{"id":1012,"date":"2010-06-11T03:17:50","date_gmt":"2010-06-11T10:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/?p=1012"},"modified":"2017-04-26T13:24:35","modified_gmt":"2017-04-26T20:24:35","slug":"h-conference-and-faster-singularity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/h-conference-and-faster-singularity","title":{"rendered":"H+ Conference and the Singularity Faster"},"content":{"rendered":"

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.<\/em>
\u2014Alan Turing<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a programmer, I look at events like the H+ Conference<\/a> this weekend in a particular way. I see all of their problems as software: not just the code for AI and friendly AI, but also that for DNA manipulation. It seems that the biggest challenge for the futurist movement is to focus less on writing English and more on getting the programmers working together productively.<\/p>\n

I start the AI chapter of my book<\/a> with the following question: Imagine 1,000 people, broken up into groups of five, working on two hundred separate encyclopedias, versus that same number of people working on one encyclopedia? Which one will be the best? This sounds like a silly analogy when described in the context of an encyclopedia, but it is exactly what is going on in artificial intelligence (AI) research today.<\/p>\n

Today, the research community has not adopted free software and shared codebases sufficiently. For example, I believe there are more than enough PhDs today working on computer vision, but there are 200+ different codebases<\/a> plus countless proprietary ones. Simply put, there is no computer vision codebase with critical mass.<\/p>\n

Some think that these problems are so hard that it isn\u2019t a matter of writing code, it is a matter of coming up with the breakthroughs on a chalkboard. But people can generally agree at a high level how the software for solving many problems will work. There has been code for doing OCR and neural networks and much more kicking around for years. The biggest challenge right now is getting people together to hash out the details, which is a lot closer to Wikipedia than it first appears. Software advances in a steady, stepwise fashion, which is why we need free software licenses: to incorporate all the incremental advancements that each scientist is making. Advances must eventually be expressed in software (and data) so it can be executed by a computer. Even if you believe we need certain scientific breakthroughs, it should be clear that things like robust computer vision are complicated enough that you would want 100s of people working together on the vision pipeline. So, while we are waiting for those breakthroughs, let\u2019s get 100 people together!<\/p>\n

There is an additional problem: that C\/C++ have not been retired. These languages make it hard for programmers to work together, even if they wanted to. There are all sorts of taxes on time, from learning the archane rules about these ungainly languages, to the fact that libraries often use their own string classes, synchronization primitives, error handling schemes, etc. In many cases, it is easier to write a specialized and custom computer vision library in C\/C++ than to integrate something like OpenCV which does everything by itself down to the Matrix class. The pieces for building your own computer vision library (graphics, i\/o, math, etc.) are in good shape, but the computer vision is not, so that we haven\u2019t moved beyond that stage! Another problem with C\/C++ is that they do not have garbage collection which is necessary but insufficient for reliable code.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A SciPy-based computational fluid dynamic (CFD) visualization of a combustion chamber.<\/em><\/p>\n

I think scientific programmers should move to Python and build on SciPy. Python is a modern free language, and has quietly built up an extremely complete set of libraries for everything from gaming<\/a> to scientific computing. Specifically, its SciPy<\/a> library with various scikit<\/a> extensions are a solid baseline patiently waiting for more people to work on all sorts of futuristic problems. (It is true that Python and SciPy both have issues. One of Python\u2019s biggest issues is that the default implementation is interpreted, but there are several workarounds being built [Cython<\/a>, PyPy<\/a>, Unladen Swallow<\/a>, and others]. SciPy\u2019s biggest challenge is how to be expansive without being duplicative. It is massively easier to merge English articles in Wikipedia that discuss the same topics than to do this equivalent in code. We need to share data in addition to code, but we need to share code first.) <\/p>\n

Some think the singularity is a hardware problem, and won\u2019t be solved for a number of years. I believe the benefits inherent in the singularity will happen as soon as our software becomes \u201csmart\u201d and we don\u2019t need to wait for any further Moore\u2019s law progress<\/a> for that to happen. In fact, we could have built intelligent machines and cured cancer years ago. The problems right now are much more social than technical.<\/p>\n

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      We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      \u2014Alan Turing<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done. \u2014Alan Turing As a programmer, I look at events like the H+ Conference this weekend in a particular way. I see all of their problems as software: not just the code for AI and friendly AI, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1012"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56600,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012\/revisions\/56600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}