Is Technological Singularity almost a reality?

Until two days ago, I was very skeptic about technological singularity. I believed in the paradox that if humans created the machines, how can they be smarter than their creators? So, computers could not even start to be smarter and cognitive work would always be done by humans. This is pretty much the same view of Frank Levy and Richard Murnane on the matter in their 2004 book “The New Division of Labor - How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market”.

In the book, they say that computers are changing work and salaries, shifting the most well paid jobs to areas focusing on expert thinking, complex communication, and non-routine tasks that involve cognitive work or where humans “still have a comparative (that is, relative) advantage”. (p. 36)

Of course I always agreed that our systems will improve and become more complex, efficient and capable with time but I didn’t think they could get to a point where they would behave as humans and evolve by their own terms and become conscious of their actions.

In this context, there would always be limitations and we are already approaching some of them if we don’t discover another means (such as is believed with quantum computing) to improve technology since thermodynamics is one of the constraints reaching limits.

I’m still skeptic but a very captive special report by IEEE caught my attention on Friday and kept me thinking about this topic. There, two articles are particularly interesting together by their antagonistic views: The first of them, by Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi, argues that yes, machines can eventually have consciousness and execute at least some cognitive work. "Consciousness is part of the natural world. It depends, we believe, only on mathematics and logic and on the imperfectly known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology; it does not arise from some magical or otherworldly quality. That's good news, because it means there's no reason why consciousness can't be reproduced in a machine—in theory, anyway."

The other article, by Alfred Nordmann, is on the other direction. For him, technology isn't evolving faster now than it was from 19th century until 1960s (he presents a timeline of some of humans' important and popular breakthroughs from 1830s onwards to exemplify this) and argues that "the story of the Singularity is sweeping, dramatic, simple—and wrong".

In the different scenarios of the report, singularity is possible (or should I say believed?) in some of them and not too far away from our present time. For me, right now, I don’t know anymore what to conclude. I need more reading and discussion time.

A sunset on sundays

Lotus Temple, Delhi, India

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 has been released!

Great news! We are now one step closer to version 3 of Firefox. See the release notes at the official Mozilla web site.

I've been using the new Firefox since its beta 4. The Mozilla Blog has been talking about it for a while now but it is never too much to highlight the completely renewed and integrated address bar and bookmarking system plus the more efficient memory management. All great!

If you already use Firefox 2, I sincerely recommend you to try the new version. It is definitely stable enough for any user and you can use the Nightly Tester Tools to run most of the add-ons that are incompatible just because the interface to identify the add-on compatibility changed.

One night of chaos in India

It all started when I left the shopping mall. The large and yet packed-with-cars avenue was duping the incautious dwellers with its traffic lights and the impractical number of headlamps. The glare was blinding them and everything seemed normal; whatever normal means in India. But I noticed the difference. Half the city was already under complete darkness and a thunderstorm was approaching.

My watch was marking 10pm sharp. The mall was closing and its staff was going home. For them, nothing else mattered, so selfishly minding their own business. But I noticed a flare. It came from the building across the avenue and it looked like it was exploding. And indeed its transformer had just blown and with it all the nearby electrical network, leaving a path of sparks over the wires like scary fireworks. I glimpsed at leaving the place but nowhere would be safe if the whole city was collapsing.

I took a rickshaw. This little devil, covered with some synthetic fabric, completely opened at the sides, was to me the fastest means to get out, zigzagging through cars in a cacophony of horns and moos and barks and shouts, in roads full of bumps and puddles. It was cold and the open sides meant no windows to close and a freezing wind surrounding my body. It was the heavy storm now all over, striking glances of light to the blackout. The lightning could be seen from a distance; 1, 2, 3 and there it was the thunder adding one more percussion to the cacophony.

With all the water everywhere, I should have expected what was coming next. A truck ran over and obviously hit one big puddle and splashed all of us. Remember, no side windows in the rickshaw. And after strings of curses from the driver, another truck came and, probably on purpose and on behalf of the previous truck, splashed us again. At least I think they were having fun.

