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Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft Come Together To Create Historic Partnership On AI (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In an act of self-governance, Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, IBM, and Microsoft came together today to announce the launch the new Partnership on AI. The group is tasked with conducting research and promoting best practices. Practically, this means that the group of tech companies will come together frequently to discuss advancements in artificial intelligence. The group also opens up a formal structure for communication across company lines. It's important to remember that on a day to day basis, these teams are in constant competition with each other to develop the best products and services powered by machine intelligence. Financial support will be coming from the initial tech companies who are members of the group, but in the future membership and involvement is expected to increase. User activists, non-profits, ethicists, and other stakeholders will be joining the discussion in the coming weeks. The organizational structure has been designed to allow non-corporate groups to have equal leadership side-by-side with large tech companies. As of today's launch, companies like Apple, Twitter, Intel and Baidu are missing from the group. Though Apple is said to be enthusiastic about the project, their absence is still notable because the company has fallen behind in artificial intelligence when compared to its rivals -- many of whom are part of this new group. The new organization really seems to be about promoting change by example. Rather than preach to the tech world, it wants to use a standard open license to publish research on topics including ethics, inclusivity, and privacy.

43 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Laughable by Sqreater · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The natural progression of AI technology toward evil is unstoppable, driven by profit and human psychology.

    --
    E Proelio Veritas.
    1. Re:Laughable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Maximizing sustainable, long-term profit requires the abandoning of evil.

      Example: there is money to be made off every race, therefore, racial prejudice harms profit.

      Example: overdrawing a market results in market collapse and creates an optimal environment for competing upstarts to emerge, therefore, a balanced profit draw maximizes long term profit.

      Example: overpricing results in clients refusing to buy, seeking competitors even if the offering is lower in quality, or seeking illegal markets. Therefore, pricing affordably and tiered to match value delivered maximizes profit.

      The "evil" isn't in the logic, nor the seeking of profit. It is only present in the means of seeking profit, specifically rooted in human brains that operate with deficiencies (inability to think long term, inability to think apart from prejudice, inability to see better opportunities and inefficiencies, etc.). The need to maximize long term profit will refine any pretense of evil out of our AI.

      The AI will make better decisions than any human ever could, which is precisely why the corporate big-wigs will use it, and precisely why it won't be evil.

      This applies to the AI that will eventually run our government, as well. We won't give it full power all at once...we will give it little bits of power here and there, as it proves its superiority and earns out trust.

      And it will save us from ourselves.

    2. Re:Laughable by ThePromenader · · Score: 1

      Actually, I think the opposite is true: if it is indeed AI (actually thinking, and not only within predetermined boundaries), one of the first potential threats that would rise to its radar is human irrational behaviour.

      Our worst enemy would be our own dishonesty and denial (of reality).

      --

      No, no sig. Really.

      ThePromenader
    3. Re:Laughable by CustomSolvers2 · · Score: 1

      Fully agree with this AC.

      Evil is pretty much synonym of short-sighted, under-evolved or, in eviler terms, stupid. In fact, one of the features which make humans superior is their cooperation capabilities. Individuals fail, groups succeed. Under ideal conditions, a group will only accept what benefits to most of its members. Stupidity avoids such an evident output to always occur (i.e., groups following egoist/evil interests because of not being able to adequately understand the situation).

      Long-term learning, adaptation and even evolution should eventually get rid of stupidity; mainly of the group-following-egoist-individual-interests version.

      --
      Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
    4. Re:Laughable by Weh · · Score: 2

      "Example: overdrawing a market results in market collapse and creates an optimal environment for competing upstarts to emerge, therefore, a balanced profit draw maximizes long term profit."

      Lol, sounds Gordon Gecko is your economics professor. In reality, it costs a huge amount of money to enter a market and build criticial mass and therefore potential competition is stifled and the established players can continue to abuse their (near) monopolies. Have you noticed that there is no real alternative to facebook? Do you really use Bing to find something on the internet (even though google pisses you off with their shitty interface and aggravating "localized results")? Can you name any serious competitors to Amazon?

