Almost human
October 12, 2008
In the final round of competition for this year's Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence, held today at the University of Reading in the UK, a robot came within a whisker of passing the Turing Test. In a series conversations with people, the winning robot, named Elbot, fooled 25% of its interlocutors into believing it was a genuine human being. A score of 30% would have been sufficient to pass Turing's criterion for a true artificial intelligence.
Five machines competed in today's finals, and each of them managed to convince at least one person that it was human. All the robots, moreover, received strikingly high scores for their conversational skills. Reports Kevin Warwick, a professor in the University of Reading's School of Systems Engineering and the organizer of the test:
This has been a very exciting day with two of the machines getting very close to passing the Turing Test for the first time. In hosting the competition here, we wanted to raise the bar in Artificial Intelligence and although the machines aren't yet good enough to fool all of the people all of the time, they are certainly at the stage of fooling some of the people some of the time.
Today's results actually show a more complex story than a straight pass or fail by one machine. Where the machines were identified correctly by the human interrogators as machines, the conversational abilities of each machine was scored at 80 and 90%. This demonstrates how close machines are getting to reaching the milestone of communicating with us in a way in which we are comfortable. That eventual day will herald a new phase in our relationship with machines, bringing closer the time in which robots start to play an active role in our daily lives.
Here's how Elbot opened a conversation with one of its human interrogators:
Judge: "Hi. How's it going?"
Elbot: "I feel terrible today. This morning I made a mistake and poured milk over my breakfast instead of oil, and it rusted before I could eat it."
Hah! The old robot-pretending-to-be-a-person-pretending-to-be-a-robot ruse. Elbot, you are the man!
UPDATE: You can chew the fat with Elbot here.
UPDATE: The Guardian's Esther Addley is unimpressed.
No worries
October 03, 2008
Congress's new and improved bailout bill includes, along with the obligatory helpings of pork, a provision that would increase FDIC bank deposit insurance from $100,000 to $250,000. Should the House pass the bill today, that boost in insurance would let a lot of Americans sleep a lot easier.
And that's the problem.
When the government provides free insurance for an investment - any investment - it removes considerations of risk from investors' decisions and, as a result, it distorts financial markets. In the worst-case scenario, that contributes to the kind of craziness that has put the world economy on a precipice. As Floyd Norris writes in the New York Times today:
As the ideas fly for saving the financial system, it is amazing — and appalling — how many of them seem to be straight out of the playbook from the savings and loan crisis. Then, as now, Congress decided to reassure investors by more than doubling the amount of deposits that could be insured ... The raising of the deposit guarantee limits in 1980 to $100,000, from $40,000, made depositors less concerned about the health of their institution, and made it easier for dying institutions to attract deposits. Raising the figure to $250,000 now could have the same effect.
I'm not suggesting that insuring bank deposits is a bad thing. An even worse worst-case scenario is the kind of panic that leads to general runs on banks. What I don't understand is why the insurance is set at a full 100% rather than, say, 80% or even 90%. By putting some fraction of deposits at risk, you'd at least provide a little incentive for people to be conscious of the health of the bank in which they're putting their money, which in turn would put some additional pressure on banks to temper the risks they take.
Even if Congress had kept the full insurance on the first $100,000 of deposits and then provided 80% insurance for the next $150,000 of deposits, it would have injected a little more rationality into personal banking decisions. When it comes to money, panic is bad but nervousness is good.
Here comes the "Windows Cloud"
October 01, 2008
Amazon and Microsoft are about to be partners - and competitors.
Last night, Amazon's Werner Vogels announced that later this fall developers and companies will be able to run Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which up to now has been limited to Linux or other Unix-based systems. Given the broad popularity of the Microsoft operating system, the move promises to considerably expand the usefulness of the EC2 utility-computing system. According to Amazon:
Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server provides an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. By choosing Amazon EC2 as the deployment environment for your Windows-based applications, you will be able to take advantage of Amazon’s proven scalability and reliability, as well as the cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model offered by Amazon Web Services.
As Vogels notes, it will also become possible to run virtual Windows desktops from Amazon's cloud.
Details about pricing have yet to be released. The big question, as Alan Williams notes, is this: Will Microsoft adopt a true utility pricing model for virtual computers running Windows, allowing Amazon to roll the operating system licensing cost into its hourly fee, or will the Windows licenses have to continue to be purchased separately? If it's the former, Microsoft will have made a significant step forward into the utility world.
