Eric Schmidt on the New Digital Age

Eric Schmidt on the New Digital Age:

Daniel Dennett on Tools To Transform Our Thinking

Youtube video of Daniel Dennett on tools to transform our thinking:

The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor who came up with a way to predict the future capabilities of information technology.  Ray's core thesis, which he refers to as the Law Of Accelerating Returns, is that fundamental measures of information technology follow predictable and exponential trajectories, and therefore can be predicted accurately.

Perhaps it is Ray Kurzweil's Law Of Accelerating Returns that is the underlying cause for the changes Alvin Toffler describes in several of his books:

• 1970:  Future Shock about how the speed of life will keep accelerating and cause some people to experience a new type of culture shock called future shock.
• 1980: The Third Wave which I briefly describe in my previous post.
• 2006: Revolutionary Wealth where Toffler examines the many ways the "Third Wave" is revolutionizing our relationships to three "deep fundamentals" and, therefore, to wealth systems in general. The deep fundamentals are time, space, and knowledge.

In Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray says,

"...the future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating."

Ray's book shows many charts describing and predicting the accelerating capabilities of many technologies.  It also describes how this trend has gone on for a long time and that human events, such as wars or depressions, have not altered the accelerating capabilities of technology.  Based on the smooth and accelerating rate of technological change, Kurzweil predicts, with specific time frames, major milestones of technological capability in relation to the human brain.

Ray estimates the calculations per second of the human brain to be around 10 to the 16th power.  He then refers to his plot of computer calculations per second per $1,000 by year.  With the accelerating nature of the plot, $1,000 computers will reach the calculating power of one human brain sometime around the year 2020.  Supercomputers will reach the calculating power of one human brain near the year 2013. I'm fairly sure having the calculating power of one human brain does not translate into being as smart as one human brain.  Humans still need to develop computer artificial intelligence to the point where it can make use of the calculating power of the computer.  But when we do, we may want to drop the word "artificial" from the description.

Computer memory versus human memory is another way to consider how computer capacity compares to human brain capacity.  Kurzweil estimates that human functional memory size is around 10 to the 13th power (10 trillion) bits. He also estimates that we will be able to purchase 10 trillion bits of memory for one thousand dollars around the year 2018.  Therefore he predicts that $1,000 computers will have as much memory as one human brain around the same time they have the calculating power of a human brain.

The mind blowing milestone is that $1,000 computers will reach the calculating power of all human brains near the year 2050.  This means that even if you put all human brains together (approximately 9.6 billion humans in 2050) to calculate something, that our $1,000 computer in 2050 would be able to do it faster because its calculations per second would be faster than all humans combined. What are the implications of these predictions? The technological singularity is the answer that Kurzweil postulates.

The Technological Singularity is the moment that non-human intelligence, (i.e. computer intelligence or artificial intelligence), becomes more intelligent then human beings.  Once this happens it is impossible for humans to predict (understand) what will happen beyond that point. (Brings up visions of The Matrix, doesn't it?) Ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity will happen near the year 2045.

Kurzweil spends the last third of The Singularity Is Near responding to criticisms and possible criticisms of his ideas. To this day he follows up on the accelerating intelligence that he sees happening in the world and continues to track his predictions and write about them.

I will be referring to many of the concepts and ideas of Ray Kurzweil in this blog.  He has given us a great yardstick with which to watch and predict the massive and accelerating changes happening to our civilization.

The Third Wave - Alvin Toffler

   "A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.  This new civilization brings with it new family styles; changed ways of working, loving, and living; a new economy; new political conflicts; and beyond all this an altered consciousness as well. Pieces of this new civilization exist today.  Millions are already attuning their lives to the rhythms of tomorrow. Others, terrified of the future, are engaged in a desperate, futile flight into the past and are trying to restore the dying world that gave them birth.
   The dawn of this new civilization is the single most explosive fact of our lifetimes."

- Opening of Chapter One, "Super-Stuggle" in The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.

In my opinion, Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi do a brilliant job of explaining the vast and overwhelming set of changes that are affecting human society during the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century. I consider Alvin Toffler to be the most prescient futurist of my lifetime.  The copyright date for my hard-back version of the The Third Wave is 1980.

