Tag Archives: Computers

Dialectics of Energy and Intelligence : 1

22 Monday Aug 2016

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RV-AI719_BKRV_M_P_20121116004627Intelligence is a hot topic in technical and business circles. Intelligence is no longer an intellectual or philosophical or psychological topic of discussion. Intelligence is now regarded as the fuel for the future engines of progress for humanity. Artificial intelligence is expected to fuel the most important machines of our time. Be it IBM Watson, or Apple Siri, or Amazon Alexa or Google DeepMind, Artificial intelligence is the driving force for all these advanced information machinery.  When we are seeing a society and economy dominated by the constellation of advanced machinery and their information architecture, it is quite natural to believe that the combination of artificial intelligence and advanced information machinery is going to rule this world. Even if we accept the autonomous nature of information machinery powered by artificial intelligence, the question of energy and its dialectic relationship with intelligence comes into play.

How does energy influences intelligence? Does this question sound odd ? When I mention intelligence,  it is not only artificial intelligence. The terrain of intelligence touches upon natural intelligence, human intelligence, societal intelligence, personal intelligence, organic intelligence, cellular intelligence, atomic intelligence, sub-atomic intelligence, particle intelligence, material intelligence, fluid intelligence, entropy intelligence, fractal intelligence, quantum intelligence and so on. Artificial intelligence we are talking about is just a sub-set of human intelligence in the personal and inter-personal level. It is not even the complete mapping of human intelligence at the societal, personal and organic level. If we take into account these multitude categories of intelligence, the next question is on the dialectic relationship between energy and intelligence.

The relationship between energy, matter and space time is of profound implications. At the quantum mechanical level, energy influences space time properties such as angular momentum, velocity, wave length, frequency etc. On the galactic dimensions, space time curvature together with matter influences the nature of electromagnetic waves. The precise nature of energy, matter and space time are meshed together in the extreme dimensions, be it microscopic or macroscopic. This dialectical relationship between matter and energy is manifested in different space time conjectures differently.

Should humanity panic about infinite computing and artificial intelligence?

04 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in Engineering, Essays, Opinions, Perspectives, Philosophy, Research, Science, Technology

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Unlike humans, computers scale like nothing before – Carl Bass on TEDx Berkley.

This quote is from a TEDx talk on the ‘New Rules of Innovation’ by Carl Bass, the president and CEO of AutoDesk Inc. It was quite an explorative session on innovation. He had spoken about a variety of topics around the world of innovation. One among his themes was the coinage ‘Infinite computing’. Infinite computing? the terms sounded interesting and weird to me at the same time ! I just googled by impulse and curiosity.

One snippet from Wikipedia says

A quantum mechanical system which somehow uses an infinite superposition of states to compute a non-computable function.

Thus my preliminary analysis suggested to me that infinite computing can be achieved through the confluence of quantum mechanics and computational designs.

In this session, Carl Bass, had invoked this term to denote the scale at which the computational powers of machines are growing. He compared the rapid scale at which computers are growing in intelligence in comparison to us. It seems he had made a statement that the computational power of some of the most advanced machines of today is as powerful as the aggregate capacity for computation that existed a decade ago.

This comparison may panic at least someone among us after famous physicist Stephen Hawking has commended on AI. Apart from the hype around the race towards artificial intelligence and contradicting predictions, an interesting take away from such a discussion is our hope that even if machines become more intelligent than us, they should be kinder than us. More importantly we aspire that machines should be kinder to us. May be we can pause for a moment and think how kind we are towards the supposedly less intelligent species around us. Are we really showing loving kindness or compassion to the inferior species around us? At least let’s reflect about the kindness that we humans show towards people hailing from different races, cultures and religions. So connecting intelligence and compassion in the scope of AI may sound hollow and shallow.

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Leaving the hypes and tropes of intelligence aside, let us come back to the theme called ‘infinite computing’. Yes, compared to our own past, today’s computers are way too smarter. Should we roll it back or destroy them or unplug them? No. It is sheer stupidity to stop the technological progress and our quest for imparting intelligence to machines. On the contrary, this is high time, we start pondering about the ethics we have left in the scientific and technocratic community.

What is driving our quest for artificial intelligence and deep learning machine? Is it the quest for enlightening ourselves and improving the lives as we proclaim. Or is sheer passion for more power and information to win a rat race in the market of momentary fluctuations, perpetual randomness and collective variances.

