Ray Predicts the Technology Future

Good thoughts, below just the intro, much more at the link:

Ray Kurzweil Predicts Three Technologies Will Define Our Future  By Sveta McShane and Jason Dorrier -Apr 19, 2016

This is the last in a four-part series looking at the big ideas in Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near. ​Be sure to read the other articles:

Will the End of Moore’s Law Halt Computing’s Exponential Rise?

Technology Feels Like It’s Accelerating — Because It Actually Is

How to Think Exponentially and Better Predict the Future

Over the last several decades, the digital revolution has changed nearly every aspect of our lives.

The pace of progress in computers has been accelerating, and today, computers and networks are in nearly every industry and home across the world.  Many observers first noticed this acceleration with the advent of modern microchips, but as Ray Kurzweil wrote in his book The Singularity Is Near, we can find a number of eerily similar trends in other areas too.

According to Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns, technological progress is moving ahead at an exponential rate, especially in information technologies.

This means today’s best tools will help us build even better tools tomorrow, fueling this acceleration.

But our brains tend to anticipate the future linearly instead of exponentially. So, the coming years will bring more powerful technologies sooner than we imagine.   As the pace continues to accelerate, what surprising and powerful changes are in store? This post will explore three technological areas Kurzweil believes are poised to  change our world the most this century.

[Read more about exponential progress in computing, Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns, and how to think exponentially and better predict the future.]

Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics   ......   (Read the whole thing and articles linked to)   ....... 

Kurzweil Interview on Future Arc of Technology

Of interest.  Brought to my attention by Walter Riker.

Kurzweil AI
accelerating intelligence
the TED Interview | Future Arc of Technology: a special conversation
on air | feature with: Ray Kurzweil  ....  "

Google's Gmail will Answer Your Emails?

What is Ray Kurzweil up to at Google?  Writing your Emails.  ... in Wired ..  I respond:

Interesting background and information about an innovator and his team's neural net driven AI project.  Good as an indication of how Google works internally with innovative ideas.  Worth readng for that.  Kurzweil is very well known, innovative and very smart.

But here is a case where I have been actually 'using' the results of his team's work since it was made public on Google Mail in May.   I would say I use one of his auto answers or 'Smart Replies'  maybe one out of twenty times.  Then worry that the recipient might notice.   Have never edited an answer, but understood that I could.  Just easier to write the whole thing.

  And must say that I am not overly impressed.  This could have been done better with a lot less resources and effort.  I would not pay for this if I had to, not even close.   Is trite a good word?   Not what I expected when I heard it called  'automatic answering'.   The latter is really hard, at least to do well.   I would have to read it very closely to see if it is correct.  If its not that important, why answer at all?    More and better is coming they say, I hope so.   My singularity receptacle is waiting. But you will have to catch me.

Singularity by 2045?

Says Kurzweil,  Google's Director of Engineering.  Will that mean Google Drive will be the approved recepticle?  Google Analytics the means of  understanding?  Deep Mind the means for running offline? Very ambitious I think.  Google presents the Singularity Cloud! But if so, there is lots to figure out before then.

Making Chatbots at Google

Kurzweil writing chatbots for Google.  This can mean many things.  But mimicking the conversation and leveraging of expertise like we do with humans, with contextual focusing and modeling, adapting and learning is a powerful thing.   Expect to see something interesting to come out of this.

Origin of Trancendant Singularity

I had thought that Kurzweil was the originator of the mathematical term singularity in the Transcendence sense, but the Wikipedia writes:

" ... The first use of the term "singularity" in this context was by mathematician John von Neumann. In 1958, regarding a summary of a conversation with von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam described "ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue".[2] The term was popularized by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement, or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity.[3] Futurist Ray Kurzweil cited von Neumann's use of the term in a foreword to von Neumann's classic The Computer and the Brain. ... " 

In the enterprise we worked for years withVon Neumann's daughter, Marina. 

Waiting for Strong AI

Back in the 80s we were waiting, and expecting the emergence of Strong AI.  Generalized intelligent machines, that would be as intelligent as a human, and do things humans can, but faster and cheaper.  Run our plants lights-off.  Well, that has not happened yet. Neither Watson nor Siri are close.  If it did happen, its implications would be enormous.  So how do we predict that it will soon happen, so we can prepare?  Ray Kurzweil takes the question.  But doesn't answer it.

