Phew, close one! Wolfram Alpha stinks.

I can't begin to tell you how relieved I am that Wolfram Alpha stinks out loud. I tried what I thought would be incredibly simple questions and got nothing but confusion from the search engine that supposedly can understand natural language... but my relief was short lived...

FTA: A web browser that can understand technical terms in life sciences and automatically find additional resources and services has been developed by European researchers. It could lead to a new generation of intelligent search engines.

This demonstrates how much easier it is to develop narrow AI for HIGHER level disciplines than for common, every day syntax. AI will rapidly master things like anatomy vocab, but if you want your robot butler to pass you the ketchup it's holding, don't dare say, 'Give it here.'

Surge in AI stories makes me think its arrival may be sooner than expected.

IBM has announced Watson will begin sparring humans this year leading up to a final contest sometime in 2010. Steve Wolfram has announced Wolfram Alpha will launch in May. The good folks over at Caltech have 'trained' a computer to analyze the behavior of fruit flies... in real time, something it takes a human close to 100 hours to do. A Program, dubbed Adam, has also been developed capable of making, and testing, a hypothesis has produced modest, though publishable results. A group at Cornell has created an AI that can derive the laws of physics from data of the natural world, with some refinement, it should be able to extract tons of information from the massive amounts of data we already have. The University of Southerland, meanwhile, is working on CASSANDRA, a program to monitor stock markets and guard against insider trading and spin.

When we look at these news stories we see a trend emerging, programs able to understand natural human language, recognize patterns, make inferences... what happens when we have computers as powerful as bluegene available for tens of thousands of dollars (rather than hundreds of millions), a program like Watson, which can read texts and 'understand' them, *and,* unlike Watson, you hook it up to a search engine like Wolfram Alpha? Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot, HAL really can read lips...

This brings me back to the point I keep trying to hammer home, it doesn't take true sentience for a program to displace a person from a job. If your job is monotonous, highly technical, or requires you to have command over vast amounts of information, your job will be among the first to go. Doubly so if it's also high paying.

No Take Backs!

http://mashable.com/2009/03/19/gmail-undo-send/
A new feature on gmail that allows you to take back that email you just sent. Just, as in, you have five seconds to do it. I wonder how much longer it will be before we can take back any email that has not been read or openned yet.

A step towards Ubiquitous Computing

Ah, wikipedia, is there anything you can't define for me? Ubiquitous Computing, or ubicomp, 'is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. As opposed to the desktop paradigm, in which a single user consciously engages a single device for a specialized purpose. In the course of ordinary activities, someone "using" ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so.'

I also like the phrase, 'everyware.' Anyway, I know what you're thinking, 'MissedCall, what small steps been taken towards ubicomp?' Well, take a gander- FTA: This ultra-thin chip package (UTCP) technology allows integrating complete systems in a conventional low-cost flex substrate. This paves the way to low-cost, unobtrusive wearable electronics for e.g. wearable health and comfort monitoring.

Shirts that call for an ambulance if their wearer has a heart attack, or houses that adjust their lighting and temperature when you walk in based on the layers you're wearing are only the beginning. Its easy to imagine how ubicomp could impact augmented reality... or more darkly, end privacy.

Of course, like many of you, I'm less concerned about my privacy rights and more concerned about whether or not there's a ridiculously cute picture I can loosely link back to this topic. Why yes there is- having the chips is one thing, but we'll need to power those chips, I submit to you this!



FTA: "This can totally be scaled up," said Zhong Lin 'ZL' Wang, who co-authored a paper describing the research in this month's issue of Nano Letters. "This is just the first step. The idea is that we would harvest energy from any body movement, from walking, breathing, from any kind of vibration."

One serious note: think about how ubicomp could improve our modelling of traffic, solve congestion problems, create an understanding of how pedestrian traffic impacts a neighborhood, maybe even provide insight into how the phenomenon of emergence relates to human crowds. Very, very useful things that are very, very difficult or time consuming to model. And, though, I'm not wild about the idea of government being able to know exactly where I am at all times, it is nice to think that I could perhaps recover all of my things if I'm mugged.

Your kids' homework just got easier.