If it is a quest for knowledge and bettering humanity and nature, then learning machines will not be harmful to our pathways. We will find novel methods to harness the computational power and intelligence of these learning machines of our times. Like I mentioned in one of my earlier post in LinkedIn, we should learn from our learning machines with the right perspective.

Keeping these observations in perspective, I am thinking about the direction in which our machines are progressing. Infinite computing, hyper computation, Zeno’s machines etc are some models for future. We are not yet there. We are not yet sure if they are making sense at all. There are hypotheses floating around us. There are supporters and critics of hyper-computation.  To those who are new to the construct called hyper computation, Wikipedia says “Hypercomputation or super-Turing computation refers to models of computation that go beyond, or are incomparable to, Turing computability. I suggest this construct should be revisited with the same vigor in reading and watching the ingenious life and works of Alan Turing, one of the foremost visionary in the field of computation and information theory.

We should move beyond the immediate benefits and perils of artificial intelligence or machine learning and try to understand the possibilities of constructing machines that can take computation to infinite scales and bounds. The simple reason is that, we are no way near the reality of intelligent machines. The hue and cry about the world ruled by machines is not grounded on rational investigations, rather based on irrational fear and ignorance about the history of knowledge, humanity and nature.

Photo Copyright: Flicker/PascalShodan

Dialectical Nature of Natural Computers: Beyond Cognition

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

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Constructing an artificial intelligence paradigm beyond the limits of cognitive computing

Nature is a beauty and the beast at the same time. Bewildering varieties of designs, and fathomless sources of information. This nature is full of vivid beings and diverse entities that presents social and engineering challenges of any scale you imagine. Let us observe some natural processes. Honey bees do construct their honeycomb in unimaginable precision and dexterity. Ants march in patterns so curious and laborious. Birds build nests using any material you can think of. The list of natural engineering marvels is endless as it goes. Behind these wonderful creations and engineering skills in nature, there lies a computational intelligence embedded in the nature. Animate and inanimate nature around us are harnessing the power of this computational intelligence for conditioning their internal and external reality. What is this natural computational intelligence essentially?

Our natural beings measure, compile, decipher, encrypt, optimize, forecast, predict themselves and engage with the world around them in numerous computations. Thus every minutest entity in this material world has an abundance of computational capacity within.It is interesting to  note that 99% percent of these natural computations are unconscious, subconscious, spontaneous and very instinctive. This realization is very important as cognitive computation forms only a mere 1% of the entire natural computation happening on this universe.

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Our recent progresses in the area of artificial intelligence have enabled us to develop a lot of neural algorithms and a few cognitive computers like IBM Watson etc.But nature is way beyond the powers of cognitive computing frameworks. Natural computation is largely instinctive and unconscious in itself. One key challenge is that natural computing is so much hardwired and intrinsic to the beings that they don’t visibly expose the internal elements of computation in their life processes.

Hence on a primary observation we can say that nature has intentionally encapsulated computation in its powerful patterns and designs. Some may attribute evolution as the reason for this gradual emergence of abstraction in natural computation. Thus data and logic associated with natural computation is well abstracted by nature. When we interact with these layers of abstraction in the nature, we get a lot of knowledge about the internals of these patterns and designs.

Artists among us get inspired and venture to create forms of fine art that inspire humanity further to create forms of art and engineering. When engineers among us understand nature, we assimilate those abstractions in our mental models and venture to create forms of figures. When philosophers among us explore this natural abstraction, we try to create finer forms of abstraction from the highest level of perspective possible. When scientists among us interact with nature, we rationalize and speculate with nature such that we dissect our knowledge of reality itself. Hence nature remains as the most elementary and abundant source material for all sort of human and natural computations. Thus both cognitive and instinctive computers will need to rely on nature to further its scope and boundaries of knowledge.

In our recent times, we have made a lot of progress with cognitive approach to natural computation. It is imitating the complex cognitive activity of mind that deals with semantic structures. We are also successful in constructing engineering models that imitate the computational behavior of neurons and the processes that happens in neural-synaptic end points. When we consider these behaviors in natural entirety, these exhibits are not an end in itself. Natural computation progresses beyond cognition. Cognition is an advanced natural process. We have a lot of natural computational processes which are wide spread, rudimentary, adaptive and essentials to the genetic and stem cell structures. We need to explore them as well. Thus understanding natural computation calls for a dialectic approach to the forms of real life processes. Both advanced and primitive processes should be comprehended and modeled and unified with a dialectical unity in perspective.

