The Lamisphere

If there is one thing we have come to expect for society these days, its volatility. The ups and downs of the financial markets mirror the gyrations of corporate strategy that in turn are reflected in the uncertainty of our country, careers, even ourselves.

We’d all like to have a “rock”, a center of calm in the storm that rages around us. But, at least for me, I find myself having a harder and harder time just relaxing and tuning it all out.

It wasn’t always this way. Prior to 1865, the fastest way to get a message across the Atlantic Ocean was by ship. Finding out “what happened to the European markets” was nearly a month long endeavor.

Decision-making was a local sport. Your personal volatility was largely limited to the actions that you and your community could take. A hundred years ago, we simply didn’t have the insight of what was happening beyond our local frame of reference.

This, in turn meant that society was filled with lots of local optima. Across each family / community / business / industry, we created an optimal experience based on what we could control. It was incredibly inefficient from a big picture perspective, but it was also amazingly flexible and redundant. A bank failure in one small town wasn’t likely to affect one across the state. They weren’t connected.

So how did we evolve to our hyper-connected, hyper-volatile society of today?

Society has used the power of accelerating technology to drive an endless drumbeat of linkage-driven efficiency.

Today we have a spaghetti mess of interconnected architectures. Our personal lives are intertwined with our jobs and our companies and the markets and other cultures etc etc. We’ve reached the point where it is too much for our human brains to keep up with it, much less optimize it.

And this leads to massive scale volatility. Everything is designed to be globally optimal. The markets are super efficient and so are the supply chains and so too our individual spending habits. But unfortunately, when something goes wrong in the vast interconnectedness, it can almost bring society to a screeching halt.

So what is the answer?

Architecture and strategic planning. I’m not kidding! We’ve known for years that you can’t make good decisions without understanding what you have and how it is all connected. And as technology within the enterprise has gotten more complex, we have evolved processes and capabilities to track and manage it. The only problem is that the rest of society likes to execute, not plan. To shoot first, ask questions later.

The fall of 2008 presents an amazing inflection point for society. We are going to have to re-architect the financial markets, and are on the track to bring massive change to the political markets as well. I hope the new leaders who stand up to guide these endeavors can take a page out of the Enterprise Architecture playbook: Begin with the end in mind. Create a reference model that explains how things are connected. Document enough of the current state to be able to make sane decisions. Establish standards that make sense and stick to them. And always ask “what if” before you pull the trigger.

1 Comment | In: Enterprise Architecture, Strategic Planning, Uncategorized, Uncertainty | | #

On your next trip to India – you might just want to take a detour to Ambalappuzha.  Ambalappuzha is a small town in the state of Kerala, in southern India. The town is famous for its Sri Krishna temple and its rice pudding.

For the temple of Ambalappuzha is where the legend of Paal Payasam originates.

According to legend, Lord Krishna once appeared in the form of a sage in the court of the king who ruled the region and challenged him for a game of chess. The king being a chess enthusiast himself gladly accepted the invitation. The prize had to be decided before the game and the king asked the sage to choose his prize in case he wins. The sage told the king that he was a man of few material needs, and thus all he wished was a few grains of rice. The amount of rice itself shall be determined using the chessboard in the following manner. One grain of rice shall be placed in the first square, two grains in the second square, four in the third square, eight in the fourth square and so on. Every square will have double the number of grains of its predecessor.

Upon hearing the demand, the king was unhappy since the sage requested only a few grains of rice instead of other riches from the kingdom, which the king would’ve been happy to donate.

Never-the-less, the game commenced, and needless to say the king lost the game. The King called forth to a porter from the royal granary to bring forth a bag of rice to met out the  prize. As he started adding grains of rice to the chessboard, the king soon realized the true nature of the sage’s demands. By the 20th square, the number had reached one-million grains of rice and by the 40th square, it became one-trillion. The royal grainery soon ran out of bags of rice. The king realized that even if he provides all the rice in his kingdom and his adjacent kingdoms, he would never be able to fulfill the promised reward. For the amount of rice required to fill a 64-squared chessboard is 18 billion billion grains of rice - 460 billion tons.

Upon seeing the dilemma, the sage appeared to the king in his true-form, that of lord Krishna. He told the King that he doesn’t have to pay the debt immediately but can pay him over time – and that The king shall serve paal-payasam in the temple freely to the pilgrims every day until the debt is paid off.  And today, you will still find rice pudding in the temples of southern Indian state of Kerala.

