accelerating technology

December 13, 2015|accelerating technology, AI, Elon Musk, Friendly AI, Peter Thiel, Stephen Hawking, The One Percent

The Most Important Charitable Initiative of the Year–OpenAI

A group of billionaires, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, have established a new initiative called OpenAI. It will attempt to accelerate research into artificial intelligence (AI) but in way that assures that the resulting AI will be “friendly.” In my view, this is the most important philanthropic initiative of the year, perhaps of the decade, because it addresses a crucial issue of our time—dangers from the accelerating pace of technological change.

The development of AI can help navigate the rapids ahead, because progress in artificial intelligence can aid in assessing the consequences of social policy for other forms of accelerating technology, such as nanotechnology and biotechnology, more accurately and quickly. More substantial machine intelligence can process data, simulate the world to test the effects of future policy, and offer hypotheses about the effects of past policy.

But as Musk and Stephen Hawking have argued, strong AI– defined as a general purpose intelligence that approximates that of humans—also could threaten humanity, because it might be unable to be controlled. Man will be in the unhappy position of the sorcerer’s apprentice—too weak to master the master machines.

October 26, 2015|accelerating technology, free goods, Friederich von Hayek, Hal Varian, socialist calculation controversy

The Socialist Calculation Controversy Redux?

by John O. McGinnis|

One of the most telling debates of the twentieth century was the socialist calculation controversy. The question, broadly speaking, was whether the government could figure out how to set prices for goods without the market. Frederich von Hayek told socialists that such a feat was impossible, because the market provided information that no centralized authority could replicate. The fall of the Soviet Union provided a real world confirmation of Hayek’s academic insight.

Nevertheless, today much of our debate about growth and inequality still depends on our confidence in government calculations. In a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, claimed that productivity and economic growth were severely understated, because government statistics are not capturing many of gains in the information economy. One problem is that government only measures something as part of GNP when people pay for it. But much of what Silicon Valley produces is free or nearly so. Google’s search engine puts the information of the world at our fingertips. Yet this value is not fully captured.

Government measurements of productivity and growth were designed for the industrial age, not the information age, where the dematerialization of the world created by information technology helps create more and more free goods.

April 22, 2015|accelerating technology, connectivity, Kurzweil, Moore's Law, software

The Death of Moore’s Law Will Not Kill off Computational Disruption

by John O. McGinnis|

Exponential increases in computational power generate most of the rapid social change in our time. Some of the changes are largely good. The increase in amount and speed of information promotes the availability of more diverse and expert views on policy and politics. The rise of genomics and personalized medicine can lead to longer and healthier lives. Even energy production, both of fossil fuels and the greener variety, is boosted by computational power. But computation is also the cause of domestic turbulence, as automation replaces some kinds of jobs, and of danger abroad, as it empowers the organization of non-state terrorist actors.

Moore’s law is thought to encapsulate ongoing computational improvements. This law, named after Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, is in a reality a prediction of a regularity, i.e. that the number of transistors that can be fitted onto a silicon computer chip doubles every eighteen months to two years. This week Moore’s law reached the age of fifty and there are widespread predictions and fears that it will die before sixty, because of the physical impossibility of shrinking transistors further and the expense of trying to do so.

But the computational revolution has deeper and broader roots than Moore’s law and thus the rate of computational and social change will continue even after its demise and may indeed accelerate.

April 16, 2015|accelerating technology, Computation, European Union, Google, IBM, Microsoft, monopoly

Is It Time to Sell Google?

by John O. McGinnis|

Yesterday The European Union sued Google under its competition law. This lawsuit shows either that the European Union understands nothing about the way technological acceleration affects competition or that the EU is biased against American companies or both.

The complaint is that Google has monopoly power in search and that it abuses this power by favoring its own services, like its own travel reservation business, in the links it provides to queries. But with a few taps on a keyboard or a click of a mouse, consumers can easily switch from one search engine to another, casting doubt on the EU’s claim that Google has monopoly power. More importantly, technological acceleration makes it very unlikely that Google could maintain an entrenched monopoly in search over the long haul. As people spend more time on their smart phones and less time at their computer, Google’s form of search is increasingly displaced by apps. Another threat to Google is Facebook, which uses the connections of its social network to customize search and advertisements.

The difficulty of maintaining entrenched monopoly in accelerating technologies is not unique to Google.

