Edge in the News: 2016

"With Big Data we can now begin to actually look at the details of social interaction and how those play out, and are no longer limited to averages like market indices or election results. This is an astounding change."- Professor Sandy Pentland - leading specialist in data science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA - above Edge.org.

Pentland had ambitions to reinvent human society on a large database platform. He believes that with scientific data, one can understand the operating system to generate human society of the future system stable and safe. Thus, the financial system is not disturbed, paralyzed government and the health system will actually work effectively.

"The ability to see the details of the market, of political revolutions, and to be able to predict and control them is definitely a case of Promethean fire—it could be used for good or for ill, and so Big data brings us to interesting times. We're going to end up reinventing what it means to have a human society." - Professor Sand Pentland said.

I imagine the reluctance to publish Q&A interviews is one reason that we British readers find so few serious interviews with scientists in our newspapers—compared, say, to interviews with novelists or with retired politicians.

It need not be thus. John Brockman’s Edge publishes (almost) exclusively long verbatim conversations between scientists about science, and every one of them is riveting. Oscar Wilde said something to the effect that he never needed to go out in the evening when he could find such wit and wisdom in the books he had at home, and I feel something similar when I read interviews on Edge. Indeed, it may be as well that Edge limits itself to publishing one main interview per month, since if there were many more of them I would have time for nothing else.

Oscar Wilde said something to the effect that he never needed to go out in the evening when he could find such wit and wisdom in the books he had at home. I feel something similar when I read interviews on Edge.

This fascinating book contains the thoughts of the world's leading biologists, geneticists and evolutionary theorists. It's all about where we are, and where we're heading—from a comparison between genes and digital information to new findings on how parents individually influence the human genome.

Speculation comes to mind of a reigning "social mood" in recent days, with a local reality in gray tone that combined corruption scandals, economic recession and defeat in the Copa America, and that in turn matches no less daunting international context, between Brexit, the prospect of Donald Trump winning the election in the United States, terrorist attacks and turbulence in the markets. These were the dominant themes in the media and on social networks in recent days. ...

Six years ago, John Brockman, editor of Edge.org, published a book with 125 short essays written by several of the most influential thinkers in the world, who attempted to answer the question: "What is going to change everything?" The texts were authors like Richard Dawkins, Ian McEwan, Nassim Taleb, Steven Pinker, Freeman Dyson and Jared Diamond, among others.

Most responses came from the field of artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, physics and astronomy (the most repeated response will change what all was the discovery of intelligence beyond Earth).

In the past week I seized the opportunity to meet two foreign role models who visited the country.

One is the theoretical physicist Lisa Randall. The other is the artist Brian Eno.

Lisa Randall...spoke to Science & Cocktails in Christiania, which I blogged about here. And she is the person who to me has opened the magic of the laws of physics (and our limited senses to understand it) with books like 'Knocking on Heaven's Door' and her totally humble nature.

Then there's Brian Eno.

...[H]is cooperation with Stewart Brand and The Long Now Foundation and involvement in the anthology This Will Make You Smarter (published by Edge and which each year asks experts in their field an ambitious questions - and to the anthology this year was: "WHAT IS THE MOST INTERESTING RECENT SCIENTIFIC NEWS?"), I found out that Eno is actually deeply ambitious about the world's development while he is a great artist.

John Brockman is a colourful character, known to share photos of himself rubbing shoulders with the likes of Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, or John Cage. That popular culture should include intelligent conversations about science is a given for him.

Edge.org, sometimes dubbed “the world’s smartest website”, was born out of an idea from Brockman’s late friend, performance artist James Lee Byars, who suggested that rather than trying to assimilate the information contained in the six million books housed in the Harvard library it might be more productive and instructive to assemble the hundred most brilliant minds and have them ask each other questions in order to achieve what Brockman has referred to as “a synthesis of all thought”.

Life is the fifth volume in The Best Of Edge series, and as with previous books, most of the featured content has already appeared on the Edge.org website....

...[T]here is an advantage to reading the essays featured in Life as opposed to gleaning information from random articles on the Internet.

On the net knowledge is dispersed, whereas this book has a structured sense of narrative, showing how research from different disciplines, and their disciples, can bolster and inform each other.

Ultimately, the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, perhaps an apt and fitting off-the-cuff metaphor for the subject matter – life.

[Mary Lou Jepsen's] vision is broad and sweeping: it runs from a new generation of extremely high-resolution, affordable MRI machines for early detection of cancer, heart disease, and more, to a far-out time (or maybe not so far-out) when machines can read people’s minds and people can communicate—with each other and maybe even with animals—via thoughts.

The idea “leverages the tools of our times,” Jepsen says, citing advances in everything from physics to optoelectronics to consumer electronics to big data and A.I. that can be combined to shrink the size, improve the functionality, and lower the cost of MRI. “I could no longer wait. I’m still writing up the patents. But I am incredibly excited to strike off on this direction,” she says.

The startup, whose name has not previously been released as far as I can tell, is called Open Water (it could also be OpenWater, “not sure yet…either is OK for now,” she says). “Peter Gabriel gave me the name. He is a great advisor,” Jepsen says. In particular, she was inspired by this article he wrote for Edge.org, called Open Water–The Internet of Visible Thought, in which he credited Jepsen for introducing him “to the potential of brain reading devices.”

Like many people nowadays, I do not talk on my iPhone as much as talk to it. That’s because it runs a program called Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface) that works as an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator. It’s useful, in a way. If I ask it for “weather in London today”, it’ll present an hour-by-hour weather forecast. Tell it to “phone home” and it’ll make a decent effort to find the relevant number. Ask it to “text James” and it will come back with: “What do you want to say to James?” Not exactly Socratic dialogue, but it has its uses.

Ask Siri: “What’s the meaning of life?”, however, and it loses its nerve. “Life,” it replies, “is a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings. I guess that includes me.” Ten points for that last sentence. But the question: “What should I do with my life?” really stumps it. “Interesting question” is all it can do, which suggests that we haven’t really moved much beyond Joseph Weizenbaum’s famous Eliza program, which was created in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory between 1964 and 1966. . . . 

. . . [O]ften what really matters to us humans is stuff that we have difficulty articulating.

What’s brought this to mind is an extraordinary interview with Stephen Wolfram that’s just appeared on John Brockman’s Edge.org site. The term “genius” is often overused, but I think it’s merited in Wolfram’s case. Those of us who bear the scars from school and university years spent wrestling with advanced maths are forever in his debt, because he invented Mathematica, a computer program that takes much of the pain out of solving equations, graphing complex functions and other arcane tasks. But he’s also worked in computer science and mathematical physics and is the founder of the WolframAlpha “computational knowledge engine”, which is one of the wonders of the online world. . . .

...[W]ith the culmination of decades of progress in building advanced computing devices and machine learning putting the world on the cusp of true AI, the ground is finally fertile for philosophers, scientists and all manner of other experts and thinkers to jump into the discussion with their own vision of the future of the thinking machine. 

What to Think About Machines That Think is a compilation of incredibly short essays on AI, edited by John Brockman ... literary agent to some of the finest minds of our times. ...

Brockman currently runs the ‘online science salon’ edge.org (which The Guardian once called “the world’s smartest website”). The Edge Question, which he poses every year to his extended network of exceedingly intelligent friends and clients, is a simple, direct question that seeks to push the boundaries of understanding on a burning scientific issue.

Year 2015’s question prompts respondents to ruminate on the potential technological, ethical and even emotional issues that will arise when the first machines start to think independently. ...