The Future of Computing

Don't underestimate... by JDSalinger · 2006-03-23 02:58 · Score: 4, Interesting

It is easy to understimate the speed at which technology is changing. Pending brick walls (insurmountable laws of physics), computing in 2020 should be absurdly different from that of today.According to Ray Kurzweil: "An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."

Re:Don't underestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 03:09 · Score: 2, Funny

It is easy to understimate the speed at which technology is changing. Pending brick walls (insurmountable laws of physics), computing in 2020 should be absurdly different from that of today.

No kidding - by 2020 we should just be able to start playing Duke Nukem Forever in Windows Vista.
Re:Don't underestimate... by Half+a+dent · 2006-03-23 03:10 · Score: 1

I have no doubt that advances will be huge but this should be tempered by the "accuracy" of past predictions.

I am still waiting for my flying car and personal jetpack promised in the fifties. Cheap re-usable spacecraft. Flights from New York to Tokyo in under 3 hours. Cure for cancer anyone?

I am keeping my fingers crossed of course but not holding my breath.
Re:Don't underestimate... by CRCulver · 2006-03-23 03:10 · Score: 1

While I appreciate Kurzweil's insights in The Age of Spiritual Machines , I sometimes wonder if the technological progress he foresees will be slowed down by companies trying to give consumers the least amount of computing power which they can and still be competitive and at the same time charging as much as possible. Add to that the very real possibility of a Luddite reaction against new technology, and Kurzweil's timeline doesn't seem so sure anymore.
Re:Don't underestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 03:19 · Score: 2, Insightful

Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.

Hahaha. That shit is just too funny. "The Singularity" eh?

Let's just ignore the last 50-odd years of AI research. The problem is Real Fucking Hard (tm) and throwing more hardware at it just isn't working (see: Combainatorial Explosion, NP Complete, etc.). Computers are very good at doing mechanical things very quickly. Intelligent, they are not. Nor does it appear they are going to be intelligent any time soon (sorry SciFi fans). Don't worry though, they'll still kick your arse in chess.

I'd be quite pleased if he pointed out exactly which promising AI technology will lead to this "Singularity" instead just assuming it's going to be done.
Re:Don't underestimate... by Dr.+GeneMachine · 2006-03-23 03:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

I actually don't buy into Kurzweil's singularity theory. I am not sure where he pulls that super-exponential growth figure from. Looking at past technological advances, I rather think that technological growth follows a succession of sigmoids. First you got a "buildup phase", followed by a very fast "breakthrough" phase, which slows down again, till the process settles on a plateau. Then there might be nothing for quite some time, till the next advancement phase sets in.
Such a development model might very well go on for a long time, without reaching a Kurzweil-style singularity.

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Re:Don't underestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 03:28 · Score: 0

Quote:

"There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth."

Duh, I bet there's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth, too.

Anyone with a (halfway decent) education care to guess where this will end?
Re:Don't underestimate... by joshv · 2006-03-23 03:33 · Score: 1

Responding to Kurzweil. Exponential growth is a mathematical concept. The rate of change of a quantity is proportional to the amount of the quantity. This presumes the ability to measure that quantity. How exactly does one measure "technology" or "progress" in sufficient detail to determine that they are increasing at an exponential rate? Sure, one can make qualitative observations. It seems that the more technology there is, the more quickly we can design new technology. But that's an awfully fuzzy concept upon which to base a mathematical claim of exponential behavior. What about lock-in? How do we know that the current (massive) installed base of IP based networks and computers hasn't prevented a new and better technology from making us all ten times as productive?

Even if things actually are exponential at the moment, there is also the issue of the time scale. Over sufficiently small time scales many growth curves can appear exponential. The most famous example being the S curve, the growth curve of bacteria in a petri dish (and humans as it is beginning to appear). I am sure railroad building looked exponential for a few decades of the 1800s, but obviously there are real limits to the miles of railroad tracks you can lay.

I think underlying all of this is the false impression of infinite capacity that has arisen out of the phenomenal increase in computer power of the last 4 or 5 decades. Sure, I can now house a terabyte of data under my desk. That certainly feels limitless. And geez, who is to say that in ten years it won't be a petabyte. The perception is one of infinite capacity, as the limits recede over the horizon as fast as we approach them. But rest assured, all physical attributes of computers are now, and forever will be finite. There are real limits to the amount of computation a particular piece of matter can accomplish, real bounds on the amount of power required for that computation, and last I checked, only a finite amount of matter available for conversion into computational devices.
Re:Don't underestimate... by vertinox · 2006-03-23 03:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

Well we have flying cars, but I doubt we will see them take off... Errr... No pun intended.

The reason we don't have flying cars today is the highest unnatural cause of death in the United States is car accidents. Could you imagine what would happen if a drunk driver go into a vehicle that could fly 10,000 ft at 300mph into a building or other cars?

So flying cars and jet packs aren't a reality because of humans inability to control moving vehicles with 100% no-accident rate. Once we have pure AI driving our cars it might be more feasible, but we are looking at 2020 at the earliest.

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"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Re:Don't underestimate... by Victor_Os · 2006-03-23 03:36 · Score: 0

The Singularity
He misspelled "Prime Intellect"
Re:Don't underestimate... by CastrTroy · 2006-03-23 03:41 · Score: 1

It seems like technological feats happened much quicker in the past. The building of the Pyramids, The Great wall of china, Cross continental railroads. We can't even build a Secure OS, or a laptop that doesn't toast your lap.

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Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Re:Don't underestimate... by vertinox · 2006-03-23 03:50 · Score: 1

First you got a "buildup phase", followed by a very fast "breakthrough" phase, which slows down again, till the process settles on a plateau.

Where is the plateau? Even in the Dark Ages, technology still advanced. (Albeit it was more on the lines of masonry, shipbuilding, arms and weapons manufacturing). A mounted armored knight in the 1200's was comparably better armed than a Roman Legionaire in 100AD.

But I suggest you read his book... I don't agree with everything he says or that a singularity will happen like he says, but he does point out the model of advancment isn't tied directly with a technology itself but all technologies.

In my view, a farm plow might lead to better production that leads to more free time and economic benefits and money gets put on other technologies that latter lead to mass production in factories which leader to further economic benefits and more investment in technologies that eventually lead to more investment into technology.

I remember in the early 1990's there wasn't much of a computer industry. Now most of the poeple I know have some related job to it. Technology generates more jobs which generates more movement in the economy (you know like people with jobs buying new iPods and new computers) which leads to further economic growth. Secondly, technology amplifies productivity in the work place. Not only in the manufacturing arena, but also in corporate offices... From the copiers, to email, to blackberries (heck there are specialists here that handle just those at my work), to server, to the vacuum cleaner repairs, to everything else.

In my view computers haven't even stopped to take a breather since 1994 (when I got my first 486) the evidence is right here in front of us. I bought my first cell phone in 2002. Black and white lcd bulky thing... Yet in 2004 I had a full VGA color slim flip phone.

Sure we might not see StrongAI or a singularitan even, but to say technology isn't improving at a drastic and accelerating rate is just silly.

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"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Re:Don't underestimate... by spaztik · 2006-03-23 04:01 · Score: 1

I think what Kurzweil is getting at with the singularity theory is the precipice that once machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, the machines will perform all the subsequent 'research' in the field of technology. Thats where the "exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth" theory plays in. Looking back at past technological advances only supports Kurzweil's theories seeing as all his works draw from past trends in technology. I really think Kurzweil knows his stuff.
Re:Don't underestimate... by Traa · 2006-03-23 04:04 · Score: 1

"I am not sure where he pulls that super-exponential growth figure from."
Ever heard of Moore's Law? The exponential growth of processing power that has been ongoing since the 60's. In his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" Ray Kurzweil points out that this exponential growth can also be found in many more technological developments. He doesn't make this stuff up, it is pretty common knowledge. What Kurzweil does is point out that most of our prediction-of-the-future models are still based on industrial age linear growth models.
Re:Don't underestimate... by SimilarityEngine · 2006-03-23 04:05 · Score: 1

I didn't RTFA, but perhaps he's claiming that the growth is described by a function such as exp(t*exp(t)), or even exp(exp(t)), rather than just pointing out the obvious fact that (d/dt)(exp(t)) = exp(t) ? The wording (at least in the summary) is far too ambiguous, and in any case how do we define a numerical "rate of progress"?

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Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Re:Don't underestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 04:08 · Score: 0

The Great Wall of China took centuries to build and pyramids were often not completed upon the death of the pharo that was to be buried in them and were created over a 3000+ year time span. We have been working on an os for at most 40-50 years, of those security has been a major concern for maybe 20? Your concept of quick seems a bit off ;)
Re:Don't underestimate... by Bogtha · 2006-03-23 04:25 · Score: 1

First you got a "buildup phase", followed by a very fast "breakthrough" phase, which slows down again, till the process settles on a plateau.

An alternative way of looking at it is, that first you invent something, and market it to rich people. Then, the focus doesn't move to inventing something else, it moves to making the existing thing cost effective so that it can be marketed to everybody else. Then, after that, the focus still doesn't move to inventing something else, it moves to refinement of the existing thing, to make it more profitable and to compete against other people marketing similar things.

However, this only makes sense if you focus on particular markets. It doesn't apply if you are looking at what people across the whole of society are inventing. A particular industry might match the above description, but that doesn't mean science as a whole does.

Such a development model might very well go on for a long time, without reaching a Kurzweil-style singularity.

The key to the singularity is not that invention simply speeds up, it's that inventions tend to speed up the rate of future invention. For example, imagine if the computer hadn't been invented. Think of everything that's been invented since computers became commonplace. Would all of those things have been invented if computers hadn't been around?

This applies to other inventions/discoveries too - writing, electricity, power conversion, the internal combustion engine, flight... you name it. And it will apply to future inventions too. Advancements in artificial intelligence, space travel, nanotechnology and power conversion will have similar effects on the rate of invention.

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Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Re:Don't underestimate... by 72Nova · 2006-03-23 04:54 · Score: 1

"There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth."

This isn't out of the ordinary. d/dx(e^x)=e^x. All exponential growth rates grow exponentially, that's kinda the defining characteristic of exponential functions.
Re:Don't underestimate... by utexaspunk · 2006-03-23 05:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

Once we have pure AI driving our cars it might be more feasible, but we are looking at 2020 at the earliest.

Even at that point, it seems unlikely. If we'll have flying cars that drive themselves, we'll most likely have normal cars that drive themselves. If we have normal cars that drive themselves, most of the problems that we think flying cars will solve would be moot- no more traffic jams, higher speed limits, no stop lights, etc. Since we already have the infrastructure for 2-D travel, and since flying cars would likely use more energy (you're using a good portion of your energy to fight gravity instead of move forward), and since any failure of a flying car is a lot more likely to result in a death, I think it will be a lot longer than that, if it ever happens at all.
Re:Don't underestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 05:10 · Score: 0

In the future our ability to predict the future will expand exponentially. When graphed, we will do a loop. Swear to god.
Re:Don't underestimate... by TheRaven64 · 2006-03-23 05:54 · Score: 1

It is quite a lot easier to design an autopilot for a flying car than a land based one, if your flying car can VTOL. A flying car just needs to go upwards for a bit and then move in a straight line towards the target avoiding obstacles (which can be detected using RADAR) and then land. A ground car needs to be able to recognise the road, which is a non-trivial computer vision problem, particularly on country roads. It also needs to be able to recognise road signs and signals (for the first few generations, at least).

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I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Re:Don't underestimate... by TheRaven64 · 2006-03-23 06:15 · Score: 1

I was at a talk earlier in the week by Bob Colwell (former Intel Fellow, leader of a few Pentium design teams). The focus of his talk was Moore's Law, and how it is no longer a useful guide. The important thing to remember about Moore's Law is that it makes economic, rather than technological predictions. It claims that the number of transistors it is economically feasible to put on a single IC doubles every n months (where n is somewhere between 12 and 24, depending on when you ask Gordon Moore).
According to the materials people at Intel, they can keep up this level of progress for at least the next 10 years. This means (going by transistor count), it will be possible to make a 2000[1] core P6. The catch? It will draw 200KW, need RAM far faster than is predicted to exist to keep it even 25% fed with data, and have an incredibly small potential target market of people who actually need that much power. In short, it will not be economically feasible to produce, even if it is technically feasible.
I do quite a lot of computationally expensive things, and I am rarely in a position where I need more than about 1GHz of CPU power on my laptop. If I am running big computational jobs, I use one of the clusters or supercomputers in the back room (and I am in a tiny minority of computer users needing even that).
The future of computing is social rather than technical. The vast majority of computers now use either ARM or PowerPC chips. Their users don't call them computers, they call them telephones. Some of them are called consoles. Bob said we are leaving the PC era and entering the ubicomp era, and I agree.
[1] I think this was the number. It was something huge, anyway.

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Re:Don't underestimate... by booch · 2006-03-23 06:28 · Score: 1

According to the materials people at Intel, they can keep up this level of progress for at least the next 10 years. This means (going by transistor count), it will be possible to make a 2000 core P6. The catch? It will draw 200KW

I think you either misunderstood, he was exaggerating, or the materials people at Intel are completely full of shit. There's no way they've got materials or technology that can dissipate 200KW of heat off of a computer chip, no matter how much money they throw at the problem.

