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NEVER MISTAKE A CLEAR VIEW FOR A SHORT DISTANCE

A.I.'s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly.

The concept of ultrasmart computers - machines with "greater than human intelligence" - was dubbed "The Singularity" in a 1993 paper by the computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. He argued that the acceleration of technological progress had led to "the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth." This thesis has long struck a chord here in Silicon Valley.

Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human functions with computer-driven machines. These machines can see and hear, respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans can today. Such a shift, they say, would lead to a vast acceleration in technological improvements of all kinds.

The idea is not just the province of science fiction authors; a generation of computer hackers, engineers and programmers have come to believe deeply in the idea of exponential technological change as explained by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of the chip maker Intel.

In 1965, Dr. Moore first described the repeated doubling of the number transistors on silicon chips with each new technology generation, which led to an acceleration in the power of computing. Since then "Moore's Law" - which is not a law of physics, but rather a description of the rate of industrial change - has come to personify an industry that lives on Internet time, where the Next Big Thing is always just around the corner.

Several years ago the artificial-intelligence pioneer Raymond Kurzweil took the idea one step further in his 2005 book, "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology." He sought to expand Moore's Law to encompass more than just processing power and to simultaneously predict with great precision the arrival of post-human evolution, which he said would occur in 2045.

In Dr. Kurzweil's telling, rapidly increasing computing power in concert with cyborg humans would then reach a point when machine intelligence not only surpassed human intelligence but took over the process of technological invention, with unpredictable consequences.

Profiled in the documentary "Transcendent Man," which had its premier last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the concept of post-humanism. He is the co-founder of Singularity University, a school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal - to "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity's grand challenges."

Not content with the development of superhuman machines, Dr. Kurzweil envisions "uploading," or the idea that the contents of our brain and thought processes can somehow be translated into a computing environment, making a form of immortality possible - within his lifetime.

The science fiction author Ken MacLeod described the idea of the singularity as "the Rapture of the nerds." Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired magazine, notes, "People who predict a very utopian future always predict that it is going to happen before they die."

However, Mr. Kelly himself has not refrained from speculating on where communications and computing technology is heading. He is at work on his own book, "The Technium," forecasting the emergence of a global brain - the idea that the planet's interconnected computers might someday act in a coordinated fashion and perhaps exhibit intelligence. He just isn't certain about how soon an intelligent global brain will arrive.

Others who have observed the increasing power of computing technology are even less sanguine about the future outcome. The computer designer and venture capitalist William Joy, for example, wrote a pessimistic essay in Wired in 2000 that argued that humans are more likely to destroy themselves with their technology than create a utopia assisted by superintelligent machines.

Mr. Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, still believes that. "I wasn't saying we would be supplanted by something," he said. "I think a catastrophe is more likely."

Moreover, there is a hot debate here over whether such machines might be the "machines of loving grace," of the Richard Brautigan poem, or something far darker, of the "Terminator" ilk.

"I see the debate over whether we should build these artificial intellects as becoming the dominant political question of the century," said Hugo de Garis, an Australian artificial-intelligence researcher, who has written a book, "The Artilect War," that argues that the debate is likely to end in global war.

Concerned about the same potential outcome, the A.I. researcher Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, an employee of the Singularity Institute, has proposed the idea of "friendly artificial intelligence," an engineering discipline that would seek to ensure that future machines would remain our servants or equals rather than our masters.

Nevertheless, this generation of humans, at least, is perhaps unlikely to need to rush to the barricades. The artificial-intelligence industry has advanced in fits and starts over the past half-century, since the term "artificial intelligence" was coined by the Stanford University computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956. In 1964, when Mr. McCarthy established the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the researchers informed their Pentagon backers that the construction of an artificially intelligent machine would take about a decade. Two decades later, in 1984, that original optimism hit a rough patch, leading to the collapse of a crop of A.I. start-up companies in Silicon Valley, a time known as "the A.I. winter."

Such reversals have led the veteran Silicon Valley technology forecaster Paul Saffo to proclaim: "never mistake a clear view for a short distance."

Indeed, despite this high-technology heartland's deeply held consensus about exponential progress, the worst fate of all for the Valley's digerati would be to be the generation before the generation that lives to see the singularity.

"Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the 'great dawn,' " said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. "Life's not fair."

Source
The Coming Superbrain by John Markoff, The New York Times, May 23, 2009

Friday, May 08, 2009
Posted by Roberto
6:45 PM 0 comments

INTERPRETING DATA

U.S. Economy:

The U.S. Labor Department said that employers cut 539,000 jobs in April. That was less than expected and the smallest reduction in six months.

