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 Sunday, May 24, 2009
 Posted by Roberto
 9:14 PM   0 comments   

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   1 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

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