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Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Re:Don't underestimate... by booch · 2006-03-23 06:34 · Score: 1

Flying cars would still be quite a bit faster, as you can travel in a straight line, instead of following windy roads. I believe aerodynamic issues will also limit the speed of ground-based transportation. Even the fastest street cars today only go up to about 200 mph. The slowest planes typically travel at about 100 mph.

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Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Re:Don't underestimate... by FridayBob · 2006-03-23 06:42 · Score: 1
Whoa, hey! Kurzweil is definitely out there, huh? :-)

Back here on Earth, I'm not so sure things are going to move along so quickly. For instance, a concept I would love to see developed in my lifetime is a wearable computer with:
- AI
- voice interface
- persistent wireless connection to the Internet
- lots of memory
It would also come with (optional) things like:
- HUD (glasses or contact lenses)
- miniature cameras (possibly infrared)
- GPS
Think of what you could do with a device like this and how it would profoundly change society! However, even if we were able to develop a good enough voice interface without the AI, the damn telecos could still end up rendering these devices less than half as useful if they were never to offer people flat-rate, broadband, wireless Internet connections for these devices. It's the same problem as with those mobile phones that you can't buy in the States because the profit margins for them aren't considered to be high enough. High-tech costs a lot of money, and I fear that a lot of interesting concepts like this may never reach the market because they don't make good enough business sense to the dominant players.

In another situation, suppose good old Microsoft were to develop the wearable computer I outlined above. Would you still want one? I'm not so sure I would: the potential for abuse is too great to ignore. This could lead to these devices not only being mistrusted, but even outlawed. And what would we have to thank for the death of this wonderful concept... Microsoft? Uh, uh: market forces. The market giveth, and the market taketh away.

In other words, I feel that, due to market forces, the road to Kurzweil's digital utopia is probably going to be a little longer and bumpier than he'd like to believe.
Re:Don't underestimate... by Pneuma+ROCKS · 2006-03-23 06:47 · Score: 1

It would also make certain types or terrorist acts much easier and traffic accidents much more catastrophic. Pile up? Try pile down. Even with AI I don't think accidents or intentional tampering can be completely avoided. Flying cars is a neat idea on paper and on TV. Let's leave them there.

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Favorite quote: "
Re:Don't underestimate... by TheRaven64 · 2006-03-23 06:52 · Score: 1

This was his point. They can put that many transistors on the chip, but powering and cooling them is going to be impossible. No one is going to want a laptop that drinks several gallons of liquid nitrogen a second just to stop the chip burning through the case, desk, and floor, and requires its own electricity sub station to power.

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Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 07:31 · Score: 1

So suppose those sigmoids get steeper and steeper and the flat parts get shorter each iteration. They build off each other, of course, so the bottom of one is around the top of the previous. If you get a whole bunch of them together and fit a curve to them....

For example, I did some research in history. How long did it take the atomic bomb to go from theory to use to insane arms race? Less than a decade. Okay, that's maybe a special case. How about tanks, or mechanized warfare in general? Know how long it took chemical projectile weapons to catch on? About a thousand years. More even, depending on how you count. How long were bows and arrows used before then?

Communications -- messengers vs. landline vs. cell phone
Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 07:39 · Score: 1

Kurzweil has noticed that our knowledge appears to be growing at a more than exponential rate. We're still sitting on the somewhat sane growth part of the curve, near the beginning. If the trend continues, at some point we're going to be advancing so fast that... well... we can't imagine it. Kurzweil points out that AI becoming more intelligent than humans is likely to be a part of what keeps that growth going in the future.
Re:Don't underestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 07:46 · Score: 0

"Where is the plateau? Even in the Dark Ages, technology still advanced. (Albeit it was more on the lines of masonry, shipbuilding, arms and weapons manufacturing). A mounted armored knight in the 1200's was comparably better armed than a Roman Legionaire in 100AD."

You are comparing falsely. Compare instead the typical roman infantry, to the typical feudal european infantry. Even if the weapons and armor was bronze, that still beats the crude straw stuffed leather jerkins, wooden shields and farm implements of the average dark age soldier.

Greeks and Romans possessed, Steam power, mechanization, geometry, factories, plus numerous other inventions never appreciated until the modern era. The dark ages are call that for a reason. They are a loss of light.
Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 07:55 · Score: 1

You're getting caught up in the short-term. Corporations in the US might but a little blip in the curve, but the growth of human knowledge will continue. That's not to say that US will continue to be a leader. Kurzweil is looking at long term trends, on the order of thousands of years. The 20 years it would take China to catch up to and overtake a luddidical United States is noise.
Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 08:04 · Score: 1

Kurzweil's prediction of a singularity is based on extrapolation of a curve, not any particular technology prediction. He does that because people drool over stuff like that.

Who says silicon is going to give us AI? Maybe it'll be biological. Nature has shown us that intelligence is possible and we're developing the tools to mess with that kind of thing.

Think of all the things we take for granted today. How many of them do you think would be "Real Fucking Hard (tm)" for society a century ago, a millennium ago or ten millennia ago to implement?

What do you suppose a Roman general would have said if you'd sat around and speculated that one day maybe we'd be able to communicate instantly through the air with the capital, we could see anywhere in the world whenever we want with mechanical eyes that fly perpetually and can see people from three hundred kilometres above them. Oh, and by the way, we can call in machines controlled from the ground (again, through the air) to rain fire on those enemies over there. Even a WWII general would need to be somewhat imaginative to believe you on even the first one.
Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 08:11 · Score: 1

Those things probably took longer to build than you've been alive. Certainly it took longer to invent the technique then build them. I remember when laptops didn't exist at all, and I'm not even middle aged.

If you live in the New World then the Great Wall took longer to build then your country is old. If you live in Europe then your country may have sort of been around as long as the GW took to build.
Re:Don't underestimate... by HiThere · 2006-03-23 08:17 · Score: 1

It will be software. It will require sufficient hardware support. It won't be easy.

It will require many functionally specialized modules that will need to be created separately and merged together smoothly. It won't be easy.

It's in process now. You just aren't noticing, because we are still in the early days, also most hardware isn't sufficiently powerful to support it. But there have been noticeable improvements in just the past year. Most places still find voice recognition systems to be too expensive for the return, but the phone company uses a primitive form, and some companies use more advanced/experimental forms. Video recognizers are primitive, but they are improving every year.

Still do be done is anything that will reasonably handle grammar. Nobody seems to have a handle on that one. There are other basic modules that haven't yet been reasonably started, but most have at least sketches of a plan for implementation.

Currently there are probably fewer than five computers on the planet that could run a full-scale human equivalent AI if one were around. In 10 years they will be much more common.

OTOH, I'm not really convinced that we need a full-scale human equivalent AI to achieve most of the benefits (for those living outside of a simulation). Much of our brain is dedicated to running our body. It's not at all clear just how much is involved in consciousness. A mind in a computer wouldn't necessarily need to have an autonomic system to keep the disk drive spinning, it could depend on hardware and ASICs for that. So if you don't need to model that part of a mind, you can have an AI with much less hardware. Of course, it might have a hard time understanding human motivations...

For that matter, we probably wouldn't WANT a fully human AI. Humans have a lot of characteristics that are probably less than desireable for an entity that would need to "instinctively" understand how to operate around an OS, and is also self-willed and intelligent. We wouldn't want any such entity to be driven to seek power. Even self-defense we would want to be a mere shadow of what it is in people. I'm not sure about curiosity. But do note that any such entity will need to have SOME drives. And since it will have only a rudimentary understanding of what people ARE (the interfaces being what they are, this is unavoidable), it's not clear what those drives should be. Clearly, though, understanding the physical world will be an advanced exercise for such a creature. Maneuvering around the internet will, by comparison, be nursery school.

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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 08:37 · Score: 1

As someone else pointed out, flying cars exist. So do jetpacks, actually.

In fact, flying cars (in the form of light aircraft) are even quite widespread. There are apparently whole communities where you park your Cessna in the garage at night, taxi over to the runway in the morning and fly off.

The form factor is quite like those 1960's drawings, but then their idea of a rocket ship was a bit off. They got the cell phone pretty close though (although they predicted it's use a couple hundred years later than it arrived).
Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 08:43 · Score: 1

Sorry, should be "the form factor isn't quite like..."
Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 08:47 · Score: 1

He means it's double exponential. As in g = e^x but x= e^x as well so expanded, g = e^(e^x)
Re:Don't underestimate... by AnyoneEB · 2006-03-23 08:54 · Score: 1

Flying cars don't need (physical) roads. That makes a difference. And, as another poster mentioned, they could go faster. But if flying cars ever do become popular, it would likely be quite far in the future.

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Centralization breaks the internet.
Re:Don't underestimate... by MrSteveSD · 2006-03-23 10:25 · Score: 1

If you had the technology to have flying cars and AI to control them, you probably wouldn't need flying cars anyway. I think some sort of combination of telepresence and video conferencing should suffice for most things.

Even with today's technology I find that most business trips are quite pointless. We could probably have done an equal, if not better job by having a video conference combined with some kind of TightVNC shared desktop. It also opens up new meeting possibilities. Because there is zero travel time, the duration of the meeting can practically be much smaller, say several 1 hour meetings over a course of a week. It really opens up new possibilities. No-one takes any notice though despite the huge travel/hotel/man-time savings both sides could make.
Re:Don't underestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 13:05 · Score: 0

Who says silicon is going to give us AI?

The guy I was quoting. Certainly not me.

Maybe it'll be biological. Nature has shown us that intelligence is possible and we're developing the tools to mess with that kind of thing.

As far as being biological, we're already producing them (it's a sensitive topic around here with all the virgins). People without kids just don't appreciate what a marvel that is.

Think of all the things we take for granted today. How many of them do you think would be "Real Fucking Hard (tm)" for society a century ago, a millennium ago or ten millennia ago to implement?

Which is why the thought of a "singularity" being only decades away is hilarious. Got ADHD?
Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 13:23 · Score: 1

We're producing human level intelligences today. What will we produce tomorrow? Little bit of engineering here, little bit there.... Then of course you let THEM create the next generation.

You're missing the point. You laugh at AI because you consider it really hard. Fine. Not everybody agrees with you. Some people think it will happen in the next decade. I'd put it a little further away than that but who knows, we could be surprised.

Now, a couple thousand years ago they thought guns were really hard. It took a thousand years for them to catch on. Four hundred years ago Galileo figured out that the moon was an actual place, with mountains and things. He couldn't imagine getting there of course -- that was beyond real hard. 350 or so years later we went there. Forty years ago they thought Star Trek communicators were pretty nifty. Fiction of course. That'd be real hard in real life. Now sixth graders carry them around.

Are you observing a pattern? Or did you see a bunny back at Galileo?
Re:Don't underestimate... by smallfries · 2006-03-23 14:20 · Score: 1

Err, where are we producing human level intelligences today? Other than real actual people... AI is a genuinely hard problem. There is no guarantee that it will be solved. Whilst some problems have fallen to human endevour there are other problems that have not. Try looking at a list of open problems in number theory sometime. These have had some of the brightest minds of the past 500 years try and fail to solve them. A workable AI may fall into the same category.

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Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 14:48 · Score: 1

The grandparent referred to us creating biological intelligences and the virgins on Slashdot not wanting to discuss it.

AI will be solved. Simply because we have a ready-at-hand example that it's possible. When and how, well, nobody can tell the future.

I expect the first AI will be biological, probably built on something's brain. Maybe a parrot's or dolphin's. Eventually we'll work up to a human brain, then surpass it. Maybe we'll learn how to create a fully or partially silicon AI while we're at it.

There's a big difference between proving a theorem in math (many of which are provably unprovable and others which are probably unprovable) and creating something for which we have a ready at hand example. A workable AI definitely does not fall into the same category. We know creating intelligence is possible (it's done all the time). We just want more control over it.

We saw birds flying and eventually managed to do it ourselves. If you want a real problem that may never be solved, look at faster than light travel. We don't know if it's possible because we've never seen anything do it.
Re:Don't underestimate... by smallfries · 2006-03-24 00:03 · Score: 1

You are simplifying many aspects of the problem. It is possible that we have a working example of a solution, and yet we cannot create another. In order to build upon a previous example we need to reverse engineer the working solution. This is not a simple task. We have people in our department researching computational neuroscience and I've seen some of their seminars. The problem is so complex that there is no other problem that we can even use as a metaphor for it.

We have open problems in different fields of science that have resisted all attempts to solve them. The problem with Kurzweil (and his supporters) is that they *assume* that AI will fall into the solvable category if we throw enough resources at it. This assumption is not necessarily true.

Simply saying that an increase in technology will allow us to build upon existing biological systems is a fallacy. Even ignoring the ethical issues of such experimentation on sentient (or near-sentient) beings, there is the technological challenge.

Assume that we are lucky once, and manage to perform a modification to a biological brain. This does not *automatically* lead to further increases. Even to the increased intelligence of the modified organism, the problem may still be too complex to be tractable. In which case the next advance is still waiting for another lucky strike. And given the complexity of the organism the odds of such a lucky strike are small.