Picture Courtesy: Flicker/Pavlina Jane

Agility in Analytics and Imagination: Digital keys to survive the future

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

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There are only three moments in the history of humankind. Yesterday, today and tomorrow! We traverse through these three moments every day, every minute, and every epoch of time, consciously or unconsciously ! Various forms of consciousness emerge out of these interactions. Political consciousness, digital consciousness, ethnic consciousness, racial consciousness, class consciousness etc. There are many more ways of seeing time.

Yesterday, we have seen ages of empires and nation states. We witnessed the ages of dictators and philosophers. We traversed the ages of wars and epidemics. We read, re-read and interpret the instances and phases of time. Some of call us study them under the frameworks of history, archaeology and geography. Thus yesterday is as materialistic as the hardest element you find in the periodic table !

Today is as brief as a ‘do it now’ moment ! It is the confluence of our present experiences, past engagements, and future expectations. Hence it is chaotic and complex as you can imagine. Thus in a minute measure of time, myriads of events are happening. Today is an age of data, as they say. Today is an age of information, as they say.Today is an age of finance capital. Today is the age of global trade and market economy. Nothing cryptic about it!

What about tomorrow? Heaps of predictions are flying around us. Visionaries say it may be an age of advanced analytics, age of visual culture, age of big picture, age of design thinking, age of digital imagination and so on. Will tomorrow be more ordered or chaotic than today? It is not a plain yes / no question to answer. We aspire to control tomorrow more precisely than yesterday and today. The question is whether it is possible?

If we observe our lives more closely now, we can understand that tomorrow is already happening. We are living in the world of predictions and prescriptions. Prescriptive analytics is as popular as predictive or diagnostic analytics. We predict weather, epidemics, elections, global trade, future of investments etc.

Now coming back to our earlier reflections about the entities and nature of time, we need to think how is time evolving as it is now? Time is non-linear. When we look back into the time zones, it is more ordered with webs of knowledge and ignorance interwoven. When we look at the current space time, it is chaotic and dynamic, with webs of knowledge and information encircling each other. What about looking into the time zones of tomorrow. It is the height of uncertainty. The only thing we can do is to create minute integrals of fragmented predictions about future.

We know that future will not be perfect as we imagine. Yet we can create some specific events in future through our control over certain political and economic realities. Though we can manufacture some episodes of time, the larger pie of future will be beyond our imagination. Hence time and space in future will offer more exciting challenges at a faster pace than today. Hence agility in imagination and analytics will be one of the essential DNA for survival for any enterprise or community or ethnic race or individual entrepreneur.

Quantum Chaos and the Digital Universe : How to surf through the Tower of Babel 2.0?

07 Friday Nov 2014

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Internet is evolving and revolutionizing every media ecosystem connected and dependent on it. The relativistic acceleration and the quantum of information gravity of digital communication systems is so much high that we have already started thinking about digital universes and digital consciousness vividly. Digital time and analog time have already become distinctive dimensions! May be we can define this state of affairs as a hyper computation landscape where computation itself has become a relativistic communication between analog and digital universes. There no need to mystify this kind of a perspective as we humanity will coexist in digital and analog universes.

A few decades back theoretical physicists and the most elusive mathematical algorithms were dedicated to the realms of astronomy and high energy physics. Within a short span of 25 years or more, internet and world wide web demands attention from the club of exotic mathematicians . Theoretical computation has absolutely no boundaries at this moment. It traverses through neural networks and genomic sequences.  This is no wonder or miracle for any science student of our times when we consider the pace at which our databases and named graph stores are growing. Data has become the prime mover for the global finance capital and hence it moves faster than the flight of capital between nations and markets.

Can you imagine what will John Von Neuman, Charles Babbage and Alan Turing will do if they were offered a re-birth in this earth of evolving internet architecture?

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They would have seen internet as a tower of babel in the making. It is because our inventions and innovations in the internet ecosystem is happening in silos and the confined walls of enterprises such that there is so much of redundancy in the systemic design. Whenever a new protocol or a new communication media emerges, such as web sockets and web RTC, leading technology players start to develop their own private incubators around the base idea and come up with their own separate solutions. It is good that there is a democratization of protocols and media types. But are we really optimizing our systems around our freedom to innovate?

In a system perspective, Internet revolves around the possibilities and horizons of protocols and media types. HTTP is just one protocol among the myriads of communication possibilities around us. Even hypertext is not a rudimentary concept though it has become one of the fundamental premise for the internet architecture. Considering the deeper aspects, the very existence and adaptability of hypertext, hyper links, intelligent session management methods, digital and analog state of information etc makes internet one of the most creative inventions of our time. Nations and corporations are aspiring to control the future road map of internet. IETF and W3C are sometimes the battlefield of ideas and lobbying interests.

