Singularity and the common man

For some time people have proposed the idea of a moment when machine intelligence will outstrip that of not only humans as individuals but that of the entire collective race. Ray Kurzweil has predicted this in around 2040 and suggests that at this time artificial intelligence will be able to solve all the problems of the world and elevate mankind to a state of pampered security without the need for jobs, money or struggle against illness.
Is this possible or just hogwash? Strangely, despite my cynical nature I think so! There are however, as always, caveats that will make such a process difficult in the shorter term and which will make transition to such a new age of plenty very painful for some.
The greatest question of what will we do when machines can do everything? springs to mind. There is indeed a possibility that this might be answered sooner rather than later and this answer will become a test for how we deal with what may be inevitable.
Today Google and now others have perfectly functional self-driving cars that perform driving tasks far more reliably than people. A self driving vehicle cannot become drunk or use recreational drugs. Neither can they fall asleep at the wheel or suffer bouts of road rage. While not even truly intelligent, the software mechanisms and hardware integration is simple enough that the processing power in a mobile phone can now take on the principle job of truck drivers the world over. Companies would certainly prefer to have a tireless self driving truck deliver goods without obligatory rest stops or accidents caused by overworked drivers distracted by their CB radio or texting while driving. Unions however will inevitably see this as erosion of rights and an excuse for companies to eliminate their entire workforce in favour of robot vehicles. Unless it is done carefully, the destruction of robot trucks will be guaranteed by all ex truck drivers and a new age of luddite values will hold sway.
The truck driver then must probably become the model for this new world order that will surely arrive if we continue to develop intelligent machines that can take on otherwise human tasks. Truck drivers will necessarily become well-paid and pampered chaperones of machines with a highly desirable job that will probably become regulated by a guild structure once again. After all, when you have to do nothing but accompany a robot truck on a thirty seven hour non-stop journey with no stress and no actual work to do, well then everyone will want to be a truck driver!
Once again, the traditional job of the desperate immigrant, Taxi driving, would be eliminated by self driving, one hundred percent safe and reliable taxis. Of course, the process of ensuring that excessively drunk passengers do not board and that vandalism does not take place during the journey should rightly fall to a supervisor who should be paid for their work. This would continue until such times as the taxi itself is intelligent enough to refuse a fare based upon the comportment of the client or go directly to a police station if vandalism is instigated.
As society becomes more used to the idea that we have no choice but to pay people for doing essentially nothing, so then will companies have to accept that giving away their goods for free is the norm. Why should a food distributor pay a wage when they can simply feed their employees instead? Logical knock-on consequences would continue up and down the supply chain such that organised barter would become a great part of the commercial structure. This all implies that radical and fundamental changes must occur in society if we are to continue on track in our technological development.
The logical conclusion of this becomes a race of humans with no need for work. This could mean no need for education because education today is mostly preparation for work. The possible future portrayed in E. M. Forster's <i>The Machine Stops</i> is too horrible to imagine yet all too possible. Another possible future would be that the human race would be subject to compulsory continuous secular education interspersed with the creation of personal development projects.
The ultimate question of what will we do when machines can do everything else is probably that we could spend a long and full life raising children with no need to worry about war, with no need for money and no worry about health care costs. Insurance would be redundant, as would the mortgage. These two burdens alone would alleviate vast suffering because the need for a country with vast resources to maintain them within it's borders to promote the cycle of cashflow would also be redundant meaning that resources could be shared with the rest of the world. The truth is that more well-off people have fewer children and spend more time improving their own minds and bodies. This could become universal. What will be required without doubt is original creative work by people to share with others. The currency of the human race in such a world would be the currency of fame engendered by the personal talents of exceptional people. No longer would the billionaire be the most important person but the actor, the sportsman, the writer, the comedian. The intangible products of the human mind are after all the true currency of society, everything else is support and enablement.

