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Home , How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil

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where you are wait - power status light indicates right charge for your smart - ing so you know when the dock is charging. phones and tablets. when it’s on the Cables for each device stow out www.griffintechnology.com carousel. The TrakDot of the way when not in use, but will retail for $49.95, with the cables aren’t included with SpareOne Phone an $8.99 activation fee for the unit. The charge is 10 watts The SpareOne is an emergency the tracking service and a for each charging bay, and the cell phone designed for natural $12.99 annual service fee. The list of compatible devices disasters like Hurricanes Katrina TrakDot company has set April 2013 as includes the original iPad and and Sandy or the Indian Ocean One of several products the date for release. second, third, and fourth gener - tsunami. The single AA battery announced at the Consumer w ww.trakdot.com ations, as well as iPad mini; iPod will last for up to 15 years, so Electronics Show (CES) in Janu - classics, Nano, and iPod Touch you can store one of these ary, the TrakDot from GlobaTrac PowerDock 5 two, three, four, and fifth gener - phones in your emergency sup - is a GSM (Global System for Griffin’s PowerDock 5, launched ations; and 3G, 4, 4S, plies for use later, much later. Mobile communication) tracking at CES, has a footprint that’s and 5. Another new charging Once you pull the tab to connect device for your luggage. Pack it equal in size to one iPad resting device is the PowerBlock Univer - the battery contacts, you can use in your suitcase, turn on the on the counter. Within its plexi sal with ChargeSensor, an AC- the phone or the flashlight func - device with the button on the dividers, however, you can stack to-USB plug-in charger that tion on the SpareOne — the front, and it will notify you five iPads or other Apple devices senses the charging require - flashlight will stay on for 24 through your cellphone that the to charge all at the same time. ments and provides that charge continuous hours, and the device is on and working. When No need to remove the iPads for any device plugged into it. phone will give you 10 hours of you and it arrive, hopefully at from their covers, and each The PowerBlock will accept any talk time with a SIM card the same airport, it will send a tablet, iPod, or iPhone has its AC power source from 100 to installed. Without a SIM, the message or e-mail—you decide own input. The illuminated 240 volts, converting it to the phone can connect you to emer - which you would prefer. It runs gency services. The AA on two AA batteries and is FAA battery is replaceable. compliant. It shuts down when There’s no display other the plane takes off and then than the blinking blue turns back on after landing. It lights, which indicate then sends a text message or e- battery on and connec - mail to let you know when it’s tion established, but the nearby, or you can follow its sounds provide all the progress with an app you down - guidance you need for load onto your iOS or Android the functions. You can device. It will also ping you preset nine phone num - when it comes within 30 feet of bers, and the lock but -

58 STRATEGIC FINANCE I February 2013 TECH FORUM

Accelerating Intelligence at By Michael Castelluccio, Editor

According to the latest numbers on Google’s 2012 Finan - cial page, the company has 53,546 employees. In DataTraveler December, one of the new hires on that list attracted a lot The Kingston DataTraveler of attention: Raymond Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, and HyperX Predator 3.0 is an the man called the “restless genius” by The Wall Street enterprise-size USB flash drive. Journal , joined the Mountain View company as a director Its capacity is an amazing one of engineering “to work on new projects that involve terabyte (1TB), and the and language processing.” read/write speeds are up to Kurzweil’s AI () credentials are 240MB per second read and world class, and his experience goes well beyond the the - 160MB per second oretical. He builds the things he thinks up. Founder of a write. This is the world’s number of companies —Kurzweil Computer Products, largest-capacity USB Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Kurzweil Music Systems, ton prevents “pocket calls” that 3.0 flash drive. The 1TB model and the Medical Learning Company —he has been in - will waste your battery. There is to begin shipping in first ducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and was are two GSM frequencies avail - quarter 2013, with the 512GB awarded the prestigious MIT Lemelson Prize for innova - able, and you can even pur - version already being delivered. tion. His inventions include the Kurzweil Reading chase a two-pack (two phones), The casing is a zinc alloy for Machine for the blind and a line of Kurzweil Music Syn - one for each GSM band. Spare - durability and shock resistance, thesizers. His most recent project was Blio, an e-reader One can serve for international and it comes with a custom software platform. His website, www.KurzweilAI.org , destinations, where you can Kingston key ring and a HyperX covers AI and general technology, but for Kurzweil, the activate the phone after pur - valet keychain. Both capacity AI has come to stand for Accelerating Intelligence, not chasing a local SIM card with drives are backwards compati - Artificial Intelligence. prepaid minutes. Installing the ble with USB 2.0. Both drives Now that he’s moving from Cambridge, Mass., to card is as easy as snapping off offer the convenience of size at Mountain View, Calif., the question resonating on both the back and slipping in the about 1"  2.8" without a key coasts is “What’s he going to do at the ?” card. The phone includes a ring and 1 "  3.8" with the Although the platform seems a reasonable waterproof flotation pouch. ring. Both are very expensive place for him to land, somehow that doesn’t cover all the Check the www.spareone.com compared to larger portable speculation surrounding the move. is days website for GSM frequencies memory drives with similar away from turning 65 years old, and restless geniuses and coverage. capacities. www.kingston.com aren’t likely to move cross-country just to incrementally add to what they have already done with text-to-speech language recognition and AI. When you factor in the likelihood that a company like Google has more than a few projects they might want to keep close for the time being, and that Google is wildly diverse in its interests— continued on next page