The metaphor that Toffler employs, waves of civilization change, quickly synthesizes and explains the myriad of changes affecting industry, jobs, society, government institutions, family units, economies and every nook and cranny of human civilization.  It describes the variability and massiveness of the changes as they roll like waves across the existing civilization.

Toffler describes three types of societies, based on the concept of "waves"—each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside.

• First Wave is the society after agrarian revolution and replaced the first hunter-gatherer cultures.
• Second Wave is the society during the Industrial Revolution (ca. late 17th century through the mid-20th century). The main components of the Second Wave society are nuclear family, factory-type education system and the corporation. Toffler writes: “The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.”
• Third Wave is the post-industrial society. According to Toffler, since the late 1950s most nations have been moving away from a Second Wave Society into what he would call a Third Wave Society, one based on actionable knowledge as a primary resource. His description of this (super-industrial society) dovetails into other writers' concepts (like the Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village, technetronic age, scientific-technological revolution), which to various degrees predicted demassification, diversity, knowledge-based production, and the acceleration of change (one of Toffler’s key maxims is "change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways").

In this blog I will be following the changes that are occurring in our society and relating them back to the concepts of Toffler as well as other theories and predictions of the future.  Specifically, Toffler's idea of demassification seems to be a recurring change driver for industries and government.  For example, the changes happening in the music industry are a great place to spend time understanding demassification and how to profit from this idea now and in future industry upheavals.

There are many theories and ideas about how and why large changes are taking place.  I plan to cover the ones I find relevant and hope to learn about new theories as I go.  Alvin Toffler's theories are clearly relevant and give us many ways to try our hand at predicting specific changes that will happen in the future.

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins - Confirmed Prediction is Understanding

According to Jeff Hawkins in his book On Intelligence, human understanding is the act of our neocortex correctly predicting, in parallel across all our senses, the world around us. Confusion happens when our neocortex has incorrect predictions. For example, if you are walking on a concrete sidewalk, when you take a step forward, you expect the ground to be firm. If, on your next step, you were to sink into the ground like quicksand, you would be surprised. You would not be expecting soft ground. Your brain would have incorrectly predicted solid ground and confusion would result. This notion applies to all human interactions from opening doors to sitting in cars or interacting with other people and even breathing. We have a set of predictions in our brain and when they are violated it gets our attention.  Jeff’s book is interesting because in it he is describing his theory for how a neocortex works. His goal is to recreate the human neocortex using software algorithms. 

What will the future effect be if Jeff Hawkins is able to successfully create a neocortex using software?  How will the theories and products that Jeff Hawkins is working on change our predictions of what will happen in the future?

Humans not only predict second to second but they also predict tomorrow, next week, next month, next year and so on.  Predicting stock market movements correctly and acting on them can make you rich.  Predicting the best education for your children can give them a great start in life.  Predicting the reactions and thoughts of others can give you an edge in human interaction.  So how can we make sure we have the best information to make great future predictions?

I’m no expert, but I do like to seek out, read about, and discuss those individuals, trends, theories and ideas that are the most likely to have a large impact on our future.  And so I have created the Future Effects blog to write about these ideas and hope to find others that are interested in these ideas as well.

Jeff Hawkins' story continues, in March 2005, Jeff Hawkins, together with Donna Dubinsky and Dileep George, founded Grok (originally named Numenta). The company's goal is to simultaneously create a theory of how the brain works, and a computer algorithm to implement this theory. They have been using biological information about the structure of the neocortex to guide the development of their theory on how the brain works. So far, they have come up with two major algorithmic frameworks: Hierarchical Temporal Memory and Fixed-sparsity Distributed Representations. The frameworks can find patterns in noisy data, model the latent causes, and make predictions about what patterns will come next.

Two commercial software programs have been created from Jeff’s original theories so far: 

1)      SightHound Video which can recognize people and objects in the same way that a human brain works.

2)      Grok which automatically learns what patterns are normal for a data stream, then highlights any unusual behavior.

There is open source access to the Python/C++ implementation of Jeff's theories in software here.

Will Jeff Hawkins’ neocortex theory change the world?  It still remains to be seen, but I think it is a story worth following.