@isaac

Why there’s no sexy scientist in China?

Do we need futurists?

There’s an eye-catching news in technology industry recently, though not a big torrent in  public mass. Ray Kurzweil, a prominent futurist known for the term “Singularity” he coined, was hired by Google to design some new future oriented products that may emerge in decades.

Why Googlers and Kurzweil reached this deal?  I believe it’s because Kurzweil hit Googlers on two stunningly accurate predictions back to 1999.  Kurzweil then said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions. People criticized those predictions as unrealistic. Nonetheless, they all become true these two years, with the Google driverless car, and Apple’s Siri system. If you don’t the meaning of those innovations, please just imagine a 6 year-old girl can command their home limo to send back her 80 year old granny to her home. It’s not sci-fi anymore, driverless car has been legalized by California last year.

General innovations come from two ways of thinking: evolutionary and revolutionary. Evolution could be lazy, and very random. It takes big number of samples and long long time, with rare directions can be predicted.  Those natural happenings, like our human being, came from such evolutionary innovation of nature.  Revolutionary thinking could be disruptive, but takes on intelligent minds, like Einstein,  Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, etc. But until many years later, we common people can really understand the meaning of those forseers. For many people today, they already accept the universe we are living may come from a Big Bang, instead of personal creator. However, they may not really know that just because of Eistein and his ground breaking theories, we have today’s many advanced life styles including  X-rays, laser, transistors, television, radio, radar, microwave, computers, Internet, MRI scanners, etc . almost everything in our living, in a modern hospital can be traced back to those early futuristic scientists.  We always live in futurists envisioned good.

Kurzweil has soon unveiled his bold projects in Google on “giving  computers the ability to understand the language that they’re reading”, as he talked to Cnet,  “It’s ambitious, in fact there’s no more important project than understanding intelligence and re-creating it”. The whole Internet and society are far from well linked to each other. Many knowledge are still leashed within different information islands. For example, in Wikipedia, there are over 4M pages in English, nonetheless only 600K pages in Chinese. The lament lag indicates two problems at least, most of human knowledge didn’t translated into Chinese, and Chinese community didn’t write enough to archive their own knowledge, either. It’s so obvious issue we should tackle in more creative ways, not mentioning those minor languages in extinction.  In her new book, “Found in Translation”, Nataly Kelly said,”The world’s information cannot be accessible if it’s locked up in languages that people cannot understand. The only way to unlock that information is through translation.”. She also commented on Huffington Post,  “The implications of this(Kurzweil’s working with Google) are vast and go beyond mere language translation. This is what making the world’s information useful and accessible really means.”

In philosophy, Kurzweil emphasizes an accelerated future. He believes the technology boosted human society evolution in an accelerating speed, the progression is exponential. Any single PC today on our desktop can actually run billions times more than a IBM mainframe computer in 1970.  Current examples are Twitter and Facebook, they both have whole new paradigm of connecting people that now puts together hundreds of millions people in just less than 5 years’ time. It is partly because new technologies, mostly, harness the power of Internet, can easily link up with millions of people. Even we understand it theoretically, few people predicted that how Jasmine Revolution could burst in Arabic world in 2010. But one Chinese businessman in Shenzhen did tell me in 2009 that he saw boosted usage of cheap Shanzhai phone shipped from his business to Egypt could be a big threat to authority. I didn’t believe him like those critics Kurzweil received early days.

We are living in a transformation age in an accelerated rate. In less than 10 years, we could see many people can order the products based on customized 3D model;  In less than 15 years, we would see several  genetic medicines which can hold out cancers; In less than 20 years, we could see human brain and memory can be copied into computer in a way called connectome. We may not just uploading them into distant spaceship to maneuver interstella research, but also help dream of a kind of immortality for common people;  Back to most recent 5 years, we can take a small device, recording our surrounding life bits 24 hours a day from senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, etc.). All data will be auto saved to our personal cloud in real time.  We are making ourselves more digital. Many things will be shared in digital way to wholly change what we called “media” today. Your personal data, from basic profile, to biography, to what you have published online on those web n.0 websites, your gene data, your e-portfolio from hospital, etc. all need redundant global storage. You can easily migrate your working place from one city to another one. You don’t need take a lot of books with you anymore, instead, your foldable e-book reader will include all books and magazines in your whole-life-reading list.  Life will be more fascinating than today’s smartphone cacoethes.

Future-oriented thinking can vary from slow evolution, or it may drift to nowhere. It’s same to social developments. The appearance of language, Renaissance of art, Industry Revolution, Democratic System, Internet etc. all enabled the whole society reconstruct itself. However, I would argue that another type of futurists should tell the problems emerging with future innovations. Technological innovations will never stop, same to social problems. The challenge of big data will be faced by anyone, even a disk of dish in front of us could be reflected in a data scheme.  Once we see through the future signals, we have reasons to worry about more humanity issues including data security and privacy concerns, but also equality concerns. There were several mass online privacy disasters in China, US, Europe the passing 5 years. We would speculate more in the future, no doubt. The same time, we need some close eyes on government’s abuse of public data. According to report from Freedom House, the biggest breach of digital privacy is not coming from business or independent organizations, instead, mostly from governments. How to curb the power of governments, which is always unsolved problem, should be confronted in new ways.

Under such a theme, we’d prepare new social, political and legal settings to face any problems. It could become global challenges together. The unbearable evidence is on human being’s accelerated capability of intelligence just within a short portion of its long evolution process.  It’s why we need futurist more than ever before, not only technological predictions, but also a grid of social/political envisions to ensure we live well together with technologies, not just commercial luxuries. Some issues like equality of future rights, like who should be treated first by the newest cancer therapy, public mass or just privileged group?  Those problems are not just moral issues in situ, they should be considered and debated in advance back to today. Even we don’t  be not so paranoid as Bill Joy’s argument in  “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us”, we still need serious thinking on the issues of the consequences of rapidly expanding changes. It’s a kind of futuristic thinking as well.

For anyone of us, do we  need more futurists like Kurzweil in our society?  If Google does, other companies, like Jeff Jarvis said, all should try. Governments, NGOs and institutions should learn it too.

Research assistant on Sharism (Closed)

update: I got dozen’s of responses in just one day, can’t we believe the power of social media? And I do believe there were already many qualified candidates. So it’s temporarily closed.  Will  update once I have chosen.

I’m looking for a research assistant on Sharism, either short term(in 1 yr of my book writing) or longer(up to 5 yrs) , to support me doing some raw material discovering, lecture facts checking, and social relationships tracking(like media coverage,social buzzing). No need to be full time(flexible enough), with roughly 400$/month allowance. No location or timezone restrictions.