I was just reading an article in the Boston Globe, “The Leadership Thing”, about how a professor at Tufts is trying to change some of the curriculum at colleges and the way they judge students for acceptance.  Colleges now obviously focus on academics on grades, both in their curriculum and their admissions.  But there are so many important skills that one needs for a job and for life that colleges do not teach.

I always try to ask myself what is the purpose or goal of anything I do so I know what to try to get from it.  It seems to me that a lot of kids go to college just because thats what you’re supposed to do.  They have no idea what they’re going to do after college, what skills they need, and the college doesn’t try to teach them those skills either.

In an earlier post, I said I thought one of the most important skills in life is to be able to separate imporant information from unimporant information.  I think another one is knowing when to stop work on something.  The last 5% of a project always takes longer than the first 95%.  I know the perfectionists out there will disagree with me, but at a point I think the cost/benefit ratio says you should stop working on something.  Anyway, these are examples of some skills that someone should teach maybe?  Probably more important are social skills and dealing with your boss, etc.  I certainly like their ideas for have the admissions be more based on problem solving and creativity than academic scores.

I guess the question is, what is college for?  To prepare you for a job?  To prepare you for a happy life?  To teach you academic knowledge?  I do think that the co-op program at Northeastern does a good job of preparing you with some skills for jobs and things, you certainly have a much better idea what a job will be like, what you need to know for it, and what you want to do after working at a couple different companies.  And it changes what you take out of your classes. But there are some skills that colleges are missing as well.

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

~Alfred North Whitehead, 1911

This is true is so many fields. In computer science, more and more simple functions are written into libraries and can be used without thinking. First you had to write code to print something, now you just call a print function. In all research, you build on the previous research in the field that has proved/disproved various aspects of your research. And in society in general, we continue to automate jobs: from the industrial revolution automating things to the technological revolution automating more intelligent processes. And as these various jobs and processes get automated, it gives us more time to work on more important and higher level matters and “advance civilization”.

One thing that is mentioned in “The Singularity is Near” is the theory that universe is ultimately a piece of software.  This is a theory fist proposed by Edward Fredkin in the 1980s.  If you look at physics as basically an information process, with all interactions really just changing the “information” in different elements (such as their spin, charge, etc.), then universe is full of an enormous amount of information and is performing an incredible number of calculations all the time.  Of course, “there is no shortcut to finding out what… [the program] …will lead to.”

Here’s a quote from Robert Wright talking about Fredkin:

“Fredkin believes the universe is very literally a computer and that it is being used by someone, or something, to solve a problem.  It sounds like a good-news/bad-news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places.”

It’s certainly an interesting idea, it was also mentioned at the EDGE talk I went to last week by Seth Lloyd (he’s releasing a a book on this soon).  But it makes you wonder, “what is the universe calculating?”, “why is it calculating it?”, “who designed/programmed the universe?”

I’ve been reading the book “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil, which Holly and Rick gave me for Christmas. It’s all about the accelerating rate of technology and what will happen when that rate approaches infinity (the singularity). This is something I discussed in one of my old rants from 2003 (Part 1, Part 2). I speculated that this infinite rate could be reached when we can manipulate and travel in time. Since an actual rate of infinity seems impossible, would we be able to differentiate between close to infinity and really really close to infinity? Would our perception of time change as technologies are developed at such an absurd rate?

In the book, Kurzweil suggests that the singularity will occur when when we develop powerful enough computers with good enough AI that they can design newer better computers. These intelligent computers would redesign themselves, continually designing better and better computers and other technology. With the computer power available increasing exponentially and the amount of money we spend on computers each year also increasing exponentially, we’ll be buying enough computing power to match all of life on Earth by the 2040’s, so this is when Kurzweil suggests the singularity will occur. We will all be augmented by computers in our brains and also have rapidly accelerating intelligence to go along with the artificially intelligent computers.

Here’s a quote from the book (p. 22):

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

~Irving John Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” 1965.

I was wondering today about the qualities an ideal government or politician would have. I think the key things would be:

1. Actually tries to do what is in the best interests of the citizens, not whats in the interest of the corporations or the politician himself or his friends or those that give him the most money.
2. Thinks about how the legislation will affect not only the current generation but future generations. It’s easy to ignore pollution and global warming and the oil crisis since they will not come to fruition during his term in office, but its important to think about the effect of these things on our children and our children’s children.
3. Be willing and able to admit when he makes a mistake and attempt to correct, rather than just try to cover up or deny any mistakes as our current administration does.

Are there any other key qualities that I’m forgetting?

I went to a talk at Harvard last night to promote a new book from the Edge website (www.edge.org). The Edge is a website where the most brilliant thinkers of our time discuss things.

