All posts by Jim Muttram

What is the next phase for humanity? Robin Hanson set out to answer this question in a thought-provoking and lively talk to London Futurists on March 19th.

He argues that humanity has been through several distinct economic growth phases each of which has been “exponential” in character. The first lasted nearly 200,000 years from the moment Homo Sapiens first emerged as hunter-gatherers. These early humans were vastly superior to the animals they replaced, successfully exploiting their environment through the use of organisation and tools. The next economic era began with the arrival of agriculture about 10,000 years ago and brought about a huge acceleration in development, with efficient use of labour and larger and more sophisticated societies. This ended with the birth of the third era, the industrial era, which started around 1760. Again, an exponential increase in economic output and efficiency. This gave way to the computer age in which we currently are. The exponential periods of these eras has been becoming shorter and shorter with world GDP doubling roughly every 15 to 20 years today.

What, Hanson asked, could create an economy which doubles every week or month?

And the answer he comes up with is – robots.

What Hanson means by “robots” is true general artificial intelligence and he argues there are three ways to do this: better software, a comprehensive theory of intelligence, or emulating a human brain.

And it is his belief that the most likely scenario is that we will first develop the capacity to emulate a human brain and that this should happen “sometime in the next century”.

All we need, he argues, are “many parallel computers” which are capable of scanning a human brain, modelling every brain cell type and recording what we see and then “running the model”.

This doesn’t mean we need to understand how a brain works – he thinks we may be centuries away from this. But we would be able to run what he calls “EMs” – short for emulations.

If we had them there would be a new age – the age of EM.

It is this new era, then, that he sets out to describe. Running in software, EMs are effectively immortal -“like houses and cars, if we choose”. But it’s unlikely EMs will choose to be – much more likely that they will spawn short-lived versions of themselves to carry out repetitive or one-off tasks and then shut these down when they have served their purpose.

The new age will have new morals – EMs will probably be OK with termination and respooling.

Partly this is simply a result of obsolescence – “Currently if the economy doubles every 15 years your skills as an individual become obsolete in that time.” This is why we retire and let the next generation learn the next set of skills. “In the world of the EM faster emulation means faster obsolescence.”

They will run faster because, even though these new consciouses are essentially human brains, “human brains are parallel so more hardware means more speed.” And they will take up very little space as they only really need to inhabit robot bodies when they need to do something in the physical instead of the virtual world. Hanson believes most of the time they will inhabit a purely virtual environment.

Hanson sees the birth of EMs as inevitable – they will be developed to speed economic development. And in the early days humans will own the EMs – much like slaves were owned. But just like slaves, some EMs will “buy” their freedom and from there they will quickly make up more and more of the economy (which may now be doubling in a matter of weeks or days). Because they are so cheap to create (an EM could be copied millions of times at very little cost) and because they cost so little to run he says wages will effectively fall to way below human subsistence wages.

Humans will be eclipsed. The whole human race will retire.

Whether that retirement is a happy or a tragic one is very much up to us, he believes, as we will be quite rich enough as a whole to ensure a good outcome, although those riches will be extremely unequally distributed.

But either way, we might be retiring into a very different world. “Robots don’t need nature” he says. “They may choose to save nature but don’t need to.”

And if we are thinking all this doesn’t sound too good, and that we humans are bound to resist, he doesn’t really buy the “robot wars” scenario, either. “There wasn’t a farmer-industry war during the switch to the industrial era.”

So if this new era could begin soon, how long will it last? Hanson believes that because EMs will be running so fast the whole era could last just a couple of years. After that, maybe they will develop true software AI which will spawn the next era – who knows….

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University.

Business, Climate Change, Economics

More promise for solar breakthroughs

20th March 2016 Jim Muttram 2 Comments

Sample 3D Modules Credit: Allegra Boverman

The 3D solar towers being developed by MIT illustrate just how much further we have to go in stretching the still new technology of solar power. These experimental towers are up to 20 times as efficient as today’s flat roof panels.

If the British Government needed any further evidence that the plans for Hinkley Point are misguided, this should give them pause. Guaranteeing to pay three times today’s price for electricity for the next 30 years against a backdrop of dramatic increases in efficiency of solar power (which has already reached price parity in many places at today’s prices) is lunacy.

I would be tempted to conclude that the decision is ideological, but I just can’t see how a Conservative government getting into bed with a French state utility and the Chinese Government to make their white elephant a reality gels with the Conservative free market philosophy. Perhaps it is simply that having large grey boxes hidden away on the coasts are easier on the eye than rooftop solar panels and windfarms? Who knows.

