It’s been an interesting few weeks for the announcement of potentially dazzling new online applications, from Microsoft’s search engine Bing, and Google’s collaborative communication tool Wave, to the giant killer of them all, Wolfram Alpha, supposedly the biggest thing since, well, Google.
Of the three, I am the least impressed thus far by Bing. It looks to me like little more than just another search engine, but configured to present results in order of commercial size instead of link popularity. Yawn. I actually hope it is not successful, because it seems to reinforce the hegemony of big corporations over small startups and little guys. And, as this article says, “Yes, Bing is easy. It’s always easy to have someone else choose your values and make your decisions for you. But is that good for society?”
Wave could be quite useful in certain situations, such as project coordination, but I’m not sure it will catch on and become a hugely popular app like Facebook. It’s possible, though, that a generation or two younger than me might enjoy using it in ways that I wouldn’t, so we’ll see. One thing that I found interesting about Wave is that it appears to be a sophisticated version of the ad hoc “virtual workshop” approach that I and others organized a few years ago for developing some nanotechnology scenarios.
And now we get to the big gorilla, Wolfram Alpha, which is, according to one breathless report, “An invention that could change the internet for ever.”
The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.
The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.
Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet.
Maybe. Or maybe not. It is, at the very least, a completely new approach to returning search results. Whether or not it will live up to all the hype and “change the internet for ever” is still to be seen.
In any case, either Wolfram Alpha or something like it will at some point dramatically alter our way of accessing all the vast stores of information that lay mostly fallow on the Internet—fallow in the sense that all of today’s search engines merely bring bits and pieces of information together for us, but they are not yet able to connect them in creative ways that we ourselves would not think of.
Here is something I wrote on this subject back in 2002:
The invention of the World Wide Web (Paradigm V) made it possible for millions of computer users to quickly and easily share data. A single computer can store and retrieve the information contained in thousands of books—but today countless computer networks are interconnected via the Internet and individual humans on every continent enjoy nearly instantaneous access to more information than all of humanity had known in prior centuries.
As computer storage capacity continues to increase explosively, it will soon outstrip our human ability for effective retrieval of information (if this has not happened already). Fortunately, before long we will enjoy the assistance of artificial intelligence (Paradigm VI) that will not only provide access to needed answers, but also will be smart enough to ask questions we could not even formulate. This can be expected to occur within the next 15 to 20 years, if not earlier, and will make available to many humans the knowledge equivalence of at least 100 million books. . .
Reliable storage and easy access to information—no matter how much or how fast—by itself is not enough to power the rapidly approaching technological singularity. Information quality (i.e., accuracy and relevance) and the ability to make creative, innovative, productive use of information are equally significant. But if we assume that tomorrow’s artificial intelligence will be smart enough to quickly and easily sift out quality data, and that the AI also will possess creativity at least the equal of our own, then it seems certain that technological and social change will indeed occur at a pace faster than we can presently imagine.
Seven years ago, I predicted that this big step forward—what I call the Sixth Paradigm—would occur “within the next 15 to 20 years, if not earlier.” That would make it sometime between 2017 and 2022, or possibly before. I’d say Wolfram Alpha looks like a significant but incremental step in that direction, and not yet revolutionary.
What’s still needed is an artificial intelligence that possesses not only speed and power far greater than our own, but also genuine creativity: the ability to find and make new connections between apparently unrelated things and then to judge the value of those new connections and expand upon them as appropriate. Then we will really be on to something.
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