The Great Stagnation of Innovation

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Scott Jackisch

There was much talk at the Singularity Summit this year of the Great Stagnation. The basic idea is that contrary to popular belief (among transhumanists), innovation is actually in decline. Here is an excellent blog post about the Huebner study that showed a reduction in per capita patents since 1870. I guess John Smart takes issue with the data sampling, etc. I have my own doubts that patents are a good metric for innovation, but it’s an intriguing idea. Sure you have the internet, but where are the flying cars? If per capita innovation is going down, maybe Homer was right all along and we are a bunch of degenerates.

Peter Thiel has been talking about this for a while now. He points to high energy costs as a failure to innovate in the energy space. He mentions that median real wages are unchanged since the 70’s and that this suppresses innovation. He sees the space program in shambles. Libertarian Thiel even actually (sort of) attributes the Apollo launch to the higher marginal tax rate of the 60’s. Well he concedes that the government had more macroeconmic control but exercised less microeconomic control. (i.e. the Polio vaccine wouldn’t have made it past the FDA)

In a debate at Stanford between Thiel and George Gilder, Thiel expands on his ideas that innovation in the real world of matter has been outlawed driving all innovation into the virtual world of bits such as information technology and finance. Gilder on the other hand takes a view that all fields will become subject to information technology and will soon start to see progress similar to that seen in the world of bits. Kurzweil commonly makes similar arguments when he says that biology is becoming an IT field. As an aside, I know some folks in bioinformatics and the fact is that this field is quite rocky. Job growth isn’t very impressive. It’s one thing to crunch the numbers, it’s another thing to deliver tangible results.

So Thiel focuses on the real world and talks about how food production isn’t outpacing population by much. And he loves to bring up the theory that food cost triggered the Arab spring. I’m sympathetic to this, I see him coming from an embodiment angle with that. He also takes some issue with the views of optimistic experts like Gilder and contrasts that with the views of average people. The percentage of people who think the next generation will be better off than the last generation has steadily gone down over the past 40 years. I like that angle too, it reminds me of Wisdom of the Crowds.

But I am always wary about these over-regulation stories. First, improvement in communication technology must be providing a huge decrease in the pressure to innovate on the transportation side. On the other hand I wonder how much easier it is to move goods around. I know most shipping cost is tied to fuel prices which supports Thiels energy narrative. But, we do see logistics operations like Apple, Amazon, and even Walmart that simply could not exist without IT. Sure, personal air travel might not be faster today than in the 1960’s, but my MacBook air arrived at my doorstep from Shenzhen 4 days after I ordered it.

A lot of the huge progress on the physical side might just have been low hanging fruit and we may just be in the area of diminishing returns. Gasoline’s energy density is hard to match. The information theory folks like Gilder and Kurzweil seem to do some handwaving on the energy story.

Fracking might be a thing, but we have to see how it actually pans out. I don’t blame people for getting pissed when it turns their tap water flamable. These energy companies love to skimp on costly safety measures (Valdez, Deep Water Horizon, even pipeline monitoring. ) Those Yankees whose drinking water gets hosed by cheap concrete lining in the fracking wells will probably shut it down. Yankees are feisty like that.

Another problem with the over-regulation theory of innovation decline is that we would expect to see better innovation rates in places with less regulation. So why don’t we see Texas taking the national lead in innovation? Europe is pretty heavily regulated and we still see plenty of patents coming out of there. So I don’t really disagree with most of Thiel’s observations (on this innovation thing only, not the other crazy shit). I more question the causal mechanisms. I look forward to his forthcoming book on this topic, coauthored with Max Levchin and chess great Garry Kasparav. But I am skeptical about any grand plans to change the tides.

I talked with a bunch of Singularity Institute folks about this at the Less Wrong pre-party and the Summit itself and opinions varied. Some say the innovation slump isn’t actually a thing. Some say that it’s a thing but it doesn’t matter. Some suggested that it might buy more time to develop friendly AI.

But what about the long, long term. Say there is no Singularity and that innovation was merely a function of population growth. If we have population stabilization or even a population crash, will we see innovation follow suit? In Incandescence by Greg Egan, the survivors of innovation crash are “mining” wire to make crude tools. This is a common thread in SciFi. In A Canticle for Leibowitz survivors create illuminated manuscripts of circuit boards.

Oh, but those are more technology crashes than innovation crashes…hmm…

Kevin Kelly makes a compelling argument about the nature of technology in What Technology Wants. This is a cool book that deserves much more discussion, but the basic idea is that new technology sort of springs from the existing framework of old technology. He points out many inventions that were independently arrived at. In some sense technological change becomes inevitable but also highly constrained. Innovation is dependent on the underlying framework of enabling technologies.

So how are you really going to change that?

UPDATE 12/27/2012: A DOE scientist I met a few months ago actually pointed out that energy efficiency does represent real innovation in the energy space in spite of price increases:

For one example: See figure 1.3 of:
http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cp/p09b/p0957.pdf

You will see that the real price of lighting services has dropped by a factor of ~1000 over the last two centuries: the lighting equivalent of Moore’s law.

Singularity Summit Day 2: Verner Vinge reminds me why I doubt the recursive self-improving AI

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Scott Jackisch

I did break down and actually attend a couple of talks at the Singularity Summit this year: Vernor Vinge and Peter Norvig.

