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BT Futurologist On Smart Yogurt and the $7 PC
WelshBint writes, "BT's futurologist, Ian Pearson, has been speaking to itwales.com. He has some scary predictions, including the real rise of the Terminator, smart yogurt, and the $7 PC." Ian Pearson is definitely a proponent of strong AI — along with, he estimates, 30%-40% of the AI community. He believes we will see the first computers as smart as people by 2015. As to smart yogurt — linkable electronics in bacteria such as E. Coli — he figures that means the end of security. "So how do you manage security in that sort of a world? I would say that there will not be any security from 2025 onwards."
I can't seem to open the containers without some of it splattering all over my glasses.
So his portfolio has outperformed the S&P, I take it?
*ducks*
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
And New York was going to need 100,000,000 telephone operators by the middle of the 20th century.
Get a grip, for God's sake.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
We already have people that are as dumb as computers. I say leave well enough alone.
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but different in practice.
I know some people that aren't any smarter than my current computer. Heck, in terms of chess, I'm one of them... my computer can kick my ass at chess. Right now we have computers that can feign intelligence, i.e. use the internet to pass a multiple-choice test, but this is not a true measure of intelligence. If in 2015 a computer literally breaks out of a research lab and starts a mission of doom, then I'd say we might have one as smart as a person.
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There will never be a $7 PC in the future, for the same reason there isn't one now: when technology improves, people want to spend the same, but get a better computer, and manufacturers cater to this. No one ever says, "Hey, maybe we'll use technology that isn't the latest and greatest, but instead make it much much cheaper and just as good as they were in the recent past."
Well, no one except Nintendo.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
When futurists look into their crystal ball to predict the future, they typically try to find the common themes of the present age and using their own special multiplier they derive some kind of super-present with basically the same things we have now, only bigger or faster or smarter.
The problem is that they can only detect trends and can't really predict real things. So when you see a futurist going out on a limb and claiming that X is only 10 years away, they are hedging their bets that you will forget they ever made such a silly prediction 10 years from now. If they do manage to get something right, you can bet they'll be working overtime trying to get grants from RAND and MITRE for more futurism.
However, the reading of trends is a very important role of sociology. Only by accurately predicting what sorts of stresses and issues we will face in the near-term future can we sufficiently prepare ourselves for them. The Rand corporation has a list of 50 books for thinking about the future. (http://www.rand.org/pardee/50books/) These offer insights into the past and present and into the minds of successful futurists.
The one thing you will notice about successful futurists is that they don't go overboard predicting killer electronic e coli yogurts. Rather, they outline the likely changes in society and provide suggested remedies for foreseeable problems as well as suggested directions for societal growth.
The area of futurism is very interesting and a strong futurist school of thought is vital to our success as a society. Cranks who like to come up with doomsday scenarios do the entire field a disservice.
Please stop posting predictions of "futurologists". They are the modern era's form of witch doctors, shamans, medicine men, and other self-proclaimed prognosticators. Since BT apparently actually employs one, I am reminded of another article I read a long time ago which proposed today's corporations and brands as substitutes for an innate desire for membership in parallel to the tribes and clans of yore, replete with those who attempt to hold positions of power by their somehow unique predictions of the future that have no more or less probability of coming true than any random statement of anyone in the group, but dress it up in some sort of mysticism, whether spiritual, or false intellectualism, to make it sound divinely guided or erudite.
I predict that in 2015, this guy will still be making predictions. His track record will be no better than random probability would have resolved. The time you have spent reading his predictions and even this response is time out of your life that you will never recover, and reading it will not put you to any better advantage than if you had not.
[...] in around 2015-2020, you could say that we won't need people to write software, because you just explain what you want to a computer and it will write it for you, and there's no reason then to have people working in that job.
Maybe not, but I'll have the job debugging all the mistakes the androids will have in their code. They'll be outsourcing debug work to us humans.
The other side of AI says that "my brain is magic, and I'm really smart and you can't possibly produce a robot as
clever as me". I don't subscribe to that one - I think that's nonsense.
