Friday, July 22, 2011

On the last job on earth

We are experiencing a huge change of our society that many job was simplified, or even replaced by robot, machinese or computer. Even the so called "creative" job, like artistist and scientists.

If we realized that creative is just as simple as combination. As a famous quote said, a monkey can type a Henry IV by Shakespeare, if we give it enough time, or if we had so many monkey working. Another example is the IBM deep blue super computer, which was designed to play chess. Many people believe chess player require alot of instinct and creative to construct a strategy or a magic move, but in fact, the requirement of instinct can be replaced by huge calculation that the deep blue simulate the chess board for every possible move. The result is, it beaten the human champion Garry Kasparov.

Another achievement also come from IBM, the Watson. Watson is able to learn and understand human language. It is not simple google translate or a dictionary. It can understand the inner logic of a language, what a sentence infer the speaker emotional context by the conversation! The principle of Watson is learn by statistics, engineers feed the bible, Wikipedia, Shakespeare's and other English contexts. Thus, imagine one day, when you call the customer service hotline, on the other side of the phone is Watson, which also answering million other calls on the same-time.

Recently, scientists also build a robot scientist in bio-lab. And that robot scientist is able to give hypothesis, verify and make conclusion. Can you imagine if this robot scientist combine with Watson, which can be a huge active database and able to speak and write a scientific paper?

However, it is not the end. When we speak of combination, we infer that there is rules to make the combination. Although the rule can be very general and cover a huge area. There is a rule or a formalism.

Kurt Gödel shown on his incompleteness theorem, that, a mathematical structure cannot be shown by its principles or laws that it is logically complete and consistence. Thus, on building up mathematics structure, instinct is an essential. This instinct is a pure creation rather then just combination. Thus, as long as robot does not have instinct, ( which I doubt) the last job on earth is mathematician.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Privacy

"privacy" is extended so widely today and exposed a lot of concern, especially by the internet.

i admit there are somethings people don't want others to know, say, your bankbook passwords, your email passwords, or  a set of personal data that is qualified to be used on the things that make you lose, say, people can use your citizenship number and address and phone number and birthday to pretend your relatie and get money from your bank. or use this identity to commit crime that you never did.

notices that the many "and" between those items, only your address make no harm. coz people can always make up this address, but it is the COMBINATION that define you, or the social identity that is you in the court or in bank. therefore, your phone number, your citizenship number, your address, your blood type, your medical history, your finger print ALONE. is not important and should nto be counted as secret at all. coz the data alone fail to represent a person and function as "another" identity. ( fake identity is, picke one some data that the combination is not a real person in the world, say, Barack Obama, born in 12, July, 1964, blood type B, etc.. is not the a real person! so, that is fake identity )

however, people are easy to be scared by things they don't understand. and or some private reasons, they don't like those data are able to be known by others.

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." by Eric Schmidt.

Cockroaches