Cambrian Explosion: beware bony crawlers

Posted on September 14, 2014March 3, 2016 By Joel Mentmore

According to Dag Kittlaus over at TechCrunch at last we’re heading for a Cambrian Explosion in AI led by personal assistants like Siri and Cortana.

The unlocking of AI ultimately allows this Cambrian Explosion to finally find the light of day and enables a dynamic new world to emerge. As your trusted assistant becomes more and more capable as thousands of developers join the marketplace, it brings scale and breadth to something that AI has aspired to for decades. It scales usefulness.

Scales usefulness? That’s a lot of scales.

Of course Kittlaus has ambitions to bring us THE GLOBAL BRAIN but I feel there may be an additional interest in pushing this agenda. I’m not saying he’s a drunk, but remember when he shared with us his wonderful vision for the usefulness of this technology.

The Slough of Despond: Gartner’s Emerging Technologies

Posted on August 31, 2014August 31, 2014 By Joel Mentmore

The Economist explains:

Upgraded Siri AI crossing from digital to real world operations

Posted on August 13, 2014November 2, 2014 By Joel Mentmore

The hand of friendship

Siri’s Inventors Are Building a Radical New AI That Does Anything You Ask

Kittlaus (of Viv Labs) says the end result will be a digital assistant who knows what you want before you ask for it. He envisions someone unsteadily holding a phone to his mouth outside a dive bar at 2 am and saying, “I’m drunk.” Without any elaboration, Viv would contact the user’s preferred car service, dispatch it to the address where he’s half passed out, and direct the driver to take him home. No further consciousness required.

A beautiful vision, and a fitting evolutionary goal – technology that will help drunks. The key quote is “No further consciousness required” at which point we salute our new AI overlords.

Brain re-wired

Posted on August 7, 2014 By Joel Mentmore

How the Web Became Our ‘External Brain,’ and What It Means for Our Kids

The title doesn’t really do the article justice – the theme Harris is proposing is that “technology is changing the structure of our brains” ! ! ! On the other hand, and Harris does acknowledge this – our brains are designed to be changed. In many ways that is what is so unique about our brains (and perhaps what gave us the edge over the Neanderthal brain). In fact this very plasticity that may account for the rise and evolution of speech and language as a result of developing technological prowess (knapping stone tools). So adaptation to the internet may be a good thing freeing our brains from having to remember a lot of stuff and allowing new modes of thinking. Who knows, with brains like ours, our intellectual evolution isn’t over, and may yet give us an advantage over the fast evolving AI threat.