I have mixed reactions regarding the Singularity, the “technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.” Once this happens, the argument goes, AI will program itself and spiral beyond human comprehension. If so, will they consider humans adorable pets or vermin destroying the planet?  It’s hard to feel a sense urgency when state-of-the-art recognition AI involves telling people from trees. But when it comes to uncontrollable, incomprehensible intelligence, you either have to reject the premise or welcome some contingency planning.

Ray Kurzwell takes a broader, sunnier view, emphasizing exponential advancement in numerous technologies. “With 30 linear steps, you get to 30,” he says. “With 30 steps exponentially, you get to one billion.” Progress is misleading though, because at 15 steps you’re only 0.003% there. Kurzwell estimates we’ll advance the equivalent of 200 centuries this century. He predicts we’ll download our brains, and live forever.

Incredible gains generate concomitant risks, however. If you hate the Gulf spill, imagine the equivalent catastrophic failure with self-replicating nanobots. Some feared turning on the Hadron Collider would generate a black hole (more like “apocalyptic failure”). And as  Adam Smith observed, people over-invest seeking upside and under-invest in risk mitigation (e.g., we buy too many lottery tickets and too little insurance).

Then there’s the exponential increase in destructive capabilities. About when my grandmother was born, the NY Times opined we were millions of years from manned flight. When her daughter was a teenager, B29s dropped 3600 tons of incendiary bombs on her home city in one night. And when her grandchildren were teenagers, ICBMs were capable of destroying the world many times over without even being piloted.

Too bad human benevolence doesn’t increase exponentially (or even linearly). Yet it stubbornly refuses to be defeated entirely. Ironically, my grandmother’s daughter named her son after Robert Little, a colonel in the Air Force that had devastated her hometown. After the war, he had shown tremendous generosity to her family, refusing to judge a people by the atrocities their Empire committed. Hopefully this capacity for kindness and understanding, despite our horrible flaws, will score us some points with our future robotic overlords.

Bonus links:

• If you’re interested in the exponential advancement of technology, Michio Kaku wrote a great book called Physics of The Impossible. He talks about crazy ideas that are theoretically possible, and how far we’ve gotten (like time travel and teleporation–did you know scientists have teleported particles?)
• For Hadron Collider fans, some people at CERN made the coolest uber-geek rap video ever made (topics include anti-matter and the Higgs bosons).

I’m posting this week’s blog a little early, to provide some color commentary for a new release of Vitamin D Video.

Version 1.3 is another free upgrade, with some significant improvements.

• Performance enhancements.  Processing video is now up to 2x faster!  Since we process video in real time, this really means you can run more cameras at once on your PC, or free up more processing power for other applications.  The biggest areas of improvement are at QVGA (320 x 240) resolution, and in scenes where there is very little activity (since we’d previously put effort into optimizing busy scenes). Your mileage will vary to a large degree, depending on factors described here.  A fast quad-core PC should now run up to 16 cameras at QVGA.
• Multi-camera arming (with delay). (Basic and Pro Editions).  If you have multiple cameras, you can configure a set to turn on with one click from a toolbar icon (in case you’ve been wondering why we have a toolbar for just two icons!).  There is an option to set a delay so you can leave the premises before notifications or alarms start. You can turn off all cameras with one click as well.
• Remote storage of clips to an FTP site. (Basic and Pro Editions). You can set up a rule to upload clips to a secure remote server.  There are websites that make it easy to set up an account to do this, many offering 1GB of storage free.
• Custom responses to rules. (Basic and Pro Editions). This was actually in v 1.2, but in case you missed it, you can set up a rule to trigger a custom program or script.  For example, you can configure a home automation system to turn on a light when an event is seen.

And my favorite interface enhancement is that if you have multiple cameras, you can stretch the monitor view to arrange the video panes in multiple columns.

For a video overview of these and other features, click here.

Happy monitoring!

You can change from one column of video panes to multiple columns by widening the window.

Last week the NY Times ran seven pieces covering your brain on gadgets, the Internet and multitasking. Several showed families engrossed with gadgets while ignoring each other.

Is this technology making us unable to focus (except, ironically, on our iPhones)?  It reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where an executive concludes grimly that souls don’t materialize because people are “distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.” After a dramatic pause, another asks, “What was that about hats again?”

Apparently, we evolved to react to stimuli–last guy to notice the panther didn’t breed.  Novel stimuli actually provide a  dopamine hit, explaining the addictive aspects of being plugged in. So wireless gadgets are like crack pipes for cyber-stimuli.  iPads sell because they provide a purer high.

We crave stimuli, but also justify gadget addiction.  Multitasking makes us more productive, right? Well, people can’t literally concentrate on two things simultaneously, like driving and texting.  We’re really “task switching” when we IM and email “simultaneously.”

