Philip Bethge

Tag: computer sciences

  • Microsofts Craig Mundie: “Microsoft can be cool!”

    In a SPIEGEL interview, Craig Mundie, 63, Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft, discusses the companies future, the mistakes of the past, computing in the 21st century, the upcoming Windows 8 Software and the Surface tablet.

    This is an extended version of an interview published at SPIEGEL Online International.

    SPIEGEL: Microsoft will presents a whole array of new products at the end of this week. Is this the beginning of a comeback to former glory?

    Mundie: I believe that Microsoft never lost it’s relevance. I always tell people we’re almost 40 years old now, fighting against every venture-funded good idea on the planet  in the world’s most competitive industry, and we’re still here, okay? So I say, „Do you think that’s just an accident?“. I don’t think so.

    SPIEGEL: Microsofts track record at anticipating technological trends hasn’t been the best in the past. With the tablet Surface and the new Windows 8 software you are now targeting in particular the mobile market. Again ten years too late?

    Mundie: My response is that we had a music player before the iPod. We had a touch device before the iPad. And we were leading in the mobile phone space. So, it wasn’t for a lack of vision or technology foresight that we lost our leadership position. The problem was that we just didn’t give enough reinforcement to those products at the time that we were leading. Unfortunately, the company had some executional missteps, which occured right at the time when Apple launched the iPhone. With that, we appeared to drop a generation behind.

    SPIEGEL: What happened?

    Mundie: During that time, Windows went through a difficult period where we had to shift a huge amount of our focus to security engineering. The criminal activity in cyberspace was growing dramatically ten years ago, and Microsoft was basically the only company that had enough volume for it to be a target. In part because of that, Windows Vista took a long time to be born.

    SPIEGEL: Have you learned your lessons?

    Mundie: Steve (Ballmer) made many changes, starting even at the top management level of the company. For example, there’s not a single product group president here today who was here five years ago. These changes are a reflection of the fact that we gave up leadership in some categories that turned out to be very important. Today our execution is not hampered by the same errors. We have learned our lessons. That doesn’t mean we won’t make some errors someday, but we’re at least not making the same ones again.

    SPIEGEL: Which role will Microsoft play in the coming decade as an IT company?

    Mundie: I think it’s going to be an interesting next decade. This is my 20th year at Microsoft. Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold hired me to develop the company’s capability in non-PC computing. In 1992, that seemed very avant-garde, but, of course, today we all live with computing everywhere around us.

    SPIEGEL: How will the computer of the future look like and how will we interact with those devices?

    Mundie: What we’re trying to do is to make the computer more like us and as helpful as an expert. To do that, we have to teach the computer to emulate more and more of the human senses, seeing, listening, speaking, as well as the tactile senses. We believe that our motion sensor Kinect will be a big part of that. The computers and the back-end cloud services are powerful enough now that we will see more of this type of technology very soon.

    SPIEGEL: What would that mean, for example, for peoples homes or offices?

    Mundie: For example, you’ll be able to directly ask the computer to help you. In the past, to work a computer program, you had to learn how to use the tool, and the tool had rigidity. In the future, it should be more like going to an assistant and saying, „Here is a document, make it look good,“ rather than saying „well, make this paragraph this point size and fit this font.“ A big emphasis at Microsoft is machine learning. The computer should not only be able to emulate your senses, but to appear to understand things based on learning or history. For example, for Office 365 that is in testing right now, we built a machine-learning-based assistant for your Inbox. The program looks at all your historical mail handling. From that, it makes judgments about what’s most important to you and groups those things together. How does it know? Because it has observed your behavior over some period of time.

    SPIEGEL: Don’t people want to define themselves what’s important to them and what isn’t?

    Mundie: That would require that people could actually describe their own behaviors, which we’ve learned they can’t do. They can’t tell you how they think enough to be able to put it into rules. The computer on the other hand is very well capable to observe your actions and deduce from that a set of behaviors or rules.

    SPIEGEL: If you look ten years ahead, which role will the PC play?

    Mundie: I think it will be about almost like it is today. However, it will be supplemented for example with intelligent whiteboards and displays for group discussions. Eventually, you will come into a room and the whole room will be the computer. In fact, people will be thinking more about computing and not computers. So for example, when you go into a space, you might have your phone in your pocket and your tablet in your briefcase. And if you set them down, they will all work together.

    SPIEGEL: Right now, the whole industry seems to have made it the user’s problem to migrate what they care about from one device to the next.

    Mundie: Yes, and I think that Microsoft may in fact be the company best positioned to help with this cacophonous situation, simply because we have a viable position in every product category, including a robust cloud service to connect all the different devices.

    SPIEGEL: Still, the world doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to your innovations.

    Mundie: I disagree. For example, if you look at the reviews, people who have a Windows phone actually prefer it over an Apple phone or an Android phone at this point. And Surface, I think, has met very strong, positive reviews and is really resonating with people.

    SPIEGEL: Surface will be on online-sale in Germany from Friday onwards. Again, Microsoft seems to be very late with such a device. The iPad is on the market for years. Why should people care?

    Mundie: Our experience is, despite some rhetoric, that most people who want to do any serious computing don’t want to do it trying to type on a glass screen. As a consequence, they always end up having two computers, a laptop and a tablet. Our dream was that you could have a no-compromises tablet experience and a click-on, high-quality keyboard, so that you don’t really need two computers. Surface fuses two worlds, and I think when people look at the engineering and design of the device, they will have an epiphany.

    SPIEGEL: Besides the X-Box, Surface is Microsofts first in-house computer hardware. Why did you decide to go this way?

    Mundie: Our marketing for many, many years was always through our partners. You never really bought a product directly from Microsoft, but from HP, Dell, Lenovo and alike. So, in a way, Microsoft always depended on its indirect representation through those companies. Now it became clear to us that we have to speak for ourselves. We have to tell the complete Microsoft story.

    SPIEGEL: How much is industrial design part of this story? Apple for example puts a lot of emphasis on design. Does design become more important for Microsoft?