No Comments | In: Accelerating Technologies, Business, Just Plain Cool, Singapore | | #

Press release from Lamar University

Technology innovation in the coming decade will be unlike anything the world has seen, and corporations, small businesses and individuals will have to paddle hard to catch this wave — or they might just be ripped asunder. So says Jonas Lamis, executive director of SciVestor (www.scivestor.com ), a research and advisory firm focused on understanding how future technologies will disrupt the business, economic and social frameworks of society.

Lamis will speak as a part of the IES Entrepreneurship Lecture series at 11 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 2, in the Landes Auditorium of the Galloway Business Building.

At the lecture, Lamis will cover understanding the law of accelerating returns; how semantic technologies and Artificial Intelligence will change the future of the Web; Green autonomy – how robotics and AI are redesigning the automobile and changing the climate-crisis debate; the emerging science of longevity medicine and what it might mean to people; and a framework for thinking about the potential value of new concepts and companies.

Lamis is also the director of partnerships at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (www.singinst.org), a consortium focused on developing a framework for safe advanced artificial intelligence, primarily through research and software development. He manages partnerships between the business and investment communities, and SIAI.

Lamis is an active contributor on topics of futurism and business at several blogs, including Singularity University (www.singularityu.org), Robot Central (robotcentral.com) and SIAI Blog (www.singinst.org/blog/).

Lamis also is the founder and editor of Architecture & Governance magazine, a publication focused on helping large IT organizations plan and manage major transformation initiatives. The quarterly magazine is circulated to approximately 15,000 key IT decision-makers.

In the last decade, Lamis has held executive and managerial roles in several venture-backed software companies.  Prior to founding SciVestor, he was the vice president of alliances and vice president of corporate marketing at Troux Technologies. He holds a master of business administration from the University of Texas, a master of science from Georgia Institute of Technology and a bachelor of science in industrial engineering from Purdue University.

Lamar’s Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, headed by Russ Waddill, entrepreneur-in-residence of the College for Business, stimulates economic development and diversification in Southeast Texas by addressing the needs of current entrepreneurs and small businesses while simultaneously enhancing the education of tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. Since its founding in 2001, the institute has engaged in research to benefit the region, working closely with local chambers of commerce, economic development agencies and city and county leaders.

Within the College of Business, students can major in entrepreneurship receiving a bachelor in business administration — general business entrepreneurship. New curriculum has also led to the creation of a minor in entrepreneurship for non-business majors, which is open to all disciplines on campus. Courses offered to the public to assist in developing business ideas, networking and finding venture capital help put wings to inspiration for students, entrepreneurs and small businesses alike.

The Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies presents lectures twice each year that adhere to the institution’s mission statement: “to stimulate economic development and diversification in Southeast Texas by addressing the needs of current entrepreneurs and small businesses, while simultaneously enhancing the education of tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.”

No Comments | In: Anti-Aging, Artificial Intelligence, Events, Futurism, Robotics, Semantic Web | | #

SciVestor sat down with Dewey Gaedcke, Founder and CEO of Minggl.com.  He discusses the future of the social grid, how Moore’s Law is powering Web 2.0, and why companies and investors should care about Minggl.

No Comments | In: Artificial Intelligence, SciVestor, Semantic Web, Video | | #

SciVestor sat down with Doug Lenat, AI pioneer, founder and CEO of Cycorp. He discusses how Cycorp might change the world in the next 10 years, why Moore’s Law is important, and why businesses should be interested in AI.  View the video here: http://scivestor.blip.tv/#926947

No Comments | In: Artificial Intelligence, Cycorp, SciVestor | | #

Recently, SciVestor was quoted in a piece on the emergence of Semantic Web technologies in InfoWorld.

With the Semantic Web’s ability to hone in on just the information a user needs, companies based on a Web search advertising model such as Google may have to reconsider their plans, said analyst Jonas Lamis, executive director of SciVestor.

“They may need to rethink their business model because if I have an agent that acts on my behalf and finds things that are interesting for me, it’s not necessarily going to be reading Google ads to do that,” Lamis said.

