What happens when the Review Application is Smarter than we are?

According to an article in the Science section of the NY Times, scientists have become concerned that machines may one day outsmart us.

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

I think that there is no doubt that a profound change is occurring here, and that we need to (at least attempt to) proactively manage the change. In our industry, we have seen some displacement of attorneys reviewing documents due to outsourcing. What happens when the review application not only stores the review data, but also actually conducts the review for relevance as well? Yet trying to install limits on the growth of technology is a difficult, and perhaps ill-advised, effort.

The article continues by mentioning scenarios which have machines taking over…or at least foresee the ending of the “human era.” Interestingly, the final passages look at an interesting occurrence in these times:
Despite his concerns, Dr. Horvitz said he was hopeful that artificial intelligence research would benefit humans, and perhaps even compensate for human failings. He recently demonstrated a voice-based system that he designed to ask patients about their symptoms and to respond with empathy. When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.”

A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion. “That’s a great idea,” Dr. Horvitz said he was told. “I have no time for that.”

So here, we program a machine to simulate human emotion, alleviating the need for a real human to be supportive. Of all the ways the future can go, I would say that humans attempting to emulate machine-like behavior for the sake of efficiency is the worst choice. We cannot be better machines than machines…we can only maintain a true course in all of this chaos by embracing our own humanity. The doctor above who “had no time” to be supportive needs (ahem) to be re-programmed.

This post will self-destruct in 5…4…3…

If you’re hearing the Mission Impossible theme, then we are on the same page. Science Daily has an article discussing a method allowing content to expire and self destruct. Developed by University of Washington computer scientists, the technology would make it so that even the content’s original sender couldn’t retrieve the data beyond the “expiration date.” Why do this?

“If you care about privacy, the Internet today is a very scary place,” said UW computer scientist Tadayoshi Kohno. “If people understood the implications of where and how their e-mail is stored, they might be more careful or not use it as often.”

Nothing there a surprise to people in this industry. How does it work?

The Vanish prototype washes away data using the natural turnover, called “churn,” on large file-sharing systems known as peer-to-peer networks. For each message that it sends, Vanish creates a secret key, which it never reveals to the user, and then encrypts the message with that key. It then divides the key into dozens of pieces and sprinkles those pieces on random computers that belong to worldwide file-sharing networks, the same ones often used to share music or movie files. The file-sharing system constantly changes as computers join or leave the network, meaning that over time parts of the key become permanently inaccessible. Once enough key parts are lost, the original message can no longer be deciphered.

[...]

Unlike existing commercial encryption services, a message sent using Vanish is kept private by an inherent property of the decentralized file-sharing networks it uses.

A big advantage to the system, is that the user has no need to trust an administrator or service provider. The system takes personal action and discretion out of the equation.

Preview of MS Office 2010

Microsoft has announced details of upgrades to its office suite, and PC Pro Posts a preview here. Among other things, the article discusses changes to Outlook:

As far as the desktop applications are concerned, the Ribbon interface first introduced with Office 2007 has now been rolled out across every application, including Outlook.

Outlook also sees the introduction of two new email features for office workers drowning under a deluge of email. The Conversation Clean-Up tool will condense long email chains into summaries of the conversation, allowing you to catch up with all the key information without having to open dozens of different messages individually.
…
Outlook will also have a new Ignore Conversation feature that allows users to opt-out of round-robin emails that don’t concern them. Adams gives the example of a long email discussion about a dinner engagement that you know you won’t be able to attend. One click of the Ignore Conversation button will junk any further emails on that topic.

Other changes include an entire line of web-based apps, a la Google; better image editing within Word and PowerPoint; and fewer licensing categories (reducing the number of ‘versions’ of the suite from its current eight to five).

H/T: Slashdot

Cell Phone Data becoming a Factor in the Court Room

From the New York Times:

The pivotal role that cellphone records played in [] two prominent New York murder trials this year highlights the surge in law enforcement’s use of increasingly sophisticated cellular tracking techniques to keep tabs on suspects before they are arrested and build criminal cases against them by mapping their past movements.

But cellphone tracking is raising concerns about civil liberties in a debate that pits public safety against privacy rights. Existing laws do not provide clear or uniform guidelines: Federal wiretap laws, outpaced by technological advances, do not explicitly cover the use of cellphone data to pinpoint a person’s location, and local court rulings vary widely across the country.

H/T: Slashdot

Google Unveils Plans for New O/S

The BBC has posted an article announcing that Google will extend its offerings to a new operating system for PC’s:

Google is developing an operating system (OS) for personal computers, in a direct challenge to market leader Microsoft and its Windows system.

