Artificial Intelligence  

The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the "wicked" problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute.

The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the "wicked" problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University.

The Human Computation Institute is a nonprofit innovation center dedicated to the betterment of society through novel methods leveraging the complementary strengths of networked humans and machines.  We strive to engineer sustainable participatory systems that have a profound impact on health, humanitarian, and educational outcomes.

In an article published in the journal Science, the authors present a new vision of human computation (the science of crowd-powered systems), which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.

Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pattern recognition to creative abstraction. With the help of computers, these cognitive abilities can be effectively combined into multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.

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Most of today's human computation systems rely on sending bite-sized 'micro-tasks' to many individuals and then stitching together the results. For example, 165,000 volunteers in the EyeWire project have analyzed thousands of images online to help build the world's most complete map of human retinal neurons.

This microtasking approach alone cannot address the tough challenges we face today, say the authors. A radically new approach is needed to solve "wicked problems" - those that involve many interacting systems that are constantly changing, and whose solutions have unforeseen consequences (e.g., corruption resulting from financial aid given in response to a natural disaster).

New human computation technologies can help. Recent techniques provide real-time access to crowd-based inputs, where individual contributions can be processed by a computer and sent to the next person for improvement or analysis of a different kind. This enables the construction of more flexible collaborative environments that can better address the most challenging issues.

This idea is already taking shape in several human computation projects, including YardMap.org, which was launched by the Cornell in 2012 to map global conservation efforts one parcel at a time.

"By enabling members of the general public to play some simple online game, we expect to reduce the time to treatment discovery from decades to just a few years."

"By sharing and observing practices in a map-based social network, people can begin to relate their individual efforts to the global conservation potential of living and working landscapes," says Janis Dickinson, Professor and Director of Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

YardMap allows participants to interact and build on each other's work - something that crowdsourcing alone cannot achieve. The project serves as an important model for how such bottom-up, socially networked systems can bring about scalable changes how we manage residential landscapes.

HCI has recently set out to use crowd-power to accelerate Cornell-based Alzheimer's disease research. WeCureAlz.com combines two successful microtasking systems into an interactive analytic pipeline that builds blood flow models of mouse brains. The stardust@home system, which was used to search for comet dust in one million images of aerogel, is being adapted to identify stalled blood vessels, which will then be pinpointed in the brain by a modified version of the EyeWire system.

"By enabling members of the general public to play some simple online game, we expect to reduce the time to treatment discovery from decades to just a few years", says HCI director and lead author, Dr. Pietro Michelucci. "This gives an opportunity for anyone, including the tech-savvy generation of caregivers and early stage AD patients, to take the matter into their own hands."

"Human computation and machine intelligent might turn out being mutual catalysts," says Michelucci. "Either way, I don't see machine intelligence surpassing human intelligence in the foreseeable future, but putting the two together might produce something that is more than the sum of its parts."

Michelucci further explains the aims of the HCI here.

SOURCE  EurekAlert

By 33rd Square

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 Aging  

Arguably human evolution is now being driven solely by cultural evolution, which may suggest some deeper evolutionary  transition away from biological evolution is already in the process of occurring. An anthropologist now suggests that life extension technology may yield a new human species by as early as 2050.

According to new research by evolutionary anthropologist, Cadell Last your grandchildren be an entirely new kind of human being. The researcher says mankind is undergoing an evolutionary transition as big as previous jumps from monkeys to apes, and apes to humans.

Last's theory was recently published in the journal Current Aging Science.

"The whole of human evolution in some sense can be viewed as our species trying to abolish the category of adulthood. We want to keep the creativity of cultural reproduction into adulthood."

Instead of the biological evolution that caused massive physical changes over millions of years, Last a and researcher at the Global Brain Institute, believes that cultural evolution is changing the human species in a matter of decades.

He thinks that as early as 2050, we'll be living to an average age of 120, making the the biological clock essentially obsolete.

"Humans are naturally interested in music, movies, mathematics, and science and all of these things. So we're just entering a world where we can own our own cultural reproduction, and we can engage in this for an entire lifetime," Last told Aol. "We're not in this world yet, but this is sort of where we're going."

He says human evolution is a long transition from quote, "living fast and dying young" to "living slow and dying old."

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"These are sort of the beginning signs that we're making a transition to a radical life extension — within 20 or 30 years," Last told Business Insider.

"What my paper tries to show is that the whole of human evolution in some sense can be viewed as our species trying to abolish the category of adulthood," Last said. "We want to keep the creativity of cultural reproduction into adulthood."

In Last's paper, he writes:

I predict that the full realization of this life history transition should occur before 2050, which suggests that this theory could be in some way connected to the hypothesized metasystem transition commonly referred to as Global Brain. In order to take this 21st century future seriously we need only assume that the pressures of the modern developed world hold and accelerate globally. First and foremost, the pressures for the acquisition of more advanced cultural information must accelerate as a result of advanced ICT [information and communication technologies]. This will continue to force an extension of a widespread postponement of biological reproduction. Secondly, continued advances in our understanding of aging and degenerative diseases must accelerate dramatically, allowing us to radically extend life expectancy and possibly usher us into a post-aging world. This will remove the evolutionary imperative to create complexity through biological reproduction, as delaying current reproduction would always be preferred in favour of dedication of energy towards culturally mediated growth and maintenance.

