The future of computing

Being able to simulate events with a high precision will give access to a limited capacity to view in the future and predict certain phenomena. Most of them will be natural, but statistically distributed social simulations will also give many clues about human evolution. In a few decades, we will be able to simulate every reaction between sub-atomic particles of a physical system. It will allow much better management of primary and secondary economic functions as agronomy and molecular engineering knowledge will allow precise and energy-efficient farming and manufacturing.

At one point we will be able to capture every detail relevant to a realistic simulation from every improbability wave and simulate concurrent outcomes that will answer questions involving chaotic communication functions. The faster we are capable of resolving improbability waves, the more precise our capacity to understand the consequences and benefits of a decision. When humans will form a computer that is capable of solving every improbability, genetic algorithm simulations explaining statistical outcomes of the best decisions will reduce the margin of error in every field of human influence and will enable scientific political decision-making.

One after another, every obstacle we face will evolve enough developments to work flawlessly. Starting with the simplest, the most complex will all be within the reach of the distributed intelligent system that will succeed the Internet. Human politics will evolve into a science when the basic aspects of an economy will be automatically regulated. At this point, permanent communications will be universal and computation will be capable of solving larger improbability functions, such as those involved in social interactions. Chaotic functions will be computable and achieve the creation of the mathematical functions of communications.

Computer-assisted decision-making is a crucial part of the semiconductor industry roadmap, whose performance is an achievement that should be followed. "Increasingly, new materials need to be introduced in technology development due to physical limits that otherwise would prevent further scaling. This is required especially for gate stacks and interconnect structures. Modeling related to reliability and process variations is needed. In consequence, equipment, process, device, and circuit models must be extended to include these new materials. Furthermore, computational material science needs to be developed and applied to contribute to the assessment and selection of new materials in order to reduce experiment effort." (International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, executive summary, p. 30). Multi-core systems, with over 100 processors per chip in aproximately 10 years, will scale the grid enormously. The combined computing resources of billions of processors will provide such power in a few years, provided required investments are made in key telecommunications technologies.

News in America

News media exert a powerful influence on political matters as they are the source of all popular political knowledge. Without a functioning news media a democracy is harmful, tolerating high levels of incompetence. An essential criterion of a complex adaptive system is a judgment mechanism that prohibits harmful behavior. Due to their power, incompetent politicians are harmful and can create strong negative consequences.

An essential responsibility of news media is to enforce accountability, as without extensive coverage a legislature would be useless. It is the citizens who provide the final judgment of accountability. It is however impossible to make an intelligent decision without a clear understanding of the salient elements. Politics is basically a very simple system as only a few people are involved in final decision-making. As long as there is a way for citizens to understand everything the government does, which is fairly easy, a democracy will self-improve. But without a mechanism to discard incompetent decision-makers, regression becomes much more likely.

Influential news media, despite their large budgets and resources, are unable to provide the duty they are responsible to deliver. Fox News leads the way (All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing)— as satire to what news media is supposed to deliver. Access to information relies too heavily on subjective sources. Instead of having access to valuable information in clear and systematic processes, journalists have to hunt for their information. While it may provide a poetic legacy to the profession of journalist, the information bandwidth is simply too small for important information to receive the attention it deserves.

The evolving Internet is most likely to become the source and medium of transmission, a complex adaptive system provided with the tools to generate sufficient computation and communications capacity to access intelligent decision-making networks.

Artificial intelligence engineering

Scientists from the NASA Ames Research Center have engineered antennas using an artificial intelligence system through genetic algorithms. The simulation ran on 80 personal computers for 10 hours and provided a design that would never have been found without computation assistance.

The program is designed to evolve solutions from a set of desired parameters and can work on any technology which can be defined in terms of desired behaviors. "Scientists also can use the evolutionary AI software to invent and create new structures, computer chips and even machines, according to Lohn. "We are now using the software to design tiny microscopic machines, including gyroscopes, for spaceflight navigation," he ventured."

This is a first step in what will define manufacturing and engineering in the coming decades, when all production and development processes will be handled through intelligent software. Starting with simple electronic devices, intelligent systems will be able to engineer larger and more complex devices, including large-scale logistical processes for mass manufacturing.

To provide an overview of coming uses for such technological developments, read our text on the world in 2055 or browse through Singularity articles at KurzweilAI.