Unfortunately, studies have shown task switching inhibits rather than increases productivity. The research often consists of switching between small tasks like adding vs. multiplying numbers.  You incur “switching costs” when you re-orient, so it’s more efficient to finish one task first.

But isn’t reality more complex?  Checking mail while waiting in line doesn’t get you your latte any slower. Or if you get bored or fatigued,  switching could theoretically increase  efficiency. (And what about time-sensitive tasks?) That said, you’re probably less efficient in “squirrel chasing mode” than you think.

Others, however, cite studies showing beneficial effects of being plugged in, even of multitasking. So which side is “right?”

Well first, don’t trust people who say studies support sweeping conclusions like “web surfing helps memory.”  If you actually read the studies and their methodologies, you often find narrower results than you expected.

Technology amplifies human tendencies, and isn’t inherently good or bad.  But whatever the negatives, people dislike giving up benefits, so you might as well go with the flow. Food creates problems too, but you can advocate good cooking and fighting obesity at the same time.

A friend recently forwarded me an interview with Robert Cailliau, co-developer of the world wide web.  At one point Calliau says the inefficiency of the iPhone drives him crazy, asking why he must take eight steps to enter an appointment instead of two on his Treo.

“I like things to be beautiful,” he says. “But first and foremost they have to be productive…. This is totally ridiculous.… Why are we going backwards?”

Apple’s design philosophy emphasizes beauty and simplicity, sacrificing some efficiency. It’s wonderful to have a one-button phone, but that means it has to take more steps to do other things.

The genius behind Apple’s designs lies in a ruthless enforcement of simplicity. If you achieve purity of design, people tolerate significant limitations (like no copy and paste on the first iPhone). But if you bet on purity, you have to be all in. Once you spoil the purity, people stop forgiving the limitations.

In contrast, the original Palm OS philosophy emphasized the simplicity of efficiency, sacrificing beauty.  I sought purity in functional and visual efficiency. Ruthlessly minimize steps for frequent tasks. Press one button to power on and see your entire day’s schedule in a split second. Beauty wasn’t problematic in principle, but it was in practice–back then it would have required making a painfully slow and bulky mobile device.

Unfortunately, an interface optimized for stylus-based input for calendar and contacts (and 1995 hardware) cannot by definition be optimized for a keyboard-based phone with email, browser and camera.  Palm OS took us pretty far, but the purity was lost.  Apple started with a clean slate and succeeded with a new form of purity.

Palm later came back with webOS, bringing back beauty and fresh innovations to the interface. But I’d like to see a comeback for some of the ruthless efficiency of old. Maybe a few extra seconds doesn’t bother many people. But an iPhone processor is 37.5 times faster than a Pilot processor was.  I refuse to believe I’ll never be able to look up a phone number as quickly as I could fifteen years ago.

I recently came across a 2008 lecture by Anthony Greenwald, who says he can tell you precisely how biased you are. Or more specifically, he developed a psychological test that measures unconscious associations. (You may have read this in Blink).

Greenwald uses the terms “Level 1″ and “Level 2″ to distinguish between deliberate, high-level thinking and automatic, unthinking behavior.  We’re often on Level 2 auto-pilot, even when we think we’re in Level 1. For example, if asked how you’re doing, “Fine” might be a Level 2 response, whereas “The North Koreans are on to me” suggests Level 1 engagement.  (In HTM parlance, Level 2 is the state when lower-level predictions are met.)

Next, Greenwald shows a cool optical illusion illustrating how context can create powerful, unconscious bias.  In this image, squares A and  B are exactly the same color (seriously):

Click the image above for proofs and an explanation of the illusion.

Finally, he described the Implicit Association Test (IAT).  In one test, you categorize pictures of light vs. dark skinned faces, then “good” vs. “bad” concepts (e.g., joy, love, agony, failure).  Next they pair the categories. If it’s a light face or “bad” concept, press one key. If it’s a dark face or “good” concept press another.   Then they switch the pairs.

Greenwald found significant differences in reaction time for different combinations (measured in milliseconds). He claims this represents unconscious bias:  if two concepts are associated, you answer more quickly (responding at Level 2). Taking longer means your Level 1 brain needs to be engaged to overcome Level 2. The test has its critics as well as supporters (Greenwald’s responses can be found here). But it’s fascinating to go to the IAT website and test yourself.

I found my results to be…unsettling. Greenwald said that he’s taken the test hundreds of times and his biases have barely changed.  Someone asked if one could become aware of when you were biased.  Greenwald politely replied that, well, it wouldn’t be “unconscious” then would it?

I wonder if it’s fair to say that it only takes me a few hundred milliseconds to overcome my unconscious biases if I stop to think….