You can read the full piece here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/01/15/sparql-semantic-web_1.html

 

No Comments | In: Articles, SciVestor, Semantic Web | | #

I’m blogging Gartner Symposium down in Orlando this week.  My favorite session so far is: Generation Virtual: How a 40th-Level Half-Elf From Secaucus, New Jersey Will Change Your Business, by Gartner Analyst Adam Sarner.

I’ve been attending Gartner Symposium for the last 5 years (as part of my day job at an enterprise software company), but have only recently seen any recognition from Gartner that there is a relationship between their heavily IT crowd and the emergence of transformative technologies like virtual worlds and AI.

Of course, they cast this presentation in the “mavericks” track so as not to scare the assembled techies too much, but the very fact that Gartner is investing research dollars into this space is a bell-weather in my opinion.

Adam’s predictions:

• All you need is love: By 2015, 2% of people in the U.S. will be married to people they will never meet in person.

• A convenient truth: By 2015, time spent online will compete with the real world becoming the most “green” activity, reducing the average person’s overall carbon footprint by more than 50%.

• The dot-com bomb: Sales and marketing of products and services to virtual personas will “explode,” overtaking B2C spending by 2020.

• The day the earth stood still: By 2020, more than 70% of R&D investment in personal robotics will shift to virtual personal assistants.

• Mayor McBlank: A city will elect a virtual anonymous persona for mayor by 2020.

One of Sarner’s more powerful memes was the relationship between Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the emergence of Virtual worlds and AIs. Sarner believes that the virtual world is providing the “self-actualization” that Maslow forecast, but few have been able to achieve in Meatspace.

The latter half of his presentation focused on the emergence of personal AIs – what he called “persona bots”. His take:

In 2017, the persona bot will be mass adopted (more than 20 million active persona bot users in the U.S. alone; more than 10 million in the rest of the world). The drivers for this mass adoption are primarily the persona bot’s time shifting/time saving ability, and ability and authority to carry out tasks on the user’s behalf. The persona bot’s strength will be its ability to be at many virtual places at once, seeking vast amounts of territory, while filtering back and reporting on relevant information.

 

Just as the customer will have the persona bot as a “killer application,” companies will have their own automated bot for critical relationship handling, such as sales, customer service and marketing. By 2010, more than 15% of B2C Fortune 1000 companies with a Web site will use a chat bot for online customer service. Top drivers, such as 24/7 presence and the ability to communicate domain expertise, will help customers navigate their way toward a purchase. A practice already used is text-based hybrid bots with the ability to start an automated conversation with a customer, then alert a live representative to take over the avatar once a lead is qualified. Eventually, companies will need to develop an interaction process around a fully automated persona bot gathering information from a fully automated company bot.

Sarner’s recommendations to the assembled IT intelligentsia:

• Companies should organize and target products and services online based on mankind’s journey toward self-actualization.
• Sell to the persona, not the person. A persona will show you how it wants to be treated.
• Create virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases.
• Shift from collecting demographic data to psychographic data for understanding online persona behavior and its interaction with others.
• Shift Investment from known customers to unknown ones. Focus on the influencers within the meritocracy.
• Develop and retain or outsource new skills to attract, connect, contribute and gain insight from personas and virtual environments.
• Begin to develop strategy, process and technology around relationships with persona bots as a tool for mutual exploration.

I’m glad to see that Gartner is getting on board. Their perspective will help drive attention and investment to the area.

1 Comment | In: Artificial Intelligence, Events, Futurism | | #

Today’s keynote at the Singularity Summit was Peter Norvig, Director of Research from Google. His talk was titled The History and Future of Technological Change, and he couched his presentation as an analysis of “how to evaluate technical change”.

This is the first time I have heard Norvig speak, and I found his talk to be extremely pragmatic. His trek through the art of predicting the future, to demonstrations of narrow AI to his list of AGI prerequisites pointed toward a technologist with a perspective firmly grounded in continuous improvement, averse to making high-risk, long-shot bets. If Norvig speaks from a place of authority on Google product direction, it seems to me that we should expect continued evolutionary innovation from GOOG, but they will leave the breakthrough innovation of AGI to others. This is an important observation for the investment community that has put Google on pedestal related to the continued release of major breakthroughs.

Norvig began his talk discussing how the predictions he was used to making are about incremental advancements in technology. A 1% improvement here, a 2% improvement there. He pointed out that predictions about AGI are 100% “or greater” improvement ruminations. He pointed out the dichotomy between other prognosticators. “We will all be dead in 100 years” vs. “We will live to be 1000 years old”. “AGI can’t happen for another 100 years” vs. “within the next 10 years”.

