Monthly Archives: May 2017

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Ask Ethan: What Happens When A Black Hole's Singularity Evaporates? Forbes It's hard to imagine, given the full diversity of forms that matter takes in this Universe, that for millions of years, there were only neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium gas. It's perhaps equally hard to imagine that someday, quadrillions of years ...

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Ask Ethan: What Happens When A Black Hole's Singularity Evaporates? - Forbes

Not long ago, your parents mightve noticed a kid staring at a smartphone in their front yard. There wasnt anything there. The kid was justhanging out. What they didnt know? Said kid was gazing through a digital window and seeing a mythical beast in their well-manicured roses.

This youngster was playing an augmented reality smartphone sensation called Pokmon Go that swept the online masses before fading back. But dont confuse ephemerality for significance. Pokmon Gos simple yet viral appeal suggests AR is going to be huge.

The reason I'm inspired by this? I don't think Pokemon Go is the pinnacle of AR. It's kind of like the Solitaire for Windows 3. It's a killer app at a certain time, a big milestone, John Werner said at Singularity Universitys Exponential Manufacturing Summit in Boston.

Formerly an innovator at MIT Media Lab, Werner is now VP of strategic partnerships at augmented reality company Meta, the maker of a head-mounted AR display of the same name.

Since the beginning, Werner said, weve interacted with computers in a number of different ways, each iteration simplifying and improving on what came before it. First, it was punch cards. Later, it was the keyboard, mouse, and graphical user interface. More recently mobile technology brought us touchscreens.

Whats next?

Augmented reality is part of a new wave of tech that includes the related (and sometimes confused) fields of virtual reality and mixed reality. And the biggest names in the industry, from Google to Microsoft, are jumping into all of these areas for good reason. This is the birth of the next great computer interface, according to Werner. But it doesnt actually have a name yet.

If you look at the players that did well on the different waves, you see a number of them going into VR, AR, MR, Werner said. And I think those are just placeholders. We haven't figured out what to really call this next wave of interacting with technology.

Augmented reality isnt all that new, Werner pointed out. Weve been overlaying digital information on the real world for a while. Pilots use it to keep track of digital gauges, and NFL broadcasts include a digital yellow line on the field to show how far teams have to go for a first down.

But his vision goes far beyond Pokmon Go and yellow lines on a football field.

The rapidly falling cost and convergence of the underlying technologies are conspiring to make AR more usable, comfortable, and suitable for the mainstream. Most importantly, whereas AR is now largely constrained to 2D screens, its becoming immersive and wearable.

When it comes of age, Werner thinks itll merge with VR and change how we use computers.

People see AR and VR as two separate things, Werner said. But eventually, it's going to converge. And VR's going to be a feature of this strip of glass where you can just dive into something [for full immersion] or you can pull back.

You can see an early example of this futuristic vision by looking at his companys Meta 2.

Werner described the device as a light AR headset with a fully immersive 90-degree field of view. Theyre striving to make an operating system with zero learning curve. Expected applications include product design, as a new partnership with Dell, Nike, and Ultrahaptics shows off.

The Meta 2 isnt the only head-mounted augmented reality device in the works. Theres also Microsofts HoloLens, which is being sold as a developers kit for $3,000. The much-hyped and secretive Magic Leap has attracted some $1.4 billion. Most of whats known about the device is via insider accounts and rumor, and theres no definite date for when it will go public.

But if Google Glass, an early step toward rudimentary augmented reality, taught us anything, its that its easy to get carried away and dream of the faraway potential of a new interface technology before its ready. This is standard hype-curvelore in technology.

Virtual reality, for example, is further along than augmented reality. There are now affordable, consumer VR devices on the market. But the excitement around VR has cooled. Next steps will be more practical as it matures and finds real market appeal.

This cycle applies to head-mounted augmented reality too. Only for AR, its earlier still.

The wearable AR devices weve seen are yet a bit clunky, and they arent likely to sweep away todays computer interfaces right away. But they are light years beyond the earliest devices from decades ago. Werner noted how one of the first VR devices, called the Sword of Damocles, was so heavy it would kill the user should it, heaven forbid, come loose of its moorings.

Today, AR devices are light enough to wear on your head, without breaking it. And there are a few converging forces that Werner thinks will accelerate development in coming years. These include advanced voice recognition (think Amazon Echo and Google Now), real-time modeling of three-dimensional spaces (Google Tango), ever-faster connection speeds (5G), laser-based displays (instead of pixel-based screens), and AI.

