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Meshing Developmental Evolution and Technology
Jerry23 writes "IT Conversations has free audio of a very provocative talk by futurist and developmental systems theorist, John Smart. He weaves a big-picture narrative featuring developmental evolution, technological acceleration, computational autonomy, the emergence and behavior of human social systems, why prediction has such a poor history, the unique growth properties of Information and Communication Technology and the limitations of biotech, finally culminating in his case for the inevitability of digital personality capture and a ubiquitous Linguistic User Interface. Among many other things, he asks 'What will Windows (and the Google Browser) of 2015 look like?'"
Forget what MS Windows and Google will look like in 2015. What will they look like in 2215?
For an answer read anything by Ian M Banks
Assuming that Windows is still around in 2015. To be honest, I don't think it will be at the rate it's going. Then again, that may just be wishful thinking on my part.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
This is a good time as any to mention Vinge's Singularity. The main topic is AI, but he also talks about IA or Intelligence Amplification. The DM in the article is a type of IA for communications systems between people. It would merge the useful parts of online communications such as active logging without the problematic impersonal problems that are sometimes caused. This gets extended further when people are connected 24/7 and they have the ability to treat the real world and the wired world much more similarly
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Wired article as proof
Google Technological Singularity M or use the Wikipedia link. Speculating on anything after machine intelligences starts improving itself is futile. ETA 2060
Help fight continental drift.
Hopefully by 2015 there will be 'other' alternatives to windows.
Maybe the billion linux os' can get together and make everything seamless by then.
If not there will be Haiku OS.
One key breakthrough will be to give computers the ability to take an intentional stance (short definition or longer essay) with regard to users. If Google could infer why I am searching instead of just what I am searching, it would be able to do a much better job. This would move from search-as-data-retrieval to search-as-intelligent-dialog.
I'm not sure if this can happen by 2015, but it seems like a key goal that is much more important than adding "Genuine People Personalities" to computers
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I am quite excited by the confluence of advances in prize awards for technology advancement, and advances with the theory of compression. I'm convinced that if a substantial prize award can be created for dramatic advances in natural language text compression, it will lead directly to a solution to the most critical aspect of the "AI problem" -- that being the problem of the explosion of words without concomitant understanding. I had high hopes for the Internet being the new Gutenberg press leading to a new enlightenment but I'm concerned that without dramatic advances in AI to correlate the huge corpus being generated, the benefits of the new enlightenment may be too long in coming to save us from ourselves.
My work on a legislative proposal for fusion technology prizes was picked up by one of the founders of the Tokamak program. The more recent X-Prize award has a renewed the popularity of such prizes.
As a consequence I've been suggesting the creation of a new prize based on Kolmogorov complexity. As argued by Mahoney in "Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence":
"The Turing test for artificial intelligence is widely accepted, but is subjective, qualitative, non-repeatable, and difficult to implement. An alternative test without these drawbacks is to insert a machine's language model into a predictive encoder and compress a corpus of natural language text. A ratio of 1.3 bits per character or less indicates that the machine has AI."
A simple prize criterion would be for the first program producing a major natural language text corpus, with the size of the program being less than 1.3 bits per character of the produced corpus. Smaller intermediate prizes would help spur broader interest.
Seastead this.
If I am looking for information, I prefer the written word. I can read much faster than some person or simulated person can talk to me.
On the other hand, if I want to book an appointment, I prefer to deal with a secretary or simulated version thereof. "Can John meet with me next Tuesday morning." My simulated secretary talkes to his simulated secretary and the appointment is booked in both our books.
One of my retirement projects is to take an old crank phone, put a computer into it and have it act like an old time operator. Pick up the phone: "Operator", "Phone the bookmonger." "The bookmonger has changed it's now Deb Hill. I'm ringing her now." I don't have to see the operator's face. In fact I would prefer not to.
If you want to see what happens when you endow everything with a personality check out "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." I definitely don't need doors that thank me for using them!
In 2015, Linux and BSD + KDE/GNOME would probably be commonplace on most desktops, and alternate operating systems such as Plan 9 and The Hurd will finally see the spotlight, in usages such as servers, research, or learning the innings of those systems. Mac OS X will probably be OS XI or OS XII, and it will probably be an operating system for those who want something better than KDE/GNOME, as well as those who love the seamless integration between Mac hardware and the Mac OS. Windows will still exist, for the same reasons why IBM mainframes with COBOL are still running in some places.