"We'll be having babies later in life, and fewer of them, in order to focus on their cultural development," he explained.

"People are going to be able to have more control over how they spend their time and energy, culturally speaking. And that will be a big change, that will be a fundamental difference between industrial society and the society we're making."


SOURCE  Aol

By 33rd Square

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 Artificial Intelligence  

Part of the growing explosion of artificial intelligence systems, Viv, coming soon from the original team behind Apple's Siri, looks to release a virtual assistant that can actually learn about you and your needs.

At the stealth start-up called Viv Labs a small team of engineers claim to be on the verge of realizing an advanced form of AI assistant. As the minds behind Apple's Siri, they are definitely worth listening to.

As part of the growing explosion of artificial intelligence systems, Viv Labs is contributing to the field, and looking ahead.  “Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story,” says Dag Kittlaus, one of Viv’s co-founders.

Kittlaus, and cofounders, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham believe we will all have our own virtual assistant one day. The system will do everything for you – book your flight, make your hotel reservation, remind you to pick up your child from school, and order your next pizza. There are many pieces to this puzzle for it to work. The first one is voice recognition. The second piece is extremely deep domain expertise. For example, in order to book a flight, you need many inputs and access to various websites or travel agents to do the booking.

While Siri, has been explicitly programmed for responses, Viv, say the start-up's founders, will be able to teach itself, opening up almost limitless capabilities. “I want to do something bigger than mobile, bigger than consumer, bigger than desktop or enterprise. I want to do something that could fundamentally change the way software is built,” Cheyer says.

Viv will be able to use your personal preferences and a near-infinite web of connections to answer almost any query and perform almost any function.

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Viv's creators want to make the first consumer-friendly software assistant that truly achieves the initial promise of Siri. They want to make it smart and infinitely flexible and omnipresent. They hope that some day soon it will be embedded in a plethora of Internet-connected everyday objects. Viv founders claim you will use the artificial intelligence system as a utility, the way you draw on electricity. Simply by speaking, you will connect to what they are calling “a global brain.” And that brain can help power a million different apps and devices.

According to the Viv Labs website:

Viv is a global platform that enables developers to plug into and create an intelligent, conversational interface to anything. It is the simplest way for the world to interact with devices, services and things everywhere. Viv is taught by the world, knows more than it is taught, and learns every day.

"Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story."

Viv’s founders don’t see it as just one product tied to a hardware manufacturer. They see it as a service that can be licensed. They imagine that everyone from TV manufacturers and car companies to app developers will want to incorporate Viv’s AI. They see its icon joining the pantheon of familiar symbols like Power On, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

Quite a few things have to go right for Viv to make good on its founders’ promises. It has to prove that its code-making skills can scale to include petabytes of data. It has to continually get smarter through self-learning, and it has to win users, and developers despite not having a preexisting base like Google and Apple have.

Moreover, writes Wired's Steven Levy, "it has to be as seductive as Scarlett Johansson in Her so that people are comfortable sharing their personal information with a robot that might become one of the most important forces in their lives."

When Viv is released, the competition between Siri, Google Now, Amazon’s Fire TV voice, Cortana, and more should heat up even more.

SOURCE  Viv Labs, Wired

By 33rd Square

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 The Singularity

In Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, he discusses three main technologies that will impact the future: G, N and R for genetics, nanotechnology and robotics (which includes the most powerful technology, AI). But did the futurist leave out one very important development that is presently impacting society, economics and people's lives in a very substantial way?

Ray Kurzweil carefully explained in The Singularity Is Near how Genetics (G), Nanotechnology (N) and Robotics (R) are the primary exponential technologies of the coming Singularity.

These "the three overlapping revolutions," he says they will characterize the first half of the twenty-first century. He goes on to say, "These (GNR technologies) will usher in the beginning of the Singularity. We are in the early stages of the 'G' revolution today. By understanding the information processes underlying life, we are starting to learn to reprogram our biology to achieve the virtual elimination of disease, dramatic expansion of human potential, and radical life extension."

Kurzweil then says regarding nanotechnology, "The 'N' revolution will enable us to redesign and rebuild - molecule by molecule - our bodies and brains and the world with which we interact, going far beyond the limitations of biology."

 Of the three (GNR), Ray Kurzweil believes that the most powerful impending revolution is the 'R' revolution as it encompasses artificial intelligence.   He writes, "Human-level robots with their intelligence derived from our own but redesigned to far exceed human capabilities represent the most significant transformation, because intelligence is the most powerful 'force' in the universe.  Intelligence, if sufficiently advanced, is, well, smart enough to anticipate and overcome any obstacles that stand in its path." —

The 'R' acronym essentially encompasses I.J. Goode's "intelligence explosion," that is for many itself synonymous with the Singularity.

Are the GNR technologies enough though?  Could Kurzweil have overlooked other factors that will power and accelerate the technological Singularity?