The end result as Werner sees it is an experience more like interacting with the real world, in which our computers adapt to us, instead of the other way around.

The way our keyboards are arranged, he said, descends from movable type, a centuries-old technology. But this is how we type and tweet.

"We're held hostage by this arrangement...Our eye can take in 10^8 bits per second of information, and yet this is how we're communicating with technology."

Turns out Werner isnt the only one thinking about how AR and VR will merge. Google featured both technologies at its annual Google I/O developers conference last week.

In a blog post before the conference, head of Google VR Clay Bavor mused on how the two relate. He suggested AR and VR are points on a spectrum between the real and digital worlds. On one end, its all real, on the other its all virtual. And in between, its both.

He suggested a few namescomputing with presence, physical computing, perceptual computing, mixed reality, and immersive realitybefore landing on immersive computing. Of course, just because Google calls it immersive computing doesnt mean the name will stick. Perhaps well cycle through other options, or simply expand what we have to include the whole category.

Whats clear, Bavor writes, is that through history, computer interfaces have become more intuitive by removing layers of abstraction. As a result, they've become more accessible to more people doing more things. AR and VR will make the digital world more like the world we evolved to interact with. How long it will take isnt clear, but the trend is.

With immersive computing, instead of staring at screens or constantly checking our phones, well hold our heads up to the real and virtual worlds around us, Bavor writes. Youll have access to information in context, with computing woven seamlessly into your environment. Its the inevitable next step in the arc of computing interfaces.

Image Credit: Dell/YouTube

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The Next Great Computer Interface Is EmergingBut It Doesn't Have a Name Yet - Singularity Hub

Circumstances are making it hard to see what's in the little plastic cylinder molecular biologist Meow-Ludo Meow-Meow is waving in his hand, with somewhat ironically given his moniker the air of an exuberant puppy.

For starters we're on Skype and his room in Sydney's inner west is dimly lit. Then there's his vaping smoke wafting over everything.

"That," says Meow-Meow, with a triumphant rattle of the tube as the mist clears, "is an Opal card for going on public transport."

"But I've got to get it implanted first."

Meow-Meow, Bachelor of Molecular Genetics, former Science Party candidate and co-founder of Sydney's Biofoundry is a grinder, someone embedded deep in the Mad Max-esque world of biohacking for whom putting Sydney's equivalent of the Myki under your skin is just one more step on the road to transhumanism.

"The rules say it remains the property of CityRail," says Meow, fingering the chip in a bottle. "I'm worried they could confiscate it now. But if it's under my skin, good f---ing luck to them."

Meow-Meow already has a chip in his thumb that can open a door and tell his smart phone it's him, but there's a new venture in the world of implants that makes Meow's invisible hardware seem tame, and it's brought to you by that entrepreneur with a habit of making mad science real.

In March the Wall Street Journal breathlessly announced that Elon Musk, billionaire purveyor of Tesla cars and Powerwall batteries, and whose SpaceX outfit recently brought Mars colonisation closer with the first ever launch of a "re-usable" rocket, was hiring for a new company.

Elon Musk predicts AI will surpass human intelligence "by a lot" but a brain computer interface could help us keep up. Photo: AP

Neuralink will build a brain computer interface (BCI) or "neural lace" that will eventually "upload thoughts" to the internet but, along the way, deftly heal those with epilepsy, Parkinson's and depression, and restore function to people with stroke and brain injury for good measure.

Neural lace, says Musk, will add a digital layer to the brain that can wirelessly beam data from our noggins to connected devices and the cloud.

Anyone else would be accused of overreach, but Musk's track record commands a certain respect, and the job descriptions on his Neuralink website are sufficiently techno-opaque to suggest a very advanced team.

Elon Musk's Neuralink aims to build a brain computer interface that can "upload thoughts" to the internet. Photo: Susana Gonzalez

So it's not unicorn-chasing to wonder why Musk thinks it's a good idea to re-engineer our grey matter and, for that matter, just how the finished product will work.

The back story is that Musk sides with the transhumanist sentiment that, to steal futurist Ray Kurzweil's book title, "the singularity is near".

Futurist Ray Kurzweil warns of the singularity the point at which artificial intelligence starts teaching itself. Photo: Trevor Collens

That's the point where AI starts teaching itself, prompting an exponential leap in machine smarts that will make humans look, in Meow's words, "like the Amish", and in Musk's parlance, like "house cats".

Actually, it's worse than that.

Here's what Musk said in Tim Urban's epic April blog post on Neuralink: "A house cat's a good outcome, by the way.

