Category Archives: A Better Future

Consequences of a Star Trek-like computer

Star Trek, along with other science fiction futures, has given us many things, apart from a vision of humanity that is hopefully a little better than we prove to be, but also a taste of what technology can be like when it is integrated so fully into people’s lives that it’s nearly taken for granted.

The computer on the Enterprise is an interesting entity to think about. A crew member can ask it just about any question and it can give the desired answer. It doesn’t matter if the question is slightly vague, or depends on prior knowledge of the conversation. What phenomenal power! How does it work?

I can think of only two possibilities:

  1. It can read their minds
  2. It has been paying attention to their conversation, and thus understands the context.

Not discounting the possibility of the first scenario, I want to think about the second.

Context

How much understanding of our immediate environment is due to context? When analyzing a situation we have at our disposal our

  1. Experience
  2. Book knowledge
  3. Logical analysis/intuition (I include them in the same since intuition could theoretically be a subconscious logical process, colored with experience—I don’t know if I believe that, but it’s not important)

Now take away experience. How would you fare when confronted with new situations (Which, by definition, are all situations)?

Most of us, I think, would understandably quail under the rigor of thought required to get through such an ordeal. If you believe otherwise, make the situation extreme—flying a plane, or leading a squad into war. No amount of knowledge or rational thought will help here—you need the benefit of hard-core training: experience–context.

Do this exercise: describe to someone what salt tastes like.

On the other hand, saying “It’s too salty.” immediately conveys exactly what you mean, based on shared context, mutual experience.

There is an enormous gap between where our computer systems are now, versus what is perhaps the holy grail of foreseeable technology, the computer on the Enterprise—an all-seeing, all-knowing, conversant entity. It’s like Wikipedia, but to a depth of knowledge unheard of on any web site today, all cross-referenced and Searchable.

Wikipedia is a decent (I won’t say great) source of much knowledge, but it’s hardly definitive, or all-encompassing. Also, it’s just facts. It’s not calculation or interpretation. It does not advise or synthesize.

In Star Trek, when  a crewmember asks questions, they can be these fact-based, context-free questions that require simple look-ups to respond with. But often, there is a series of questions, with dialogue in-between, all related to a certain topic. Each query does not contain the total information required to retrieve a response. Rather, the computer has tracked the context and maintained an accurate representation of the conversation thus far. In essence, the computer is participating in the conversation fully.

An idea of what context means is demonstrated by this simple list of questions. Just imagine giving these to a computer or search engine today. The first one is ok, but following that, not so much.

  • What are the latest Hubble Telescope pictures?
  • When were these taken?
  • How much longer will it stay up?
  • How will the next space telescope be different?
  • Compare the efforts of all G7 nations to build orbiting observation platforms.

Each of those questions presupposed the previous one. The computer must keep track of this. That last one is a real doozy—it’s asking the computer to synthesize information from multiple sources into a coherent, original response. We can’t even dream of something this advanced right now, but I believe it’s coming.

On the other hand, let’s take a different direction, more personal:

  • Which of my friends are having a birthday in the next month?
  • What book should I read next?
  • What do I need to get at the store?
  • Where are my children?

Is this possible to do today? Yes, technologically speaking.

It’s not technology that will hold us back. It’s us.

Security, Privacy

Think of what it means to have a computer able to access full context to answer any query you throw at it. It has to know everything about you. To give you good food recommendations, it has to know where you’ve eaten and how you liked it. To be able to answer arbitrary questions in context, it needs to record your every conversation, parse it,  cross-reference it, and store it for later access.

In our current culture, what this means is tying together all systems. There are intimations of this happening. Every time you hear of a company providing an API to access its data, that’s a little piece of this context being hooked up. It means that the Computer now has access to your Facebook and LinkedIn data, so that when you search for “tortoise” it can see you’re a developer and a high-proportion of software developers want to actually download “TortoiseSVN”, not see pictures of reptiles. In fact, it probably means there is no such thing as Facebook (or any other social network) anymore. There is just one network filled with data.

It becomes even more intertwined. If I really want the computer to have full context of me, it should monitor what I watch on TV, what my tastes in music are, where I go, where I work, my habits, who I call, what I talk about, etc., etc., etc. It never ends.

Now, here’s the million-dollar question: who would agree to such invasive procedures, even if the benefit was enormous?

