Rise of the Machines

My family and I watched Jeopardy the other night, where the two greatest Jeopardy champions of all time were challenged by Watson, a really, really smart computer made by IBM. You've probably heard by now that Watson kicked butt. Silicon triumphs over carbon.

I was trying to impress upon my kids the historic nature of what they were seeing, as computers rapidly approach the intelligence level of humans. It won't be long until you won't know if you're talking to a computer or a human over the phone.

This point-of-no-return is sometimes referred to as the "singularity." Computers will understand the subtleties of human speech, even humor and sarcasm. They will make jokes themselves. We will interact with them the same way we interact with people, only the computers will have vastly superior memories, and they will keep getting smarter.

What really kicks things into gear is when computers can improve themselves, because, unlike biological improvement (i.e. evolution), which can take eons, iterations of technological improvement can happen very quickly. All bets are off when this happens, but it's a reasonable assumption that robots may become indistinguishable from humans at some point. Debates will flare up over what "rights" should be accorded to these creations. I see the ACLU getting fired up about this.

If all this sounds like the musings of a teenager who has been watching too much Star Trek, I know. It does. But it doesn't make it any less inevitable.

Is this all a good thing or a bad thing? Depends who you ask. Ray Kurzweil is perhaps the scientist/futurist who has given this the most thought. I highly recommend his book, The Singularity Is Near.

Kurzweil is very excited by the singularity. He says it will allow humans to transcend biology, which, as he points out, is already happening anyway. Think cochlear implants, pacemakers, and artificial hips. How much of us has to be artificial before we are...something else?

Computers are also augmenting our intelligence. Ever settle a dinner table argument by looking something up on your smart phone? There you go.

In fact, smart phones are a development worth pondering. I argue that people in the distant future would love to travel back and see today's world, just as we might love to travel back to see when some caveman learned how to make fire or when Gutenberg first fiddled with movable type. Why? Because this decade marks the first time in human history when essentially everyone started taking their computers with them everywhere. Computers have become an extension of ourselves. The other day I ran a short errand and forgot my iPhone. I had to restrain an impulse to run back and get it. A few years from now, it will be unthinkable.

There's no going back. From this point on, computers will be with us wherever we go, and they will become integrated with our daily lives to the point where going off-grid will be the equivalent of losing one's sight or hearing. Computers become a sixth sense, if you will. One that connects us to everything else.

The integration will start to become physical. For instance, instead of having to carry a device around, perhaps it projects on to the back of your retina. So imagine, for a moment, you're at a party and someone approaches. You know you've met him before but you can't place it. Damn!

Not a problem. A micro-camera implant scans the face and immediately recognizes it, having tagged it previously. Then you see an instant summary of who the person is and how you met them. Inside your eye.

I don't know about you, but I'd find that pretty useful. And I'd no longer have to grab my wife's elbow and whisper, who is this guy again?

Kurzweil, the optimist, predicts this will take us to some pretty cosmic places. Frankly, if I just blurted them out here, they'd seem ridiculous. If you let him build his case, though, most of his conclusions seem almost inevitable. He is nothing if not meticulous in constructing his argument.

Kurzweil's principle insight is that numerous technologies are advancing at exponential rates. Moore's Law, except not just for microprocessors. He argues that exponential growth can have some wildly profound implications, but we don't see them because our minds are programmed to project linearly. That, and exponential growth isn't so noticeable at first.

Consider the Chinese legend of the chessboard. Some clever fellow introduces the game of chess to the kingdom and the emperor is impressed. He is asked what the clever man would like as a reward, to which the man says one grain of rice doubled on each square of the chessboard until the board is full. No problem, says the emperor. One piece, two, four, eight...hey, this guy's not so clever, after all!

Probably somewhere around the middle of the third row it dawns on the emperor that maybe it is he who is not clever. By the end of the third row, he owes 16,777,215 grains of rice for a single square. By the end of the last row, he owes 2 to the 65th power, or more rice than there is in the world.

I think he chopped the guy's head off for making him look stupid.

But the point is, exponential growth can be extremely uninteresting for long periods of time. Then, quite suddenly, it becomes very interesting, indeed. According to Kurzweil (and others), we are at that point right now. Fasten your seat belts.

There are others in the uber-nerd community who have a dystopian take on this. Their godfather is probably Bill Joy. They believe that exponential growth is replete with dangers that can't even be imagined. A lone scientist creating a world-killing plague in his bathtub. Smart machines deciding they don't need us anymore. That sort of thing. (I call that last one the Terminator Scenario. I'll be back.)

I guess the main point here is that the nerds don't seem to be disagreeing on the basic point of exponential growth, merely on its implications. Either way, those implications are profound, and they are in our lifetimes, so it is important for anyone with even the least bit of intellectual curiosity to educate themselves on the basics. Listen to the nerds. Entirely new industries will be born in months and others swept away. It will pay to be on the right side of these trades.