Tells me all I need to know about this guy's predictions.
He fails to understand that in the 40+ year history of AI research noone has demonstrated even the inklings or foundations upon which actual AI can be built upon.
They may be nothing special about the human mind, but what ever the case is, we certainly havent figured it out yet. It's more likely that we'll have cold fusion by 2015 than AI.
Uh, I thought that, explaining what you want to a computer, is precissely what programming is all about. Isn't source code a program's best specification? What are programmers doing if not explaining what they want from the computer?
When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
Asimov thought the internet would be in a single computer called "multivac" and that robots would be a hell of a lot safer, and that the self-driving car "Sally" would be in production long before 2020.
In 1955 Heinlein, in Revolt in 2100, had the protagonist heading to "the Republic of Hawaii", not able to forsee that fpur years later it would become a state.
Roddenberry had automatic doors, cell phones, and flat screen monitors 200 years in the future rather than 30 years later (now). His writers had McCoy give Kirk a pair of reading glasses in Star Trek IV, not forseeing that twenty years later the multifocus IOD would be developed.
This guy says we'll have six hundred million androids in ten years. He doesn't understand computers, or that AI is just simulation. "I'm in the 30-40% camp that believes that there's really not anything magical about the human brain." But he doesn't see that it is analog, and that thoughts, memories, and emotions are chemical reactions while digital computers are complex abacuses working exactly like an abacus (except it ises base 2 instead of base 10).
He talks of that Warwick guy - "Kevin isn't really the first human cyborg". Nope, he isn't. Vice President Cheney is a cyborg, as he has a device in his heart. I'm one, as I have a device in my left eye (the aformentioned IOD). People have artificial hips and knees. "Captain Cyborg" isn't really a real cyborg, he's a moron like the writer of TFA.
Nothing to see here - at least, nothing for anyone intelligent to see here.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Boy have I heard this one before. It just used to be that computer languages would become so simple that the profession of Programmer would disappear because everyone would just be able to write their own programs. Sure hasn't happened yet.
Someone once famously said: Computers are useless, they can only give answers.
The problem here is, even if you had a computer like the one described here, you still need to be able to understand your problem well enough to cogently explain it to your computer. And that's where most people will fail. They don't understand their problems in the first place, and have no idea how to communicate the solutions they actually need.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think he is onto something there. A few of his predictions align with what I know about my field, so I think they deserve some moderate credibility. One helpful idea that I use is the comparison of now to 15 years ago, and see what is different. In 1990 no one (read almost everyone) had the PDA or the internet, but we had the paper notebook, the phone, and the encyclopedia britanica. Fairly good stand-ins. Just look at everything in incremental improvements and try and predict a few of them out. I think that's what he is trying to do.
Yep, that skycar has been only a few years away from your dealership...for nearly three decades now.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'd prefer to think of that as the realist camp. It's not that I think we'll never build computers that can match the processing power of the human brain, it's that I don't think most AI technologists realize just how much processing the human brain is doing in real time. If nothing else holds back computers, I doubt we'll be able to approach the memory bandwidth to handle all the data that we get from our 5 senses. Do you realize how many millions of pressure sensors there are on your body? How many millions of hot/cold sensors? How many millions of optical and light/dark sensors there are in your eye? How many millions of taste sensors you have? How powerful your conscious sense of smell is? Your unconscious sense of smell (pheromones)?
Like I said... I don't doubt that eventually we'll develop a computer that can match the processing power of the human brain. But I doubt it'll be soon. It *might* be within my lifetime, but I'm not holding my breath on that one... The brain isn't magical, it's a trillion-core symmetric computer with a staggering memory retention and bandwidth, and a programming so complicated that we're nowhere near matching it. Oh, and that's not mentionning that the brain doesn't work in binary switches, either. It works in chemical switches, with about 50 possible states running in parallel.... Some day, we'll beat out the human brain with a computer. Humans are just too arrogant to believe that we can't, and so somebody will eventually do it. But it's not going to be tomorrow.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
item# 172008
http://www.officedepot.com/ddSKU.do?level=SK&id=17 2008&x=0&Ntt=organizer&y=0&uniqueSearchFlag=true&A n=text
A lot depends on how you define a computer, but think about what this would have been like in 1970?
