Like many I’ve read Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” in which he describes the point at which machine intelligence and human intelligence merge. Kurzweil, uses his law of accelerating returns to predict an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence. Kurzweil famously calculates that the singularity will arrive around 2045.
Many scientists, not the least of which was John von Neumann, and science fiction writers, in addition to Kurzweil, have written about “Technological Singularity”, when intelligent machines will dominate human life. In all of these writings “The accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, give the appearance of approaching some point in the history of the human race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue”.
While singularity writings and predictions have been widely circulated and understood, they have also been widely discounted as unlikely. This is what Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen wrote about Kurzweil’s predictions in the MIT Technology Review, “This prediction seems to us quite far- fetched.”
However, President Trump’s Federal Communication Commission (FCC) chairman, Ajit Pai, appears to have determined he can “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” (oops! maybe he’s working for the wrong President) by ending regulations regarding what’s known as “net neutrality”. “Net Neutrality”, is a term coined by Columbia University media law professor Tim Wu in 2003, as an extension of the longstanding concept of a common carrier, which was used to describe the rights and responsibilities of communication companies.
For the second time in less than four years, Chairman Pai and the Trump FCC is considering ending Net Neutrality regulations so Internet Service Providers (ISP) like AT&T, Verison, Comcast and others, will no longer be required to treat all data the same, regardless of the origin or purpose of that data. The term Net neutrality is the principle that your internet provider shouldn’t be allowed to restrict access to web content because they don’t like it or because someone isn’t paying them behind the backs of consumers. Without the Obama-era rules in place Chairman Pai and President Trump will assure that every facet of the Internet will be in the hands of these few giant telecom companies, effectively monopolies in most areas but therein lies the brilliance of the Trump/Pai strategy.
In the end, the medium is not the message, and the Internet is a medium, a repository and an archive. Until now its greatest virtue has been its greatest weakness: it is un-selective. This means that it is undiscriminating, in both senses of the word. It is indiscriminate in its principles of inclusion: anything at all can get into it. But it also – at least so far – doesn’t discriminate against anyone with access to it.
The Trump/Pai strategy is to change that vision by enabling large businesses and the Federal government to exert almost complete control over the Internet. Knowledge may not be the same as power, but it is unquestionably a means to power for President Trump and Chairman Pai. The internet itself is disinterested but what the Trump administration uses it for is certainly not.
Opponents of net neutrality regulations, President Trump’s political allies, argue that Internet Service Providers (ISP) should have the right to prioritize traffic and charge for their services as they wish but it’s been a problem for them to do that because of the responsibilities assigned to them as Common Carriers described by liberals like Professor Wu and others. So this is how Chairman Pai and his allies intend to get around the laws that have confounded them so far.
Without Net Neutrality the Internet will become the province of very large telecommunications businesses like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and a handful of others. Once that occurs one thing is certain and that is ISP’s will be able to change the traditional pricing model of the Internet dramatically. This is how Jonathan Hill, dean of the Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Pace University in New York, describes how it is likely to work:
“If you are a consumer, everyone is going to get to pay for the bronze, silver and gold package, and if you don’t have the gold package, good luck catching up on ‘Game of Thrones’. It’s going to be a slower and more frustrating process.”
When all is said and done the only real users of a “Trump/Pai Internet” will be those who can afford to be the customers of the remaining telecommunication businesses that provide it’s infrastructure. The entire issue of customer expense will be left up to the good old competitive pricing principle of, “whatever the market will bear”, which is exactly the policy President Trump knows made America Great before and will do it again.
This brilliant Trump/Pai strategy will also, effectively bring about the Singularity well before Ray Kurzweil’s 2045 prediction, galvanizing Trump and Pai in the hearts of all venture capital, technologists and assuring plenty of reelection campaign contributions from what are sure to become the most profitable businesses in the world.
When Net Neutrality is eliminated the only remaining users of the Internet will be ones that can afford the fees of the ISP telecommunication companies. The Internet will then have become, essentially, a network for conducting business and driving the profitability of the telecommunication industry. It will become a network on which businesses share the costs of operating what used to be private telecommunication networks. The Internet will be used just like legacy private networks were used and that was to minimize the costs of doing business.
Essentially, the Internet will be transformed into a modern-day version of the old Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system. The EDI system existed for more than 30 years and provided the standards and protocols that eventually became available for free to all with the Internet. As a business network the Internet will be managed as all business networks are and that is, “to minimize transaction costs”. Economies of scale will become the key operating principle for the Internet and the services that are offered will be those that enable business customers to minimize costs as well. Think of “peopleless” warehouses and ubiquitous robots.