The future of the human race

I took two of my children, Julia and Aran with me yesterday when I went to see some folks at Sensorit, a spinoff company of Microsoft France. Sensorit do gesture aware interfaces based on the Microsoft Kinect device most often used on X-Box games platforms but, of course, Kinect is just an input system so using it to recognise hand, arm or even whole body movement as an input stream to control software other than games is a logical step in a logical direction.

Aran is seven years old. He has never seen a telephone with a dial, he has lived all his life in a world that has The Internet and Google, his house is filled with computers and his dad, your's truly, works in an industry that deals in the ultimate abstraction of software architectures and user interfaces. He has had no formal training in the use of computers but he understands the use of a mouse, clicks, double clicks and context clicks. He understands at a fairly deep level that a progress bar shows a position on a time-line. certainly, he understands it well enough to put himself back where he left off in an on-demand program or video on You Tube. 

Sensorit have just created an interactive map of Paris that can be navigated by simple gestures. Zooming, scrolling, selecting and so-on can be accomplished using body gestures with arms and hands. This was effectively exactly what was so stunningly amazing about the first sequences of the film Minority Report. Interaction with a computer using a mixture of voice and gesture to sort through and select data from a visual database.

Within a few minutes Aran had gleaned all he needed to know from the system to begin to interact with it. Interestingly, the engineers said that Aran did all the things that an adult would do and made them think more deeply about the interface and its possible shortcomings. Using this system Aran was able to "fly" over the map, scrolling and selecting areas for deeper study, zooming in and out to get greater or lesser detail as needed. He didn't need a course in computer interfaces, it just happened.

Children born today will grow up in a world that has a Higgs Boson. They will probably have a quantum computer in their pocket where we carry a smart-phone. Their phones might be really smart, like Siri but with true intelligence and a real personality. Their cars will drive themselves so teen-agers won't have to die in stupid drunk-driving accidents. One thing is for sure. There's no going back from here.

Paranormal activity on the increase. 400% rise!

Hello and welcome to my little experiment. Have you arrived at my blog because you searched for paranormal activity? Well, thanks so much for coming and helping to prove that the world is a strange place because it has folks like you in it.
A few days ago I posted a little tongue-in-cheek post about mermaids that was a response to the number of, well, lets tell it like it is shall we? IDIOTS who called into marine scientific institutes, the offices of the Discovery Channel and other places because the aforementioned TV channel had made a spoof documentary suggesting the existence of those mythical beasts.
The thing that surprised me most of all was that my hits on my blog went soaring through the roof and I decided to attempt a little experiment to see whether another headline would draw even more, well, lets say it again shall we? IDIOTS- to read what was posted.

Anyone who reads my blog on any sort of regular basis, and there are a few, will know that my tolerance for things unscientific is slightly less than zero and the mere mention of anything that might be construed as nonsense mumbo-jumbo promulgated by, well, lets.... you get the picture... brings a shudder to my spine in the same way that a slug sandwich might.

If you are indeed an idiot. Please leave this blog by clicking on the image shown to the right of this text ->

Existence of mermaids finally proven!

Something which I have hoped for these many long years is that the existence of the mermaid (piscespartes dominia) has been finally confirmed. US government science advisors have rushed to deny this after the discovery channel released the news this last week but there's no fooling the canny folks who live along the eastern seaboard of the USA and who are even now packing up rod and reel with a view to catching themselves a trophy. Never mind the traditional formaldehyde Marlin or the demure and tasteful Billy Bass mounted on the den wall. Imagine what the boys in the fraternity would say to a beautifully stuffed mermaid with pert little titties and a big-ole sardine tail "down below"

Of course, none of this would be possible without the intervention of the good-ole-boys in the North Carolina state legislature who say that we don't have to believe scientists any more and that we can rely on historical evidence for all our daily truths. The bible has real pictures of mermaids that were drawn by a man who actually seen 'em in real life when he signed on aboard Noah's ark as a deck hand.  The picture is in the Nuremberg Bible so it has to be true! Those mermaids even have a little mer-dog to get the newspapers in for them. Ahhh.