Global supercomputer basics in advanced test phase

The research team for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in construction at the CERN complex on the French-Swiss border to be operational in 2007, has completed an initial test phase for distributed grid computing that presents concrete capacity for global supercomputing.

The LHC will produce an estimated 15 million gigabytes in its first year, approximately 41,000 gigs per day, that must be analyzed and stored.

A graphical overview of the current grid's layout:

This distributed system provides a proof of concept for large-scale high-throughput grid systems that will extend to the global computing grid in the coming years.

Original article: 'Maiden Flight' for LHC Computing Grid Breaks Gigabyte-per-Second Barrier

As a reminder of what a distributed computing grid can accomplish, sub-atomic precise simulation of physical environments will be achievable. Above 10²⁵ cps of computing power and equivalent fast-access memory and bandwidth, a distributed computing system will be capable of calculating genetic algorithms to build engineering solutions as well as provide a much deeper understanding of the universe's forces. While a largely overlooked knowledge to gain, significant understanding of universal forces will create more economic wealth than all human work through history. Full capacity for nanoengineering, assisted by genetic algorithms simulated in full reality environments, will allow to build the most complex object at insignificant costs compared to industrial processes. The mere capacity of full molecular nanotechnology engineering (MNE) will increase the speed of evolution in information technology hardware, by making obsolete the currently required need to build multi-billion dollar factories. This increase will accelerate even further the efficiency of MNE, which will allow faster computation, storage and bandwidth.

Economic cycles will accelerate with the evolution of scientific discovery, evening out most current economic problems. Intelligent monetary and financial policies will remain a requirement for any economic policy, but an economy inevitably responds to the law of accelerating returns as soon as knowledge becomes the major constituant of its economic throuput. As we have shown in a previous post, Estimating future human economic growth, humankind will reach the knee of the exponential curve around 2010. This growth will largely be driven by limited nanotechnology and more intelligent software systems that will improve the efficiency of all work and processes.

Artificial intelligences will be capable of predicting social behavior from statistically distributed personalities among the simulated minds. It will make achievable an understanding of the deep mechanics of economics and most social behaviors. It would not even need to identify a single live citizen by using artificial simulated environments.

American political accountability: flashback

On December 2, 2001, the following exchange between Donald Rumsfeld and Tim Russert took place on Meet the press.

Russert: The Times of London did a graphic, which I want to put on the screen for you and our viewers. This is it. This is a fortress. This is a very much a complex, multi-tiered, bedrooms and offices on the top, as you can see, secret exits on the side and on the bottom, cut deep to avoid thermal detection so when our planes fly to try to determine if any human beings are in there, it's built so deeply down and embedded in the mountain and the rock it's hard to detect. And over here, valleys guarded, as you can see, by some Taliban soldiers. A ventilation system to allow people to breathe and to carry on. An arms and ammunition depot. And you can see here the exits leading into it and the entrances large enough to drive trucks and cars and even tanks. And it's own hydroelectric power to help keep lights on, even computer systems and telephone systems. It's a very sophisticated operation.

Rumsfeld: Oh, you bet. This is serious business. And there's not one of those. There are many of those. And they have been used very effectively. And I might add, Afghanistan is not the only country that has gone underground. Any number of countries have gone underground. The tunneling equipment that exists today is very powerful. It's dual use. It's available across the globe. And people have recognized the advantages of using underground protection for themselves.

Rendering printed by the Times of London:


Of course the rendering was fantasy. Most people require more accountability from their children than is asked from politicians. I fail to see how it is possible for democracy to function if a leader, unelected that is, can make such obviously false statements without any consequences, among many others. We can also remember "We know where [the weapons of mass destruction] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat", on March 30, 2003.

That a journal would be as incompetent as to print this is one thing. But one of the fundamental characteristics we should absolutely require of political leaders is their integrity and judgment. It is impossible for decision-making to emerge when such mistakes are not followed by, at the least, complete radiation from political life.

People in office are only in power because specific rules were laid out to allow them. The outcome was the direct result of a specific system. Clearly, with the quality of our modern political systems, there is a heavy justification for improvement in terms of accountability and competence of political functions.

