ON TECHNOLOGICAL STAGNATION

Guessing the roots of economic crisis

In 2013 the world is crossing through lots of uncertainty, economic difficulties and fear of environmental collapse. In a previous document I had suggested a few reasons to this state of things: oil price, disappearance of some industries, automation, shift of popular interest in cars and some other. But maybe there are other problems like the worldwide conflict between keeping contaminating technologies such as oil fuels and the need of more environmentally friendly ones. Another cause for economic downgrade might be that the private sector just reduced personnel to an optimum. I mean, maybe there was some sort of employment boom, in which there were many job positions not being really necessary. Perhaps outsourcing to less developed countries killed many work positions in the developed world. This should have led to better living standards in poor countries where the outsourcing economy created jobs. But it seems it did not happen. I guess one essential cause for economic difficulties is technological stagnation, I mean not searching for revolutionary options but only improving what already exists.

Cutting edge tech

Up until now technology and perhaps science, have been only refining what had been under development from the beginnings of twentieth century: airplanes, engines, computers, rockets, etc. Reaching the sky is a very expensive endeavor that prevents humanity from conquering new worlds or make use of minerals in the moon or somewhere else. Oil price rises every passing day, which reduces the chances to transportation, commerce and recreational travel. But reducing its cost would lead to higher atmospheric contamination. Renewable resources are reaching exhaustion limits which is a threat to human success on earth. Mineral reserves are decreasing. All of these issues require a true revolution in technology and science in order to guarantee humanity's sustainability and our expansion to new worlds.

What does it take

So far the only motor to technological revolutions has been worldwide war. The US financial crash of early twentieth century was resolved by entering World War II. Atomic technology came out of the war with a great financial cost. After the war all those German engineers and scientists were recruited by the USA and Soviet Union. As a result from this, rockets took people to the moon, airplanes evolved from wooden bodied ones to metallic jets capable of beating the sound barrier. But now planetary war does not seem likely due to nuclear weaponry and its devastating menace. There is a theoretical vision developed by The Club of Rome, which states that human race will collapse by 2040. Now we are experiencing depletion of sea-fishing resources, air pollution, metals shortage and climate change that seem to be confirmations of that doomsday scenario. A nuclear worldwide war is possible when economic crisis deepens to unmanageable. Maybe the world will not end, but atomic weapons apparently model a war to last just days or weeks, until parties at conflict negotiate a truce or someone just loses the fight. This would not allow time enough for a revolution in science and technology. So maybe the engine to this foundational shift will come after reaching the doomsday scenario suggested by the Club of Rome.

A final clarification

I decided to write this document without any Internet research. This is because I think when being too methodical, one misses creativity and our own biases are usually corrected without trace. So maybe I will develop a second document with data gathered from the web so I can check how close to reality I was.

ROBOTS AREN'T TAKING OVER, YET

It's a common idea that robots will take most jobs and people won't work anymore. This would lead us to either fall into misery or enjoy a life of abundance, according to different views of the future. But this is an oversimplification of robotics. We assume robots are almost-human-machines with emotions and moral thought. That's far distant from reality. Currently robots are just tools with very limited capabilities and lots of technical issues. Except for drones, robots can't get freely around. They are like trees, stuck to a fixed place or requiring human supervision to move between locations. And there is another major problem: machine-understanding of visual content (watching things) is just at its beginnings. For now any image or video, is just a bunch of pixels that no computer can see as we humans do. So there is no way for a robot to process its surroundings in a human-like way. Finally, I think machines with some kind of consciousness will be ready in at least 30 years. Then, The Judgment Day is away. But robotics will have overcome most of current challenges when conscious machines arise. Therefore, perhaps robots will be ready to beat humanity when that day comes.

In 2013 the world economy is going through a crisis that could worsen. Automation is blamed for this and robots are perceived as a close danger for employment. How much of that is true? I searched the Internet and found the opposite: robotics boosts job creation! There is a double explanation for this. First, as I already explained, robots are unable to behave or move like humans. This means any job that requires understanding what's around, walking or simply casually interacting with people, needs human workers. The second reason is that robotics (broadly automation) at factories dramatically increases production. This leads to more distribution and sales forces that only can be met by humans (more jobs.) New technology usually leads to lower prices which allows people to buy other things, which leads to new companies and new jobs. Automation in general does not affect highly and lowly paid jobs but middle level ones seem to be decreasing either in manufacture or services. Then, maybe this is the big concern for most.

After all these marvelous ideas were written, the world economy remains in great turmoil. I searched for causes and found that everything started with banks uncontrolledly lending money in the US, for real state acquisitions that led to a financial crash when people failed to pay their debt. But why did banks follow this trend? Something is still missing. My next suspect was oil price, but I found that in the 80s it was even relatively higher than today. Then come all those gone industries: music-records, film-photography and even the current publishing-books industry victimized by the Internet and people like me at blogging. Have all those gone jobs not recovered? My last suspect is the car industry. The developed world has been spinning around cars and parts factories. But it seems production reached its peak and now people are not so interested in buying more of them. Maybe the technological shift to a more automated world is taking its toll.

