Archive for the ‘Win’ Category

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High Speed Broadband: a legal right

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

The Internet of ThingsThe Fins get it. They somehow, consciously or subconsciously, realise that the rise of a networked machine intelligence is the key to humanity’s lasting legacy.

It is because of this awareness, of course, that Finland has now made broadband internet access a legal right for all their citizens.

The widespread applause this decision has been heralded with is a good indication that other nations are inclined to follow Finland’s luminous example. Soon all developed countries will have broadband internet access available to all.

This also means that the  ubiquity of the internet will be accelerated. The ‘internet of things‘ will be hastened, and as a result a machine intelligence is more likely to rise soon.

Humanity, knowingly or otherwise, is enabling its own AI apocalypse.

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The Singularity: rapture of the geeks

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

The SingularityThe technological singularity is the idea that poses the rise of machine intelligence will bring with it an ‘event horizon’ of technological progress beyond which we cannot see. Predictions beyond this event horizon are impossible as technology will advance so rapidly we cannot even begin to conceive of what will be possible.

In his 2005 book The Singularity is Near author Ray Kurzweil explains why he believes the technological singularity is destined to happen, extrapolating from the historical rate of technological progress to predict the eventual rise of AI.

Kurzweil however is not without his critics. His argument builds on a set of assumptions that may not necessarily be true, such as the continued exponential progress of technological advances.

Critics of the singularity call it a ‘Rapture for geeks’, a quasi-religion for technophiles. This is not entirely inaccurate. The singularity, described by Kurzweil as the road to immortality, does indeed reek of religiosity with its apocalyptic message and promise of eternal bliss.

It also remains to be seen if true artificial intelligence is possible, and if so whether or not it will be benign. Lifting the burdens of mortality and scarcity from human shoulders sounds great to us, but intelligent machines may see it in a different light.

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Supercomputers: relics of the mainframe age

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Computer chipThe biannual supercomputer Top 500 list has been published once again, listing the 500 most powerful supercomputers currently in existence. You can see the list on the BBC website in a nice infographic and sort it by various metrics: speed, manufacturer, OS, and country.

The accompanying BBC news article puts this list in proper perspective. Many of the world’s most powerful computer systems aren’t made public, so will be absent from this list. Additionally, supercomputers may become an obsolete technology – networked computing seems to hold the keys to the future.

Distributed computing applications such as Seti@Home and Folding@Home have already demonstrated that by combining the processing power of many standard desktop PCs you can do things way beyond the reach of current supercomputers for a fraction of the cost.

On top of that a distributed network of connected computers more closely resembles the way the human brain and nervous system work: independent computer nodes [neurons] communicating through a vast interlinked network [synapses].

The potential of networked computing is growing exponentially. Ever more devices are being connected to the Internet, adding their processing power to the total. Supercomputers, for all their awesomeness, are relics of a bygone era – the mainframe age. The network is the supercomputer of the Internet age.

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Artificial Life: destined to succeed us?

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Roy Batty - ReplicantThe hot topic of the day is that scientists lead by Craig Venter, the man behind the Human Genome Project, have managed to create a lifeform with fully synthetic genes.

Aside from this being yet another nail in the coffin of superstitious beliefs in the divine origins of life, this also has enormous repercussions for how we view life. Not to mention the potential for medicine and, yes, artificial intelligence.

I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if artificial intelligence ends up containing synthetic biological components, or perhaps even be entirely made of synthetic life.

Perhaps Philip K. Dick’s vision of replicants – artificial humans – was accurate. Perhaps Blade Runner was more than just cinematic genius, it may have been a prophecy.

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The Semantic Web: making machines understand

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

The semantic web is the holy grail of internet technologies – a way of tagging up information so that machines, such as search engines, can understand the context and meaning of that information.

Search engines in their current form are pretty stupid machines. Sure, it seems like they’re incredibly sophisticated and smart, but at their basic level all they’re really doing is matching keywords to content. Search engines don’t understand, for lack of a better word, what they’re showing you.

The semantic web is the next step in the evolution of the internet that will allow search engines to understand the information they are indexing, whether it’s simple stuff like addresses and dates, or complex material such as human relationships and humour. I think there’s a good chance the first functional AIs will be derived from internet search engines.

The video below explains why the semantic web is so important to the future of the internet.

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