In many ways, we are agreeing to it all the time. We allow places like Amazon, Netflix, and iTunes to track all our purchases in order to give us decent recommendations (in the hope we’ll purchase more). We give up our privacy a bit when we get the grocery loyalty cards, or even credit cards. This is all tracked and correlated. In the case of recommendation systems, there is a tangible benefit for us,but the loyalty cards are less certainly valuable to us, other than lower prices (which is not an inherent benefit of those cards, just a marketing tactic). Indeed, studies have shown for just how little we humans give up our privacy.

There are a few levels of security we need to worry about. At a low level, how much do you trust Google, or Microsoft, or Apple, or Amazon with your information? Right now, a lot of us trust them with a fair amount, but nowhere near our entire life’s story. We have it neatly segmented. Part in Amazon, part in Facebook, part in Google, part in all the other companies we deal with. If mistakes are made, consequences not thought through, we have problems like all our friends seeing what we’re purchasing.

At a high level, we need to consider all of this context ending up in the wrong hands. Not just scammers and other low-lifes, but government, foreign and domestic. The potential for abuse is massive—so much so that most of us wouldn’t voluntarily agree to any of the unifying ideas in this essay in our lifetimes. We just don’t trust anybody that much.

In essence, a Star Trek-like computer would require massive amounts of “spyware” on every system in the world, all tied together in a massive database. This is possible (maybe even desired?) in a closed system like a ship, where everything is easily monitored and hierarchies of security are well-understood. In the world at large, it’s just scary.

Economy and Altruism

I believe another obstacle to this is money. The way our society works, with limited resources, we are required (?) to have some system of trade, an economy. These days, the trade is often over information, the very thing this mythical Star Trek computer depends on. Think credit reports, buying history, demographics.

What is the specific danger of businesses finding out personal information about you? Can they force you to buy something? Not likely. But they can manipulate the environment in such a way to make it more likely. They present a lie designed to sell you something you don’t need. More maliciously, they can also sell your information to more vital entities, like insurance companies, or governments. If the government is too powerful, there is no way to prevent this. Think about what happens in China.

Is the only way to have such efficient and helpful systems to do away with our current capitalistic economy? Yes and no. Such far-reaching, life-changing technologies will undoubtedly continue to be developed and become more a part of our lives than they already are. Unfortunately, the potential for abuse is enormous and will grow as we become more and more dependent on them. We have no inherent trust in the system, nor should we. Just look at the ridiculous politicking taking place over voting machines. That’s just one system, and our society can’t get it right. We have a thousand such systems, many hanging onto usefulness and security by a thread. I bet that it’s not even the exception, but the rule to have such systems. Why should we trust such things to run our lives? We shouldn’t. There are so many reasons for this: corruption, economy, politics, and motivation.

Perhaps motivation is they key. We are often motivated now by money, comfort, or some other selfish reason—reasonable or not. In the Star Trek vision of the future, we see a population depicted as motivated by a quest for knowledge and understanding. That’s why they can have all-knowing computers. They trust who created it and what it does. They know there is no political or other ulterior motive. Yes, there’s adequate security and protections against attack, but the whole starting mindset is different.

Don’t think that I’m in favor of destroying capitalism in favor of more socialistic or idealistic systems. Imposing a system of “fairness” or “equality” does nothing to further those goals and I’m not advocating any political or economic system—I’m merely stating what I think the reality must be in the future for us to make these advancements. People themselves must reform their motivations. Pushing any political system has no effect because the fundamentals of our world haven’t changed. Resources are still scarce, thus economy must still exist. If people’s intrinsic motivations are to be changed, I believe resources must be (practically) infinite.

When this happens the nature of the Internet will change as well. If the economics change and we are no longer concerned with that, and we also have an altruistic frame of mind, information that is posted on the Internet will similarly change. No longer do we have to actually care about our walled gardens—the information is just put “up there”, in the “cloud”, to use the popular term. A computer would be free to just quote the contents to the user, or recombine it with other content. It’s all just content, with a single interface to access it all.

Understanding

There’s an important issue I glossed over in the above paragraphs. That is understanding. I talked a little about this in my previous blog entry about Software Creativity and Strange Loops.

I’m excited for this future. I doubt I’ll live to see advances fully along these lines. The problems are phenomenally difficult and they’re not all technical, but it’s still exciting to think about. Those of us who can just need to do our small part to contribute towards it.

Software Creativity and Strange Loops

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of technology and scientific understanding that would need to go into a computer like the one on the Enterprise in Star Trek, and specifically its interaction with people. It’s a computer that can respond to questions in context—that is, you don’t have to restart in every question everything needed to answer. The computer has been monitoring the conversation and has thus built up a context that it can use to understand and intelligently respond.

