Chapter 5 Teamwork

We humans realized early that a team of average people can accomplish much more than the smartest person on the earth working alone. All of us have seen small teams of people work together and achieve great things. I think of a team as a group of people or an organization working together to achieve a common goal. So all small and big companies are teams. It is pretty amazing that we have successfully built some pretty amazing teams with 100s of thousands people like Walmart, IBM, Boeing and many other. Even bigger teams are the many governments that run our countries.

Are the teams that we call governments productive? It is so tempting to say no, specially in today world of political stalemate and conflict. Look at the big picture though. We have made huge progress as a species with the world being run by these so called unproductive teams. If someone from 200 years ago was to look at the world today, they would not stop praising the governments of today. We get so used to the conveniences made possible by the governments, and even demand these as our rights, that we forget the enormity of the accomplishments. They have successfully delivered mega cities, where complicated traffic patterns allow people to move from one place to another, utilities that allow each of us to live in comfort, work like we have never worked before and have levels of productivity that no human has had before.

But can the governments do better? Yes they can and they need to for us to survive the next 1000 years. The world has been becoming more peaceful over time. The cooperation between governments is increasing. But mostly the society today expects governments to deliver infrastructure services, maintain law and order and ensure comfortable life styles for its citizens. There is no reason for countries to fight with each other. Future survival requires utmost cooperation between all concerned. We need a new kind of team. A really big team with goal of ensuring the survival of human species. You can call it the United Nations or another creative name. This team will be responsible for building the human informant database, exploring outer space and other planets to create alternate survival environments. Infact the goal of this new team is not so trivial that it can be detailed in this blog.

But the level of team work we humans can achieve grows at its own pace. The first step to this growth is the realization of a need for this team. The innovations in social networking technology is an important stepping stone toward this goal. We can now collaborate with a large number of people across the world. It is already helping in scientific research and growth of multiple national companies. As the distances shrink, the team sizes will grow and we will move closer to our goal of one big government.

Chapter 4 Tools and Technology for Human Information Database

I have discussed the need for capturing human history as it is being made for the future generations. Fortunately the technology innovations have provided multiple options to accomplish this task. Most big tech companies such as +Oracle, +IBM, +Microsoft boast of database software that can store large amounts of data. Hottest tech term today is bigdata. Facebook, twitter and google are showing how to capture current a large number of events in a way that is instantly searchable. Analytics software makers are churning out new capabilities for analyzing big data everyday. In short, we have all the tools we need to start building the human information database. All we need is the team spirit and coordination, the ability to rise above political divisions and biases.

We need an initiative at an agency such as UN, which will start creating an electronic record for every new born. The agency will be responsible for enforcing security and privacy of the data. Details of what data and how to secure it will have to be worked out in detail. The power of UN is needed to enforce it in all countries. The other option is for an innovative company like Goole or apple to come up with a way that is voluntary and secure to build this database.

In the end, it doesn't matter who does it and how it is done, it is essential that we build this for the future generations. In my opinion, this will be possible when human team building skills are more developed than the current state of affair. I will discuss this in detail in the next chapter on team building. Today the biggest successful companies are the biggest and best teams we have. Government are bigger teams but we all know they are not efficient yet. UN is a bigger forum but it is a weak form of what we need to build the human information database.

Let us all do our part in working to capture as much information about our lives as we can. Even if it is not organized, it will still be very useful. Keep a diary or write blogs or an autobiography, but don't let your existence be meaningless by going through life and not leaving informant for the future generations. That is one action that can make all of or lives meaningful for now.

How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil - A review

Ray Kurzweil has written a masterpiece combining hard cold facts about biological structure of brain and its functioning with his own theories for everything that is still to be discovered. He makes a convincing case for advent of human like intelligent machine by 2030. It is natural to not want to believe all his predictions because that would mean accepting defeat from our own creation.