    Mundie: I think it does. Surface for example is a product that gave us an opportunity to establish a new bar in this respect. Many people had said, „Oh, Microsoft technology is too bloated, it’s too fat, you guys don’t pay attention to these things.“ We think that Surface is a place where we can prove to people that this mythology is wrong. It’s a place where we get to speak to the public with our own voice about what’s possible, at an aspirational level. In part, the reason to do Surface was also to create a benchmark for our partners, saying, „look, there’s nothing intrinsic in our technology that won’t support products that operate at the upper tier; you just have to design them“.

    SPIEGEL: By building your own computer hardware you effectively become a competitor of your own partners. Are you going to go it alone in the future, like Apple does?

    Mundie: Apple has always had the luxury of being a software and a hardware company. I do describe that as a luxury, because you only have to think about yourself. But at least in the past, when you start to fan out and want to provide products for the whole world in every country, it’s very hard to do that on your own. We still think that it’s better to have a symbiotic relationship with our worldwide community of partners. And we are not alone with this model. Googles Android for example has gotten a big share fairly quickly by allowing several companies to participate.

    SPIEGEL: There are other device categories in the making. Google presented its Google Glass-project lately. Is Microsoft interested in glasses with augmented reality?

    Mundie: None of these things are particularly new or unanticipated. At a research level, we look at everything.

    SPIEGEL: Microsoft Research has 850 Ph.D.-level researchers. The company invests hundreds of millions of dollars per year in research alone. Isn‘t there just enough innvoation for the money spent?

    Mundie: And those people just don’t know what they’re talking about. I keep score every year how many things come out of research into the product group, and these transfers are counting in the hundreds. Microsoft Research is the world’s largest computer science research operation. I have seven labs, and each of them compares well to the faculty of a pretty good-size university computer science department. What this research provides to Microsoft is long-term nourishment. We think that, unless you have the ability to play with big ideas and to do fundamental research, you eventually run out of gas.

    SPIEGEL: When Windows 95 was launched, in 1995, computer geeks lined up to buy the first copies. Bill Gates paid three million dollars to the Rolling Stones for rights to use their classic „Start Me Up“ as the softwares’ theme song. Nothing like that happens now. Has Microsoft losts its cool?

    Mundie: It’s hard to keep your cool against young companies. But I do think it’s important to be cool. And the thing that always shows me that Microsoft can be cool is the whole Xbox business. We are worldwide number one in game consoles. This shows that when we package and present ourselves right, there is no stigma associated with being Microsoft.

    SPIEGEL: The stigma seems to be more prevalent in the PC business right now. The package hasn’t been right in the past?

    Mundie: I think we are able to learn. The phones and now the Surface are showing that our ability to sprinkle the fairy dust and have the coolness is growing. However, people have to understand that we are in a dilemma. A huge part of Microsoft’s revenue is to businesses, and if you’re a business, the last thing you want is us to be cool, because we’re providing you with your mission-critical infrastructure. Guys who buy infrastructure don’t buy cool, okay? Because they want you to be reliable like a rock. It is a lot easier to have the cool part emerge when you don’t have the enterprise part. But that’s a very critical part of our business.

    SPIEGEL: Still, some industry experts predict that Microsoft will become the next big technology giant to slip into obscurity if the company can’t reinvent itself.

    Mundie: I’ve been telling people to think about it like being in the Olympics. From the very beginning, the Olympics not only had the individual events, but they had the decathlon. Why? Well, they not only wanted to not know who could win each race in track and field, but they wanted to know who was the best overall athlete. I like to think that Microsoft will come to be recognized as the best athlete in computing.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge

    –> Read edited interview at SPIEGEL Online International

  • Michio Kaku: ‘Eternal Life Does Not Violate the Laws of Physics’

    In his best-selling book “Physics of the Future,” American professor Michio Kaku lays out his vision for the world in 2100. Kaku, the son of Japanese immigrants, spoke to SPIEGEL about a future in which toilets will have health monitoring sensors and contact lenses will be connected to the Internet.

    SPIEGEL: Professor Kaku, in your book you write about how we will be like gods in the future. Are you saying that our grandchildren will be gods? Isn’t that a bit immodest?

    Kaku: Just think for a moment about our forefathers in the year 1900. They lived to be 49 years old on average and traveled with horse-drawn wagons. Long distance communication was yelling out the window. If these people could see us today with mobile phones at our ears, Facebook on our screens and traveling with planes they would consider us wizards.

    SPIEGEL: It’s still a big step to go from wizards to gods.

    Kaku: So what do gods do? Apollo has unlimited power from the sun, Zeus can turn himself into a swan or anything else and Venus has a perfect body. Gods can move objects with their mind, rearrange things, and have perfect bodies. Our grandchildren will be able to do just that.

    SPIEGEL: Let’s do a little time traveling. Close your eyes and imagine waking up on a September morning in the year 2112. What do you see?

    Kaku: More important than what I see, is what will be omnipresent. Intelligence will be everywhere in the future, just like electricity is everywhere today. We now just assume that there’s electricity in the walls, the floor, the ceiling. In the future we will assume that everything is intelligent, so intelligence will be everywhere and nowhere. As children, we will be taught how to manipulate things around us just by talking to them and thinking. Children will believe that everything is alive.

    SPIEGEL: We’ll ask the question in a different way. What will we experience on this morning in 2112?

    Kaku: When we wake up, the first thing we want to know is what’s going on in the world. So we put in our intelligent contact lenses and with a blink we are online. If you want information, movies, virtual reality, it is all in your contact lenses. Then we’ll drive to work.

    SPIEGEL: Driving? How boring!

    Kaku: Aw, you want to fly? Cars may even fly, but we will also be able to manipulate our cars just by thinking. So, if you want to get into your car, you simply think, and you call your car. The car drives itself, and boom, there you are.

    SPIEGEL: So our grandchildren will fly to work. And what will change there?

    Kaku: If you are a college student, you blink and you can see all the answers to the final examination by wearing your contact lenses. Artists will wave their hands in the air and create beautiful works of art. If you’re an architect, you will see what you are creating and just move towers, two apartment buildings around as you construct things.

    SPIEGEL: Why do we have to even bother leaving the house if all of our needs, questions and desires are played out virtually on our grandiose contact lenses?