A computer that records and correlates conversations real-time must have a phenomenal ability (compared to our current technology) to not just syntactically parse the content, but also construct semantic models of it. If a computer is going to respond intelligently to you, it has to understand you. This is far beyond our current technology, but we’re moving there. In 20 years who knows where this will be. In 100, we can’t even imagine it. 400 years is nearly beyond contemplation.

The philosophy of computer understanding, and human-computer interaction specifically is incredibly interesting. I was led to think a lot about this while reading Robert Glass’s Software Creativity 2.0. This book is about the design and construction of software, but it has a deep philosophical undercurrent running throughout that kept me richly engaged. Much of the book is presented as conflicts between opposing forces:

  • Discipline versus Flexibility
  • Formal Methods versus Heuristics
  • Optimizing versus satisficing
  • Quantitative versus qualitative reasoning
  • Process versus product
  • Intellectual versus clerical
  • Theory versus practice
  • Industry versus academe
  • Fun versus getting serious

Too often, neither one of these sides is “right”—they are just part of the problem (or the solution). While the book was written from the perspective of software construction, I think you can twist the intention just a little and consider them as attributes of software itself, not just how to write it, but how software must function. Most of those titles can be broken up into a dichotomy of Thinking versus Doing.

Thinking: Flexibility, Heuristics, Satisficing, Qualitative, Process, Intellectual, Theory, Academe

Doing: Discipline, Formal Methods, Optimizing, Quantitative, Product, Clerical, Practice, Industry

Computers are wonderful at the doing, not so much at the thinking. Much of thinking is synthesizing information, recognizing patterns, and highlighting the important points so that we can understand it. As humans, we have to do this or we are overwhelmed and have no comprehension. A computer has no such requirement—all information is available to it, yet it has no capability to synthesize, apply experience and perhaps (seemingly) unrelated principles to the situation. In this respect, the computer’s advantage in quantity is far outweighed by its lack of understanding. It has all the context in the world, but no way to apply it.

A good benchmark for a reasonable AI on the level I’m dreaming about is a program that can synthesize a complex set of documents (be they text, audio, or video) and produce a comprehensible summary that is not just selected excerpts from each. This functionality implies an ability to understand and comprehend on many levels. To do this will mean a much deeper understanding of the problems facing us in computer science, as represented in the list above.

You can start to think of these attributes/actions as mutually beneficial and dependent, influencing one another, recursively, being distinct (at  first), and then morphing into a spiral, both being inputs to the other. Quantitative reasoning leads to qualitative analysis which leads back to qualitative measures, etc.

It made me think of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s opus Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. This is a fascinating book that, if you can get through it (I admit I struggled through parts), wants you to think of consciousness as the attempted resolution of a very high-order strange loop.

The Strange Loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.

In the book, he discusses how this pattern appears in many areas, most notably music, the works of Escher, and in philosophy, as well as consciousness.

My belief is that the explanations of “emergent” phenomena in our brains—for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will—are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing “resonance” between different levels… The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself.

I can’t help but think that this idea of a strange loop, combined with Glass’s attributes of software creativity are what will lead to more intelligent computers.

Nuclear Energy and the Question of Uranium Supply

In the replies to my article about nuclear power, there were statements about the supply of uranium the world can provide and that in the end, nuclear power may not be the panacea we hope it would be.

I respectfully disagree.

First, let me state my bias: I am an optimist. I almost never buy into doom and gloom scenarios in any domain. I am cynical about a few things (the ability of politicians to do what’s best for us, for example), but by and large I think things generally work out.

That said, I don’t believe we’ll run out of uranium anytime soon.

It is easy to find reports out there on the availability of uranium. For example, this one by the World Nuclear Association, or another by the European Commission. Those both limit the supply to less than the next 100 years on the outside, and just a couple of decades worst-case.

However, this is by no means the whole story. All of these studies make assumptions that I think are a bit weak, such as the amount of known reserves, current exploration, research, funding, scientific breakthroughs, etc.

Once nuclear energy is a more fundamental part of our energy and economic infrastructure, technology will improve, efficiency will improve, uranium harvesting will improve. It’s cliche, but I’m still going to point out the silly estimates of oil reserves (we’ve had 50 years of oil left for the last 100 years), or food reserves, or overpopulation, or [pick fad]. The reality is that humans are amazing at developing technology to increase our efficiency to amazing levels. We make huge leaps that completely negate all previous predictions. There is no reason to think this will end.

One idea that came up a few times in my research is the idea of mining uranium versus reusing it. Currently, most nuclear plants can only use uranium once before discarding. By using different processes, breeder reactors, including plutonium in the process, the efficiency and life span of uranium can be dramatically increased. Unfortunately, it looks like politics gets in the way of some of these ideas (such as the usage of plutonium).