Unfortunately, the current state of robotics is, in terms of cost-effectiveness, about where computers were circa 1955. For example, Honda's "little android," the Asimo (at least according to Wikipedia) still costs about $1 million per unit to produce, and still can't even hold the door for you.
When they've come down about in price by about a factor of 10^3 and can actually hold a door open, the robot future will have arrived. It happened for computers and will happen for robots--it'll just take awhile.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
I think you're making a pretty bold statement saying that there is no possible way to create true human level AI. Who's to say that 25, 50, 100 years from today someone doesn't figure out a way of programing a computer/entity/whatever-sort-of-electronic-device -you-like with the ability to actually learn, process information, and even re-write its own programming in such a way that it achieves a level of I/O processes that perfectly emulate human intelligence and conciousness (which would be the definition of Artificial Intelligence)?
Frankly, making broad statements like that sound an awful lot like insisting 640kb of RAM ought to be enough for anyone, or that a computer will never be smaller than a gymnasium, or that man will never fly or travel to the moon.
Yogurt may not be smarter than me, but it has more culture.
[Insert pithy quote here]
The confusing thing about all of his "yogurt"-preditctions is that they are internally inconsistant. At first he discusses how electrically-active bacteria could be oriented in such a way as to design a computer. This is entirely reasonable and is, in fact, how animal nervous systems function. THEN he goes on to these ridiculous claims about bacteria hacking electronics after being released in air conditioning systems or infecting our brains and controlling our thoughts. (And I wish I were exaggerating here...)
First of all, this is internally inconsistant because removing the bacteria from their computing structures would remove their capacity for computation. Moreover, his claims don't address the fact that these bacteria would still be subject to the same growth demands as regular bacteria. Given that electronic circuitry is generally pretty dry and nutrient free, exactly how are these bacteria going to control electronics if they can't even survive? Also, how could these mind-control bacteria go unnoticed by the human immune system? There are only a few bacteria that are known to pass through the blood-brain barrier and these ALL result in INFLAMMATION (which stops the functioning) of the tissue. Lastly, even if one designed bacteria that were individually "intelligent," these bacteria would most certainly be unable to survive in the real world because they would be inherantly inefficient and uanable to compete with the normal microbal flora.
I can't speak for his other predictions, but judging by his fundamental misunderstanding about basic microbiology, I'm inclined to believe that they're bunk as well.
-Grym
Personally I think genetic style programming will show the most promise in AI. Whats funny about it is there is a good chance that once we achieve self-aware AI, we probably will understand its programming about as much as we understand the human mind.. We will be able to see.. AKA not so much. Sure we might be able to trace its paths and figure out its logic, but we might still not have any clue as to what really makes it self-aware and conscious.
It's more than just that technology doesn't advance in the direction that people expect. People (many of them, anyway) intuitively feel that all problems are about the same level of difficulty.
But solving something that's NP-complete is not "just a little more difficult" than writing a word processor or an OS. It's so much harder that we need a totally new theoretical framework. Faster processors aren't enough to get us there. And the theoretical breakthroughs come a whole lot less frequently than processor speed increases.
Flying cars? You know, we could probably do that today. It's just a personal STOL aircraft, basically. We can solve the technological problems there. What we can't solve is the rest of it. Between the power requirements (cost) and the driver knowledge needed to operate it, the market size is too small to be worth the effort to create such a beast.
AI? We have the computers that could run the code (maybe). We don't know how to write the code. We probably won't know how next decade, either, or the decade after that.
Smart bacteria? We could perhaps create them. Making them spy on keypresses? Possible. Finding the data you want in the stream of data coming from a trillion (or quadrillion) bacteria? He seems not to have addressed that one.