"AI is obviously going to surpass human intelligence by a lot There's some risk at that point that ... the AI goes rogue."

Neural lace will, according to Musk, head off AI armageddon by plugging us into evolving machine intelligence and keeping us ahead of the game.

Of course, as Maureen Dowd noted recently in Vanity Fair, Musk's dark prophecy could well be tinged with the entrepreneur's supreme marketing flair hi-tech cross-branding with a thought uploader won't hurt Tesla's image one bit.

Even sceptics, however, can't ignore feats such as DeepMind's (the Google AI system) 2016 trouncing of world champion Lee Sedol in AlphaGo, the board game many thought was an impregnable bastion of human intuition.

But if Musk is really concerned about an AI uprising, why start out by curing a bunch of sundry, albeit devastating illnesses, rather than crack on with supersizing human brain power?

The reasons are deeply practical. To implant an experimental device you need approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, and that's only going to happen if you're treating a serious illness.

Moreover, as Gerwin Schalk, Deputy Director of the National Centre for Adaptive Neurotechnologies in Albany, New York, told me, each experiment with a brain implant for human use costs tens of millions. And Musk is, after all, a businessman.

"At some point in the future, brain implants will fundamentally change humanity. But at present, the sexy stuff is not it," says Schalk, referring to the scant foreseeable returns on implantable superintelligence.

"Even Elon is not going to have the amount of resources that it would take to basically ignore economic realities."

Gerwin Schalk of the National Centre for Adaptive Neurotechnologies says treating disease is the first goal. Photo: Mike Wren

Those realities lie firmly within the perimeter of disease, believes Schalk, who sees stroke rehabilitation as a frontrunner application for any commercially viable neural lace.

So what could Musk's lace possibly look like?

The basic brief for any BCI is to record the electrical activity of brain cells and sometimes squirt back a little voltage to stimulate those same cells.

EEG records brain waves from outside the skull, but high fidelity means getting up close, generally by draping an array of 100-200 electrodes over the dura, the brain's hard outer layer, or plunging electrodes directly into the squishy stuff.

These deeper brain dives have, already, produced some astounding results.

Deep brain stimulation has helped people with uncontrollable tremor from Parkinson's hold a cup of coffee. In epilepsy, the NeuroPace device senses an impending fit and heads it off with a judicious surge of current. A DARPA program culminated in a paralysed woman using her thoughts to control a robotic arm and gently shake hands with an incredulous interviewer.

And a February article reports that a woman paralysed with Lou Gehrig's disease used the BrainGate device to type at a record eight words per minute. With her thoughts.

There is, however, a big problem with sticking things in the brain.

"You have an electrode that's hard and artificial, it's made of metal and it's spiky. And on the other side is the brain that's soft, chemical, electrical and pliable. Those two things don't work together all that great," says Schalk, with neuroscientist deadpan.

Brains get traumatised, scar tissue forms around electrodes, the signal degrades, the body rejects the device, and so on.

Which is why the work of a young Melbourne neurologist named Tom Oxley has the tech world slightly aquiver.

Last year Oxley published a groundbreaking proof of concept paper in Nature Biotechnology for a BCI that could record hi-definition brain activity without having to open the skull.

His technique was to wend a device, the "Stentrode," up the jugular of anaesthetised sheep and plonk it in one of the large veins that lies against the brain, where it sat happily for up to 190 days as the sheep, now awake, went about their business.

In April, Oxley's company Synchron nabbed $US10 million in funding for a first-in-human trial slated to start in Melbourne next year, with the ultimate aim of having paralysed people walk again by controlling an exoskeleton with their thoughts.

Oxley's short term goals are more modest, however, and focus on software to decode thoughts and let people drive a wheelchair or control heating, cooling and appliances in the home.

Oxley's take is decidedly more pragmatic than Musk's "thought upload" mantra.

"You can get a bit philosophical about it but the thoughts in themselves are only useful in so much as they are recognised by the computer reading the program, at which point an output is triggered. Think about it as uploading a real time command control system."

Oxley's vision of "brain as remote control" means we need to be able to switch bits of the Jello on and off. And there is one region particularly well suited to the task.

"You can activate different parts of your motor cortex by thinking about moving particular parts of your body in ways you have grown up all your life doing," says Oxley.

Then the trick is programming the computer to see that brain activity as a signal to do another task.