Ray Kurzweil's Life

In the WSJ:  The intersection of the life of inventor Ray Kurzweil and health technology.   Good to see.    He is extrapolating some information about how life expectancy is increasing every year.  A dangerous thing to believe. I recall back in the 80s some people claiming they had solved the death problem.  We will know soon enough.  " ... But be warned: There is no magic pill. Mr. Kurzweil submits to a relentless series of blood tests to monitor his efforts to reprogram his body chemistry against aging and against inherited propensities for diabetes and heart disease. "I'm reasonably confident that I will make it," he adds. "But it's not guaranteed. There are still many diseases we don't have an answer to, though I do have some good ideas about cancer and heart disease." If diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, he adds, he already has plans to put aside his other projects and develop a cure. ... " 

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Starting now you can utilize blog tags here, also called labels.  They are found at the bottom of each post.  These tags classify the blog post with others that are of related topics.  You can click on these at the bottom of the post to get all blog posts classified this way.  You can also use this syntax - label: tag in the search block at the upper left to search for particular categories. (case sensitive)

For multiple tags use label:tag1 label:tag2 (case sensitive).  Many past key blog posts, but not all, have been tagged.  All new posts from now on will be tagged.  Your comments are welcome.

Team Blogging Practices

When I ran a multiple internal blog operation in the enterprise, the goals were knowledge retention, sharing and collaboration.  We did both internal and external facing work.  This new article looks at the practices involved.  In particular as it addresses team operation.  We used a wiki style architecture for permanence.   Largely obvious, but worth the review.

How to Create a Mind

A piece on Ray Kurzweil's  (now at Google)  latest book: How to Create a Mind: the Secret of Human Thought Revealed.  Always fascinating, sometimes over the top views of a very technological future.  I have yet to read  in full any of his recent books, but have scanned sections closely.  Good at the very least for scoping the possibilities.   Less so in scoping unintended consequences.

Teaching Human Language to Computers

A talk with futurist Ray Kurzweil, now with Google,  on a favorite topic.  I emphasize the task of 'teaching', rather than just programming.  And understanding the ability to then reason in a useful hierarchical way.  Teaching is the ultimate ability to drive any AI.  

Boosting Productivity with Social Media

In the HBR Blogs:  A video interview with Alexandra Samuel. Some interesting points here.   Yes, I believe this can be done, selectively.  I do not yet believe that managing the process can be effectively done with today's social media, which disrupts more than it focuses.  See also Vision Critical, which does predictive analysis via social conversations.

Kurzweil Joins Google

The futurist proposer of the approach of an inevitable people-machine singularity, Ray Kurzweil, has joined Google as an employee.   In GigaOM.   Apparently to work on machine learning and language processing.      Given the long time interest of the Google founders and the company itself on AI related topics, this sounds like a logical step.  Note also, the Singularity University.

Deep Learning

From KurzweilAI:  More on deep learning.    On the future of bio inspired neural network infrastructure  intelligence.   We creep closer to human intelligence by learning.   An interview with " ... Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber is Director of the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab, IDSIA. His research team’s artificial neural networks (NNs) have won many international awards, and recently were the first to achieve human-competitive performance on various benchmark data sets. I asked him about their secrets of success. ... " 

Commenting on Communications

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Where is Artificial General Intelligence?

We expected Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to follow quickly when we formed an artificial intelligence team and lab in the late 1980's.  Surely once we started to build incremental intelligence into the expert systems of the day they would soon be interconnected into 'general' intelligence that would guide the enterprise forward.  Yet that did not happen. Five years later our AI team was disbanded.  Despite some successes, they were all in focused, limited domains.   We invested in companies  that looked like they would become giants of AI, like Teknowledge.  But these companies also soon sank into limited domains.   Even successes like IBM's Watson are mashups of the ideas we used then.  What happened?  Why have there been no advances for AGI  in decades?

Discussed in Kurzweil AI.   Good thoughts.  One answer:  The hardware has not caught up yet.  Despite all the suggestion that the brain's neural methods would soon be replicable, it has not happened yet.

Creative Machines Overtaking Man

What happens when creative machines overtake us?   Can machines be creative?  We examined this for the product development context. It  did not lead to anything substantial at the time, but I am convinced the possibilities were there.  Kurzweil Net examines. 

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Computing the Brain's Secrets

In Kurzweil AI:   Some visual images that give some evidence we may someday understand the brain as a computational problem, but also in their very complexity show how very hard that may be to do.  The suggestion is that we understand the infrastructure of the neocortical column.  At the right a simulation. 

" ... Henry Markram, Director of the École Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne (EPFL) Blue Brain Project, says the mysteries of the mind can be solved — soon. Mental illness, memory, perception — they’re made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models the neocortex.
“The brain builds a version of the Universe, and projects this version the version of the Universe like a bubble, all around us,” says Markram. “For the first time, we can actually address this with brain simulation, and ask very systematic and rigorous questions when this theory could possibly be true….