Matthew Mather's Blog, page 5

When will electric cars outsell gas again?

So when will electric cars again outsell gar powered ones? It wouldn't  not the first time electric cars have outsold gasoline powered cars. In fact, the first “cars” were electric, some of the first constructed by New England inventor Thomas Davenport in 1834, and up until 1900, electric cars outsold gasoline powered ones; in fact over 90% of cabs in New York City in 1901 were electric. The Baker Torpedo was the fastest car in the world in 1902, clocking in at over 120 mph. 
People preferred electric cars for their quiet, clean efficiency, lack of need for gear shifting or cranks to get going, and relative simplicity. It was the oil lobby that changed all that with the discovery of oil in Texas and other places that eventually drove the electric car off the road. In the end, it didn’t make any sense? Why build overlapping energy distribution systems, one for electricity and another for an explosive, toxic chemical. But the oil lobby group won the day.
Major improvements would be needed to help advance the progression back to electric - one such non-linear innovation could be the discovery of room temperature superconductors which would revolutionize energy storage and electric motors at the same time, not to mention energy transmission.
When do you think electric cars will outsell gas cars again?

How the future looked this week

This was an interesting week for the future. The Bieb slipped 10 points in his bid for the 2053 US Presidential race, and we discovered about the same number of people think the world will end this year as think the Chinese have a shot at winning the World Cup in the next 40 years (assuming the world doesn't end, but I didn't manage to get a cross-correlation of what people thought the Chinese chances were assuming that the world didn't end...)

The mood is fairly evenly split over the fate of the Euro...about half think it is doomed, so we'll keep an eye on that situation. I have a hard time imagining Europe ever giving up on the Euro, so I personally stump for it making the long haul, but these are dangerous waters we are swimming in. It is amusing to imagine the mad scramble of national central bankers to get their own currencies printed and distributed again...but honestly, this wouldn't be funny at all.

Fitting for a portal driven by sci-fi enthusiasts, we have a lot of posts about extraterrestrial intelligence, although surprisingly low numbers seem to vote that we'll find intelligent life out there anytime soon...barely more than half think we'll see any signs before the middle of this century. Then again, it is hard to downplay the unbelievable shift in global consciousness that will occur if we do conclusively see anyone else out there...I suggest a quick read of Peter Cawdron's book "Anomaly" on the topic if interested.

Lastly, I am actively gathering together a group of sci-fi authors to write headlines for PhutureNews, the idea being to link these to stories they are writing and drive traffic to their books or blogs...if anyone out there is interested, just drop me a line at matthew.mather at phuturenews.com


See you in the future next week!

How the future looked this week of Dec.29th, 2011

With 2012 just around the corner, a quick look at what was happening on PhutureNews this week. My personal favorite was Justin Bieber being elected as the 52nd President of the United States in 2053...nearly 30% of people voted that they thought this could happen, but more to the point of the question was whether a naturalized American (vs. natural born, whatever that means) could run for the highest office. Course, after watching the Bieb on David Letterman last night, I have to say I think the chances of him running for the Oval Office as higher than 20%; as Dave pointed out, “you’re only 17, your whole life is ahead of you, you can do anything!” I think Dave had been reading PhutureNews J
In other news, 20% of people think there is a real chance of the world ending with the end of this cycle of the Mayan calendar on Dec.23rd, 2012 – better enjoy this year folks! And if that doesn’t finish us of, over 70% of people voted that they thought there would be a major cyber war before 2020, assuming the Georgian war didn’t count.
On a more positive note (and I always like to end on a positive note!), over 90% of people voted that they thought it likely that there would be an Olympics in Africa before 2040...heck, half of the schedule is already filled up so they better get a move on.  And, interestingly, less than 15% of people thought that the IOC may lift its drug bans at Olympics in the near future, although we’ll have to see what they say about the various prosthetics that are on their way!
Any ideas of stories from the future you’d like people to vote on, submit them at PhutureNews!

More human than a human

Soon machines may be more human than a human - the results of the latest Loebner prize competition had some machines almost outscoring human beings on a rating of "how much do you think this is a human" on its annual Turing test competition.

Back in 1950 one of the giants of computational theory, Alan Turing, proposed replacing the question “can machines think” (Turing was the first to even mention machine intelligence in 1947) with a test where a human chats with a machine. If a human couldn’t tell whether they were talking to a human or machine, he reasoned, then shouldn’t we consider whoever was on the other side as intelligent? For instance, if a spaceship appeared out of the sky and landed and we began chatting with whoever was inside, if they carried on a conversation with us like a sentient being, wouldn’t we consider this an intelligence? But there seems to be prejudice on our side when it comes to things we create...

ELIZA was the first computer to fool some humans in 1966, though not for the majority of people, and was the predecessor of chatbots of today. Enter the Loebner prize competition which runs the Turing test each year for a $100k Grand Prize...so far there have been no clear winners although they are getting closer and closer (you can try chatting yourself with the 2011 Loebner prize winner Rosette here. The “More human than a human” article I put up on PhutureNews describes the day when a machine wins the Loebner grand prize. The new chatbots being created this year may give the contest a run for its money in 2012, with SuperChatBot being trained up using social media comments as a data source. I guessed the date of 2017 as the year when machines will finally beat the Turing test, and so far 91% of people agree with this prediction. Already the Cyberlover malware chatbot convinces lonely people across the web that they are chatting with a real human being, emerging as the first “valentine risk”...not very far in the future it will be impossible to tell if an email, text, or even voice conversation is with a real human being, opening up some very interesting and potentially dangerous issues.
The bigger question is, after Big Blue beating Kasparov in chess back in the 90’s, and last year another IBM creation beating the pants off humans in Jeopardy, when a machine beats the Turing Test, at what point do we need to begin considering machines as intelligent in their own right? If you prick us, do we not bleed? And when do we need to begin considering the rights of such machine intelligences...?