Computation enables full physical simulation

With sufficient computation power and emotional drive, through artificial intelligence, we will be able to calculate full physical simulations of precise environments. In less than 30 years, humankind will be able to fully simulate an environment, from its most fundamental physical forces to the most complex biochemical processes. Such a simulation will form the basis of most economic, academic and social activities. It will simulate engineering platforms and use genetic algorithms to form the most efficient designs.

This project is most often considered a research subject. However, it has reached maturity except for political commitment. It would take barely a few million dollars in investments and international cooperation to create a vast computational network capable of such processing powers. The hundreds of millions of computers that are connected to the Internet can provide an exponentially increasing pool of computing power. This approach has already been used several times, notably by the SETI@Home and the World Community Grid. The economic benefit of fully realistic simulations are valued several trillions in a decade's time as they would greatly improve all manufacturing, transportation and telecommunications processes.

All mathematical and algorithmical functions, which comprise the vast majority of the mechanisms in an economy, can be automated with enough computing power. The tools capable of achieving nuclear fusion and other advanced sources of energy are worth more than all the wealth created by humankind in its history. Significantly higher levels of energy would provide access for humanity to the basic forces of life. Bending the nuclear forces is possible with sufficient energy and is an upcoming step of evolution in regards to picotechnology. Such a level of technology means interstellar travel that would provide access to planetary resources. Computation and genetic algorithms are indispensable to create such technology and will help achieve them much faster.

Microsoft (strangely) leading the next economic paradigm

Microsoft has lately expanded its plans to license their IP property. The only logical outcome of such a practice is that the technology Microsoft has developped will be improved without cost to them or Microsoft consumers. It is very likely that salient developments will be made, especially if academic institutions can benefit from educational access. In effect the overall field of software will expand in value and along will Microsoft's value.

One of the developments we have made at the Economics, Science and Communications Institute is a new model of intellectual property which emphasizes economic reward but opens the intellectual content of patents. As a whole, science is synergical and benefits from greater numbers of thinkers. Economic markets that were created in the last fifty years account for well over half of all economic throughput and are responsible for more than 95% of all economic wealth. Information is already the most valued economic resource and will progress increasingly faster with scientific research and advanced education. Education remains the most powerful economic investment any society can spend. Rewards only come after 15 to 20 years but they create much more wealth in their lifetime than any other economic activity.

Microsoft's move is a heavy push towards such a system. A rework of intellectual property is self-evident in the force that open-source pushes against commercial software. In a short lapse of time such development can be ignored but as it becomes as solid as commercial software it poses a rethinking of business practices. On a long-enough period of time, any piece of software that can generate a loyal core of developpers and users will provide more usefulness and value than a comparable piece of commercial software.

Intellectual property will represent a large portion of economic wealth in a few decades and will need to make use of all emotional computation capacity it can handle, the primary source of which is human intelligence. As artificial intelligence begins to handle most, and then all, economic processes, computation and information technologies will run the entire manufacturing, transportation and communication mechanisms while human intervention will be devoted to designing and developping concepts and theories. The future economic development of industrialized societies is directly tied to the development of information technologies, computation, specially nano-based computation, and telecommunications.

News.com — Microsoft expands IP licensing program

St Lawrence of Google

The Economist — St Lawrence of Google

Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, “they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test”—in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.

Collaboration as economic efficiency

Collaboration has surpassed competition in the new industries. While production needs the pressure of self-improvement, collaboration is far more efficient in knowledge industries. Engineering partnerships in the automobile industry are self-evident with the numerous cross-ownerships of the majors. The computer chip industries also strongly collaborate (Toward the Chips of Tomorrow, BusinessWeek) in order to achieve an industry-wide roadmap that would otherwise be out of financial reach.

The purpose of work turns into a logical decision-making process rather than a strategic one. Science is a self-correcting process that works best with a maximum number of criticism of the solutions evaluated. Research has a much higher return over a long period than production. Since competition drags down research by limiting creativity and evolutionary mechanisms, a reworking of intellectual property laws is clearly needed. Research benefits from the law of accelerating returns and therefore constitutes the only sustainable economic policy.

Research information tool: intelligent text mining

Embryonic development of a distributed supercompter serving public research.

The Guardian — Digging for data that can change our world

The government's response has been to set up the National Centre for Text Mining, the world's first centre devoted to developing tools that can systematically analyse multiple research papers, abstracts and other documents, and then swiftly determine what they contain.

Text mining uses artificial intelligence techniques to look in texts for entities (a quality or characteristic, such as a date or job title) and concepts (the relationship between two genes, for example). In many ways, it's more precise and sophisticated than a search engine: it not only tracks down information against specified criteria but can also draw out relationships between hitherto unlinked bits of research (see below).

2006 expected technological developments

Popular mechanics — 15 Tech Concepts You'll Need To Know In 2006

• Driver-Monitoring System
• Body Area Network (BAN)
• Internet Protocol Television (IPTV)
• Metadata
• NAND Flash Memory
• Nanoparticle Batteries
• SPIT (SPam over Internet Telephony)
• Micro Fuel Cells
• Electronic Medical Records (EMR)
• Coal Gasification
• Perpendicular Storage

Worldwide nanobiotechnology survey

A worldwide expert survey on 20 future developments in Nanobiotechnology (NBT) has been successfully completed. The survey was conducted as part of the Foresight activity within the EU network of excellence "Nano-to-Life" (N2L). 139 experts from 30 countries participated in the survey. For each development the experts assessed the likely year of realization, impact on science and technology, environment, quality of life and the labor market, and commercialization prospects in medicine, security, environment, agro-food and consumer products....

The Interdisciplinary Center for Technology Analysis &
Forecasting at Tel-Aviv University — N2L Expert Survey