    Kaku: Well, you will want to go outside because we are humans, and our personality hasn’t changed in 100,000 years. We’re social creatures. We like to size each other up, figure out who’s on first, who’s on second. But technology will be able to help with that. In 2100, for example, when you talk to people, you will see their biography listed right in front of you. If you are looking for a date, you sign up for a dating service. When you go outside and people walk by you, their faces light up if they’re available. If someone speaks to you in Chinese, your contact lens will translate from Chinese to English. We will still resist certain technologies, however, because they go against who we are.

    SPIEGEL: What’s an example of that?

    Kaku: The paperless office. The paperless office was a failure, because we like tangible things. If I give you a choice between tickets to see your favorite famous rock star or a video of a close-up of your favorite rock star, which would you choose?

    SPIEGEL: The concert tickets naturally.

    Kaku: That’s the caveman in us. The caveman in you says, “I want direct contact. I don’t want a picture.” The caveman in our body says once in a while, we have to go outside. We have to meet real people, talk to real people, and do real things.

    SPIEGEL: Speaking of real things, we were fascinated by the toilet of the future described in your book.

    Kaku: Yeah. You will still have to go to the bathroom because our biology hasn’t changed. But your toilet will have more computer power than a university hospital does today.

    SPIEGEL: The toilet as a supercomputer?

    Kaku: Your toilet will have a chip in it called a “DNA chip.” It will analyze enzymes, proteins and genes for cancer. In this way we will be able to fight cancer long before a tumor even has a chance to develop. We will be able to also detect other illnesses early and fight them. But we will still have the common cold. There are at least 300 different rhinoviruses and you need to have a vaccine for each one. No company is going to do that, because it is going to bankrupt a large corporation to make a vaccine for each of them.

    SPIEGEL: What a defeat! Comfort us — did you not just refer to the perfect body of Venus?

    Kaku: The nature of medicine will shift away from basically saving lives to perfection. We will be able to rearrange our own genome.

    SPIEGEL: I assume that you mean to make ourselves prettier, stronger and generally better?

    Kaku: Those ambitions will be there.

    SPIEGEL: As we get a better handle on genetic technologies, won’t there be more of an urge to create designer babies?

    Kaku: We need a debate about these issues. This is going to create societal problems. You have to have an educated public democratically debating how far to push our beautiful children and the human race.

    SPIEGEL: Will we eventually be able to conquer death?

    Kaku: Eternal life does not violate the laws of physics, surprisingly enough. After all, we only die because of one word: “error.” The longer we live, the more errors there are that are made by our bodies when they read our genes. That means cells get sluggish. The body doesn’t function as well as it could, which is why the skin ages. Then organs eventually fail, so that’s why we die.

    SPIEGEL: What can we do about that?

    Kaku: We know the genes that correct these things. So if we use genetic repair mechanisms, we might be able to repair cells so they don’t wear out, so they just keep on going. That is as real possibility. We will also be able to regenerate organs by growing new ones. That can already be done now.

    SPIEGEL: Then we will get rid of death?

    Kaku: In principle, yes.

    SPIEGEL: Then how will we decide who gets to live and who must die? Who will be allowed to have children?

    Kaku: I don’t think children or overpopulation are going to be a problem. When people live longer, they have fewer children. We see that in Japan, the US and in other countries where prosperity, education and urbanization are on the rise.

    –> Read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE International

    ‘It’s Nice to be Superman for an Afternoon’

    SPIEGEL: Okay, back to the toilet. What do I do when the toilet tells me that I have cancer cells?

    Kaku: You talk to the wallpaper, and you say…

    SPIEGEL: Excuse me, but you talk to the wallpaper?

    Kaku: As I mentioned, everything will be intelligent, even the wallpaper. You talk to the wallpaper, and you say, “I want to see my doctor.” Boom! A doctor appears on the wall. It’s a RoboDoc, which looks like a doctor, talks like a doctor, but it’s actually an animated figure. It will tell you what is going on in your body and answers all medical questions with 99 percent accuracy, because it has the medical histories of everyone on the planet available.

    SPIEGEL: Will we also have robot driving instructors and robot cooks?

    Kaku: Yes, of course.

    SPIEGEL: But aren’t robots still rather dumb, even after 50 years of research into artificial intelligence?

    Kaku: That’s true. ASIMO, the best robot around today has the intelligence of a cockroach. However, that will change. In the coming decades, robots will be as smart as mice. Now, mice are very smart. They can scurry around, hide behind things, look for food. I can see that in 10, 20, 30 years, we will start to have mice robots, then rabbit robots, cat robots, dog robots, finally monkey robots maybe by the end of the century. They will do dirty, dull and dangerous jobs for us. That means they have to feel pain too.

    SPIEGEL: Are you talking about machines with the ability to suffer?

    Kaku: We will have to build robots with pain sensors in them, because we don’t want them to destroy themselves.

    SPIEGEL: Then won’t we have to start talking about robot rights?

    Kaku: Once we design robots that can feel pain, that’s a tricky point. At that point, people will say, “Well, they’re just like dogs and cats.”

    SPIEGEL: When will machines become a threat, like HAL from the movie ‘2001?’

    Kaku: At some point we can plant a chip in their electronic brains that shuts them down when they start to develop dangerous plans.

    SPIEGEL: But won’t they be intelligent enough to take the chip out themselves?

    Kaku: Sure, but that won’t happen until after 2100.

    SPIEGEL: How comforting.

    Kaku: Then we always have the option of making ourselves even smarter.

    SPIEGEL: Are you referring to the old science fiction idea that our brains are immeasurably smart?

    Kaku: Exactly, and spending the whole day calculating Einstein’s theory of relativity. I don’t seriously believe that. It goes back to the caveman in us. What do cavemen want? Cavemen want to have the respect of their peers. They want to look good to the opposite sex. They want prestige. If we’re stuck inside a computer calculating Einstein’s theory of relativity, who wants that?

    SPIEGEL: The idea that one day we will all be Supermen or Superwomen sounds really tempting though.

    Kaku: I think what’s going to happen is we will have avatars. They will have all these powers that we want — to be perfect, superhuman and good looking.

    SPIEGEL: Great! Does that mean we can send our avatars to meetings that we don’t want to attend?

    Kaku: You will send your avatars to the Moon or on virtual trips or whatever. But you also have the option of shutting it off and getting back to normal again. The average person will not necessarily want to be Superman, but they may want the option of being Superman for an afternoon. It’s nice to be Superman for an afternoon, but then to say, hey, “let’s go out and have a beer with friends.” Do you see what I’m saying?

