The Future is Rapidly Approaching

This morning (02014.03.10) I’ve read postings having the following titles.

• Sniffing out cancer with electronic noses — BBC.com
• It’s time to build a bionic brain for smarter research — TheConversation.com
• Bioprinting: Building living tissue with a 3D printer is becoming a new business, but making whole organs for transplant remains elusive — Economist.com
• The rechargeable revolution: A better battery — Nature.com
• Folding@home simulates activation of key cancer protein, could lead to novel drug design — Phys.org
• SXSW Cognitive Cooking: Belgian Bacon Pudding — IBM on YouTube.com

The future is rapidly approaching, yet from a sociopolitical perspective it seems as though we can’t escape the 20th century.

Truman Fed Me Math Fodder

Truman went to R Place for his skillet. Stopped at grain elevator to get a bucket of corn for the squirrels.

Water elevators are hurt by the boxcar. The per bushel price for corn and beans took him by surprise.

Truman fed me math fodder on Father Day’s 02013.

Smartphones Remind Me of External Tape Drives

Smartphones are external devices, but what’s external today might become internal someday.

Apple (AAPL) stock is nearing $700 per share and at one point on 14 September 02012 Apple Inc.’s market value exceeded $650 billion. Tweets about Apple’s iPhone 5 has flooded my tiny neighborhood of the Twitterverse and that has been frustrating because I am not a consumer of iWhatever products.

A couple months ago I quoted myself saying, “I’ll call my phone a smartphone when it starts paying the bills.” A couple of days ago I quoted myself saying, “If only smartphones made us smart.”

These days I believe the following is true: Smartphones are to humans as external tape drives are to computers. [And I am thinking of those old clunky external tape drives.]

External tape drives, once purchased and drivers installed, are often permanently attached to computers. Smartphones, once purchased and activated, are often permanently within reach of humans. I find it interesting that there are so many humans willing to be permanently tethered to a device when they are free not to be.

Over time many external drives got smaller and were able to became internal drives; in other words, they were installed in the computers.

It’s possible that smartphones will morph into supercomputers and get small enough so that they can be installed in humans. If this happens, then it makes for some interesting stuff to ponder. Some examples: Will the Digital Divide get wider? Will humans still be able to function (think) if their computer is down? Will humans still be able to function if their computers get disconnected from the Internet? What can happen to humans when their computer gets cracked? What happens to a human when they encounter another human who has a more powerful computer? Will humans have zero privacy? Will criminals hurt/kill humans in order to steal their computers? What happens to a person’s computer when they die? Etc.

Ismail & Templeton Say “Be Prepared for Exponential Times”

Be Prepared for Exponential Times – Salim Ismail & Brad Templeton – DLD Moscow 2012

I’ve been a fan of Brad Templeton for a long time, but I watched only Salim Ismail’s part of “Be Prepared for Exponential Times” presentation. I mined the following quotes because I strongly agree with them.

All of our societal structures evolved in a time when we were local in a linear world. Today we’re global and in an exponential world. — Salim Ismail

Society is not ready for the pace of change the technology is bringing. — Salim Ismail

Once you take any domain and discipline and ground it in information properties it goes into an exponential growth path. And then nothing will shake it off that path after that. — Salim Ismail

Be Prepared for Exponential Times – Salim Ismail & Brad Templeton – DLD Moscow 2012

Revisiting the ‘P’ in HPC

“Don’t ask me about the ‘P’ in HPC…” is something that I’ve said a lot over the last half decade.

Readability.com::The Era of Pervasive Computing

The article uses the phrase “the Era of Connected Devices”, but I like the phrase “the Internet of Things.” I won’t bother listing the “things,” but the Readability.com posting was specifically focused on “sensors and devices that will monitor and sense our environments, collect data and provide timely and critical feedback.”

I like this quote: “Everything that will benefit from a connection will be connected.”

The following is something I wrote on 1 April 02009…

About the ‘P’ in HPC

HPC stands for High Performance Computing. Historically, the ‘P’ in HPC stood for “performance;” however, these days it stands for much more.

The following is my attempt to define HPC in one sentence.

HPC is a highly pervasive computing environment that
enables highly productive computing via a highly persistent
cyber-infrastructure that exploits highly parallel computing
to provide highly powerful computation.