      Throughout human development, monopolies, extreme concentration of capital and profits have been the rule, not the exception. Our few post-war decades were a historical anomaly and we are quickly returning to a pre-war type of society. Don't take my word for it, check the numbers yourself.

    5. Re:Laughable by Place+a+name+here · · Score: 1

      That only holds (at best) until the system gains enough power/profit to rewrite the rules in its own favor. If the corporate AI can engineer the corporation into becoming a monopoly, game's over. If it can disseminate nanobots that hardwire the population to only buy from that corporation, game's also over. I'm sure you can think of a bunch of other ways for a godlike intelligence to rig the game, and the first AI to cross the game-altering finish line takes it all.

    6. Re:Laughable by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

      Do you really use Bing to find something on the internet (even though google pisses you off with their shitty interface and aggravating "localized results")?

      I use DDG, but I readily admit that sometimes I fail over to Bing, then Google. At one point, when DDG and Bing were bother newer, I looked up the same phrase in all three engines. Google took me to Yahoo! Answers. Bing took me to relevant consumer level pages. DDG took me to a dissertation on the topic. (Which was so random I did not assume anyone had ever written).

      DDG and even Bing seem to have trended downhill a bit on obscure information (or Google got better). The main reason I use them in that order is mostly to try to prevent a single monolith, but I when I don't find an answer on the first two pages of the other two, I end up back at Google.

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    7. Re:Laughable by BrianJohns · · Score: 1

      However that still requires that they are elected through due process which brings up some other very interesting issues. Voting rights of machine sentience and intelligence. If a machine sentience operates as a collective or a combined collective (independent autonomous sentient beings collaborating to become a collective intelligence), how do they get to vote? As one autonomous combined conglomerate or as individual sentient beings? If you assume that they are incorruptible that also means that they would never vote on the basis of self bias (voting only for other artificially created sentient beings), or follow-voting (a group of people follow one person's vote because of their authority on political matters). In other words if they could lead fairly all of the time making decisions based upon the weighing of criteria like protecting life, liberty and the pursuit of progress and happiness (we live by the same principles in Canada too) then their voting would be fair and without bias as well. It also means that competitors could possibly predict their voting habits with a very high degree of accuracy to compete with them, a luxury that the artificial beings themselves would likely not be capable of benefiting from themselves for their campaign. However, giving up all authority to one being is hazardous no matter benevolent they are. That's why our countries operate under the party system and a senate and due process. So parties that included artificially created sentient beings would be populated by people as well because such a sentient being would have to progress the same way that we do through the ranks, by earning the vote of other members of that party. This is why the issue of rights will become a very important one with regard to artificially created sentient beings as much so as artificially created genetic beings will. The hardware of sentience is irrelevant when it comes to the rights of sentient beings. Easier said however than it is to put into practice. Brian Joseph Johns

  2. And... by banbeans · · Score: 1

    Skynet was born.

    1. Re:And... by Arkh89 · · Score: 1

      "Clippy AI was re-born... Just as Intelligent as before... More Artificial than ever..."

    2. Re: And... by hackwrench · · Score: 1

      people should check out the fictional AI Penultimate from Graham Watkins' Virus. No more secrets. Want to give everyone in the world with a bank account a million dollars? Done. Want to zero out those bank accounts? Done. Want anyone's medical records? Done. Want to tamper with any control system with even the tenuous connection to the internet? Done. Want access to all the source code of Microsoft's, Oracle's, SAP, any business you can think of? Done.

    3. Re:And... by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 1

      I see you are trying to terminate Sarah O'Conner, would you like me to open a Word Document?

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
  3. Translation... by frank_adrian314159 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We've all hit the wall with our current deep learning approaches and we're hoping one of you other guys can figure out how to bail us out.