However, the U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 8.9 percent, the highest since late 1983.

Oil Price:

Benchmark crude for June delivery rose $1.04 cents to $57.75 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. In London, Brent prices rose 83 cents to $57.31 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.

The Energy Information Administration said America's oil surplus grew less than expected, which is typically gives energy prices a boost.

But levels rose nonetheless, meaning storage houses were bloated with more crude than has been seen in nearly 19 years. Growing levels of unused crude in most cases would drive energy prices down.

Thursday, May 07, 2009
Posted by Roberto
3:34 PM 0 comments

ALPHATRENDS MARKET ANALYSIS (VIDEO)

AlphaTrends

Monday, May 04, 2009
Posted by Roberto
10:18 AM 0 comments

WOLFRAM ALPHA

The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.

The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail, a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.

Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a neat page of related information, all properly sourced, such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

What the experts say

"Generally, I did not use search terms that clearly had no computable answer (and therefore would have stumped Wolfram). But I also didn't throw any softballs in areas close to the heart of its makers: physics, chemistry, engineering, and genomics. On hard-core scientific questions, it gives you tons of symbols and graphics and other information that would be useful to a researcher but obscure to most people. But on many common questions for which there is no obvious data element, you will not get much help. In any event, if its plans hold, you should be able to test it out yourself in two or three weeks."
- David Talbot, Technology Review

"If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha."
- Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com

Worldwide network: A brief history of the internet

1969 The internet is created by the US Department of Defense with the networking of computers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute.

1979 The British Post Office uses the technology to create the first international computer networks.

1980 Bill Gates's deal to put a Microsoft Operating System on IBM's computers paves the way for almost universal computer ownership.

1984 Apple launches the first successful 'modern' computer interface using graphics to represent files and folders, drop-down menus and, crucially, mouse control.

1989 Tim Berners-Lee creates the world wide web - using browsers, pages and links to make communication on the internet simple.

1996 Google begins as a research project at Stanford University. The company is formally founded two years later by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

2009 Dr Stephen Wolfram launches Wolfram Alpha.
In a recent article on CNN, by John D. Sutter, entitled "New Search Engines Aspire To Supplement Google" the author examines some recent new search engines. The author discusses: Twine, Hakia, Searchme, Cuil, Kosmix, Wolfram Alpha, Topsy, TweetMeme and OneRiot. Each of these are different, making your web search more personal, more visual, or connecting your search to new social networks like FaceBook and Twitter.
The new search engine from Microsoft called Bing, which is very similar to Google in many ways. To Bing or not to Bing, that is the question? There's a very informative article on Bing by Farhad Manjoo on Slate entitled: "Beware Google: Microsoft's New Search Engine Isn't Half-bad." Just Bing or Google to find it!

Google Trends on May 4
Top Search Terms in the USA right now
1. prejean photos
2. miss usa runner up
3. carrie prejean pictures
4. cinco de mayo
5. miss california pictures
6. michael savage

Sources:
An invention that could change the internet, by Andrew Johnson, The Independent
Wolfram Alpha and Google Face Off, by David Talbot, Technology Review
Labels: Wolfram Alpha Google Data-Centric Service Wolfram Research

Thursday, April 30, 2009
Posted by Roberto
11:27 AM 0 comments

WALL STREET LOOKS FORWARD, NOT BACK

Wall Street sees signs of an economic recovery, so it is abandoning so-called safety stocks like Bristol-Myers for early-cycle plays like Fortune Brands. The focus is shifting from defense to growth because money managers expect a much better business environment six to nine months from now.

The only thing that matters is the performance going forward. That's why a consistent, stable firm like Bristol-Myers Squibb [BMY 19.15] can lose 4.3% in a single trading session, despite reporting solid numbers today. At the same time, Fortune Brands [FO 38.98] cut its dividend, but that stock finished the day higher by 3.9%.

Wheii.com Notes:

We still have to consider that consumer spending dipped in March as recession persists and jobless claims are stuck at elevated levels!
The number of people continuing to draw unemployment benefits jumped to more than 6.27 million, the highest on records dating back to 1967. Journalists shouldn't call the lower claims of 631000 last week (down from the prior week's 645000) a bullish signal!!! It is lower but we still have 631,000 NEW initial claims for unemployment!

