Lewis Carroll, Machines and Impossible Things

Machines can Learn.

I think it is worth repeating that.

Machines can Learn.

They can do so very quickly, they can instantly share their knowledge between each other, they have millions of eyes and ears, they control millions of incredibly strong “arms and legs”, they can hear us and speak to us. Yes, in some areas they do better than others, but they are learning fast.

Here is an interesting, mind-bending postulate:

“In 2030, the smartest brain on the planet will be a machine. It will be smarter and more knowledgeable than the top 1 000 smartest humans combined” 

Yes, it may be spread across an acre of computing infrastructure and will consume more power than a small town, but so what, computing power is cheap and solar power is almost free.

A sea change is spreading across the world at speed. The manner in which we humans produce our needed goods of safety, sustenance and joy is being altered faster than ever before in our history.

We are truly living in amazing times. One can single out five major events that occurred over the past 13.7 billion years, and it would seem two of these are occurring right now in the space of a single lifetime:

• Big Bang

After centuries of research and efforts by thousands of scientists it would seem our best guess at the beginning of the universe is the Big Bang. Based on evidence gathered this seems to have happened 13.7 billion years ago. All energy and matter seem to be the result of a massive explosion centred on a single infinitesimally small point. What came before or what caused the big Bang no one knows. Are there multiverses, are we going from the big bang to expansion to contraction the second time around, or the 1000th?

• Life

Approximately 3.5 billion years ago, on our planet Earth, life formed. Inanimate matter organising to reproduce, signal and communicate. A complex interplay between DNA, RNA and amino acids producing all known life forms, including us humans. No one knows precisely how the first simple life forms came to be. No one knows whether there is life beyond planet Earth.

• Sentience

Matter studying Matter. It is an intriguing concept: collections of atoms consisting of protons, electrons and other exotic forms of matter studying the behaviour of protons, electrons and other exotic forms of matter, following the trail through to the beginning of time. Humans are the only known life form able to study the nature of life and existence. Modern humans have been around for only 60,000 of the previous 13.7 billion years, with serious collective effort at studying the nature of existence and the universe around us only since the previous 500 years or so. Sentience is definitely having an impact on our small patch of the universe.

• Directed Evolution

As Dr. Craig Venter states “Life is a DNA software system.” Up to now the software of life has been written by random character changes over millions of years. Via the process of evolution life has evolved from single celled bacteria to the millions of life forms in existence now, including us humans. This process occurred incredibly slowly via the natural processes of evolution and natural selection. Genetic mutation and reproduction occurring by chance with not a thought for the required genetic and biological changes needed to increase chances of survival. Now for the first time humans are able to direct evolution, not by selective breeding but through the direct splicing and combination of the required genetic material for the desired effect. The impact of directed evolution could make a mockery of the 3.5 billion years of natural evolution to date within short order. This is an intriguing and somehow frightening thought. Coupled to that we are starting to create entirely new forms of life from scratch with Dr. Venter again seeming to lead the way.

• Non-biological life and non-biological sentience

Signals are being processed by silicon. Logical programming constructs are being combined in an evolutionary fashion. Are the agents of Tierra, the artificial life simulator, alive? The Internet of things will soon combine billions of eyes and ears into one global signalling system. Expert systems are able to drive a car, provide directions when asked, execute simple medical procedures and understanding what we are saying. What will we have when we combine these systems into one? A system that has access to all knowledge, can drive cars, execute medical procedures, beat anyone at chess, Go and any other strategic game and recall any fact or make almost any correlation between facts instantaneously. Is life and sentient life spreading from biological “wetware” into a flexible combination of reproducible hardware and software? The answer will most likely arrive sooner than we expect. Directed Evolution is a reality, with non-biological life and non-biological sentience fast approaching.

Yes, the world as we know it is experiencing unprecedented change at an unprecedented rate. We are in a state of Constant Revolution. The primary forces at the root of this state of Constant Revolution are:

• Moore’s Law

From Wikipedia: “Moore’s law is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. The period often quoted as ‘18 months’ is due to Intel executive David House, who predicted that period for a doubling in chip performance (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster).”

The introduction of nonhuman computing power is having an enormous impact on the world. We are essentially extending our brains and bodies. We started from a very low base, but still computing power is increasing at an exponential rate, therefore we are effectively extending our brains and bodies at an exponential rate. We are already achieving significant extension capabilities for our brains and bodies, but the scope and range of extension over the next 5-10 years will be enormous.

• Digitisation

Every form of information and communication is being digitised at pace. There is not much left of the analogue world. Music, radio, television, books, educational content, photos, maps and money have been transformed into digital bits and bytes. The senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell are being digitised, spread all over the planet and connected.

• Information access and communication

Smart mobile devices which allow instant access to digitised information anywhere on the planet are spreading faster than any technology ever before. It is doing in 10 years, maybe less, that which took Gutenberg and the printing press many centuries to achieve. These devices are also used for communication and coordination. The cost of communication across any distance is rapidly dropping to essentially zero. The cost to access all of human knowledge and “see, hear, touch, smell” anything anywhere across the planet is dropping to essentially zero.

• Cloud computing and cloud services

The promise of ubiquitous computing switched on and off and decreased and increased just like electricity is here. Designing, developing and launching revolutionary services that combine digital information of all types with instant global access is easier than ever before. Many services are having their initial revolutionary launch within weeks of the concept being dreamed up by students in their dorm rooms. Now it is cloud learning and cloud speaking…

• Disintermediation

Middlemen be wary. From brokers to video stores to recording labels to newspaper classifieds to what next? With instant global access to information business to business, consumer to business and consumer to consumer transaction costs have plummeted. Are teachers and university professors next? Banks? Political parties?

• Decentralisation and Centralisation

One used to call a number at a newspaper and place a classified ad. They would collate all the classifieds and publish them in their newspapers. There were 1000’s of newspapers doing this. Now global platforms have been created where folks place their own ads. Massively centralised platforms and decentralised self-organising communities of interest. Wikipedia is a massively centralised encyclopaedia yet it was created and is maintained and expanded in a massively decentralised manner. We used to call our brokers too. Now there are massively centralised trading platforms available to a decentralised investor community.

• Autonomation

Humans and machines working together seamlessly. Expert systems able to do white-collar work. Human / computer teams are the world chess champions. The self-driving car. 3D printing. Baxter the human friendly robot and its derivatives about to disrupt the industrial robotics industry and many forms of remaining manual labour.

The world has sped up. Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland thought an outlandish notion was:

“Sometimes I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

A more appropriate quip for today’s world might be:

“Sometimes as many as six impossible things occur before breakfast”

Stated another way:

“Software is eating the world” – Marc Andreessen

“The software is controlling the machines of global production and service” – learningmachines.co.za

Are machines learning and servicing for you?

If not, the time for them to start doing so is Now.

Call us.