Is internet becoming yet another Tower of Babel in the biblical sense ? We have to remember that once we failed to build this architectural marvel though it was the foremost ambitious project of the prehistoric times. What we need is the business agility, technical maturity and architectural creativity to open up internet once again getting rid off the redundant protocol stacks, operational frameworks, chaotic varieties of content types, rigid and lack luster algorithms and computational models. I can assure you that it is not a small task upfront considering the quantum of chaos in the digital universe.

Vivid Dimensions of Applied Creativity in a Social Enterprise Perspective !

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

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Applied creativity? yes, like applied sciences, creativity is a field of knowledge that need to seen from an application perspective. Recently I read about applied creativity from Harvard Business Review​.

It has prompted a lot of questions about applying creativity in a dynmic social enterprise. Every enterprises of today are dynamic and social in nature, whether you classify them to be monolithic, matrix, functional or hybrid. Hence applied creativity can transform your enterprise innovation style in radical terms.

We are familiar with the terms such as ‘mindmap’, ‘roadmap’ etc in our daily workplace. We visualize mindmap using various techniques. Many of us apply mindmap techniques while we confront a vague or a complex and vivid problem set. How about visualizing a roadmap towards an innovative ecosystem inside an enterprise ecosystem?

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There are different routes to achieving innovative products or services as a final destination. Irrespective of the routes taken, you should be good at identifying problems in the current state of things and behavioral settings of cultures. This is only part of the journey. You should cultivate a problem solving mindset and an impetus to create solution. One may say that creativity lies at the bottom of these things.

​There are schools of thought that endoreses applied creativity as the key driving force of innovative ecosystems in enteprises, whether they are start-ups or big-wigs. Creativity can be applied either in the open innovation or reverse innovation workflows, though with different perspectives. It is very important to understand this element of perspective in applying creativity.

Every enterprise, every social entity, every human entity, every human experience interact with a creative problem differently. Some enterprises showcase amazing agility to a creative problem. Someothers defend a creative challenge with astouding resilence generated from its DNA. Someothers try to persist and walkthrough the situation carefully.

Hence the important matter is to have an objective approach to applied creativity. There is nothing like a universal toolbox to apply creativity.  Bringing this kind of perspective to creativity can inspire new inventions and to nurture talents within the organization that can be both disruptive and sustainable at the same time!

Realizing Quantum Computational States through Magnetic Materials

07 Tuesday Oct 2014

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From my discussion in ResearchGate social network on the relationship between electron spin and quantum computer states.

Magnetism offers quite a lot of possibilities to generated quantum states necessary for the creation and sustenance of computational operators. Electron Spin is largely a measurable quality. If you measure the minutest variations in the electron spin and a lot another magnetic properties, their ensemble will function as the ecosystem for computational operators with quantum capabilities. Thus material properties in the minutest level provides us excellent opportunities to create next generation computers. Next generation computers should offer maximum symmetry and similarity to the human nature ecosystem. This is the natural rode to the high performance and sustainable computational systems.

Are we becoming a mindless and flickering society?

06 Monday Oct 2014

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An interesting presentation in ‘ Slideshare ‘ about the decreasing levels of attention span of human beings with the advent of internet and social networks is the inspiration in this post. Initially I tried to find evidence negating this observation. May be we can rephrase it by saying that we are becoming connected to so many things, be it physical or cognitive. This creates a kind of cognitive overload such that we tend to be having lesser focus on an idea. Still we cannot completely be pessimistic about this happening. Why is it so?

This presentation made me ponder on the two directions. It is true that our attentions pan is diminishing at a fast pace and we may become a mindless or a spinning mind generation. At the same time, we are become more connected and innovative and versatile in our professional and personal lives. This is because of the parallelism in our ways of thinking. At the same time, it is always good have the capability to think about the deeper aspects.

Is moving away from devices, terminals and computer interfaces a viable thing, even if supposed to be ideal? Not necessarily. Buddhism says that emptying out the mind is a way out from the mindless ways of life and various methods of meditation offers a remedy to this. How can we think of meditating with devices and our life patterns? Writing habits and physical activity at workplace is a good solution to this challenge. This is not a comprehensive or universal solution. You need to choose this based on your creative and physical prowess.