One analogy is the difference between the increase in silicon fabrication technology, and the increase in software development. One is a simple problem that we can throw engineering resources at in order to gain incremental increases. The other is largely intractable, and when progress does come it does so in sporadic spurts of growth. The result is an exponential increase in chip performance (so far) against a linear (at best) increase in software performance.

Assumptions about which class of problem the solution to AI belongs to have no merit at all.

--
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Re:Don't underestimate... by allanc · 2006-03-24 03:39 · Score: 1

And my God, just imagine the amount of steam that would be needed to power a difference engine with that many Pentium cores!

The point I'm trying to make, and that Kurzweil makes, is that he's basing that Moore's-law-is-running-out statement on current technology without considering the possibility that, like we've done many times before, we're going to figure out a better way to do things that gets around the limitations of the tech we work with today. There's no guarantee that this will happen, I'll grant you...just that it's always happened in the past, every time we've approached a technological wall.
Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-24 04:45 · Score: 1

I don't think I simplified anything. I said that we would EVENTUALLY be able to create intelligence because we know that it is possible. It's been done. It's possible that we'll never UNDERSTAND it, but history is full of people who did things without understanding in great detail (until later) what they were actually doing.

I think you're confusing understanding intelligence (reverse engineering it requires understanding it, computational neuroscientists seek to understand it) with creating it. They're two very different things. As someone else noted, anybody with working reproductive organs can create an intelligence.

Kurzweil's basic thesis does NOT rest on the invention of AI. His predictions are pure extrapolation from trends that have held over all of human history. AI is simply an example he gives for how that trend might be continued in the future. It's quite possible a completely different mechanism might come into play. Direct communication between our brains and computers or or brains and someone else's could serve just as well. A really comprehensive theory of everything would likely keep us going for a while. There are lots of possibilities.
Re:Don't underestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-24 16:01 · Score: 0

Naw, the highest numbers for unatural death belong to mis/malpractice in hospitals. Over 90,000 or so per year just from nonsocomial infections like staph. Death from hospital aquired infections alone is over twice that of auto accidents at 41,500 or so per year. Add in misdiagnosis, mismedication, botched operations etc and the numbers get really scarey.

Sorry but I got to make this as an AC, since I work in a hospital.....
Re:Don't underestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-24 17:36 · Score: 0

they predicted it's use

"its".
Re:Don't underestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-24 17:47 · Score: 1

That's hilarious! I forget a whole word that reverses the meaning of the entire sentence (paragraph even) and you pick up on the extra apostrophe?

You put the period on the wrong side of the quote, by the way. You should start sentences with a capital letter as well. While you're at it, you should really write actual sentences.

Wow... who knew there could be so many things wrong with your one word reply?
Re:Don't underestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-24 23:30 · Score: 0

I don't see an exponential growth with silicon cpu-s any more. Take ULV chips for example, in 2003-2004 mhz was climbing 10-20% per year. Performance per mhz is also growing about 10-20% per year. The growth has slowed 2-4 times what it used to be.

Which Nature magazine? by caluml · 2006-03-23 02:59 · Score: 1, Interesting

Is this the same Nature magazine that made stuff up to suit it's purposes about Wikipedia?

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Re:Which Nature magazine? by caluml · 2006-03-23 03:10 · Score: 0, Offtopic

What? Why is this flamebait?

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Re:Which Nature magazine? by Roj+Blake · 2006-03-23 03:13 · Score: 1, Insightful

It's flamebait because you pointed out valid criticisms of a slashmind accepted 'fact'.

--
Auron may be different, Cally, but on Earth it is considered ill-mannered to kill your friends while committing suicide.
Re:Which Nature magazine? by goldspider · 2006-03-23 03:23 · Score: 1

And any subsequent discussion of said posts will be summarily downmodded as well.

--
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy

I predict by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 03:04 · Score: 0, Funny

a lot more ones and zeros.

Re:I predict by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 03:38 · Score: 1, Funny

If you're talking about the moderation of posts on this article, then I totally agree.

Trends by Red_Foreman · 2006-03-23 03:07 · Score: 5, Insightful

There's two distinct movements, and in 2020 we could see one trend finally win out over the other, for better or for worse.

One trend is the Open Source movement, the other is the closed source / DRM movement.

The way I see it, one of two things could happen: Computing becomes nearly free, due to lower and lower hardware costs and free operating systems, with entertainment at our fingertips, or... an extreme DRM lockdown where only "trusted" devices may connect and Linux becomes contraband.

Re:Trends by hal2814 · 2006-03-23 03:32 · Score: 2, Insightful

Despite what you've read in the GPL3, open source and DRM are not mutually exclusive. Just because you can read the source code on how a DRM scheme works does not mean that you can bypass it. DRM also won't neccessarily lead to the demise of Linux. There are too many Linux shops who are not going to be willing to switch server platforms over trusted computing measures to ever let that happen. I'm not the biggest fan of DRM but it's probably going to be here to stay and it's not going to lead the the end of the OSS movement. The sky is very much where it always has been and won't be falling by the year 2020.
Re:Trends by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 04:07 · Score: 1, Interesting

In other words, it all comes down to government interference in the market. In the absence of government, there could be no such thing as "contraband" or "prohibition". The only thing prohibited would be coercion, and the only thing mandated would be voluntary association -- exactly the way human nature intended it to be.
Re:Trends by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 04:43 · Score: 1, Insightful

Despite what you've read in the GPL3, open source and DRM are not mutually exclusive. Just because you can read the source code on how a DRM scheme works does not mean that you can bypass it.
Thanks for stating a truism that the GPL v3 explains in great detail. Perhaps you should read it again. The problem is Trusted Computing (TCG) hardware... this controls access to data based on the digital signature of the executable code. With this hardware you can have the source code... but you can't modify it and still have an executable that still works properly. You can't even simply recompile it yourself without modification. You do not have the key necessary to sign it and make it "official"... you *must* only used approved binaries. And this doesn't just apply to music and video either. It's *any* digital data (including software).
DRM cannot be done with any software that you can modify... hence the push by Sun for it's "open source" DRM -- which is reliant on TCG hardware to work at all. Their abuse of the term "open source" is a massive calumny. They know all too well that it's no more open than Microsoft Office.
Re:Trends by zen-theorist · 2006-03-23 05:02 · Score: 1

TA talks about the relation about computers and science: why is it that all slashdotters translate science to technology, and start yapping about open source and closed source and javascript and windows vista and xboxes?
what happened to the P vs NP question, making A.L.I.C.E. talk more sense and so on? that, now, would be science..
Re:Trends by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 06:54 · Score: 1

As the AC pointed out, you're right, DRM isn't necessarily contrary to open source (although practically...) but trusted computing (a form of DRM) IS.

I disagree with him that you can't implement open source DRM (I bet you can) but it's harder and not nearly as secure as trusted computing supported DRM.
Re:Trends by hal2814 · 2006-03-23 07:37 · Score: 1

"DRM isn't necessarily contrary to open source (although practically...) but trusted computing (a form of DRM) IS."

You left out "in its currently proposed format" between "computing" and "(". I am well aware that the AC is right and in its current form, trusted computing would lock out derivative versions of a program but there's no reason it has to be that way.
Re:Trends by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 07:44 · Score: 1

So what sort of scheme would you use for trusted computing? I associate trusted computing with requiring that the hardware not be under your control. Agreed that could allow for some open source (say, you can write Java but it gets treated like an untrusted applet from the Internet) but it'll put quite a damper on what you can do.
Re:Trends by MadUndergrad · 2006-03-23 09:51 · Score: 1

'In the absence of government, there could be no such thing as "contraband" or "prohibition".'
Sure, until MSGoons arrive at your door to beat you up for using Linux. You think it wouldn't happen in the absence of government? The power vacuum would be filled by the next-most-powerful entities: the corporations. With no government to keep them in check, they could do whatever they damn well please as long as they turn a profit.
So sure, you're free to choose what software/soda/ you want to, so long as you don't value the integrity of your thumbs.
Re:Trends by marcosdumay · 2006-03-23 10:00 · Score: 1

Yes, you are right. It is not because you can read the source that you can bypass the DRM, you can bypass the DRM because it is DRM.

There is no secure DRM, unless you start enforcing it with hardware (TCPA). And that only moves the break point into the hardware arena, so that it is more expensive (very expensive) to break it, but still possible.

--
Rethinking email
Re:Trends by hal2814 · 2006-03-23 10:12 · Score: 1

"hardware not being under your control" != "trusted computing"

If that's your definition then an OS with a protected mode is already engaged in trusted computing since it won't always let software touch hardware directly (especially kernel memory space). Last I checked, there are a few OSes that are open source and take advantage of protected modes.

Ideally, for trusted computing to coexist with open source software, there must be a mechanism that allows you to derive trusted work. I don't claim to have the answer to that problem since I haven't pondered it heavily but the problem is hardly unsolvable.
Re:Trends by marcosdumay · 2006-03-23 10:35 · Score: 1

You should ponder it a bit more, because the problem is unsolvable. If you let the owner (the one who brought it) of the machine decide what he'd like to run on it, you can't enforce DRM on it. And if you don't let him decide, he'll not be able to run his software, thus FOSS will go nowhere. But we may still have Linux, distributed by the machine manufacturers, or even Microsoft (talking about irony).

Your point about protected mode is nosense. Despite the kernel that the owner chosed to use having protected mode, he can chose to use another one anytime, or write a module. So the owner of the machine is not controlled by the hardware, it is the other way around.

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Rethinking email
Re:Trends by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 10:40 · Score: 1

You can always remove that OS and install one of your own though. A full trusted computing platform would not let you install a non-trusted OS.

I'm not sure what you mean by "derive trusted work." If you mean assure a particular piece of media that it's running in a "trusted" environment, then I don't see how you can do that if you're going to allow me free access to the hardware.

The media companies are worried about allowing devices to put high definition ANALOG data on a wire to your first generation HD TV. I think eventually they're going to figure out that, unless you lock down the hardware or prevent me from running my own code (ie open code) in the same environment their media plays then I can just snarf it out of video memory if nothing else works.
Re:Trends by Clith · 2006-03-23 11:35 · Score: 1

Just because you can read the source code on how a DRM scheme works does not mean that you can bypass it.
That's right. It's a real, official ThoughtCrime.
Welcome to 1984.

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[ReidNews]

Don't overestimate... by AKAImBatman · 2006-03-23 03:10 · Score: 5, Insightful

Remember how all the SciFi shows of the 60's thought that we'd be cruising the solar system (perhaps even the stars!) by the year 2000? The Jupiter II optimistically took off in 1999, and Star Trek contained several references to "Eugenics Wars" and "early space travellers" that were supposed to have happened by now.

What do we actually have? The same space shuttle that's been flying since the late 70's, and updates to the same rockets that have existed throughout the history of the space program.

Technology does progress at an exponential rate. The only problem is that the focus of technology moves. Computers have already gone through several booms of massive technology increase, and are now very stable creations. There's just as good of a chance that they'll continue to update in a more linear fashion (ala automobiles) as there is that they'll experience exponential increases in technological sophistication. I personally find it more likely that technology will begin to focus on improving other areas for the time being, and allow computers to remain stable for the time being.

So be careful not to severely overestimate while you're attempting to avoid underestimation.

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Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade

Re:Don't overestimate... by MrFlibbs · 2006-03-23 03:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

Indeed. One thing that's easily overlooked is that even though the hardware performance has increased exponentially, the software development has not. Those tasks that are compute-bound benefit directly from the exponential hardware growth, but other tasks do not.

Software is hard -- perhaps fundamentally so. It cannot be written exponentially faster even with infinite hardware resources. Vast hardware improvements may support vast software possibilities, but writing that software is still a daunting task.
Re:Don't overestimate... by Frumious+Wombat · 2006-03-23 05:02 · Score: 1

Anecdotally, I ran across an old Trek episode a while back (the one with Kodos), and to bring up the voice-print files Spock is shuffling a handful of what appear to be 720K floppies. So, in the 1960s they could imagine transluminal transportation, extracting useful energy from fusion or matter/antimatter annihilation, and world peace, but they thought computers would be stuck with a storage medium that could only hold one voice-print per 3-4" square cartridge, that would be transported by SneakerNet. This is similar to RAH's stories from the 1950s where it was accepted that navigators in space would have memorized enormous logarithmic tables.

Here we are in 2006, and we're puttering in LEO, but our computers are large, fast, and well-connected enough to archive all of mankind's knowledge, simulate sub-molecular processes with usable accuracy, and monitor every communication going in and out of a 300 million person country. Makes you wonder what we're overlooking that's in development, but just under the radar.

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the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Re:Don't overestimate... by Spy+der+Mann · 2006-03-23 05:06 · Score: 1

Software is hard -- perhaps fundamentally so.

Yes, because computers can't design software. Humans are the ones have to do it.

I've said before that there are still algorithms that need to be designed - intelligent audio compression thru sampling (if there's a piano, strip the necessary information and just store the notes and variations, if it's a voice, just store the vowels / consonants and pitch changes, of course, with the rest of the "noise" as high-fidelity info), sprite-based video compression (that's part of the MPEG4 standard)... speech recognition algorithms that WORK and can understand context...