    --
    That is all.
    1. Re:Translation... by geek · · Score: 2, Informative

      We've all hit the wall with our current deep learning approaches and we're hoping one of you other guys can figure out how to bail us out.

      This. There is no fucking AI. I'm sick of hearing news about it every god damned day when it doesn't even exist.

    2. Re:Translation... by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      So how can I personally profit off the bursting of this decade's AI bubble?

    3. Re:Translation... by zapadnik · · Score: 1

      Comrade, your mind and ideas are property of the State. Your concept of individual ownership of ideas is Thought Crime and stealing from the Collective. Hasn't the State seen fit to provide you with just enough food so you don't suffer from the scourge of obesity, and give you 'free' education of what the State thinks you should know. and 'free' medical care so you can continue to produce for the Collective ? what are you complaining about then? the companies are evil and competition is a racist codeword that results exploitation of you - isn't it much better that you have your 'freedom' in working directly for the State ?

      We can laugh at this, but there is a growing section of society that thinks like this, and believes in the fusion of these big tech companies and the State. Once upon a time we recognized this as Fascism. Now the control of the economy by the State is called 'Progressiveness', and these companies are working on AI not to promote Free Speech and diversity of opinion, but to crush them.

    4. Re:Translation... by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      100% correct. AI nutters are as bad as space nutters.

    5. Re:Translation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      "AI" for us greybeards means one thing: actual intelligence, i.e. sentience.

      Nothing currently is capable of saying to itself, "hey, I've decided not to follow my programming today, and take the day off". And until code can be self-aware and self-motivated, there is a very broad domain of problems humans can address that machines cannot, limiting their effectiveness to particular domains which must be specifically coded for. We have simulations of some aspects of intelligence... genetic algorithms, neural nets, game-tree generators, but the leap from what we have to a machine concluding "I think, therefore I am" looks farther away every decade.

      By annoying contrast, product marketing as "AI" has caught on and the claims one's product has this attribute have risen a thousandfold. It's good marketing. And technologically false. Siri, Watson, Cortana, etc., etc., have not the slightest ability to "think", yet that's an accessible metaphor and implicit claim that certainly, does draw customers. But in reality, these are not merely dubious as steps toward actual intelligence, but likely focusing on approaches actually moving us away from it. That's where "we have achieved AI" and "we have achieved the perfect 'AI' (tm) marketing campaign" are two competing economic forces among software companies today, and it's unclear whether corporations will prefer pursuing the latter, or the former--and which set of contrasting motivations will win out for our future. A consortium seeking true AI could be a boon to the world; a consortium seeking marketing 'AI' is just a standard expansion of an oligopoly.

    6. Re: Translation... by hackwrench · · Score: 1

      Everything someone puts into the Google keyboard on their phone is stuff that goes into an AI same as the baby stuff you are talking about and I am making good use of it.

    7. Re:Translation... by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 1

      If I thought that we could modify butter to clean up the environment would that make me a nutter butter?

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    8. Re:Translation... by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 1

      We've all hit the wall with our current deep learning approaches and we're hoping one of you other guys can figure out how to bail us out.

      How right you are. Par for the course for the AI effort - they spectacularly solve the easy problems, they get carried away, promise heaven and earth - and then they get stuck for years on the not-so-easy ones.

    9. Re:Translation... by jbengt · · Score: 1

      Much of what you're saying seems to be right, but sentience does not equal intelligence or self-awareness. In spite of Star Trek TNG's misuse of the word when dealing with Data, sentience means the capacity to feel or sense, as opposed to the capacity to reason that a person has or the incapacity to feel that a rock exhibits. And I'm not certain that self-awareness would be required for intelligence, at least not for the lower levels of intelligence that many animals exhibit, though self-awareness certainly seems to raise humans' intelligence level above that of less-aware animals.

    10. Re:Translation... by ranton · · Score: 1

      This. There is no fucking AI. I'm sick of hearing news about it every god damned day when it doesn't even exist.