So, there you have it. Santa Claus is true because NORAD tracks him wherever he goes. Mermaids exist because it says so on Discovery channel and especially in the Bible which we all know cannot tell a lie and never EVER cuts down apple trees. God did make little green apples cause Tony Bennet said so and that's good enough for most people. Darwin was a lying poof and that poor tortoise, lonesome George only died because that SOB gave him a vernacular disease. Y'all have a good one!

China thanks your continued support of filthy murdering bastards

Do you own a pair of Nike shoes or an iPhone or anything "made in China"? I know I do. Cheap, almost slave labour, has made China a financial superpower in a few decades because they can make all the ridiculous plastic crap and electronic geegaws far cheaper than countries that have a social conscience, benefits for disabled or unemployed people and a modicum of social freedom.
China's iron rule of Tibet, including the brutal forced sterilization of young girls before they get a chance to breed and the continued violent suppression of Tibetan national identity is as bad, if not worse than the atrocities carried out by Nazis during world war two. At least the Nazis centralised and documented all of their crimes. The Chinese simply carry on day after day killing, ethnically cleansing and repressing everyone they can.
Recent outrage over the forced abortion of a seven month pregnancy which resulted in graphic images of a violated young mother and her murdered child are but the tip of the iceberg and the rage generated is no more than a quiet snivel.
Governments should wage war against China by starving it of income. Enable zero tax zones in western countries that would enable manufacturing to be moved back to Europe and America. Place crippling import duties on Chinese goods so that they have to spend a dwindling cash supply on internal affairs and are prevented from buying up large swathes of Africa and South America.
Every thing you buy from China enriches them and condones their actions. The trouble is, when they expand because of their vast resources, it'll be your daughter that they sterilize for not being Chinese enough.

WAHOO GPS!!!

I was looking for an open source GPS framework and had found one written in C and C++ which I thought about putting my mind to packaging as a DLL somehow but this is perfect for me.

The GPS3 project on CodePlex and the DotSpatial project will enable me to create my glass cockpit system easily.

All I need now is a small battery operated touchscreen PC!

Congratulations to Venezuela

In this article, Venezuela enacts a law banning the commercial sale of guns and ammunition to private owners. What an enlightened stance from the embattled neighbours of the knee-jerk reactive and constitutionally stunted United States.

Facebook shares. What did you expect?

The Facebook "debacle" is a term much bandied about today. I find it very difficult to imagine how anyone thought an IPO for a company based upon the whimsical fads of users could be an investment of any kind. This is just another example of post 90's dot-com fever that people should have looked at and said "Once bitten-twice shy"

One of the big problems is that Facebook's attempts to monetize a free web-app has been to open up the system to intrusive and frankly egregiously pushy applications. When one uses an app these days the first page says "MyCrapApp will have the right to see your personal data, access your friends lists and post on your behalf" I tried this for a couple of days with the SchoolFeed application which became so annoyingly free with posting on my behalf that it was difficult for friends and family to decide what I was actually doing in amongst all the carefully constructed spam.

Facebook now has vast restrictions, having to satisfy shareholder demands. Unfortunately, the demand for shareholder profits will be nearly impossible to realise because as popular as Facebook is, it cannot compete in the same space as Google for advertising revenue.

It won't be long before the shareholders boot Zuckerberg from the board, the "team" who takes over will never be able to drive the worlds greatest white-elephant in any meaningful direction so Facebook will become the next (or next but n) MySpace.

I give Facebook three years before it becomes a cheap buyout for Google or Microsoft to gain a few hundred million hang-on users. Mark had better put his billions in a nice interest earning account someplace and learn to live a frugal life.

Lacking in tech

I've spent twenty years posting wildly about tech issues. I had a CompuServe account and was very active on those forums, Later my bobpowell.com site became popular as a support site for Stingray products I had written, then my "External Monologue" and bobpowell.net sites became well used by people looking for help with graphics and Windows Forms stuff.
Lately I have become jaded. My dad died a short time ago, my children have had problems that absorbed all my time and I'm a bit short on enthusiasm.
I'll continue to post and you can continue to look but please accept my apologies if the content doesn't meet with your exacting standards. Maybe I'll have a burst of energy soon but don't hold your breath.
Bob.