Politics is tricky. On the one hand, we don’t want bad guys to get a supply of high-grade, volatile nuclear material. On the other hand, we need to learn to take advantage of it for the advancement of all mankind.

A report by the IECD and IAEA estimate uranium supplies lasting from 270 to 8,500 years, depending on our technology and process. There is also an interesting essay by James Hopf, a nuclear engineer, at American Energy Independence. It may be a little biased, but it’s worth reading.

Read the references at the bottom of the Wikipedia article on uranium depletion. There is also a good summary of some of the main studies and ideas on the subject in the article itself.

Questions about Robots

In the future, when you have your first humanoid robot servant and you decide to have some fun with it, and you tell it to do something stupid and arbitrary like go stand in the corner for no reason, put itself in embarrassing poses, or anything generally “abusive”, will you feel bad afterwards? Should you? Why?

I think I would, perhaps depending on the severity and arbitrariness. I asked my wife. She said definitely yes, and that regardless of whether the machine can “feel” embarrassment or frustration, it reveals a character deficiency in yourself. She compared it to abuse against animals.

I think it may also depend on how humanized the robot is. You would feel bad doing it to Data (ignoring his free will), but maybe not to a mute, grotesque car welder.

Thankfully, South Korea has come up with a robot code of ethics.

We Need More Growth of Nuclear Power

With this post, I’m beginning a new series or category of bog posts that I’m loosely terming “A Better Future.”


I’ve been thinking a lot about the grail of infinite power, coupled with the enormous rise in gas prices this week.

While I am all in favor of reducing wasteful consumption, increasing efficiency, and generally being smarter about everything, I do not believe we will ever reduce our energy requirements in the long-term. We are always inventing, always creating, and most things we create require power in some form. It’s a fool’s errand to try to reduce the actual energy we’ll use overall. This doesn’t even take into account all of the peoples of the world who are just now beginning to participate in the global economy. There will always be something to eat up the energy we produce. Fighting against this trend seems to me, in a way, trying to run evolution and progress backwards. Our race as a whole won’t do that. Given this, it makes much more sense to develop clean, efficient, abundant, cheap sources of energy.

Increasingly, I am convinced that the way to build out a vast network of nuclear reactors powering our grid. We have an enormous network of power distribution–we should be taking more advantage of it.

According to the US Department of DOE, our 103 active nuclear plants provide 20% of the nation’s electricity. You can even get the operational status of each one.

Worldwide, the IAEA predicts that the electric power generation capacity of the world in 2015 will be roughly 20,000 billion kilowatt hours. In that year, nuclear generation will provide roughly 2,972 billion kilowatt hours, or less than 15%. That report has a lot of other information and I highly encourage you to read it.

We need to increase that percentage drastically–to the point where it supplies power not just to homes, but to plug-in hybrid cars, and everything else.

Nuclear power has gotten a bad rap in the US and other parts of the world for a long time. I think the attitudes are changing, but not quickly enough. At what point will the benefits outweigh the risks in most minds? I think that point is almost upon us.

With the increasing development of pebble-bed reactors, nuclear technology is advancing. We need to increase this development to promote further advances in the safety and efficiency of these promising power sources. None of the operational reactors in the US are pebble-bed reactors (aka HTGR–high temperature gas-cooled reactors), nor are any planned. There is a research reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. All of the commercial HTGR development is taking place for other countries. These reactors, while not universally acclaimed, seem to be safer, cheaper, and the spent fuel less able to be repurposed as weapons-grade material.

We can’t wait for others to do these things–we need to do them. Our country needs to get in on the act at a higher level of commitment than ever. We can’t wait for these technologies to become perfected, either–that will happen over time. As we use a technology more, we will learn new techniques, ways to improve efficiency, and how to lower costs further.

There is no excuse for the US not  to be a leader in this area–we have one of the largest energy demands, the most capital, the most to gain by investing in it, and the most  to lose by not doing it.

The next generation of nuclear technology may not be the ultimate energy savior we’re looking for, but it’s a huge step in the right direction–a step we’ve delayed taking for too long.

Nuclear certainly has some down sides, but I’ll discuss those in a future entry.

Relevant Links:

  1. Pebble-bed reactors at wikipedia
  2. Energy Information Administration / Department of Energy
  3. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
  4. Inconvenient  Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green (Wired Magazine)
  5. Idaho National Laboratory
  6. Module Pebble Bed Reactor (MIT)