Technology, There Is No Stopping The Advance
Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between science and technology, because they are so closely related. I don’t think it really matters that much how we classify something if they are related to either subject. In that vein I would like to discuss some of the things I have noted in what I have classified as technology, but you could also classify as science. There is talk that there has been a big leap in Artificial Intelligence. It is said a new method has been discovered where if used can teach a machine something in just one try. The US military has funded a program for teaching Artificial Intelligences and it is named Bayesian Program Learning. It is said the Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be able to learn how to do simple tasks as fast as a human. I guess it is just one of my hang-ups, but there is something about machines learning things which seems to be very dangerous to me. Maybe I have seen too many movies about machines taking over the world, but I can’t help but feel there is a distinct possibility that this could happen someday. When tested on some of the things the machine was taught, it scored 97%, about the same as a human when given the same test.
It is beginning to look like there is no stopping the electric car business. A new electric car company is opening a one billion dollar factory in Nevada. The company is called Faraday Future. President Obama had set a goal of 1,000,000 electric cars on the road by 2015 (there is about a three week lag between writing and posting articles). He has two weeks left as of the writing of this article to somehow get another 965,000 on the road to reach his goal. Yes we have only 35,000 electric cars on the road and I think most of us realize the president is not the one who determines their numbers, but the consumers. The company is backed by a Chinese billionaire who made his fortune on the Internet. He wants his new auto plant to be near Las Vegas. The company is secretive, but we know it has about 400 employees right now and some are from Tesla such as Nick Sampson former director of vehicle and chassis engineering at Tesla. Faraday Future’s vice president and former director of manufacturing for Tesla’s Model S said Nevada made them the best deal.
A new report has come out and it is not pleasant. The report is over 300 pages long and from the Bank of America Merrill Lynch and it examines the effects of robots on society in Great Britain and the United States. The crux of the report is that 1/3 of jobs in Great Britain will be replaced by robots of some sort and in the United States the figure will be even higher at 47%. When computers started becoming popular many people predicted a large loss of jobs, but it seems they created even more jobs because human beings wanted more data so they got data they previously never would have asked for, which in turn needed more people to manage it. Things are different today, because we are talking about far more sophisticated machines which will be a lot more human like in some cases. Could a robot replace a bartender or a bakery clerk? Not only could they, they have in some cases. Robot bartenders are now available. Robots are not just machines for us to play around with, they are the forerunners of the machines that will take away jobs.
The Tesla car company has released an autopilot for its cars. It will drive the car for you, but you still need to be available. It an effort to make it as safe as possible the autopilot will alert you when it doesn’t have enough data to steer and tell you to take over. In an emergency it will tell you to take the wheel immediately. It can read traffic lights so it knows when to slow down and stop. The same is true for traffic signs which it can read. If the car in front of you slows down so will your car. It will even change lanes on its own if there is an obstruction and go around it. It has been said this software will save lives, because it is far more efficient than the average driver.
I wonder how many people know this fact. The average smart phone is millions of times more powerful than all of NASA’s combined computing power when it landed a man on the moon for the first time. Software was used for the first time to control the first Apollo mission’s critical safety and propulsion mechanisms and set the stage for today’s modern computing. If we examine the IPhone 6 we find it is 32,600 times faster than the best NASA mainframes of the time and powerful enough to guide over 120,000,000 Apollo era spacecraft to the moon and the instructions would be performed 120,000,000 faster.
The first true computer programmer was a woman named Ada Lovelace and as incredible as it sounds she was born in 1847 and was the daughter of Lord Byron. She had gotten interested in the work of Charles Babbage who was working on his Analytical Engine, which was the forerunner to the modern computer. In 1842 she translated a description of it by Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea. When Babbage read what she wrote he knew she understood his machine very well and asked her to expand her article and she did and included the first computer program. It was an algorithm that taught the machine how to calculate a series of Bernoulli Numbers. She understood the machine was far more than just a calculator. Many believe she was able to see how these machines would change the future as millions of people would use them.
I think all of us are getting fed up with how easily our computers and data can be tampered with. It looks to many of us that nothing put on a computer is safe. I know I feel that way. Not all scientists feel this way however. Two years ago a couple of studies came out which stated there were powerful new methods for making our computers and the data on them safe. The scientists were referring to something called Indistinguishability Obfuscation. That is quite a mouthful, I know. It is said to be a major breakthrough in cryptography. So here is how scientists use a simple definition to define it. They say it works by transforming a computer program into a multilinear jigsaw puzzle. Each piece of the program gets random elements mixed into it. The program will only be revealed and the random elements cancelled when the program is run in the prescribed manner. The reason it is not ready for commercial use yet is this method turns a program into a giant mess which is unwieldy, but look for this problem to be solved sometime in the future.