Sending cans to other parts of the solar system? We've done that. Permanent colonies? It's a lot harder than just sending a bigger can with more stuff in it.
We have breakthroughs in one area (CPUs, for instance) and people assume that other, related problems must be "only a little harder" and therefore about to be solved. But problems differ enormously in difficulty; the level of breakthroughs that we have now is nowhere near what we need for certain problems.
First of all, I am a student of AI. I'm currently working on my Ph.D. in AI, studying, among other things, knowledge-based reasoning, machine learning, agent systems, and HCI. Also, I believe that strong AI is _possible_, in the sense that I believe humans are machines that function according to the laws of physics, so theoretically, a fast-enough computer could too. (Indeed, computation speed is the least of our problems.)
The problem is that people who want to build strong AI are trying to do in decades what took nature billions of years. Certainly, directly engineering something is usually faster than evolving it, but even orders of magnitude speed up won't have strong AI systems any time soon.
Since the dawn of computing, people have been assuming that once computers got fast enough, the AI problems would just solve themselves. The problem is that we're talking about very hard problems. Things that are easy for us (walking, visually recognizing objects, etc.) are hard for computers. Things that are hard for us (math, data processing, etc.) are easy for computers. Why? To do things that are hard for us, humans have developed, over thousands of years, detailed and exacting formalisms. Math has axioms, a syntax, and a set of mechanical processes to carry about. Even complicated proofs involve an extraordinary amount of simple symbol-pushing that a computer could do easily. Computers are based on exactly those same formalisms, so it makes sense that it would be easy to program a computer to do those things. Computers are NOT, however, built anything like how the human brain works, and that's why AI researchers use neural nets and genetic algorithms for so many things.
Long before we're plagued by computers thinking for themselves, demanding rights, and taking over the world, we'll simply continue to be plagued more and more by increasingly catastrophic bugs introduced into increasingly more complex applications. Far from having autonomy, our bug-ridden software does exactly what it was coded to do, right or wrong, and we'll suffer from it. And all along the way, the blame for the problems will fall squarely on the human engineers who made the mistakes in the first place.
Hopefully it would be able to tell us.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
thank you article writer and editor for giving us all the info.
My posts are definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
I suppose I'm one of those 60% - 70% of the "AI community" (or of the former AI community, because I left AI and went into algorithms, which was what I wanted to do more anyway, when people started spouting this nonsense), but I'm skeptical of any claims that we will develop strong AI by a certain time period that do not propose a reasonable way of doing so.
Here's a hint: it's not about raw processing power! The challenge is still theoretical. We can't even implement AI on an oracle the way things are now, much less a real machine. Great, so you'll have a powerful enough CPU to simulate a brain. Any idea how you're going to write a program that simulates one, considering we don't know anywhere near the requisite level of detail of the brain's operation yet?
No, it isn't IT. We design all of the hardware in IT; we know under what circumstances signals are going to be sent. It's kind of hard to have that level of control when you're talking about the nervous system, especially with how little we understand about it now. The best analogy I can think of is attempting to prove a theorem in physics and mathematics (the former is regarded as bad science; the scientific method is empirical). We make the rules in math, so we know when something agrees with those rules. New rules come from old ones, so everything remains intact. We don't make the rules of physics (or biology), and there's plenty we still don't know about those rules.
Hell is BT?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
"From my point of view the US is lost to the latinos, asians and other peoples - the only white nations left will be the original European ones."
You do realize how fluid the definition of "white" is over the decades, right? A century ago, most of Europe itself wasn't considered "white," especially the southern and eastern bits. When you get right down to it, the only reason Italians, Pols, or even the Irish are considered "white" nowadays is because their emigrants have made a name for themselves in "white" countries like the United States.
Immigrant-friendly "white" countries have taken in plenty of disparate newcomers, far removed from the populations they tried to integrate into, and instead of these countries ceasing to be considered "white" (as many xenophobic contemporaries have always feared), the definition of "white" has simply expanded.