One possible acronym that might be 'C' for connectedness, or connectivity, communication, or even cooperation.

We are now well into the development and implementation of 'C' technologies from the telegraph to the telephone, to the internet. As these technologies continually become faster, cheaper and closer to direct incorporation into our bodies and minds, they are a key component of the technological Singularity.

Consider the impact of the internet itself.  In The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil does not really lump the Internet into a G, N or R category, and obviously the world-wide-web impacts all of these areas, from allowing scientists and researchers to communicate there ideas with unprecedented speed and reach.

For nanotechnology, Kurzweil also mentions that the devices we will implant into our own bloodstreams will communicate with intelligent software and other online services.  Artificial intelligence systems will obviously interact and communicate with people and other AIs via the internet as well.

In Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis also explore 'C' technologies that are empowering the Singularity from competitions, to crowd sourcing and on-line education.  These tools empower the technophilanthopists and DIY innovators Diamadis and Kotler describe to further accelerate technological development.  Information and communications technologies are, as a result, key building blocks of their Abundance Pyramid.

Another 'C' acronym word that might even be included is culture.  As Ronald Wright points out in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny:

Next humans started with a completely second kind of evolution: cultural evolution (the evolutions of ideas, memes, and technologies).  Amazingly, that evolution has sustained the trajectory that biological evolution has established towards greater complexity and cooperation.

Kotler and Diamandis point out that the cultural evolution brought about the most powerful tools for cooperation the world has ever seen.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs also points out, "In the world's most remote villages the conversation now often turns to the most up-to-date political and cultural events, all empowered by cell phones even more than radio and television."

Possibly a 'C' could also represent the rise of the global brain.  The global represents the worldwide intelligent network formed by all the individuals of this planet, together with the information and communication technologies that connect them into a self-organizing whole.

According the Wikipedia definition of the global brain: as the internet becomes faster, more intelligent, and more encompassing, it increasingly ties us together into a single information processing system, which functions like a nervous system for the planet Earth. The intelligence of this network is collective or distributed: it is not centralized or localized in any particular individual, organization or computer system. It rather emerges from the dynamic networks of interactions between its components, a property typical of complex adaptive systems.

Image Source: Stefan Larsson

Cybernetisist Cliff Joslyn points out that,

We are seeing a vast increase in the variety of kinds of activities and information available to individuals. This does not just facilitate human freedom, it effectively is human freedom in the sense of there being an increasing variety of possible states of human experience and actions. But on the other hand, constraints are introduced from the global level through economic and technological processes, and “canalization” and self-organizing around norms, protocols, and economic structures. 

The 'C' technologies that are helping give rise to the global brain will also make use of the cognitive surplus, a term conceived of  by Clay Shirky who notes that we are experiencing an era where people like to produce and share just as much, if not more than they like to consume. With technology allowing the production and sharing as never before we will see a new era of participation that will lead to big change.

As the newly formed Global Brain Institute looks to the phenomenon of the global brain,

We see people, machines and software systems as agents that communicate via a complex network of communication links. Problems, observations, questions or opportunities define challenges that may incite these agents to act.

Challenges that cannot be fully resolved by a single agent are normally propagated to one or more other agents, along the links in the network. These agents contribute their own expertise to resolving the challenge, and if necessary propagate the challenge further, until it is fully resolved. Thus, the skills and knowledge of the different agents are pooled into a collective intelligence much more powerful than the one of its individual members.

The propagation of challenges across the global network is a complex, self-organizing process, similar to the "spreading activation" that characterizes thinking in the human brain. This process will typically change the network by reinforcing useful links, while weakening the others. Thus, the network learns or adapts to new challenges, becoming more intelligent in the process.

With the Internet of Things also bringing our machines online it is essential that the thinking around 'C' technologies not be limited to person-to-person communication or cooperation.  Today, there are about two Internet-connected devices for every man, woman and child on the planet. By 2025, analysts are forecasting that this ratio will rise past six. Therefore can expect to grow to nearly 50 billion Internet-connected devices in the next decade.

"Eventually," Kurzweil writes "we will merge with these technologies." At that point, the Singularity, humans will become immortal and capable of changing their forms and environments at will, Kurzweil believes.

"There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine nor between physical and virtual reality," Kurzweil writes in his book.

As Eric Savitz from Forbes points out, "This fabric of technology will allow us to measure systems on a global scale and at the same time offer a never before seen resolution. This capability to bring the big picture into sharp focus enables us to provide a real-time digital representation of our constantly changing world. This is the first step in a journey to explain the world will live in, our role in it and our impact upon it."

The connectedness expressed via concepts like the global brain, to this end, represents also how humanity will potentially merge with machine intelligence.  Based on the idea that the global brain will arise from the connections as a new form of intelligence, perhaps it belongs as part of Kurzweil's 'R' technologies?

There is no denying that GNR technologies are powering the exponential growth of human capbility that will ultimately create a technoligical Singularity, but without 'C' technologies as well, none of the others would be possible, or even matter. What else do you think Kurzweil potentially left out of his definition of  the Singularity?

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