Ray explains that brain is made of 300 million identical processing units, each with several inputs and one output. The processing unit, when triggered evaluates a combined score of all its inputs and if the combined score is higher than the threshold for output, the output is triggered. Each input has a certain associated weight. The strength of each input combined with its weight is used for calculating the combined score. The output of most of the 300 million processing units become inputs for one or more of other processing units. Ray calls these processing units as pattern recognizers with the input output connections making a hierarchical structure. Pattern recognition is a general word for any task that the brain needs to do: reading, conversation seeing or whatever else. The book postulates that everything we know and do is stored as patterns in these processing units, organized in a hierarchical manner. When we hear something, the chain of patterns starting from the smallest component of that sound are recognized by the processing units, feeding into the higher level combinations of sounds( words), which in turn feed into still higher level pattern(sentence) and so on to meaning of what was said. All these patterns are learned by the brain over time. In other words learning is the process of programming the 300 million processing units and building the hierarchical relationships. 

Ray claims that with IBM Watson and Apples Siri, we are starting to build computers that operate in a similar manner. These are generic information processors that learn and than use their knowledge to answer questions. They are not programmed with all of their knowledge but learn a large amount of their knowledge just like humans do. With these fundamentals in place, Ray addresses a host of questions about consciousness, creativity, feelings, innovation and ultimately the singularity of man and machine.

It was certainly a very informative experience for me to listen to this book. My brain certainly stored a lot more patterns in the process. I cannot say that I buy all the theories that are presented in the book, but they sound plausible and force you to think about ways to contradict or support them. I would recommend this to everyone. Anyone who has experience in the field of computing and is moderately curious about the brain will enjoy the book for sure.

Chapter 3 Human Information Database Need

The struggle to discover our history is not a legacy we should leave for future generations. With the tools and technologies available to us today, it is our responsibility to capture a rich data set for the future generations. This data need to be highly detailed and include all aspects of "all of our lives". Not just a sample of humans from each kind, whatever be the definition of kind, but for each human that ever lived, including the relationships between people. I do understand that there is a,lot of concern in a large number of people about " Privacy". This would certainly go against there wishes. It will not be cheap or easy, but it is vital for survival of human race. 

Why is this necessary? One day in future, this will be one of the most valuable resources for research and will be used in ways we cannot even imagine today. Capturing as much data as possible and organizing it in a database will provide for discovering trends and knowledge today and in future. As the data completeness improves, so will the complexity to analyze and discover trends, but also the potential for discovering life threatening issues and their solutions. We have several intractable problems today: cancer, AIDS, climate change or global warming , terrorism and many more which would benefit from a such a rich data set. 

What should be included in this database? The simple answer is everything. Practically, it would evolve over time as we start developing it. All official records would be a good starting place: birth records, residential information, criminal history, medical history, financial history, social interactions. 

The data needs to be secured and used in such a way that it can be used for good endeavors only. It is not in scope of this blog to detail the means of ensuring the misuse of this data. I recognize that a lot of work will be required to make it happen and it needs to be done in a responsible way.

Chapter 2 - History so far

To the best of our knowledge the planet earth was created 4.5 billion years ago.  Some human like form of life has existed for roughly 3 million years. Our current human species has existed for about 200,000 years.We all know that there was a long period of time when the primary purpose of human life was to find food for survival. Even by optimistic estimates, the human species has had a few thousand years where the prime focus has not been to feed everyone so that the species doesn't become extinct. Survival is a basic instinct in all living beings. We reproduce, socialize and develop processes and procedures so that the survival of specis is ensured.

Back then even though no one had time to think about the meaning of life, but everyone worked real hard to survive, so that we can be here today. In hind sight the meaning of their life is very clear now. We owe our existence to our ancesters. We can all agree that they lived ameaningful life. Otherwise how would we be debating and trying to discover the "meaning of life". It is a formal topic in the world of philosophy today.