But an even bigger step into the cloud appears imminent. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced in London today that the company will unveil its own "cloud operating system" at its big developer conference at the end of this month. According to The Register, Ballmer said: "We need a new operating system designed for the cloud and we will introduce one in about four weeks, we’ll even have a name to give you by then. But let’s just call it for the purposes of today ‘Windows Cloud.'" Ballmer also said: "The last thing we want is for somebody else to obsolete us; if we’re gonna get obsoleted, we better do it to ourselves." Even as it links up with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft is preparing to muscle onto its turf.
The email monster
Clive Thompson recently pointed to a post in which Amherst College's IT director provided some stats about the school's new freshman class. The students' tech habits are pretty much what you'd expect - everyone's on Facebook, no one has a landline, laptops have almost entirely supplanted desktops, and the Mac's beating the PC.
What I found most striking, though, were the stats on email. About 180,000 emails are received each day at the school (which has around 1,600 students), and 94% of those emails are spam. The storage required for the emails received last year equaled the total storage required for all the emails received in the preceding five years combined. And 95% of email storage now goes to holding email attachments rather than the messages themselves. Email has become everyone's personal data warehouse.
With the management of email systems growing increasingly onerous, it's hardly a surprise that a lot of colleges are choosing to offload those systems to Google and other cloud providers.
Shooting at clouds
September 29, 2008
Free software activist Richard Stallman is taking a break from his campaign to stop people from buying Harry Potter books to blast the concept of cloud computing. "It's stupidity," he tells the Guardian. "It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign." He's right, of course, about the "marketing hype campaign," but his real beef with the cloud is the same as his beef with corporate-owned software programs. "Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program," he says. "If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."
And while you're at it, stock your cellar with lots of canned goods.
Stallman is a little late to this party. People have been voting for web apps, at least in rudimentary form, since back in the heyday of AOL. And they're going to continue using Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, TurboTax Online, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Photobucket, Twitter, etc., just as they're going to continue to buy J.K. Rowling's books. Why? Because, for better or worse, they like 'em. It's a done deal.
More on target was Larry Ellison's rant against the cloud last week:
The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
It'll stop as soon as the computer industry succeeds not only in rendering the term "cloud computing" meaningless but also in draining it of its marketing oomph, at which point the industry will move on to a new buzzphrase. Same as it ever was.
But the technology of utility computing, unlike the hype about the cloud, will continue on its appointed course, and, no doubt, Larry Ellison will be there at the appropriate time to ensure that Oracle milks the utility model for whatever profits it can churn out. Oracle is the giant cockroach of the IT business - it thrives under any conditions. That's because Oracle, though based in Silicon Valley, is not of the Valley. Ellison long ago came to understand one of the fundamental truths about the corporate IT business: there's more money to be made in exploiting old technology than in pioneering new technology. Hedge your bets, bide your time until the cash begins to flow, then make your move.
A few months ago, Oracle announced that, with its software-as-a-service business growing at nearly a 25% a year clip, it was breaking ground on a big new data center in Utah to help power its web apps. And at the very same conference at which Ellison went on his anti-cloud rant, Oracle announced an extensive partnership with Amazon Web Services to incorporate Oracle products into the Amazon cloud.
It's healthy for big guns like Ellison to shoot holes in the cloud hype. But also keep your eyes on what Oracle is actually doing at ground level. Cockroaches don't lie.
Going to the Googles
September 26, 2008
Stephen Colbert and I chat about the Net and the future of man:
Give it up.
Colbert et moi
September 24, 2008
Programming note: I will be a guest on the Colbert Report on Comedy Central tomorrow (Thursday) night. Tune in.
New horizons in data centers
September 22, 2008
Recent months have brought a burst of innovation in data centers. We have seen data centers in semitrailers, data centers in caves, data centers in Siberia, data centers in the Las Vegas desert, and data centers that float in the middle of the ocean. Today we have word, via Data Center Knowledge, that Microsoft has been testing data centers in tents. (They're calling it In Tents Computing.)