    SPIEGEL: Yes, of course. Atavism beats out the avatar. But just how strong are these caveman impulses? Could there one day be a movement against all of this new technology?

    Kaku: Such movements always accompany technological changes. When the telephone first came out, it was very controversial. Throughout history, we only talked to friends, relatives, kids. That’s it, period. Then comes the telephone. There were many voices denouncing it, saying we had to go back to talking to our families, so on and so forth.

    SPIEGEL: You claim in your book that we are the most important generation that has ever lived. Doesn’t every generation think that?

    Kaku: Out of all the generations that have walked the surface of the Earth, we’re the only ones to witness the beginning of the process of becoming a planetary civilization. We decide whether humanity survives.

    SPIEGEL: What do you mean by “planetary civilization?”

    Kaku: We physicists rank civilizations by energy. A Type 1 planetary civilization uses all the energy that is available on the planet. In a hundred years, we’ll be Type 1. We’re on our way there. We will control the weather. We will control earthquakes and volcanoes eventually. Anything planetary, we will control. Type 2 is stellar. We will control stars, like Star Trek. Then Type 3 is the entire galaxy, where we’ll control the Milky Way galaxy.

    SPIEGEL: Hold on a second. We aren’t even close to that now!

    Kaku: No, we are in a transition. We still get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. Carl Sagan did a more precise calculation. He figured out that we’re actually Type 0.7. So we’re on the threshold of being Type 1. We will have two planetary languages, English and Mandarin. Look at the Olympics. That’s planetary sports. Look at soccer, another planetary sport. The European Union is the beginning of a planetary economy, if it ever gets off the ground correctly.

    SPIEGEL: We are having a few tiny problems with that last one.

    Kaku: Well, nevertheless, when I look at the larger sweep of things, I see that we are already coming together. We’re entering the birth of a planetary fashion and we are already seeing the birth of planetary culture. Democratization of the world marches on.

    SPIEGEL: What is one thing from the world you imagine that you would like to have today?

    Kaku: Well, I wouldn’t mind having a few more decades to live and, for example, to see the first starship. Also, it’s a shame that I cannot live in the 11th dimension.

    SPIEGEL: What do you mean by that?

    Kaku: The energy of wormholes, black holes and of the Big Bang. You would have to be a Type 3 civilization before you can begin to manipulate that energy. That’s the province of my field of research, string theory.

    SPIEGEL: I think that’s where we can no longer keep up. Professor Kaku, we thank you for this interview.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Rafaela von Bredow

    –> Read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE International

  • A Future of Self-Surveillance? Tech Pioneers Track Bodily Functions Day and Night

    Using smartphone apps and sensors, high tech pioneers are monitoring their own bodily functions such as heart rates, sleep patterns and blood. The ‘self trackers’ dream of a digitalized medicine that will enable people to lead healthier lives by getting around-the-clock updates on what goes on inside their bodies

    By Philip Bethge

    Larry Smarr’s large intestine appears to float in the middle of the room, nestled like a stuffed sausage between his other virtual organs.

    Smarr, a computer science professor, adjusts the dark-tinted 3D glasses perched on his nose and picks up an electronic pointer. “And this is where the wall of my colon is inflamed,” he says, pointing out a spot where the intestinal walls are indeed noticeably swollen.

    A supercomputer combined MRI images of the 63-year-old professor to create the three-dimensional illusion now projected on the wall. It gives the impression that the viewer could go for a stroll inside the researcher’s abdomen. (more…)

  • Technology Pioneer David Gelernter: ‘Love Is Beyond Watson’

    What does Watson’s Jeopardy victory tell us? Not much, says David Gelernter, the computer science pioneer and Yale professor. SPIEGEL spoke with Gelernter about the prospects of achieveing artifically-created consciousness and the belief that eternal life can be secured on a hard drive.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, the American journalist Ambrose Bierce described the word we are looking for as “a temporary insanity curable by marriage.” Do you know what we mean?

    Gelernter: I don’t.

    SPIEGEL: It’s love. It’s a question from the TV show Jeopardy, and the IBM supercomputer Watson had no problem finding the solution. So does that mean Watson knows what love is?

    Gelernter: He doesn’t have the vaguest idea. The field of artificial intelligence has not even started to address how emotions are represented cognitively, what makes a belief and so forth. The problem is, I don’t think only with my mind. I think with my body and my mind together. There’s no such thing as love without bodily input, output, reaction and response. So love is beyond Watson.

    SPIEGEL: Why, then, is Watson still doing well at Jeopardy?

    Gelernter: Because the body is not involved in playing Jeopardy. You don’t have to mean or to believe a single thing you say. The game is superficial enough to be winnable by an entity with no emotions, no sensations, and no self.

    SPIEGEL: Still, Watson’s opponents, Jeopardy all-time champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, said in interviews that they had the feeling they were playing against a human. How come we can even consider Watson being on a par with us?

    Gelernter: I even consider my macaw Ike to be on a par with me (laughs and points to his macaw). But seriously, I’d rather chat with Watson than with some of the people in my department at Yale. Any baby with a teddy bear immediately anthropomorphizes the teddy bear. We want to see images of ourselves, mirrors of ourselves. Anthropomorphizing is a powerful human urge. So I have no problems calling Watson a “he.” That’s a normal human response.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Watson defeated Jennings and Rutter in the competition recently with staggering ease. If not human-like, can Watson at least tell us something about the human mind?

    Gelernter: Watson was not built to study the human mind. And the IBM people don’t claim that they’ve solved any cognitive problems. Watson was built to win Jeopardy. That’s it. For that purpose, it is drawing heavy on the parallel programming strategy. This strategy explicitly says: forget about the brain. The question is, can we burn raw computing power in such a way that we can create something that’s able to compete with a human? The result is an extraordinary piece of technology that — unlike IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue — has major implications for applied artificial intelligence.

    Computers Don’t Know What Pain Is

    SPIEGEL: But could you bring yourself to call a machine like that “intelligent”?

    Gelernter: The question is how superficial you are willing to be with your definition of “intelligence.” When we think of it seriously, intelligence implies a self who is intelligent, an entity that can sense its thoughts, is aware of the fact that it’s thinking and that it is manifesting intelligence. None of that is part of Watson by design.

