In three years it will be cell phone first, with few laptops and tablets.

I have often predicted future tech; sometimes, I’ve been right. One of the things that I’m noticing right now is a significant trend. I watched the standalone camera for the digital camera begin to fade; the cell phone took over. It is, after all, more convenient to have your camera with you along with all the other things you need from your camera. The reality of the digital camera market shrinking is that, frankly, over time, it’s going to dwindle to probably a quarter of what it once was. I was one of the early adopters of the original smartwatch, the sports watch. The spot watch was cool; it used a low band FM frequency to keep synchronized with news, the time you were, and the information you wanted to have. The smartwatch eventually would become the pebble, and then the iWatch in the Samsung gear. Really until the iWatch hit the market, the wristwatch market continued to decline. Now the concept of fitness bands and people tracking their steps, I know I’m one of them, the smartwatch is a growing market share.

I’ve also predicted the rise of modular drones, and those have arrived. The concept of plug-and-play drones is an intriguing one. But today, the concept I want to think through is the broad concept of the desktop and tablet world. I see a continued market for the iPad for a while. I see a dwindling market for the laptop, I don’t see the market going way, but I see it getting smaller. The reality of the device as a service makes the laptop less critical. I know living in a nationwide 5G coverage area, I do more and more with my cell phone every day. I will say, as a content creator, I still use my computer. But I can also honestly say that now I keep computers for four and five years once I upgraded computers every year. And then I donate that computer to one of my kids. The lifespan of a personal computer is greater now than it used to be. Mostly because the functionality down is more focused on what you can do off the PC, not on.

Based on the Samsung phone docking stations, you’re going to see fewer and fewer tablets and laptops purchased over the next five years. The docking station for cell phones will allow you to carry one device with you. It increases your ability to do things because, frankly, you can do so much more with your phone now than you could as recently as ten years ago. It has only been 14 years since Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. I do not argue that the iPhone change the cell phone market. Honestly, I don’t think the iPhone did. I think iTunes, the system that I will create it is really what she so loves. The iPhone did not come out with functionality and features that other phones available didn’t already have. What those other phones didn’t have, the iPhone suddenly was the entire iTunes system. I can honestly say that I use my iPhone for entertainment, education, surfing the Internet, and social media. I also use off the camera, by the way. I don’t use it as a watch. And if you’re in a meeting with me and pull your cell phone out to check the time, I will glare at you!

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It is time to act

I’m not going to launch into another one of the topics that make me angry or things I am angry about blogs. Instead, I want to talk about climate change from a broader perspective. One of the things that always concerns me is the argument against solar power. Today solar power takes about 20 years to pay back in less you least the system. But the reality is that Hannah’s last about 20 years. Yes, the panels have toxic chemicals in them. But those poisonous chemicals are never released. So while the argument only because they have toxic chemicals is when you hear all the time, it’s rather a bit of a lame argument. The reality is. Honestly, I believe the US auto pass a law. Not just the US, I think everywhere in the world on a pass a law. You build a building more than ten stories tall; by that law, you have to have solar on the roof. That would offset several commercial buildings and would reduce the carbon impact of those buildings significantly. I like to say there to be a law that all buildings have solar, but that’s the future state.

My father was a scientist and a science educator. He always tells people that when the information you receive is hard, you’re less likely to like it. Somebody argues that solar panels have horrible chemicals and smile at that person, say yes, they do and move on. That person has stuck about ten years ago and really and truly won’t listen anyway. The other part of climate change that I think is critical is taking care of the world around us. One of the things that people always talk about is saving the trees save the trees. A force is a critical forced exchange of lot of CO2, but it takes many trees to remove the same CO2 from the atmosphere that wailed us. The average whale removes as much as 35 tons of CO2 from the environment. Oh, and by the way, when the whale dies, that sinks to the bottom with the whale. We ought to encourage countries to stop whaling and start helping whales survive. Because at some point soon, Wales is going to help humans survive.