Since early March, financials have risen 74 percent; cyclical consumer discretionary have jumped 46 percent; industrials gained 44 percent and materials are up 41 percent. The defensive sectors are underperforming. Almost half of the S&P are now up 50 percent from their 52-week lows.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Posted by Roberto
6:19 PM 0 comments

INTEL: TOP TEN TECHNOLOGY PREDICTIONS FOR NEXT DECADE

Intel predictions:
1.    New classes of portable devices with ten times more battery life
2.    Low-cost silicon photonics for faster data transmission
3.    New heights of realism in visual computing
4.    Realistic computer generated images
5.    Malware will become a thing of the past
6.    Personal internet devices will be truly personal
7.    Composable computing a reality
8.    Next-generation TV will not be about pixels
9.    Seamlessly connected 3-D worlds
10. A spectrum revolution is looming

Prediction One
:. new classes of portable devices with ten times more battery life

Sub-threshold integrated circuit technology requires only 300mV to operate.
Intel showed 4-way SIMD (single instruction multiple data) vector processing accelerator in 45nm in CMOS operated below its gate threshold voltage at the ISSCC technology conference. "This will lead to new classes of portable devices designed to take advantage of greater battery life, which in turn will drive popularity and uptake."

Prediction Two
:. low-cost silicon photonics for faster, more reliable data transmission
Silicon photonics optics channels will be used inside and outside PCs.

For example, remote optical memory can be used to create converged I/Os so a PC could have a single unified connector for a computer display, LAN, printer, wireless connection, scanner, USB and so on. Furthermore, because an optical channel does not require design engineering to ensure speed - its inherent in its nature - speed is implicit which has all sorts of positive implications such as true HD down loads, storage capability and terabit networking.

Prediction Three
:. new heights of realism in visual computing

There will be a shift from dedicated hardware graphics engines to general hardware running dedicated software as this has greater flexibility so features such as shadow map algorithms - an aspect of rendering that creates tiny ragged outline edges - can be replaced by 'soft shadows'. 'Order independent transparency' - the ability to create overlaid images which are clearly transparent, will be vastly improved. Overall, these benefits will deliver new heights of realism to computer generated imagery. Immediate applications areas are gaming sphere, but it will also have implications for business applications and the film industry.

Prediction Four
:. realistic computer generated images

Some types of complex graphic rendering requires the use of data sharing between the CPU and the graphic processing unit (GPU). However, the hardware-based model for graphics does not easily facilitate this at present. The sharing of virtualised memory between the CPU and the GPU will deliver the highest performance yet, for what are typically very complicated interactions. For example, complex data structures can be shared between the two with applications easily split between the CPU and GPU.

Prediction Five
:. malware will become a thing of the past

Malware, whatever form it takes whether viruses, trojans or worms, will be beaten by hardware-based techniques that protect at the deepest level. Today Intel has 'trusted execution technology' which is a set of processor hardware extensions and chipsets that have security characteristics such as measured launch and protected execution. It achieves this by creating an environment in which applications can run within their own space, protected from all other software on the system. To a degree, the success of hardware-based security is also dependent on how much effort vendors are prepared to put into securing their products. But once it is known that there is a solution that successfully addresses the problem of malware market forces will drive vendors in this direction.

Prediction Six
:. personal internet devices will be truly personal

Mobile internet devices (Mids) are already powerful enough to be useful and the introduction of sub-threshold devices (prediction one) mean these will run all day.
Add this to a continuous Internet connection and users will, for example, be able translate words into other languages and hear then pronounced, or with GPS get a constant geographically-based pollen prediction for that day. Ten years from now Mids will be ubiquitous and application developers will flood the market with all sorts of ingenious ideas.

Prediction Seven
:. interactive computing devices make 'composable computing' a reality

'Composable computing' is the impromptu assembly of a logical computer from wireless components that are nearby - enabled by wireless links, automatically assembling networks, and simple graphical user interfaces that allow available components selected and connected as the user desires. For example, images taken on a mobile device could be directed onto a nearby TV, or the music playing on an MP3 player could be sent to a HiFi in the room.

Prediction Eight
:. next-generation TV will not be about pixels

There is a limit to how big a TV screen can be without needing larger rooms, and a limit to the amount of resolution this size of screen needs. Beyond this, TVs will have to differentiate themselves by delivering further information. For example, click on a athlete in a running race to bring up biographical details in a window.
Viewing will be from any location, delivered through various means such as 'over-the-air' and multi-cast IP, and available on a wide range of devices from notebook PCs to mobile internet devices and smart phones.

Prediction Nine
:. seamlessly connected 3-D worlds

3D worlds, perhaps the World of Warcraft and Second Life, will overlap and be used for more practical activities. Companies already get feedback from virtual users about new products before they are brought to the real market, and virtual spaces can be created as meeting places where employees can exchange information regardless of geographical location. With the impending advances in computer graphics and growth in devices, how long will it be before a company like Amazon.com, for example, establishes a 3D presence with shopping aisles and book shelves that can be entered via virtual worlds such as Second Life?

