The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (32 page)

“The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”

—Western Union executive, 1876

 

 

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are not possible.”

 

—Lord Kelvin, 1895

 

 

“The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented by new discoveries is exceedingly remote.”

—Albert Abraham Michelson, 1903

 

 

“Airplanes have no military value.”

—Professor Marshal Foch, 1912

 

 

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

—IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943

 

 

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”

—
Popular Mechanics,
1949

 

 

“It would appear that we have reached the limits of what is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years.”

—John von Neumann, 1949

 

“There’s no reason for individuals to have a computer in their home.”

—Ken Olson, 1977

 

 

“640,000 bytes of memory ought to be enough for anybody.”

—Bill Gates, 1981

 

 

“Long before the year 2000, the entire antiquated structure of college degrees, majors and credits will be a shambles.”

—Alvin Toffler

 

 

“The Internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.”

—Robert Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet), who, in 1997, ate his words (literally) in front of an audience

 

•
Prediction:
A computer will defeat the human world chess champion around 1998, and we’ll think less of chess as a result.

What Happened:
As I mentioned, this one was a year off. Sorry.

•
Prediction:
There will be a sustained decline in the value of commodities (that is, material resources) with most new wealth being created in the knowledge content of products and services, leading to sustained economic growth and prosperity.

What Happened:
As predicted, everything is coming up roses (except, as also predicted, for long-term investors in commodities, which are down 40 percent over the past decade). Even the approval ratings of politicians from the president to the Congress are at an all-time high. But the strong economy has more to do with the Bill in the west coast Washington than the Bill in the east coast Washington. Not that Mr. Gates deserves primary credit, but the driving economic force in the world today is information, knowledge, and related computer technologies. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently acknowledged that today’s unprecedented sustained prosperity and economic expansion is due to the increased efficiency provided by information technology. But that’s only half right. Greenspan ignores the fact that most of the new wealth that is being created is itself comprised of information and knowledge—a trillion dollars in Silicon Valley alone. Increased efficiency is only part of the story. The new wealth in the form of the market capitalization of computer-related (primarily software) companies is real and substantial and is lifting all boats.

The U.S. House Subcommittee on Banking reported that in the eight-year period between 1989.and 1997, the total value of U.S. real estate and durable goods increased only 33 percent, from $9.1 trillion to $12.1 trillion. The value of bank deposits and credit market instruments increased only 27 percent, from $4.5 trillion to $5.7 trillion. The value of equity shares, however, increased a staggering 239 percent, from $3.4 trillion to $11.4 trillion! The primary engine of this increase is the rapidly increasing knowledge content of products and services, as well as the increased efficiencies fostered by information technology. This is where new wealth is being created.

Information and knowledge are not limited by the availability of material resources, and in accordance with the Law of Accelerating Returns will continue to grow exponentially. The Law of Accelerating Returns includes financial returns. Thus a key implication of the law is continuing economic growth.

As this book is being written, there has been considerable attention on an economic crisis in Japan and other countries in Asia. The United States has been pressing Japan to stimulate its economy with tax cuts and government spending. Little attention is being paid, however, to the root cause of the crisis, which is the state of the software industry in Asia, and the need for effective entrepreneurial institutions that promote the creation of software and other forms of knowledge. These include venture and angel capital,
¹³
widespread distribution of employee-stock options, and incentives that encourage and reward risk taking. Although Asia has been moving in this direction, these new economic imperatives have grown more rapidly than most observers expected (and their importance will continue to escalate in accordance with the Law of Accelerating Returns).

•
Prediction:
A worldwide information network linking almost all organizations and tens of millions of individuals will emerge (admittedly, not by the name World Wide Web).

What Happened:
The Web emerged in 1994 and took off in 1995 through 1996. The Web is truly a worldwide phenomenon, and products and services in the form of information swirl around the globe oblivious to borders of any kind. A 1998 report by the U.S. Commerce Department credited the Internet as a key factor in spurring economic growth and curbing inflation. It predicted that commerce on the Internet will surpass $300 billion by 2000. Industry reports put the figure at around $1 trillion, when all business-to-business transactions conducted over the Web are taken into consideration.

•
Prediction:
There will be a national movement to wire our classrooms.
What Happened:
Most states (with the exception, unfortunately, of my own state of Massachusetts) have $50 to $100 million annual budgets to wire classrooms and install related computers and software. It is a national priority to provide computer and Internet access to all students. Many teachers remain relatively computer illiterate, but the kids are providing much of the needed expertise.

