaded into a PC (or more probably, a supercomputer PC cluster). Human “BAs” (brain architects) then connect these evolved modules according to their human designs to architect artificial brains…

The first author [de Garis] thinks that the artificial brain industry will be the world’s biggest by about 2030, because artificial brains will be needed to control the home robots that everyone will be prepared to spend big money on, if they become genuinely intelligent and hence useful (e.g. baby sitting the kids, taking the dog for a walk, cleaning the house, washing the dishes, reading stories, educating its owners etc). China has been catching up fast with the western countries for decades. The first author thinks that China should now aim to start leading the world (given its huge population, and its 3 times greater average economic growth rate compared to the US) by aiming to dominate the artificial brain industry.

If it’s true that the downturn in the economy will cause a relocation of AGI research personnel from other countries to China, this could turn out to be one of the most significant unforeseen consequences of the downturn.

26 October 2008

The Singularity will go mainstream

Filed under: AGI, brain simulation, cryonics, Moore's Law, robots, Singularity — David Wood @ 1:49 pm

The concept of the coming technological singularity is going to enter mainstream discourse, and won’t go away. It will stop being something that can be dismissed as freaky or outlandish – something that is of interest only to marginal types and radical thinkers. Instead, it’s going to become something that every serious discussion of the future is going to have to contemplate. Writing a long-term business plan – or a long-term political agenda – without covering the singularity as one of the key topics, is increasingly going to become a sign of incompetence. We can imagine the responses, just a few years from now: “Your plan lacks a section on how the onset of the singularity is going to affect the take-up of your product. So I can’t take this proposal seriously”. And: “You’ve analysed five trends that will impact the future of our company, but you haven’t included the singularity – so everything else you say is suspect.”

In short, that’s the main realisation I reached by attending the Singularity Summit 2008 yesterday, in the Montgomery Theater in San Jose. As the day progressed, the evidence mounted up that the arguments in favour of the singularity will be increasingly persuasive, to wider and wider groups of people. Whether or not the singularity will actually happen is a slightly different question, but it’s no longer going to be possible to dismiss the concept of the singularity as irrelevant or implausible.

To back up my assertion, here are some of the highlights of what was a very full day:

Intel’s CTO and Corporate VP Justin Rattner spoke about “Countdown to Singularity: accelerating the pace of technological innovation at Intel”. He described a series of technological breakthroughs that would be likely to keep Moore’s Law operational until at least 2020, and he listed ideas for how it could be extended even beyond that. Rattner clearly has a deep understanding of the technology of semiconductors.

Dharmendra Modha, the manager of IBM’s cognitive computing lab at Almaden, explained how his lab had already utilised IBM super-computers to simulate an entire rat brain, with the simulation running at one tenth of real-time speed. He explained his reasons for expecting that his lab should be emable to simular an entire human brain, running at full speed, by 2018. This was possible as a result of the confluence of “three hard disruptive trends”:

  1. Neuroscience has matured
  2. Supercomputing meets the brain
  3. Nanotechnology meets the brain.

Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT, drew spontaneous applause from the audience part-way through her talk, by showing a video of one of her socially responsive robots, Leonardo. The video showed Leonardo acting on beliefs about what various humans themselves believed (including beliefs that Leonardo could deduce were false). As Breazeal explained:

  • Up till recently, robotics has been about robots interacting with things (such as helping to manufacture cars)
  • In her work, robotics is about robots interacting with people in order to do things. Because humans are profoundly social, these robots will also have to be profoundly social – they are being designed to relate to humans in psychological terms. Hence the expressions of emotion on Leonardo’s face (and the other body language).

Marshall Brain, founder of “How Stuff Works”, also spoke about robots, and the trend for them to take over work tasks previously done by humans: MacDonalds waitresses, Wal-Mart shop assistants, vehicle drivers, construction workers, teachers…

James Miller, Associate Professor of Economics, Smith College, explicitly addressed the topic of how increasing belief in the likelihood of an oncoming singularity would change people’s investment decisions. Once people realise that, within (say) 20-30 years, the world could be transformed into something akin to paradise, with much greater lifespans and with abundant opportunities for extremely rich experiences, many will take much greater care than before to seek to live to reach that event. Interest in cryonics is likely to boom – since people can reason their bodies will only need to be vitrified for a short period of time, rather than having to trust their descendants to look after them for unknown hundreds of years. People will shun dangerous activities. They’ll also avoid locking money into long-term investments. And they’ll abstain from lengthy training courses (for example, to master a foreign language) if they believe that technology will shortly render as irrelevant all the sweat of that arduous learning.

