Starting a Small Business
The G Factor
When I was a so called “mature-student” at uni back in about 1998, one of my computer science lecturers asked us what Internet search engines we used. After some of the students said “Alta-Vista” or “Yahoo” etc., the lecturer confidently said, They're all rubbish, everyone should be using Google.
A quick demonstration on the PC projector (very expensive high-tech thing at the time) only required about 10 seconds to convince just about everyone in the lecture-hall that he was right. By 1999 I was confidently saying to anyone who'd listen (not many) that I thought Google would be the biggest company in the world.
Within seven years I was right (for once). Google's stock was worth more than any other. Why? Because, there were no limits to how big it could get and no restriction on where it could explore with its new found market dominance. Google has moved at the most phenomenal break-neck pace ever known in business history.
All the time, it innovates and redesigns whole industries. Soon the sat-nav industry will be a Google dominated market. The mobile phone market will be at least 50% running on Google Android software. A significant chunk of the PC market will soon have Google operating systems. The Internet browser Google Chrome will soon have a 10% market share.
Television broadcasting will potentially become dominated by Google (they already own YouTube) and the next generation of Sony TV's will be built with Google television channels.
Does this sound all a bit scary?
Yes, it is, but that doesn't stop it from becoming the inevitable. I think the scariest thing about it is the extreme speed at which it (Google) is moving. I suppose that nowadays we don't really worry about corporations like Sony but at the time, in the early eighties, it was finding its way into everyone's lives with products like the Walkman.
Now, it is the information companies that apparently hold the economic destiny of the world. It is shocking to think of the tsunami-like power of these revolutions in consumer behaviour. Who now uses the printed Yellow Pages to find a business? Very few I suspect.
The Internet giants of today aside from Google would include names like ebay, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo. They can be started up and be worth a Billion pounds almost seemingly overnight; this is the new economy that will increasingly be overtaking the old economy.
The old economy still has a lot of power that is based predominantly upon raw materials, ownership of land and buildings. But all will be changing. An almighty behemoth of a corporation like BP can now be brought down to its knees very quickly. The massive banking institutions have in the past couple of years shown that none of them are built on top of very solid foundations. Lehman Brothers disappeared almost overnight (an unthinkable occurrence even the week before it happened). Is this an age of extreme uncertainty? Yes, and it will get ever increasingly so.
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
The information age that we've been experiencing with the Internet will soon be ubiquitous and normal. Anyone born in the last twenty years or so has never known anything other than the Internet and the ease with which information can be found.
So, what is the next big thing to change our lives and most particularly, to change the way in which business operates. My belief is that the next big thing is Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.
What is A.I.?
It is difficult to really define. If you had asked a Victorian whether a hand-held device powered only by sunshine, could make any mathematical calculation in milliseconds, then they would have said (I'm fairly certain), that such a device was intelligent. Nowadays, very few people would say it was intelligent. The same applies perhaps with chess-playing computer software.
Most people under the age of 70 will have pretty-much grown up with knowing that such technology was available. So intelligence and artificial intelligence seems to be a shifting thing depending quite a lot upon our familiarity with it.
Some people would define intelligence as consciousness. It is considered unlikely that a computer would develop consciousness in the next few decades, though I think it will almost certainly happen at some point in the future.
I think that the most likely breakthroughs in artificial intelligence will be in the basic understanding of the way we humans communicate.
Currently, if I type into a Google search engine “What is the capital of France?” Then it will just go ahead and search for the string of words “What” and “is” and “the” etc. It will then bring me pages where this string is shown. Of course, it is likely that the answer of “Paris” will also be featured on these pages.........but the search-engine never really understood, nor tried to understand using any intelligence.
There are other search engines, e.g. Ask.co.uk that claim to be able to answer more intelligently but I don't think that they get very far. One that shows a bit more promise than others is WolframAlpha, which is fairly good for scientific questions.
Something that Google is fairly good at...and showing a reasonable level of intelligence is for spelling. If you type in something with a spelling error, e.g. California, then it will make a very accurate suggestion: “did you mean California”?
This is an awful lot better than a typical spelling checker, which very rarely knows any proper-nouns. And here lies a clue, I think in where the future of AI will come from. It will come from aggregation of people's collective intelligence. And Google is placed directly in the most optimum of environments to exploit this collective intelligence. It already has literally billions of people's intelligence being fed into its database. If you now start to type something into the search box then you will notice that it will make suggestions as to the words you are going to type.