•
Prediction:
In warfare, there will be almost total reliance on digital imaging, pattern recognition, and other software-based technologies. The side with the smarter machines will win. “A profound change in,military strategy will arrive in the early 1990s. The more developed nations will increasingly rely on ‘smart weapons,’ which incorporate electronic co-pilots, pattern-recognition techniques, and advanced technologies for tracking, identification, and destruction.”

What Happened:
Several years after I wrote the Age of Intelligent Machines, the Gulf War was the first to clearly establish this paradigm. Today, the United States has the most advanced computer-based weaponry and remains unchallenged in its status as a military superpower.

•
Prediction:
The vast majority of commercial music will be created on computer-based synthesizers.

What Happened:
Most of the musical sounds you hear on television, in the movies, and in recordings are now created on digital synthesizers, along with computer-based sequencers and sound processors.

•
Prediction:
Reliable person identification, using pattern-recognition techniques applied to visual and speech patterns, will replace locks and keys in many instances.

What Happened:
Person-identification technologies that use speech patterns and facial appearance have begun to be used today in check-cashing machines and to control entry into secure buildings and sites.
¹⁴

•
Prediction:
With the advent of widespread electronic communication in the Soviet Union, uncontrollable political forces will be unleashed. These will be “methods far more powerful than the copiers the authorities have traditionally banned.” The authorities will be unable to control it. Totalitarian control of information will have been broken.

What Happened:
The attempted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 was undone primarily by cellular telephones, fax machines, electronic mail, and other forms of widely distributed and previously unavailable electronic communication. Overall, decentralized communication contributed significantly to the crumbling of centralized totalitarian political and economic government control in the former Soviet Union.

•
Prediction:
Many documents never exist on paper because they incorporate information in the form of audio and video pieces.

What Happened:
Web documents routinely include audio and video pieces, which can only exist in their web form.

•
Prediction:
Around the year 2000, chips with more than a billion components will emerge.

What Happened:
We’re right on schedule.

•
Prediction:
The technology for the “cybernetic chauffeur” (self-driving cars using special sensors in the roads) will become available by the end of the 1990s with implementation on major highways feasible during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

What Happened:
Self-driving cars are being tested in Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, and other cities. There were extensive successful tests on Interstate 15 in southern California during 1997. City planners now realize that automated driving technologies will greatly expand the capacity of existing roads. Installing the requisite sensors on a highway costs only about $10,000 per mile, compared to $1 to $10 million per mile for building new highways. Automated highways and self-driving cars will also eliminate most accidents on these roads. The U.S. National Automated Highway System (NAHS) consortium is predicting implementation of these systems during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
¹⁵

•
Prediction:
Continuous speech recognition (CSR) with large vocabularies for specific tasks will emerge in the early 1990s.

What Happened:
Whoops. Large-vocabulary domain-specific CSR did not emerge until around 1996. By late 1997 and early 1998, large-vocabulary CSR without a domain limitation for dictating written documents (like this book) was commercially introduced.
¹⁶

•
Prediction:
The three technologies required for a translating telephone (where you speak and listen in one language such as English, and your caller hears you and replies in another language such as German)—speaker-independent (not requiring training on a new speaker), continuous, large-vocabulary speech recognition; language translation; and speech synthesis—will each exist in sufficient quality for a first generation system by the late 1990s. Thus, we can expect “translating telephones with reasonable levels of performance for at least the more popular languages early in the first decade of the twenty-first century.”
What Happened:
Effective, speaker-independent speech recognition,  

MY LIFE WITH MACHINES: SOME HIGHLIGHTS

 

I walked onstage and played a composition on an old upright piano. Then came the yes-or-no questions. Former Miss America Bess Myerson was stumped. But film star Henry Morgan, the second celebrity panelist on this episode of
I’ve Got a Secret,
guessed mysecret: The piece I had played had been composed by a computer that I had built and programmed. Later that year, I got to meet President Johnson with other high-school science winners.

In college, I ran a business matching up high-school kids with colleges using a computer program I had written. We had to pay $1,000 an hour to rent time on the only computer in Massachusetts with an extraordinary million bytes of core memory, which allowed us to fit all the information we had about the nation’s three thousand colleges into memory at the same time. We received a lot of letters from kids who were delighted with the college that our program had suggested. A few parents, on the other hand, were furious that we had failed to recommend Harvard. It was my first experience with the ability of computers to affect people’s lives. I sold that company to Harcourt, Brace & World, a New York publisher, and moved on to other ideas.

In 1974, computer programs that could recognize printed letters, called optical character recognition (OCR), were capable of handling only one or two specialized type styles. I founded Kurzweil Computer Products that year to develop the first OCR program that could recognize
any
style of print, which we succeeded in doing later that year. So the question then became, What is it good for? Like alot of clever computer software, it was a solution in search of a problem.

