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When Things Start to Think
One underlying theme dear to Gershenfeld's heart is the death of traditional academic distinctions between physics and engineering, or between academia and commerce. Applied research is real research.
Another major theme is that older technologies should be treated with respect as we seek to supplement or replace them. For example, a laptop's display is much harder to read in most light than the paper in a book.
The book starts by drawing a contrast between Digital Revolution and Digital Evolution. Digital Revolution is the already-tired metaphor for universal connectivity to infinite information and memory via personal computers, the Internet, etc. Digital Evolution describes a more democratic future, from Gershenfeld's point of view, when computers are so smart, cheap, and ubiquitous that they do many ordinary chores to help ordinary people. When things talk to things, human beings are set free to do work they find more appealing.
"What are things that think?" asks the first section of the book.
Gershenfeld's whizbang examples won't be big news to Slashdot readers. My favorite, the Personal Fabricator, ("a printer that outputs working things instead of static objects")-- whose relationship to a full machine shop analog is like that of the Personal Computer to the old-fashioned mainframe. Gershenfeld actually has one of these in his lab (it outputs plastic doohickeys)--seeing it was one of the high points of my visit there.
"Why should things think?" asks the second section.
My favorite here is the Bill of Rights for machine users. (In true Baby-Boom style, it's of list of wants arbitrarily declared to be rights.) "You have the right to
Have information available when you want it, where you want it, and in the form you want it
Be protected from sending or receiving information that you don't want
Use technology without attending to its needs"
Under the heading "Bad Words," Gershenfeld offers a snide but useful summary of many high-tech pop-sci buzzwords, showing how they get misused by people who don't understand their real content or context.
"How will things that think be developed?"
By making them small and cheap. By getting industry to pay the bills for targeted, practical research, using the Media Lab model TTT ("Things That Think.") By reorganizing education on the model of the Media Lab, where students learn things as they need them for practical projects, not all at once in a huge, abstract lump.
The book concludes with directions to various websites, including the Physics and Media Group (One of their projects these days is "Intrabody Signaling.") Slashdotters might also be interested in Gershenfeld's textbooks The Nature of Mathematical Modeling and The Physics of Information Technology.
You can purchase When Things Start To Think from bn.com, and Amazon has the book paperback discounted to $11.20. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Sounds like he makes a point or two:
"older technologies should be treated with respect as we seek to supplement or replace them"
This is something that most launches of new and amazing gadgets fail to see. An ebook is not better if it cannot offer more that an ordinary book. An ordinary book is usually the best book there is.
In the why section: "Be protected from sending or receiving information that you don't want "
Like "bug reports" to M$ with so much irrelevant info in 'em that they aught to pay the poor sucker's [who send them in] internet bill.
In the last section it looks like he is trying to get more funding: "By getting industry to pay the bills for targeted, practical research, using the Media Lab model TTT"
My favorite, the Personal Fabricator, ("a printer that outputs working things instead of static objects")
This bears resemblance to "Molecular Compilers" as imagined by Neal Stephneson in everyone's favourite nanotechnology novel, The Diamond Age, a device where you simply insert the program describing the object you want, plus payment, and return in an hour or so to retrieve your newly formed item.
Gives a whole new meaning to Internet Shopping...
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
Don't buy into the same hype that he uses
/. readers would love. (If you ever actually
to charm tech companies into donating to the Media
Lab. He's been spouting this stuff for so long he starting to believe it.
I also read several of his books: beware the typos and far-reaching statements. Although, "The Physics
of Information Technology" is something I believe
most
use any of the formulas in that book, look them up elsewhere... they're always slightly wrong.)
As the header says, it does seem a bit overly optimistic. Esp: "When things talk to things, human beings are set free to do work they find more appealing." It just seems to scream utopia socalism, but more to the point in our history with all the great time saving inventions and methods, many "ordinary people" still spend as much time doing "chores" as they did 50, or even a 100 years ago.
Of course, if one is talking about the work place then there's an entierly differnt issue. That of unemployment. (I'm not saying wheter it's good or bad to introduce technology that can do another's job. I'm only saying it *is* an issue, esp. if you're somone who's job is at risk.)
Will computers ever think like we do?
I hope not.
Will computers ever out-think humans?
Almost certainly.
How soon?