Wildly off topic but here goes...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120523200749.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

I am a father of eight and have been present at all the births of all my children. Childbirth is a perfectly natural process that most women could comfortably handle on their own or with a few wise grandmas around to push things in the right direction.

Laying a woman on her back is the worst thing that can be imposed upon her in labour. It restricts the movement so vital to ease the baby on its way. Women naturally stand, wiggle their hips, crouch, crawl on all fours and move into more comfortable positions during labour they NEVER EVER lay down unless forced to do so.

Pain relief methods such a Pethidine slow what might otherwise be a quick process and of all the births I've seen that had no intervention whatsoever were the ones that passed the quickest and with least trauma to mother and child.

Ok. Birth is a messy business. Amniotic fluid, blood, and shit all gets mixed up. When a baby crowns, the child is usually face up, nose toward the mother's belly but as it progresses through the cervix and down the vagina, the child turns so that its face is towards the mother's arse. With all that pushing going on, the mother usually craps at the same time and the baby's face passes within an inch of the rectum. This is enormously important because it is at this time that the child gets a good smear of mum's excrement across his lips, injecting him with her gut flora and kick-starting his own life-long friendly bacteria culture.

Of course, in the clean-room environment of the Cesarean operation where mum's that are too posh to push have the child torn from their uterus with scalpel and rubber glove, no one imagined that a great medical procedure would be to take a rectal swab from the mother and pop it in baby's mouth before they get wheeled off to their nice clean little lives.

Violent Action

How strange that my blog post of the other day should coincide so neatly with the problems of Sea Shepherd leader, Paul Watson who seems to be embroiled in an attempt to extradite him for attempted murder of crew members of a boat that was involved in shark finning for sharks fin soup.
I wholeheartedly support the Sea Shepherd mandate and would even encourage them to spend money on a well-armed submarine rather than a flashy gin-palace style boat.
Get serious, buy something with which you can sink the filthy bastards that destroy our ocean heritage.

When does a minority become a majority?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18100457#
This article kinda suggests that the nice stable world of white middle class America just became a significant minority.
The current birthrate figures suggest that in just twenty or so years, the USA will become a place where white people are the minority. This may be a good thing and teach them to get along with their neighbors a little better.
As a "wetback" myself, or at least, that was the perception I had as an H1B Visa holder in the US, I can well appreciate the prejudice that can be levied upon one if "y'all ain't from around here are ya?" Perhaps a majority of people who don't follow the conservative white ideals will breathe a breath of fresh air into a nation so set upon it's quasi-aryan supremacy.

Computer science degrees overrated

The recent article about the demise of Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo! serves to highlight the fact that degrees in computer science are massively overrated and, like degrees in Business Studies, they only serve to fill out the CV to get you to something better.

I can honestly say that I have never met a raw graduate of Computer Science who was good for anything in a commercial programming job. Everything important in that field comes from experience after some period of learning has been finished. Likewise, no good company would appoint a raw business studies graduate as a CEO right off the bat.

People are penalised too much today. Even blatantly lying about a CS degree is something that many many job applicants do. What should really matter is did the guy do the job better than anyone else available? More fundamentally, can they do the job at-all?

Being harangued out of a great job by a smart-ass hedge fund manager is ignominious indeed.

I urge anyone who has dirt to dish on Daniel Loeb, perhaps a disgruntled ex-girlfriend, perhaps a high-school teacher with a story about his personal habits, to dish that dirt to the world in the hope that justice can be done when something insignificantly embarrassing pulls his world out from under him.  