FTA: Most search engines like Google and Yahoo scan through billions of web pages for keywords or phrases and return a series of documents that may contain the answer to your question., or point you in the right direction.
'We can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out,' Professor Wolfram said.
However, the London-born physicist claims his website 'Wolfram Alpha' can understand what you are looking for and calculate a precise answer.
So in theory it will be able to answer questions such as 'What is the location of Timbuktu?', 'How many protons are in the hydrogen atom?' and 'Where is the International Space Station?'

This is excellent. This is something that AI will clearly need in order for it to be useful to the majority of people. Personally, I think if we get AI/AGI, it won't come from full brain emulations, at least not any time soon, but rather by understanding the brain well enough to see what is needed to achieve intelligence and then breaking that down a part at a time and creating a system just for that part. Then, once enough systems have been created, create a system to govern those systems- this is Gall's Law at work.

OK, well it looks like another piece of the puzzle is within reach. What's next?

Bye bye books.

FTA: If King, Dan Brown, JK Rowling and Patricia Cornwell were all to decide to move to selling their books online themselves, rather than going through a publisher, they'd certainly benefit financially. Typically, an author only receives about £1 for every copy of their book sold. Rather than relying on a publisher, big-name authors could afford to simply employ an editor, a PR person, a typesetter and a designer. They could price their books at only £2 or £3 and still make much more money than under the current system.

I suspect publishing is going to die the minute the kindle (or comparable device) hits a price point of $100.

Hey, who wants to down load a blurg?

Someone's built a machine that can layout molten plastic in layers, sort of like a three dimensional inkjet. One day, we'll be able to download plans from Ikea and build create the parts right there at our desks.

FTA: Dr Bowyer said that: “These days, most people in the developed world run a professional-quality print works, photographic lab and CD-pressing plant in their own house, all courtesy of their home PC. Why shouldn't they also run their own desktop factory capable of making many of the things they presently buy in shops, too?

“The possibilities are endless. Now, people can make exactly what they want. If the design of an existing object does not quite suit their needs, they can easily redesign it on their PC and print that out, instead of making do with a mass-produced second-best design from the shops. They can also print out extra RepRap printers to give to their friends. Then those friends can make what they want too.”

Pretty neat. Seems like reality is going to become more like Second Life. This could also finish off the job of gutting our manufacturing once and for all. Combine this tech with bioplastics and we could be in pretty good shape.

IBM to deliver 20 petaflops computer... that number could be made up.

There's a lot of implications to this...

FTA: IBM has promised the DOE that the computer, part of its Blue Gene series and scheduled for delivery in 2011, will be capable of 20 petaflops, or 20 quadrillion floating operations per second. That's the equivalent of completing calculations in around eight hours that would take a typical Intel-powered (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) laptop 20,000 years--or, by IBM's count, the ability to finish in one hour a series of computations that would require the entire population of the planet, armed with pocket calculators, 320 years to complete.

That's neat but what I'm interested in is this... From another article: With 20 petaflops of computing power, meteorologists could predict local weather down to the 100-meter range. For an event like a tornado, that could mean being able to predict the path that the twister takes through a town, allowing for targeted evacuations that save lives.

And more importantly, from a third article (this one a couple of years old...): So, to simulate a human brain running in real-time, we need about 20 petaflops of computational capacity.

Personally, I think this guys estimates are way off, but then again, Kurzweil guess is 10 petaflops... Anyway you slice it we're closing in (or are alreaty there). My best estimate, we're about half way between a mouse and man.

One last note, this advance is well ahead of Moore's law.

The Cheapening: Power Consumption

Will we get off fossil fuels? Not quickly, but we may be able to avoid the worst of peak oil but continuing to improve the energy efficiency of all of our tech... and a big, big portion of our electricity goes to computers...

FTA: "Roughly speaking, we predict there could be a 1,000-time reduction in power consumption with electronic computers built in this new way," said Wolkow, a physicist at the University of Alberta.

But wait, there's more...

FTA: "And they could be something like 1,000 times smaller in size. So it's reaching the very limit as far as anyone could imagine of how small things could get."

What kind of sorcery is this?!?

FTA: 'Scientists at Edmonton's National Institute for Nanotechnology have made a significant breakthrough that could help pave the way for new generations of smaller, more energy-efficient computers.

The team, led by Robert Wolkow, has invented the world's smallest quantum dots, atom-sized devices capable of controlling electrons, using a fraction of the power of current computer technology.'