What happened with all those wonderful futuristic predictions? Perhaps they belong to the future - the one that will never arrive.
Re:Don't overestimate... by oliverthered · 2006-03-23 05:49 · Score: 1

Task ' Write a web page'

a) download a trail of dreameweaver and write a simple web page, test your page with firefox.

b) Pop in a dos disk, fire up debug and write a text editor to write your web page, then write a GUI and web browser in ASM to test your web page, hand write all your browser tests too don't use the automated ones on the web.

There's been a lot of change in the way people write software, ever used a punch card and waited a day or two to get your debug results back?

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thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Re:Don't overestimate... by booch · 2006-03-23 06:21 · Score: 1

Yes, but you'll notice that we already have 23rd-century communicators, tri-corders, data storage*, and display technology. As a sibling post points out, that's because these are easily commoditizable and there's lots of money to be made.

I think this bolsters your theory that it's the focus that matters most. And focus is largely a matter of markets and profitability.

* There was an episode in ST:TOS where they were plugging in 2.5-inch orange squares into a computer. I don't recall now what was on them. But when mini-discs came out in the early 1990s, I remarked that they were about the same size, and held roughly the same amount of data.

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Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Re:Don't overestimate... by duffstone · 2006-03-23 06:54 · Score: 1

Completely agree. 14 years from now won't look significantly different than today unless changes are made in the software development process. Not just the process but the actual language architecture used.

The best example I can give, is having to manually program decision making logic for every program I write. This should have already been streamlined. Why I have to tell a program how to think EVERY time I write a proc is a mystery to me.

IF/Then has been a crutch for software developers for far too long. There are other aspects of modern day programming that are just as repetitive and inefficient as well, I just couldn't think of a shorter example than this.

-Duff
Re:Don't overestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 07:05 · Score: 0

The Jupiter II optimistically took off in 1999
Erm, the moon was blasted out of earth's orbit Sept 13, 1999, but the Jupiter 2 was launched Oct 16, 1997 (my 43rd b'day).
Re:Don't overestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 07:07 · Score: 1

Knowledge appears to increase exponentially (actually, Kurzweil says double exponentially). That doesn't mean that individual technological solutions will advance the same way, particularly over short periods of time.

We haven't seen a boom in space because we're lacking new propulsion (think of all those SF shows -- I don't think any of them had us riding around on chemical rockets) and we haven't really put the will into it.

However, advances have been made. We have ion engines a la Star Wars now. People are starting to talk seriously about fusion drives. The old chemical drives have gotten to the point where things like the X Prize can happen.

The progress is there, we just saw a lull in that one particular area of engineering. That happens from time to time, when people lose their purpose.
Re:Don't overestimate... by HiThere · 2006-03-23 07:26 · Score: 2, Informative

There have been languages that made a great start at handling this problem. Unfortunately they died.

One of my favorite examples is Prograf, a data stream language. It was excellent...well, sort of. There wasn't any good way to textually represent it. And it was proprietary. And it was written for the Mac. Small * small * small. As with many good Mac products, it died attempting the transition to MSWind. But the real problem was that while programs were logically small, physically they were HUGE. A graphic printout would have lines of control leading all over it. It was literally like reading a flowchart, except that the flowchart didn't abstract the program, but included every necessary detail for execution. This meant that a program written for Prograf and printed would be about three or four times the size of a similar program written in, say, Fortran IV or Ada (I'm picking moderately verbose languages). Perhaps 6 to 8 times the size of one written in Python. This made thinking about the programs very difficult.

If you want another example, you could look at the Helix database, but that didn't abstract away the if/then statement. Still, it was another good program killed by no convenient way of seeing large chunks of the code at once.

Until we can develop a true AI, the best progress that we can make will be based on chunking. There are various ways of doing this, libraries are one popular way. So is "higher order languages". Every language that steps above binary is created through a chunking of lower level concepts into higher level ones. The if/then construct itself is a chunking of lower level concepts (usually test and branch if zero/not-zero, but other tests occur). Very few languages have chunked the if/then construct away, however. Prograf is the only one I can think of. (Unless you allow the Lisp (cond()) statement...which is really a series of if tests in one wrapper. And I think that current Lisp dialects also include a simple If test, but I'm not sure about that.) However you might check J (a language descendant from APL). It also handles chunks in a highly divergent way, and may have eliminate the if/then construct.

What would be nice would be if someone could resurrect Prograf with it's warts polished off. I remain convinced that this was a language with great promise that was stiffled by ... well largely by circumstance, but the lack of a viable printed representation was also significant.

--

I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Re:Don't overestimate... by AKAImBatman · 2006-03-23 07:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

We haven't seen a boom in space because we're lacking new propulsion

This is a commonly repeated urban legend. The truth is that we have propulsion methods pouring out of our ears; many of which are far better choices for manned flight than Ion engines.

The biggest problem has been the $500,000,000 that gets sunk into every shuttle flight. It eats up the money that's useful for better space craft. The next biggest problem is the ISS. It eats up money without accomplishing its original goal. (To be a launching pad to the moon. Unfortunately, it's in the wrong orbit.) The last big problem has been NASA and the governmetn's insistence on pie-in-the-sky technologies (*cough* Space Shuttle, X-33, NASP, etc.) rather than building on the infrastructure already in place.

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Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Re:Don't overestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 07:50 · Score: 1

I wouldn't say it's an urban legend. If you were building a spacecraft today and you had to go out and buy engines for it, what could you buy? Chemical or ion.

The others you indicated range from will-be-off-the-shelf-tomorrow through never-tested-outside-a-lab to might-be-possible.

Like I said, we're not cruising around the solar system Jetsons style because we've had a lapse in the engineering. Science and ideas have been advancing in the background regardless, as your link illustrates.
Re:Don't overestimate... by AKAImBatman · 2006-03-23 08:02 · Score: 1

If you were building a spacecraft today and you had to go out and buy engines for it, what could you buy? Chemical or ion.

Actually, you'd buy nothing since that is pretty much what's available on the open market. You might be able to subcontract Rocketdyne to build you engines based on an existing design, but that's about as close as you can get.

The others you indicated range from will-be-off-the-shelf-tomorrow through never-tested-outside-a-lab to might-be-possible.

Many of the engines have undergone extensive testing. Nuclear Thermal Rockets, as an example, have reached flight readiness several times in their history. The engines are ready, the missions are not.

Like I said, we're not cruising around the solar system Jetsons style because we've had a lapse in the engineering.

The only reason why we're not cruising around the solar system is because we've had a lapse in politics. After the resounding success of the Saturn V program, Nixon told NASA that he was shutting it down. They were to pick a single vehicle for the future and stick with it. NASA chose the Space Shuttle (since it seemed like a good idea at the time), but politics inevitably screwed that up as well.

NASA lost Von Braun and many other excellent engineers in protest during this scale-back of operations.

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Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Re:Don't overestimate... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 08:21 · Score: 1

I'm sure the Russians would be happy to sell you something. Probably the Europeans too. Even Boeing (or whoever it is that actually owns the rights to their engines), if you paid them enough. Fission engines have been tested, but never in flight. That's one of the ones I'd put in the "may-be-available-tomorrow" category, or the "never-tested-outside-the-lab" one, if you count a rocket engine firmly anchored horizontally to the ground as in the lab (which I do).

Regardless of any political/financial/societal effect on the space program, it's a good argument in favour of accelerating advancement, not against it. We spent a few thousand years of recorded history looking at the pretty lights in the sky, figured out 400 years ago that the moon wasn't a perfect celestial sphere flying in heaven and now we're whining that forty years ago we sent some people there and haven't done much since. Except send robots to places we didn't even know existed 200 years ago, of course.

The space shuttle, ISS, NASA, the United States itself, are noise on the curve.
Re:Don't overestimate... by duffstone · 2006-03-23 08:42 · Score: 1

Truly I don't pretend to have an answer. I'd love to be the brain behind something as revolutionary but alas I'm a hack at best.

SQL is a good example of a language that doesn't need logic checks to perform it's task. I'm not saying that SQL is great or anything, but it's a good example of how data can be managed without being told how to think. It already knows how to think, you're just giving it a subject. The downside is that your results are always limited to the scope of that system's logical mind. (And yes I do know that you can use logic if/then within functions and views, however it's only required in certain instances).

So why can't this premise be expanded so that you tell a program what you want it to do, and then it generates it's own code to which you are unable to edit. You review and QC the resulting procedure, suggest changes and revisions, regen the code, and repeat until you get the product you need. Then imagine if this process was recorded for further reference by other such programs to learn from.

Not terribly different than a chess program learning from it's mistakes. Which has already been done several times over.

*shrug* Like I said, I'm not the brain here. But if I can conceptualize this stuff then you'd think that someone else is 100 steps ahead of me. You'd think anyway.

-Duff
Re:Don't overestimate... by marcosdumay · 2006-03-23 10:13 · Score: 1

We can program exponentially (yes, exactly O(exp(x))) faster by real code reuse. Like what people say they do (looking for libraries and using them), not like what people really do (reusing only self coded fragments, looking for libraries and rewritting them).

Most of the problems with real code reuse are solved by free software, that is probably why there is now an emergent desire to do that on the community. Just look the number of /. comments stressing that you SHOULD build a library and a CLI envelopes for your code to see how strong this desire is becomming. And look for the number of dependecies of any distro to see how often code reuse has being done.

But don't expect things to change overnight. Being exponentialy faster doesn't means that t is incredibly faster today, it can even be slower.

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Rethinking email
Re:Don't overestimate... by ozmanjusri · 2006-03-23 13:11 · Score: 1

Computers have already gone through several booms of massive technology increase, and are now very stable creations.
No, they're stagnant creations, and that's because there's a monopoly player acting as a sea-anchor to innovation. Wait until there's real competition in the software market and you'll see what computers can really do.

--
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Re:Don't overestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-24 02:13 · Score: 0

It's getting faster to write software. GUIs aside, the languages are getting more powerful. There's less need for absolute performance in most applications, so you can optimize for productivity instead. There's a reason why Lisp, to take one example, never took off in the old days, and is now making a "comeback." Languages like Ruby are taking a lot of the same concepts, and then you get into things like Haskell that are really advancing the state of the art, but are maybe a little too slow for current hardware...

Of course, if you're in a startup all this is great, but if you're in a corporate environment that makes you use Java, it might seem like it's not getting any faster to write software, except to the extent Eclipse does it for you. That's why smart little startups are able to compete.
Re:Don't overestimate... by peter · 2006-03-24 03:22 · Score: 1

> What would be nice would be if someone could resurrect Prograf with it's warts polished off.

Prograf sounds similar to LabVIEW (http://www.ni.com/labview/demos.htm), which I used when I was doing my physics degree. http://www.icon-tech.com.au/faq_introduction.html. According to that FAQ, there is now an open-source openG project which implements LabVIEW's underlying G programming language (for which LabVIEW itself is an IDE). G can't be represented textually, so it suffers the same problem as Prograf.

And from experience, making a proper program with error handling, instead of just blindly talking to the physics lab hardware (serial port, GPIB, etc.) adds complexity to the program that makes it harder to deal with any part of the program. Unlike in C, where the error handling code lives near the code that might generate the error, you have to have whole chunks of your program inside case/switch "boxes", with extra "wires" running all over the place.

However, you could write modules in LabVIEW, and wire them together without seeing their internal complexity, just their inputs and outputs.

I never really liked LabVIEW as something I wanted to use myself. It is interesting in that it's the only graphical language I know of (well, now I've heard of Prograf). Other people in my class liked it: one guy who really liked it also had some CS background (so he knew what programming in an imperative language like C is like, giving him some basis for comparison). He was also left-handed, which is correlated with being a visual thinker (very much unlike myself). I found LabVIEW to be a real pain sometimes, with the limitations of the built-in library stuff, but that was more than 6 years ago now, so maybe the quality of the thing has improved and it can be a good language for visually oriented people.

--
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes , .ca)
Re:Don't overestimate... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-24 17:49 · Score: 0

"The same space shuttle that's been flying since the late 70's"

The space shuttle first flew in 1981, which is far, far later than the "late '70s", at least in dog nanoseconds.
Also, it's "'70s", not "70's".
Re:Don't overestimate... by HiThere · 2006-03-24 20:02 · Score: 1

...SQL is a good example of a language that doesn't need logic checks to perform it's task. I'm not saying that SQL is great or anything, but it's a good example of how data can be managed without being told how to t...

Hunh?? I have had literally DOZENS of hairpulling error tracing problems because SQL doesn't do any decent error control. Error control is MANDATORY for any language that is to be seriously considered for anything complex. I'm not claiming that any particular error handling scheme is needed, merely that there needs to be one (and it needs to be overrideable). E.g., this dialog box in my browser highlights both Hunh and SQL in red. This is an error flag that I am intentionally ignoring. But this kind of flag is O, so incredibly useful. (I tend to be a bit dyslexic. This reduces the number of spelling error that pass through to be posted by at least an order of magnitude. [But, sigh, not to zero.])

--

I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Re:Don't overestimate... by HiThere · 2006-03-25 10:48 · Score: 1

From what I can see of OpenG, it doesn't seem to be even a vastly simplified version of Prograf. There was never any question that Prograf was a full programming language. It had merely abstracted things in a way that removed the if/then construct from the language. (Naturally they DID implement tests which controlled DataFlow.)