Putting terrorism in perspective

One overlooked fact with the current threat of international terrorism is the incredible evolution humankind has gone through in the last decades. Little over 60 years ago, Europe was in flames and so was nearly half the world. For decades following the last major war, the world stood on the brink of nuclear armageddon on a daily basis. Today, these ideas have lost so much meaning that the handfew who hold ideological beliefs have to shout or hit to even be heard. The fantastic beliefs of such individuals resonate only to the poor few who have lost hope for themselves or who think they have something to benefit. It was as true with poor russian and chinese peasants and german workers as it is to anyone today living in poverty. There have been plenty of both miserable and exploiters in human history.

Today, there is little immediate threat to fear from any nation and the interdependance of world economics has generated a prosperity that has shown the obvious economic advantages of peace and democracy. There is no current threat capable of sending ICBMs, heavy mechanical forces, fighter jets or highly equiped troops outside of the United States.

Luckily, the shaky remnants of democracy still infused in the American system is many times more likely to improve than even the most moderate of abusive regimes. It remains nonetheless that world justice and democracy is highly unlikely without the G7 becoming truly democratic nations, the United States being the most critically important. If western governments were at least capable of finalizing the last few reforms that will make then achieve a truly democratic form, humankind would be better prepared for its long-term evolution.

It takes a nation to lead a war. Groups can only wage battles and are no match against an organized army. However even the most powerful army in the world is not immuned from political stupidity. There is little to fear from all the most fearsome terrorists combined compared to some of the most unlikely armed forces. Even the small, heavily trained, Canadian forces would have been sufficiant to handle all terrorist groups if they had been handed intelligent political decisions. This strategy only works when actual decision-making drives politics, which is impossible without full accountability for every political decision.

Unilateralism would not work any better against the United States than it does in its favor. That American politicians fail to understand this speaks greatly of their utter incompetence in doing anything remotely related to political decision-making. There is no reason to believe that what is completely impossible in each and every aspect of society, that individiduals can be unaccountable for their decisions without undesirable consequences, could work in politics, where everything is in fact less likely to happen than in any other human affair.

Bin Laden's group is hated throughout the Middle East and the large majority of muslims support democratic reforms. All over human history groups of disaffected egomaniacal males believed they had a divine quest to liberate their fellow. Uses of organized violence against the established order can be counted in the hundreds of thousands, probably even millions. What islamic terrorists do is not unlike what hundreds of thousands of violent groups did in human history.

Islam itself is irrelevant to the question of islamic terrorism. It is merely ideology that, once again, causes great loss and suffering. A crime of passion's motive has no effect on the nature of the crime. A religious motive does not change that fact and is one of many types of such crimes. There have been people ready to die for their beliefs throughout human history and there are still today in every culture. In the middle ages and before, those who acted as the islamic terrorists today became kings and emperors. The seizure of power always begins with a conviction that surpasses the fear of death.

It is far from new in human society to use violence to gain desirable objectives. History only legitimizes winners, regardless of prior motives. It is the way criminals operate and it is the way tyrants operate. There have been millions of the first and thousands of the latter. There have been catholic terrorists, buddhist terrorists, pagan terrorists, protestant terrorists, atheist terrorists just as there were smart and dumb terrorists who acted for numerous reasons. Religion is neither new nor unexpected as a source of oppressive and aggressive violence, it was the history of christian europe, taoist, shintoist and buddhist asia, greek and mayan societies as well as practiced by regimes of all types.

Humankind needs to look ahead and work to reform its political institutions. We are capable for the first time in human history of using collective intelligence to work on complicated questions. The deep transformations of the coming eras of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and biotechnology will render all current political issues meaningless. It is time we face today the questions that will matter in the long term. Our governments' habit of satisfaction with short-sighted solutions must be parted with. We must complete the final improvemements that will finally accomplish truly democratic societies. Many people still wonder how to define democracy, when in fact it is not something that can be idealized but achieved. I fail to see how we can achieve anything, let alone democracy itself, without an actual coherent effort in political decision-making.

Estimating future human economic growth

A fundamental characteristic of information patterns is that they are exponential in nature. Each salient discovery promotes higher levels of effiency, not merely cummulative input, and allows more complex technologies to evolve.

Looking at past numbers and calculating an exponential trend, the reason for which becomes apparent by looking at past growth, we can estimate the GDP value with an interesting precision. Numbers were taken from a paper published by J. Bradford Delong, from U.C. Berkeley, about past economic growth.