Futurism

Future Shock

11th March 2016 Jim Muttram 2 Comments

There was a very perceptive article in the current issue of the Economist which argued, basically, that Moore’s Law is in sight of breaking down. The result, though, is maybe not what you might think. Progress may not necessarily just get slower; it is more likely to be much, much more unpredictable.

The reasons, according to the Economist are because these days there is so much more that is important than just the single chip in a single computer, among them the role of software, the cloud and new, specialised architectures optimised for particular tasks.

I think we can see some of this unpredictability unfolding in front of our eyes as Google’s Go-playing computer AlphaGo has beaten Lee Sedol, ranked number 4 in the world, in the first two of their best-of-five series. Go is seen as a special challenge to AI because it is very much more complex than chess and a “brute force” approach won’t work.

The really interesting thing about this match is that it was generally thought we were 10 years away from building a computer which could win at Go. AlphaGo surprised the world back in October last year when it won against Fan Hui who is ranked 633rd in the world. What has taken Lee Sedol by surprise is how much better the program has become since – we was apparently quite certain he could beat it.

Hold on to your seats – we could be in for some really quite startling surprises in the coming months and years.

Business, Economics, Futurism, Uncategorized

The industries of the future

25th February 2016 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

The question Alec Ross set out to answer at the RSA today was: “If the last 25 years shaped by Internet, what comes next?” His book T he Industries of the Future addresses the question more fully, but for the audience today he focussed on two examples: robots and AI, and genomics.

He began, though, with central thesis: if land was the raw material of agricultural age and iron the raw material of the industrial age, then data is the raw material of the information age.

“We now live in the age of zettabyte, he said. “90% world’s data has been produced in the last two years.” There are now 16bn internet connected devices and by 2020 that number will have grown to 40bn. “Harvesting of actionable business or medial intelligence from this data will create the trillion dollar industries of the future.”

But now for the two example industries of the future.

” The cartoons of the 70s will be the reality of 2020s,” he argues. One of the key advances is the fact that we finally seem to have cracked the problem of robots grasping – a surprisingly difficult task, he says. The other is the advent of “cloud robotics”. This means robots don’t have to be packed with hardware and software if they are connected to the cloud. “We don’t have to invent millions of very clever robots.”

He uses the example of Foxconn, the Chinese giant responsible for vast numbers of iPhones and Samsung Galaxies. Foxconn is a poster child for globalisation with 973,000 employees in China. But the ceo says he’s not going to hire any more people and instead is now buying $14k robots. He argues humans are “CAPEX-light, but OPEX-heavy” whereas robots are the opposite.

This is the start of a profound trend. “Cloud robotics coupled with rise of AI will mean a move to non-routine and cognitive work.”

The second industry of the future he focussed on is the commercialisation of genomics. “It has been 15 years since the first mapping of human genome and finally we are now within two or three years” of really beginning to reap the benefits he says. Diagnostic test are now in development with are over 100 times more sensitive than MRI scanning, holding out the prospect that we could have an annual blood test which could detect virtually all cancers at stage 1, when they are eminently curable, he predicts.

However, all these advances come with “promise and peril”.

“Tomorrow will be better than today for most of us. But you have to be pretty clever to navigate your way through with the pace of change increasing all the time.”

There were other topics which came up in the Q&A on which he had salient views:

Cyber security: “Weaponisation of code is the most signification development since the weaponisation of atoms. The difference is weaponisation of code is much easier. Once it is done it can be copied. I have a very dark view – the threat from cyber weapons is closer than that of nuclear weapons.”

The importance of gender equality: “There is a correlation between women on board and economic performance,” he said, citing a study from the Peterson Centre for International Economics.

Economics: “This the the key question,” he said. The problem dynamic is “bounty and spread”. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1bn it had only 20 employees. Kodak, which went bust at pretty much the same time, had 120,000 employees. When we create these internet billionaires we have a “corresponding obligation to use the resources of the plutocrats to avoid creating a violent under-privileged underclass”.

R&D: “Those states and societies (like Russia) which have dialed R&D down are saving money in the short term but killing themselves in the long run.” China, he says, is being smart. “They believe they missed out on the commercialisation of the Internet and they are putting a spectacular amount of investment in genomics and clean tech” so they don’t miss out of these coming revolutions.

Economics, Politics

Loss aversion and the EU referendum

24th February 2016 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

eu-union-jack-flags Given the prevalence of the “loss aversion” cognitive bias, it should in theory be highly unlikely that the British population votes to leave the EU. As a refresher, here’s how Wikipedia defines it:

In economics and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains

The “out” camp have to persuade the electorate that leaving the EU will result in upside for them and the country. The “in” camp on the other hand need to focus on the benefits of the status quo and the risk of downside to the electorate and the country from leaving. Given the mechanics of loss aversion it should be very much easier for the latter than the former, especially against the backdrop of a split electorate.