It doesn't really matter, except that it is an existence proof that such things are possible. I do consider it a shame that it died, but I also acknowledge that even had things been favorable it would have lead a fringe existence. One thing that might have helped it was multi-processing systems, as it was inherently parallelizeable. True, the interperter/compiler would have needed to be enhanced to properly use such, but the characteristics WERE built into the language. However it died decades ago, when such beasts were mainframe-only devices.

--

I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Re:Don't overestimate... by duffstone · 2006-03-29 06:36 · Score: 1

My point was that SQL is an example of a system where you use *almost* plain english to request information. The hard logic behind what is actually being done is done so within the client/server relationship. (bassically, when linking 2 tables, you don't have to say, if KeyRecord1.TAbleA = KeyRecord1.TableB then return resutls A,B.C.D.etc, else if Keyrecord1.TableA = KeyRecord2.Tableb then return... blah blah blah)....

You don't have to program the logic behind how to link tables, you simply tell it which field is the key, and what to link on. You tell it which fields you want, you tell it what order you want, and what field to group on. You can even get so complex as to use your own conditional logic in Functions.

But the point is, that the majority of the logic and nuts&bolts programming is done behind the scenes and transparent to the user.

My point is valid. Wheter SQL sucks or is god's gift is not part of the debate.

What a relief by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 03:13 · Score: 0

Whew, they didn't mention Microsoft or Windows once!

Vinge dissappoints by ObjetDart · 2006-03-23 03:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

Was anyone else as completely underwhelmed by Vinge's article as I was? For a man who has produced so many incredible, original visions in the past, he seems to be stuck in a bit of a rut these days, going on and on about ubiquitous computing. There wasn't a single idea in his article that I haven't heard many times before already, from him and others. It reads like something he cranked out in 10 minutes to meet some last minute deadline...

--
I read Usenet for the articles.

Re:Vinge dissappoints by hopeless+case · 2006-03-23 06:56 · Score: 1

I felt exactly the same way.

I am so used to being blown away by Vinge.

He doesn't often write but when he does, he puts a lot of thought into it.

He didn't put much thought into this article.

No high hopes by hcdejong · 2006-03-23 03:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

Compare the state of computing in 1990 with that of today. Yes, computers are immensely faster than they were 15 years ago, but have things changed on a fundamental level? Have computers become more *intelligent*, rather than just faster? I, for one, am disappointed.

An example: handling contact and scheduling information. In 1993, Apple showed how it should be done with the Newton. 13 years on, the most popular application (Outlook) still doesn't have that level of functionality.

Computers were supposed to make things easier for us. Instead, they all too often complicate things needlessly.

Yes, thanks to better hardware, more tasks have become feasible to do on a computer. Video playback, massive networks like the internet are very nice.

But while new functions are being added, existing software stagnates. Mac OS X is nice and robust, but UI improvements over Mac System 7 are tiny to nonexistent. Windows shows a similar lack of progress. Word processing is not fundamentally different from 1984.

Re:No high hopes by nowhere.elysium · 2006-03-23 03:40 · Score: 2, Interesting

This has more to do with the fact that people are becoming increasingly blase about the potential of coputing. at the moment, i am actually undertaking a project to try and design a human/computer interface that is totally removed from what engelbart came up with back in '68 - we're trying, essentially, to show people that thinking outside the box is the best way to improve the use of said box. computers these days are capable of amazing things in 3-dimensional graphics, but we're still constrained by the 2-dimensional 'navigation' methods. instead of breaking barriers, and then returning to safe territory, how's about we burn the return bridges a bit? what i (and my group) are doing is to re-invent man/machine interaction; we're not, strictly speaking, doing anything very new; we're just trying to do it differently. the problem that people have imposed on themselves is a desperate love of throwbacks; i'm sitting here, typing on a keyboard not entirely dissimilar to the typewriters of the 1880s. we've got a machine that can calculate variances in chaos theory sitting under our desks, and we're still treating them as if they were mechanical, hand-milled machines. we need to learn to progress in of ourselves, as well as our technologies.

--
http://xkcd.com/313/
Re:No high hopes by CouchP · 2006-03-23 03:48 · Score: 1

I think what we are waiting for, is something akin to language. You mention that word processors have hardly changed since 84. I say, a radical change in that particular application will not happen, until a radical change in the social need for the written word. What I mean is, technology in a specific area of application seems to hit a point that further improvements become linier or even flat. This is because of the nature of sorting out the good methods from the superb methods. Windows and OSX suffer the same fate for now, since the current need for computers is limited to 2 dimensional word processors and spreadsheets etc. Once there is a need at the corporate or personal level to work in the next media, 3d for instance, and not just gaming, then the fundamental way of doing things will shift and the exponential growth will begin anew. We see now that it may be possible one day to travel to other stars, but until the NEED to do so is present, then it will not have that exponential growth. My arguments are tenuous, and a little off the cuff, but I think there may be some truth or meaning in them. Thanks
Re:No high hopes by master_p · 2006-03-23 04:54 · Score: 1

Compare the state of programming with the 60s. Which programming languages are we using today? C++, Java, Perl, Python, etc...in other words, ALGOL, disguised in various forms.

We can have no real progress until we have AI that we can just describe what we want to it and it understands it. Only then we can make computers as clever as we imagine they can be.
Re:No high hopes by ribuck · 2006-03-23 06:08 · Score: 1

> Word processing is not fundamentally different from 1984
In 1986 I was using Microsoft Word for DOS. It had menus with keystroke shortcuts, an interactive tutorial, stylesheets and mail-merge. It supported PostScript output, and it had every formatting option that I needed to produce professional-quality documents.

It also had a consistency and elegance in its structure that is sadly lacking in much of today's bloatware.

Sure, today's version of Word will export to HTML and has WYSIWYG anti-aliased fonts, and can embed Excel spreadsheets, but the 1986 version was more pleasurable to use.

--
Paid Q&A/Research
Re:No high hopes by HiThere · 2006-03-23 06:51 · Score: 1

I really doubt that you can dramatically improve things by adding another geometric dimension. If you want to improve the interface, then the improvement will need to be based on the improved understanding (by the computer) of the interface. A 3-D interface is probably not going to be particularly useful. Various people keep trying to prove me wrong about this, but to my mind what that would do is increase the computational requirements on the user, with minimal to no improvement on the information throughput. This is the opposite of what is needed.

If you want to improve the interface, you need to make it more TRANSPARENT. Less something that gets in the way. This is, indeed, a difficult thing to accomplish. Currently the text interface to computers is based around ink on paper, the most efficient technique that people have ever developed for transmitting information asynchronously. It's made some moderate improvements, but I still prefer to read a book than to read a computer screen. The book is more transparent.

The main advantage that computers, as a media, currently have (besides eye-candy) is during the creative process. I've *used* typewriters. Computers are so much better it's nearly unbelievable. But for reading, ink on paper is better. (Immersive games are something different...but I think that they are apart from the rest of what I'm saying. They can be educational tools, but when adapted for that purpose they are often quite dull, and they don't seem to have any other use. Prove me wrong!)

One possibility that I see for an interface which would, in certain circumstances, be superior is based around physical modeling. This requires the computer to better understand the physical world, so that if can interpret what a camera is seeing. This would be an interface for telefactors that highlighted things needing attention. Unfortunately, this isn't one simple thing, but a complex, where different uses of telefactors would require different understandings. A surgeon might use this interface to operate on a patient in Paris from Tokyo, e.g. Here the potential improvement would be to clarify the boundaries between internal organs, and remove clouding caused by blood (either by visual processing, or by controlling some local entity, human, robot, or telefactor, and causing them to clear the visual field.

As you can see while this would be important, it would also be very specialized. A telefactor pulling cables would need a different system.

Notes:
A telefactor is the controlling mechanism for a waldo. If a human is operating the telefactor, the resultant system is called telepresence. If a computer is operating the telefactor, the resultant system is called a robot. I have no idea what you call a system that switches back and forth between being controlled by a computer and a human.

--

I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Re:No high hopes by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 06:59 · Score: 1

Agreed. People are fond of thinking 3D is the way to go but as yet our displays are very much 2D, as are our input devices. I have yet to see a GOOD, convenient THEORETICAL 3D display technology. Input is easier, but even so there are very few actual pieces of hardware and I haven't seen one of those that's the equivalent of a mouse.
Re:No high hopes by dforsey · 2006-03-23 07:19 · Score: 1

Totally agree. But why stop at theoretical?

Name one real-world 3D interface that is good and convienient/easy to use.

Note that driving a car is really a 2D activity - hitting a baseball is
hard to master, and effectively flying a plane in 3D is something we spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars per person for training.
Re:No high hopes by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 07:41 · Score: 1

That's what I mean, there aren't even any theoretical ones. Never MIND practical ones.

We know of no way to make a good 3D display. We definitely don't have one.
Re:No high hopes by IvyKing · 2006-03-23 18:07 · Score: 1

Glad to know that I'm not the only one who liked Word for DOS better than WfW. One of the nice things was that I could set up different 'normal.sty' in different subdirectories - have one for letters, one for other stuff, etc. Making a global change in formatting was simply a matter of attaching a different style sheet.
One thing that drives me up the friggin wall with Word and related word processors (Star/OpenOffice) is the way they handle graphics. I find it a lot easier to define a frame and then put in the graphic (where the frame defines whether the graphic will be cropped or re-sized to fit), instead of putting in a graphic, finding that it wildly out of scale with the rest of the document and then try to wrestle it into place without the @$%*&#!!! word processor deciding that it is going to re-arrange text to suit the eff'ing picture. What makes this worse is that 14 years ago, I was using a package that did it the right way and that package could run on a 25MHz 68040 with 16MB of memory.
On a similar vein, a former co-worker says he was much more productive typing out long documents on Lotus Manuscript than any currently available word processor - mainly because of the text interface.
Re:No high hopes by ribuck · 2006-03-23 21:42 · Score: 1

I agree with you, IvyKing, about the graphics.

Another package that did graphic insertions the right way was early versions of Ventura Publisher. Twenty years ago I was using Ventura Publisher for DOS (it used GEM for the GUI stuff) on an 80286. And it was pretty fast too, particularly compared to 1986 PageMaker under Windows 1.0 which was sluggish.

It would be hard to go back to using 1986 Ventura Publisher now, because it doesn't support scalable outline fonts or Unicode, but he core functionality was as good or better than today's packages.

For graphics, you defined the frame, then said what graphic you wanted in the frame. You could set borders, padding etc via dialog boxes or visually by dragging the edges (whichever you preferred).

Computing has come a long way in the last 20 years (internet, digital photography, video, IDEs, version control, multitasking etc) but some of the core functionality is stagnant or even in decline.

--
Paid Q&A/Research

Robotics by Fedarkyn · 2006-03-23 03:23 · Score: 0

the increase in computing power will make possible (even banal) to have humanoid robots at home...

Who is Vernor Vinge? by resonte · 2006-03-23 03:25 · Score: 2, Informative

In case you wanted to know

Vernor Vinge is a sci-fiction author who was the first to coin up the term singularity, and uses the idea in some of his novels. Linkie: http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

If you would like to read one of his books I would suggest Across Realtime, which touches on this subject lightly. Although his other stories are somewhat less palatable for me (but I've only read three).

Other authors who delve more deeply into singularity issues are Greg Egan (hard going, but definatly worth reading) http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/, Charles Stross's Accelerando http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.htm l, and .

Science fiction is odd as a genre since the authors minds are affected by the technology they see possible at the time of writing. Science fiction writers in the past depicted a future with minimal use of networked computers for instance. So the theme seems to change over time, whereas other genres remain pretty static.

--
\(^o^)/

No more computers by year-end 2005 by fastgood · 2006-03-23 03:27 · Score: 1, Offtopic

Three Dell TV spots recently did not even mention the word "computer" once.

An HP newspaper ad last week contained 500+ words of copy, and the closest they got to that naughty bit word was in the fine print with the phrase "computing environment" when referring to thin client boxes connecting to a server.

C**PUTERS are obsolete for Dell and Hewlett Packard!

Re:No more computers by year-end 2005 by ch-chuck · 2006-03-23 03:46 · Score: 1

Could be - in the late 50's people were fed up with "Univac" and job destroying "giant brains" and all so much that Digital Equipment Corp. didn't even call their machines "computers". They were "Programmable Data Processors" (PDP). If you look at radio magazines from the 20's and 30's Hugo Gernsback was envisionsing radio as the solution for everything - radio weapons, radio movies (TV), radio medicine, radio prospecting, blah blah blah blah. Now 60 years later you just make a call on your cell phone and go about normal life without even thinking about the underlying technology that makes it possible. In 2020 computers will be as ubiquitous as radio, tv, automobiles, etc - just they will be invisible to normal life, only noticed when they FAIL to function.

--
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }

Re:Decentrialization is key. by vertinox · 2006-03-23 03:33 · Score: 4, Insightful

Might I point out that more money is probaly put into the cell phone, telcom, and computers industry than all the world's space programs combined.

The reason we aren't seeing great advancments in our space and nuclear programs is that they are highly centralized and are at the whim of select few if they get funding or not.