At the talk were John Brockman (who started the Edge), Daniel Dennett (philosopher from Tufts who researches conscienceness), MIT Quantum physicist Seth Lloyd, Harvard pyschology professor Daniel Gilbert, Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, and Harvard psychology professor Elizabeth Spelke. Brockman talked about how this guy 30 years ago thought the best way to gain knowledge was not to read lots of books but to get the smartest people together in a room and have them ask each other the questions that they were asking themselves. That eventually turned into the “World Question Center” where Brockman asks hundreds of scientists a thought provoking question each year. The 2004 question was “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” and they just released a book of the answers, which is what the talk was about. On the Edge website, you can also see everyone’s answers to “What is your dangerous idea?”, the 2005 question.

Anyway, the talk was very intriguing. Hauser talked about how all of us are very much the same, genes provide the opportunity for lots of variation and your environment and culture selects it. Lloyd talked about how science can never really be proven, all you can do is run experiments over and over again until you are convinced. This was an interesting one, its funny how people believed for so long that the world was flat, the earth is the center of the universe, etc. I wonder what misguided scientific thoughts we have now that we will soon replace? Lloyd also mentioned that all atoms are really calculating things, with spins and charges changing based on collisions and things, and so at its core, the universe is really running a program and calculating an answer (similar to the hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy i think, anyway, Lloyd has an upcoming book about this).

Gilbert and Dennett both talked about consienceness. Gilbert talked about how the only thing that you can really prove is your existence. You know what its like to be you. You can’t really know for sure what its like to be anything else. He made the point that we feel moral obligations to beings that we feel that we know what its like to be them. We dont want to hurt other people or dogs, but we dont care as much about ants, trees, or rocks being harmed, since we don’t know what its like to be them. He brought up a vision of the future when robots become sentient and seem like us, and suddenly say I am me, I want civil rights.

Dennett talked in a similar way about the difference between us and animals. First he asked if we could know what its like to be a beehive or an anthill. Or a rabbit. We feel like we could know whats its like to be a single animal but not many, but apparently the rabbit brain is very separated and may not be that different from a pair of oxen or a beehive. He didnt feel that we could know what its like to be a dog either. Someone asked him about dogs being excited and Dennett pointed out that dogs have been selected and breeded to show human traits, to be like us, and be our companions. So they aren’t representative of other animals and they’re possibly not really feeling these things. Dennett also brought up how language may be the difference between us and animals. Gilbert and Hauser disagreed saying that animals can communicate with gestures and things. Dennett countered by saying it wasn’t our ability to talk but the fact that it allowed us to try to deceive others, disguise our true feeling and intentions. This ability means we must have a theory of minds, we can understand how others think and react to what we do.

Anyway, lots of crazy talk, makes me wonder about what the universe really is, what is consienceness, and what is going on in the brain. I think I want to get some of Daniel Dennett’s books on consienceness as well.

When I was visiting the University of Texas in Austin, Prof. Stone gave a software demonstration of automated cars driving through an intersection. Since they were controlled by computers and could communicate wirelessly, there was no reason for stoplights and they were all zipping through pretty fast.

It will be cool when they have automated parking lots where you can pull up to the door and your car goes off and finds a spot. Then when you check out it sends a signal to your car to come back to the door.

I also imagine that cars will no longer be restricted to the right side of the road. Depending on traffic, cars could drive on the left side of the road and easily merge back over if another car was coming. Roads could be optimized for traffic in this way. I imagine it would be like walking on a sidewalk. Other than the occasional dance step that occurs when you start walking towards someone head on, humans can share the same sidewalk going both directions pretty easily.

Imagine how crazy the “drugs” of the future will be. Instead of chemicals that slightly elevate your mood, make you relax, or give you crazy thoughts, there will drugs or electrical stimulation that directly activate those regions of the brain. They’ve done studies where they give a rat an electrical stimulus in the pleasure center of the brain when it hits a lever. The rat gets so addicted to the stimulus, it won’t even leave the lever to eat food and it eventually dies. The stimulation is more important to it than living. Obviously this could be dangerous, but it a more moderate form, there could be stimuli to provoke wild thoughts, relaxation, weird visualizations, extraordinary perceptions, etc. Should be one crazy future.

I was thinking the other day how much different kids grew up that are just 5 or 10 years younger than me. For me, computers got big in late elementary school/jr high, dial-up internet in high school, cell phones at the end of high school, and broadband internet in college. Kids now have grown up their whole lives with cell phones and broadband internet, myspace and instant messenger. They’re always connected no matter where they go. They’re never separate from their friends at night, chatting online. And they’ve grown up using these tools, which I’m sure will make them the most tech savvy generation yet.

It will be interesting to see how different this generation will be when they are graduating college and entering the work force in a few years. They should relate socially different than our generation and be much more technologically savvy.

South Korea plans to get robots into every home, and even patrolling the streets, in the next few years:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/world/asia/02robot.html