What's next? Here's my prediction of the ten top data center innovations we'll see over the course of the next year:
1. Data centers in blimps
2. Data centers in shoes
3. Data centers in termite nests
4. Data centers implanted under the skin of people's forearms
5. Data centers in canoes
6. Data centers constructed entirely of post-consumer waste
7. Data centers rolled in seaweed like maki
8. Data centers worn by Japanese schoolgirls
9. Data centers in trees
10. Data centers as figments of the imagination
Sun Microsystems reportedly has a working prototype of a data center in a kangaroo's pouch, but that's unconfirmed.
Apple declares war on sneaker hackers
September 11, 2008
It was painful to watch, at Apple's big media event on Monday, Steve Jobs attempting to pawn off a retread music-recommendation system as some sort of great technological breakthrough. Yes, iTunes will now be able to suggest songs you might like based on what you and other like-eared users listen to. Wow. That's so 2002. And the company even has the gumption to call the feature Genius. A better name, if the experiences of early users are any guide, would have been Halfwit.
But that's nothing. Today, reports New Scientist, Apple has applied for a patent to - no joke - extend digital rights management to tennis shoes and other articles of clothing. "What is desired," the patent application says, "is a method of electronically pairing a sensor and an authorized garment." It continues:
As used herein an authorized garment is a garment sanctioned to be electronically paired with an authenticated (i.e., certified) sensor. Once the garment and sensor are electronically paired, the sensor can receive (and in some cases process) sensing information (such as garment performance data or user performance data) received from the garment. Since only authorized garments are configured to electronically pair with authenticated sensors, a user (or manufacturer) can be assured that the sensing data received by the sensor is both accurate and consistent with its intended use (a sensor designed for use with running shoes can not properly be used with dance shoes, for example).
Apple views tennis-shoe DRM as a way to head off what it sees as a potential plague of sneaker hacking. "Some people," the patent application observes, "have taken it upon themselves to remove the sensor from the special pocket of the [iPod-linked] Nike+ shoe and place it at inappropriate locations (shoelaces, for example) or place it on non-Nike+ model shoes." Oh my God: Geeks are ripping the sensors out of their sneakers and sticking them on their shoelaces! Unleash the shoe nazis!
It used to be cool to be an Apple fanboy. Now it's starting to be embarrassing.
The Omnigoogle
September 07, 2008
“Some say Google is God,†Sergey Brin once said. “Others say Google is Satan.â€
The confusion about Google’s identity may not be quite that Manichean, but it does run deep. The company, which today celebrates the tenth anniversary of its incorporation, remains an enigma despite the Everest-sized pile of press coverage that has been mounded around it. People can’t even agree what industry it’s in. The many businesses that see the young company as an actual or potential competitor include software houses, advertising agencies, telephone companies, newspapers, TV networks, book publishers, movie studios, credit card processors, and Internet firms of all stripes. If your business involves information, you probably fear (and admire) Google.
The sheer breadth of Google’s influence and activity - just this past week it unveiled its own Web browser, introduced face-recognition software, and shot a satellite into orbit - can easily be interpreted as evidence that it is an entirely new kind of business, one that transcends and redefines all traditional categories. But while Google is an unusual company in many ways, when you boil down its business strategy, you find that it’s not quite as mysterious as it seems. The way Google makes money is straightforward: It brokers and publishes advertisements through digital media. More than 99 percent of its sales have come from the fees it charges advertisers for using its network to get their messages out on the Internet.
Google’s protean appearance is not a reflection of its core business. Rather, it stems from the vast number of complements to its core business. Complements are, to put it simply, any products or services that tend be consumed together. Think hot dogs and mustard, or houses and mortgages. For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks — entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions — Google’s range of complements expands into ever more industry sectors. That's why cute little Google has morphed into The Omnigoogle.
Because the sales of complementary products rise in tandem, a company has a strong strategic interest in reducing the cost and expanding the availability of the complements to its core product. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that a company would like all complements to be given away. If hot dogs became freebies, mustard sales would skyrocket. It’s this natural drive to reduce the cost of complements that, more than anything else, explains Google’s strategy. Nearly everything the company does, including building big data centers, buying optical fiber, promoting free Wi-Fi access, fighting copyright restrictions, supporting open source software, launching browsers and satellites, and giving away all sorts of Web services and data, is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. Google wants information to be free because as the cost of information falls it makes more money.