Business, Economics, Futurism, Internet Economy, Society

Network Society: the coming socio-economic phase transformation

21st February 2016 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

The world is headed for a big transition, says David Orban, entrepreneur and Singularity University faculty member, speaking at a London Futurists lecture in London on February 6th.

“Technology created humans,” he says. “And we continue to use reason to advance technology for humanity’s benefit.” But the key to the future wellbeing of society lies in practicing open science and having an open society, he says.

Historically we are always “shackled to moral norms by limitations of technology” he says. For example we had child labour because our technology wasn’t good enough to run industrial revolution mills without them. We had slavery because our agricultural and engineering techniques were running behind our economic development.

Now we destroy the environment because it is deemed necessary in order for economies to grow and citizens to consume. Once these ills become untenable, necessity drives alternatives, he says.

Widespread social and cultural change only happens once a robust technology platform underpins them

The networked exponential technologies which are coming next are going to profoundly disrupt the Nation State, he argues.

Solar panels are a good example. When people put solar panels on their roofs they make lots of small decisions, each of which doesn’t cost much. When the State makes energy decision for the country it is done by one big, long term centralised project (think Hinkley Point). The opportunity to call the future wrong is vastly more in the second case than the former.

Another example is 3D printing. This can stop waste from centralised manufacturing getting it wrong but distributes power to the consumer.

And growing food hydroponically in the basement of apartment blocks, reduces waste by bringing food production close to the consumer, using exact quantities of nutrients and light and heat, and growing year-round.

And there are lots more examples, he says:

Health sensors keeping people healthy
MOOCs educating people wherever they are
Crypto currencies reducing the cost of transactions and challenging the power of the banks
Even Airbnb competing with security agencies through “a self-reinforcing reputation system which expels from the network if breached”

All such examples are inevitably portrayed as passing fads, he says, but they are in fact part of unstoppable trend.

In this environment exponential technologies lead to exponential uncertainties, he says. There is great value for those whose get it right.

The next trillion dollar companies are being born right now

What has to happen next, he argues, is for computers to be allowed to make decisions by themselves. The world is rapidly become too complex and fast-moving for humans to be the only decision-makers. The LHC, for example, throws away 99% of data itself because it knows it is of no value and the human scientists would become overwhelmed. “Self-driving cars need to make their own decisions.”

Dumb machines must lose and smart machines must win

The idea that it is essential for humans to have the last word was fatally undermined when Andreas Lubitz decided to deliberately fly Flight 9525 into a mountainside, he says. “Planes must be able to disobey and save their passengers.”

But for computers to make decision we need to make them moral. We have a “cosmic responsibility to adapt and face our challenges” he says. We need a global network of ideas which can evolve scaleable solutions. First there will be a science of morality then we will need to engineer morality into our machines. It is, he says, inevitable.

The promise of the fully networked society is great, but the outcome isn’t a given. “It is up to us whether this phase transition will be peaceful or not”, he says. The current levels of inequality will be just the start unless we meet the challenge to change society so that everyone can enjoy the coming benefits. “We cannot continue vilify the unemployed as we do now,” he says, because in the future we all will be unemployed.

David Orban is an entrepreneur, a member of the Faculty of, and Advisor to the Singularity University, and the Founder of Network Society Research, a London based global non-profit.

Business

How smart is the Smart Keyboard?

26th January 2016 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

The Smart Keyboard for my iPad Pro arrived today and I’ve done a quick bit of testing. As for the typing capabilities – not bad at all. The keyboard is pretty responsive to the fingers and well-spaced so even though it was unfamiliar to me, quite a fast speed can be reached and I guess I should get faster the more I use it.
Another plus, folded the keyboard isn’t as bulky on the front of the iPad as I had feared.
Does it turn the iPad into a laptop replacement?
I don’t think so just yet, but it will increase the utility to the point that the device can be used solo in more situations and for longer. iCloud could be the key, as storing documents remotely means a fairly high number of day-to-day uses could increasingly be covered by the Pro providing productivity software like Pages and Numbers continues to grow in sophistication.
Whether this combo amounts to value-for-money, though, is quite another question.

Futurism

Flying car at last?

8th January 2016 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

The thing most disappointing to life-long technophiles is that the flying car we have always dreamt of never came.

In many ways we far exceeded the dreams of futurists past. The modern smart phone is vastly more powerful and capable than anyone could have predicted and the modern internet is a phenomenon way beyond prediction.

Some things which were predicted did come to pass – Dick Tracy’s wrist radio (Apple – and Android – watch) and Star Trek’s universal translator (Google translate) for example. But no flying car.