Finally, somebody will probably come out with a new OS that has exokernels and whatever operating system technologies in invented between now and 2015, who knows....
You may all be interested in the TaoRiver Futures wiki.
There's also another one developing, the WikiCities Futures wiki.
The idea is that by combining our understandings from our respective fields, we can attempt to better understand the possibilities open to us, and the timing and dependencies behind them.
Many other related wiki are listed on the Futures wiki WikiNode.
I was expecting Smart to make a connection between LUI'S and Personality Capture, but if he did I missed it. It has to do with the notion that Natural Language Processing (which he pointed out is such a challenge) is naturally done by personalities. Okay, perhaps it is not a link with the "capture" part of Personality Capture, but we capture things now with computers. The link is with the "personality" part.
/.), along with visual processing so that it can experience walking see other things walking. Then when it hears references to "walk" it can make the connection.
." or something.
Language processing is based on life experience. In order for a neural net to learn language it must have inputs such that it can understand a concept such as "select", "walk", or "win." For a computer to understand "select" might be pretty easy. The trainer could say "I select a file" while he uses a mouse to select a file. The neural net could interface with that. But more sophisticated interfaces will be required to provide the nn with "context" for less computer-like concepts. We could put the nn into a robot that walks (like recently discussed on
(Yes, people who are unable to walk from infancy can speak intelligently about walking. Blind people can speak of and understand seeing. But those objections miss the point of a lack of "context input." As I understand it, a totally blind person does not know what "red" really is. (If I am misspeaking on this point, I apologize, especially to blind people or their close friends.))
Now consider this sentence, which is spelled phonetically:
"wonwonwonandwonwontoo"
Pretend that you heard it spoken instead of saw it written. The proficienct English speaker would realize several things. First, she would parse that into individual words:
"won won won and won won too"
Then she would do a lot of fast computation work to try different parts of speech for each word such that the sentence fits semantically and grammatically into rules of English. She might then write the sentence on paper as:
"One won one and one won two."
And that is enough for her to understand that the sentence is a fragment of a larger text, a newpaper report on the dog show or something. This is because the sentence has a lot of ellipses in it with anaphoric references being elided. Since references must be present, there must be more text associated with the sentence. With the references put back into the sentence it would read
"One person won one prize and one person won two prizes."
or "one dog won one bone . .
The proficient English speaker would not even be thinking about "anaphoric elliptical references." She would "just know."
All of these levels of computation go on in our brains constantly when we participate in all forms of communication. And in order for a LUI to work properly, the machine will also have to be able to do the same thing. Yet without other faculties (such as visual processing, mobility, etc.) these things can not be learned either. Hence, Linguistic User Interfaces and Personality emulation are intrinsically linked (and pretty darn tough).
the Dunedan
How about mobile phones? Wireless networking? PDA's? P2P? And this is only in our small field of ICT. 10 years ago nearly nobody had a mobile phone, now everyone and his dog has one. 10 years ago we were more or less bound to our boxes, now they are bound to us.
If we (buzzword warning!) extrapolate this 10 years into the future, I'd expect things like implated communication devices using ad-hoc mesh networks. The real changes of the last 10 years haven't been strictly related to computers or the Internet (which, I might remind you, was conceived in the 70's), but more to how/where we communicate and exchange data.
Naturally, you're right that we'll see the most advance in 'new' fields (as they didn't exist before, duh), however it's wrong to use the lack of change in one field to prove that change on a whole is slowing down. Besides, we may had Jurassic Park 10 years ago, but who could have imagined massive CG scenes like in RotK back then? I believe change is nearly always evolutionary, with once-in-a-lifetime revolutions.
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Abstracting their prize criterion:
Previous record: X
New record: X+Y
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z x (Y/(X+Y))
Applying this to Kolmogorov complexity (ignoring several technical details for the moment):
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program producing uncompressed corpus
M = S/P
Anytime someone demonstrates a larger M, they are awarded money according to the abstract prize criterion above.
The only problem with it is that it doesn't include Mahoney's threshold of 1.3 bits per character for artificial intelligence.
Seastead this.