Why is Technology Adoption Happenning Faster Today?

Cooley and Yorukoglu made some very interesting observations in their 2003 paper about the adoption of technology. They suggested that as a society we are adopting technology much faster today. Their observations are summarized in the table below.

Invention	Year Invented	Years to Adoption
		by 25% households
Electricity	1873	46
Telephone	1876	35
Automobile	1886	55
Airplane	1903	64
Radio	1906	22
TV	1926	26
VCR	1952	34
Microwave Oven	1953	30
Personal Computer	1975	16
Cellular Phone	1983	13
Internet	1991	7

What are the reasons for this? Let us know what you think are the reasons for this. Let me put forth mine to start a discussion:

• Technology is being produced at cheaper cost.
  
• Society today is "rich" and can afford to buy the technology.
• Technology has become a part of our daily lives in work and play and we have become dependent on it.
  
• Technology is used to fill time and space in our lives.

Conformism Leads to More Intelligence!

In the past hundred years we have made more technological and scientific progress than in the past many centuries. Consider the following advances:

• Our knowledge of the universe has increased tremendously
  
• Advances in medicine save more lives than ever before
• Technology has improved the quality of life many fold
• Crop yields per hectare have multiplied

What brought about these advances in the past 100 years, did man suddenly evolve into a more intelligent being? That is very unlikely so we can rule out biological possibilities and conclude that the human brain hasn't changed in the past hundred years.

But then why has there been a surge in the advances being made by mankind? In the 1800's the gap between advances made from one generation to the next was very small. Today the gap in terms of capability, between generations, is huge. This generation has made major technological and scientific advances compared to earlier ones, and the next is likely to achieve even greater things.

Biologically the human brain hasn't changed, but the way we think seems to have changed and that has resulted in the humans of today being more intelligent than those before.

I am going to argue that humans have become more conformist and that has resulted in our making these advances:

• Food: Close to 90% of the world population subsists on three cereals - wheat, rice and maize. The top twenty crops account for about 80% of the cultivated area today. A hundred years back they accounted for less than 30%. What this means is that diets today across the world are getting more and more similar. [This means that today farmers have an easier job, food processing companies have an easier job, transporters have an easier job, all resulting in higher productivity and better food security.]
  
• Education: Today every child in every country undergoes twelve years of schooling and the curriculum is very similar. Basically a majority of humans by age 20 have gathered roughly similar knowledge in science, geography, history, mathematics, etc. Education was never this standardized in earlier times. Different people learnt different skills based on social, economic and local community needs. [Modern day schooling ensures that knowledge is evenly spread. As soon as new knowledge is created it is quickly absorbed and disseminated.]
  
• Employment: Nine to Five jobs are a recent occurrence, so is the concept of weekend holidays. The growth of corporations as employers is also a recent phenomenon. There are clear and well defined ways of making a living. Earlier people were mostly self employed and people had to search for new ways of making a livelihood. [This means livelihood is assured for a majority of the people today resulting in more people being able to engage in creating knowledge.]
  

I would love to get your comments. My thoughts on this are very preliminary.

Chatting With a Computer?

We all chat on instant messaging applications like Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger, but have you ever had multiple conversations going with your messenger friends at the same time and found it difficult to manage? Well we can manage about five conversations simultaneously but anything more and it becomes difficult. Have you ever wished a chat bot could handle some of your conversations while you finish up with the others?

Well it turns out that handling conversations for computers is hard because question answering is not easy for them. Computers programs are excellent at search. All of us know how fast Google is able to retrieve documents. Search works with the computer indexing all the documents available on the web and as soon as you fire a query, by initiating a search through this index to find documents matching your query. In this the whole web is a library in which each document is indexed by the words it contains.

Question answering is harder because the computer now has to find a specific answer to your query. Say you want to know what weather is good for growing grapes. Google can find you all documents containing grapes, weather and grow as keywords, but it cant give you the answer. Worse if you wanted to know what weather is not good for growing grapes, search would most probably return the same set of documents. Also ambiguity is hard to figure for computers. "Did you shoot Dana?" Are you referring to shooting your friend, making a movie called Dana, then there could be many Dana's so which Dana? Humans also use sarcasm and humour which is very hard for computers to understand.

Still people have attempted to build chatbots and the quality of chatbots has been steadily improving. While the IBM Watson system that will compete on Jeopardy is not a chatbot, it still has to learn how to answer questions posed to it. There is the expectation that this system will spur dialog technology and in the next few years we will start seeing chatbots that could take your place in chatting with your friends on instant messengers.

Watson: Computers vs Humans at Jeopardy

IBM is building a question answering system to take on humans at Jeopardy.

Jeopardy contestants need to know a broad range of topics like history, literature, science, pop culture, among many others. Jeopardy has a unique answer-and-question format in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and must phrase their responses in the form of a question. The contestants need to provide accurate responses at high speed based on clues that involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities. Watson the computer that will play Jeopardy will learn to do all this.


Watson will be an advanced Question Answering system that can rival human's in their ability to answer natural language questions.

