The Automation of Intelligence

Automated intelligence (also known as "computational intelligence"), doesn't need to be conscious in order to realize the promise, peril and potential of Artificial Intelligence. Meanwhile, computers run human cognitive skills such as decision making, analysis, testing, learning, creativity, invention, design, self-improvement... at hyper speed... and accelerating.

Early computers leaped from the assembly lines of the industrial revolution. These accelerated typewriters, doped with shreds of human cognition; memory, logic and calculating power, plowed the paper blizzard triggered by the men and machines of the factories. And as the next page of history turned, it dissolved into electronic pulses.

Today, the heart of our world beats with increasingly powerful cognition engines. Hyper speed simulated human mental functions run non-stop throughout our global computer systems, many way beyond human capabilities. And ALL of them promise the sort of returns that attract big investment.

It's Not About Consciousness

I'm not referring to some sort of conscious system that would spend 99% of it's time making itself brighter than it's builders while delightfully distracting us with the remainder. But all the promise, peril and potential of artificial intelligence will be realized through automated intelligence. In fact, while these emerging systems process human mental functions billions of times faster than a human, most fruitful thought about its implications has been bottlenecked by the A.I. consciousness debate. So whether artificial cognition systems can or cannot become conscious, they are getting exponentially better at behaving intelligently.

Things like automated decision making, analysis, testing, learning, creativity, invention, design and self-improvement, simulations, even perception such as vision hearing smell touch taste.

Emerging Cognitive Systems

Many singular functions are networked into systems from artificial sensory systems to new armed military robots.

What's Next?

As cheaper, more powerful coordinated automated intelligence continues to accelerate, learn, network and influence our global systems, what will be the impact? What will be the hallmarks of automated cognition systems at work inside businesses, nations, the markets and our personal lives?

Stay with me to explore the implications and impact of these hyper speed self-improving cognitive systems networking with each other and the world at large. I've got some ideas and I invite yours.

(Smart Mass) Times (Acceleration) = Smartforce

Swarming behavior is an accelerating social force.

Emerging from the global connectedness of cell phones, the Web, Email distribution lists etc., technological swarming is a novel development in Guerrilla warfare, protest, politics, journalism, and every social sphere. Experiment for yourself with some searches.

This one snagged me though: From China to Colorado, consumers are connecting online in coordinated "mob buying" sprees. A Smartforce of hundreds of people ready to purchase big ticket items, swarm temporarily into a collective that sellers are willing to compete for.

Here's a classic shot of a journalistic flash scoop collectively aiming their phonecams at the New York steam pipe explosion.

Tiny Liveable Houses

These houses have a tiny "footprint" but are beautiful and use space very efficiently. Energy use and maintenance is correspondingly tiny. Some people put them in their back yard as a retreat. Some use them as guest houses. Others actually live in them full time. Cool idea. You could probably put a dome over them and create an artificial environment. It only takes 5 minutes to heat the whole house up, and energy costs are between $20 and $50 per month. I can imagine installing solar panels and going completely off grid.

Pictures here.

Emotional Reactions to Robots

At first I thought it was just me. Watching a recent video of a new 'pack-mule' robot (nicknamed BigDog) being tested by the US military, I suddenly began feeling pity.

I know it's just a machine. But during testing inside a small room, when a researcher kicked it to demonstrate how it recovers with an animal-like fluidity, I was secretly wishing it would kick back. But it also moves like 2 torso-less people trying to move a couch. That made me laugh.

Both of those responses came directly from the animal-like motion. And this highly complex movement is a sign of how advanced robotics is becoming.

This discussion on Digg has several posts describing emotional reactions to the vid.

Update: Mar 17 2008 Check out BigDog on ice, snow, climbing over cinder blocks, jumping and more.

Want to see more creepy robot motion? See the tree climbing robot that moves and looks like a cockroach that recently crawled out of university research labs. Others move like spiders and snakes.

Robots Are Evolving In Chunks

High quality reusable intelligent robot functions are hitting the market. Both the legwork of BigDog and the stability of the 2 wheeled Segway base have been adopted by the US military.

Also consider face recognition. Indeed, all of the senses, abilities and aptitudes found in nature are being reproduced and implanted into machines.

Robots of all kinds will very soon be everywhere while getting smarter very fast.

Marshall Brain's excellent read on the approaching impact of robots can be found here.

Downloading the Web in an Afternoon

That's the equivalent of what Caltech recently accomplished.

Bandwidth is a measure of how much data can be sent across a network in a set amount of time. It's what you experience online when waiting for a web page to load.

But recently, Caltech reached a stunning milestone in how fast data can be sent, transferring 475 terabytes of data in 24 hours. That's fast enough to download the entire Web as indexed by Google in an afternoon. (Cool idea too. Can you imagine having your own personal cache of the web, updated every couple of hours in the background while you surf with no page load waits?)