411 is not dead

The time wasting shitheads who sit around in internet cafes on the Ivory Coast sending out e-mails to steal from honest trusting people are still very much in evidence. This clown Guy Louis Dechaumes <dechaumes.louis@gmail.com> is one such shit-for-brains who wasted my time agreeing to purchase a car that I had advertised on ebay. These scum troll the internet for high value advertisements, promise to pay and then say "Oh, I'm on holiday at the moment and running short of cash. I can send you a certified check for the 8000 no problem but can I ask you to pay the courier fees and insurance which comes to 350 dollars. My son will reimburse the cash when he comes to get the car. I spotted the scam only after three days of being convinced I'd sold the car but my suspicions were raised when he proposed this "you pay the carriage" scheme.

Luckily I knew how to find the IP address of the sender in the mail and sussed out his Ivory Coast origins.

Please feel free to bombard the asshole with insulting e-mail.

The polite form

Modern language has lost a great deal in the Internet age where a letter, that may have been hand-written with a quill pen and upon paper that was made by manual labour, transported by horse through wind and rain and bandit ridden territory to the sad recipient who may have died of consumption in the interveneing period, can now be dashed off in a few moments by hammering some keys and pressing "send"

Today, written communication has been reduced to the easy form of Hi, blah blah, cheers! and there is very little care taken by the author to convey a sense of respect in e-mail.

In the last hours, I have been the recipient of communication written, obviously by a Gentleman of letters, who uses the polite form of address, even in the oh so immediate e-mail format and I've found myself having the same sort feelings that I had when reading Dickens. Feelings that there really is a correct way of addressing one's peers or that respect can indeed be transported via the medium of text and be recieved with good grace at the other end of an IP packet stream.

Even more surprising to me is that even though the aforementioned Gentleman sent me an e-mail in French and used the polite form of address reserved for letters that are designed to inform you of adverse court judgements or the impending arrival of a baliff, I still felt respect at the other end.

Perhaps the polite civilised manner that men such as Peypes and Darwin used to communicate is not lost and a revival of polite forms of address on the Internet would engender a new era of chivalry. We can only frikkin 'ope.

In any case, Madame or Sir, I pray that you will kindly accept my humblest sentiments of devotion.

Robert.
















PS. Hey Ricky, how's breakfast? ;-)

Massive marketing cock-up!

If you ever think you've done a wrong thing selling stuff to a customer, don't be disheartened, it can't be as bad as this!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18004097#

The cost of the public holiday

Public holidays in Portugal have just been reduced as part of the austerity measures imposed by the financial bailout package currently in effect. Four holidays, mostly Catholic religious observances, have been removed from the calendar. Of course, Anyone can chose to take time off to observe whatever holiday one desires but the ones that close a country down for a day cost businesses a vast sum when taken as a whole.
I have, in the past, been an employer and had to suffer the cost of bank-holiday that employees expect to be paid for.

I did a quick calculation for France where I live; a country that particularly likes its bank holidays and that chooses to place them on a tuesday or a thursday, giving employees the possibility to make a four day weekend out of a single day off. Remember, bank holidays apply at a national level for most employees so the actual cost to business could be calculated as:

No of employees * average wage * holidays

In France this works out to: about 15375000 employees on an average wage of 120 euros per day for 14 days per year so: 25,830,000,000 That's twenty five billion euros.

Vive la vacance!

A close run thing...

Democracy and politics are about ideas and passion. Passion in anything will usually engender a strong reaction and in politics, this is traditionally marked by a landslide victory of one side over another. Victories like that of Roosevelt over Landon in 1936 or the victory of Jacques Chirac over Jean Marie Le-Pen in 2002. These elections are the result of a population who demonstrate their wishes in the most vociferous manner. In the case of Chirac for example, the French did anything possible to vote against Le-Pen simply because he was, and still is, essentially an ultra-right wing wannabe fascist and Chirac, even though not enormously popular, was the insurance policy the gently conservative French wanted to counter the threat of a hard-line nationalist leader.