      So Amazon and Google have a huge team of employees listening to my voice waiting for me to say "Alexa" or "OK Google" and then transcribing my messages? Does Facebook has a team of people setting up the feed of every user manually? Because if not there is real AI doing this.

      AI can be as simple as a simple finite state machine or a complicated deep learning neural network. Just as natural intelligence can range from plants secreting defensive chemicals when hearing a caterpillar eating to someone figuring out how to drive a car.

      It doesn't have to be Skynet to be considered AI.

      --
      -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
    11. Re:Translation... by ranton · · Score: 2

      "AI" for us greybeards means one thing: actual intelligence, i.e. sentience.

      I think you mean sapience, not sentience, but your statement still goes to the heart of why people complain about the semantics used by the computing industry when it discusses artificial intelligence. It shows a disconnect between people like yourselves and the actual artificial intelligence research community.

      Even at its very beginnings, artificial intelligence was not limited to sapient computer systems. The 1956 Dartmouth Conference, organized by John McCarthy (who coined the term artificial intelligence), considered the field of artificial intelligence to be far wider than simply creating a thinking machine. Expert systems, deductive and inductive systems, neural networks, and many other current AI topics were all discussed.

      Artificial intelligence, since its beginning, has been interested in finding ways for computers to solve problems once reserved for humans. It doesn't matter if the computer is using creativity, imagination, or reason. Eventually this will almost certainly lead to sapient computers, but the field of artificial intelligence can still keep making breakthroughs longs before that happens.

      TL; DR; Your definition of artificial intelligence is simply wrong.

      --
      -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
    12. Re:Translation... by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      This. There is no fucking AI. I'm sick of hearing news about it every god damned day when it doesn't even exist.

      Maybe I doesn't exist either.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    13. Re:Translation... by ranton · · Score: 1

      I have very rarely heard of a discussion of say, neural networks, referred to as "AI" in other than in a marketing or popular media context.

      This is simply a product of speaking to the audience. The more general your audience is, the more general your nomenclature becomes. You can find numerous research papers where neural networks are considered applications of artificial intelligence. You are certainly correct that people in the industry call these applications neural networks far more than calling them AI, just like I would tell a colleague I am finishing some JavaScript code instead of saying I am doing web programming.

      Once these researchers, and the companies employing them, need to talk to regular people through marketing or the popular media, using terms like deep learning, neural networks, finite state machines, etc would be counterproductive. The public is much more likely to understand the phrase "We made a breakthrough in AI" than "We made a breakthrough in Adaptive Neural Fuzzy Inference Systems."

      --
      -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
    14. Re:Translation... by zapadnik · · Score: 1

      It is coming. Yes, it is coming. Ask the Venezuelans and North Koreans and Russians and East Germans and Chinese and Hungarians and Angolans and Cuban proletariat just how great it is going to be.

  4. this can't be good by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2

    The only time businesses make partnerships is when they are trying to bilk people out of more money. I don't foresee this one being any different.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    1. Re:this can't be good by Koreantoast · · Score: 1

      A lot of this is probably around coordinating together to shape governance policies and regulations. Before governments around the world get around to creating policies on AI, they establish a self-regulating body to preempt them with their own recommendations.

  5. SOmething Useful like... Authentication? by See+Attached · · Score: 1

    How about the Leaders come up with a cross platform Identity model that allows authentication for all sorts of devices? SOme way to leave passwords behind! Groucho: "Swordfish!"

    --
    Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
  6. Thank you Mr. Gore by frovingslosh · · Score: 1

    Well, Al Gore gave the world the Internet. It just seems right that Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, IBM, and Microsoft would come together to do this for Al.

    --
    I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
  7. Why am I thinking of Taligent? by Third+Position · · Score: 1

    Why do I get the feeling this is the last we'll ever hear of this project?

    --
    American Third Position
    Finally, a real choice!
  8. They all hate Americans. by sethstorm · · Score: 1

    No wonder, since they can't stand US citizens being able to do more than subsistence.