    SPIEGEL: But let’s assume that we start feeding Watson with poetry instead of encyclopedias. In a few years time it might even be able to talk about emotions. Wouldn’t that be a step on the way to at least showing human-like behavior?

    Gelernter: Yes. However, the gulf between human-like behavior and human behavior is gigantic. Feeding poetry into Watson as opposed to encyclopedias is not going to do any good. Feed him Keats, and he will read “My heart aches, and a drowsing numbness pains my senses.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? When a poet writes “my heart aches” it’s an image, but it originates in an actual physical feeling. You feel something in the center of your chest. Or take “a drowsing numbness pains my senses”: Watson can’t know what drowsy means because he’s never fallen asleep. He doesn’t know what pain is. He has no purchase on poetry at all. Still, he could win at Jeopardy if the category were English Romantic poets. He would probably even do much better than most human contestants at not only saying Keats wrote this but explaining the references. There’s a lot of data involved in any kind of scholarship or assertion, which a machine can do very well. But it’s a fake.

    SPIEGEL: What is so special about the human brain that the machine can’t replicate it?

    Gelernter: The brain is radically different from the machine. Physics and chemistry are fundamental to its activity. The brain moves signals from one neuron to another by using a number of different neurotransmitters. It is made out of cells with certain properties, built out of certain proteins. It is a very elaborate piece of biology. The computer on the other hand is a purely electronic machine made out of semiconductors and other odds and ends. I can’t replicate the brain on a chip just in the same way I can’t replicate orange juice on a chip. Orange juice is just not the same thing as a chip.

    SPIEGEL: Are you serious about your statement that a machine won’t truly be able to think until it can daydream and hallucinate?

    Gelernter: Absolutely. We go through an oscillation between different mental states several times during the day, and you can’t understand the mind without understanding this spectrum. We have wide-awakeness, high energy, high level of concentration, which is associated with analytical capacities. And at the other end of the spectrum, we are exhausted, our thoughts are drifting. In that state, our thoughts are arranged in a different way. We start to freely associate. Take Rilke: All of a sudden it occurred to him that the flight of a swallow in the twilight sky is like a crack in a teapot. It’s a very strange image but a very striking image. Certainly, nobody else ever said it before. These sorts of new analogies and new images give rise to creativity, but also to scientific insights. Emotion has a lot to do with it. Why do you combine a bird flying with a piece of ceramic with a crack? Because, at least in Rilke’s mind, they are tagged with a similar emotion.

    SPIEGEL: But we are certainly able to think without getting so poetic.

    Gelernter: True. At the upper end of the spectrum, when my thoughts are disciplined by the logical rules of induction, analogies play no part. I have hypotheses, and I work my way through to conclusions. That kind of intelligence doesn’t need emotions, and it doesn’t need a body. But it is also of almost no importance to human beings. We think purely logically, analytically, roughly zero percent of our time. However, when I am thinking creatively, when I am inventing new analogies, I can’t do that without my emotional faculty. The body is intensely involved; it created the fuel that drives that process by engendering emotions.

    SPIEGEL: But even Watson might soon be able to come up with interesting analogies. Just give him the right books to read.

    Gelernter: It’s possible to build a machine that is capable of what seems like creativity — even a machine that can hallucinate. But it wouldn’t be like us at all. It would always be a fake, a facade. So, it is perfectly plausible that “Watson 2050” will win some poetry contests. It might write a magnificent sonnet that I find beautiful and moving and that becomes famous all over the world. But does that mean that Watson has a mind, a sense of self? No, of course not. There is nobody at home.

    SPIEGEL: Can you be sure?

    Gelernter: There is nothing inside.

    SPIEGEL: How can you know, then, that somebody is at home within another human being?

    Gelernter: I know what I am. I am a human being. If you are a human being too, my belief is you are intelligent. And not because you passed a test, not because you showed me you can do calculus or translate Latin. You could be fast asleep, somebody could ask, “Is he intelligent?” And I will say, “Yes, of course. He’s a human being.” The only intelligence everyone has ever experienced firsthand is his own. There is no objective test for intelligence in others. The observable behavior tells you nothing about what is within. The only way we can confidently ascribe intelligence is by seeing a creature like us.

    “Scientists Will Never Reproduce a Human Mind”

    SPIEGEL: There is a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a group of scientists are trying to recreate the brain’s biology in each and every detail, one neuron at a time, in a supercomputer. They hope to replicate a complete human brain within a decade. Wouldn’t that be “a creature like us”?

    Gelernter: They could produce a very accurate brain simulator. They may be able to predict the behavior of the brain down to the transmission of signals. But they’re not going to produce a mind any more than a hurricane simulator produces a hurricane.

    SPIEGEL: Other scientists are far more optimistic. Regardless of all the obstacles, they say, the exponentially growing number of transistors on a chip will provide us with virtually infinite possibilities. If we connect huge numbers of computer chips in the right way and give them the right tasks to perform, then at some point consciousness will emerge.

    Gelernter: It is impossible to create mental states by writing software — no matter how sophisticated it gets. If a simple computer can’t produce orange juice, a much more complicated computer won’t do any better. Computer chips are just the wrong substrate, the wrong stuff for consciousness. Now, can some kind of a miracle happen if you put a lot of them together? Maybe. But I have no reason to believe that such a miracle will happen.

    SPIEGEL: Given that we can manage a really good fake, a robot that pretends to be conscious in a convincing way — would we even notice if it wasn’t the real thing?

    Gelernter: It already makes no difference to us. Just take the robots in Iraq and Afghanistan where they search for mines and so forth. The men on the front lines become emotionally attached to their robots, they’re sad when they are destroyed. And 50 years from now, robots will be much better. There are a lot of lonely people in the world. So now they have a robot, and it is around all the time, chats with them. Sure they will be attached to it. The robot will know all about them. The robot will be able to say things like, “How are you feeling this morning? I realize your back was hurting yesterday.” Will people have human-type feelings towards the robots? Absolutely. And then the question becomes: Does it matter that, in this sense, they are being defrauded? The answer is, given the scarcity of companionship in the world, it probably doesn’t matter in practical terms. However, it certainly matters philosophically. If you care about what it is to be a human being, the robot is not going to tell you.