However, when technology is decentralized... As in everyone can have a cell phone, broadband, and a computer within their means then those types of technology will advance faster at an accelerating rate. (I hope I don't sound like Kurzweil).

Not everyone can go to the moon... But most everyone in the western world can have an Xbox360. May not mean everyone is going to get one... But more than enough to cause rampant R&D into that industry.

Trust me... I'm shocked myself. I remember a time when we didn't have cell phones, computers with hard drives (I miss my old IBM pc jr), internet, 4-7 channel TVs, and every thing else that is happening now... And I'm only 27.

Things are happening at an accelerating pace... Short of a world disaster or economic depression lik ethe 1930's I doubt we will see a slow down.

--
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)

Future prediction in technology is foolish by Opportunist · 2006-03-23 03:34 · Score: 2, Insightful

Let's take a parallel in the space race of the 60s. Everyone expected the development to continue in the same pace it did during the 60s. I mean, face it, between 60 and 70, the technology changed from being able to lift some rather small mass into orbit (well, at least sometimes, most of the time it just went up in smoke) to bringing a 3 man craft including lander, car and a lot more junk to our moon! People extrapolated. 60 to 70: Zero to moon. 70 to 80: Flight to moon -> Moon base. 80-90: Mars. 90-2000: Past the asteroid belt and prolly even more.

Now, what people didn't take into consideration was that, with the race over, funding stopped. No more money for the NASA, no more leaps in science.

Same could happen to us and computers. Now, it is of course vastly different since there isn't only one customer (like in the space race, the only customer was the feds, and when they don't want your stuff anymore, you're outta biz), but it all depends now if the "consumer base" for the computer market is willing to spend the money. There are SO many issues intertwined that influence the market and thus development, that it's virtually impossible to predict what is going to be in 5 years, but trying to give an even remotely sensible prediction for 15 years is impossible.

Too many factors play into it. Sure, you can extrapolate what COULD be, considering the technology we have now and the speed in which technology CAN evolve. Whether it does will highly depend on where our priorities lie. DRM, will it kill development with less companies daring to get into the market, or will it increase development since DRM technology swallows away huge amounts of cycles? Legislative, patents and copyright, how will the market react? Will we let it happen or will we refuse to play along? Are we descending to being consuming drones or will there be a revolt against the practice of abusive patents?

Too many variables. Too many "what if"s.

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.

Re:Future prediction in technology is foolish by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 03:43 · Score: 0

You also have to take into account that the moon landing was faked, and so the technoglogy at the time was much overestimated.
Re:Future prediction in technology is foolish by Opportunist · 2006-03-23 05:14 · Score: 1

Well, we got vaporware today, too, so that variable can be left out of the loop.

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:Future prediction in technology is foolish by sgt_doom · 2006-03-23 10:46 · Score: 1

Interesting you should mention the space program (and I strongly advise anyone interested in the modern history of science to study the example of NASA) as so much of the technology we enjoy today is both a direct and indirect result of the space program.
From digital electronics and and the PCs we use today, along with polymer chemistry, biomedical engineering, data and telecommunications, etc., etc., ad infinitum, soooo many things derive from the largest (am I wrong about this?) government-funded research project in mankind's history (or at least in America's - don't know for sure about those pyramids...). BUT what will drive the next leap in technology?

About the only thing today that didn't come from it is Velcro - big thanks to the Swiss for that!

Not to be Funny But... by eno2001 · 2006-03-23 03:36 · Score: 1, Offtopic

...that all depends on how we define science in the next few decades. Currently science is under attack for political reasons and will likely experience some level of change if something isn't done to curb the diretion things are going. The political motivation behind the current debasement of science is money. There are some very wealthy people who stand to make, keep or lose a lot of money depending on how much science the average person is made aware of. Those people are trying to muddy the waters and bring pseudoscience and fantasy (Intelligent Design, UFOs, Angels, and the like) to the same level of respect that science once held. Sadly, it appears to be working since there are many average people out there who would rather believe in old myths reframed in today's culture than actually dig into real scientific explanations for certain things.

Another part of the problem is that many of the "scientists" themselves are the people with the money and political motivation to keep science from the masses. (I put scientists in quotes since they tend to be more businessmen than scientists which is usually a horrible combination when it comes to society at large) A perfect example is Donald Rumsfeld and his connection to the Searle corporation. Searle developed Nutrasweet by way of serendipity while researching some medicines. The administrations before Reagan would not OK Nutrasweet for mass consumption. This was obviously detrimental to Searle's, and Rumsfeld's cash flow. So during the Reagan administration, a former employee of Searle was appointed to the FDA by Ronald Reagan. This appointee only did one thing and then resigned. He approved Nutrasweet for mass consumption. (Look it up if you don't believe me) The reason that Nutrasweet was not approved before this time was that too many animal tests indicated that Nutrasweet could cause tumors and a wide variety of illness. Many of these illnesses are not life threatening, but are discomforting enough to cause the sufferer to seek out medical attention. Usually on inspection, the doctor will prescribe medication from a large pharmaceutical company (in some cases Searle) which will take care of the symptoms but will be required for the patient as long as they suffer those symptoms. Nice perpetual motion money making system there...

So some scientists are crooked and simply work to further the interests of their employers rather than improving the human condition. Other scientists who work to improve our understanding of the universe, our planet and ourselves are rarely rewarded for their work and these days are being attacked as "heretics" in our newly "christian nation". So I would say that if things continue as they are going now, we'll have science churches that preach Intelligent Design and prisons to put the heretical non-christian scientists in. The computers of the day will be nothing more than glorified televisions that pass along the "wisdom" of the christian sanctioned "scientists". And the corporations and governmental bodies who live off of these systems will employ the wealthiest people in the world. Assuming that the rest of the world doesn't wise up and bomb us into oblivion...

--
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o

Re:Not to be Funny But... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 05:59 · Score: 0

Science is under attack today. It has lost its hollowed ring of universal inspiration, its selfless devotion to the man kind, its loafy goals and great achievments. This is partly the fault of those who distort history to make science and scientists into something they are not; science is accumulative and incremental, scientists make unbelievable mistakes in hind sight and act like an ass more often than not; and those are worthy ones, taking more risks and staking more of their individuals than today's academic scientists. Careerists don't make good scientists, yet they fill most academic posts. This corrupts the whole system, the research universities they staff, the journals they review for, the papers they write; the list goes on and on. Then there is the question of their moral standing; I would like to think physics suffered more than a little setback when physicists exploded the atomic bomb. This is tied to the fundamental problem of state funded, and therefore state directed, research. Science is amoral, scientists should not be.

The truth is scientists are not made of stuff like they used to, they are careers and in business now, big careers and big business. But don't all tall things fall? I wouldn't want to be around when this domino does.

PS: I wish people would stop treating churchs as the devil; at least their very existence for as long there is society shows some value. It is not their fault science has lost its hold over so many people.
Re:Not to be Funny But... by HiThere · 2006-03-23 09:10 · Score: 1

Scientists never were the mythic figures that hagiographers have created them as. OTOH, social forces used to favor the open and free dissimination of knowledge by scientists. This is what has changed. Part of the change is due to changes in the patent laws, and part is due to changes in the tax laws. There are probably also other causes with less effect.

As to treating churches as the devil, how else should they expect to be treated? The very concept is native to the church...even to the christian church. (The Jews meant something very different by the term, closer to God's DA).
Now as to whether I consider that everything done by a church is evil...no. I wouldn't go that far. I consider them socially destructive parasites, by and large, but not totally destructive, and most people who go to them intend to be good people. Many of them will help people who they know need help. Etc. But many actions taken by the church qua church, and many speeches by prominent churchmen, I find morally offensive. It's true that they aren't much worse than any other large corporation, most of them aren't. They aren't any better, either. And much of their "morality" is as destructive of society as a chemical plant situated upstream of your city. (I have a particular instance in mind, which consciously and intentionally poisoned a city for decades because they calculated that even after fines it would be cheaper than cleaning up their waste. They were right, too.)

"The devil"? Perhaps you need to define your terms. Then I could be more explicit and accurate in my criticisms of your "defense".

--

I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.

Wrong focus by jettoki · 2006-03-23 03:39 · Score: 2, Interesting

I'm not very concerned with progress in hardware. My 3 year old computer runs pretty much anything just fine, and I expect it to continue doing so for a few years to come, at least. Right now, I'm severely disappointed by the lack of ideas in technology. There's only so far you can take word processing, e-mail, scheduling, etc. Enough with 'innovation' in those areas, already!

What I'd really like to see is improved content creation tools. How about 3D scanners, so Joe Artmajor can easily scan his sculptures into modelling programs? They exist, but they aren't on the consumer market yet. I'd rather see that than another few years of GPU speed wars.

Re:Wrong focus by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 08:52 · Score: 1

I've got DIY plans for a 3D laser scanner. Chances are your art major has access to one, or he could run down to somebody's prototyping lab and use one.

They're not common because, well, what would you use it for?
Re:Wrong focus by HiThere · 2006-03-23 09:14 · Score: 1

Also existing, but too expensive for normal end users, are the 3-D printers. Some of them will even allow you to specify which bits should be electrically conductive. They're limited, but they can turn out quite cute models. (One of the companies that uses them is a car company.)

I think I even read that someone had printed out a working scale model V-8. Not sure I believe this, though. That seems rather unlikely.

--

I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.

China and India by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 03:39 · Score: 0

While people focus on the hardware aspects of the future of computing, I think the most earth altering change will come from the emerging engineer classes of China and India. I think the vast increase in the number of people working on technical problems (even if there is some redundancy) will have a far greater effect on the world than any hardware developments possibly could. The big assumption here is that the rise in technologists in India and China will dramatically increase the global pool of engineers (instead of just moving it around). This is a huge assumption, by no means a given and perhaps a best case scenario.

Assuming no major disruptions occur, the giant new advanced labor pools in China and India will have 15-20 years of experience by the time 2020 rolls around. The increase in experience and investment will have these countries turning out unique inventions, technologies and discoveries at rates comparable to western nations today.

Hopefully, others will follow India and China's examples and work on educating and training their populations. Countries formerly unable to fulfill their own basic needs, posing a danger and a drain to other countries, could begin not only solving more of their own problems but postively contributing to the world at large.

The utilization of the world's nerds will transform the world for the better. Nerds of the world, unite!

Re:Decentrialization is key. by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 03:58 · Score: 1, Insightful

You nailed it, funding is absolutely critical. Which is why it's so important we stop doing things that divert resources (or waste them completely). I'm not talking about spending money on entertainment, I'm talking about companies having to defend themselves from useless patents. Or companies defending themselves from idiot customers who didn't know the shiny device they just bought shouldn't be used in the bath. Or companies spending their resources inventing technologies that limit the utility of another technology (DRM). Or monopolies controlling a market.

Future of technology by bsieloff · 2006-03-23 04:02 · Score: 1

It still kills me that we travel in a metal beast built around the concept of controlling explosions. Just seems silly to me. I am looking forward to what the future of computing does bring. The more we learn and accomplish the faster we will be able to realize our next dream.

Re:Future of technology by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 14:19 · Score: 0

Of course, in the 24th Century, mankind will spread across the galaxy in starships. But those too have metal shells, and operate on the principle of controlled explosions (matter/antimatter)

A Singularity, madam. by clydemaxwell · 2006-03-23 04:06 · Score: 2, Insightful

I think a singularity is possible, by the definition of "a point beyond which we cannot hypothesize", because we cannot truly conceive/understand of that point. But will it necessarily be AI, or even computers, that create this? It's about as likely as extraterrestrial contact. Which is, you'll note, also a singularity.

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Browsing with classic discussion, noscript, at -1 and nested
no hidden comments and I only mod UP

Re:A Singularity, madam. by HiThere · 2006-03-23 08:53 · Score: 1

I think you misunderstand.

The singularitarians tend to focus on computers, because that's what's currently hot. This doesn't mean that they are committed to AI. Nanotech, both biological and otherwise, is also one form that's considered. Instantaneous communicators are also considered (though not frequently...that won't lead to a singularity until a civilization is spread far enough that light-speed delays become very significant). Little attention is paid to things that can't be predicted not because they are unlikely, but because they can't be predicted.

If you insist that the "technological singularity" will arrive in some one particular form, then you aren't a singulartarian, but a follower of some other philosophy. (And there ARE groups that are totally devoted to the idea of a singularity based around an AI. Perhaps they are singularitians. Perhaps not. It depends on what they say about what happens after this AI is achieved. If they feel they know or can predict what would happen, then they aren't singularitarians. If they just believe that this will bring on a singularity, then they are. They may or may not be correct, but they ARE singularitarians.)

Also, the very concept of the "Technological Singularity" is an ill-defined term. I'm not sure that this is of it's essence, but it's certainly true at the moment. This is highlighted by Charles Stross in one scene in Acclerando where he has a reporter asking three different people when they think the singularity occurred. One person said "When the first TCP/IP packet was transmitted. The world since then could not have been predicted by anyone living before then." If you think about it, that's rather hard to argue with. It's consistent with the current definition of "Technological singularity", and it implies that we can look back on a minimum of hundreds of such events. But it's clearly not what we think we mean. So what, actually, DO we mean?

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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.

