Paul Ryan asked me to write a story for the June/July issue of Anthill about digital media and entrepreneurship. I ended up writing something about how it seems to me that digital media entrepreneurs require a higher code of ethics, a higher vision, than your run-of-the-mill online entrepreneurs. Click on the image below to read the full article.
I’m working on an idea and I need your help. I want to put together a list of the top thinkers in Australia. I mean the really amazing people, the ones with a huge vision for the country or the world or even their industry. The people who are leading from the front, dreaming big dreams and doing their best to realize them. I’m looking for inspirational, amazing Australians.
I’m nominating Peter Ellyard but I’m struggling to come up with the rest. I’m sure they are out there but who are they? Who is on your list?
IEEE Spectrum has a series of new essays on the singularity from the likes of Vernor Vinge and Rodney Brooks (who have both been on this show in the last year).
My favourite quote so far comes from Vinge’s new essay “Signs of the Singularity“:
“The best answer to the question, “Will computers ever be as smart as humans?†is probably “Yes, but only brieflyâ€.”
Hans Moravec has suggested that the human brain has a processing capacity of 10 quadrillion instructions per second (10 billion MIPS). In comparison, it was announced today that the fastest supercomputer in the world, called Roadrunner and devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, is capable of handling 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
In 2007, it was announced the previous fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene /l, had been upgraded to achieve 478 TFLOPS sustained and 596 TFLOPS peak. So in less that 12 months, we’ve doubled (hey, I should create a law around that prediction).
So, if Moore’s Law holds out:
2009 – 2 QIPS
2010 – 4 QIPS
2011 – 8 QIPS
2012 – 16 QIPS – which puts it 6 QIPS above the suggested ability of a human brain.
Are you ready for that? Do you think the human race is ready for that?
We have NO IDEA what the consequences of that are. On one hand, it could be nothing. On the other hand, what if sentience is nothing more than massive computation?
Either way, here we are, a mere 4 years before a machine is likely to be built which will have a bigger brain than a human and we aren’t even discussing what that means for the human race.
Well, that’s not exactly true – Tyler’s Singularity Institute are discussing it, but where is the debate in mainstream media, in the government, in polite society?
It reminds me of a chat I had with Australian SF author Damien Broderick over dinner about ten years ago. I asked him when he thought these subjects would be discussed by the general populace. He replied “when it’s way too late to do anything about it”.
Andre writes the “Lost Parent Diary” blog and he recently contacted me about a podcast I did where I mentioned how my twin boys started saving their pocket money to buy their own laptops when they were about five years old. He wrote it up into a blog post about teaching your kids to save money. He even turned it into a step-by-step guide!
Now I must admit, while we were helping Tay and Hunter save for their laptops, it didn’t seem like we were doing anything super special. I was impressed with is decision to save for a laptop at age five, but apart from that, we were just doing the basics of what I’m sure all parents do with their kids. But the way Andre has written it up makes it sound like we knew what we were doing. It’s all in the writing, I assure you.
I’m excited these days about helping them start their first business this year. We’ve been talking about it for a year or so now and it’s the next logical step.
I’m looking at starting a podcast about parenting at the moment actually. Anyone interested in hosting it should let me know.