We start from 1000 to 1850, where we see GDP grows by a factor of 5-6 times in the first 800 years:

Growth from 1900 to 2000 shows a sharp exponential increase and grows by a factor of 18 to 37 times:

Graphs reveal the exponential trend, slowly at first but sharp closer to 2000:

The exponential trend is more observable on the complete millenium scale:

What is most interesting, however, is if we calculate the exponential trend. Incidentally, it is pointless to calculate the trend prior to 1900, as growth is too slow. The knee of the curve sits from 2000 to 2010:

If past trends keep the pace, we should expect a GDP of:

• 2020: $80 trillion
• 2040: $150 trillion
• 2060: $280 trillion
• 2080: $510 trillion
• 2100: $935 trillion

As economic capital further relies on information, it is natural for its processes to grow along information functions rather than work functions.

Links to high-resolution images: 1000 to 2100 and 1900 to 2100.

Direct representative democracy basics: The communications engine

At the closest level of direct representation lies the relationship between a citizen and his representative. It is important for citizens to have knowledge of those who offer solutions to political problems. This begins with allowing everyone offering solutions to political problems to reach all other citizens who are interested in such ideas and justify their capacity to accomplish them.

A communications engine is the most basic element of a direct representative democracy, as it is through communication that politics function. The capacity to reach individuals is the most accurate measurement of political power. It should be accessible not through a single channel but rather needs to be able to reach all those who want to be reached. Will alone should be sufficient to generate political dynamic. The engine should therefore provide the capacity to filter out elaborate criteria to help understand the broadcasted communications. Artificial intelligence will be able to provide that in about a decade. By reaching all citizens, political power would be accessible to everyone and function as a dynamic social system, rather than a passive and enclosed institution.

At its first iteration, the communications engine should take the form of a Web site. Driven by Web application dynamics, the Web can now provide powerful communications tools. A most fundamental aspect would be to provide the capacity for citizens who offer ideas to be heard in an intelligent environment. The application needs to reference knowledge whenever applicable, known information otherwise.

At its basics are 2 types of citizens: executive and legislative. Executive take direct action and pursue decision-making. They would be either representatives or work in a networked decision-making system. Legislative citizens would give ascent or rebuttal to policies. Legislative citizens would judge and comment on formulated policies. Executive citizens would actively develop policies and present ideas and projects. Legislative citizens could choose to have their will represented, unless they veto their voice, by an executive citizen. Most legislative citizens would therefore select a representative to thrust on most votes.

Candidates would start by providing basic facts about their ideas, their intentions and the justifications for their capacity to accomplish the projects they propose. A simple array of texts, videos and presentations would already provide a toolkit several orders of magnitude better than the conventional political campaign dynamic of rhetoric and filtered communication. A minimum number of standard characteristics need to be provided in order to allow intelligent matching between the will of citizens and the candidates' proposed ideas. This way citizens will be able to search and watch for specific issues and ideas, compare and make informed decisions.

Communication between representatives and the citizens they represent would be another major part of the engine. Representatives would be first and foremost accountable before the people who support them. Citizens would have a direct channel to question and hold accountable their representatives. It is merely a matter of synthesizing the noise to make sense of the opinions and ideas of the collectivity. Representatives would be much more useful working with citizens who inspire them. It is absurd to think a few people will be capable of solving society's problems. A much larger intelligence is required for such a task, a collective intelligence.

In a later evolution, the communications engine should be able to provide an intelligent selection system to allow a precise measurement of public opinion, broadcast ideas from those who do not want to wield political power and filter the noise for those listening in. The collective intelligence of humankind is the most powerful force known in the universe. It is strongest in a permanent communications and will provide the capacity to evolve further, a necessity in a chaotic world.

Ideological pathology

A sad but obvious caracteristic of ideology is its pathological nature. All humans with a normally functionning biochemical system are capable of being entirely rational on all but a few issues. Those issues are among the most demanding in terms of emotional perturbation, love being an obvious candidate for inviting irrational behavior. Although we have not published an official paper on the subject, a venue we are studying at the Institute is the relation between intelligence and emotions. A few posts below reflect on that matter but we have not explained it yet.

