The success of Chromebook

What are the chances for a success of the Google Chromebook?

There are 5 main segments today: Workstation, Laptop, Internet tablet, smart phones and mobiles phones. The Chromebook will have to compete with these, and possible create a new segment. But I think 6 segments is at least one too many, and one of them will be marginalized. Unless the Chromebook do not out-compete either the Laptop or the Internet tablet, I think it may be that the Chrombook is the one that will be marginalized. (Aside from that, I think workstations and "dumb" mobile phones are also going to be marginalized soon.)

An important question is if the Chromebook is right in time. For it to succeed, people have to accept that everything is done in the cloud. The cloud services are improving quickly, but is it quickly enough? It is a paradigm shift, and it may take time to get used to it. I think this paradigm shift will win eventually, but the success of Chromebook is more uncertain.

Why is Google investing so much into Chromebook? Google's revenue comes mainly from Internet advertisements. They prefer people to use Internet services for their daily businesses, instead of legacy applications downloaded to the PC. The perfect world would be if everyone only use a web browser. And so, a perfect world for Google would be if everyone use a Chromebook.

People are not going to change to Chromebooks just because that is what is best for Google, especially if the pricing is not competitive. I think Google will have subsidize the Chromebook to succeed. An alternative solution to a Chromebook would be to have a separate keyboard that can be attached to an Internet tablet. That looks more attractive to me, personally.

Simulation argument

There is a theory that we are all living in a computer simulation. Maybe not computer, but simulation anyway. This is a theory that is neither provable or disprovable, so it is undecidable. That means it falls into the same category as a religion. Nevertheless, there are signs that suggests we are in a simulation. These are based on what I would assume how such a simulator would be constructed.

Problem: To make a simulator of a real world, a lot of performance will be needed. One way to achieve this is to use a massively parallel computer. One problem with such a simulation would be that every event that happens anywhere would influence every other part of the simulation (through one of the forces in nature). This would be expensive, and has to be minimized.

Solution: Limit the speed with which events can influence other parts.

Our world: No information can travel faster than the speed of light.

Problem: Given time, events will eventually have effects on all other parts of the simulation, even if there is a speed limit.

Solution: Let the simulated world expand in such a way that there is a limit where changes can no longer catch up outside of a limited sphere.

Our world: The universe is expanding, and we will never be able to see beyond a certain point because that point is moving away too fast.

Problem: Computing exact results with infinite precision takes infinite time.

Solution: Impose a limitation on the precision of computations.

Our world: There is something called the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. It states that precise inequalities that constrain certain pairs of physical properties, such as measuring the present position while determining future momentum; both cannot be simultaneously done to arbitrarily high precision.

Problem: There are many computations that may never be observed and may never have any effects outside a limited environment.

Solution: Make use of a lazy algorithm. Things are not computed until the result is actually needed somewhere.

Our world: In quantum physics, there is something called quantum entanglement, whereby the degrees of freedom that make up the system are linked in such a way that the quantum state of any of them cannot be adequately described independently even if the individual degrees of freedom belong to differentobjects and are spatially separated.

Exponential growth

Can the economy continue to grow exponentially?

There are many organizations today that claim that the growth must halt soon, or we will deplete important earth resources. Looking at it that way, it is obvious that, for example, the oil consumption can not continue to grow. And there are many other resources that simply can't be expanded on.

However, the thing is more complicated, and it is wrong to generalize. So let's have a look at some exponential behaviour. One of the more famous examples is Moore's law, which says that the number of transistors on a chip growths exponentially. A more interesting version of this law is the measurement of the number of CPU operations you get per dollar. This doubles approximately every year, and has been doing so for a long while. Actually, the trend is picking up speed. One reason for this trend may be that producers of processors knows where they will have to be in the future if they will be able to stay in the business. So every generation provides a measurable improvement compared to the previous generation, which means there is an exponential growth. This growth may not depend in depleting earth resources, at least not the way that energy from oil depends on oil resources.

Now on to the next type of exponential growth, and that is inventions in general. Sometimes, an invention builds on another. The invention wouldn't be possible until now. This is also a kind of exponential growth, as improvements build on other improvements. It can be argued, and it has been many times in history, that we now know most of what can be invented, and so this type of exponential growth will halt. Not because of lack of natural resources, but because of the end of scientific progress. This is harder to prove or disprove, but I am optimistic and believe we are no way near the end.

Finally, there is emerging another type of exponential growth because of inventions, and that is software. There is a constant stream of software inventions, where some of them build on the previous ones. This development is also fuelled by the exponential growth of CPU power. I am convinced this is where we will see an explosion of activities in the future. Until now, computers and software has just been seen as one component in our daily lives, in the list of cars, houses, phones, etc. But I think the software business will expand relatively to the other industrial areas. Economists that only look at GDP and other similar key figures will miss it out entirely.

Will a general artificial intelligence be benevolent?

It is hard to predict what AIs will do, especially as we have problems to define what an AI is. If you take a chess program, most would define it as narrow AI. Good at chess, but worthless at other things. But how then do you make a general AI? And if you succeed to create one, what makes it do anyting at all? Why wouldn't it just sit there, thinking of something, and remain incommunicative?

I think one of the important building blocks of an AI is the driving force. The problem with chess programs is that the driving force is extremly narrow. It is something like "for each piece, try every possible move. For each of the tests, try every possible response. All the time, evaluate the situation according to a strictly defined algorithm". And some more. This doesn't give the program much ability to generalize.

If the computer instead would have a driving force more generally defined, as "play human opponents, goal is to win", then it would leave more room for out-of-the-box solutions. For example, you win more if the humans play worse. So one solution would be to select low talented opponents. Another solution that would fulfill the goal would be to somehow arrange to have the opponents killed, and win by walk-over. A program that can take this kind of very general definition of driving force doesn't exist yet. Even if the given example is extreme, more near future realistic examples can be imagined.

It is a version of the old adage "the way you ask something determines what kind of answer you get". I think the defined driving force, the algorithms, and the rules, are what will ultimately make up an AI. You don't really need the rules to make an AI, but I strongly encourage the use of them. Even if the driving force is seemingly benevolent, it is no guarantee of the eventual behaviour.

A discussion you see now and then is if the driving force should be copied from humans. Looking closer to this, I think the main human driving force is to spread your genes. Everything else is just a side effect, to improve the chance that you succeed. Behaving nice to people, even doing charity, improves the chance.

The hope is that using a human driving force for an AI would also give it the same behaviour. But I think that is a mistake, as the nice part of (most) human behaviour is only a side effect. There are spectacular examples of humans that succeed well on an individual point of view, but catastrophically from the point of view of the human civilization.

Intelligent spam

In the near future, maybe 5-10 years, we will start to see intelligent spam. There will be participators in discussions argumenting for a position. The discussion will be two-way, not the one-way we see from spam today. This intelligent spam will be created automatically by software, from goal and rules defined by a stake holder.