    SPIEGEL: Things might change if you give him a near-perfect body, equipped with sensors that help him feel things and explore his environment like humans do.

    Gelernter: In that case the machine would be capable of simulating humanness much more effectively. But a fake body attached to a computer is still not going to generate real sensations. If you knocked your foot on something, your brain registers what we call pain. If you think of something good that is going to happen tomorrow, the body responds by feeling good, then the mind feels better and so forth. This feedback loop is very important to human behavior. A fake body, however, is still just binary switches with voltage levels going up and down.

    SPIEGEL: The American computer scientist Ray Kurzweil argues that the Internet itself might be on the brink of becoming super-intelligent, just because it will have computing power beyond imagination. And his beliefs are gaining in popularity. Why are these ideas so attractive?

    Gelernter: Because creating the mind is the philosopher’s stone of the Digital Age. In the Middle Ages, the alchemists tried to produce gold. Now they’ve moved over to the mind. Don’t get me wrong: They are going to produce a lot of interesting science along the way. But they are not going to get a mind.

    If You’re Dead, You’re Dead

    SPIEGEL: The so-called Singularity Movement predicts the advance of highly intelligent machines that will one day perhaps even become part of our bodies.

    Gelernter: We are being offered more ways than ever to destroy humanity by negating the significance of humanness. In the science fiction community there are those who say, “I will live forever insofar as I will be able to take my entire mind state and upload it to some server, and then I can die, but it doesn’t matter if my mind stays there.” Now, any two-year-old child can see the flaw in this argument: When you die, you are dead, and it doesn’t matter if there is one copy or a billion copies of what your mind was before you died. It doesn’t matter to you. You’re still dead. The great philosophical analogy of the second half of the 20th century was that mind is to brain the way software is to computer. But this is ridiculous. There is no analogy between mind and software.

    SPIEGEL: Why not?

    Gelernter: If you have some software, you can make as many copies as you like. You can put it on a million different computers, and it is always exactly the same software. Minds, however, run on exactly one platform. You can’t swap the mind out to some storage medium and then run it again after keeping it offline.

    SPIEGEL: Hypothetically, what would happen if you managed to transfer one person’s brain into another person’s body?

    Gelernter: There would be no mind anymore. As you took the brain from somebody and put it into somebody else’s head, the mind that you used to have is gone because that mind was part of a body and responsive to that body. From a medical standpoint, the question is if the brain is a flexible enough organism to re-tune itself to a different kind of input from a different body. But the original mind would definitely be lost.

    SPIEGEL: Assuming those popular visions of Artificial Intelligence won’t come true in the foreseeable future, where do you see AI research going in the next decade?

    Gelernter: My hope is that the philosophy of mind and cognitive science will develop a very sophisticated theory of how the mind works. The philosophy of mind has been dazzled by computing, which led down the wrong path. We have to get rid of this ridiculous obsession with computing, which has done tremendous damage. People worrying about singularity should go back and read Nietzsche. They should try and understand Kafka seriously. They should read a poet like William Wordsworth. Now, in an entirely separate effort, Artificial Intelligence will produce more and more powerful machines. We’ll rely on them heavily. They will fix problems and answer questions for us all the time. No one will claim that they have minds, least of all the people who built the programs.

    SPIEGEL: One of those powerful assistants might well be a descendent of Watson. Let’s assume it has been shrunken to the size of a pea, and it could be plugged into our brains. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have all that knowledge on hand within your own body?

    Gelernter: I can have all of Watson’s knowledge available already — by just opening my laptop. Does it matter to me if I can get the answer not in 10 seconds but in 10 microseconds? It really depends on how I define my integrity as a human being. Could I get more direct access to a million completely meaningless disconnected facts if I implanted a Watson chip and then go onto Jeopardy? I would win Jeopardy. However, it would give me no happiness, no satisfaction, no feeling of triumph, no feeling of accomplishment.

    SPIEGEL: You wouldn’t feel tempted to get yourself a Watson?

    Gelernter: Sure I would. This is a brilliant, exciting piece of technology. I don’t want to take anything away from it. It puts AI on a track that is going to produce fascinating technology. It uses exactly what we are rich in, namely pure primitive computer power, to produce sophisticated answers to complex questions. We need that ability, and Watson can do it.

    SPIEGEL: Would you trade your macaw for Watson, if you had to choose?

    Gelernter: No way would I trade my macaw in for any piece of software. Look at him. He’s got a face. He’s got a big smile on his beak. He’s a creature who does have emotions, who has interests, and who is a member of the family. You’d have to offer me a lot more than Watson for my macaw.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, thank you very much for talking to us.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Manfred Dworschak

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • ‘People are basically good’: Twitter-Founder Biz Stone on the networks revolutionary power

    Isaac “Biz” Stone, 36, reportedly set up Twitter with his buddy Jack Dorsey in only two weeks in 2006. Meanwhile, the Network has over 175 million users worldwide.

    Q: Mr. Stone, the movie „The Social Network“ depicts how Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg bullied his way to be the youngest billionaire of all times. Would it be possible to tell a similar story about Twitter?

    Stone: I don’t think we’re quite interesting enough to be a movie. We’re not like the dorm room startup and there is not enough intrigue.

    Q: However, you burned three CEO already, after only three years in business. What went wrong?

    Stone: This has a lot to do with what Twitter needed at different times. In 2009 we had about three million users. Now we have about 175 million. For a long time we were working on reliability and we achieved that. But always fighting fires kept us from developing a strong vision what Twitter could be in the future. That’s what we are trying to do right now with a new CEO. And the recent relaunch of Twitter shows it.

    Q: What is Twitter today and how would you explain it to new potential users?

    Stone: Twitter today is a real-time information network that spans everything from your friends’ updates to global news and events. There are 90 million tweets being created every day, and all of these tweets are being archived at subsecond speed by our search engine, which means for any person in the world there’s pretty much going to be something relevant to them in the Twitter network. So I always advise people to search Twitter about something that interests you, whether it’s sports, the name of your company, your city, what’s going on in your neighborhood, and get into it that way.

    Q: But people are overwhelmed anyway with information from the net.