Human intelligence was the result of a complex evolution that needed a set of careful objectives. Those objectives were provided by emotions, in the form of biochemical rewards to the biological substrate. What was good for the biological body, in terms of emotional satisfaction, was good for the organism. One of the most fundamental caracteristics of our intelligence is that we are capable of adapting to all new knowledge we can understand. Context is a very important factor in the rationality of this mental exercise. Emotional balance influences information received by the brain and changes the pattern of learned information. Emotion can therefore influence what we understand and therefore the computed solution to a particular input. When emotions reward an individual for a specific information, it is a biological constraint for the individual to reject information that contradicts and embrace information that strenghtens the emotional satisfaction. There was an evolutionary bias to seek information that pleases our emotions. It should thus come at little surprise that these biases affect political leanings.

A recent study by Emory University psychologist Drew Westen, briefly explained in this Washington Post article - Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases - identified through brainscans that emotional reward centers gratified discarding true information that did not fit emotional bias. Partisans of either the Democratic or the Republican party were as prompt to notice hypocrisy from a politician of different political leaning as they were to excuse similar hypocrisy from an individual who relates to their emotional biases.

While the implications of this can be overlooked, it calls for an important debate on the contexts in which political power should relate to the citizens it represents in a democracy. Politicians have largely taken advantage of emotional imbalance in citizens to gain support. While this is a largely accepted fact of political life, there are few justifications to reason that it is the best way to function. The governments' own incompetence and unaccountability are diseases that prevent them from exercising power in the first place. Fully accountable politicians would have much more freedom of action as abuse would be too easily detected.

Politics being the nervous center of a society, it is obvious that all should be done to achieve the best political system possible. Excuses abound about how much the task is difficult. Political philosophers and politicians have professed this for almost three millenas and achieved little while scientists have gone exactly the opposite way and have already achieved more influence than politicians. While the two groups may seem opposed, they both seek answers to society's problems and formulate answers to improve them. Technology has a much larger role in peace, justice, equality, wealth and health than governments do in every society. Politics are usually derided as deranged theatre and most citizens of modern democracies care little for political affairs. They do not affect them nearly as much as the technologies that grant them access to a material wealth that satisfies their most basic needs.

A marvelous epiphany most political science teachers like to reveal to their students is that politics is still working on the same problems as 2000 years ago. Such a fact is shameful in every science. Again, excuses abound to explain how hard the problems politics try to solve are complex. It's an obvious statement that changes little to the debate and neglects that it took over 2000 years to understand a clear enough picture of nature, which we mostly do not see. Politics at least has the advantage of being in position to know everything about itself. Decisions always tend the opposite way despite the absence of arguments.

Ideology is a pathology of the mind, a memetic virus that shields the mind from rational political debate. Politics, if it is to become a science, must provide itself with tools. Even economics has managed this well by using mathematical tools. The tools of politics are based on communications. At the Institute, we have formulated the systems of executive citizens, intelligent selection, the supercomputer-run encyclopedia and direct representation. We have also formulated a general theory of political science, which deals with a rational procedure that could be followed to achieve useful solutions. The idea of the tools society is fundamental to our research and could eliminate the pathology of ideology to produce a much more efficient, effective and legitimate political system. Most political debate, however interesting, is largely pointless as it rarely evolves from its original statements. If politics are to become a useful part of society, it must improve itself and equip with useful tools.

Site redesign

The Institute Web site has been upgraded to a much more editable version. Changes are mostly minor on the public side but the administrative mechanisms have improved enormously. This will improve the overall usge of the site thanks to much faster editing, through a custom AJAX-based CMS.

What this implies is that we simply need to log on the site and edit changes directly to on the site, with live modifications. This upgrade is one of a series of tools we will build to satisfy the evolving processes of our editing. We will incorporate decision-making tools, archiving that will track the evolution of our texts and more contextual content.

Linear work vs. exponential knowledge

New research subject here at the Institute: Linear work vs. exponential knowledge.

Summary:
Knowledge is additive and therefore has a linear function. Additional workers only add roughly equally valuable output to any process. Knowledge can provide a boost of several thousand percents to any economic process with much less effort and resources than equivalent work-based value output. It benefits from an exponential function and explains how over 95% of all economic wealth of modern societies is backed by knowledge.