Some kind of future

Gulf · May 13, 2016

The future is closer than many think.

Your Personal Sim: Pt 1 — Your Attention Please
The Brave New World of Smart Agents and their Data

The biggest advance in computing technology that humanity has yet seen is sneaking up all around us, right now. In just the last five years, our leading IT companies are building the first truly useful intelligent assistive personal software agents, or “smart agents” or “bots” for short. The exponential convergence of speech recognition, natural language understanding, deep machine learning, increasingly deep and valuable knowledge graphs andknowledge bases of big data, and context from our digital devices, including our online habits, email, social networks, purchases, and location data, is allowing smart agents to anticipate our daily actions, wants and needs.

Conversational agents include Google Now, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa,Microsoft’s Cortana, Facebook’s M, the Siri founder’s startup Viv, Baidu’sDeep Speech (technically, the speech rec front end to an agent), IBM’s Watson Analytics (technically, an analytics front end to an agent), and a large number of offerings from smaller companies, such as Soundhound’s Hound, call customer service and center automation agents and agent platforms like IPSoft’s Amelia, Next IT’s Alme (I am an advisor to NextIT), Creative Virtual’s V-Person, Go Moment’s Ivy (for hotels), platform tech support bots like Slack’s Slackbot, scheduling bots like X.ai’s Amy/Andrewand Clara Lab’s Clara, email assistant Crystal, chatbots like Microsoft’s Tay, and a host of others around the world, either less well-known or presently in development. Smart agents are increasingly good at understanding the semantic meanings in our text, voice, GPS and other data, inferring our likely next actions, and predicting our needs, based on our current context. When they don’t understand, they are also learning how to ask questions to clarify our intent.

At the same time, Google, Baidu, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Nvidia, Factual, and other IT platform leaders are building both proprietary and open knowledge graphs and knowledge bases, vast databases that allow automated semantic structuring and semantic search of public and private information, and which use machine learning to do reasoning and inference with this data. In early 2015, Google began ranking websites based on their factual accuracy, not just PageRank. Any site with more than a few factual inaccuracies, according to the base, such as the antivaxxer sites, now gets a lower ranking in the new algorithm, renamed RankBrain, as it is centered around artificial neural networks.
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https://medium.com/@johnsmart/your-personal-sim-pt-2-why-agents-matter-266d397d372e#.a7zyb88oe

https://medium.com/@johnsmart/your-...-and-mediated-reality-c6725a9e92fb#.kzuj544ej

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-paul/does-trump-triumph-signal_b_9850206.html

From the perspective of an increasing number of Americans of both political parties, the economic system is rigged. Globalization has pitted American workers in a wage competition death match with lower paid workers across the world, suppressing domestic wages while boosting corporate profits to historically high levels. New technologies that offered the prospect of increasing labor productivity and wages have instead proven to exacerbate the problem as traditional industries have been disrupted and jobs lost. Instead of increasing wages, in a globally competitive labor environment where capital is mobile and abundant, the application of new technologies has facilitated the out-migration of jobs and enhanced the return on capital, further exacerbating the concentration of income and wealth.

The titans of the Silicon Valley are ecstatic about their vision of the tech-enabled world that lies just beyond the horizon. Advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printers and biotechnology offer a future that will accelerate the disruption of service and manufacturing industries alike. It is a future, in their minds, that reduces the need for mundane work and increases the opportunities for unconstrained creativity. Yet looming behind this utopian vision lies the inevitability of the continued elimination of existing jobs and pressure on real wages for the average American worker, accelerating the stratification of incomes and wealth. According to the Federal Reserve Bank, 47% of Americans could not come up with $400, in cash or from credit cards, in an emergency. For that half of America, no glowing vision of the future could make up for the prospect of losing the source of livelihood they now have.

Pressed to respond to the neo-Luddite fears of a future that will only worsen the economic pressures that have been steadily encroaching on American middle class incomes, tech guru Marc Andreessen argues the opposite. Technology will solve any environmental crisis created by economic growth, and the steady economic growth in countries from Asia to South America, and increasingly to Africa, attests to the absolute good created by the combination of exploding technological innovation and economic globalization. He offers neither sympathy nor a solution for the adverse economic impacts of the combination of technology and globalization on those employed in sectors of the economy that have been or inevitably will be disrupted and destroyed, but rather sees the benefits that those forces have provided to society as a whole.

Arguments against fears about the continued adverse impacts of technology and globalization tend to focus on positive aggregate data and trends, as Andreessen suggests, while the people who show up at Trump rallies are individuals whose own lives and families have been adversely affected by economic pressures and job losses. Trends don’t vote while individuals do, and there lies the rub for those who envision a future of greater freedom and creativity—but fewer jobs. For the nerds in the Silicon Valley, the future glows like a shining city on a hill. “We have this theory of nerd nation,” Andreessen commented, “of forty or fifty million people all over the world who believe that other nerds have more in common with them than the people in their own country.”
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