Following is a picture of an Amazon distribution center operated by Amazon Robotics.
Amazon Robotics technology allows amazon.com to operate “peopleless” distribution centers using robots to pick items from shelves; pack items into cases; arrange the cases into pallets and even load the truck – all without the involvement of humans. Kiva Systems, now owned by Amazon and operated by Amazon Robotics, is also used by retailers such as Staples, Crate & Barrel and the Gap.
An on-board camera enables the robots to navigate by reading 2D barcodes laid out on a grid system of the floor of the warehouse. When the robot reaches the correct location it retrieves a mobile pod with the items and then transports it back to a worker fulfilling the order. People still have to put the items in the box and finish the packaging – perform gift wrapping; add packing materials; seal the carton; and apply a mailing label. but the over labor saving cuts of using robots has made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world and makes President Trump that much more intent using Amazon technology to make Trump allies even richer.
Another interesting model is emerging from Rethink Robotics. Baxter, pictured below, which looks more the like the robots many of us have seen in the movies, has two human-like arms that can be used for basic part handling; simple line loading and unloading; packing and unpacking tasks.
The most important feature of Baxter is human beings can operate side-by-side with it. The robot can be trained within minutes. No expertise in software or robotics is required and processing lines can be changed-over without the involvement of robotics technicians.
The brilliant Trump/Pai strategy does not stop at the warehouse or factory wall, however. telecommunication companies will be able to extract almost as much profit from Service robots. With their great flexibility and versatility, the mobile logistics robot can be used in tens of thousands of businesses like, hospitals, grocery stores, nurseries — and of course in the homes of almost all Americans.
Countries around the world are grappling with how to care for a growing population of elderly people. The percentage of the US population aged 65 or older is currently at 13%, but that number is expected to nearly double by 2050, according to the Pew Research Center and the United States isn’t even close to the oldest nation in the world — that title is reserved for Japan. In fact, 20% of Japan’s current population is 65 or older.
As countries witness a climbing number of seniors, the amount of caregivers remains stagnant. By 2020, a quarter of Europeans will be over 60. In their silver age, many would like to stay in their homes and will require care from family or social workers. Unfortunately, the number of caregivers is diminishing year-after-year due to shifting demographics and an increase in working families. This has lead to a ‘care deficit’ that poses a major challenge to most western societies.
Today’s social workers are often hard pressed, wishing they had more time to connect with the people they care for, rather than the rush through the numerous tasks that fill their days. It’s also hard physical work requiring workers to bend over up to 1300 times per shift . Substituting “carebots“, connected to the Internet, for human care givers will not only drive profits for Telecommunication companies it will drive enormous profits for the companies that employ the human care givers.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), an independent organization that sets standards for 164 member countries, recently created a new standard to ensure interactions between carebots and humans remain safe — highlighting a growing number of robots of this nature.
The standard — formally called the ISO 13482 standard for service robots — allows for “close human-robot interactions so there will be protection against litigation in the event of an accident occurring,” Gurvinder Virk, a professor of robotics who helped lead the creation of the ISO standard, told reporters.
Then there is “the office”, where millions of white collar workers through out the world spent the majority of their time.
Telepresence robots like iRobot’s Ava, in the adjacent picture is the first “collaboration robot.” The Ava 500 was built by iRobot in collaboration with the networking experts at Cisco, and was designed to bring enterprise businesses what could be the first viable telepresence robot on the market. The Ava 500 is actually the second time the platform is being put to use. The first was the RP-Vita, that the company bills as a “telemedicine solution,” or basically a telepresence bot for hospitals that gives doctors remote access to patients and on-site care teams.
Telepresence robots allow care workers and family to drop by a patient’s house remotely. There’s no need to pick up a phone, or start a computer. The robot, essentially a videoconference system on wheels, will drive up to you and initiate a conversation. It’s the modern day equivalent of a knock on the door. The idea is not to replace in person visits, but to allow them to happen more frequently, and at the times that matter most. Imagine having your daughter drop by – albeit sometimes virtually – multiple times a day, or being able to ask for help when needed.