Peter Norvig gave a talk that would have satisfied any generic group of AI developers. Google is making some frightening progress. This Deep Learning project is the most interesting aspect of his presentation from an AI architecture point of view. It’s impressive that Google can pair two top-level researchers in the field (Andrew Ng and Geoffrey Hinton) with parallel processing expert Jeff Dean and scale up academic models onto a functional 1000 node cluster. Boom, you are identifying cats and faces from unlabeled YouTube videos. It must be sickening to anyone who wants to compete with Google in the AI space.

But he never really mentioned friendliness. I was hoping he would trot out some more theory behind this big data approach. He gave a similar talk to Monica Anderson’s AI meetup a couple of years ago. I was there for that and it was pretty cool to see him present to such a small crowd.

At the Singularity Summit this year, he also talked about Google’s translation service which basically derives translations by mapping many many identical documents written in multiple languages. I was hoping to ask him what happens when the algorithm starts consuming translations that were actually created by Google Translate. It’s bound to screw them up if that happens. But then I realized that Google probably saves every translated document and checks new documents checksums against previous translations before using them to build mappings. That’s hard to picture though. They manage: A. Mind. Crushingly. Large. Amount. Of. Data.

Vernor Vinge outlined some outcomes that he sees for the singularity. One crazy idea he puts forth is a digital gaia where the world is minutely ornamented with digital sensors coupled to processors and actuators. One day they all spontaneously “wake up” and all hell breaks loose. He describes a reality with all the stability and permanence of the financial markets. I had a vision of my SmartLivingRoom(tm) suddenly reconfiguring itself into a nightmare of yawning jaws and oozing orifices. But in reality, we might just see wild fluctuations in the functionality of computationally enhanced environments; from smart to dumb to incomprehensible.

Next up: Augmented intelligence, a neo-neo-cortex provided by technology. This is his preferred scenario. Crowdsourcing is cool, yada-yada. Vinge imagines a UI so extreme that accessing it would be as convenient as the supported cognitive features. I used to like this idea until I started thinking about the security implications. I don’t want my brain hacked.

He did make one amazingly succinct point about human computer synergy. Computers can give us instantaneous recall and amazing processing speed, humans can provide that which we are best at: wanting things.

Humans want things. For me this cuts to the very heart of the AI question. I always complain that none of these AI geniuses can show us an algorithm to define problems. (No, CEV doesn’t count.) Algorithmic problem definition is just another way to say algorithmic desire definition Good luck with that one.

All simple human desires seem to arise from biological imperatives. Maybe artificial life could give you that. More complex desires are interpersonal and might be impossible to reduce back to metabolic processes. You may want fame for the status, but the specific type of fame depends on which person or group you are trying to impress. And that changes throughout your life.

And if we do build Artificial Life, it may well be that it can only function with similar constraints as, uh, non-artificial life. In fact, Terrence Deacon may well be right and constraints are the key to everything. Ahh, the warm fuzzies of embodiment are seeping over me now.

But seriously, SingInst, where is this algorithmic desire going to come from? And once you get that, how the hell are you going to constrain the actions of GodLikeAI again? I know, I know, Gandi would never change himself into an anti-Gandi. But we may be like bacteria saying that our distant offspring would never neglect the all encompassing wisdom of nutrient gradients.

Singularity Summit 2012 Day 2

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Scott Jackisch

I continued my strategy of mostly skipping talks in favor of socializing today at the Singularity Summit. However, so many people I talked to raved about the Jaan Tallinn talk that I regretted missing that one. Many people were impressed by his presentation and the prezi platform he apparently used for his presentation. My friend Peter McCluskey explained that his thesis builds on Nick Bostrom’s “Are You Living In a Simulation?” paper but expanded it in new directions. Robin Hanson tried explaining to me that there were only three plausible descriptions of our current perceived reality if we accept the premise that future agents will have the ability to simulate humans:

We are on the verge of extinction. (Really?! Wow I am really missing something.)
We are living in a simulation now.
No one in the future cares to simulate humans. (Ok, unlikely that NO one would care to simulate human perceived reality.)

I find it quite hard to get my head around this one. My initial reaction is to question the assumption that future entities will be able to simulate humans. But since we can simulate so much stuff now, that’s a pretty dark vision of the future too. I will go read Bostrom’s paper and wait impatiently for the video to get posted.

I had the rare privilege to briefly meet James O’Neill who sits on the board of the Thiel Foundation, SENS, and the Seasteading Institute (among others), though I had no idea who he was at the time. He talked a bit about Mithril Capital, Thiel’s new VC firm. (Yes. This is a $400 million dollar firm named after a mythical metal from the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien.)

O’Neill is also involved with Breakout Labs which seeks to fill the funding gap for radical early stage science projects that can’t get funding from VC investors with short-term goals or risk-averse long-term government sources. They are funding Dalrymple’s Nemaload worm neuron mapping project I learned about yesterday.

I also spoke further with Paul Bohm who has some interesting ideas about leveraging social network topologies to help people share information. He suggested that these social networks mights be isomorphic to the neural networks of a brain. He further suggested that the per capita decrease in innovation that we may be seeing might be corrected by reducing the cost of information sharing. Now I really need to dig back into Christakis!

Then suddenly a girl in shiny clothes appeared with a camera and whisked Bohm away to be filmed for the SpaceCollective website. She said they were from LA and looking to collect profiles of transhumanist types. It seems pretty interesting, I look forward to seeing some of the profiles that they gathered at the Summit this year.