More links:

On automation
On technological unemployment
What is a robot
On robotics and job creation
On tech evolution
Future's workers
On middle class shrinking
The Luddite Fallacy I
The Luddite Fallacy II

UBERMACHINES

DISRUPTIVE DRIVES

Solid state drives that are more like huge usb-stick memories are going to disrupt all the computing world, when they replace the conventional hard disk. From operating systems to main processors, nothing will be the same within the next five years. Until now, disk drives have been passive receivers of data waiting for a database update, software configuration change, a new program to install or some other input/output task. All the software development has been conceived in the way of open/close files or  read/write data from the disk to main memory. Computers are turned on and off. These new memories, when fast and cheap enough will eliminate the need for the famous RAM memory and maybe letting just some memory space within the processor itself for a more quickly processing (buffering or whatever). Turning on and off will disappear, and the processor will be designed to function in wake-sleep modes only. The sleep state will serve to process some chores that do not require user's participation and maybe help them solve some kind of internet-search problem, prepare the next session with interesting stuff according to user tastes. The most interesting feature of these drives is that their whole space could be used as main memory. So very complex software will be able of performing intelligent activities such as better user-machine interface with audio and video interaction and more intuitive human-machine connection. The input/output or read/write logic might be discarded from programming languages. I think that processors won't be a single chip anymore but distributed ones (embedded into the main memory drive) with more simplistic tasks and maybe one main processor to guide the general operation.

ISSUES

I read somewhere that solid state drives are prone to fail when intensely used, so perhaps they should be developed to last longer for the prior ideas to be implemented. But it would be more interesting if those new memory drives were able of automatically replacing their own hardware, such as living tissue does, so they can live for many years. This could allow the development of personalized computers suited for each one's particular needs.
A link to a possible solution:
Phase change memory
Self repairing hardware

A FEW CONJECTURES

Maybe bigger platforms carrying SSDs could be based upon artificial intelligence. Then a few questions come out. Will the conventional directory tree and file system be replaced by an associative data storage? What kinds of associations? What could be the minimum data unit? Perhaps an idea could be that minimum. And what is an idea? Would these techniques mimic the chaotic human brain way of thinking? Could machine memories be as dynamical as human ones, being rebuilt every time one recovers them?

Interesting link from a comment on G+:

Phase change memory

FUTURELAND

Here are some ideas on how I see the next hundred years.

THE END OF GAS

There will be no more gasoline internal combustion engines. A simple and wasteless fuel will take over. Powerlines will not be necessary anymore. You will have your own power station at home. Cars won't need refueling. The price of traveling and transport  will decrease dramatically so people will mix a lot with diseases spreading worlwide and goods being produced anywhere on earth.

AUTOMATION AND THE EXPIRATION OF DEMOCRACY

Automation and robotics are a current revolution. The world will be very different in some 30 years due to the economic shift of a majority of people not working but plenty of goods being produced by machines. Maybe there will be less democracy because governments will rule the economy in order to distribute the welfare generated by self-driven machines. This automated society will behave very differently than we currently do. Maybe poor countries will stop working at all and accommodate to receive full help from the robotised rich world; therefore the gap between developed countries and the third world is going to magnify.

PLENTY OF WATER AND FOOD

I guess there will be an important discovery on how to process salt water from the sea into drinking liquid on a very cheap way. Biotechnology will increase productivity at the top and instead of farms, food will be harvested in many floors(*) buildings inside cities (levitating towns).
Link (Dec-27-2012):
Water purifying technique.

THE OPEN SOURCE PARADISE

At some point, when abundance in rich countries assures all life conditions for everybody, technology and science will be released by companies and governments or at least there will be a great share of knowlegde-exchange because current rules of competition are not going to be a need to survive. There will be no more struggle to overcome the other one, so knowlegde-secrets will not be an advantage anymore. As a result from this, human evolution is going to accelerate and more advancements and discoveries will take place. Link: Open Source Initiative.

ON FILMS

I think movies are going to be developed entirely by software, even from the script. So very few people will be in charge barely on the most refined work or minor shifts. But since nobody wants imaginary artists -people want real blood- there will be true people holographed in files that will be used for making films. These persons are going to true-film the dangerous scenes, or at least pretend they are. They will be forced to lead lives that resemble their movie characters and maybe even participate in dangerous situations in real life, or fake them. Maybe some of this is already happening, I am not too much a movies man.

FLIGHT AND LEVITATION

My last guessed revolution has to do with flight or levitation. I think there will be a major breakthrough on how to keep things floating in the air or escaping the gravity attraction. So flying will not require wings and maybe there will be floating cities. Perhaps space flight will be easy and humanity will settle on the moon, mars and other worlds, creating new countries and political problems.

Biotechnology, genetical engineering, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will complete this new world that comes.

WORKERS OF THE FUTURE

I think there will always be jobs for the less educated but very little. Most of the workers in this new world will be scientists, philosophers, inventors, entrepreneurs, artists, entertainers, judges, managers, social carers, teachers, motivational trainers, law enforcement, planners, politicians,  religious leaders and everything related to automation that cannot be performed by machines.

