Tag Archive: “computing”

Smarter than Human Intelligence

Posted in brainbits by Adam

23 May 2015

A look at what it will take for an AI to be smarter than a human.

When speaking of AI, we should do well to look at what is needed to actually be smarter than a human.

With an AI, we assume it has dedicated hardware and power. Given it can operate continuously, it may not have to be smarter than a human to be smarter than a human. That is, if I’m half as smart as you per cycle, but can operate for thrice as many cycles, can I be said to be smarter?

As smart as humans are, we have memory recall problems, we have worries and stresses (that go beyond just having to eat, sleep). We have split attentions and interests. An AI can focus and not worry or get distracted. If it can be three times as consistent in its work than a human is, how dumb can an AI be and still be smarter than one of us?

We have to assume it can be duplicated. If I am half as smart as you, but can make two more copies of myself that can cooperate with me, can I be said to be smarter?

Compounding continuous operation, focus, and duplication, how much intelligence does an AI need to be smarter than a human?

I’ve read a few books. Some people have read many more than I have. At the tip of the long tail, someone has maybe read, what, 100,000 books? And let’s say, comprehended most of them. An AI can access all of that data and more. It still has to work out contradicting information, but what hurdles does it have that we lack? If it can grab information in a few ticks, when it takes one of us at least seconds, if not minutes or hours, how smart does it have to be when it can get the answer from stored knowledge?

If you had the perfect library of knowledge, if you could spend a lifetime curating it, then be reborn, to live with that perfect library, how much more productive would you be, finding each mote of knowledge at the right place? An AI could rewrite every document it scans through in a way that makes its next pass that much faster and more useful. And it doesn’t have to be too smart to do that. Probably not even as smart as one of us.

I’m starting to think that an AI doesn’t have to be very smart in the small to be smarter than a human in the large.

Mozilla’s Advantage in Mobile

Posted in biz by Adam

23 November 201324 February 2017

Mozilla’s bet on the web is a long play, betting that integration via the web will defeat walled gardens and repetitive technology efforts.

One of the major technology spaces still up for grabs is mobile. Apple led out with the i-series of mobile devices (iPhone, iPad), running iOS, while Google came back with third-party manufactured Android and their own Google-designed Nexus devices. Of course, Microsoft has their devices and their mobile operating system, but they are playing catch-up.

Mozilla has come in late with the FirefoxOS, and without plans for their own hardware. Yet they have a distinct advantage.

One of the frustrating things about new technologies from the big three (Apple, Google, and Microsoft) is lack of integration. Especially if you don’t standardize your technology choices on one of them, but even then.

For example, you can subscribe to various publications or buy certain media from these technology vendors (and others, like Amazon), but you don’t necessarily get equal access from all your platforms. Indeed, some of your platforms may be wholly excluded.

That’s the most common case for me, as a Linux user. There isn’t a native client for accessing media on Linux, and the web offering is usually inferior (example, with the streaming music services). In some cases the web offers no solution, mostly in the case of video. A few video providers utilize Adobe Flash, but these require an obsolete library, HAL, to support their copy protection schemes (“DRM”).

But that’s why Mozilla has a strong position: the native web. It lacks some features, but it can gain them. As it develops, it will provide the strongest point for integration between platforms.

Google recently announced their “Play News Stand” application for Android. It’s an application to deliver news to you, and some of the content is purchased. But there’s no web version. There is less incentive than ever for users to buy content that’s only accessible on one device.

Consumers don’t want to switch all their device profiles and operating systems to one vendor simply to gain the marginal benefit of equal access. The economics aren’t there. They don’t get cheaper access. All they get right now is access to one shop per device.

Credit card companies would not be the force they are today if their cards only worked at just one vendor, or even a handful of vendors. True market capitalism requires open markets, and that’s what the web represents, what the web (and any viable replacement for the web) must evolve into.

Mozilla’s road may be rocky in establishing FirefoxOS and its benefits. The web as a platform has much growing up to do (especially in things like having a common user interface for applications developed by different vendors), but it has every sign that it will.

Mozilla is playing the long game here.

2020: When Computers Will Look “Over There”

Posted in science by Adam

9 June 2012

Wherever you are right now, go somewhere else in your head. In some near-tomorrow you will be able to do the same with your computer.

Wherever you are right now, go somewhere else in your head. If you’re in your home, think about a different room. If you’re not at home, think about a room in your home. You can probably look around the room a bit, remembering all the parts of it. Now you can probably go to some shelf or drawer and look around there.

You don’t have a perfect replica, but it’s good enough that you can remember, right now, where some remote object is. And if you went there right now, you would find that object where your brain said it would be.

This is a highly developed skill of the brain. So developed, in fact, that quite a few people use mnemonic device called the Memory Palace (Wikipedia: Method of loci) to allow them to memorize information rapidly and recall it with ease. But our computers currently rely upon the use of textual bits to demarcate things like files and folders.

If we’re forced to give the location for something, we tend to speak relatively: “down the hall, third door on the left, the big bookshelf in the corner with the taco bookends, second shelf from the top.” We don’t say, “the room called var, the piece of furniture called games, the shelf called board games, the object called dominoes.” (Okay, we do say roughly the last part.)

That’s all going to change. Let’s say you have a next-generation, non-invasive Brain-computer interface (Wikipedia: Brain-computer interface). Suddenly the computer can listen for you to “say” something like, “open that thing over there.” It can store a mapping for what “over there” means, and it can use your reference to it to trigger the mapping and get the data you want, without you needing to remember the location in the computer’s terms.

This will allow the computer to manage more of the problems that are currently shared between computer and user. And it will make computers easier to use.

But it will do some other things, too. It has the potential to overturn education, by having the computer help in your learning in a way that only the best teachers currently do.

Take, for example Kickstarter: Zombie-Based Learning: Geography taught in Zombie Apocalypse by David Hunter. This looks to be a great example of traditional teaching. The teacher uses their creativity to generate a compelling narrative for the material, setting the proper pacing, activities, etc. so that the kids all learn and retain the knowledge.

With computers, and a BCI (Brain-computer interface), the computer can help people to store memories in ways that will maximize their recall. This will initially happen in some rudimentary ways, like flashing pictures that are composed from a variety of images thought to be uncanny enough to help in memory. For example, a clown in a fish bowl, next to a fish in scuba gear.

But that may give way to better schemes where the computer has image representations of some of the places it knows you remember things, and it could suggest you add the memories in those places. It could also quiz you by flashing the location and asking you to show you remember what you should.

Passwords might consist of a challenge/response, where the computer flashes an image and you have to recall another image at some place in the same sequence.

Brain-computer interfaces represent a major leap forward in what computers will be able to do for humanity. They are on the horizon, and they are undoubtedly an epoch. Just as there is the world before the Internet and after, there is the world before widespread BCI and after.