Prediction Ten
:. and finally a spectrum revolution is looming

Already many devices contain two or three wireless connectivity options and as television becomes more interactive this need will become more pressing. As things stand today, the spectrum is fragmented and fairly chaotic, parts are saturated, and parts almost empty. It's unlikely that this will happen in a smooth manner, as many organisations will wish to maintain dominance of their spectrum segment.
However, for example, as broadcast TV eventually concedes its position to interactive TV which is tailored to each user's preferences, spectrum will eventually be freed up.

Source:
Intel top ten technology predictions, by Steve Bush, ElectronicsWeekly.com

Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Posted by Roberto
8:02 PM 0 comments

THE WORLD DIGITAL LIBRARY

Map of the New World, drawn by Diego Gutiérrez in 1562.
1562 Map of the New World

A digital repository of some of the most important documents in world history was launched by UNESCO this week.

The World Digital Library makes cultural and historical documents (maps, pictures, texts and other cultural artefacts) freely available on the Internet.
The World Digital Library

Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Posted by Roberto
10:05 AM 0 comments

DO "QUANTS" ADD UP ON WALL STREET?

What follows is an excerpt from the article written by Dennis Overbye and published on page 12 of the Global Edition of the New York Times on Wednesday, March 11, 2009.

They are known as "quants" because they do quantitative finance. Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money. Quants occupy a revealing niche in modern capitalism. They make a lot of money but not as much as the traders who tease them and treat them like geeks. Until recently they rarely made partner at places like Goldman Sachs. In some quarters they get blamed for the current breakdown - "All I can say is, beware of geeks bearing formulas," Warren Buffett said on "The Charlie Rose Show" last fall. Even the quants tend to agree that what they do is not quite science.

As Dr. Derman put it in his book "My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance", "In physics there may one day be a Theory of Everything; in finance and the social sciences, you're lucky if there is a useable theory of anything." In the 1970s the late Fischer Black of Goldman Sachs, Myron S. Scholes of Stanford and Robert C. Merton of Harvard had figured out how to price and hedge these options in a way that seemed to guarantee profits. The so-called Black-Scholes model has been the quants' gold standard ever since. In the old days, Dr. Derman explained, if you thought a stock was going to go up, an option was a good deal. But with Black-Scholes, it doesn't matter where the stock is going. Assuming that the price of the stock fluctuates randomly from day to day, the model provides a prescription for you to still win by buying and selling the underlying stock and its bonds. The Black-Scholes equation resembles the kinds of differential equations physicists use to represent heat diffusion and other random processes in nature. Except, instead of molecules or atoms bouncing around randomly, it is the price of the underlying stock. The price of a stock option, Dr. Derman explained, can be interpreted as a prediction by the market about how much bounce, or volatility, stock prices will have in the future. But it gets more complicated than that. For example, markets are not perfectly efficient - prices do not always adjust to right level and people are not perfectly rational. Indeed, Dr. Derman told The Times, the idea of a "right level" is "a bit of a fiction." As a result, prices do not fluctuate according to Brownian motion. Rather, he said: "Markets tend to drift upward or cascade down. You get slow rises and dramatic falls."

One consequence of this is something called the "volatility smile," in which options that benefit from market drops cost more than options that benefit from market rises.
Another consequence is that when you need financial models the most - on days like Black Monday in 1987 when the Dow dropped 20 percent - they might break down.

One of the most outspoken critics is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former trader and now a professor at New York University. He got a rock-star reception at the World Economic Forum in Davos this winter. In his best-selling book "The Black Swan" (Random House, 2007), Dr. Taleb, who made a fortune trading currency on Black Monday, argues that finance and history are dominated by rare and unpredictable events.

"Every trader will tell you that every risk manager is a fraud," he told The Times, and options traders used to get along fine before Black-Scholes. "We never had any respect for nerds."

Dr. Taleb has waged war against one element of modern economics in particular: the assumption that price fluctuations follow the familiar bell curve that describes, say, IQ scores or heights in a population, with a mean change and increasingly rare chances of larger or smaller ones, according to so-called Gaussian statistics named for the German mathematician Friedrich Gauss.

But many systems in nature, and finance, appear to be better described by the fractal statistics popularized by Benoit Mandelbrot of I.B.M., which look the same at every scale. An example is the 80-20 rule that 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work, or have 80 percent of the money. Within the blessed 20 percent the same rule applies, and so on. As a result the odds of game-changing outliers like Bill Gates's fortune or a Black Monday are actually much greater than the quant models predict, rendering quants useless or even dangerous, Dr. Taleb said.

Links:
They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street
The Black-Scholes model