OK, for math heads, here's the figures I used rounded to the nearest sanest numbers:

475 terabytes (the amount of data transferred in 1 day by Caltech), divided by 156 terabytes (the size of Google's web) = (roughly) 3.

More math? OK here is how I determined Google's size:

I did a Google search with my preferences set to return 100 pages. I searched for everything using *.* (Note: This search query doesn't work anymore. Use a creative seach of your own with common words like "home" or "welcome").
From those 100 hits, I added up the size of each page for a total of:
1721 k
and then divided that by 100 to get the average size of each page.
That gave me an average of 17 K per page
Multiply that by the number of pages on Google (9,180,000,000)
and that gives 156,060,000,000,000 Bytes or 156 terabytes.

How to Visualize Data

Did you know that 1 CD can hold the entire Human genome? That a Gigabyte of text printed out would fill the bed of a pickup truck with paper? That it takes 20,000 trees to print out 400 Gigabytes on paper? That 100 Terabytes is a high-side guess of Human brain storage space, slightly less than one days Web Page views from Google in 2009.

I've been collecting these data bits for a couple of years now, finding gems and doing my best math to see if they fall in line with everything else. It's pretty close. Close enough to give you some useful comparisons.

Bits

2 bits: any 2 choice decision. Yes/No Run/Stop...
3 bits: A color pixel. Only 3 bits are needed to represent any colour. Red, Blue and Green, from which all other colors are derived.
8 bits: 1 byte

Bytes

1 byte: Any character on your computer keyboard (not including your cat).
5 bytes: The average English word

Kilobyte

1,024 bytes often rounded to 1,000 bytes
1 Kilobyte: A joke or a couple of paragraphs
2 Kilobytes: Typewritten page
3.2 Kilobytes: The amount of data in the H1N1 Swine Flu virus
3.5 Kilobytes: The size of the first web page
5 Kilobytes: A Desktop Icon
10 Kilobytes: A page out of an encyclopedia
17 Kilobytes: The size of an average Web Page
50 Kilobytes: A (roughly) 4 by 6 inch image
100 Kilobytes: A low-resolution photograph
750 kilobytes: The file size necessary to categorize the entire range of human experience and interest. (11 categories and about 450 unique sub-categories) as indicated by the Yahoo! directory on November 3rd 2007. (I wrote a small program to fetch all the headings and categories, save it to a text file, then view the text file size.)

Megabyte

1,048,576 bytes,
1 Megabyte: Small novel, 3-1/2 inch diskette
2 Megabytes: 12 Megapixel Digital Photo, high resolution
3 Megabytes: The average mp3 song. (Rough rule of thumb: an mp3 plays about 1 megabyte per minute.)
4 Megabytes: A Non illustrated King James Bible. I downloaded a text version from Project Gutenberg and viewed the file size).
5 Megabytes: 1 minute of a YouTube High Quality video.
10 Megabytes: (Roughly) 1 minute MPEG movie.
20 Megabytes: Typical hard drive in the first desktop PCs
100 Megabytes: Roughly the text info contained in 1 meter (3 feet) of bookshelf
750 Megabytes: 1 CD. The Human genome (props to Max for his comment below)

Gigabyte

1,073,741,824 bytes,
1 Gigabyte: The bed of a pickup truck filled with paper.
7 Gigabytes: 1 DVD
10 Gigabytes: A 1 inch stack of CD's
28 Gigabytes: Tweets Per Day on Twitter as of Jan 1, 2011
30 Gigabytes: From My Life In A Terabyte - Roughly the entire collection of Gordon Bell's Gordon Bell's articles, books, correspondence (letters and email), CD's, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings by 2003.
400 Gigabytes: 20,000 trees made into paper and printed.
500 Gigabytes: 100 DVD Movies

Terabyte

1 Terabyte: 1000 gigabytes
An 8 foot stack of CD's or about 150 DVD's. It would hold all 350 episodes of The Simpsons or all 238 episodes of Friends. About 2 years non stop MP3s. About 50,000 trees made into paper would be needed to print out a Terabyte of data. 250 million pages printed both sides, over 10 miles high. Roughly 250,000 MP3s (2 years non-stop listening). About 2 weeks of non-stop DVD movies. 500,000 digital camera pictures.
4 Terabytes: The YouTube record of U.S. user names and IP addresses including every record of every video watched by them as of 2008.
10 Terabytes: Enough to store everything you look at for a year, and could include a heart monitor, personal GPS, everything you type and every move of your mouse. From Charlie's Diary Shaping the Future.
45 Terabytes: All the videos on YouTube as of Aug 2006
100 Terabytes: High guess of Human brain storage space. The monthly growth of The Internet Archive in 2009. From this Google search
122 Terabytes: The size of one days Web Page views from Google in 2009 (7.2 Billion daily page views) X 17 Kilobytes (the size of the average web page).
150 Terabytes: Estimated size of all Web pages indexed by Google on Dec 8th 2005 (not including databases or video). (See this article for the figures I used)