That depends on your metrics. When you speak of abstract throught, you're automatically applying a set of logical "filters" that have to do with evaluating the intellegence of humans whith whom you interact and "opponents" with whom you must contend. In many ways, many machines already out-think humans in creative ways, but they are savants for the most part, only capable of thinking in narrowly pre-determined areas. We are constrained this way too. We cannot think four-dimensionally, for example. But, we do not consider that to be a major limitation. Perhaps someone who could think four-dimensionally would think of a human mind as "unintelligent".
Bottom-line: machines keep getting smarter, but the problem of CONVINCING A HUMAN that you are smart means having some sort of survival and/or communication skills. Those problems are probably still 5-20 years off and involve massive learning simulations that will take years to evolve a suitable program. In the end, we'll probably be able to cut down on the time it took nature to create a human brain by a factor of several million, and improve on it substantially (removing a lot of the archaic reflexive responses, and replacing them with the ability to work in very large groups without breaking down, etc).
One underlying theme dear to Gershenfeld's heart is the death of traditional academic distinctions between physics and engineering, or between academia and commerce. Applied research is real research.
How would he know? MIT Media Lab, under Nicholas Negroponte, don't do anything that any academic or industry practitioner would consider to be "research". You see, in the words of Negroponte, they live in a world not of "atoms" but of "bits". In the world of atoms, researchers have to produce such things as peer-reviewed papers and working prototypes. In the world of "bits", researchers are measured by the number of column inches they get in Wired magazine. MIT Media lab churns out books and articles by the tonne, but it's little better than scifi, most of it, and very little of it is even original.
You would think that the hard-headed engineers at MIT would have seen that the Emperor has no clothes and would have cut off their funding by now, but mysterious the Media Lab clings to life. They are an embarassment to real futurists everywhere. Contrast them with the work done at IBM's labs, or BT's, or even Nokia, where stuff is made that actually makes an impact on the real world a decade or two later.
Is a computer ever going to invent mathematics without previous knowledge of it just because it find it to be a useful utility for solving problems?
No, we'll tell it about math. Note that I didn't think of math by myself, nor did you. It took humanity thousands of years to invent and perfect it , with millions of people using the state of the art of their time because that's what they were taught to do.
It's conceivable that an AI could figure out some things like this from scratch, but in practice we won't do that (since we can teach it math, or hard code it). It's enough if it can sometimes think of some new method to solve a problem to be considered as intelligent as us, in my opinion.
Your comment is like "how can a computer ever print a text? Is it going to invent writing, and an alphabet by itself?" :-). We're "allowed" to teach it the same things we teach our kids, and hardwire stuff that needs to be hardwired (like a lot of things are hardwired in our brain, vision, language structure, etc).
And as for language translation, in my personal opinion, you need general AI before you can have human-language understanding, and you need that for translation.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
My grandfather once gave me a copy of this book. Being interested in what I do learning Artificial Intelligence he also read it. He found it clarifying the possibilities of AI and IT in general a lot. Him not having the slightest experience with computers generally would mean that it's not so interesting for someone deeper into the subject.
But while it's true that the book doesn't get really technical and left me wondering for a lot of the details, the enthusiastic way it's written and the really original projects that are described make it a really nice read. It's really motivating and can help the known problem of having learned a programming language and not having the slightest clue what to program in it.
I think that when you don't see it as a computer book but as reading material for a holiday the book deserves more than a 5. Borrow it from someone and read it, it's not like it'll take a lot of time.
I think that what appears to be overly complex and, if you'd like to call it this, "subtle," is really nothing more than the illusion of complexity. Let me explain...
Take a game of Go (aka, Baduk). You have a 19x19 grid. One player gets white stones, the other gets black. The players alternate playing stones on the intersections of the board (not in the boxes). This very, VERY simple setup leads to amazingly complex results such that no existing Go program can even come close to challenging a mid-level player much less a master.
The point I'm trying to make is that extremely simple beginnings can lead to extremely complex behavior. Just because we seem complex does not mean that we are more than just a lot of very simple bits working together, in other words. I'm with Kurzweil in the sense that the brain is nothing more than matter operating under physical constraints. Mimic the parts and understand the constraints and you have, for all intent and purpose, a brain. And by extension a thinking thing.
The question then becomes "have we captured the bits that matter?" ie, is there a soul?
I'm an atheist. I'm not the guy you want to answer this question. And I'll refrain from touching on Wolfram's A New Kind of Science at this point... =)
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