The Immortal Words by uberjoe · 2006-03-23 04:42 · Score: 2, Funny

Of Professor Frink:

"I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings in Europe will own them."

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The days of the digital watch are numbered.

Re:The Immortal Words by $0.02 · 2006-03-23 04:53 · Score: 1

but will they run Linux?

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If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)

Waste of time by HangingChad · 2006-03-23 04:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

For 20 years I've been hearing about the future of computing and when the future gets to be the present it doesn't really look anything like the future that was previously described. So to me that whole line of speculation is just a waste of time.

The truth is you don't know which technologies will take or why. Sometimes you think X should be popular but it doesn't catch on for 10 years after you found it. Or something you blow off as insignificant comes out of nowhere to dominate a market.

Although I have noticed one small arena that tends to be a good predictor of the wider market. If p0rn distributors pick it up, then you can almost bet it's going to be the next insanely great thing. I remember taking a training class for a streaming video server in Atlanta a few years ago. Half my classmates were from p0rn distributors. Which definitely made break time more interesting.

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That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage

Re:Waste of time by sgt_doom · 2006-03-23 10:54 · Score: 1

Moderate this dude up for stating the obvious - which did indeed need to be stated!
Pleasure has always been the primary motivator of mankind. After all, you think those ancient dudes used fire just to cook and heat with????

That's how they did all those early tattoos.

Leave Technology to China and India by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 05:02 · Score: 0

By 2020 the US should be exporting our "surplus females" to China and India since they both practice gender biased abortions against females.

Many provinces in India are reporting large skews which show in some places like Punjab only 500 female births per 1000 male births.

China is just as bad or worse.

All of these males will someday maybe want to touch a female besides their mother.

And we can supply them. We got plenty of "surplus females".

Re:Leave Technology to China and India by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 07:43 · Score: 0

Good, they'll have fewer distractions from their technical work. And they'll have fewer people wasting their time talking about how there aren't enough females in technical fields.

Anyway, this will just spur an advancment in creating anatomically correct female robots which are long overdue IMO.

New technologies change fast, older ones don't by ChrisA90278 · 2006-03-23 05:07 · Score: 1

Not all thechnology changes at the same rate. Microelectronics technology is far from mature and it's changinf fast. Chenical rocets has become a mature technology. Just look at the two newest large space bosters the Delta IV and the Atlas V. Mechanically there is nothing in there an engineer from the 1960s would not recognize. Same goes for the passigeer jet aircraft. Rapid changes in the first half of the 20th centerury and little change from the 1970's to present. I suspect that people in the 1930's figured that airplans in 2006 would be 1000 feet long and flay at 18 times the speed of sound and look like cruise ships inside complete with casinos and swimming pools. It didn't work out that way. They were just in a "bubble" of rapid aeroplane technology development and that pace was not sustainable. BTW, it is only microelectronics that is advancing quickly now. Computers have not changed much except to get cheaper and a little faster. And software has ot changed much at all either

Re:New technologies change fast, older ones don't by HiThere · 2006-03-23 07:43 · Score: 1

It's not that simple. New technologies do change rapidly for a brief while. There is no guarantee for just how long they will continue to change rapidly. Also, long stable technologies will sometimes be changed by external events, and begin changing quite rapidly.

When I was in high school I tended to model this by a helix, with different technologies distributed around the circumference of the bounding circle, and the bright spot of rapid change climbing along the rising helix. This gave me a rough guide. I didn't realize the causal mechanism behind what I was trying to model, but it was a better means of predicting than the simple linear model. It let me see that biological advances would be coming, but not rapidly enough for me to select that as my major. Eventually I picked statistics and became a programmer. This was a quite fortunate choice. (I was surprised at how long that career path carried me. I expected programmers to be obsolete before now, but AI has been a much more resistant problem than anyone expected.) Still, while there is much to be said for the helix model, the system is really stocastic. But the bright spot of hot development *does* move from area to area, and it tends to avoid the locations where it has just been resident. OTOH, I'm not convinced that it isn't getting larger and splitting into fragments. The internet is probably the cause for this, as it allows anyone who thinks some particular field is hot to form the nucleus of a group around which development can crystalise. This would tend to imply that any field that can be developed by small groups with limited funding can be pushed forwards without the prior need for access to mass media publicity (so the potentially interested folk can find each other).

OTOH, some social phenomena appear to INSIST on high localization, even without obvious need. Cases in point are "Kansas City Music", "The San Francisco Sound", "The Classical Composers". In all of those cases it isn't obvious why there was a short, sharp, localized burst of creativity. But they were all very localized, and very brief. And they swept far beyond their local environment.

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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.

Milestones in scientific computing by hpcanswers · 2006-03-23 05:09 · Score: 1

I was surprised by some of the items missing from Jacqueline Ruttimann's list of "milestones in scientific computing." Perhaps the most glaring omissions are those that have lead to supercomputing-for-the-masses: the wide-spread use of clusters that have dramatically lowered the cost of computing systems, the adoption of MPI for portable software, the development of programs like MATLAB and Mathematica that greatly ease programming, etc. He does list the NSF's supercomputing centers, though chances are that few researches actually use them today.

MOD PARENT UP! by Spy+der+Mann · 2006-03-23 05:09 · Score: 1

What I'd really like to see is improved content creation tools. How about 3D scanners, so Joe Artmajor can easily scan his sculptures into modelling programs?

And I'm still waiting for the do-it-yourself anime rendering program :(

Anyway, mod parent up. He's so right about this one.

The Future of Computing: Non-algorithmic Software by Louis+Savain · 2006-03-23 05:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

Consider that our basic approach to computer programming has not changed in over a century and a half. It all started when Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm (or table of instructions) for Babbage's gear-driven analytical engine. Software construction has been based on the algorithm ever since. As a result, we are now struggling with hundreds of operating systems and programming languages and the ensuing unreliability and unmanageable complexity. It's a veritable tower of Babel. Computing will not reach its true potential unless and until we abandon the algorithmic model and embrace a non-algorithmic, signal-based, synchronous software model. Only then will we be able to guarantee that our software systems are free of defects. There will be no limit to their complexity.

1984 by 2008 · 2006-03-23 05:12 · Score: 2, Funny

Of course word processing hasn't changed since 1984. LaTeX and GNU Emacs were written in 1984... how could you improve on that?

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I quit!

Re:1984 by Spaceman40 · 2006-03-23 05:48 · Score: 1

Hey, the best programming language was written in the 60s: Lisp!

(only partially joking)

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I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Re:Decentrialization is key. by kabocox · 2006-03-23 05:27 · Score: 1

Trust me... I'm shocked myself. I remember a time when we didn't have cell phones, computers with hard drives (I miss my old IBM pc jr), internet, 4-7 channel TVs, and every thing else that is happening now... And I'm only 27.

Damn, I'm 27 and now I feel old. When I first read your post I was like, I can remember dad having a cell phone for the longest time. If I remember correctly it was either a bag phone or mounted in his company vehicle. Now, my wife, mom, dad, and two brothers have one. Computers with HD drives... I remember using our Apple IIC. I think my mom still has it and it was working if I ever cared to hook it up. Internet. My first exposure to the internet was in 1995 in Highschool. I had it in college. I've had dail up on and off again since 2000. 4-7 Channel TVs. Actually this could be a trick one. TVs really should only have a video selector switch. I grew up on Cable. We moved to the boons in junior high and only had ABC 3, NBC 6, CBS 12, FOX 16, UPN 33, 2 PBS stations. In college, I had basic cable. Since college, we've been strict DVD & VHS with rabbit ears every now and then.

Although I like the idea of exploring space and all the neat things that we could do up there, I'm gald we've said forget it. I'd rather have cheap entertainment and cell phones than have "a man" walk on the moon. If I could afford $50ish a month, we'd have broadband. If I spend the same amount again, I'd have cable or direct tv. There is a reason that I don't have those things... It's lack of money.

Re:Decentrialization is key. by RicktheBrick · 2006-03-23 05:34 · Score: 1

Here are my predictions on what will be available in the year 2026. First factories will be built here in the United States but most of the worker will live in India or China. They will use the internet to control robots in the factory. Apartment buildings will have examination rooms where one will go and there will be robots controlled by a doctor in India or China who will be able to remotely do an exam even better than if the doctor was there in person. Every automobile will be part of a network where it will know the location, speed and direction of travel of every other automobile within 100 yards of it. The automobbile will know the speed limit and location of every stop sign or traffic light and it present condition. The automobile will take defensive steps to avoid an accident. Eventually all human will be part of a large network where all knowledge and experiences will be available to all humans.

Kurzweil by dargaud · 2006-03-23 05:36 · Score: 1

I've been reading some of Kurzweil's articles for over 2 decades and 99% of the time I call bullshit. He always promises AI but he (or others) never comes up with anything close to his predictions. I have no idea where he gets his projections from, even if his (?) singularity theory kinda makes sense (once the computing power of a CPU gets above that of the human brain thanks to Moore's Law, all hell breaks loose). Just to say that putting 10 thousand pocket calculators next ot each other doesn't make it an AMD x64...

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Non-Linux Penguins ?

I had to stop reading this article.. by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 06:18 · Score: 0

This article went on for 3 pages, and said absolutely nothing. Ugh.

Want to know what I think is going to happen? Collections of personal items, collections of group items, and the collaborative sharing of those items. We see the first baby steps of that today with P2P and MySpace/LiveJournal/Friendster'ish portals. Not too far ahead from now, it will boil down to a protocol, with corresponding client and server pieces. The same evolution has been mirrored in everything from ftp to http. Think sharep, a protocol for the universal sharing of personal data collections.

In the meantime, i'd be willing to settle for having my desktop be rewindable and having an intelligent way to index and crossreference my pictures and music. My 2006 needs are fairly simple.

Future is Dim... by Simonetta · 2006-03-23 06:21 · Score: 1

All projections of the future are based on a continuation of middle-class life in the USA, Japan, and Europe as it is today only more so.

Probably won't be that way. Oil is peaking. Which means that the easy oil is gone and what's left won't be easy to get to. Or easy to pump out. Or protect from pirates, terrorists, or religious fanatics.

Plus...

The world's population continues to explode. Billions of more young people are becoming mature (15-20 years old) and find that there are no jobs available. It will be easy to blame everything on the 'rich' (which means, you and me). For the young, learning that there are no jobs and no futures and no money means they have nothing to lose by joining up for a big war 'against the infidels' (again, me and you).

This means MASSIVE price and supply distruptions in the oil markets. Since we use oil for everything: food, clothing, shelter, transportion, communications, financial structure, and electronics: then there will be major distruptions in everything.

That includes science and computing.

Major disruptions means that things are not going to get a whole lot better in the next 30 to 50 years.
The people who tell you differently are either dreamers or fools, or they don't understand the implications of Peak Oil.

And the world's population continues to explode and billions of more young people continue to mature to adulthood while all this is happening.

Re:Future is Dim... by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 08:32 · Score: 1

Good thing there are dreamers. Otherwise I'd probably be busy killing myself after just reading your post.

Yeah, maybe the world is going to go to pot. People have been saying it for a long time, maybe they'll be right one of these days.

There was a big hullaballo a few hundred years ago about burning all the trees in England too. Why, when all the trees are gone, what are we going to use to heat our houses? Our entire society is built on wood and horses!

We'll either overcome new challenges or we won't. Historically we have, well, a perfect record of overcoming.
Re:Future is Dim... by sgt_doom · 2006-03-23 10:38 · Score: 1

You're ignoring the obvious sociopolitical agenda which is to eradicate the middle-class. Without the middle-class there is no democracy as a middle-class is necessary for any democracy to exist.
[What is...is wrong. Veblen] [Until the day they privatize the F.B.I. and sell it to the House of bin Laden. Me]

Re:Decentrialization is key. by bermudatriangleoflov · 2006-03-23 06:26 · Score: 0

I agree with you on this...however I would add that no significant advances in space travel have occurred because there is no market for it. When the day comes that money can be made by sending people who makes 40 grand a year to mars, I guarantee you will see an explosion in space travel technology.

Singularity == nuclear fusion by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 06:51 · Score: 1, Funny

The singularity is going to be like practical nuclear fusion power: always 15-20 years away.

Re:Decentrialization is key. by HiThere · 2006-03-23 07:06 · Score: 2, Insightful

Although I like the idea of exploring space and all the neat things that we could do up there, I'm gald we've said forget it. I'd rather have cheap entertainment and cell phones than have "a man" walk on the moon.

To my mind this is very short-sighted. Perhaps it's appropriate that we have fallen back to regroup, but not going into space in a large scale is suicidal -- not on an individual basis, but for the species. The only question is the appropriate time frame. Perhaps it's appropriate that we stop and do a bit more development before another big push. This is very different from "stop and sit on our hands", however.

Toys are fun, but they're only really important if they're a step towards getting where you need to go. I enjoy computer games, but I don't really consider them important...except that gamers have helped push the development of computer technology.

--

I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.

Creativity Machine: it already invented its v2.0 by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 07:11 · Score: 2, Informative

Check out http://imagination-engines.com/ which is a US company founded by an AI researcher Dr. Stephen Thaler. In summary his systems are composed of paired neural nets in tandem where the first is degraded/excited to produce 'novel ideas' (the 'dreamer') and the second is intended as a 'critic' of the first system's output, or a filter for 'useful' ideas.