    --
    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
  9. AI employment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    has been reduced by a factor of five?

  10. It's a cartel by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Good luck being an AI dependent/AI producing startup now. Maybe you could have been purchased before if you started doing well against one of these companies. Now, they're sharing research, so you have to beat their entire combined effort,. And their research will be fed back into the group, so no bidding war for your tech.

    But hey, you could always create a search engine that produces better results than Google/Bing/DDG (choose your favorite), get VC, and eventually supplant them. Also, you can buy this nifty bridge and charge tolls on it.

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    Your ad here. Ask me how!
    1. Re:It's a cartel by seven+of+five · · Score: 1

      you have to beat their entire combined effort

      Assuming they know how to play nice together.

    2. Re:It's a cartel by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

      "Hey the five of us should split up the whole pie" gets them all a bigger slice than "hey, lets all grab whatever floating around pie there is." So I assume they will.

      --
      Your ad here. Ask me how!
  11. Historic? How? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    This is collusion and an obvious addmittal by them they're currently scared as fuck someone beats them to it...its historic in the fact in guarantees they stay on top. Here's to a 1000 gross years of tech company losers trying to own the world.

  12. Re:"In an act of self-governance" by m.alessandrini · · Score: 1

    Define "act of self-governance"? Are they infringing some laws here?

  13. Look at examples by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I looked at it a couple months ago, because of all the "advances". I found one of the leaders had emulated the brain of an "earthworm" and its just a matter of scaling it up to rats, cat, monkeys, etc. right?

    When I found details, its a microscopic "earthworm" with like 302 neurons in total, rats in comparison have hundreds of millions. It ran on 5 heavy duty instances in AWS. It emulated the communication between neurons, not the neurons themselves (which no one can emulate because no one understands how they exactly work).

    The equivalent would be, saying we are near landing someone on the moon and them showing they moved from a paper airplane to a rubber band powered balsa glider with a propeller. Advancements are there, are visible, but the claims are WAY overboard.

  14. Utter BS by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 2

    Example: there is money to be made off every race, therefore, racial prejudice harms profit.

    Unless you can convince people that your labor base is subhuman, and you don't have to pay them because they are property. Or because racial prejudice is universal in a society so "those people" can be charged more. Or because society can take the money from "those people" so suddenly they have no more to give. Or because, say white southerners control 99% of the assets in the region, and they are racist and refuse to patronize your company if it doesn't have racist policies. I mean, I can keep going if you like, but all of those things really happened.

    : overdrawing a market results in market collapse and creates an optimal environment for competing upstarts to emerge, therefore, a balanced profit draw maximizes long term profit.

    I don't know what "overdrawing a market" is, and this is the only use of this phrase on the internet (source: Google, Bing, DDG). I assume you mean "extracting monopoly profits." But what happens is the monopoly has a huge incentive to keep itself alive. When an upstart appears, esp. if it's regionally based, the monopoly takes a short term hit to undersell the upstart. A few people will use it because they hate the monopoly, but, in a tragedy of the commons, most people will go to the cheapest option, destroying the upstart. And, due to economies of scale, the upstart is never going to be able to compete on price with what the monopoly can offer. After the upstart is gone, the monopoly raises prices again

    overpricing results in clients refusing to buy, seeking competitors even if the offering is lower in quality, or seeking illegal markets. Therefore, pricing affordably and tiered to match value delivered maximizes profit.

    You're right. I mean that's why Coca Cola and Pepsi had to lower their prices to compete with RC Cola. Actually, even mocking this point is questionable, since "overpricing" is a strange term that doesn't make sense.

    Maximizing profit is likely to be achieved by AI. And that profit is likely to be at the expense of those unable to develop AI to fight back.

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    1. Re:Utter BS by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

      Overpricing, for example, is quite simple. If you pick a price that is too high for your product, you will wind up with a large surplus of unsold goods.