(*) I had used the word "stories" but I think it is wrong. My Englis is not really good.

SOME IDEAS ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I did not make any web search around intelligence. I chose to go the naive way and then maybe discover the theory. Perhaps what I am writing is outdated or discarded but I am having fun with this. My point of view is that intelligence is not an abstract skill based only upon logic, math or some other human theoretical creation. Logic (maybe algorithms) seem necessary for any thought or emotional process but maybe conventional logic is not enough to grasp the whole mind's dynamics.

THE GUESSING PROCESS OF THOUGHT

Uncertainty is at the core of any thinking process. We will never be able to know everything, so we guess. Religion is a very useful tool to give meaning to the unknown; but science or philosophy give more accurate explanations. Science is an excellent tool yet there is always a limit to it. There are some questions that science does not approach; philosophy fills that space and then religion or even fantasy. Us humans organize things according to categories, similarities or convenience. Then we assign names to those categories and things. We link a thing to a category and both get a new meaning. Emotions are present at any thought process of course. So there's an emotional side for any connection or idea.

WANDERING ME

To my knowledge artificial intelligence aims to emulate the human conscious mind or solve problems based on rigid logic. Human brain runs on unexpected paths even when fully aware. You can amaze yourself playing an automatic video of stabbing some coworker on the back just because they raised the voice at you; then you come back to reality and try figure out why they did so. Psychology has determined that we have a parallel mind labeled as unconscious self that flows chaotically and apparently not following any ethical rule. This unconscious mind devises strange worlds in which the known rules of reality are barely followed and events do not happen in a linear-time way. This strange form of thinking affects our decisions however it seems artificial intelligence theorists and developers do not consider it at all.

CURIOSITY

Artificial intelligence can be whatever we humans decide it should be. We are its creator so we define how it functions. Until now, AI serves the purpose of helping us do tasks that are impossible for our natural brains. But we want artificial brains to behave as our minds work. It seems technology is not currently capable of this kind of feat. I think for a machine to cogitate like humans do, it takes perceiving reality same way as we do. This means eyes, skin, a sense of smell, ears and instinctive reactions such as our own. A full nervous system that current electronics cannot achieve. Maybe nanotechnology will solve it. Animals focus on things that start moving before them. This is an instinct for self defense and maybe for hunting. A little child is fascinated with the light of a candle, he tries to grab it and then he feels the hurt that warns him of the danger and quickly retreats. So there is a process of watching, guessing, comparing with other already known things, and when realising it is something new, beginning to explore. We learn from others too. This little kid might be warned of not touching the flame. Maybe he will obey.

PENDING: INSTINCT, EMOTIONS, TACT, MEMORIES...

Originally wrote phylosophy but there was a bell ringing until I checked the spelling.

UBERWEB

Current access to the Internet poses a series of problems to individual rights such as privacy issues, intelectual property threats coming from the terms of use (the contract). It seems the internet has evolved into a national security tool for the United States. Yet the whole world makes use of it. For US people some irruption into their cyberlives might be acceptable as long as it ensures their security and freedom. To the rest of us there is no benefit. I do not know if in the United States there are means to prevent other people from breaking into one's web connections. I guess there are, since it looks like they trust the internet for business. In my case that is not possible. I am outside the United States and I have never felt secure on the internet. Attacks to any of my web accounts have been common. Breaking passwords appears to be really easy. So it is hard for me to pass a credit card into any web service. One last and devastating issue on internet terms of use is that providers determine what you can upload or not. They define political correctness rules for anything you upload, even if it is a simple letter to a close friend. So the internet has become some kind of big brother that molds even your thoughts.

I think there is a lot of room for a new and very different electronic network. One that guarantees privacy, security, freedom, property and which should be world-wide dispersed so it does not become a national security instrument for a particular country. If it can happen it will come true. American corporations are surely going to refuse it. Are american individuals going to take it?

Links

The web 2.0

The web 3.0

THE JUDGMENT DAY

Terminator film throws a warning on robots taking over and wiping all of us out. It is not a new idea. It appears to be running around since XIX century. It brings some worry on the future. But there are many other concerns that can lead human race to self destruction much sooner than this robotic-artificial-intelligence-doom. Genetical engineering can lead to out of control mutations or diseases. Automation seems to be driving developed countries into a collapse. Even current nuclear weapons might kill most human population. People live huddled in cities. This exacts a sea of oil flowing to multimillion humans towns. If this black blood begins running short, the whole civilisation of cities would quickly die.

For machines to take over it is required two curious abilities that humans do not master yet: Self replication and self repairing. No device can rule humans if not carrying these skills. No single robot will decide our destiny if it is not self-aware and capable of desire. The only out-of-control-technology threat to mankind might be the grey goo. It is a nanotech hell of tiny machines replicating uncontrollably until they destroy all life on earth. When nuclear weapons were only a project it was suspected that a single detonation was going to spread through the whole universe and bring it all to an end. It did not happen. So even the grey goo is perhaps just too much fear. And same as nuclear bombs no grey goo or tech-doom will prevent people from trying new things.