For a person with tetraplegia, bumping up the central heating could, theoretically, be just a matter of thinking about kicking a footy, and take your pick of other imagined movements to switch on the microwave

Musk has hinted that his device could also use a vascular route to reach the brain, and so the Stentrode may well give us a peek into what a neural lace could look like.

But the Stentrode's current command and control interface seems clunky compared to the specs needed for what Musk has in mind.

The tech magnate thinks humans have an "output" problem our senses import swags of data (think how much you take in with a single visual sweep of a bustling city street) but we transmit at the slovenly speed of two thumbs tapping (try texting everything you saw to a friend).

Musk's vision calls for outputting data to devices at the speed of thought, and that's where Schalk's research may well be on the money.

Schalk monitors people with epilepsy who have had brain electrodes inserted to detect where seizures start and to guide neurosurgical treatment.

He's developed a computer algorithm that can work out what people are reading aloud, JFK's inauguration speech for example, just by analysing their brain waves. And in a 2016 article, he used a similar technique to discern words, including "cowboys", "swimming", and "python", that people were merely imagining saying.

The mind-boggling potential is that a computer could read your thoughts just by analysing your brainwaves, a game-changer for people "locked in" by paralysis so severe that thoughts are their only option for controlling the environment.

But Schalk says there's a conceptual road block to his "brain to text" algorithm linking thoughts and machines any time soon.

"You are not thinking in mental sentences," he says.

"Language isn't captured as a series of characters you can somehow find in the brain. It's a combination of many experiences and many emotions that together realise language in all its complexity."

Take "red rose" says Schalk. It could be a flower, but it could also be the first movie you saw with your girlfriend (if you like Hindi thrillers) or the name of a forest you once visited that evokes tinkling streams and the chirp of birds.

And if Urban's blog post is a guide, Musk really is aiming at getting this kind of "all over" thought up into the cloud.

Imagine, writes Urban, you're on a hike and want to share it with your hubby.

"No problem just think out to him to request a brain connection ... now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he's there. He asks for the other senses to get the full picture, so you connect those too and now he hears the waterfall in the distance and feels the breeze."

Back in the present, however, there is an elephant in the room full of would-be transhumans.

Musk himself says we're "already cyborgs" our smartphones do much of what is promised by his "digital extra layer" so why not just share that hike by uploading a video to Instagram? What's the big deal about bringing the hardware on board?

Meow has struggled to come up with good reasons why he couldn't just have his chip on a ring.

"At a practical level, having it under your skin means it's waterproof. You don't want to wear jewellery at a public pool or a beach," says Meow, who also envisages one day bringing up his daily diary remotely on a "smart mirror", while taking a shower.

But the most obvious benefits are, again, for the disabled.

Oxley points out that tasks most of us take for granted, such as moving a computer cursor, may use up a paralysed person's last remaining function, if they have to manipulate a joystick with their mouth, for example.

"There is a vast region in the cortex that is still functioning tissue, but it is not being used," says Oxley.

The neurologist sends me a video from a 2015 article in Science showing a man who has repurposed some of that cortex to move a cursor with his thoughts, freeing up his mouth to chat with the woman next to him.

"That is world changing for a patient with severe paralysis," says Oxley.

But brain implants are also lifting the lid on an ethical Pandora's Box.

"Some patients seem to experience self-estrangement. They don't recognise themselves after being implanted," says Frederic Gilbert, a philosopher at the University of Washington.

Gilbert interviewed a woman with epilepsy whose symptoms improved with an implant, but who felt worse. Having a 24/7 brain box monitor gave her the miserable feeling of being a "full time" epileptic, something she was previously only reminded of intermittently, after a seizure.

Others were weirdly drawn to think they had superpowers.

Gilbert recounts a woman in her 50s who had improved with an implant for Parkinson's, but one day decided she'd move the pool table all by herself, injured her back, and ended up in a wheelchair for two months.

And, echoing the insubordinate computer HAL in 2001, Gilbert also worries about when "the device will be allowed to kick you out of the decision loop". Imagine, he says, a military pilot who experiences depressurisation but thinks he is still competent to control the weapon system. The BCI begs to differ and overrides to fire the missiles.

But perhaps the biggest hurdle for Musk's vision, articulated in a recent MIT Technology Review piece, is more prosaic: who, after all, is going to get brain surgery to send an email?

"I would. F---ing oath I would," chips in Meow, a self-described neophile.

"I want this technology to succeed, so I'm happy to be a beta tester. As long as I'm happy with the safety."

Why? In the short term Meow is enamoured with "frictionless interaction with technology". But longer term, he's with Musk.