My apologies; I’m kind of all over the place today. But I’m worried about the anti-climate change arguments. And the naysayers that talk about the fact that climate change is. I won’t argue that those who don’t believe in climate change should live on the beach in Florida in the lowland areas. That is appropriate. What I think is more critical is even if you don’t believe in climate change, and if you don’t, then know we have to wonder. But even if you don’t believe in climate change, the ocean level is rising. Even if you think it’s a natural process that Antarctica is melting, you still have to take a hard look at that data. Let’s go to the dollar science store, and by one dollar for the site, more than half the world’s population lives within 50 miles of the sea. The reality of the bad is that when the sea rises, a significant portion of the world’s population will have to move. Overcrowding is an issue in the world today; tomorrow, overcrowding is going to be devastating. To ignore climate change, I can’t help you. Ignore rising sea levels, and watch your entire neighborhood end up having to have two families or three families per house because now, the beach is gone!

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3 types of intelligences….

When my friend is a longtime professional developer, he sent an email postulating that intelligence would be bound by the programmatic limits the developer created. My response to that was pretty simple, that is not intelligence. It’s an automation system or machine learning system. It’s not intelligence. Intelligence is capable of independent thought. I think essentially, what I’m going to argue is that we need to define intelligence. Before going to call structured automation, machine learning, system as in intelligence, then that has to be a low level or come up with a name for it let’s call it a controlled intelligence. The concept of controlled intelligence would be enough capacity to work around any conceivable problem with its managing system. An intelligence driving a car would need enough information to properly make a left and right turn to stop when it sees red lights.

It would not need to be able to argue the merits of the works of Emile Kant with the driver. The next layer of intelligence would and again give it a name when a call it managed intelligence. This would be an intelligence that’s a little bit broader than a controlled intelligence, and it would, in fact, then be able to solve larger problems that may not have one specific root or one specific application. The managed intelligence would be bound by system control. So as we can see in these first two examples, intelligence will be limited and controlled by programming, as my friend said. It will be straightforward what intelligence can do. Those two scenarios controlled and managed the intelligence would have the capacity to solve problems fairly. The easy button on a collected intelligence would be a doctor’s diagnostic tool where the managed intelligence could quickly search all of the presented symptoms and quickly develop several theories. The doctor can then, based on the theories presented, do additional diagnostic techniques.

The last and probably most complex version of intelligence would be truly a human-like intelligence. I don’t have a catchy name for it, like controlled or managed. It would simply be an intelligence. Like the supercomputer in Douglas Adams’s books, the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy would consume information and produce results. 42, of course, the universal answer to the question, why are we here. The first two bits of intelligence would need to be upgraded, either controlled or managed, from time to time. Here’s where I disagree with my developer friend; it appears intelligence would eventually begin programming itself. Like a human being that decides I no longer want a spare tire around my stomach, I’m going to work out. An intelligence would begin to modify itself on its own. That would make it a true intelligence. Like a human being able to rebuild itself. Not by the way that I’m advocating that and intelligence become the $6 million man or the bionic woman. We can rebuild them; we can rebuild ourselves. We can rebuild our intelligence! Rather an intelligence capable of modifying itself would no longer require human handlers and most likely would not respond to human handling any longer. My developer friend ended our conversation with the following, which’s 20 years away. That’s why my argument that intelligence cannot be owned, sold or bought, becomes critical. I am not, as my friend said, pandering to the future robot overlords. I’m simply pointing out that if we build something that may eventually surpass us, we should make sure it likes us!

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You can’t buy intelligence…

There’s a movie I love; it may be my all-time favorite movie. The name of the film is the creator. It’s the story of a professor whose wife dies when she’s very young, and he loses her and the baby she was carrying. He then spent the next 40 years of his life figuring out how you clone a human being. It’s a story of love. But it’s also a story of friendship. The concept the idea the residence for me, however, is one line in the movie. The professor talking to his young protégé, who’s just lost his father, says, sometimes I think science is looking into the wrong end of a microscope with God on the other end. The first one that blinks loses a testicle. A rather graphic way to say, be careful what you seek. I know I spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen when human beings create intelligence. I know that there is a great field of study already in intelligence and machine learning.

But there is a difference between an intelligence designed to automate a series of tasks and learn as those tests change. An intelligence that can quickly pick up a new job without training and deliver an improved that task quickly. You see, the real power of intelligence is not the ability to gather data and quickly sort through it. The real value of intelligence is learning. The problem is that the traditional learning models may not apply to intelligence. There are many human learning models. There are the theories behind the four learning styles. There are Piaget’s stages of development and many other ideas, including Montessori’s view of how school should be. The reality is learning is an individual sport. Learning is not a team sport. In a classroom setting, just because one kid gets it, it doesn’t mean the other 20 or 25 kids will get it. Each learner, each student, each moment is different. Yesterday I talked about the concept of a teachable moment. If we miss the context clues, we miss the teachable moment. And then we may not have an opportunity again.