There’s one more twist. Because the marginal cost of producing and distributing a new copy of a purely digital product is close to zero, Google not only has the desire to give away informational products; it has the economic leeway to actually do it. Those two facts — the vast breadth of Google’s complements, and the company’s ability to push the price of those complements toward zero — are what really set the company apart from other firms. Google faces far less risk in product development than the usual business does. It routinely introduces half-finished products and services as online “betas†because it knows that, even if the offerings fail to win a big share of the market, they will still tend to produce attractive returns by generating advertising revenue and producing valuable data on customer behavior. For most companies, a failed launch of a new product is very costly. For Google, in general, it’s not. Failure is cheap.
But while Google has an odd business model, it's not an unprecedented one. The company it most resembles is, ironically, its archrival, Microsoft. Just as Google controls the central money-making engine of the Internet economy (the search engine), Microsoft controlled the central money-making engine of the personal computer economy (the PC operating system). In the PC world, Microsoft had nearly as many complements as Google now has in the Internet world, and Microsoft, too, expanded into a vast number of software and other PC-related businesses - not necessarily to make money directly but to expand PC usage. Microsoft didn't take a cut of every dollar spent in the PC economy, but it took a cut of a lot of them. In the same way, Google takes a cut of many of the dollars that flow through the Net economy. The goal, then, is to keep expanding the economy.
God or Satan? When you control the economic chokepoint of a digital economy and have complements everywhere you look, it can be difficult to distinguish between when you're doing good (giving the people what they want) and when you're doing bad (squelching competition). Both Google and Microsoft have a history of explaining their expansion into new business areas by saying that they're just serving the interests of "the users." And there's usually a good deal of truth to that explanation - though it's rarely the whole truth.
Google differs from Microsoft in at least one very important way. The ends that Microsoft has pursued are commercial ends. It's been in it for the money. Google, by contrast, has a strong messianic bent. The Omnigoogle is not just out to make oodles of money; it's on a crusade - to liberate information for the masses - and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause. Depending on your point of view as you look forward to the next ten years, you'll find that either comforting or discomforting.
This post draws on my article The Google Enigma, which was published last year in Strategy & Business.
The cloud's Chrome lining
September 02, 2008
Google's release today of a test version of its new open-source web browser, Chrome, marks an important moment in the ongoing shift of personal computing from the PC hard drive to the Internet "cloud." I distinctly remember when, back in 1988, Apple Computer added MultiFinder to its Macintosh operating system, allowing my beloved Mac Plus to run more than one application at a time. That was, for us Mac users, anyway, a very big deal. Chrome - if we can trust the comic book - promises a similar leap in the capacity of the cloud to run applications speedily, securely, and simultaneously. Indeed, it is the first browser built from the ground up with the idea of running applications rather than displaying pages. It takes the browser's file-tab metaphor, a metaphor reflecting the old idea of the web as a collection of pages, and repurposes it for application multitasking. Chrome is the first cloud browser.
Though the initial beta release of Chrome runs only on Microsoft's Windows operating system, Chrome is being seen as yet another sharp Google stick aimed at the Beast of Redmond's cyclopean eye - an attempt not only to displace Internet Explorer but to disintermediate Windows itself as the platform of choice for running PC software. There is, no doubt, truth to that view, but in this case I think Google is motivated by something much larger than its congenital hatred of Microsoft. It knows that its future, both as a business and as an idea (and Google's always been both), hinges on the continued rapid expansion of the usefulness of the Internet, which in turn hinges on the continued rapid expansion of the capabilities of web apps, which in turn hinges on rapid improvements in the workings of web browsers.
To Google, the browser has become a weak link in the cloud system - the needle's eye through which the outputs of the company's massive data centers usually have to pass to reach the user - and as a result the browser has to be rethought, revamped, retooled, modernized. Google can't wait for Microsoft or Apple or the Mozilla Foundation to make the changes (the first has mixed feelings about promoting cloud apps, the second is more interested in hardware than in clouds, and the third, despite regular infusions of Google bucks, lacks resources), so Google is jump-starting the process with Chrome.
Although I'm sure Google would be thrilled if Chrome grabbed a sizable chunk of market share, winning a "browser war" is not its real goal. Its real goal, embedded in Chrome's open-source code, is to upgrade the capabilities of all browsers so that they can better support (and eventually disappear behind) the applications. The browser may be the medium, but the applications are the message.
The Atlantic article:
Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
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