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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
By 2015 the codebase will be so unstable that all M$ developers will have to gasp in horror, hold their breath for 15 minutes, and pray for the gods of software development to have mercy every time they commit a patch to the repository, lest Bill's children take away their pension for life.
all you have to do is spew meaningless bullshit? man. I've been doing that for years when can I get one of these futurist jobs?
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
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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Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
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.
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.
What will Windows of 2015 look like?'
If history is any indication, it'll be a poorly implemented version of something mac users have been using since 2012. (I kid...only a little).
I'm sure it will be Google's Macwinix and we'll all be bitching about it.
One massive virus, named meteor, will drive the dinosaur that is Microsoft Windows to extinction. It will seemlessly replace Windows XP with a copy of one of the many mature Linux distributions targeted at the desktop (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.). Microsoft's share of the desktop market will plummet to .2% in a matter of hours. Once the replacement is complete a message will be displayed to the user indicating that their PC has been liberated, and they will be informed of the Linux distribution and the desktop environment they are now using (Unbuntu Linux w/ Gnome for example). After 20 seconds they will be redirected to /. where they will immediately be subjected to someone posting a comment about how Gentoo is better than Ubuntu, or vice versa, and KDE is hands down better than Gnome. Enraged by the insult they will flame back calling the original poster and ass hat imbicile and although they have no idea what KDE is or how it compares with Gnome they're certain it sucks and if they ever do use it will only learn that they're original belief was true. And thus begins the successful entrenchment of Linux on the desktop. Only through the purity of a flamewar will the desktop be purged. 2007 cannot come soon enough. So sayeth the prophecies.
In a way, we do have our flying cars. It just turns out that most of us don't want/need/afford one parked in our driveway. A helicopter is essentially a flying car, but it's noisy, difficult to operate safely, and expensive to operate and maintain. Likewise, a jetliner is just a flying passenger train.
Nobody, including John Smart or Vernor Vinge, can make meaningful predictions any significant distance into the future. I think things are changing so fast now, that even 10-15 years into the future is almost inscrutable unless you're making very broad generalizations. You can say for sure: We'll have computers. They'll be real fast. But who knows what all we'll be doing with them.
Now with some good Intelligence Amplification, giving you the ability to consider the myriad variables and chart out many possibilities in future space, like a decision tree or a chess-playing program, and prune the unlikely ones, you can maybe construct a fuzzy map of the different courses the future will take. But you'll have to wait and see which one actually happens, just like everybody else.
Alright, I have to get back to brainwashing Jabberwacky ...
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
bloody american future.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
.. es easy. The least proprietary technology always wins out. Not the prettiest, not the best designed or the most elloquent. Always the least proprietary.
That's how intel made it, that's how windows (ironically) made it, that's how the tcp/ip internet made it, and that's how linux is going to make it today and why it will simply kick butt.
Google browser written in python will run on your latest Apple iBorg brain augmentation, hacked to run up to date linux 2.10.x kernel instead of MacBrain OS. No retina projector will be required for recieving google ads, they will be pushed directly to /dev/eye/right neural uplink interface no matter if you are awake or sleeping.
For Windows, things will be different. Google will buy Microsoft in 2013, releasing full Windows XXL source code under one of the following Google Directory entries:
Final selection of the topic will be performed by Slashdot poll, which result of is unpredictable at the moment.
There you are, staring at me again.
Welcome to Buzzword Bingo, I AM your host, John Smart. Can you spot the buzzwords?
Let's play!
accelerating change
I am just constantly suprised by new technological emergences
how do we socially interface with those
accelerating change
get in the zone
keep our eye on the ball
accelerating change
you can say this in the mirror every day
the future is now
it's already out there
a can-do, change-aware attitude
accelerating change
accelerating intelligence
intimacy of the human machine
evolutionary development - you're gonna hear this phrase a lot - anybody who uses this phrase thinks deeply about change
accelerating change
But seriously folks, that's about 5 minutes into an hour-long talk. Does this guy take himself seriously? Is he joking?
Smells like a leftover marketing plan from the Dot-com boom.
Just another proletarian malcontent.
only if the spellchequer fails...
This comment does not exist.
Hi /.,
t ml
:
.
For articles on the Linguistic User Interface see:
http://singularitywatch.com/lui.html
http://singularitywatch.com/promontorypoint.html
For more on Evolutionary Development:
http://singularitywatch.com/convergentevolution.h
If you find the topic of accelerating technological change fascinating and important you might enjoy our e-newsletter, Accelerating Times
http://accelerating.org/news/signup.php3
You might also wish to attend our annual fall conference at Stanford, Accelerating Change
Past conference public archives are at the website of our nonprofit, the Acceleration Studies Foundation:
http://accelerating.org/
We are still early in understanding our universal, cultural, and technological records of accelerating change, and this topic may be the most important and valuable one we could consider, as change and its opportunities may come faster every year forward for the rest of our lives.
We'd love any of you with interest in these fascinating topics to join our community.
Hope to meet some of you at Stanford in September.
Best,
John Smart
President, ASF
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
I always love it when smart people "think" they know biology. They always assume that mammals are the pinnacle of evolution, and that man is the ultimate mammal. Two eyes better than many? Obvioulsy this guy has never actually looked at arthropods. Walking upright is the ultimate? Using that as a rule, his Troodont should have been the master. It did walk upright. Running aint everything. Pluse, Troodont and it's kin lasted for longer than the raptors. Not a fair comparison- the really bad day when a huge chunk of flaming rock wipes out 70% of all life on the planet makes all the "who is better" arguments literally go up in smoke. Why do we have two eyes? Bilateral symmetry does seem to be popular amoung terrestrial vetebrates. Not surprising, since all terestrial vertebrates are descendents of fish. Have not seen any fish with 3 fillets on em. I hate when people try and attach meaning and direction to evolution. Evolution direction. There is no anti-entropy going on, other that the usual eating/sleeping/procreating. Ask Flipper if walking upright is a requirement for sentince. I cannot comment on his views on computing, but he comes across as a poseur to this biologist.
I'm odd man out on this conversation, because I don't think human intelligence is computable, and I don't think we're likely to get things like universal constructors or technological singularities. Not for lack of enthusiasm, unfortunately.
But what strikes me in all the comments heretofore has been this idea of improving usability and efficiency by having the computer anticipate your actions, get to know you, listen in real language.
Well, I don't think this would at all be useful. I switched over to GNU/Linux two years ago on a lark, but I've stayed over because of the absolute richness of the toolset, especially textutils and text editors like vim--as I'm a writer, good text-manipulation is important.
These tools are generic, but precise. I have made my own toolchain to cope with the tasks I have to do each day. On Windows, I had Word. That's it--just Word. On Linux, I use awk, bash-scripting, perl, textutils, darcs, vim, (La)TeX and a host of others.
Having tools is where it's at. Better and more tools. Evolve tools and evolve toolchains.
Natural language is wonderful for human expression, but it's imprecise for detailed specification. Witness the development of mathematical notation, BNR notation, architectural schematics, UML. Programming languages aren't simply weird because it's easier to parse, but because their stilted format gives them predictable behavior. Real human language dips into and out of metaphor freely, invents neologisms, is imbued with dialect, invokes slang, and is more full than not of social and emotional content. Which makes writing stories really fun and easy, but is shit for writing programs--which, let's face it, are just automated tasks.
I don't want Windows Search to tweak my search based on the last fifty items I looked for; I *do* want to be able to tweak the Search myself so that it can bring up relavent text within the file, as well as strip some metainformation I myself added to it and display it. That's my idea of efficient.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.