A computer one one thousandth the present size of our computers is wonderful but its the reduction in power consumption that thrills me. Think of how many computers there are in offices and homes all over the world. Obviously they wouldn't be changed over night, but with each new computer sold (once the tech because ubiquitous)that massive power need would be chipped away. Meanwhile, those of us who dream of living off the grid won't have to make such gut wrenching sacrifices, or shell out nearly as much, to go solar.

What's starting to form, what I'm starting to see emerge as the picture of our future is self sufficient energy creation. A solar panel on every roof, LED's in every light socket, a small, super energy efficient computer... if our power needs are shrinking and our capacity to generate power (through solar and wind)are increasing we can start to see a point when large scale power production becomes a thing of the past...

...of course this means job loses. Coal mining, drilling for natural gas, power stations, managing the grid, laying the cable... all of these things will go the way of the 8-track and, soon, the record store.

Its going to be a weird and, potentially, rocky transition. As our power needs shrink you can expect the price of kilowatt hours to spike, this will of course accelerate the change. This in turn could prompt power companies to drop their prices but their method of power creation may not be efficient enough to accommodate the new lower prices- they will fail. Their only option is to buy up patents on personal power generation tech and I think they're already too late.

If lights account for roughly 20% of total power usage (at least in the UK), how much would a thousand fold reduction in the power needs of computers effect our total energy demands? And what other technologies will benefit from this tech breakthrough?

The Cheapening: More Economic Optimism

I'm a fan of the $100 dollar laptop project. Right now the price is actually about $188 dollars, but its moving in the right direction and will eventually narrow the technology (and information access gap) tremendously... now India is trying to produce a $20 dollar laptop.

The world is going to get weird. Cloud computing make netbooks feasible. Breakthroughs in one technology interconnect with others. Advances in solar will change the way we look at power supply problems. Advances like the cheaper LED light bulbs reduce our power needs and could, potentially, also be implemented into netbooks or related devices.

What if the war on poverty is won not by significantly increasing wages but rather by making living on a dollar a day nearly feasible? Can we expect other important expenses to lower in a similar fashion? Houses? Cars? I'm not suggesting everyone would want to drive a Tata Nano or live in paper house, but seven thousand dollars is attainable to even a minimum wage worker- and these costs are likely to fall further.

Forget Apple, and You May Be Forgotten

Palm's new smartphone, the Pre, has garnered some attention, and some folks are calling upon it, like many before, to be the "iPhone Killer". Nokia had one. So did Blackberry. But none of them have even put a damper on Apple's momentum in the phone market.

It appears as if karma is catching up with a lot of companies for snubbing Apple over the past decade. Now that times are tough, most consumer tech companies are feeling a hit. Apple sales are similar, but they are able to sell laptops priced 30% higher then comparable offers from competitors.

My theory is that this could have been avoided if companies had only recognized Apple's turning point back in 1998 with the iMac. Before Apple unveiled their 'bondi blue' savior, their products came in beige or gray, and the few major software and hardware companies who supported them didn't provide updates for Mac as often as they did for PC. And after the iMac was released, those companies still didn't see much potential in them.

This was also right around the time that MP3s were taking over the CD and short lived minidisc market. Hardware companies were making portable players to jump on the trend, but with the exception of Diamond Rio, they didn't see profit in extending compatibility to the Mac. So Mac released iTunes, then the iPod, and finally the iTunes Store. Today, they are the #1 music software, device, and store in the world. Most of the original companies from the 90's are nowhere to be found (How many people do you see today carrying a Grundig or a Diamond Rio?). The same thing applies to phones. While Palm had limited ability to sync with a Mac, Blackberry offered nothing. People still rely on 3rd party software to make it work. So Apple created the iPhone, cutting into Blackberry's market share, and leaving Palm and Motorola in the dust.

Can you see the pattern? Apple's not necessarily trying to take over these markets. OK fine - yes they are, but part of the decision to go down the recent paths they've traveled is to further strengthen their computer market share. You haven't seen them dive into the graphic software market, because Adobe has always provided cutting edge software for them. They backed off of the printer market because Epson's entire line of printers were compatible by the mid 90's. By the time digital cameras were commonplace, Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Olympus knew better than to ignore Apple. Today, gaming companies are quickly porting their most popular games to play on the Mac, and Google was quick to admit their mistake in not having a Mac version of Chrome upon release.

The moral: Apple marketing is king. If you create a product that is not compatible with the Mac, Apple may just create a similar product that will render yours obsolete.