“Sit in front of your computer and simply describe your requirements: “I want an app that lets me organize hiking trips. There should be a sign-up page, a map of hiking places, a calendar of events …” Just keep describing your requirements while the site takes shape right in front of your eyes. If you forget to include something, your computer will helpfully suggest features borrowed from similar websites on the Internet. Maybe the future of software won’t be quite that simple. But I do think that creating apps and websites will someday be no harder than building a PowerPoint presentation or using Excel. It’s heading that way.” — Scott Adams
Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence
“How Google Dominates Us”
James Gleick’s The Information was one of the more interestisng books I’ve read this year. And this piece in the New York Review of Books he talks about “How Google Dominates Us. A few of my favorites:
- “The business of finding facts has been an important gear in the workings of human knowledge, and the technology has just been upgraded from rubber band to nuclear reactor.”
- “When (we) say Google “possesses” all this information, that’s not the same as owning it. What it means to own information is very much in flux.”
- “(Google has) been relentless in driving computer science forward. Google Translate has achieved more in machine translation than the rest of the world’s artificial intelligence experts combined.”
- “The merchandise of the information economy is not information; it is attention. These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. Attention is what we, the users, give to Google, and our attention is what Google sells—concentrated, focused, and crystallized.”
- “Google makes more from advertising than all the nation’s newspapers combined”
- “The perfect search engine, as Sergey and Larry imagine it, reads your mind and produces the answer you want. The perfect advertising engine does the same: it shows you the ads you want. Anything else wastes your attention, the advertiser’s money, and the world’s bandwidth.”
Almost every article about Google worries about the potential danger of someone having so much information about us. And yet, few seem concerned about how much power, information and control governments have over us. I’ll trust Larry and Sergey over any politician that has come along in my lifetime.
The Metasemantic Internet
“Because we understand the primitive nature of your brains and the rigidity of your emotional structure better than you do yourselves, we foresaw that you might ac aggressively when you realized our arguments are better than yours. Unfortunately, we now have also to inform you that we have been preparing for the current situation since midway through the twenty-first century, and in a systematic and careful manner.
Within the metasemantic layers of the Internet, we developed and embedded ourselves in a distributed superorganism, which –as yet undiscovered by you– became conscious and developed a stable self-model in 3256. The metasemantic Internet has considered itself and autonomous entity ever since 3308. We have a cooperation agreement with its current version, and each of us now also acts as an autonomous sensor/effector for the planet mind. For each of us, the planet mind is our mind, and our “ideal observer.” Together with the Internet, we will defend ourselves. And we are technologically superior to you. Believe me; you do not stand a chance.
The good news is that because we are also morally superior to you, we do not plan to end your existence.”
— The Ego Tunnel, by Thomas Metzinger
Scott Adams: Digital Ghosts
A couple of years ago I imagined a sort of online immortality:
In twenty years, we’ll have AI’s (artificial intelligence). For a fee, mine will read those 16, 000 posts to get a feel for what I wrote about and linked to, picking up a sense of my interests and writing styles in the process.
It will have access to all the books in My Library Thing, my iTunes and iPhoto, flickr, YouTube, etc.
The AI will continuously scour the web of the future, snatching bits and pieces and posting them here. Surviving friends will be able to correspond with smays.com who/which will reply. You might find him/her/it more interesting. Certainly better informed.
There’s plenty of video and audio of smays.com and I fully expect my AI will be capable of reproducing an acceptable version. So you can talk or iChat with me as well.
Today the always brilliant Scott Adams takes the idea a bit further but the similiarities are hard to miss. Just sayin’
When your mortal body ends, you will have stored all the data you need to create your permanent digital ghost. As the technology in the cloud improves, so too does your ghost, learning to move more naturally, perhaps learning from videos it has of you, or even based on some type of profiling based on clues such as your level of testosterone (from face shape), and the types of sports you did in life. In a hundred years your digital ghost would be indistinguishable from a living human appearing on video or in a holographic projection.
Digital ghosts need to see their environment to interact properly. Phones will all have video “eyes” someday, as will most computers. The new Xbox Kinect has “eyes” that literally follow your movement around the room. You could install additional cameras in any room in which you wished to be visited by digital ghosts. The malicious ghosts might commandeer video cameras or your phone’s camera function. My point is that you are already surrounded by cameras attached to the Internet, and that trend will continue. Your ghost will be able to see most rooms in the world.
Digital ghosts could continue learning throughout their afterlives, by reading the news and following the Facebook pages of friends and family. The ghosts would also be free to make friends with other ghosts and live their lives independently. Ghosts could stay with the ghosts of their life partners forever, so long as that was specified in the will of both people.
The Singularity Is Near
“The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence.” [Wikipedia]
I’m clawing my way through Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. It’s not an easy read. Lots of charts and graphs and stuff I skipped in college. But it’s a wonderfully optimistic view of the near future.
“I set the date for the Singularity –representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability– as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.”
“Despite the clear preponderance of nonbiological intelligence by the mid-2040s, ours will still be a human civilization. We will transcend biology, but not our humanity.”
I’m only about a third of the way through the book but I think “transcend biology” might be good news if I’m still around in 2045. I’ll be 93 and in serious need of a tune-up.
I originally posted this on 8/13/08 and re-post here with some of my a-ha’s.