    Stone: I agree, we are living now in an age of infinite information. And we can’t look at all of it. So relevance and timeliness have to be things that we have to pay a lot of attention to. We want people to be able to get the information when and where they need it and without having to sift through it all, so that they can move on with their lives.

    Q: There are millions of tweets like „I am drinking coffee right now“ – nothing anybody needs to know. Is there really a way, to find relevant information in 90 million short messages?

    Stone: Yeah, I think there is. Firstly, by following specific subjects or people on Twitter, you choose yourself which information is relevant to you. But that means that you’re missing out on a lot that potentially could interest you. Therefore, when you search for something in Twitter, we also show you the tweets that relate to your search and that were last created, just seconds ago. As an example, think of the situation a few years ago when that plane landed in the Hudson River. On Twitter, you were able to find that one first picture of that plane on the Hudson just half an hour after the crash.

    Q: You call Twitter even a „triumph of humanity“. Isn‘t that a little bit over the top?

    Stone: If Twitter is going to be a triumph at all, I believe that it will not be a triumph of technology but indeed of humanity. It really depends on what people are going to do with this simple tool; if they help each other during time of crisis, if they raise spontaneous amounts of money for people after a crisis or if they self-organize during a political upheaval. Twitter is designed to work on every phone across the planet because tweets fit in the international character limit for SMS. And there are more than five billion people using mobile phones in the world. This is so empowering. For example, if something happens in China, in Iran, in Haiti or anywhere else halfway around the world, you are able to find out about it instantly on this network because the relevant tweets are rising up and are becoming visible. That makes us realize that we are not just citizens of one country but of the world and that we are all in this together.

    Q: But does that really change anything? Looking at Iran for example: Despite Twitter the situation hasn’t really changed, has it?

    Stone: It depends on what you describe as change. Twitter isn’t in the business of changing a situation in another country. It’s in the business of allowing people to connect and share information about what’s going on. Think about China: Twitter is blocked in China. But people use Twitter in China because they’re figuring out ways around that block.

    Q: Critics believe that real political movements need a strong network and supervision. A flat hierarchy of just well-linked activists would even most likely disturb a real movement. Can Twitter push forward real change?

    Stone: Nobody here at Twitter with their head screwed on right would say that writing a tweet is equivalent to starting a revolution; neither is forwarding an email or updating your status or any of these things. But to say that Twitter would not play a complimentary role in any meaningful event in the world today is an absurd statement. A communication network that allows for information to spread very quickly, very virally, very effectively, can be used in any kind of situation.

    Q: Does that mean that Twitter is in effect a journalistic format?

    Stone: I don‘t think so. But the idea of the teaming up between Twitter and journalism is very powerful. I think Twitter has a knack for breaking news very quickly. So if there’s an earthquake, you’ll find out about it on Twitter before you’ll find out about it at the news desk. But what you won’t have then is what journalism provides, which is the fuller context of the story. What does it mean in relation to the previous three earthquakes and what geo-economic impact is it having on the region?

    Q: The editing and distribution of information was always a domain of professional journalists, and for good reasons. Today, if there is for example a political upheaval, people go to Twitter first. Isn‘t there a big risk of manipulation. How can people distinguish between trustworthy sources and others?

    Stone: Like any tool, Twitter can be used for good and for evil. However, what we’ve noticed over a decade of developing these kinds of systems is, that disinformation has a very short shelf life on these open networks. These networks tend to be self-policing. When you have some people trying to spread disinformation, you have more people debunking that and coming at it with the truth.

    Q: North Korea, for example, is sending out Tweets on a regular basis. Have you ever considered blocking Twitter accounts like that?

    Stone: Removing tweets from the system is something we don’t take lightly. We take free speech and openness very seriously, and there’s only a few scenarios in which we would remove content, like if it is breaking the law. But we can definitely highlight the more relevant information. For us, it is tremendeously important to be relevant and meaningful. We need a network that is important to peoples lives. Otherwise, we won‘t be able to make any revenue.

    Q: Twitter hasn‘t been able to generate a lot of profit so far. How exactly are you going to make money in the future?

    Stone: We are making money already. People don‘t realize this, because we are doing such a good job at our original plan. We optimized for value before profit in the first couple of years. And now we are seeing companies like the airline Jetblue or the coffee chain Starbuck’s using Twitter. And even more encouraging, people are willing to follow these accounts by the millions.

    Q: And the companies pay you money for that service?

    Stone: They pay money if we promote their tweets by putting them for example on top of our so called trend list, which can be found on the Twitter homepage. Anything that’s promoted is very clearly marked. So users can decide themselves if they want to read and follow promoted information. This is working exceptionally well for new products people are already talking about or for things like movies …

    Q: … some believe that because of Twitter they may predict if a movie becomes a blockuster or not…

    Stone: .. exactly. And the advertisers are loving it. Our ads are not banners that we are sticking in front of you that have nothing to do with anything. Our ads are tweets and are therefore part of the natural Twitter experience. In a lot of cases, you’re not even noticing that they are ads.

    Q: Is Germany a big market for you?

    Stone: It is. Germany is one of the first places that we translated the web interface into, and this year we have seen 80 percent growth in Germany. Japan was the first place that we saw such an explosion, and now Germany, France and Italy.

    Q: The Germans do really mind their privacy …

    Stone: … well, yes, and the good thing about Twitter is that we’re very, very clear about our policies in this respect. We tell people that Twitter is a very public and open service. Here in the US, tweets are going to go on CNN, they’re going to go in the Library of Congress of the United States, which is archiving public tweets. Once you send out a tweet, it is out there. We’ve tried to make this abundantly clear.

    Q: Do you still read a newspaper?

    Stone: Well, actually I read Google news, and so wherever Google news sends me is where I end up. So I guess I’m putting my faith in Googles algorithms to determine what I should and what I shouldn’t read. I don’t know if that’s the best way to do it or not.

    Q: And you really think that people will do good just because they can share information?

    Stone: I believe that people are basically good, and if you give them a very simple tool that allows them to express that basic goodness, they will. We’ve seen it over and over again. The more people are connected on something like Twitter, the more empathy they begin to feel for people who are halfway around the world. They are suddenly walking in the other people’s shoes in a way that they might not have done in the past. I think this really brings people together.

