I get Meaning of Life - Do you?

With each passing day, I feel an amazing feeling of peace and satisfaction. I feel "I get it". At any given time in our history, the living generation has lived their life feeling the same range of emotions that any other generation at any other time. Today we might feel like what a pain it was in early 1700s for people to take days to travel from Washington to Raleigh. Today we are pretty happy driving in a few hours and covering the same distance. Just like this is normal for us, the people of 1700s found the travel time and mode normal as well. If you look at all the progress as an outsider, you will notice that the normal has moved over time, but the happiness and sadness of human race is about the same around the new normal. Today we know a lot more than humans did 500 years ago and we can be sure that humans of 500 years in the future will know and do a lot more than we do. Not too many of us feel tortured by our lack of knowledge as compared to the humans of future. We do consider ourselves very fortunate to be living today as opposed to 500 years ago when so many of so called modern amenities were not there.

As I see my parents aging and my kids growing up, I think I get the meaning of life, but I cannot put it in words or explain it to anyone. I have a sense of satisfaction that I know what is going on in the world. 

Human evolution explained by Computer evolution

Humans have come a long way in answering the question of how we got to current state. Darwin's theory of evolution is widely recognized as the best answer known today. There are a lot of outstanding questions though: what is the meaning of life? What is consciousness? God? This blog by no means an answer to these questions, but a point of view for discussion. Stephen Wolfram in his book "A New Kind of Science " proposes a new way of explaining complex behavior in nature. Instead of trying to explain the universe, life and other complex topics using physics and mathematics based equations and explanations, he suggests using simple computational models with one or more variables iterated several times to generate patterns and comparing to the patterns that have been created naturally over billions of years on earth. Is the evolution of computing a model that may shed light on human evolution.

Now that the evolution of computers is knocking on the door of consciousness, does the evolution of computing help us extend our understanding of human evolution. Figures 1 shows a timeline of human evolution based on Darwins theory of evolution and figure 2 shows a timeline of computing evolution. These are generic images from the Internet and not original material. 

Figure 1: Timeline of human evolution 

Figure 2: Timeline of Computing Evolution

In less than 100 years, developments in computing technology have mirrored human evolution. Single cell organisms are represented by transistors and capacitors and other electronic components, some of the earliest computers are literally known as dinosaurs. Increasing complexity of electronic chips is comparable to the increasing complexity of organs in the various species that preceded us humans. Computers of today are still lacking the human capabilities such as emotions, consciousness. Maybe computing evolution is at the level of monkeys in the human evolution timeline. Some interesting comparisons:

- a complete sets of hardware components make a computer just like our body parts make us

- the software programs makes a computer alive just like the life within us. More about this later

- flow of electrons can be compared to the flow of blood and nervous energy in our body

- failure of a critical disk or CPU in a computer leads to its death just like the failure of heart or lungs can lead to death of humans

- connections between chips are the arteries and vein

- CPU is the brain sending instructions to all other parts

- programs and data compare to the memory and knowledge in brain that directs our actions

- programming language instructions are equivalent to genes and DNA and chromosomes

- Programs are a sequence of programming language statements similar to gene sequences. We discovered the importance of genome sequencing not too long ago, even though we have been writing computer programs for much longer. 

- internet connected computers all over the world just like the explorers of yesteryears discovered the various civilizations and connected them.

I am sure we can come with a lot more parallels between human life and computing.

So what is the big deal? There are some similarities between human and computing, so what. It gives us a whole host of hypothesis to test for answering the questions about ourselves. For example we have been working hard to uncover the mysteries of our brain. We are making progress but can we learn from the computing models to solve the brain puzzle. Let's dwell on this idea in some detail. What we are doing in brain research today is to study the flow of information over neurons and doing things like functional MRI. Imagine a computer of the future trying to discover how the computer works by looking at the flow of electrons or even analyzing the machine code to understand the complex tasks it can process in a microsecond. Wouldn't it be better for future computer to learn the programming language than to decode it by going backwards from machine code. Sounds like human genome sequencing efforts may helps us solve the brain puzzle faster.

The computing evolution to human evolution comparison leads us to challenge some of our common beliefs. For example Darwin theory of evolution did a great job of documenting the sequence of species as they evolved. There are some remanants of "Natural Selection" vs "intelligent design" debate but most people are in the camp of Natural Selection. Without much proof I am not ready to discredit the theory of Natural Selection, but the computing equivalent today is being managed by human by fixing bugs in computer software and hardware and creating bigger and better computers. Some day in future, computers will certainly be creating other computers. Just to go out on a limb, if the humans lose to the machines in the future and humans are eliminated, a smart computer may some day propose a theory similar to natural selection that explains how they got to be so smart, not knowing that once there existed humans that created them. The flip side is that the computing evolution to human evolution parallel may not check out, but further investigation seems to be warranted.

My personal digital assistant

Today everyone is trying to collect information about you except you. Music services like spotify and Pandora want to know what you like to listen and suggest songs that you will like. Netflix uses your viewing history to suggest movies you might like. Amazon is tracking your shopping habits. In short there is a whole category of businesses that are finding ingenious ways to collect information about you and then use it to offer products and services. 

The person who has the greatest opportunity to collect information about you is yourself. Why should I collect information about myself, you may ask. The fact of the matter is that computer programs have become smarter than your brain when it comes to making a choice from large number of options. For example if you would like to pick a book to read, you may research maybe 50 books and pick one. Now imagine a computer program that can analyze a thousand books to find one that best matches your likes. Today your best bet is to ask amazon and it will tell you based on the books you have purchased from Amazon before. Now imagine if you had an app that you used to keep track of your likes and dislikes. This app knows all the books you have ever read in your life and collected whatever other information is required to recommend books. 

The privacy concerns that keep lot of us awake are a very real cause for concern in letting any company collect a lot of information about us. But if each individual could control their information, the privacy concerns could be alleviated for the most part. Hackers could steal it but having it distributed would make it much harder for hackers to steal a lot of personal information for lot of people. 

How would you use the information you collect on yourself? You would need the ability to authorize other apps to access parts of your personal digital history. If you were looking for a new job, you may allow LinkedIn to access your job experience and skills information to match with open jobs. Companies like spotiffy, Pandora, Amazon, facebook and Google would really work on developing agents that can access parts of your personal information and provide the service you need.

It is not too hard to think of the components that would be needed to put together an app that would collect information about you, organize and make the pieces parts available to authorized agents. What we need is an organization that would organize the development of such a product, market it and support it. 

I am calling it a personal digital assistant. Palm pilot was the first popular PDA, but the concept above has the potential to become your new personal digital assistant that is so much more powerful and useful that it will be integral to your life. It will be your portal to the digital world. It will record and know everything about you and instantly support you in getting the most out of the future world of big data and IoT. It will help you find a job, a mate, assist you with health care, file your taxes, find business partners, plan your vacations and whatever else you need.

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.