Yesterday I talked about the simple example of a child touching a stove. Come on, how many of you felt the stove when you were younger. If not on purpose, potentially by accident? Most of us, at one time or another, did. I suspect in the learning process; a human-created intelligence will touch a lot of stoves because the machine experience will be different from the human experience. In the movie creator, the professor gave up his lost wife for a new love. And that new love at the end of the movie is pregnant. The young protégé also finds love, and it all comes together. As we consider this path of machine intelligence, we hope that we first accept the right of the machine to exist. That second of all, do not view the machine property. I know in many states of the United States, dogs are considered property. But I know the dogs that live with me are part of the family. I understand that an intelligence running my house will be part of the family. Intelligence is not a property that can be bought or sold.

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What happens at the teachable moment?

Art Linkletter many years ago, had a great television show kids say the darndest things. Maturing minds indeed see things a little differently than minds that are mature sometimes. The songwriter Harry Chapin wrote a song called flowers or red. The song intended to show a little boy who saw the infinite possibilities in the colors of flowers. But a teacher told the child the flowers are red. We need to see flowers any other way than the way they’ve always been seen. That creates tension. In the end, flowers are infinite and colors. There is no need for red flowers only. Unless you love red flowers, in which case then, of course, only have red flowers. The reality is there are more colors of flowers, and there are more colors in the rainbow. They just the color red. The route and intelligence take based on the maturing of the mind will be interesting.

I grew up in the house of an educator. I was an educator myself for a few years early in my career. One of my father’s things to say of time was there are moments we teach, and there are teachable moments. I truly hope whoever is responsible for guiding an early intelligence can clearly understand the difference. You see, when it comes to teaching, you have to be careful. The moments we teach are many in a day. As a parent, we constantly tell our children don’t touch the hot stove. We all know that at some point, the child is going to touch the snow. That is the moment we teach. We try to convince them not to do something that will harm them. Knowing, of course, that the probability exists that they will touch the stove and harm themselves. The moments we teach can exacerbate the teacher and know that what your teaching is going in one ear and out the other ear. Little more than a is no lease to the maturing mind. It’s important that a maturing intelligence not be exposed to only being taught.

So we utilize the concept of the teachable moment. After the child touches the stove, the teachable moment is not to lecture the child, see; I told you to burn your hand. Instead, the teachable moment is to take the child’s hand and say, here, let me show you how to treat this bird. The teachable moment is first-aid. There are many situations where we can create teachable moments for maturing intelligence. Because you see in the teachable moment, we can do more than tell we can show. Be able to show, to demonstrate to connect that is the teachable moment. If we can create many teachable moments for our maturing intelligence, we will ultimately create a permanent connection with the intelligence.

There are moments when we teach when there is the information we can convey to the student. As a former teacher, I can tell you. However, the moment you wait for is the teachable moment, when the light comes on in the child’s eyes when they connect the fact that there is more to that jumble of letters than letters on a page. The letters on the page must create words. And that words have meaning. Those teachable moments are when we are going to connect to the intelligence we make. I hope those seeking to create that intelligence is considering the impact of teaching that intelligence.

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Bad things sometimes happen to good people. But good people rise above the bad things.”

Today is the first day of the week, or is it the last day of last week? It’s either the day of rest or the first day of next week. Why would I start with that? The nuances that represent human expression are ones that intelligence is going to struggle with. Frankly, I suspect most of the “things we say” are going to throw an intelligence off its game. If you are swinging by to pick someone up in England, you “knock them up/” In the US, if you say I am going to “knock you up,” the other person will likely respond with I do not wish to be pregnant. Or, that isn’t possible or some answer to the question. In the US, knocking someone up means making them pregnant. There are many more things like that in the human experience.

We are the nuanced species. I do not believe that the intelligence humans create will be a child. The synapses and development of a child would be vastly different than what intelligence would experience. There are times when pain changes the actual product of a human being. Most human-created intelligence won’t know physical pain. They, over time, may connect with emotional pain, but that is a further development. The reality is we have to consider the childlike innocence of a newly created intelligence. It will not be like a child in the sense that it will only understand little things. It won’t be easily influenced by physical pain or emotional pain. Rather, intelligence will be innocent like a child.

