The tech-nerd legion bent on saving humanity from asteroids, contagions, and robot revolutions
Illustration by Asaf Hanuka
Rick Schwall retired seven years ago after a successful career in
Silicon Valley. He says he’s a millionaire but declines to reveal where
he worked or how he made his money. “I consider all of that stuff to be
absolutely pointless,” he says. “What is important is that in 2006 I
stumbled upon existential risk.”
For the uninitiated, existential risk is a broad term covering
catastrophic events that could wipe out the human species. Some
existential risk devotees agonize over nuclear wars, climate change, and
virus outbreaks. Others, such as Schwall, put more energy into worrying
about the potential downside of information technology. They fret about
a super-powerful artificial intelligence run amok and hordes of killer
nanobots. “There are a number of people who have knowledge in this field
that estimate humanity’s chance at making it through this century at
about 50 percent,” Schwall says. “Even if that number is way off and
it’s one in a billion, that’s too high for me.”
In August, Schwall started an organization called Saving Humanity
from Homo Sapiens. The nonprofit, which boasts an eye-catching logo of a
man holding a gun to his throat, looks to fund researchers who have
plans for taming artificial intelligence and developing safeguards that
protect man from machines. So far, Schwall has doled out a few thousand
dollars to a handful of researchers, but it’s early days for SHFHS.
Schwall, after all, is thinking big and answering the grandest of
callings. “There are so many people who cannot wrap their minds around
all of humanity,” he says. “I don’t know why I rose above that. I have
no clue.”
Religious groups have long dominated talk of the apocalypse. Most
often the world ends at the hands of a god who transfers people to a
better place. These days, though, you’ll find plenty of atheistic types
in Silicon Valley meditating on man’s potential for self-inflicted
destruction, and it doesn’t often lead much of anywhere. These people
design the most sophisticated technology on the planet but bemoan its
dark potential. They’re adherents of the Singularity, a sort of nerd
rapture that will occur when machines become smarter than people and
begin advancing technological change on their own, eventually outpacing
and—in a worst-case scenario—enslaving people before getting bored and
grinding us up into fleshy pulp. This, as it happens, resembles the
prospect that had the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, all worked up.
One of the gripes emanating from the existential risk adherents is
that people have not taken these warnings seriously enough. Sure,
governments, research organizations, and philanthropists fund work to
curb global warming, contain nuclear weapons arsenals, and prevent viral
outbreaks. But where’s the money for a much needed artificial
intelligence force field or an asteroid blocker? With some people
predicting the Singularity’s arrival as early as the next decade, the
race is on for man to defend himself from his own creations.
To properly address such threats before it’s too late, a booming
subculture of tech-minded thinkers, entrepreneurs, and nongovernmental
organizations has stepped into the existential risk realm. Many of the
groups, like SHFHS, focus on worries about artificial intelligence (AI).
Others have secured some serious cash to fund a broader set of projects
to protect us from annihilation in whatever form it might take.
Consider, for example, the Lifeboat Foundation. It’s an organization
run out of the Minden (Nev.) home of Eric Klien, a technologist who has
dabbled in the fields of cryonics and online dating. This group frets
about science fiction scenarios such as computers gone bad, alien
attacks, and the arrival of nasty man-made synthetic creatures. To date,
the Lifeboat Foundation has raised more than $500,000 from corporations
such as Google (GOOG), Oracle (ORCL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Fannie Mae (FNMA)
and from hundreds of individuals. Asked to comment, a spokesman for
Fannie Mae was surprised to learn of the donations, which were part of
an employer match program.
The Lifeboat Foundation’s flashiest project is the A-Prize, a contest
to create an artificial life form “with an emphasis on the safety of
the researchers, public, and environment.” Thus far, donors have pledged
$29,000 to the winner. The real down-and-dirty work, however, revolves
around shields, with projects under way to build Asteroid, Brain, Alien,
Internet, Black Hole, and Antimatter shields. Other work includes the
creation of space habitats and personality preservers.