Not every speaker was optimistic. Well-known author and science journalist John Horgan gave examples of where the progress of science and technology has been, not exponential, but flat:

  • nuclear fusion
  • ending infectious diseases
  • Richard Nixon’s “war on cancer”
  • gene therapy treatments
  • treating mental illness.

Horgan chided advocates of the singularity for their use of “rhetoric that is more appropriate to religion than science” – thereby risking damaging the standing of science at a time when science needs as much public support as it can get.

Ray Kurzweil, author of “The Singularity is Near”, responded to this by agreeing that not every technology progresses exponentially. However, those that become information sciences do experience significant growth. As medicine and health increasingly become digital information sciences, they are experiencing the same effect. Although in the past I’ve thought that Kurzweil sometimes overstates his case, on this occasion I thought he spoke with clarity and restraint, and with good evidence to back up his claims. He also presented updated versions of the graphs from his book. In the book, these graphs tended to stop around 2002. The slides Kurzweil showed at the summit continued up to 2007. It does appear that the rate of progress with information sciences is continuing to accelerate.

Earlier in the day, science fiction author and former maths and computing science professor Vernor Vinge gave his own explanation for this continuing progress:

Around the world, in many fields of industry, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are bringing the singularity closer, through the improvements they’re bringing about in their own fields of research – such as enhanced human-computer interfaces. They mainly don’t realise they are advancing the singularity – they’re not working to an agreed overriding vision for their work. Instead, they’re doing what they’re doing because of the enormous incremental economic plus of their work.

Under questioning by CNBC editor and reporter Bob Pisani, Vinge said that he sticks with the forecast he made many years ago, that the singularity would (“barring major human disasters”) happen by 2030. Vinge also noted that rapidly improving technology made the future very hard to predict with any certainty. “Classic trendline analysis is seriously doomed.” Planning should therefore focus on scenario evaluation rather than trend lines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vinge suggested that more forecasters should read science fiction, where scenarios can be developed and explored. (Since I’m midway through reading and enjoying Vinge’s own most recent novel, “Rainbows End” – set in 2025 – I agree!)

Director of Research at the Singularity Institute, Ben Goertzel, described a staircase of potential applications for the “OpenCog” system of “Artificial General Intelligence” he has been developing with co-workers (partially funded by Google, via the Google Summer of Code):

  • Teaching virtual dogs to dance
  • Teaching virtual parrots to talk
  • Nurturing virtual babies
  • Training virtual scientists that can read vast swathes of academic papers on your behalf
  • And more…

Founder and CSO of Innerspace Foundation, Pete Estep, gave perhaps one of the most thought-provoking presentations. The goal of Innerspace is, in short, to improve brain functioning. In more detail, “To establish bi-directional communication between the mind and external storage devices.” Quoting from the FAQ on the Innerspace site:

The IF [Innerspace Foundation] is dedicated to the improvement of human mind and memory. Even when the brain operates at peak performance learning is slow and arduous, and memory is limited and faulty. Unfortunately, other of the brain’s important functions are similarly challenged in our complex modern world. As we age, these already limited abilities and faculties erode and fail. The IF supports and accelerates basic and applied research and development for improvements in these areas. The long-term goal of the foundation is to establish relatively seamless two-way communication between people and external devices possessing clear data storage and computational advantages over the human brain.

Estep explained that he was a singularity agnostic: “it’s beyond my intellectual powers to decide if a singularity within 20 years is feasible”. However, he emphasised that it is evident to him that “the singularity might be near”. And this changes everything. Throughout history, and extending round the world even today, “there have been too many baseless fantasies and unreasonable rationalisations about the desirability of death”. The probable imminence of the singularity will help people to “escape” from these mind-binds – and to take a more vigorous and proactive stance towards planning and actually building desirable new technology. The singularity that Estep desires is one, not of super-powerful machine intelligence, but one of “AI+BCI: AI combined with a brain-computer interface”. This echoed words from robotics pioneer Hans Moravec that Vernor Vinge had reported earlier in the day:

“It’s not a singularity if you are riding the curve. And I intend to ride the curve.”

On the question of how to proactively improve the chances for beneficial technological development, Peter Diamandis spoke outstandingly well. He’s the founder of the X-Prize Foundation. I confess I hadn’t previously realised anything like the scale and the accomplishment of this Foundation. It was an eye-opener – as, indeed, was the whole day.

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