At least not until now. At CES this week Chinese company EHang showcased the EHang 184, a human-sized drone designed to take it’s owner at 60 mph for 23 minutes completely automatically. Obviously there are many, many hurdles to overcome before anyone will actually be able to fly such a device in open sky. But it it does seem to me that this might just be part of the future.

You only have to watch a movie like The Fifth Element to realise the hopeless impracticality of allowing humans to drive things in three dimensions. But maybe it’s the coming of self-driving cars which will finally allow the flying car to become a reality. If computers can reliably and safely drive us around in two dimensions, why not let them branch out into three. The frameworks necessary to allow self-driving cars to become a reality on our roads would, on the face of it, seem relatively simple to extend to the corridors of sky, too.

So, although EHang seems ridiculously optimistic at the moment, maybe the company is on to something.

Society

Reinventing society

15th October 2015 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

Veteran management guru Charles Handy has been thinking about curves. He told a packed session at the RSA today that everything moves through curves which go up before declining.

The tricky thing is that “you have to start the second curve before you reach the top of the one you are on.” As he puts it: “The status quo is the enemy of the second curve.”

He said he had been struck by the observation that so much of what we do today seems to have been designed for a world that has passed. “So I thought I would look at other aspects of society.”

In his book Second Curve he looks at many aspects of modern society through the lens of first and second curves. And sometimes second curves are not an improvement.

Take business for instance. He says the purpose of a business used to be quite clear – it was to acquire customers. That changed with the arrival of the Chicago School of economists headed by Milton Freedman who challenged this by asserting that the shareholders were key. Subsequently the point of the firm became to make the shareholders rich. In order to do this effectively an incentive in the form of share options was provided. “So managers decided to increase the share price which isn’t too hard to do, by cutting investment for example.”

Capitalism is broken and its Milton Freedman’s fault.

He points to the current craze for share buybacks as the logical conclusion of this. This, though, bleeds the corporations of investment capital. “Thus was a disastrous second curve.”

Curves don’t hurt apply to corporations. “What is the invidual’s second curve?” He asks. The answer he says is his “portfolio lifestyle” – Redefine what a job is, he urges and work for customers not employers.

The education system gets a workout, too. “Look at our education system,” he says. “It’s bizarre.”

Emotional intelligence is what we need for the world we are moving into he says, so we should rejig our education system, make the leaving age 14 and then have tailored apprenticeships for the next four years.

What about the welfare state? Redesign it along Singaporean lines he says. In Singapore all citizens have a Provident Fund which provides for unemployment support, healthcare and retirement. Because both the individual and the company pay in, it is seen as an investment instead of tax, he says.

What is the second curve for politics someone asked from the floor.

He didn’t answer directly but did point out a weakness with the current British system. We have developed a political class he says because you have to be an MP to be a minister. Most other countries don’t insist on this and as a result their talent pool for recruitment is much much larger.

In his book he says he is “throwing out ideas to provoke not prescribe.” On that level it seems to work. But in other respects observations on some areas seem dated. Take his thought on education and the welfare state. These are based on the notion that gainful work will be available to all. That notion is now being powerfully questioned.

Business, Internet Economy

How to build a company

26th September 2015 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

I spotted ReWork on my bookshelf yesterday and it reminded me how much I had enjoyed reading this thought-provoking account of 37 Signals’ business philosophy. That inspired me to see if I could find Jason Fried, the founder, talking about his approach and I found it here.

Here are some of the main points:

Don’t lose control of your growth. The key decision the company took was to limit the maximum price on customer could pay (initially $99 a month). This means the company has hundreds of thousands of customers, but none of them are so big that losing them would cause a ripple. Key to this is not to customise – one product, one code base.

Hire late not early. Many companies hire ahead of when they think they will need resources, especially if they have received funds from investors. This is a big mistake, Fried argues. Hiring early means there’s often not real work yet for the newcomer to do. That leads the company to make up work which is not important – a cardinal sin, in Fried’s philosophy. A related point: never hire for new type of position before you’ve had someone in the company try it first and fail. That way you know exactly what you need to get done and can hire appropriately.

Develop an audience. This is different from developing a fan base. An audience comes back to you time and time again. It takes time to build up, but once there is the most powerful way to get products out. Spend money on teaching and sharing, not marketing. 37 Signals has no salespeople: “We only want to have people who are building the product.”

Focus on the things which will stay the same. Most companies spend most time focussed on new things, innovations. But this piece of advice, from Jeff Bezos, the only investor in 37 Signals, was key. In Amazon’s case the things which will always stay the same are low price, good selection and great logistics. No matter what else changes, these fundamentals will hold true. In 37 Signals’ case the core unchanging things are simplicity, clarity and speed.

Inflection Point