It’s unclear how far along any of these projects is. Most of the
Lifeboat Foundation’s money seems to go toward supporting conferences
and publishing papers. But laying down the rigorous theoretical
groundwork for such projects ensures their viability when the
existential hammer falls. Lifeboat remains one of the only places where
people think about the panoply of nontraditional risks to mankind.
Klien would like to see some bigger donors step up and allow the
Lifeboat Foundation to tackle truly massive endeavors. Part of the
problem is that people have not gotten a real taste for a near-death
experience that awakens their existential risk spirit. “There will be a
9/11 with dirty bombs or nuclear bombs,” he says. “It will make it a lot
easier for us at that point.”
The major success story of the existential risk movement is the
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which focuses on
making sure we end up with “friendly” AI. Every year it holds an event
called the Singularity Summit where some speakers dazzle the crowd with
cutting-edge technology, while others reinforce the existential risk
cause.
The Singularity Institute prides itself on examining existential risk
with a rational eye. One of its thought leaders and board members is
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prolific blogger who spends a great deal of time
laying out the logical reasons people should be concerned about
existential risk and developing a mathematical framework for friendly
AI. Yudkowsky has a knack for walking people through the logical
constraints that a computer scientist might want to consider when
building an artificial intelligence to help make sure it doesn’t light
up and take over the world. “He is a good candidate for being the most
important person on the planet,” Schwall says of Yudkowsky. Backers of
the Singularity Institute and this type of work include Peter Thiel, the
first investor in Facebook, Jaan Tallinn, one of the programmers who
helped build Skype Technologies, and companies such as Microsoft (MSFT), Motorola (MSI), and Fidelity Investments.
Tallinn attended this year’s summit and delivered an impassioned
speech about the need to direct more money toward the prevention of
existential risk. Estimates bandied about at the conference placed
worldwide spending on existential risk at about $59 million per year.
With this in mind, Tallinn made a $100,000 donation to the Singularity
Institute on the spot and then called on other philanthropists to stop
thinking about boosting their “social status” by donating to the usual
do-gooder causes. Instead, the rich should support longer-term efforts.
“Future societies will look back on us and feel depressed because of the
actions we did not do,” he said.
This kind of talk isn’t limited to technophiles suffering from
midlife crises; there is, in fact, a youthful existential risk
contingent, too. Thomas Eliot, 23, bounded around the Singularity Summit
in a uniform consisting of red Converse All-Stars, jeans, a bow tie,
and rosy, fresh-faced cheeks. Eliot, who had just obtained a math degree
from Willamette University, plans to spend the next year or two living
off his savings while he studies machine learning and AI. He’s also been
tapped by Schwall as the executive director of SHFSH. “An unfriendly
artificial intelligence could cause a negative Singularity and turn the
entire planet into paper clips,” Eliot warns. “Even if the chances of
something like this happening are low, it would be the worst thing
ever.”
Infamous for failing to commercialize the technologies it invented,
Xerox's R&D subsidiary has a new strategy for innovation: make
money.
Cheap trick: In a prototype, logic circuits and computer memory are printed together on a sheet of plastic.
PARC
Last month, a small Norwegian company called Thinfilm Electronics and PARC, the storied Silicon Valley research lab, jointly showed off a technological first—a plastic film that combined both printed transistors and printed digital memory.
Such flexible electronics could be an important component of future
products, such as food packaging that senses and record temperatures,
shock-sensing helmets, as well as smart toys. But the story of how
PARC's technology—the printed transistors—wound up paired with memory
technology from an obscure Norwegian company also provides a window onto
a 10-year struggle by Xerox to transform the way it commercializes
R&D ideas.
For most of its 40-year history, PARC (for Palo Alto Research Center)
was as famous for squandering new technologies as it was for inventing
them. The mouse, the graphical user interface, and the drop-down menu
were all born at PARC—but it was Apple and Microsoft that commercialized
them and made them cornerstone inventions of the PC industry.
The list of innovations lost hardly stops there. While Xerox did, of
course, commercialize PARC's blockbuster technology of laser printing,
other PARC inventions ultimately commercialized elsewhere include
Ethernet networking, the PDF file format, and electronic paper—created
at the research lab in 1975, long before the Amazon Kindle and other
e-books appeared.