March 13, 2015|accelerating technology, IBM, legal search, Ross, Siri, Watson

Watson Comes to Law

by John O. McGinnis|

The latest news from the world of technology suggests that advances in computation may disrupt the legal profession sooner and more broadly than I had thought. Students at the University of Toronto recently designed a new legal search tool, winning a competition for the best use of IBM’s newest computational resource, Watson. Specially designed and programmed, Watson challenged the best Jeopardy players in the world in 2011 – and won. IBM, however, was not aiming at world Jeopardy domination but at making money by invading other more lucrative domains. And it has already spun off a division to exploit Watson’s technology in fields as varied as medical diagnostics and aerospace engineering.

Wisely, IBM has also begun university competitions to interest students in designing new uses for Watson. The result from Canada is Ross, an application expressly designed for legal research. Computerized legal research is itself nothing new, having begun over forty years ago. Today, Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw are better known than any single law firm. But Ross has two advantages over the kind of computerized legal search most of us have known.

February 1, 2015|accelerating technology, disruptions, Politics, Ray Kurzweil

Technologists Need to Consider the Political Disruptions Ahead

by John O. McGinnis|

Technologists celebrate accelerating change. For much of human history, it would have been impossible even to notice technical innovation in the course of a lifetime. But today technological change is a yearly event. This trend is not only or mainly a matter of ever smaller and faster gadgets. More profoundly, more spheres of social and economic life come to rely on the platform of interconnected computation, which itself becomes ever more powerful. Law itself is on the cusp of computational envelopment.

But technologists rarely reflect on the kinds of political institutions we need to govern a world of faster change. Flexible institutions and policies must not only respond to the rate of technological change but also incorporate it. Consider the latest predictions of even more dramatic change by Ray Kurzweil, Google’s AI chief:

November 28, 2014|accelerating technology, Drones, FAA

Will the FAA Prevent Drones from Getting off the Ground?

by John O. McGinnis|

Drones provide a paradigmatic example of an accelerating technology. They first appeared in the 1950s, but improvements in computation and automation have made drones far more capable in the last ten years. During that short period, drones have already transformed our air force and are on the cusp of commercialization. More generally, when machine intelligence gets into a space, it relentlessly advances, shaking up the world and creating wealth and opportunities.

How the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chooses to regulate drones thus has implications for accelerating technology more generally. And, from what has been published about their proposals, the agency appears to be making a complete hash of the enterprise. Some reports say that commercial drone operators will be required to hold a commercial pilot’s license and thus have experience in manned flight. But the ability to pilot an airplane may be neither necessary nor sufficient to handle drones.

August 15, 2014|accelerating technology, cameras, Ferguson, policing

Transparency, Technology and Policing

by John O. McGinnis|

The fatal shooting in Ferguson, Missouri demonstrates the need for more transparent policing. The facts about the police shooting that sparked the riots are not clear–there is no objective record of what went on. There will surely be testimony from both members of the police force and the public about the incident, but testimony about such incidents on both sides can be biased and indeed even false.

Fortunately, technology empowers us to have better records. Police can wear cameras that record video with sound both during the day and at night. The footage could help determine what actually occurred in incidents like the one in Ferguson. By providing a more objective record, they would also deter misconduct. And they would encourage firmer policing when needed because police would have more confidence that they would not be falsely accused of brutality or murder. Finally, they would make protests less likely as society would be more like to converge on a true understanding of what happened and justice would be swifter.

June 15, 2014|accelerating technology, inequality, information technology, innovation, Uber

Uber Everywhere

by John O. McGinnis|

This week brought more news of a globalized world—a simultaneous strike in Paris, London and Berlin against Uber—the service that allows people to summon cars through phone apps. Uber is itself a worldwide phenomenon. It can succeed anywhere there are a substantial number of smartphones, and that is rapidly becoming everywhere. In fact, the strikes backfired by giving publicity to Uber and encouraging more people to sign up.

While taxi drivers will continue to try to strangle the service, they will lose—quickly in some jurisdictions and slowly in others, like Virginia where regulators last week banned Uber. The advantages of Uber are ultimately too great to be denied and Uber-friendly jurisdictions will serve as demonstration projects. On Thursday The New York Times described Uber’s many benefits for consumers and for society. Most obviously, the service will bring more competition to an often highly regulated and sluggish market—the taxi industry. In particular, it will help poorer and middle-class consumers who are unable to find cabs at crucial times and are not regular users of higher-priced car services. It will shrink the carbon footprint, as fewer people will need to own cars and spend time looking for parking spaces.

Uber could also help decrease inequality of consumption, as I have previously argued that information technology generally does. Only the .01 percent can afford chauffeurs at their beck and call. But how different is the experience of having a car ready to pick you up at a moment’s notice? More and more people can ride like the millionaires of old.

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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