I recommend starting with Kurzweil's book and also Andy Kessler's Eat People. And, to quote one of the vanquished Jeopardy contestants, "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."

Mixed Feelings About the "Billionaire's Pledge"

No doubt by now you've heard of "The Giving Pledge." Founded by Bill Gates and the increasingly-irritating Warren Buffett, it is a public pledge to give the majority of one's wealth to charity. You can see who's ponying up here:

The List

How could I possibly have mixed feelings, you ask? It's all good, right?

Not exactly.

The question is not just how much social utility is created by the donation, but how much disutility is created by the extraction of the capital from our economy.

Let's examine both sides of this in the recent pledge by list member Mark Zuckerberg to give $100 million to the Newark public school system. How much utility is being created? Well, none. In fact, it's probably a big negative. Zuckerberg is demonstrably one of the smartest people of his generation, but this gift is one of the dumbest of all time, exceeded only by Ted Turner's $1 billion gift to the United Nations.

Both these gifts are examples of egregiously bad philanthropy, otherwise known as throwing good money after bad. New Jersey public schools are broken, and it's not a problem money can fix. In fact, money allows the problems to persist longer. The problem, in a nutshell, is the teachers unions, which have become a black hole of salaries, benefits, and bizarre work rules. Everything they do is antithetical to the interests of parents and students. $100 million thrown into this swamp will merely postpone the day of reckoning and allow students to be educationally abused that much longer.

Zuckerberg isn't, as we've established, an idiot. He either knows this, or could have figured it out. But that's hardly the point, is it? By some amazing coincidence, Zuckerberg was having some pr problems at the time of the gift, namely a movie called The Social Network that was making him look like a nasty piece of work. $100 million for the kids, a quick appearance on Oprah and 60 Minutes, and presto! All is well again.

The fact is, most philanthropy is accompanied by ulterior motives of some sort. Otherwise, it would all be anonymous, right?

Okay, I can hear you. You say big deal, a little ego-rubbing is a small price to pay. In some cases, I agree with you. Free markets will never solve every last social problem. In these cases, I prefer private philanthropy to solve the problem, because it will likely do a better job of it - and be more accountable - than the government. (In fact, one of the things I detest about big government is that it tends to crowd out effective private philanthropy. Just look at Europe.)

But, as with Zuckerberg and Turner, not all philanthropy solves problems. Sometimes, they make it worse. Philanthropy, poorly conceived, is replete with moral hazard.

It ain't always easy giving money away.


Ironically, I think it's Bill Gates who has his arms around this better than anyone. The Gates Foundation thoroughly analyzes where their money can create the greatest social utility for the dollar. The answer is often less-than-sexy things like mosquito netting in Africa and sewer systems in India.

But let's get back to the other side of the equation, the disutility created by removing capital from our economy. Our billionaires club presumably funds its charitable gifts by selling their company stock, or the stock of other companies. This capital creates jobs. the people that get those jobs pay taxes, buy homes, have families, and otherwise do things that create even more jobs. They even give to charity. It's a virtuous cycle, and there's no charity than can match the social utility of job creation.

For charity to be worthwhile, the social utility of a donation (not always positive, as I've mentioned) must exceed the disutility of the capital extraction from the private sector. This is not always an easy hurdle.

Mark Zuckerberg is in his 20s. He has created not just thousands of jobs at Facebook, but an entire new industry that is having profoundly positive effects. Silicon Valley is a boomtown again, and if our country is to find a way out of our current mess, the Valley will lead the way. But my point is, I don't want Zuckerberg thinking about charity. He's too valuable doing what he's doing. Later in his life, when his years of intense creativity are behind him, he can start giving it all away. I'm sure by then, when he has time to ponder the variables, he will make more intelligent decisions.

Comments on the Consumer Electronics Show

140,000 people jammed this year's CES in Las Vegas. I'd never been before, so the scope was breathtaking. There had to be fifty football fields of exhibition space. It was easy to get lost. I'm told that some of the individual corporate exhibits cost $3-4 million to construct.

Overall, I will say that this was an incremental show. Everything was a little faster, a little bigger (or smaller), a little cheaper. There wasn't much I would describe as revolutionary, other than Looxcie, which I wrote about here.