When we finally reached destination, I was cold, wet, and in the dark when I realized I had to money to pay for the ride; Just a credit card. I didn’t speak Hindi or Kannada, he didn’t speak English. I tried to say sorry. But he probably cursed me as he did with the truck driver. The security guard of my building ended up paying him; what else could I do? Well, I did what I could to finish that day as soon as possible: took a shower and went to bed, hoping for a new day to come with better moods…

Note: This is a work of fiction. Although some true events inspired it, the intensity of the story is beyond possibly any reality. Even in India.

Damn you Rubik’s cube

After 4 hours, I managed to finish Rubik’s cube for the first time ever (I’m so happy!). In my childhood I never had one but I remember playing with it for a while in my cousin’s place once. A couple of weeks ago, a friend’s play triggered my curiosity again and I decided to buy it.

For me, after reading some general instructions, it was not hard at all to cover the first two layers and reach a state that seems almost done. Almost. The damn thing was laughing at my face after several failed attempts from that point on. “You are a fool!” – The cube kept telling me.

So I succumbed to step-by-step instructions. “Solving Rubik's Cube for speed” by Lars Petrus was the most comprehensive and easy-to-follow guide I found. But that doesn’t mean that the last layer is as straightforward as the other two. It’s not. There are several different moves and combinations that you must memorize. Lars names them after people (Bruno, Sune, Allan, etc.) and I guess it’s his friends and family - Though it seems like he is casting a whole generation of his family. Even if you get the logic as I did, it is almost impossible to see it 10 to 14 steps ahead of time, so only logic won’t help you.

Now, I think I can finish it in 30 minutes. I will keep practicing for a while in my free time to see how fast I can get. My target is a 3-year old kid that can solve it in less than 3 minutes. And lets ignore a 6-year old who solves it in 37 seconds...

You have to burn the rope!

This game is so hard...

[Hat tip to Osias for the link]

Clusty, a search engine clustering the results

I intended to write about this four days ago, when I first saw this post at Google Blogoscoped but I didn’t have the time before. In it Philipp Lenssen, the author of the blog, argues that “diverse Google results are good” because they satisfy different cases of a search, given that the semantics of the same search from two different users might be different. He gives the example of the query [google blog] which might yield at least three different classes of results: “1) the user wants to see the official blog by Google Inc., 2) the user heard about Google’s blogging platform and wants to find Blogger.com, or 3) the user is looking for an independent blog covering Google.”

He goes on explaining the case for other examples and concludes that, even though some results might be diverse, there is a problem of optimization that benefits those pages that are doing a better job at it (particularly the ones that are aware that search engine optimization matters). Further, in the comments, he also adds a comparison of the overall results of different search engines, specifically Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Live.com and argues that Google’s results are better for the keywords [google blog].

I agree that, in a general sense, diverse results do benefit a broader population of users and it is in this context that I want to introduce the Clusty Search, arguing that its results are even better than Google's. This engine goes beyond the notion of crawling and indexing pages, by also querying other search engines, combining the results and grouping them into clusters. The notion of cluster here is to try to maximize the similarity of web pages within the cluster and the dissimilarity across different clusters so that the resulting clusters are as relevant as possible as a group of similar pages.

By doing so, Clusty increases the importance of different classes of the result and gives the user the opportunity to narrow it down to the specific class he or she is looking for. Lets go back to the [google blog] example. In Clusty the query returns different classes as expected (the official Google blog, the Google Blog Search tool, and several independent blogs about Google) and, more interestingly, lists the different clusters it found on the left, allowing the user to specify which ‘kind’ of result he or she wants. Note that the engine uses a soft algorithm for clustering so each result can be in more than one cluster for the same query.



A more generic example highlights this feature even further. Take the query [star], for instance, which could mean at least the user is looking for either 1) someone famous, 2) a constellation of some sort, 3) some band, or even 4) something related to Star Wars or Star Trek. These are all real examples of clusters presented as a result.

I haven’t been using this search engine on an everyday basis yet but, overall, it is quite powerful, seems to be very consistent, and has a lot of other features. To name a few related to the topic of this post, search within a cluster, highlight the page’s clusters, and narrow the results by top or second level domain. I actually got myself playing with it for a while just to see how it organizes the different ‘kinds’ of pages into clusters, without any human intervention*.

*I’m assuming the engine is using the notion of cluster as an unsupervised learning process that groups documents based on their similarity (according to some metric). See the Wikipedia article on Data Clustering for more details.