What may be the most enticing aspect of the Trump/Pai strategy is that all of the robots, described above, will be connected to the Internet controlled by the telecommunication/conglomerate of ISPs. Those businesses will be able to set their pricing models so they receive a fee every time a robot makes a request of Artificial Intelligence (AI) software running on centralized computers. This configuration makes the strategy even that much more appealing to all because with centralized AI software, that directs the robots remotely, it will make the robots themselves that much less expensive to own and operate for business users of the Internet.
When connected to the Internet, robots can benefit from the powerful computation, storage, and communication resources of modern data centers , which can process and share information from various robots or agents. Internet computing technologies enable robot systems to be endowed with powerful capability whilst reducing costs through centralized technologies. Thus, it is possible to build lightweight, low cost, smarter robots that have intelligent “brains” in the cloud. The “brain” consists of data center, knowledge base, task planners, deep learning, information processing, environment models, communication support etc.
As an example RoboEarth is a network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other and a cloud for outsourcing heavy computation tasks. RoboEarth has been described as a “World Wide Web for robots”. brings together researchers from five major universities in Germany, the Netherlands and Spain and is backed by the European Union.
The K computer, named for the Japanese word “kei” (京), meaning 10 quadrillion (1016) is a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, currently installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan.
The K performs 10 petaflops. (FLOPS, floating-point operations per second). A petaflop is 10¹⁵ . The K can perform 10¹⁵ operations ten times in a second.
The K computer is based on a distributed memory architecture with over 80,000 compute nodes. Today it’s used for a variety of sophisticated applications, including climate research, disaster prevention and medical research but the K represents just one of the models of computer available to power the Trump/Pai strategy for Making America Great Again by eliminating Net Neutrality..
Abhishek Kumar, a software developer, has created an intriguing method for projecting the improvement in processing power of computers from the 1950s to today to evaluate Moore’s Law. Kumar compares the processing power of the 1950’s UNIVAC to the K and then calculates improvement by year to see if today’s computers are better or worse than Dr. Moore expected.
The 1950 vintage UNIVAC’s 2000 operations per second seems laughable compared to the K’s 10 petafops. (FLOPS stands for “floating-point operations per second). A petaflop is 1015 operations. The K can perform 1015 operations ten times in a second.
Kumar then asks, “If we fed the UNIVAC just one petaflop of instructions, how much time would it think to process it? According to Kumar’s calculations, it would take the UNIVAC 15,855 years or about 159 centuries to perform one petaflop of instructions. The K can perform the same calculations in one-tenth of a second.
Kumar then reasons, according to Moore’s law, every two years the computing power should double. Since 1950, it’s been almost 70 years. Divide that by two, and there have been 35 two-year periods since 1950. According to Moore’s Law, the computing power today should be 70,000 (UNIVAC’s 2000 * 35) operations per second but the K’s performance is something like 14,000 times better than that. So the K’s performance is 14,000 times better than Moore’s law expected.
However, as impressive as the K’s performance is, the IBM Sequoia
supercomputer built for the U.S.Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, became the most powerful supercomputer on earth in 2012.
The IBM Sequoia led the top 500.org (http://www.top500.org/lists/2012/06) ranking of the worlds supercomputers, according to a standard software benchmark, delivering 16.32 petaflops (a thousand trillion FLOPS (floating point operations per second) using 1,572,864 processor cores. It marked the first time since November 2009 that a U.S. supercomputer topped the charts and now super computers like the K and the Sequoia are available to power the Trump/Pai Net Neutrality-free internet and Make America Great Again, not to mention hundreds of American telecommunication businesses.
All of this must be making Ray Kurzweil and his colleagues at Google, where he now works as Director of Engineering for machine-learning, admire his law of accelerating returns. After all Google is going to need a way to continue to make millions after all of its human users are replaced by thousands of robots requesting it’s artificial intelligence (AI) software that the guru of The Singularity engineered. What a strange world Making America Great Again has brought about. President Reagan would be so proud.
Notes:
- Paul Allen/ The Singularity Isn’t Near – MIT Technology Review
- (https://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/my- money/articles/2017-08-02/8-ways-to-get-your-game-of- thrones-_x-without-hbo)
- http://smallbusiness.chron.com/introduction-network-protocol-46550.html
- Steve Keifer, “Robots and the Peopleless Warehouse” – Verticalogy, 2014
- http://robohub.org/robots-that-may-help-you-in-your-silver-age/
- Danielle Muoio, “Japan developing carebots for elderly care” – Business Insider, NOV. 20, 2015
- ibid, Danielle Muoio
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer
- https://breathepublication.com/univac-vs-k-supercomputer-709909925cf3
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