Kurzweil Joins Google, Kool-Aid All Around

Like many people I was shocked to learn that Ray Kurzweil had joined Google as some sort of employee.  “Like, for a salary?” asked one incredulous acquaintance.  Yep, I assume that directors of Engineering at Google receive a salary.  That MIT tech review blog linked to above criticized his Singularity writings but lauded Kurzweil as an engineer.  Some of my futurist friends have the opposite opinion of Kurzweil: his vision is interesting, but he hasn’t given us much in terms of engineering lately.  Certainly Blio is nothing to write home about.

But I really want to talk about kool-aid.  Has Ray drunk the Google kool-aid or has Google drunk the Singularity kool-aid or both?  Maybe Ray was just as blown away by Norvig’s Deep Learning presentation at the 2012 Singularity Summit as I was.  I previously commented that the way Google was able to pull in top academics like Ng and Hinton, team them with world-class parallelization engineer, Dean and eject a functioning face and cat classifier must take the wind out anyone competing with them in the AI space.  Perhaps Ray said: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.  He clearly wants to build a brain and he certainly doesn’t need a salary.  So Ray seems to be drinking the Google kool-aid.

But what about the Google side?  Are Brin and Page secret Singularitarians?   Well maybe not too secret.  Page did help setup the Singularity University in 2008.  Foresight 2011 was held at the Google campus as well.  So there is a lot of futurist synergy with Google.  Some friends of mine think that Google’s senior executives just need to keep their interests quiet so they don’t spook investors too badly.  Maybe that’s true.  I just wonder how SIAI feels about this turn of events.  I will have to ask someone over there.  Do they think that Ray will inject caution and a concern for friendliness into Google’s pursuit of AI?  Or will he help focus Google’s massive resources into an AGI project that will unwittingly create the search version of Skynet and perhaps convert all matter in the solar system into molecular adwords?  It’s hard to tell.

UPDATE:  I was further surprised to hear that some of my secret contacts at SIAI don’t actually think Ray will be working on AGI at all.  AI maybe, but not AGI.  Go figure.

2012 Humanity+ Day 1 – Part 4 – Fred Stitt Online Education

This is part of an on-going series about the 2012 Humanity+ conference:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3.1

Architect and educator, Fred Stitt spoke at H+ 2012 about the future of education.  Stitt said that he had problems with education from an early age.  It annoyed him how inefficient it was to transfer information in a traditional classroom lecture.  It has a very low rate of bits per minute according to Fred.  I am less inclined to discount the bit rate of non-verbal communication, but I agree with the overall sentiment.  The “Education is broken” meme is gaining steam as evidenced by Thiel’s 20 under 20 fellowship where he pays promising young people to forgo college and start working directly on the projects they are passionate about.

Stitt’s preferred solution to the education problem is a little less controversial, namely, online learning. Online learning has received a lot of attention lately.  Norvig and Thrun’s Stanford online AI class famously attracted more than 100,000 students and was recently transferred over to Udacity, which is a private player in the online learning space.  MIT is a big participant with it’s OpenCourseWare and edX partnership with Harvard.  Coursera, which partners with many schools such as Stanford, Caltech, and Duke rounds out the Big Three of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) world.  So many big name schools have already started providing courses online.

Of course, I don’t want to neglect one inspirational small player, the Khan academy whose earnest founder, Sal Khan, won over the hearts (and pried open the pocketbook) of the Gates foundation.  Sal records very engaging lessons himself primarily using a virtual blackboard.  The Khan academy has quizzes for students and tools to help teachers keep track of student progress.  There is also a cool map to show students which foundational skills are required to learn each subject. I am pleased to say that I myself contributed in a small way to this project when I helped Asante Africa image a bunch of laptops to help native translators could translate Khan academy videos into several African languages.  My friend David is really into a free-schooling and was less enamored with Khan academy when he checked it out.  He thought it was too geared toward helping kids pass tests as opposed to actually learning the material.  I do agree that Khan academy’s work is more complementary to rather than than a replacement for standard classroom education.

