More on the Death of the Knowledge Society
April 22, 2009
For those readers interested in this topic, I notice a new article on the topic on the BBC news site, Simulated brain closer to thought and the source project Blue Brain Project referrred to in my original posting.
The quote from Prof Markram is very telling
“It’s not a question of years, it’s one of dollars. The psychology is there today and the technology is there today. It’s a matter of if society wants this. If they want it in 10 years, they’ll have it in 10 years. If they want it in 1000 years, we can wait.”
Death of the Knowledge Society
March 4, 2009
Since the early 90s we have been living in what many have called the Information Society, although the notion goes back much further than that. Basically it is only since then that access to technology and information have been sufficiently democratised to enable a significant impact on the day to day lives of many people. This in its turn has enabled many more people to be implicated in the creation and sharing of knowledge, and the emergence of an immaterial economy. We are already well down the path (some would say too far) towards an economy where physical goods are the least significant contributor to the economy, meaning the physical content of a product is overshadowed by its knowledge content (R&D, design, marketing, support, etc.. )
Turning to Artificial Intelligence which has long been a favourite theme of Science Fiction, futurologists and technologists alike, we can add some spice. Ray Kurzweil is probably the best known of those suggesting that desktop computing power (if it continues to follow Moore’s law) will have the equivalent processing power of the human brain by 2029, although the ability to transform that power into true intelligence may lag behind. Nonetheless the last few months have seemed to be particularly active in this field with Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom publishing a credible Whole Brain Emulation – A Roadmap, and IBM’s Dharmendra S Modha’s project to emulate a rat’s brain, suggested to the Singularity Summit that the project was positioned halfway along that roadmap, (Next Big Future) – with the rat-scale model being 3.5 larger than the previous work on mouse brain emulation.
It was estimated that a system 400 times larger than the rat model would be needed to emulate the human brain, with the most powerful machines currently available being able to handle models 10 times larger than those of the rat. With DARPA contributing $4.9 million to the project, it is clear that this research is leading somewhere, and possibly faster than we expect, even taking into account the probable need for quantum computing to reach full human brain emulation.
This of course takes us towards Kurzweil’s singularity where machine intelligence will start evolving more rapidly by itself, and I question what will happen to the knowledge society/economy when machines can accumulate and generate and create knowledge more rapidly and more cheaply than a human counterpart.
Will these knowledge machines be creative? Intuitive? Empathetic? Will they become the wealth generating engines replacing talented humans. Will our values change, with personal knowledge being no longer being a key success factor?
We are talking of potential changes over the next 25 years, and remember that 25 years ago few believed the impact that the Internet and mobile technology would have on our lives and the way we do business. My guess is that these sentient technologies will start having an impact on defence applications much sooner than that.
Given that many policy makers and leaders still do not understand the implications of a networked society, what will they make of the post knowledge society, assuming they are still in charge.
