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Recognition At the other end of Levy and Murnane’s spectrum, however,
4 But smart people have been predicting the
might call ‘brilliant tinkering’—finding engineering detours around the roadblocks thrown up by physics.
2000 book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed
After thirty-two squares, the emperor had given the inventor about 4 billion grains of rice. That’s a reasonable quantity—about one large field’s worth—and the emperor did start to take notice. But the emperor could still remain an emperor. And the inventor could still retain his head. It was as they headed into the second half of the chessboard that at least one of them got into trouble.8
category in 1958. We took that year as the starting point for
Technology is advancing exponentially
Second-Half Technologies
Moore’s Law has added up to the point that we’re now in a different regime of computing: we’re now in the second half of the chessboard.
them. This wasn’t the case just a decade ago. What does digital progress look like on a logarithmic scale? Let’s take a look.
all of these innovations show, exponential progress allows technology to keep racing ahead and makes science fiction reality in the second half of the chessboard.
computer hardware (a notable exception is batteries, which haven’t improved their performance at an exponential rate because they’re essentially chemical devices, not digital ones),
Researchers in artificial intelligence have long been fascinated (some would say obsessed) with the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping, which they refer to as SLAM. SLAM is the process of building up a map of an unfamiliar building as you’re navigating through it—where
where you are within it (so you can find your way back downstairs and out the front door). For the great majority of humans, SLAM happens with minimal conscious thought. But teaching machines to do it has been a huge challenge.
SLAM
As a 2008 review of the topic summarized, SLAM “is one of the fundamental challenges of robotics
$150 video-game accessory came along just two years after the sentences above were published.
SIGGRAPH (short for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques)
dropped into the scene. As the technology blog Engadget put it in a post-SIGGRAPH entry, “The Kinect took 3D sensing to the mainstream, and moreover,
researchers to pick up a commodity product and go absolutely
made available a Kinect software development kit (SDK) giving programmers everything they needed to start writing PC software that made use
the Kinect for SLAM, and many teams in robotics and AI research downloaded the SDK and went to work.
Kintinuous, a “spatially extended” version of KinectFusion. With Kintinuous, users could use a Kinect to scan large indoor volumes like apartment buildings and even outdoor environments
Kintinuous MIT
Cyclopean LIDAR (a combination of “LIght” and “raDAR”)
age: steady exponential improvement has brought us into the second half of the chessboard—into
you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”
digitization
Digitization
say that digital information is not “used up” when it gets used, and it is extremely cheap to make another copy of a digitized resource. Let’s look at each of these properties in a bit more detail.
“zero marginal cost of reproduction.”
“zero marginal cost of reproduction.”
“Information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce.”
Siri, for example, improves itself over time by analyzing the ever-larger collection of sound files its users generate when interacting with the voice recognition system.
Watson’s database, which consisted of approximately two hundred million pages of documents taking up four terabytes of disk space, included an entire copy of Wikipedia.
language–filled Urban Dictionary, but this archive of user-generated content was removed after, to the dismay of its creators, Watson started to include curse words in its responses.
M2M;
M2M machine to machine Waze app
Kayak’s servers immediately send requests to their counterparts at various airlines,
how much money we have in our accounts before letting us withdraw cash; digital
“The combined level of robotic chatter on the world’s wireless networks . . . is likely soon to exceed that generated by the sum of all human voice conversations taking place on wireless grids.”
global Internet Protocol traffic will reach 1.3 zettabytes by 2016.13 That’s over 250 billion DVDs of information.
nineteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures, the largest one was yotta, signifying one septillion, or 1024.15 We’re only one prefix away from that in the ‘zettabyte era.’
“science” here, we mean the work of formulating theories and hypotheses,
access data about its search terms. He was told that he didn’t have to ask; the company made these data freely available over the Web.
neither of whom was versed in the economics of housing, built a simple statistical model to look at the data utilizing the user-generated content of search terms made available by Google.
team led by Rumi Chunara of Harvard Medical School found that tweets were just as accurate as official reports when it came to tracking the spread of cholera after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti;
Twitter data
Computing Lab found that tweets could also be used to predict movie box-office revenue. They concluded that “this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which,
They concluded that “this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which,
when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.”
in the next ten years will be statisticians. And I’m not kidding.”
which are at least as old as personal computers.22 The second is GPS location information, which became much more useful for driving when the U.S. government increased its GPS accuracy in 2000.23 The third is social data;
sensor data; in fact, it essentially converts every car using it into a traffic-speed sensor and
shortcomings of traditional GPS navigation. These innovators made progress by adding social and sensor data to an existing system, greatly increasing its power and usefulness. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this style of innovation is
“If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas.”
thing. But innovation is also the most important force that makes our society wealthier.
