If the WW II generation was The Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers were The Worst. My former boss Bill Gates is a Baby Boomer. And while he has the potential to do a lot for the world by giving away his money to other people (for them to do something they wouldn\u2019t otherwise do), after studying Wikipedia and Linux, I see that the proprietary development model Gates\u2019s generation adopted has stifled the progress of technology they should have provided to us. The reason we don\u2019t have robot-driven cars and other futuristic stuff is that proprietary software became the dominant model.<\/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.<\/p>\n Simply put, there is no computer vision codebase with critical mass<\/a>.<\/p>\n We can blame the Baby Boomers for making proprietary software the dominant model. We can also blame them for outlawing nuclear power, never drilling in ANWR despite decades of discussion, never fixing Social Security, destroying the K-12 education system, handing us a near-bankrupt welfare state, and many of the other long-term problems that have existed in this country for decades that they did not fix, and the new ones they created.<\/p>\n It is our generation that will invent the future, as we incorporate more free software, more cooperation amongst our scientists, and free markets into society. The boomer generation got the collectivism part, but they failed on the free software and the freedom from government.<\/p>\n My book describes why free software is critical to faster technological development, and it ends with some pages on why our generation needs to build a space elevator. I believe that in addition to driverless cars, and curing cancer, building a space elevator, getting going on nanotechnology, and terraforming Mars are also in reach. Wikipedia surpassed Encyclopedia Britanicca in 2.5 years. The problems in our world are not technical, but social. Let\u2019s step up. We can make much of it happen a lot faster than we think<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If the WW II generation was The Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers were The Worst. My former boss Bill Gates is a Baby Boomer. And while he has the potential to do a lot for the world by giving away his money to other people (for them to do something they wouldn\u2019t otherwise do), after [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-source","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246","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=1246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51979,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246\/revisions\/51979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}