General impressions:

• Lots and lots of tablets - everyone wants a piece of the iPad market (50 million tabs will have been sold by the end of '11)
• Cars, particularly Fords, are getting wired with all sorts of goodies
• 3D TV is being pushed heavily, but consumer acceptance is questionable
• Internet-enabled TV will be the standard within a couple of years, whether people want it or not
• I heard dozens of languages, but the Asian presence was particularly strong

Some specifically cool things:

• A company is making a single, secured credit card with embedded electronics that can be used with any of your accounts, so you won't have to carry around six cards in the future. It's also rendered unusable if stolen.
• There's now 3D television that doesn't require glasses. It was pretty cool, but the problem is it only works if you stand in certain places. A techie guy next to me said that this was a non-fixable issue.
• Intel is now fitting a billion transistors on a chip the size of your thumb. The first transistor-based computers had 500 transistors and definitely not the size of your thumb.
• Acer won the "Last Gadget Standing" with a laptop that had two touchscreens. The second one is where the keyboard is normally found. It was pretty bulky, but this problem will solve itself. The techies loved it.

There was so much going on at this show that I think they ought to split it into five or six separate shows. Like running a marathon, though, I recommend doing it once.

Is Paris Hilton Inciting Violence?

Hmm. Has anyone told her she needs to dial back the rhetoric?

The Game Changer I Saw At the Consumer Electronics Show

 
Just saw the first thing here at the CES that I think is a game changer with some profound implications. Not even sure the manufacturer has thought through all the societal implications.

A company called Looxcie is coming out with a bluetooth enabled camera that fits right on your earpiece. It films everything you see and can, with the push of a button, upload what you just filmed to YouTube, Facebook, or twitter. It can even do live streaming.

Here's the cool part. As these devices spread, you will be able to tune into just about anything, anywhere in the world. Riots in Jakarta? Watch it live. Springsteen at the Meadowlands? Watch it live.

Here's another development we can expect: celebrities or other self absorbed types will stream their lives to the world 24/7. Why should Ashton Kutcher simply tweet he is getting coffee when he could broadcast the experience? If your life is boring, you will tune into the lives of others. Reality TV to the tenth power.

People - and not just celebrities - will use streaming video to build out their personal brands. Product placements will become big business - the next advertising frontier of the digital age.


I also predict that in the not-too-distant future people will use these cameras to document their entire lives so that at any point they can retrieve archived footage of any moment of their existence.

Which gets me to the creepy part. As it is, these devices are small, but in a couple of years you won't be able to tell someone's wearing one. In other words, you could be getting filmed at any time and not know it. Lots of people will get filmed saying and doing things that won't play well on the internet. Social interaction will become guarded.

I predict this device will be ground zero for the privacy wars. Congress will get in the act (particularly since they're the ones always getting caught doing embarrassing things). Stay tuned.

America the Porky

So I was at a theme park recently...the theme was, "Get in line, fatty."

                                                                     -Zach Galafianikus

GDP Since Jesus

Thought this was great, courtesy of the Economist. Here comes China:

The Malthusians Never Win

Thomas Malthus, Doofus

One wonders how many bets they have to lose before they get it:

Economic Optimism? I'll Take that Bet!

What Will Happen Soon Enough All Over the Country...

...if we don't look public sector unions (teachers union most of all) squarely in the eye and say:

You can not be paid the benefits that irresponsible politicians gave you in exchange for votes.

The New York Times, of all places, writes about a town where they just stopped the checks:

The Town That Stopped Its Pension Checks

The New Electoral Math

The results are in, and there is new electoral math to consider. Gaining congressional seats are:

Texas                 +4
Florida               +2
Georgia              +1
Arizona              +1
Nevada              +1
South Carolina    +1
Utah                  +1
Washington        +1

Losing seats are:

New York           -2
Ohio                  -2
Illinois                -1
Iowa                  -1
Pennsylvania      -1
Massachusetts    -1
Michigan            -1
Missouri             -1
Mississippi          -1
New Jersey         -1

The media today is focused on how many extra house seats this translates into for the Republicans. The answer is not insubstantial, maybe around 10 to 12 seats. But lost in the wash here is that this also changes the number of electoral votes from each state, and this will have a considerable impact on the 2012 presidential election.

The math is much more straightforward than trying to guess congressional outcomes because we don't have to see how redistricting plays out. Texas, for instance, is s slam dunk to produce an additional 4 electoral votes for any Republican.

The way I see it, Texas, Georgia, Arizona, South Carolina, and Utah are a lock for Republicans. That's a pickup of 8 votes.

Republicans also pick up seats - relatively - by losing less badly in New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New Jersey. That's another 6 seats.

Democrats likely pick up single votes in Washington and Mississippi. Our total is now +12 for the Republicans.

That leaves Nevada, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Missouri. I figure out of that the GOP nets one more seat, so that makes the tally +13. That is no small deal, especially in our era of close elections.

I can't let one other thing pass without comment. Notice any patterns here? Perhaps that almost all the losers are Blue states and all the winners Red? This is clearly due to the rampant mismanagement of states like New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. Spending and taxation have driven citizens to more economically friendly environs. Can't we learn a lesson here?

P.S. Note Sarah Palin lookalike at the chalkboard!