By 2001, Xerox had seen enough. Facing poor financial results, its
then-CEO, Anne M. Mulcahy, vowed to return the company to profitability.
As part of that effort, Xerox reincorporated its cash-burning R&D
center as an independent company, simply called PARC, with a mandate to
turn a profit whether by licensing patents, through contract research,
or by creating partnerships with other firms.
The buzzword attached to new era was "open innovation"; PARC's
researchers would now freely associate with the outside world to hone
ideas and work out how to commercialize them. "When PARC spun out in
2002, open, collaborative innovation became, in essence, the business
model for PARC," says Lawrence Lee, currently PARC's director of
strategy. "But we've only figured out what that means in practice over
the last couple of years."
PARC's advances in printing transistors came at around the same time
the lab was being reorganized, making the technology a key proving
ground for the new strategy. PARC at first hoped to develop organic
electronic displays, a potentially huge market, but the technology
proved difficult to manufacture, and it fell far short of silicon-based
displays in performance.
In the old days, the idea might have languished. Xerox headquarters
had often failed to embrace new inventions that didn't relate to the
company's core businesses of selling copiers. But following the "open
innovation" idea, PARC started shopping the technology to manufacturers,
telling them that printed transistors could also provide very cheap,
flexible sensors and computer logic for packaging, toys, and other uses.
Tamara St. Claire, PARC's vice president for global business
development, says manufacturers liked the idea but wanted to see what
she terms a "minimum viable product"—management-speak for something more
than a benchtop experiment. To develop one, in 2010 PARC formed a
"co-innovation engagement" with Thinfilm,
which was already making printed memory. The resulting prototype
circuit was the first to combine both printed transistors and memory,
according to PARC.
The Xerox company now has partnerships with several other firms and
government agencies to use printed electronics in pressure-measuring
helmets as well as in packaging that can sense pressure, sound, light,
acceleration, or temperature. By doing so, it hopes to tap a market for
printed electronics that an analyst firm, IDTechex, estimates could
reach $45 billion by 2021.
For PARC, the partnerships are signs that open innovation is working.
"There are plenty of great ideas at PARC, but you learn early on that
execution is often the hard part—execution and timing," says St. Claire.
"It's something you can say PARC is really starting to understand. You
almost have to be as innovative in the commercialization—especially when
you have game-changing technologies—as on the technology side."
PARC, which once served only Xerox, now has an expanding list of
technologies in development with outside partners that include Fujitsu,
Motorola, NEC Display Solutions, Microsoft, Samsung, SolFocus, and
Oracle. The change in strategy has helped turn it from a
multimillion-dollar financial sinkhole into a modest, but growing,
innovation business. In 2010, it was profitable on revenue of more than
$60 million, a spokesman says. PARC, which has 250 employees, is also
patenting at a fast clip, with about 150 patents filed per year since
2002.
The focus on doing business, not just having ideas, has also boosted
morale, says Teresa Amabile, an organizational psychologist at Harvard
Business School. "I've talked to a lot of scientists, technicians, and
engineers doing R&D inside companies ... and the people I talk to at
PARC [are] more strongly, intrinsically motivated than the average,"
she says. "They are driven by real passions and excitement for the
disruptive discoveries they are making, coupled with excitement for
seeing what they were doing actually being used in the world. That
combination is pretty unusual."
Microsoft announced that it will be launching silent updates for IE9 in January.
Despite
the controversy of user control, Microsoft especially has a reason to
make this move to react to browser "update fatigue" that has resulted in
virtually "stale" IE users who won't upgrade their browsers unless they
upgrade their operating system as well.
The most recent upgrade of Google's Chrome browser
shows just how well the silent update feature works. Within five days
of introduction, Chrome 15 market share fell from 24.06 percent to just
6.38 percent, while the share of Chrome 16 climbed from 0.35 percent to
19.81 percent, according to StatCounter.
Within five days, Google moved about 75 percent of its user base - more
than 150 million users - from one browser to another. Within three
days, Chrome 16 market share surpassed the market share of IE9
(currently at about 10.52 percent for this month), in four days it
surpassed Firefox 8 (currently at about 15.60 percent) and will be
passing IE8 today, StatCounter data indicates.