Google Chrome OS will be aimed initially at small, low-cost netbooks, but will eventually be used on PCs as well.

Google says that the new o/s will have, as its “key aspects:” speed, simplicity, and security. One industry expert comments on the import of this development:

“Google is coming at this fresh and, because it is based on a set of services that reside on the web, it is the first really post-web operating system, designed from the ground up, and reconceived for a web world,” Mr Enderle told the BBC.

Scientists take another Small Step Toward Quantum Computing

From Yale:

A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.

What would a Quantum Computer do for you? The article explains:

[I]magine having four phone numbers, including one for a friend, but not knowing which number belonged to that friend. You would typically have to try two to three numbers before you dialed the right one. A quantum processor, on the other hand, can find the right number in only one try.

“Instead of having to place a phone call to one number, then another number, you use quantum mechanics to speed up the process,” Schoelkopf said. “It’s like being able to place one phone call that simultaneously tests all four numbers, but only goes through to the right one.”

On the discoverability of voicemail

Mark Sidoti and Paul Asfendis, writing for Law.com, have recently posted an article discussing the different types of voicemail, and the discoverability of each:

Companies today have more options than ever for generating, receiving, storing, retrieving and disposing of voicemail messages.

In the past, voicemails were stored on analog tapes, but increasingly, organizations now use unified, digital systems that integrate telephone and computer systems. While more efficient and flexible, these advances raise a number of electronic data discovery issues.

If your organization is considering an upgrade, it’s imperative to evaluate the effect, if any, that the new system will have on your obligation to preserve, search and disclose relevant voicemail messages.

The authors discuss the differences between analog and digital systems. They also compile a list of “challenges” for the organization deciding to implement a “unified” v-mail system (that is, a digital system that is integrated with the IT Enterprise). Well worth the read.

Automating Science

Post Process has, in the past, posted small articles on the changes in technology that are transforming society. We pointed to the new field of computational journalism. We also put up a post discussing the “age of the petabyte,” in which we discussed the consequences of having so much data available. In that post, we highlighted a defense attorney’s use of Google analytics to more objectively examine a community’s definition of “obscenity.”

Now, from Wired, comes word that a computer (or robot, if you like) not only stores and analyzes facts, but uses the presence of the data now available to discover laws of physics on its own. That is, the discovery is made by the computer, rather than a human being:

“It’s a powerful approach,” said University of Michigan computer scientist Martha Pollack, with “the potential to apply to any type of dynamical system.” As possible fields of application, Pollack named environmental systems, weather patterns, population genetics, cosmology and oceanography. “Just about any natural science has the type of structure that would be amenable,” she said.

Compared to laws likely to govern the brain or genome, the laws of motion discovered by the program are extremely simple. But the principles of Lipson and Schmidt’s program should work at higher scales.

The researchers have already applied the program to recordings of individuals’ physiological states and their levels of metabolites, the cellular proteins that collectively run our bodies but remain, molecule by molecule, largely uncharacterized — a perfect example of data lacking a theory.

Their results are still unpublished, but “we’ve found some interesting laws already, some laws that are not known,” said Lipson. “What we’re working on now is the next step — ways in which we can try to explain these equations, correlate them with existing knowledge, try to break these things down into components for which we have clues.”

One wonders if the “automation” of scientific discoveries will now bring such a rapid pace of discovery, that we will all be left behind, hopeless swimming against an ever-stronger tide.

The Search Engine as Electronic Brain: Wolfram Alpha goes Live in May

CNet blogger Dan Farber discusses the upcoming release of Stephen Wolfram’s latest venture: a new search engine that is being touted as a breakthrough:
[Entrepreneur Nova] Spivack gave some insight as to how the Wolfram’s search engine works:

Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge.

For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about science — massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world.

Based on this you can ask it scientific questions and it can compute the answers for you. Even if it has not been programmed explicity to answer each question you might ask it.

But science is just one of the domains it knows about–it also knows about technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, and more.

It also has a natural language interface for asking it questions. This interface allows you to ask questions in plain language, or even in various forms of abbreviated notation, and then provides detailed answers.

The vision seems to be to create a system which can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).

As the article mentions, Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, and the writer of a book (not always warmly received) entitled A New Kind of Science.

Punchcards we loved: A Retrospective on Storage Media

Maximum PC has posted a neat article inviting readers to:

Fasten your seatbelt and take a trip back in time with us as we follow the evolution of computer storage from its earliest days, all the way up to now.

Try not to get too sentimental…