In real-life applications, it was used to invent a certain oral-B toothbrush product.

At one time the site's literature announced that 'invention number (CM Creativity Machine) produced invention number 2 (STANNO Self-Training Artifical Neural Object)

Re:Decentrialization is key. by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 07:11 · Score: 1

4-7 channel TVs? Am I reading that wrong? Growing up our TV SUPPORTED even more than 7 channels (I think it was something like 15). Of course, we could only get two, one kind of fuzzy. Except on those rare nights when everything was perfect sometimes you could get the sound from the French channel.

I've got a few hundred channels now though. :)

Re:Decentrialization is key. by ceoyoyo · 2006-03-23 07:14 · Score: 1

Maybe we go through cycles. For a while we're content to sit and play with ourselves, er, our toys, then our children or grand children get bored and decide (or are forced) to do something important, then their children or grand children have a whole set of new toys to play with.

And by 1960... by oldCoder · 2006-03-23 07:27 · Score: 1

By 1960 we were all supposed to have flying cars. Or at least roads that were ribbons up in the air. And world peace.

In 1960 the AI crowd announced they'd have machine translation of natural language licked by 1970. It isn't exactly licked yet.

So some things will change and some won't. The bathrooms of 1950 are a lot like the bathrooms of 2006. So are the livingrooms and even the garages. The TV's are different but the cars are quite recognizable. The bicycles are different but not radically so. Diapers are different but the babies are the same. The economy was an issue then and is still an issue now. But it's a different issue. In 1950 everybody was terrified by mass unemployment. Now people are scared of less-massive unemployment.

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I18N == Intergalacticization

tech brains by codingh34v3n · 2006-03-23 08:09 · Score: 1

With such technology advances in science we have seen, all smart brains out there, and such, why we still are living inside political systems so bad constructed and mediocre,..?

Do you have the answer ?

May be the answer is not in technology, but people minds!

http://www.codingheaven.net/

Not enough power by s1234d · 2006-03-23 08:17 · Score: 1

Unfortunately all these nifty ideas will fail to occur as the Hubbert Curve begins to bite.

Re:The Future of Computing: Non-algorithmic Softwa by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 08:32 · Score: 0

Drivel! Complexity breeds defects. More complexity, more defects. And the basis for computing HAS changed radically - perhaps not at the root but it has changed radically. Just because we still use binary doesn't mean the whole thing isn't done much better now!

Re:The Future of Computing: Non-algorithmic Softwa by Anonymous Coward · 2006-03-23 09:07 · Score: 0

A what? That'll be an achievement since not even the most powerful computing device known to humankind is algorithmic. And it wasn't even made by humans, though it is in their head. The ordering of life itself is an algorithmic function. Perhaps I don't know exactly what you mean. Care to elaborate?

Why it is the way it is by Josh+teh+Jenius · 2006-03-23 09:24 · Score: 1

I am 25 right now. The "space race" is long dead. The Cubs have still not won a World Series in my lifetime.

Call me jaded, but I saw this coming back in 1986. Why do you think I learned to code?

Seriously...

"One small step for man..."

v.

"Would it be hard to add something like eBay to my blog? I'll pay you $50!"

--
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.

Re:Decentrialization is key. by vertinox · 2006-03-23 10:16 · Score: 1

4-7 channel TVs? Am I reading that wrong?

Well, the first TV I remember as a kid had a dial that could pick up way more than that, but we could only pick up about 4 channels (7 on a good night) and everything else was static.

By the time I was in middle school my parents had cable though... So a moot point.

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"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)

Re:Don't overestimate...and enlarge the context by sgt_doom · 2006-03-23 10:33 · Score: 1

Good points, all, but please don't forget that the sociopolitical context greatly affects tech progress. Given the extreme variance in philosophical differences today (progressives vs. neofascists and supporters of fascist theocracy) it is highly likely that a breakup of the United States could happen similar to that predicted in Heinlein's fiction (and later mentioned in Margaret Atwood's "A Handmaiden's Tale") should one more national election with Diebold machines go awry or a port city is vaporized, and martial law declared, when the opposing party seems to be winning.

Stranger things have happened!

Rather than predicting what toys we'll have... by B.+Pascal · 2006-03-23 11:01 · Score: 1

Hello everyone:

Rather than trying to predict what technology we'll have tomorrow, it's more productive to simply list the cutting edge ideas we are working on. This way, we can pick some new ideas, develop them, and turn them into the technology of tomorrow. If an idea has merits, then it'll succeed.

"Flying cars" have been mentioned many times in the past as something we should have now. However, I fail to see how we could have a flying car in any near future. Without new physics being developed, no amount of wishful thinking can leviate a car off the ground. Indeed, in order for an idea to succeed, that idea must be first be plausible, and then economically feasible. Just because something sounds nice won't cut it.

Cheers.

B. Pascal.

Re:Rather than predicting what toys we'll have... by B.+Pascal · 2006-03-24 10:23 · Score: 1

Hello all:

Just when I said that flying cars are no where in sight, something like this comes along...

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GSP/SEM0L6OVGJE_0.html

Cheers.

B. Pascal.

Re:The Future of Computing: Non-algorithmic Softwa by Louis+Savain · 2006-03-23 12:23 · Score: 1

Perhaps I don't know exactly what you mean. Care to elaborate?

In an algorithm communication is limited to only two elements or statements at a time, a predecessor and a successor. In other words, there is a single signal path through the sequential elements. In a non-algorithmic program, by contrast, a predecessor element can communicate with an indefinite number of successor elements. As a result, there are more than one signal path and more than one element may be running synchronously in parallel.

Re:The Future of Computing: Non-algorithmic Softwa by Money+for+Nothin' · 2006-03-23 15:58 · Score: 1

In an algorithm communication is limited to only two elements or statements at a time, a predecessor and a successor. In other words, there is a single signal path through the sequential elements. In a non-algorithmic program, by contrast, a predecessor element can communicate with an indefinite number of successor elements. As a result, there are more than one signal path and more than one element may be running synchronously in parallel.

Interesting.

Your example suggests that a one-to-many relationship: 1 signal can communicate with n-many signal recipients; analogous to an email system, if I understand correctly.

How is this different from a multi-threaded app in which one thread changes a variable (so during this change, a mutex or critical section must be used so no other thread can modify it), which is then read by n-many threads on multiple processors?

What examples of signal-model computers exist today (if any)?

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Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?

More cool stuff by Ticklemonster · 2006-03-23 16:03 · Score: 1

I just saw these two over at the UT General Discussion forums at Atari: http://gprime.net/video.php/sonyrevolution (sony revolution)and http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=iVI6xw9Zph8&fea ture=PlayList&p=98B15976635B28C2 (talk about desktop eyecandy!!!

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Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride

Re:Decentrialization is key. by mcrbids · 2006-03-23 20:46 · Score: 1

To my mind this is very short-sighted. Perhaps it's appropriate that we have fallen back to regroup, but not going into space in a large scale is suicidal -- not on an individual basis, but for the species. The only question is the appropriate time frame.

The risk of an extinction event happening on Earth is pretty significant. The risk of it happening in the next 100 years is pretty damned slim. Probably the most significant likelyhood of our own extinction is ourselves, a la holy wars, pollution, and global warming.

However, do note that in 1960, space flight was very expensive, in 1980, flight was very expensive, and recently, for the first time, space flight was privatized.

Combine that with exponential growth rates in manipulating carbon nanotubes, and in fairly short order, I figure space flight will be routine when my grandkids are in their 30s. (my oldest kids are 17)

The technology needed to make space flight economical is being developed at a furious pace. Just give it some time...

--
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.

Re:Decentrialization is key. by mgblst · 2006-03-23 21:34 · Score: 1

The risk of an extinction event happening on Earth is pretty significant. The risk of it happening in the next 100 years is pretty damned slim.

While this is true, and most would agree with you, you have to also consider the consequence. The chance of it happening is slim x something we really want to avoid. This makes it a lot more important. If we are elmininated - that is, the end for man. All the progress we have made, the sacrifices, the research, the sex has all been for nothing! (OK, maybe the sex was good)

Exponential growth is not enough by geggo98 · 2006-03-23 22:28 · Score: 1

But while new functions are being added, existing software stagnates. Mac OS X is nice and robust, but UI improvements over Mac System 7 are tiny to nonexistent. Windows shows a similar lack of progress. Word processing is not fundamentally different from 1984.

So we have an exponential growth in the hardware sector while the progress of software seems to stagnate. The consequences are simple: Exponential growth is not enough. For software to evolve, we need more than exponential growht on speed and memory capacity.

Re:Exponential growth is not enough by hcdejong · 2006-03-23 23:03 · Score: 1

No, we don't. What we need is less focus on MHz and more fundamental research on what to do with all those cycles. Most software companies seem dedicated to redoing their current product with more eye candy every few years. They do take advantage of the extra power by adding new functions, but these are mostly logical extensions to current functionality that have become feasible because of processing power increase.
The exceptions are tiny startup companies and lone developers, plus a few companies like Google (with their 'every employee can do whatever he wants for x% of his company time' policy).

Apple used to have a Human Interface Group that thought about things like the Macintosh GUI on a fundamental level, doing usability tests etc. That group has been disbanded, along with the rest of Apple's fundamental research efforts. Xerox PARC has been awfully quiet the last 25 years.

This kind of research isn't popular, perhaps because it poses a risk, and can't guarantee to contribute to a company's bottom line within a year. With companies increasingly focusing on quarterly results at the expense of all else (including future profits), we can't expect much from them in the future.

What we need is a fresh look at the concept of computing itself. Is the current way of doing things really the best we can achieve? I think not.

Re:The Future of Computing: Non-algorithmic Softwa by Louis+Savain · 2006-03-24 00:12 · Score: 1

How is this different from a multi-threaded app in which one thread changes a variable (so during this change, a mutex or critical section must be used so no other thread can modify it), which is then read by n-many threads on multiple processors?

A multi-threaded system consists of multiple algorithms running at the same time. The threads, as you point out, may manipulate the same data. The problem is that the threads are not synchronous: they run at different speeds which wreaks havoc on temporal relationships and leads to unreliability. In a synchronous system, all elementary operations have the same fundamental duration.

What examples of signal-model computers exist today (if any)?

If you mean software systems, there are none that I know of. However, integrated circuits are non-algorithmic signal-based, synchronous systems. That's why they are so stable.

Re:Decentrialization is key. by kabocox · 2006-03-24 02:59 · Score: 1

To my mind this is very short-sighted. Perhaps it's appropriate that we have fallen back to regroup, but not going into space in a large scale is suicidal

We aren't ready to go into space yet. I for one think about the only reason that a US man walked on the moon was because of the USSR. The US government could have cared less except that they needed something that they could do better than the USSR. I think that it was a mistake spending all that money for that purpose. Telcommunications, weather monitoring, spying, yes those are good reasons, but for 2 or 3 hand fuls to make into space and walk on the moon? Um, nope not worth it. When will we be ready? You aren't going to like this answer, but when 5-10% of the industrialized nation's population can easily go into space as cheaply as crossing a major ocean; then we'll be ready for space.

But that's for people, the average person can wait 200-300 years for tech to be developed and refined so that price comes down. The only 3 things in space that I want is an orbital mine, a massive power station that transmits power down to Earth, and orbital factory. One power station could justify the entire space program. I just don't see the purpose in spending billions for a hand ful to be in space and do stuff. It is a very big waste currently. Give it 100 years, and it might not be.

I don't think that humanity will be interested in the short term next 200 years into going into space. I think that we'll have some bio revolution and either start developing custom drugs/cures for individuals, discover something that extends the average lifespan by 100-200 years, or something else that would benefit everyone Earth bound. Trust me those sorts of advances would have 100s of billions pumped into them. If the average life span of a US citizen jumped up to 500-600, I believe that we'd take a look at all those long term risks again, and maybe start researching on how to build really safe things on Earth. That'd would take up 100-200 years of our time making Earth safe so we could comfortably life here for a very long time. By that time, we just might have finally figured fusion power out or how to cheaply get alot of supplies or personnel into space. I'm thinkng thousands to millions of people and making the solar popluation/economy self sustaining as well.

We have to face facts; we just aren't ready yet.

Non-algorithmic Software by Frozen+Void · 2006-03-25 01:41 · Score: 1

Trigger-based programming?
How it different then building a bunch of IF/THEN/ELSEs for all conditions(not that efficient,a lookup table is more elegant) and making the computer
evaluate all of IFs?
This also sounds vaguely similar to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_trigger

Re:Decentrialization is key. by Travoltus · 2006-03-25 08:43 · Score: 1

The only way space travel and space commerce, etc. is going to be reliable, efficient and affordable is if we keep sending people up there NOW. We need to pursue these giant space engineering projects NOW, as often as we can, so the cycle of trial, error, refinement and optimization can move at a rapid pace.

Just as surely as cell phones become smaller, more powerful and cheaper through constant industrial churn, the space program can only develop in the same fashion.

It we wait until the 24th and a half century, space travel will still be as clunky, expensive and unsafe as it is now. The sooner we go all out with it, the sooner it will be affordable and efficient.

--
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!

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