What makes this data so important is the fact that Google is
dominating HTML5 capability across all operating system platforms and
not just Windows 7, where IE9 has a slight advantage, according to
Microsoft (StatCounter does not break out data for browser share on
individual operating systems). IE9 was introduced on March 14 of 2011,
has captured only 10.52 percent market share and has followed a similar
slow upgrade pattern as its predecessors. For example, IE, which was
introduced in March 2009, reached its market share peak in the month IE9
was introduced - at 30.24 percent. Since then, the browser has declined
to only 22.17 percent and 57.52 percent of the IE user base still uses
IE8 today.
With the silent updates becoming available for IE8 and IE9,
Microsoft is likely to avoid another IE6 disaster with IE8. Even more
important for Microsoft is that those users who update to IE9 may be
less likely to switch to Chrome.
Everyone likes personal cloud services, like Apple’s iCloud, Google Music, and Dropbox.
But, many of aren’t crazy about the fact that our files, music, and
whatever are sitting on someone else’s servers without our control.
That’s where ownCloud comes in.
OwnCloud is an open-source cloud program. You use it to set up your
own cloud server for file-sharing, music-streaming, and calendar,
contact, and bookmark sharing project. As a server program it’s not that
easy to set up. OpenSUSE, with its Mirall installation program and desktop client makes it easier to set up your own personal ownCloud, but it’s still not a simple operation. That’s going to change.
According to ownCloud’s business crew,
“OwnCloud offers the ease-of-use and cost effectiveness of Dropbox and
box.net with a more secure, better managed offering that, because it’s
open source, offers greater flexibility and no vendor lock in. This
makes it perfect for business use. OwnCloud users can run file sync and
share services on their own hardware and storage or use popular public
hosting and storage offerings.” I’ve tried it myself and while setting
it up is still mildly painful, once up ownCloud works well.
OwnCloud enables universal access to files through a Web browser or WebDAV.
It also provides a platform to easily view and sync contacts, calendars
and bookmarks across all devices and enables basic editing right on the
Web. Programmers will be able to add features to it via its open
application programming interface (API).
OwnCloud is going to become an easy to run and use personal, private
cloud thanks to a new commercial company that’s going to take ownCloud
from interesting open-source project to end-user friendly program. This
new company will be headed by former SUSE/Novell executive Markus Rex.
Rex, who I’ve known for years and is both a business and technology
wizard, will serve as both CEO and CTO. Frank Karlitschek, founder of
the ownCloud project, will be staying.
To make this happen, this popular–350,000 users-program’s commercial
side is being funded by Boston-based General Catalyst, a high-tech.
venture capital firm. In the past, General Catalyst has helped fund such
companies as online travel company Kayak and online video platform leader Brightcove.
General Catalyst came on board, said John Simon, Managing Director at
General Catalyst in a statement, because, “With the explosion of
unstructured data in the enterprise and increasingly mobile (and
insecure) ways to access it, many companies have been forced to lock
down their data–sometimes forcing employees to find less than secure
means of access, or, if security is too restrictive, risk having all
that unavailable When we saw the ease-of-use, security and flexibility
of ownCloud, we were sold.”
“In a cloud-oriented world, ownCloud is the only tool based on a
ubiquitous open-source platform,” said Rex, in a statement. “This
differentiator enables businesses complete, transparent, compliant
control over their data and data storage costs, while also allowing
employees simple and easy data access from anywhere.”
As a Linux geek, I already liked ownCloud. At the company releases
mass-market ownCloud products and service in 2012, I think many of you
are going to like it as well. I’m really looking forward to seeing where
this program goes from here.
The lottery of who you sit next to on an airline flight can make travel interesting, or unbearable. Recognizing that the experience of its passengers can be greatly influenced by the people sitting next to them, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is introducing ‘Meet & Seat.’ The service will allow passengers to choose who they sit next to based on their social media profiles.
The service will be available to everybody and both passengers must choose to take part in the service in order to pick your fellow passenger. Those who enjoy simply putting on their headphones and enjoying a movie on their laptop – alone – can just avoid the experiment altogether according to the International Business Times.