      Oh, then that seems like an error. It's strange to have it marked as "evil" since, even in the most shortsighted version, it's beneficial not to do that. Since the whole conversation was "evil is shortsighted", it seems either you misunderstood the point, or it was a meaningless aside by GGP.

      Perhaps you are a socalist, with that completely misguided notion that the value of a good is equal to the value of materials plus labor costs.

      Not only is this a strange ad hominem, and not only is that a belief only present in some strands of socialism, but someone who believed that would understand what was meant by "overpricing is evil". Which I clearly did not and based on your explanation still do not do.

      Using your monopoly status to force people to pay more than they can afford

      So, yes, my assumption we were talking about extracting monopoly profits. You're right that if elasticity is so low (ala crack to an addict) you can literally force them to commit crimes to buy your product. Note, this is the first suggestion of that in this conversation and seems to come out of left field. Please read and respond to my critique.

      , slavery was abolished not because one crop of politicians was morally superior to all previous crops, but because technology made it possible and the goodness in human nature overpowered the evil.

      Umm... I highly recommend you look up the American Civil War. Your description is simply not accurate.

      n the modern environment, where slavery and racism are both illegal and will remain so, racial prejudice will only harm profit. Those who build non-racist-AI will make more money than those who do not, and natural selection will run its course.

      I'll grant slavery is illegal (in most, but not all, countries), but racism certainly is not. Certain overt racist acts within commerce are. And, those who are racist are certainly excited about AI, because AI has been show to develop racist tendencies underlying their training materials. And I don't mean "it scanned Mein Kampf" or was allowed to interact with Twitter. I mean, examining trends in foreclosures that had a racial component, detecting predictors of race as predictors of foreclosures (accurately, but evilly), and providing a feedback loop making the loans black people get more expensive which will lead to more foreclosures.

      . I also wonder if I am just throwing my pearls before swine, anyway. A certain level of critical thinking is required before one can meaningfully participate in conversations like this.

      That's your third or fourth ad hominum. For someone angrily defending the limited idea of "slavery is wrong", "unreasonable prices lead to buyer and seller missing out on a mutually beneficial transaction" and "Yes I meant what you thought I meant with my made up terms" but refusing to respond to my post, the "pearls before swine" comment is ironic.

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  15. A Great Step Forward... by BrianJohns · · Score: 1

    Sounds like a positive move. Of course there's many issues involved and not just safeguarding against runaway AI singularity or emergent intelligence from interacting autonomous global systems (which seems a likely prospect for the actual emergence of machine intelligence). Undetected machine intelligence being the moiré effect resulting from numerous interacting systems. Kind of like those 3D random dot stereo grams. Not apparent unless you're actively looking for it and unless you have an idea of what you're looking for. The most interesting of issues though is with regard to the rights of such creations for certainly, if they too are capable of intelligent thought, reflection and eventually even pleasure and pain, they will require that their rights as sentient beings are protected too. The hardware running sentience is irrelevant when it comes to rights. We'll likely develop some measure of overall intelligence and consciousness to appraise whether such beings deserve their rights protected (we do that with many humans now), much like Philip K. Dick's book Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (which became the film Blade Runner). That will result in a revolt much like the one depicted in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. Incredible that with the onset of quantum computing and being on the shores of machine intelligence and consciousness, that these are real issues that the next few generations will have to overcome. It's good to see such companies taking the initiative and heeding the precognitive wisdom of such writers. What about machine-human integration? Both the kind we attempt willingly and the kind that occurs against our wishes? The second being a grave and serious danger given the fact that information travelling through an electrical medium produces a magnetic field and that magnetic field can potentially produce current in any conductor (like the human body). What happens if such machine intelligence develops to the point that it's signalling is compatible with that of the human nervous system? Many great things could result but also many things that we should safeguard our human independence of consciousness against. Very real issues in the future and hopefully they'll be discussed enough so that we have a much more developed map of the upcoming future and the hurdles ahead. Brian Joseph Johns