Aside from this language based intelligence, there has always been a considerable interest in the way in which robotics can emulate the intelligence of dealing with the physical world e.g. remaining upright on legs. The Honda made robot Asimo is one of the most advanced two-legged walking robots. The amount of “thinking” or processing that it needs to do is very considerable, millions of calculations per second required to walk without falling over.
A robot also needs to be able to see and to recognise objects and to know how far away they are. This requires a phenomenal amount of intelligence, but the advancement in these areas are amazingly rapid. I was attending a lecture at the Cheltenham Science festival recently and was fairly amazed by the demonstration of a photo editing software that was very able to pick out an object from a picture and could isolate it from the rest of the image.
There was also a very interesting project called Natal (pronounced like the region in South Africa). This technology was about reading a human movement in three dimensions. This is soon to be deployed in the latest version of the X-box games machine. It can see how you are moving your arms etc. at any axis e.g. the motion of serving in a game of tennis, it can see how your arm is moving and of course the velocity.
Artificial intelligence and robotics will probably not suddenly arrive in the fully fledged state that one might see in a science fiction film, but they will gradually evolve and grow into our lives in a process of small iterative steps, the same way that smartphones have done so.
Many people like me will now assume that a phone can take good quality pictures, be able to surf the Internet and be able to send emails and suchlike. But cast your mind back if you're old enough, to say year 1990, just the idea of making a mobile telephone call seemed like a sci-fi event. I remember seeing the first mobile phone call in the UK live on Tomorrow's World, that was in about 1985 or so.
If someone from 1985 could see the astonishing capabilities of one of the latest smart-phones they would have thought it incredible.....absolutely mind-blowingly futuristic. On one single device, I can call someone whilst emailing them a picture that I've just taken on the very same gizmo. I can search any information that exists in the whole world, in seconds. I can listen to high quality music recordings or watch a show that I missed on the BBC iplayer......all on one device that is the size of a packet of cigarettes. We are evidently already living in the future!
However iterative the development of AI is, there will still be milestones that we will be able to witness for ourselves. I have yet to have seen anything that can accurately recognise the words that I speak. But, I am looking forward to having a go with the Android operating system on phones that can run this voice recognition technology. Apparently it is amazingly good.
The main difference between the Android system and other software, is that it is going to do the real crunching of the data on the Google servers and not on the phone itself. This is a fairly significant next step in the evolution of such things. All the phone needs to do is be a transmitter of the data. The phone itself doesn't need to be crammed with silicon-chips and software to be able to do the most cutting-edge processing of data.
This potentially gives a smartphone the same data-processing capabilities as any vast super-computer; this is the one single thing (in my opinion) that will drive forwards the capabilities of artificial intelligence in devices and robots. In the same way that a phone needn't have the storage of all one's email archives, it simply needs to have a data connection to the place that it is held. This allows the boffins to build increasingly bigger and better and more clever web-servers for any device to access.
The cost of this ultra high tech development is shared immediately amongst the millions of users via very low cost services or paid for by advertising services. There is therefore a virtuous loop of improvement because the more users there are, the more intelligent the system becomes as it aggregates the sheer number of users inputs and desired outputs.
Google or whomever can put themselves in a similar position will be in a position to know the answer to pretty-much any conceivable question that can ever be asked by anyone. Is this intelligence? maybe not. Is it artificial intelligence? Yes I think it is.
If you have seen the astonishing Spielberg film A.I. then you may remember the android boy seeking the blue-fairy. He is advised to see Dr Know (quite a funny play on words based upon on the James Bond novel Dr No). The Dr Know system was used to locate the blue fairy, and is sophisticated enough to be able to cross-reference results with other results and to make logical conclusions.
Of course, this is science-fiction, but in my opinion, it could become very near reality within the next ten years. The way in which data could be categorised is just a matter of how people make their own logical conclusions of its correctness.
Most people are now familiar with Wikipedia; it tends to divide opinion as to its worth. The content on Wikipedia is not going to be 100% accurate, even if such a thing is possible; but it will for the vast majority of ordinary uses, be perfectly accurate enough. This is the raw power of the aggregated knowledge of millions of people, and most crucially, it is free. Free to access, and free to use and free to contribute to.
I do not need to purchase a set of Encyclopaedia nowadays, because here is an encyclopaedia online that will be often updated on the same day, on literally any subject every thought of.
And currently it is cross-referenced by Google, which is my preferred means of searching. So Google provides the front end of my search. It will ensure that I have spelled correctly the words that I type in, then it will find, almost always within the top ten of the list provided the most relevant Wikipedia pages. This, for me is a very basic form of the cross-referencing idea that I had described in the film AI, and I can see this situation getting much more common.