  • Sci-Fi Author Daniel Suarez: ‘We Have To Regain Control Over Our Own Data’

    Programmer Daniel Suarez has written books about a future where human lives are controlled by software. Suarez’ sci-fi scenario involves a malicious, murdering ‘bot’ network. It’s fiction — but Suarez warns that the groundwork for such a future is being laid by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and mobile phone firms.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Suarez, in the novels “Daemon” and the sequel “Freedom” you have invented a world in which small software applications that run automated tasks — generally called “bots” — control us and determine our destiny. Science fiction writers have often been prescient: Could this be a warning that applies to our current reality?

    Daniel Suarez: Well, the sequel is certainly fiction — but my fiction is only just over the horizon. I present a world that’s different but it’s familiar enough that it freaks people out a little. And it should. Because even today, we are surrounded by an army of bots that influence our lives profoundly.

    SPIEGEL: Some examples?

    Suarez: Sure, let’s take a look at what recently happened at Wall Street.

    SPIEGEL: On May 6, the Dow Jones suddenly dropped by nearly 1,000 points.

    Suarez: And then (bounced) back a couple of minutes later. And those were bots, trading with each other, beyond human control. They evaporated a trillion dollars of wealth in 20 minutes. Or look at medical decisions: Recently there was the case of several women who were kicked off their health insurance just because they were diagnosed with breast cancer. And it wasn’t a person that made this decision. It was a bot. They can do really atrocious things. And nobody questions it. Bots also work out your credit rating, which will determine whether you get a loan, an apartment or even a job interview. And that data never goes away.

    (—> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

    SPIEGEL: Where does all this data come from?

    Suarez: Data is gathered all the time. Just take your mobile phone. Geo-location data collected by your (mobile phone service) provider is not just about your movements. It’s about who you are with and what you will do next. There was a recent study at the Northeastern University in Boston, examining 50,000 cell phones and their owners. After some time, the researchers found they could predict the movements of any individual with 93 percent accuracy. And you can start to correlate that data with other data — for example, with credit card purchases or surveillance camera footage.

    SPIEGEL: Is the data being used already?

    Suarez: I’d be shocked if it wasn’t. Firstly, it would be part of the war on terror. But then it is also about selling things. Bots screen a vast ocean of data (for patterns). And they are very effective. Whether it’s about helping an intelligent agency find members of the opposition or selling people ice cream at the exact moment they’re most susceptible to buying an ice cream. If you can come up with a sophisticated bot algorithm, then you’re going to make a lot of money.

    SPIEGEL: In your books the story line involves a software tycoon and game designer Matthew Sobol, who accidentally creates a highly sophisticated network of bots that go into action when Sobol dies of cancer. The network, eventually named Daemon, then starts to dismantle civilization as we know it and even convinces followers to murder. How does all this happen?

    Suarez: The incentive is money. Basically all money exists as a series of ones and zeroes in databases. So, if you’ve got bots that are inside those systems, they can create money and then hand it to anybody. The bots also know who you’ve talked to, what your job is, what your hobbies are and so on. By the way, this is exactly what social media already does these days. There are 400 million people on Facebook. And Facebook is constantly being (researched) by bots. Those bots aren’t even intelligent. I don’t think it’s going to take a greater-than-human intelligence to trap us.

    SPIEGEL: In your books, you talk about a Darwinian struggle for survival between bots and humans. That sounds a little far fetched. Is the survival of humankind really at stake?

    Suarez: No, but our quality of life could be. A life where bots tell us what to do every second — get up, go to work, do this, have kids with this person — is completely reasonable. Bots determine our economic opportunities; We have already accepted that. So, really, how much of a journey is it from that point to having bots determine what other opportunities you get in life? All the decision making would be done by bots and we wouldn’t even notice.

    SPIEGEL: But surely there are still people behind all of this, programming the bots and coming up with a purpose for them?

    Suarez: Sure, and I’m not saying it’s a vast conspiracy. You don’t find evil people sitting in the corner going “ha, ha, ha.” (The programmers) are all good citizens. But the whole thing can easily get out of hand. There are networks of bots out there with 10 million machines. Who’s controlling them? You tell me where the process that’s attacking your data is, physically. You can’t just shut it down.

    SPIEGEL: Couldn’t one just pull the power plug out?

    Suarez: How would you unplug the Internet? There is no way. Data centers have generators these days. They don’t rely on the electrical grid. And you wouldn’t know where to start anyway. Even if you shut down 20 percent of the (Internet), it would still exist. My point is that we are creating something very powerful. And we don’t understand the implications. Bots are like parasites, they evolve all the time. Eventually, we loose control.

    SPIEGEL: So what can we do about that?

    Suarez: We have to regain control over our own data. I think that transparency is the key. If you know where you are at, you can act accordingly. And if somebody else wants to use your data, you should be able to decide yourself if you want to hand it over.

    SPIEGEL: So as a software specialist, how do you take care of your data?

    Suarez: I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use Twitter. I don’t give anyone a lot to grab onto. Sometimes, I even take out the battery of my mobile phone so that I can’t be localized. A very small group of powerful people is deciding what’s going to happen with your data, and they’re using bots to help implement what they want to do. That has nothing to do with democracy. It’s all about efficiency. And that’s the really scary thing about it. I’d prefer we don’t take that trip. Otherwise, this could really end up being a hellish world.

    (—> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

    This article was published first in German in the DER SPIEGEL-supplement Kultur SPIEGEL

  • The Best Translation Program Yet: Google Delivers Foreign Tongues at the Press of a Button

    A German scientist has developed one of the first translation programs suitable for everyday use. Sheer computing power gives the Google software surprisingly good results — perhaps the best yet seen created by a machine.

    It’s a good sign when the creator of a piece of software ends up using it. On a recent trip to Japan, Franz Och, who doesn’t speak Japanese, was able to decipher restaurant menus and even read local news — using his mobile phone, which provided him with the translations within seconds.

    Och spent the last six years developing Google Translate, a translation program, at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, “and so far I’ve never really used it myself,” Och admits. But then the 38-year-old research scientist has a change of heart and adds, “I am very happy with what we have achieved.”

    Och, a German citizen, is the behind-the-scenes star of a segment of the software industry that has taken on a challenge no less daunting than tearing down global language barriers. In his job at Google, …. More