"We have to convince robots and AIs that we are worthy of joining the singularity with them. If we don't join with machines now they're going to overtake us and we're going to be like a cockroach to them ... we're doomed."

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Elon Musk building brain-computer interface to protect against AI ... - The Sydney Morning Herald

Everything is changing again. But this time, its happening faster.

In his talk at Singularity Universitys Exponential Manufacturing Summit in Boston, Deloittes Digital Transformation Leader Geoff Tuff gave the audience some great tips for understanding todays business environment and taking advantage of its opportunitieswithout falling prey to its exponential speed.

The latest round of quick automation and exponential change is being dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to Tuff, though, thats a misnomerit sounds like something thats happening to us, when really its something we need to shape and react to. The problem is that the pace of change is so rapid, businesses cant react like they have in the past; they need new models for innovation and growth. Without these, they arent likely to stick around long term.

The Golden Ratio of Innovation, established by his team just five years ago, already seems outdated, Tuff says. The rule statesalthough Tuff says it wasnt intended to be so universalthat to stay competitive, companies should allocate 70 percent of their resources to innovating within their core business, 20 percent to the space adjacent to their core business, and just 10 percent to the transformational space, which means discovering brand new customer needs.

A 2012 study of companies in the industrial, technology, and consumer goods sectors showed that companies that allocated their resources according to this ratio outperformed their competitors.

But sticking to this model now yields surprising returns. In fact, it yields something close to inverse returns, with 10 percent coming from core business investments and up to 70 percent from the transformational space. What companies need to do, today more than ever, is invest even greater resources in non-core areas, working across a wide spectrum of innovation.

But what does that mean, and how can companies adapt?

Tuff recommends starting by dividing your business into known or knowable opportunities, which can be planned for and tackled, and unknown opportunities, which must be discovered or developed.

Asking existing business units to discover unknown opportunities wont workthat will take different people, metrics, and funding mechanisms. Start a team, a digital foundry, and task them with this.

Now youre ready to find a tech solution to transform your business, right? Not according to Tuff.

New outcomes and improved efficiency arent possible without people changing their behavior. Choosing your technology first wont get you very far if no one wants to use that technology. The trick is to identify behavioral shifts that will create value, then use data to track those shifts. The insights you gain from that process should then be a guidepost to decide what technologies you want to use.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but youll get greater return on your digital innovation by putting behavior first and technology second rather than the other way around. This will help you sort through the thousands or tens of thousands of digital solutions and startups on the market.

As youre probably aware, we humans tend to be creatures of habit, and changing our behavior on a large scale is no easy task. We can look to three large manufacturing companies to see how they looked at behaviors they wanted to target first and then found the right tech for the job.

At Nissan, a rapidly aging workforce compelled management to ask, How do we stop our employees from doing the repetitive tasks that are harder for them as they age and may even harm them? The answer was to stop them from having to do difficult physical maneuvers without taking them out of the production process entirely. The company came up with cobots, or collaborative robots, which work in tandem with people by taking over some of the physical tasks. The company saw higher output levels and improved efficiency in both time and cost.

Caterpillar just completed the acquisition of Yard Club, a market-making app that connects people who own construction machines with potential renters. Caterpillar wants people to be able to rent their machines instead of having to buy them, letting the company derive value from selling tools, attachments, and parts in addition to large machines. To drive usage of their machines, they need to create an efficient market for those machines. Having witnessed the explosion of Uber, Airbnb, and other apps that interface supply and demand, its undeniable that the right app can powerfully change consumer behavior.

UTC Aerospace Systems understood that they could drive better use of their systems in airline customers if they could get users to work more efficiently, increase on-time performance, and get more information into the hands of pilots and crew. They created an app called OpsInsight that gives pilots access to live data, allowing them to adjust aircraft operations in real time. The apps creation was driven by a desired behavior in the end market; giving customers tools to improve their own outcomes will improve company outcomes toodouble win.

Its a complex time to be a manufacturerthe landscape is changing so fast its hard to keep up, and traditional business models and systems arent yielding the same results they used to.

But the good news is, manufacturers sit right in the middle of the value chain, with the ability to influence suppliers, downstream customers, and even customers customers. Shedding outdated ways of thinking and adapting your operations to our exponential times will make all the difference to success or failure.

In closing, Tuff acknowledged that while its not certain Charles Darwin actually said this, the words certainly do apply to doing business in the 21st century: It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.

Image Credit: Pond5

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How to Stay Innovative Amid the Fastest Pace of Change in History - Singularity Hub