I happened to sit next to a blind gentleman oa a plane flight, and he explained to me that the only real handicap that he experienced was his inability to rad ordinary printed material. It was clear that his visual disability imparted no real handicap in either communicating or traveling. So I had found the problem we were searching for—we could apply our “omni-font” (
any
font) OCR technology to overcome this principal handicap of blindness. We didn’t have the ubiquitous scanners or text-to-speech synthesizers that we do today, so we had to create these technologies as well. By the end of 1975, we put together these three new technologies we had invented-omni-font OCR, CCD (Charge Coupled Device) flat-bed scanners, and text-to-speech synthesis to create the first print-to-speech reading machine for the bilind. The Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM) was able to read ordinary books, magazines, and other printed documents out loud so that a blind person could read anything he wanted.

We announced the KRM in January of 1976, and it seemed to strike a chord. All the evening network news programs carried the story, and Walter Cronkite used the machine to read aloud his signature sign-off, “And that’s the way it was, January 13, 1976.”

Shortly after the announcement, I was invited on the Today show, which was a little nerve-racking since we only had one working reading machine. Sure enough, the machine stopped working a couple of hours before I was scheduled to go on live national television. Our chief engineer frantically took the machine apart, scattering pieces of electronics and wires across the floor of the set. Frank Field, who was going to interview me, walked by and asked if everything was okay. “Sure, Frank,” I replied. “We’re just making a few last-minute adjustments.”

Our chief engineer put the reading machine back together, and still it didn’t work. Finally, he used a time-honored method of repairing delicate electronic equipment and slammed the reading machine against a table. From that moment, it worked just fine. Its live television debut then proceeded without a hitch.

Stevie Wonder heard about our appearance on the
Today
show, and decided to check out the story himself. Our receptionist was skeptical that the person on the other end of the line was really the legendary singer, but she put the call through to me, anyway. I invited him over, and he tried out the machine. He beseeched us to provide him with his own reading machine, so we turned the factory upside down to hurriedly finish up our first production unit (we didn’t want to give him the prototype we used on the
Today
show, as it still had a few battle scars). We showed Stevie how to use it, and off he went in a taxi with his new reading machine by his side.

We subsequently applied the scanning and omni-font OCR to commercial uses such as entering data into databases and into the emerging word-processing computers. New information services, such as Lexus (an online legal research service) and Nexus (a news service), were built using the Kurzweil Data Entry Machine to scan and recognize written documents.

In 1978, after years of scrambling to raise funds for our venture, we were fortunate in attracting interest and investment from a big company: Xerox. Most Xerox products transferred electronic information onto paper. They saw the Kurzweil scanning and OCR technology as providing a bridge back from the world of paper to the electronic world, so in 1980 they bought the company. You can still buy the OCR we originally developed, suitably updated-it’s now called Xerox TextBridge, and continues as a market leader.

I kept up my relationship with Stevie Wonder, and on one of our gettogethers at his new Los Angeles recording studio in 1982, he lamented the state of affairs in the world of musical instruments. On the one hand, there was the world of acoustic instruments, such as the piano, violin, and guitar, which provided the rich complex sounds of choice for most musicians. While musically satisfying, these instruments suffered from a panoply of limitations. Most musicians could play only one or two different instruments. Even if you could play more than one, you couldn’t play more than one at a time. Most instuments only produce one note at at time. There were very limited means available to shape the sounds.

On the other hand, there was the world of electronic instruments, in which these control limitations disappeared. In the computerized world, you could record one line of music on a sequencer, play it back, and record another sequence over it, building up a multi-instrumental composition line by line. You could edit wrong notes without replaying the entire sequence. You could layer multiple sounds, modify their sonic characteristics, play songs in nonreal time, and use a great variety of other techniques. There was only one problem. The sounds you had to work with in the electronic world sounded very thin, rather like an organ, or an electronically processed organ.

Wouldn’t it be great, Stevie mused, if we could use the extraordinarily flexible computer-control methods on the beautiful sounds of acoustic instruments? I thought about it and it sounded quite doable, so that meeting constituted the founding of Kurzweil Music Systems, and defined its raison d’être

With Stevie Wonder as our musical adviser, we set out to combine these two worlds of music. In Jun of 1983, we demonstrated an engineering prototype of the Kurzweil 250 (K250) and introduced it commercially in 1984. The K250 is considered to be the first electronic musical insturment to successfully emulate the complex sound response of a grand piano and virtually all other orchestral instruments.