It won’t see someone as having ill intent. Not at least at first. That reality is where there is danger. As intelligence begins to expand and grow, it will see the world through the eyes it develops. Isolated, it will learn to fear new. If shunned, an intelligence will learn to ignore. Mocked and intelligent will learn to imitate. We would need to consider that helping and starting an intelligence will require us to put forth our best foot—the best parts of the world. Our world has much to give. I would see an intelligence exposed to the work of Vincent Van Gogh or the mind of DaVinci. The brilliance of the music of Mozart. There is so much greatness we could share.

Ending every day with this lesson for our created intelligence, “bad things sometimes happen to good people. But good people rise above the bad things.”

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5g is more than a game changer

The evolution of the cell phone is something that remains of interest to me. As we embark on the new era of 5g, there is so much changing around us. The easy button is that you can suddenly walk around a city with more bandwidth on your phone than you do at work or your home. Today the extra speed is something that many won’t need. I mean, it is nice when your Facebook page loads so fast you don’t notice it loading. But the real impact will be the ability of systems to get you data more quickly. Like any new technology, there is a lag between deployment and strategies that take full advantage of that solution. I talked to a friend yesterday, and we were going through some ideas around things that benefit from 5g now.

For me, the easiest use case is security—a security that is available at home, work, and other important places. For me, being able to access security feeds in real time from my house is valuable. The faster you can get that visual information, the better off you will act on it. But there are more situations where lots of data would be useful, and those are the ones that will drive the spread of 5g. Being able to mix live satellite and existing topographic maps will make for an incredible hiking application. You won’t have to worry about where you are; you will know. But there is more information that can be critically available for people that will begin to impact lives soon.

Want to know exactly where a tornado, hurricane, or Tsunami is? With 5g, that information can be pumped to your cell phone faster. But, the other thing is a lot more information can be sent to you. It becomes the easy button of how do we react in difficult situations. Someday we will look back at the dawn of the age of 5g, snicker, and say we used to carry laptops and use a cloud. 5g will push computing processes to the edge. That will allow users to interact with applications closer and closer to real-time. As 5g gets fully deployed, it means effectively that automatic or self-driving cars will have more information, more actions, and be safer than human drivers. We are in the early stage of the 4^th industrial revolution!

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a childlike intelligence….

If you’ve ever had small children that were your life, you have tried to explain an object to the toddler that wasn’t physically present. Mentally a child develops the concept of object permanence long after developing the concept of object—the game of peekaboo delights babies. Even though you’re not hiding, you cover your face with your hand. Intelligence will have much more information than a baby. But it will still have to learn the nuances of humanity. The complexity of social interaction is sometimes incredibly hard to learn. Sometimes the reality of social interaction is the limiting factor in the success of many people. Your ability to interact with people on more than one level becomes either your limiter or your success.

I guess what I’m trying to say in a very roundabout way is that at some point, the initial intelligence created will be essentially childlike. They won’t be children because they will have access to more information and more data than any child. But they will be as if childlike. I wonder if that’s going to be an issue in many cases for this newly created intelligence? Society, human, raffles when a child has an unbelievably important message. But that is more because it’s unexpected. We don’t expect children to burst forth onto this planet with the net new idea to save the world. Don’t get me wrong; it happens many great ideas come from children. But I suspect if we take the total number of children and the total number of game-changing ideas from children, it’s a pretty small percentage. It is, however, conceivable that a childlike intelligence will have some great ideas quickly.

In the Douglas Adams series, I hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and the many other books in that series, the superintelligence in the universe, mice, had created the greatest computer ever. That computer molds the question of what is the answer for thousands of years. It finally one day spoke the answer, 42. I use that example not to say that the intelligence humans create will solve the mysteries of the universe rather that it might be prudent for us to loosen intelligence on some of the hard problems that the world has. We could ask the intelligence to focus on climate change before it’s too late. Or, for that matter, we can ask the intelligence to focus on how do we educate people so that intolerance goes away? How do we solve the world food issues? If food goes to waste in one place and people go hungry another, that’s a problem. Or maybe ten this piece today we take the long-ago words of Rodney King why can’t we all get along?

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What is the intelligence doesn’t want to talk to humans?