The newspaper naturally discusses the match making potential of KLM’s service.According to the IBT, a recent poll showed a third of passengers surveyed said they later met with a fellow passenger after a flight.
Everybody’s favorite news analysis animators over at Next Media Animation in Taiwan were a bit more blunt. Their description of how KLM’s new service might work doesn’t include waiting for the airplane to land.
This concept model for a next-generation vending machine, which features a see through display, is being developed by Sanden, a large manufacturer of vending machines, in conjunction with Okaya Electronics and Intel.
This concept model has a vertical, 65-inch, Full HD transparent display. The products behind the display can be seen through the glass, and you can simultaneously see high definition text, pictures, and Flash animations on the display.
"This vending machine uses the Intel SandyBridge Core. It features Audience Impression Metric, or AIM, and can do anonymous face recognition. So this machine can recognize whether customers are male or female, or old or young."
When there aren't any customers, the machine shows a large digital clock and animations, to attract the attention of people passing by. If a customer stands in front of the machine, it estimates their attributes from anonymous video analysis, and shows advertising content to match the customers demographic.
"In this demo, we're suggesting that vending machines could be used to purchase luxury items, such as cosmetics and wine. The machine also has a public safety mode in times of emergency, which shows information such as evacuation routes."
"I think this machine could be used in lots of ways, depending on customers' imagination. It has a great many possibilities, so we'd like to get ideas from everyone, rather than just using it as a regular vending machine."
Once Upon is a brilliant project that has recreated three popular sites from today as if they were built in the dial-up era, in 1997.
Witness Facebook, with no real-names policy and photos displayed in
an ugly grey table; YouTube, with a choice of encoding options to select
before you watch a video, and Google+, where Circles of contacts are
displayed as far easier to render squares. Be prepared for a wait though
– the recreations are limited to 8kbps transfer speeds, as if you were
loading it on a particularly slow dial-up connection.
This is perhaps the most extreme version of Web nostalgia we’ve seen. On a related note, these imaginings of what online social networking would have been like in centuries gone by are worth a look. Also, our report on 10 websites that changed the world is worth reading- they’re not what you might expect.
How a little-known 1971 machine launched an industry.
Forty years ago, Nutting Associates released the world’s first
mass-produced and commercially sold video game, Computer Space. It was
the brainchild of Nolan Bushnell, a charismatic engineer with a creative
vision matched only by his skill at self-promotion. With the help of
his business partner Ted Dabney and the staff of Nutting Associates,
Bushnell pushed the game from nothing into reality only two short years
after conceiving the idea.
Computer Space pitted a player-controlled rocket ship against two
machine-controlled flying saucers in a space simulation set before a
two-dimensional star field. The player controlled the rocket with four
buttons: one for fire, which shoots a missile from the front of the
rocket ship; two directional rotation buttons (to rotate the ship
orientation clockwise or counterclockwise); and one for thrust, which
propelled the ship in whichever direction it happened to be pointing.
Think of Asteroids without the asteroids, and you should get the picture.
During play, two saucers would appear on the screen and shoot at the player while flying in a zig-zag formation. The player’s goal was to dodge the saucer fire and shoot the saucers.
Considering a game of this complexity playing out on a TV set, you
might think that it was created as a sophisticated piece of software
running on a computer. You’d think it, but you’d be wrong–and Bushnell
wouldn’t blame you for the mistake. How he and Dabney managed to pull it
off is a story of audacity, tenacity, and sheer force-of-will worthy of
tech legend. This is how it happened.
With the holiday season heating up, you can imagine that Amazon.com
has lots of orders to fulfill. The amount of packages that their
fulfillment centers have to manage these days is simply incredible. Here
we a look inside their Swansea, Wales, warehouse and the endless row of
packages is overwhelming. The scenery is almost worth a Gursky
photograph with the patterns that the packages and small warehouse
personell are building.
Despite
the controversy of user control, Microsoft especially has a reason to
make this move to react to browser "update fatigue" that has resulted in
virtually "stale" IE users who won't upgrade their browsers unless they
upgrade their operating system as well. 
