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Preprints & Reprints What is the future of man, woman and machine? In a museum a few years ago I saw in a column of formaldehyde a splendid human brain complete with the eyes, the spinal cord, and all the spinal feeds to the rest of the body. It suddenly occurred to me that that was the complete human being, the complete system. We do not understand it. Having spent three years dissecting nematodes, the human race has a complete map of the brain of a worm, which has 22 neurons but we still do not know how it works. What chance of understanding the human brain which has 1010 neurons? Without augmentation of our brains we would understand little. Without adequate machinery we will not survive long as a species. We have built a system of providing food and doing business that is like a ratchet: it goes one way. If we were to switch off the telephone network and the computers in the UK, most of the 60 million population would be dead within a year. The dominant language on the planet is already binary. Machines have more conversations every day than human beings have had cumulatively since the creation of Eve. By the year 2015 we will see the computer that is as good as a human being from the point of view of storing and processing information. All the componentry to do this exists today; it is only a matter of turning the handle. Should we be worried? We do not worry about the fact that millions of people are walking round with pacemakers, cochlear implants, pain relief modules. By default we are becoming, as a species, cyborg. Our lives are now in the hands of machines, but, in general we do not worry because these technologies are friendly - like light switches. Who worries about the power station when we throw the switch? Getting the best from technology My father had a working life of 100,000 hours. I could do everything he did in 10,000 hours and my son will be able to do it in 1,000. This speed-up means that we have to think and behave in a different way. It took the UK 70 years to industrialise. Subsequently the US did it in 40 years, Japan in 27, China in 10. The US has created an information economy in 15 years whereas the Europeans persist in trying to create an information society. We have to focus on the wealth generation mechanisms first - and society second. If not, the competition will eat our lunch. Work is no longer a place, it is an activity! I work everywhere all the time, and I go to my office to be disturbed, not to concentrate. My concentrated effort now takes place on trains and planes, in cars and hotel rooms, at home, and not in my office. Seven years ago my company had 242,000 people. Today it has fewer than 110,000 and the number will continue to fall as much of the work previously undertaken by people is now done by machines. You might ask what is going to happen to the people who are put out of work. But it is as relevant a question as the fate of unemployed monks and the destruction of the quill pen industry when the printing press was invented. People will be doing new things that we find difficult to imagine today. Only 500 years ago no one could imagine a computer let alone multi-media. In 50 years we will wonder what all the fuss was about! Life is getting faster, and not just in business. It is happening in healthcare and education and every other sector. Probably government is the only area that is totally immune because it has no competition. But they should be aware that technology and society will render them irrelevant and by-pass them if they do not change and adopt new technology and organisational methods. I have traveled the planet, including the Third World, and the only place where I failed to get my computer to work was the House of Lords. The power sockets there are older than I am and the wiring is cotton-covered. We are already creating a society of just two classes. The first and larger class will spend incredible amounts of time to save money. The second will spend incredible amounts of money to save time. As we get more and more mobile devices we will see whole networks brought down by chaos. Imagine a large conference where 4000 are listening to a presentation and not making phone calls. At 10.15 coffee arrives, and 200 mobile phones come out \within two minutes and the system crashes. A motorway accident can give rise to 1,000 calls within two minutes and again the system crashes. We have to think about how we organise our systems to cope with chaotic demand. We now have Coke machines that ring up for more supplies when the sun comes out and chocolate-bar machines that ring up for more chocolate when the weather is cold. When you get married you buy your washing machine and tumble drier and so on and seven years later everything crashes and has to be replaced. The appliances have been designed to have a meantime between failure of about seven years. There are many mechanisms for creating chaos in our society and systems - and it is the natural mode. Perils of continual reorganisation More and more people are buying through virtual shops on the Internet. In this arena retail and wholesale have been wiped out by disintermediation. But they will soon reappear in a new form as the speed of the electronic world demands even more intermediaries than before. Buying petrol will soon see us buying music and the games and loading them into the hard drive of future cars. At home I discovered that I had spent £1,000 on woodwork (furniture) to store my CDs, but on average I only like three tracks on each. That is expensive music! So my son pulled off all my favourite tracks, digitally encoded them, and put them on my laptop. A 10-gigabyte hard drive costing £300 will store all the music you ever heard let alone the few thousand tracks you like. No doubt the prospect of such a future will upset the music industry because the bottom will drop out of the market. When you can buy most tracks you want for 45p direct off the Internet if you know where to look, why spend £14 on a CD? The library at my laboratory used to occupy several large room and employ 30 people. Five years ago and replaced by a digital library that is now ten times bigger - and growing fast. It is staffed by only 12 of the original librarians who are now among the best html programmers in the company. This digital library has become an essential part of our lives and the work output has gone up tenfold in ten years. My laptop has far more processing power than an ant, but it is dumb. The primary reason it is not more powerful than an ant is that it has no sensory capability. However, there are now micro-machines, including a tiny six-legged robot with only three transistors. With the equivalent of only three crude neurons, such machines can walk. The clever thing is that it has a lot of sensors, and the sensory feedback creates the intelligence. So far we have done nothing to connect our large computing machines to our world, and until we do they will remain dumb. A virtual shark has been created that can swim inside a computer. It was not programmed to do so; it evolved that capacity and, remarkably, it swims in a way that mirrors the carbon life form it is emulating. We can now think in terms of electronic agents swimming through a network of fibres, able to search and find and bring information to us. Some interesting things are happening in the way engineers and scientists are looking at what machinery, as opposed to evolved systems, is doing. By the year 2020 machines will be writing better software than humans. Imagine 10,000 parents coming together in one giant copulation, bringing genetic material to produce an offspring. If the offspring cannot solve a given problem, it is destroyed. If an offspring can solve the problem better some of the parents, then destroy those parents. Then feed the offspring back into the loop as a parent. Keep going round that loop and eventually only a small number of parents and some very clever programs remain. This evolutionary approach to programming and artificial intelligence has already created some significant results. We can expect the deign of everything from cars, and aircraft, banking and stock markets, to integrated circuits and networks to be influenced by this technology. Learning how things work Using the metaphor of a chicken, the future for artificial intelligence and life goes something like this: For thousand of years philosophers looked at a chicken trying to figure out how it worked. They didn't make a lot of progress. The first people who tried to do something clever were the physicists. They killed the chicken and took it to pieces. That gave them an inkling of how it worked. However, the next on the scene were my heroes, the engineers, who tried to build a chicken. (Building something is a powerful way to learn a tremendous amount). But of course the people who worry me are the software engineers: they just want to specify a chicken. Through such a process we are now getting useful results. But there are those besotted by the notion that we have to have full understanding before we do something useful. In reality our learning cycle has adopted a new route. We build computers, they learn from us, then we learn from them. A general education Wealth generation |