From there, Norvig took a detour through other concepts of “Artificial General”. He postulated about “Artificial General Space Exploration”, “Artificial General Materials Science”, and “Artificial General Culture” – equating these concepts to the emergence of AGI.

Here Norvig was at his most pragmatic. He sees continuous innovation in these areas bringing about a more advanced capability, but certainly no “rapture”, no “big bang”. He commented that “the Singularity is a period, not a point”. He sees a date in the future when we look back at the progress and say – wow that was a big change.

In preparation for this presentation Norvig used Google Scholar to query papers presenting breakthroughs in AI. His keywords were “AI” and “unlike previous”. From 1968 – present, Norvig can’t tell the difference in breakthrough claims, with claims of novelty repeating in the data set. This indicates to him that we are not on the verge of discovering something major in AI.

To bring about an AGI, Norvig offered his list of prerequisites:

• Probabilistic First-Order Logic
• Hierarchical Representation and Problem Solving
• Learning over the data from above
• With lots of data
• Online
• Efficiently

I think the recursive thinking nature of Norvig’s AGI underpins his continuous improvement philosophy, and also presents a very Googlian view of success. Let an algorithm loose on lots of data, and eventually it might get there.

Rodney Brooks asked Norvig a question during the Q&A session:

Brooks – Any emergent property of Google materializing within the massive systems that has been a surprise?

Norvig’s best answer was that he was surprised at how Game theoretic Google’s role in the internet is. Initially, he thought Google would be an observer of the internet – just serving up search results. Now Google is co-evolving with the web.

No Comments | In: Artificial Intelligence, Google, Singularity Summit | | #

J. Storrs Hall is a noted scientist and author. He is chief scientist at Nanorex and has published extensively on the subject. His most recent book is titled Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine (2007).

Hall spoke at The Singularity Summit this morning on the topic of revising Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. As a refresher, Asimov’s laws follow:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

With Asimov, the 3 laws were “hardwired into the circuitry.” He envisioned the laws being codified in the circuitry. Alas, according to Hall, the Robotic AGIs (Artificial General Intelligence) of the future will be software and wetware. And “Asimov’s robots didn’t Improve Themselves. Our AIs, we hope, Will.”

So, Hall posed the question, “how can you imagine writing a law that is to govern in an environment you can’t predict. Like Hammurabi writing laws that predict the Enron scandal.” Our new “laws” have to be much more abstract and flexible – more like a conscience. According to Hall, we’ve done this for ages – it’s called raising children.

To punctuate his perspective, Hall predicted “by 2050 – most corporations will be run by their management information systems. Their first law will be ‘make a profit’.”

Hall’s New Laws of Robotics:

• Law #1 – A Robot shall understand as much as possible.

Hall referenced Socrates – “there is no good but knowledge, and no evil but ignorance” as a basis for morality across cultures. The same should apply to AGI.

o Law 1a – in particular a robot shall understand mimetic evolution.

Mimetic evolution is the reflective or representative of actuality or reality of human experience (derived from Aristotle’s concept of mimesis or imitation). This is important because evolution is where morals come from.

• Law #2 – A robot shall be Open Source.

We live in a world largely run by artificial organizations that have no conscious – Corporations and Governments. But corporations are required by law to have an “open-source motivational system” – Auditing – because Money is their Emotion. Transparency to robot motives and capabilities will be critical with an AGI.

• Law #3 - A robot shall be Economically Sentient

Our economic environment is the necessary outcome of evolution. We must train our AGIs to understand and appreciate the power of economics so that they will drive toward optimal decisions.

• Law #4: A robot shall be “Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent” and shall do a good turn daily.

No Comments | In: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Singularity Summit | | #

“We’re all machines,” says Rodney Brooks. “Robots are made of different sorts of components than we are — we are made of biomaterials; they are silicon and steel — but in principle, even human emotions are mechanistic.” A robot’s level of a feeling like sadness could be set as a number in computer code, he said. But isn’t a human’s level of sadness basically a number, too, just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot’s numbers be any less authentic than a human’s?”

Robots and Robotics - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Artificial Intelligence - Science and Technology - New York Times

1 Comment | In: Robotics | | #