Even though there is lack of food and resources for some members of the human population,  it is very clear that there is not much danger of extinction for human specis due to lack of food. At least for a 1000 years now the human being has turned its attention to tasks other than finding food. Every feature of our society today is a result of that development. Our daily activities today are not impacted by the needs of survival of human race. Should they be? Are we unconsciously working towards that goal?

Human Evolution interactive is a great resource to see the detail of our evolution so far.

Raising Children

Kids are the greatest teachers. Sounds backwards but it is so true. As parents,we have completed our education and have great jobs. We are proud of our contributions at work and feel pretty good about our achievements. Then the kids come along. You think how to raise them, take care of all their needs and give them a future that is better than yours. It gives you great satisfaction to see them learning from you. If you have not already experienced it, or if you sit back and think about what you have learned since you started raising kids, you will realize that your knowledge has increased several folder. The most visible evidence is in the use of technology: how to program the cell phone or TV remote or use facebook - stuff parents have to ask their kids.
But as a parent in particular, and society in general, most of us feel the responsibility to provide a good education for our kids. It is infact, in my opinion, one of the prime responsibility of parents and society is to provide quality and efficient education to the new generation. That is the path forward. We need to enable the children to make new discoveries and inventions and solve the mysteries of the universe and human kind. Obviously we need to help the learn the basic or foundational knowledge. But we need to do much more. We need to capture as much data as possible so that at some point in future, the data be available for research and discovery. It is not possible to forecast if the data will be needed, but today's conventional wisdom dictates that it is likely to be needed. We certainly wish that we had more data from the past.
I don't think anybody can argue that we have a lot more to discover and preparing the future generations to make those discoveries will make a significant contribution to survival of human race. We have established institutions to provide this knowledge. Schools and Universities all around the world are doing a tremendous job in fulfilling our responsibilities towards our future genrations. But can we do more. I have not seen much change in the way we educate kids in the last 40 years. Minor changes but nothing that can be called a major improvement. We are still teaching some subjects in a class room setting and testing every year or so to measure progress. It is the same degrees that students of today earn that were being earned 30-40 years ago. We have made significant progress in the availability of information to everyone. Internet has revolutionized this field. The education system needs to morph towards teaching children to look for desired information on the internet to supplement their current knowledge. Today that skill is mainly learned on the job by most adults. Soon nobody will be able to learn the vast knowledgebase or even a meaningful subsection of it.
Creating and organizing the ever increasing knowledge base in such a way that it can be more effectively used will be a challenge for our descendents.

Gun Safety using Google Maps

I don't need to talk about Gun safety to get the readers to agree that we need to do something about the increasing number of accidents involving guns that are killing so many innocent folks. Biden and Obama like so many other politicains are trying to come up with ways to help the situation. NRA and so many others are concerned about the right to own guns. They are justified in their views. There is a solution that works for everyone. All law abiding citizens can own their guns and the innocent people can be safe as well.
Here is a simple solution using technology that is already available. Infact Google and many others have all the pieces. The basic premise is to have GPS enabled smart chips in all the guns, so that an independent non-government entity can monitor the location of each gun all the time. Then you create safe zones on the map where the guns shouldn't enter. These are like your electronic virtual metal detectors. As soon as the monitoring service detects a dangerous situation, for example an assault rifle close to the Sandy Hook Elementary school, the monitoring service, much like a 911 service calls the police and brings safety to school. Atleast we can minimize the dangers from legally owned guns.
I can see everyone screaming: we cannot have government monitoring our guns every where they go. Where is my privacy? Actually by having private companies like Google operate these monitoring service, and making sure that the location information is secure and used to invoke law enforcement in situations of danger, we can do this without invading anyone's privacy.
The reality is that with today's location intelligence technologies we can implement a general system for preventing any kind of dangerous equipment / materials from entering places where the potential for accidents is unacceptable. +Barack Obama Joe Biden Blog - Is this possible?
Let us prevent the next Sandy Hook or the Cinema shooting or....