In 1950 Alan Turing had set the test for intelligence to be the ability of a machine to fool a human interrogator into thinking that it is human. Turing proposed that the human interrogator hold a text based natural language conversation with a human and a machine, where both the human and the machine try to appear human. If at the end of the conversation the interrogator is unable to reliably decide which is the human and which is the machine then he said the machine must be considered intelligent.

Interestingly Turing had predicted that such systems will be built by 2000. Of course we are in 2009 and we still dont have such systems. Could Watson be the first step towards such a system? In Turing's test the questions could be on any topic, but Watson will limit itself to the specific format of Jeopardy.

Some people may argue that afterall humans will program the computer so the computer cannot be considered intelligent. Okay here is my counter to that: In 1997 Deep Blue (IBMs supercomputer) beat Garry Kasparov in chess matchplay. The people who programmed deep blue were five computer science researchers and one chess international master, who together would have been no match for Garry Kasparov. Obviously the computer added that something which could defeat Kasparov?

Silicon Heads: Programmable People

Can people be programmed. When computers get intelligence it is said that they have been imparted artificial intelligence. But what about computer like programming of humans.

We all go through at least 12 years of schooling and this, for sure, heavily influences how we think. Also it is well known that we imbibe the local cultures, thoughts and beliefs so that by the time we are about twenty we are rigid in our ideas about say marriage, politics, religion, etc.

Or worse many people get indoctrinated by belief systems being spread by vested interests. Terrorists are brainwashed into holding strong beliefs. Even politicians push their beliefs and common people get steeped into them. Whether it is slogans like "You are with us or against us" which Bush effectively used to quell opposition and drum up support for his Iraq plan or well thought out doctrines like terrorism, the idea is to get mass following without questioning the idea itself.

Most of us like to believe that we cannot be programmed. We like to believe that our thoughts are our own and that we have not been influenced by anyone into thinking them. But it is well known that people are vulnerable to being programmed. In Britain for instance the fight against terrorism involves protecting young muslims from predatory Al-Queda operatives who will catch the innocent youngsters and indoctrinate them with their bad ideas and program them into becoming terrorists.

But such programming is not limited to terrorist organizations. In everyday life most of us get programmed by media. Media is known to influence public thought. Evidence of this lies in people choosing highly advertised brands over less advertised ones. Simply put advertising programmes our likes and dislikes.

But being programmable has its advantages. A lot of todays advances can be attributed to the schooling structure that has been in place in the recent decades. This allows scientific temperament to be inculcated at a young age allowing kids to make contributions to science and technology later in life. In earlier centuries human thought was not focussed and perhaps that didnt allow technological advances to be made?

Who is More Intelligent, Father or Son

Is man getting more intelligent? In the past century we have learnt many things about the universe, human body, and invented new technology to make our lives simpler.

We have probably learnt more about our surroundings in the past few years than we did in the past many centuries.

Does this mean that humans today (who made all this progress in terms of acquiring knowledge) are more intelligent than their predecessors?

More precisely, does this mean you are more intelligent than your parents? Does this mean your children will be more intelligent than you? Is human intelligence evolving so fast? After all recent generations have made so many new discoveries that our predecessors could not even imagine.

Inherent Intelligence

If I jump up I am bound to return to the ground. Do I return because of any special effort on my part? No that is inherent intelligence present in the universe.

Intelligent Universe

Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, had argued in the late nineties that just six basic numbers define the universe. And these numbers are so precisely set that if they had been off by even 0.001 our universe may not have been stable and could not have supported life as we know it. For example, if one of the numbers called the nuclear force that glues together protons and neutrons had been 0.006 instead of 0.007, then the universe would have been full of only hydrogen atoms. This means carbon and other atomic forms necessary for life would not have been possible.


Rees argued that multiple universes started out each with their own six numbers. But only our universe survived and flourished because the six numbers were just right in this universe. Others argue that God set the knobs giving the exact values for all the right numbers for this universe to flourish.

Well whichever way the numbers came about, the fact is that they encode an inherent intelligence into the the system that allows life to sustain itself on earth. Call them laws of Physics, Biology, Chemistry or call them God's will, the fact is that you and I don't have to make a special effort to make the universe run. In fact it is the universe that makes us run. If I jump I am bound to return back to the ground and not fly off into space. If I push an object it offers me resistance. The chemical reactions in my stomach to digest food happen based on an inherent intelligence built into the system.

Intelligent Organization

Intelligence is encoded into every system, even organizations. For example, when a customer's order reaches a company, a process to respond to it gets initiated. Mature organizations have more intelligence encoded into the system and can handle different kinds of eventualities better. Even surprises get taken care of easily by them. The intelligence in the organization is a set of rules or processes that get followed.

Rules is Intelligence?

The organization's intelligence could be termed artificial because it is comprised of the intelligence of the people in it. It is their experience that is showing through as intelligence. But remember you could change the set of people in the organization and still the organization would run properly because each response is already encoded as a rule or process.

What about the universe? It is doing very well without any human intervention. Also the universe seems to know enough to keep the planets turning, the rivers flowing, so that life is sustained in it. Again intelligence in the form of rules or laws of Physics, Chemistry and Biology is inherent in the system.

So at one level can we argue that intelligence is a set of rules? These rules encode the intelligence inherent in a system. These rules have probably evolved over time to make the system effective, but they are still rules and they support life?