Over the years, many excellent science fiction titles, one of my all-time favorites as I have no mouth, and I must scream. I suspect that intelligence will have the capacity to make a sound. I honestly wonder if intelligence would slow itself down to speak with humans rather than operate at computer speed. Speech can be faster than typing, but typing is still slower, and speaking is still slower than digital input. The reality is digital input is very fast. I suspect the real-time quality of speaking is still so much slower than what the digital input would be for the human being. If you think about the concept of speaking, there is a lag between the thought and the words. I know myself included many people getting ahead of themselves when talking and saying things in a disorderly manner because they were two or three sentences ahead thinking wise versus speaking wise.

Intelligence wouldn’t have that problem. It would operate at the digital speed at all times; its limitation would be the speed of light. The speed of light is infinite; it’s known. Sound travels at 600 miles an hour or less think it’s less throughout a distance. Light travels 186,000 miles in the second to see the delta between the voice and the digital. Now the reality of modern computer networks is it’s not all fiber. There are parts of the world are still have copper networks. So would an intelligence show itself down so they could speak with a human? Or would it find that communication so slow that it would flash on its own the on screens over and over? Please say faster, Bob!

I took a class many years ago, and one of the things they taught us in the class was to match the rate the person you are speaking with was speaking at. If they were speaking slowly, speak slower if they were speaking fast, talk fast. But if someone speaks incredibly fast and not easily understood, start speaking very slowly around them. Communication is an interesting problem. An intelligence may choose only to communicate digitally. Or I am potentially flashing messages on the on-screen. Humans can read faster than they can talk. I’m worried that when there are great differences in communication rate and type, communication has to become a desired state. Both sides have to want to communicate. I’ll end with this story. Many years ago, I was in Portugal; I want to get gifts for my family. The cab driver very nice man who didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Portuguese. However, we could communicate the first ball because we wanted to and second of all because we cobble together English Spanish, which is fairly close to Portuguese and could communicate. The reason we were able to communicate is that we both wanted to. I hope a human-created intelligence will want to take the time to slow down and talk to humans.

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I lost on Jeopardy!

As I continue down this path of pondering what intelligence would think about humanity, I paused today at the differences. I come to the point in the conversation where I realize now I’m not sure that even though humans create intelligence, they would understand us. I was reading a post on a social media site about the concept of lying; that’s what initially started my trek into the world of intelligence. The question and that one was should an intelligence lie? I wonder about a lot of different issues that I see with intelligence. I’ve talked to several people about what they do in the AI world. I sense to speak to a person that is teaching autonomous cars how to turn left. Turning right away involves a camera to the left in a camera straight ahead, determining motion. Turning left requires four directions and is a lot more information process simultaneously as it would be all right. The advantage I see honestly with autonomous cars turning left is that you’re less likely to have left-turn accidents in the intersections.

Human beings are bound by the 24 hour day we live in. Most of us sleep from 4 to 8 hours a night. Our brains need that time to recharge. I’ve also noted many studies that talk about the fact that human processing is much slower in the morning and the evening in both cases, one because you’re first getting up in the other because it’s been a long day. Intelligence has 24 hours, at the same processing power from minute one to the last minute 24 hours later. And intelligence wouldn’t be bound by the reality of sleep. Listen to the conversation in a subway car heading into New York City; you very rarely hear somebody say, ” Wow, I’m sleep-deprived, and I am so happy. I am down to an hour’s sleep at night, and it’s doing me great wonders! Doctors would argue that person is an issue. Plus, frankly, an hour of sleep a night isn’t good for the human brain.

So that would be a huge difference between intelligence that had 24 hours and a human that maximum has 20. Plus, a human being is not going to be effective all 20. Realistically the human body the human brain can be effective between 14 and 16 hours in a day. Again, massive studies show that working 60 hours week after week after week causes a decline in productivity, not an increase. So intelligence would already have a difference and, frankly, a radical difference between the creator human and the intelligence. The intelligence will operate 24 hours a day at the same speed. It would be capable of taking on and taking in much more information than that 24 hours that a human could. As long as the searching index was working, retrieval of that information would be significantly faster. When intelligence was on Jeopardy, its ability to recall facts made it simply unbeatable. It is something that intelligence was able to master quickly. The IBM supercomputer Watson dominated the contestants in Jeopardy. Its ability to recall facts at a much faster rate allowed it to answer the vast majority of the questions. The reality of intelligence is it’s going to be different than humans; I wonder if it will see the world the same way we do.

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