Disruptive Tendencies

Big Ideas: There If You Look

In today’s New York Times, Neil Gabler bemoans, “Ideas just aren’t what they used to be.”

He goes on:

“Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the way we look at and think about the world.”

One can’t argue that a “Big Idea” would have these characteristics. One can debate whether they are as rare as Mr. Gabler laments.

Humans transcending biology. Immortality. The Singularity.

If this isn’t the mother of “Big Ideas”, I don’t know what is.

No one could dispute that Ray Kurzweil’s books have ignited fires of debate, incited revolution, and have fundamentally changed the way we look at and think about the world.

Much of what Kurzweil discusses in his books, in his TED Talks and in “The Transcendent Man”, is humankind’s propensity to extrapolate linearly, and that exponential growth rates are beyond our ability to grasp, which he refers to as “The Law of Accelerating Returns”. He spends a lot of cycles plotting growth rates to log curves to prove his point that advances in technology have been growing at exponential rates. He goes on to suggest that there is no reason to expect this to change, the implication being, of course, that change is happening at an accelerated rate that few grasp.

Ray deserves credit for putting stakes in the ground and for the transparency with which he supports and defends his predictions. By estimating the computing power of a human brain and projecting Moore’s Law, he tells us that in 2020, a $1000 computer will have the equivalent processing power of the human brain. This is different than a computer becoming indistinguishable from a human. That won’t happen until 2029, when a computer with Strong AI becomes the first to pass the Turing Test.

But for Kurzweil, it’s not just Moore’s Law and exponential growth of compute power (although it is perhaps that best known example). His Big Idea comes from connecting the dots across multiple disciplines, which he has coined “GNR”, a convenient acronym for Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics/AI.

Mr. Gabler, there are Big Ideas out there. You’ve just got to look for them.

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter

About.Me/martin_suter

 

Applied Game Theory: Modern Analogue to Asimov’s Psychohistory?

Last weekend’s New York Times Magazine had an article, which I found fascinating: “Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?”  In it, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, reportedly one of the world’s most prominent applied game theorists claims to have calculated the answer.

Game theory assumes that people look out for what is good for them, (i.e. they act with rational self-interest) and de Mesquita then uses mathematical analysis to predict (very often correctly) such messy human events as war, political power shifts, Intifada.

Applied stats as a predictor of human events, I thought. Where have I heard that before?

Then it occurred to me that this was the premise behind Psychohistory as imagined by the great sci-fi writer, Isaac Asimov in his “Foundation Series”. “Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events.”

In Foundation, Hari Seldon, a Pyschohistorian, predicts the fall of the Galactic Empire, in much the same way as de Mesquita predicts the fall of the Iranian theocracy. (See the video on TED.com: “3 predictions of the future of Iran, and the math to back it up”)

Interestingly, at the end of the talk, Chris Andersen poses the question: “I got very nervous halfway through the talk, just panicking whether you had included in your model the possibility that putting this prediction out there might change the result?”

I wonder whether Chris was aware, when he posed the question, that by so doing, Bruno was violating one of the two axioms established by the fictional Seldon – “that the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses.”

Time will only tell.

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter

(martin.suter at iplicensing.net)