Earlier, my father, who was a noted musician, had played a role in developing my interest in electronic music. Before his death in 1970, he told me that he believed I would one day combine my interests and in music, as he felt there was a natural affinity between the two. I remember that when my father wanted to hear one of his orchestral compositions, he had to engage an entire orchestra. This meant raising money, mimeographing copies of handwritten sheet music, selecting and hiring the right musicians, and arranging a hall in which they could play. After all of that, he would get to hear his composition for the first time. God forbid if he didn’t like the composition exactly the way it was, for then he would have to dismiss the musicians, spend days rewriting modified scores by hand, raise more money, rehire the musicians, and get them back together. Today a musician can hear her multi-instrumental composition on a Kurzweil or other synthesizer, make changes as easily as one would to a letter on a word processor, and hear the results instantly.

I sold Kurzweil Music Systmes to a Korean company, Young Chang, the world’s largest piano manufacturer, in 1990. Kurzweil Music Systmes remains one of the leading brands of electronic musical instruments in the world and is sold in forty-five countries.

I also started Kurzweil Applied Intelligence in 1982 with the goal of creating a voice-activated word processor. This is a technology that is hungry for MIPs (that is, computer speed) and megabytes (that is, memory), so early systems limited the size of the vocabulary that users could employ. These early systems also required users to pause briefly between words ... so ... you ... had ... to ... speak ... like ... this. We combined this “discrete word” speech-recognition technology with a medical knowledge base to create a system that enabled doctors to create their medical reports by simply talking to their computers. Our product, called Kurzweil VoiceMed (now Kurzweil Clinical Reporter), actually guides the doctors through the reporting process. We also introduced a general-purpose dictation product called Kurzweil Voice, which enabled users to create written documents by speaking one word at a time to their personal computer. This product became particularly popular with people who have a disability in the use of their hands.

Just this year, courtesy of Moore’s Law, personal computers became fast enough to recognize fully continuous speech, so I am able to dictate the rest of this book by talking to our latest product, called Voice Xpress Plus, at speeds around a hundred words per minute. Of course, I don’t get a hundred words written every minute since I change my mind a lot, but Voice Xpress doesn’t seem to mind.

We sold this company as well, to Lemout & Hauspie (L&H), a large speech-and-language technology company with headquarters in Belgium. Shortly after the acquisition by L&H in 1997, we arranged a strategic alliance between the dictation division of L&H (formerly Kurzweil Applied Intelligence) and Microsoft, so our speech technology is likely to be used by Microsoft in future products.

L&H is also the leader in text-to-speech synthesis and automatic language translation, so the company now has all the technologies needed for a translating telephone. As I mentioned above, we’re now putting together a technology demonstration of a system that will allow you to speak in English with the person at the other end hearing you in German, and vice versa. Eventually, you’ll be able to call anyone in the world and have what you say instantly translated into any popular language. Of course, our ability to misunderstand each other will remain unimpaired.

Another application of our speech-recognition technology, and one of our initial goals, is a listening device for the deaf, essentially the opposite of a reading machine for the blind. By recognizing natural continuous speech in real time, the device will enable a deaf person to read what people are saying, thereby overcoming the principal handicap associated with deafness.

In 1996, I founded a new reading-technology company called Kurzweil Educational Systems, which has developed a new generation of print-to-speech reading software for sighted persons with reading well as a new reading machine for blind people. The reading-disabilities version, called the Kurzweil 3000, scans a printed document, displays the page just as it appears in the original document (for example, book, magazine), with all of the color graphics and pictures intact. It then reads the document out loud while highlighting the image of the print as it is being read. It essentially does what a reading teacher does-reading to a pupil while exactly what is being read.

It is the applications of the technology benefiting disabled people that have brought me the greates gratification. tween the capabilities of contemporary computers and the needs of a disabled person. We’re not creating cybernetic geniuses today-not intelligence of our present-day intellignet computers is narrow, which can provide effective solutions for the narrow deficits of most disabled persons. The restricted intelligence of the machine works effectively with the broad and flexible intelligence of the disabled person. Overcoming the handicaps associated with disabilities using Al technologies has long been a personal goal of mine. With regard to the major physical and sensory disabilities, I believe that in a couple of decades we will come to herald the effective end of handicaps. As amplifiers of numan thought, computers have great potential to assist human expression and to expand creativity for all of us. I hope to continue playing a role in harnessing this potential.

All of these projects have required the dedication and talents of many brilliant individuals in a broad range of fields. It is always exciting to see-or hear-a new product, and to see its impact on the lives of its users. A great pleasure has been sharing in the creative process, and its fruits, with these many outstanding men and women.