With less than two years left in decade zero of the 21st century, HPC is really HP^6C — High Performance, Productivity, Pervasive, Persistent, Parallel, Powerful Computing.

HPC systems not only provide peta-scale computation, but they also provide powerful storage systems and, in many cases, powerful visualization systems (e.g. ASU’s Decision Theater).

HPC systems (which for the most part are hardware) need software and these days the software is way behind the hardware. In other words, today’s software is not even close to exploiting the power of HPC systems.

16.32 PetaFlOPS and Counting

The June 02012 TOP500.org list has the Sequoia supercomputer ranked number one at 16.32 petaflops.

16.32 petaflops Jun 02012 (1.55x in 0.5 year; 55% increase)
10.51 petaflops Nov 02011 (10.2x in 3.5 years; 942% increase)
……………………………………………………….
1.026 petaflops Jun 02008 ( 7.5x in 3 years; 650% increase)
0.1368 petaflops Jun 02005 (i.e. 136.8 teraflops)
……………………………………………………….
teraflops 01996; gigaflops 01985; megaflops 01964

18 June 02012 (Monday):

Intel on Monday introduced a high-performance chip family called Xeon Phi, which provides a stepping stone for the company to reach the milestone of creating an exaflop computer by 2018.

The computing roadmap predicts exascale computing by 02018-02020. Intel’s Xeon Phi announcement makes it appear that the current computing roadmap will be accurate. It is possible we will have exascale computing before the end of the current decade.

Human Genome; Autonomous Vehicles; Supercomputing; SpaceX

From a sociopolitical perspective the 21st century has been a dud, but ignoring that…

Human Genome Project completed in 02003; DARPA Grand Challenge successfully met in 02005; DARPA Urban Challenge successfully met in 02007; TOP500 top supercomputer tops petaflops in 02008; IBM’s Watson wins Jeopardy! in 02011; SpaceX successfully completes its first mission in 02012.

[update::02012.06.01] This posting should have included the following… Yesterday (02012.05.31) the front page of the Arizona Republic had the following headline: “U.S. broadening cyberwar strategy”. Today the New York Times has a news story titled “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran”. My gut tells me cyberwarfare, which I think is in progress, is going to be uglier than ugly.

A Couple Turing Test Moments

I use a service called Timehop that sends me an email message everyday containing the tweets that my @nanofoo character tweeted one year ago. Today, 25 April 02012, Timehop reminded me that I tweeted the following on 25 April 02011.

#TuringTest RT @factlets: Software produced original music in style of great composers fools experts. http://factlets.info/SyntheticMusic

Notice the use of the #TuringTest hashtag in the tweet.

Yesterday, my @compufoo character tweeted the following.

#TuringTest RT @MachinesLikeUs Can computers pass as human? http://goo.gl/fb/uP6HW

Notice the use of the #TuringTest hashtag in the tweet.

LongBets.org::#1::By 2029 no computer – or “machine intelligence” – will have passed the Turing Test

Learning About the Future From 24 February To 20 April

On 20 April 02012 I gave my “Learning About the Future in 50 Minutes” for a second time. I thought it went well, but only ten people were in attendance. I gave this talk for the first time 56 days earlier on 24 February 02012. I created a web page to capture what I’ve been learning over the span of the last 56 days.

56 Days Since My First “Learning About the Future in 50 Minutes” Talk

Ubiquitous Sensing I Get, But What’s Nanodata?

The Computing Trend that Will Change Everything had the sub-title “Computing isn’t just getting cheaper. It’s becoming more energy efficient. That means a world populated by ubiquitous sensors and streams of nanodata.”

Ubiquitous sensors imply streams of data. That I get. But what’s nanodata?

“Harvesting background energy flows, including ambient light, motion, or heat, opens up the possibility of mobile sensors operating indefinitely with no external power source, and that means an explosion of available data.“

An “explosion of data” implies to me yottadata (as in yottagoo). Again, what’s nanodata?

According the MIT Technology Review article, nanodata is “customized fine-grained data describing in detail the characteristics of individuals, transactions, and information flows.” To me it seems as if nanodata is a form of metadata (i.e. data about data).

I still don’t get the term nanodata, but I consider that okay. Bottom-line: It’s possible ubiquitous sensors is our future and that implies infinite data being piped into an Infinite Computing environment.