Webs’ Random Ideas

So Thurs Feb 14th I had the privilege to listen to Ray Kurzweil speak. The talk was incredibly interesting and insightful. I really enjoyed it and at the end of the whole event our College President remarked that his coffee would have two creams (he was joking about how long the whole event was, not about how boring Kurzweil is).

For me, the whole event was incredibly boring as we had faculty awards and other things I had trouble staying awake for. Being that I really wanted to listen to Kurzweil speak I was worried that I would be asleep by the time he came up. This was my first time ever listening to Kurzweil and I knew very little about him going into the speech, but once he started speaking I was very much awake.

I don’t want to try to remember everything from the speech and dump it into this post, instead I wish to focus on a couple key items (at least in my view) and maybe discuss them a little.

From instability arises predictability:

Few will deny the Technology Industry is incredibly unpredictable and constantly changing. For instance, there are some ideas about what the next generation computer will be, but no one really knows for sure. Even if a new computer design comes out next year it still has to be adopted by the market, and this can be difficult at times. Think of the UMPC that never really took off.

Even with this instability though, on the whole Technology is very predictable. If you graph out the growth of technology on a logarithmic scale it goes up from the lower left corner towards the upper right in an almost perfectly straight line. The power of technology grows exponentially, but also the price drops rapidly and this leads to incredibly fast growth.

Even in other complex systems with high instability there is still predictability from a broad or macro view. Thermodynamics has examples of this as well as other sciences. Which means that incredibly complex systems that have variability can be predictable from a broader perspective. Ray Kurzweil gave some examples of this and explained some of his predictions, he also discusses some of these in his latest book.

Linear Thinking has Started to lose Usefulness:

Think of a mouse and a cat. The mouse sees the cat across the yard and the Cat sees the mouse. In the next split second the mouse quickly calculates that it won’t take long for the cat to get from there to his position. And his brain says you better not be there when the cat is… This is linear thinking and has evolved to the point we are at today. And really it has served us well, especially for the mouse.

Our brains have collected these types of calculations over the years and have kept us from taking out a pen and paper so that our brains calculate these formulas on the fly. I found this rather fascinating from the presentation and it makes sense. How does the quarterback of the football team know at precisely what velocity to throw the football so that it reaches the correct target on time? Our brains do calculus all the time, just without you the user really realizing it.

For humans the usefulness is starting to wear off for thinking linear though. Especially since we are interacting more and more with multiple dimensions in calculations and in thinking about solutions to problems. A shift is going to start if it hasn’t already and the calculations done in our brains are going to become much more complex to serve our needs.

Some other cool items from the presentation was the cell phone device Kurzweil had where he took a picture of a book and the device dictated back (it was plugged into the audio system for all to hear) what it was he had taken a picture of, it also stated the page was cutoff because of the angle he took the picture at, it then proceeded to dictate back the words. Talk about geeky and cool!

Plus the device can play audio files, it can act as a cell phone, and will soon be able to have the user take a picture of anything with words (even street signs) and the device will dictate to the user what it is. Such a device is going to revolutionize scanning technology (basically eliminate the need for those crappy scanners) besides the other obvious uses. The ideas of this device are pretty much limitless.

All in all if you have a chance to hear Ray Kurzweil speak, I highly recommend it. His latest book, The Singularity is also pretty good and I should get around to reading it this summer.