Petabyte

1 Petabyte: 1 thousand Terabytes. Storage at this level signals the dawn of a new era with powerful implications to the sciences and Artificial Intelligence.
About 100 years of television. The amount of data storage space the Internet Archive had in 2004.
Roughly the amount of new video added to youTube every day in 2007
A stack of CD's 3 kilometers high
2 Petabytes: The amount of data Google processed every day in 2008
3.5 Petabytes: 2007 Estimated capacity of Google's Data centers in a box.
4 Petabytes: Estimated amount of Internet data stored in RAM by Google in 2006.
4.5 Petabytes: The capacity of The Internet Archive as of 2009. From this Google search
15 Petabytes: The amount of data the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates per year as of 2008.
20 Petabytes: Google daily total workload in January 2008. The storage capacity of all hard drives produced in 1995.
60 Petabytes: Estimated total size of Flickr photos by December 2011
200 Petabytes: The estimated amount of data contained within the Googleplex in 2006.

Exabyte

1000 Petabytes.
2.2 Exabytes: According to Charles Stross, all data recorded by our species in 2003
246 Exabytes: Total storage of the Internet in 2006.

Zettabyte

1000 Exabytes
1.8 Zettabytes: Estimated amount of total electronic data in existence by 2011

Yottabyte

1000 Zetabytes.

Technology, Computers and Innovation: Why Everything is Speeding Up

Our grandparents incredulously shook their heads at the moon landing, microwave ovens, nuclear bombs and computers. Theirs was the first generation to actually feel technology speed up. Today, crude replicators, new forms of Intelligence, immortality and the very reigns of evolution are within our grasp. Why IS everything speeding up?

Innovation MEANS Acceleration

Ideas trigger ideas. Step into any research lab, and you'd probably interrupt someone methodically confirming or disproving some theory. Boiling enormous amounts of information down to one bit of data. Either yes or no.

But once that tiny single grain of new truth is harvested, new knowledge, questions and ideas automatically spring forth. There’s suddenly a whole other set of things you can do. This is the classic feedback loop of discovery.

Time saving innovations create another self reinforcing loop. Think of all the things we use to save time. Our dishwashers, cars and computers free us from one set of demands but give birth to new urgencies. Our cars make it possible to live further from work. So we commute for an hour. Dishwashers make it possible to catch up on the Email we receive from all of those people around the world we could never have met any other way. So time saving solutions also incrementally speed up the pace of life. More events get crammed into shorter periods of time. Including world changing events.

As we shall see, these simple feedback loops have been speeding up for thousands of years. And we have arrived upon the scene in time to witness leisurely progress become super accelerated.

It's Been A Long Time Coming

"We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning." Billy Joel

The world seemed as still as stone for thousands of years and technology moved as slow as amber. Take a 100,000 year walk back with me. Notice ancient hands transform logs into levers, wheels and axles. Watch these three simple innovations morph into a wheelbarrow.

Flash forward as wheelbarrows transform into wagons going 2 miles per hour, chariots at 20 mph, cars at 100 mph, trains at 300 mph, planes at 2000 mph, rockets at 4000 mph, spacecraft at 18000 mph... Innovations beget ever more and powerful innovations because each advancement illuminates a new set of still greater possibilities.

Why Our World Is Noticeably Speeding Up

It was only last century that our grandparents incredulously shook their heads at the moon landing, microwave ovens that heated only the food and not the container, nuclear bombs and computers. Theirs was the first generation to actually feel technology speed up. A mere half generation later, crude replicators, new forms of Intelligence, immortality and the very reigns of evolution are suddenly within our grasp.

Computers Changed Everything

The BIG invention was computers because they are embedded with memory, logic and calculating power. Shreds of human intelligence. Things sped up dramatically since the computer (including computers) because each generation of computer chip could be harnessed to propagate the next. Now all of our world is speeding up in lockstep with the acceleration of computing.

Centuries ago the pool of innovations we sipped from was small and local. But on the Internet, our global ocean of knowledge and a worldwide pool of innovators are brought together.

Today's automobiles spring both from inventions, knowledge and processes as far back as fire and the wheel as they do from networked minds blanketing the globe.

Is There An End In Sight?

Most of tomorrow's inventions, from new drugs, to enhancing our abilities with embedded computing, to the progress we make with Artificial Intelligence, will be about coping with the acceleration. As a species, we CAN do more than survive. We could thrive and discover ourselves in ways we now believe impossible. But, as far as I can see, the acceleration will eventually go far beyond us. Soon AI will be as good at the same intelligence feedback loop we've been using since the evolution of our opposable thumbs - and accelerating.