First Post – The Thinking Machines Are Coming

Testing 123… The Thinking Machines Are Coming. Are we ready?

I was working with GWU and former Computer Science Department Chair, Professor Peter Bock and his colleague, Jim Hubshman, my scientist brother and advisor, as well as a half dozen or more of their amazing AI builder colleagues from around the world. We were working on ALISA Systems technology to create AI business tools. It was 2012. Our tech was amazing.  But we were still years from effective productizing.

In this 6-minute adaptation of Peter’s visionary TED talk from those days, he ruminates on where we are going as a species, and how intelligent AI may become. He also predicts 2024 as the emergent year for early AI. (Hi Peter. We are almost done with processing resource constraints, and should arrive at the destination more or less on your time table.) Peter’s inspirational vision, to build a singular being, and give it the experience and exposure to life that any being might expect, to grow into a balanced, caring, functioning adult machine being.  (For those interested there is also his, not-so-sci-fi-soon, novel, addressing this vision…)

What is now emerging, so far, is not any whole being (and perhaps that is for the best).  What is emerging right now are AI technology configurations that allow and amplify machine/human interaction in a huge number and variety of useful adaptations and applications. Shortly, this rapidly expanding domain set will morph to a massive and global variety of highly specialized and broadly generalized and highly personalized intelligent agents attached to sensors and robots and people of every sort and state imaginable.  And we individuals will have access to it all. Are we not gods?

Let’s be careful. Let’s not be cocky.

At FormalFoundry we are building tools and software to govern the human/machine interface. Our mission: build tools people can use to create domain specific input/output controls that help induce provably well tuned outcomes.

~ Peter Hubshman, Co-Founder

(Professor Bock’s full 20 minute TEDX talk on the emergence of AI can be seen here.)