Close run elections are entirely different. I believe strongly that even though the media portray these polls and elections as "hard fought" and exciting, in reality they show nothing more than the total apathy of the electorate for one candidate or another. Close run elections amount to what is essentially a coin-toss result for the winner. Prime examples of this sort of election is George Bush's victory over Al Gore which was too close to call and Bush only won by forcing a change to the numerical system and increasing the number of votes to more than he was actually given. The current French presidential election which will take place this coming Sunday is another example of electoral apathy at work. Sarkozy and Hollande will be France's coin-toss election. One cannot say "May the best man win" but should probably say "May the most widely beneficial candidate have sufficient good luck to gain the upper hand".

Correct spelling is the mark of an intelligent human!

Wired magazine recently published this article by Anne Trubek who once again gives credence to the idea that the usage of language should be fluid, unstructured and we should not care about incorrect spelling in the digital age.

In this benighted article, the author once again harks back to days of yore in which phonetic spelling was used and, before standardisation of the language by first Samuel Johnson and then The Oxford English Dictionary, I refuse to call that rag Websters a dictionary, made English into a recognisable and repeatable method of communication.

While a “professor” of language, and I remind the reader that a “professor” is someone who “thinks” that they know something and not necessarily someone with actual valuable knowledge, may believe that they know far more than their predecessors; change, especially in written language, is not necessarily a good thing. Some people might consider that a language which changes quickly due to social pressures is cool and exiting, it really just shows that the lowest common denominator applies and that pig-laziness on the part, usually of children, who think that textspeak is cool, enables any number of spellings to be valid and that if you’re inclined to just go back to reading phonetically again, all will be well.

Language, and more importantly, written language is what advances our civilisation from dirt, disease and brutality towards understanding, health and betterment. A written language that is eminently repeatable and understandable is an absolute requirement for the communication of scientific ideas across the barrier of generations. Our knowledge of all things scientific and technical that our ancestors learned has been passed to us, even across the gulf of ignorance presented by the dark-ages, by written texts in Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Latin, the list is too great to mention. Our very civilisation has been accomplished by enabling children from different villages to communicate in one standard way and to have at least one common root from which their experience can grow the tree of knowledge.

On my facebook page I accept friend requests from people all over the world. I am open to all points of view but the ones that I remove or ignore quickly are the ones whose posts are habitually rendered in textspeak. It is so tiresome to read and so variable that it becomes hard work to even look at. When there are four, six or even many more different ways of spelling the same word or conveying the same meaning, even trying to accept the ideas put forward, however interesting they may be, becomes a chore not worth doing.

I truly hope that the crackpot ideas of people who pollute a language that is designed to enable communication for the betterment of mankind are quashed by the continued demonstration that a concise and understandable written phrase flows into the conscious mind far easier than one which breaks the rules of comprehensibility just to be “cool”.

Violent action is needed.

This troubling article is an example of how one small part of the world can present vast danger to the rest of us.

It has been long known that ecosystems without predators quickly collapse because the top predators keep the lower order ones at bay. In the case of marine habitats, the next most important predator on the list after the shark is the Humboldt Squid and, if you thought Jaws was scary, you ain't seen nothing next to a pack of hunting squid.

Fishing boats that participate in destructive and illegal fishing for sharks and whales should be summarily sunk. A fifteen minute warning to get crew into lifeboats and a torpedo to destroy the fishing boat would do a great deal to protecting us all from the horror of a squid attack in quiet inshore waters.

Already in the Gulf of Mexico, squid numbers have become so great that fishermen in small boats are in fear of their lives after several boats were attacked and the crews literally eaten alive.

If the international community are unable to persuade other countries to prohibit destructive fishing which affects all the worlds oceans then unilateral force should be used to protect the more progressive countries rights to a viable oceanic ecosystem.

The same principles should apply to poaching of Elephant and Rhino for so-called Chinese medicines. Poachers should be summarily executed.

Its about time that the rest of the world put a forceful end to this destruction for superstitious medicine and so-called "cultural" precedents. We don't have time to continue to be nice and discuss it in a civilised way.