The Chatterjee household and me in particular went through some infrastructure upgrades. Armed with a new phone, computer and car, I'm back to blogging.
One evening, just before I closed my eyes, my new iPhone gently chimed:
I had not asked for it. Soon after that it said "Tomorrow the weather is clear and sunny. It will be cooler than today". We are used to google telling us that "In spite of traffic and slow-downs you are on the fastest path to your destination and will arrive there in 26 minutes".
During a heated discussion back in the winter of Artificial Intelligence when I was in graduate school, our most famous faculty member, E. W Dijkstra was asked by a visiting professors if he thought machines could think. Dijkstra replied "Can submarines swim?" In 40 years we had been unable to create anything resembling intelligence.
A few years later I got into Machine Learning and noticed a completely different mindset. People were optimistic and were figuring out ways to tease intelligence out of large lumps of data. We rode this wave at Neonyoyo in 2000.
But doing complex tasks by using complex planning and reasoning wasn't going anywhere. Doug Lenat down the hallway from us at MCC in the 1990's had been trying to teach a machine called Cyc to exhibit human-like intelligence by feeding it thousands (eventually more than a million) rules about our world but it was going badly. The first Grand Challenge launched by DARPA had a couple of dozen driverless cars in 2004 trying to complete a 150 mile route through the Mojave desert. The winner only got to about mile 15. Many cars didn't cross the start line.
A mere 12 years later I pass a google self-drive car on the busy streets around Rosedale and Allandale everyday. GM and Lyft announced that they will start testing self-driving taxis within a year - making today's municipal vote in Austin for fingerprinting Lyft and Uber drivers a bit anachronistic. The change is amazing. But the rate of change is truly shocking, especially if you have been paying attention.
Vivian and Evan - what will your world look like?
Perhaps the change will be more gradual. Like for my dad. He grew up in a village with no electricity. When he got to London for graduate school, the first movie my dad and mom saw was "The Conquest of Everest". It was only in 1953 that someone eventually clambered on to the top of the highest point on earth. Man had not set foot in space. Before he died my dad could pick up a cell phone at his home in India and call me with no visible delay and a pretty reliable connection. His flights from Hyderabad to Austin took about 24 hours. The world when I was born looks shockingly like today's. There were cars in our garages and airplanes in the sky and people were needed to operate both. My mother and dad did things doctors and executives do today (though my dad had a stenographer, Ms. Roberts, who took notes in shorthand). We talked into a phone. And we listened to recorded music on LPs.
But for the first time since the industrial revolution, we are where we can see the glow of the next big change. There is a good chance that Vivian and Evan's world will look nothing like ours. My phone already knows that.
There's a lot going on tomorrow.
One evening, just before I closed my eyes, my new iPhone gently chimed:
I had not asked for it. Soon after that it said "Tomorrow the weather is clear and sunny. It will be cooler than today". We are used to google telling us that "In spite of traffic and slow-downs you are on the fastest path to your destination and will arrive there in 26 minutes".
During a heated discussion back in the winter of Artificial Intelligence when I was in graduate school, our most famous faculty member, E. W Dijkstra was asked by a visiting professors if he thought machines could think. Dijkstra replied "Can submarines swim?" In 40 years we had been unable to create anything resembling intelligence.
A few years later I got into Machine Learning and noticed a completely different mindset. People were optimistic and were figuring out ways to tease intelligence out of large lumps of data. We rode this wave at Neonyoyo in 2000.
But doing complex tasks by using complex planning and reasoning wasn't going anywhere. Doug Lenat down the hallway from us at MCC in the 1990's had been trying to teach a machine called Cyc to exhibit human-like intelligence by feeding it thousands (eventually more than a million) rules about our world but it was going badly. The first Grand Challenge launched by DARPA had a couple of dozen driverless cars in 2004 trying to complete a 150 mile route through the Mojave desert. The winner only got to about mile 15. Many cars didn't cross the start line.
A mere 12 years later I pass a google self-drive car on the busy streets around Rosedale and Allandale everyday. GM and Lyft announced that they will start testing self-driving taxis within a year - making today's municipal vote in Austin for fingerprinting Lyft and Uber drivers a bit anachronistic. The change is amazing. But the rate of change is truly shocking, especially if you have been paying attention.
Vivian and Evan - what will your world look like?
Perhaps the change will be more gradual. Like for my dad. He grew up in a village with no electricity. When he got to London for graduate school, the first movie my dad and mom saw was "The Conquest of Everest". It was only in 1953 that someone eventually clambered on to the top of the highest point on earth. Man had not set foot in space. Before he died my dad could pick up a cell phone at his home in India and call me with no visible delay and a pretty reliable connection. His flights from Hyderabad to Austin took about 24 hours. The world when I was born looks shockingly like today's. There were cars in our garages and airplanes in the sky and people were needed to operate both. My mother and dad did things doctors and executives do today (though my dad had a stenographer, Ms. Roberts, who took notes in shorthand). We talked into a phone. And we listened to recorded music on LPs.
But for the first time since the industrial revolution, we are where we can see the glow of the next big change. There is a good chance that Vivian and Evan's world will look nothing like ours. My phone already knows that.
There's a lot going on tomorrow.
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