But yeah, online learning.  It’s a thing.  According to Stitt, one of the issues that make online learning so important is the discriminatory practices of the current education system.  He pointed out the quotas that previously restricted Jewish student enrollment at the ivy league colleges and the current Asian quotas that appear to be in place.  He also mentioned that the faculty pose one of the largest obstacles to broader adoption of online learning.  So academia appears to be populated with backward racist luddites.  Do tell, Fred, do tell.

Stitt did acknowledge some drawback to online learning such as the lack of accreditation.  He argues that there will be various mechanisms for teachers to sign off on student mastery of subject matter as the field matures, but that schools that have traditionally acted as guardians of accreditation are fighting to maintain the status quo.  Stitt seems to suggest that skyrocketing education costs will provide more opportunities for new players to disrupt this situation.  Another problem with online learning is the lack of personal contact and feedback.  One solution Stitt brought up that I found interesting is the concept of multiple campus enrollment.  He is apparently suggesting that online students would be able to physically attend multiple campuses to interact with students and teachers.  Arguably, the students who stand to benefit the most from online learning, such as those in remote or undeveloped parts of the world, don’t have access to campuses anyway.  Those folks might be stuck waiting for immersive virtual reality to provide a technical solution for remote personal interaction.

Finally, it seems from my notes that Stitt suggested online learning could provide a platform to research the learning process itself.  I scribbled something about optimizing perception and lobe activation.  Now that does seem interesting.  As teachers can gather more data about precisely how the courseware is consumed, they will be able to identify the highest value techniques for students with various learning styles.  The Inner Life of the Cell video comes to mind when thinking about optimizing perception and lobe activation.  The maker of this video also presented at H+ this year and I will say more about this later, but students that watched this video scored well above a control group deprived of this animation when testing time came.

There is plenty more to say about online learning in relation to free-schooling and also the question of how humans will stay competitive in the face of automation.  I will try to dig into that more in future posts.

UPDATE:  I just came across this article in which the One Laptop Per Child folks just dumped a bunch of tablets on some African kids and let them teach themselves.  I must say that I have some skepticism around free-schooling, but this is pretty compelling.  My nagging concern is that without some curriculum, kids will overlook important foundational knowledge that is maybe less fun or interesting.  I like the idea of presenting kids with a carefully curated set of apps to explore on their own.  With this approach, care can be taken to include stuff grownups agree is important.

Do science fiction writers really write the future?

This is my multi-part series on the 2012 Humanity+ conference:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

In my previoius post, I was discussing Kim Stanley Robinson’s talk at the 2012 Humanity+ conference.  One point I forgot to bring up was about the influence of writers.  Robinson made the assertion that the vision of H.G. Wells influenced the formation of the Bretton Woods system and thus deeply impacted the course of the 20th century.  I searched around but I couldn’t actually find anyone else who made that connection.  (At least no one sane.)  I tend to be skeptical when science fiction authors tell us how deeply impactful the work of science fiction authors is.  I heard this argument from Neal Stephenson at Black Hat this year where he promoted his Hieroglyph project.

Stephenson wants SF writers to start writing positive stuff to inspire the engineers again like they used to in the old days.  But I have a hard time blaming SF writers for the Great Stagnation of innovation.  SF writers have given us a bunch of great technology that the engineers have failed to deliver yet.  Where’s my immersive virtual reality?  Where’s my utility fog, dammit?  The world wide web was supposedly inspired by a dark story by Arthur C. Clarke, so engineers don’t appear to require HappyTimeUtopia stories to inspire them.

You know, I think that markets might play a role here somewhere.  Technically, we could probably build some sort of moon base, but no one wants to pay for it.  I was talking to a scientist from PARC at VLAB last night and told me that we spend more on air conditioning in Iraq than NASA’s entire budget.  So please don’t blame (or credit) the engineers or SF writers  too much for our lack of a bright shiny future.  Politics and markets play a pretty big role in what actually gets built.