February 2013 I STRATEGIC FINANCE 59 TECHNOLOGY TECH FORUM

everything from cloud offerings to cars actually moved the grandmaster to aban - that drive themselves to computers you don the game and to wander off into the wear like glasses —and the possibilities wilderness of Russian political life. for a Raymond Kurzweil seem to widen. An interesting footnote to this predic - Add in the main theme of Kurzweil’s tion is the oft-forgotten second half of recent writings (what will happen when Kurzweil’s guess. Chess traditionally was computers exceed human intelligence), seen as the most intellectualized human and you can come up with some really contest. That was why some very smart interesting speculations about how he people thought a machine would never might be used. defeat a human champion. Kurzweil pre - Three of Kurzweil’s most recent books are The Age of Spiri - dicted that once a machine achieved preeminence, the tual Machines : When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence ; notion of chess as the ultimate intellectual endeavor would the Amazon best-seller , which covers be abandoned. He was right. some of the same ground and then builds on it; and, finally, The , in a roundabout way, gets to the question : The Secret of Human Thought of whether machines will ever be able to think. The game is Revealed . Of that work, Rafael Reif, president of MIT, says, simple. A human sits in one room communicating with two “Ray has a way of tackling seemingly overwhelming chal - other beings, hidden from his view in other rooms. One is a lenges with an army of reason, in the end convincing the person, and the other is a computer. When we reach the reader that it is within our reach to create nonbiological intel - point where the human can’t tell the difference between the ligence that will soar past our own. This is a visionary work computer and the person, the test is over. Machine and that is also accessible and entertaining.” This idea of a nonbi - human intelligence at this point will be indistinguishable. ological intelligence has been evolving over the span that pro - In February 2011, when IBM’s defeated the duced these three books, and Kurzweil recently has focused in human champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in the on when we will reach that tipping point. Jeopardy Challenge, some thought we had witnessed proof Evidence of resonance for these same notions at Google sufficient to declare the Turing Test unnecessary. It wasn’t has already surfaced. Rick Smolan, the creator of The because Watson had read 200 million pages of content and Human Face of Big Data —both the book and the app—had remembered it all. It was because it could understand the a conversation with his friend Marissa Mayer (current CEO language of the questions and answers along with the of Yahoo!) back when she was an engineer at Google. They nuanced ironies, puns, and idioms that make English, or any were discussing the reach of big data, and Mayer said, “Rick, language, a lifelong study. it’s like our planet is developing a nervous system.” Kurzweil predicted in his 1998 book Spiritual Machines Satellites and fiber networks are already in place and that the Turing Test will be aced by a computer by 2019. expanding exponentially, so will these systems serve a plane - That’s six years from now, yet meanwhile Watson is being .

tary intelligence that can accept human nodes into its retrained in the vocabulary and knowledge base of medicine C N I

, S

wiring, all of it forming a mega PC (planetary computer)? in order to teach and to become a marketable diagnostic E I G O

And will that planetary intelligence be able to be directed? machine. If the test is passed on or before the 2019 date, it’s L O N H

likely the convergence of the two species of intelligence will be C E T

L KURZWEIL’S JOURNEY met while Kurzweil is still employed at the center of one the I E W Z

As a futurist, Kurzweil frequently makes predictions about management systems for a great planetary nervous system. R U K

where we’re going. Two of his more famous guesses about How will Raymond Kurzweil fare at Google? Well, he’ll be F O

Y

the positions of human and machine intelligence involve at a company that’s willing to make serious investments in S E T R

grandmaster chess and the Turing Test. areas of research that stretch the company and take risks U O C

O

In the mid-1980s, he predicted that a computer would be many others would avoid. Google has abandoned some T O H P

able to beat world chess champions by 1998. In 1997, IBM’s rather expensive experiments, and it doesn’t seem to have : T I D

Big Blue defeated the Russian grandmaster flattened the pioneering spirit there. And Raymond E R C

in a six-game match. Previously, Kasparov had the highest Kurzweil is the kind of restless genius who might comfort - O T O H

rating of any player in the history of the game. The defeat ably settle in there for a while. SF P

60 STRATEGIC FINANCE I February 2013