Fast forward: Next 10 years

I finished my master degree 10 years ago. Back then there were very little video on the web and podcast was not "invented" yet. My master thesis was about filming lectures at universities, such that students would be able to optimize the way the study. By only viewing lecture videos with high ratings and be able to fast forward or rewind and review important stuff several times.

This year I realize that TED is a very good answer to my dreams back then.

Right after I graduated 10 years ago I got a job in the R&D department in Nokia, Copenhagen. I was supposed to work with GPRS and 3G data software (which was all very futuristic back then). I had many job offers. But I choose Nokia because I thought it was a very promising future with internet connection everywhere. But then 3G licenses was sold at astronomical costs and we techies realized that it would be many years before we would see low cost internet everywhere. And at the same time WAP manifested itself as a BIG flop.

This year something interesting has happened... I worked on a project where we would providefree WiFi internet in the trains in Denmark. Costs will be covered by advertisement. Later this project will spread to all sports facilities, waiting rooms, shopping centers, etc. Within a few years, there will be free internet in most of the public space in many countries. We will also see some mobile network operators which will provide free interent connection everywhere in exchange for advertisement.

Last week Google released their first alpha version of theirChrome OS (open source = free). Earlier this year they also released their Android OS (also open source and free).

I think that there is a very good probability that we will soon (2 - 4 years) see free computers and mobile phones given away to very large percentages of the population in the world. Affectingly resulting in free computers, mobile phones and free internet. Everywhere, always and for everyone with a credit card. (by the way I assume that credit cards will migrate into these devices soon too.)

At the same time the cloud computers are raising at a fantastic speed. Today Google is buying more computers than Germany every year. And Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. continues grow huge data centers at a very fast pace. Today there are 1 billion internet connected computers in the world. Soon we expect there will be trillions of internet connected computers. At which point humans will not control the computer, but system will control information, which control computers, which control most aspects of the humans everyday life.

She asks: So will all this computer power be green? Island has been pointed out as a perfect place to place huge datacenters with billions of computers. Island has free energy from their seismic underground and at the same time they have lots of cooling water and great internet connection. Sitting on top of most of the transatlantic internet cables. (So invest in Island now ;-))

Today the leading housing product manufactures in Denmark demoed a very energy efficient house. In fact the house can produce more energy than it uses, thus the surplus energy can be sold or used tocharge a car to drive 100 km pr. day. Then you add the modern water cleaning technologies that uses reverse osmosis and can produce 99.9999% clean water. This completely remove the need for cable and pipe infrastructure to every house and remove the need for power plants too. In addition it makes more sense to produce these modern houses in factories in low cost labor countries. In fact IKEA has already started doing so.

Next week there is a big climate conference in Copenhagen, where world leaders will try to reduce oil needs and boost renewable energy production. But we all know they will fail BIG time to make any significant changes in climate and energy production. But they will make sure their appearance are optimized for positive domestic press. If they had any balls what so ever, they would reduce oil, gas and coal consumption by 5% every year starting from 2010. We clearly have all the technologies to do so, but this will cost jobs … which is not good for reelection.

Let me try to summarize what this will mean to our economics as we know it today. Utility companies and media corporations will die a slow and painful death. Construction companies and craftsman labor force will probably be reduced to ½ of what it is today. Information and advertisement will be coupled even closer than we have seen before and in ways that is increasingly difficult to deciphered. Real time search engines and other agents will be an absolute necessarily for any human and corporation. So old jobs will disappear and new jobs in IT sector and housing factories will be created. But not necessarily in the same locations.

Meanwhile my brother and I worry more about when the next major world war will surface. Both USA and China are very proud nations and I predict that the American economics will worsen when weapon based oil dominance, seas to drive the US economics with unfair advantages. At the same time China continues to take control over huge chunks of the American brands and economic. This could cause dark forces in US to raise and take power and demand war.

By the way: Reasonably I asked my brother: What is the biggest shift/event in the world during the last 5 years. Answer: China is now the biggest english speaking country in the world!!

The big thing the next 10 years will be user aware advertisement. As computers and networks know more and more about us they can predict the probability that we are going to by this and that. Advertisement-network-operators will profile you and give you free products and services in return. A good profile may be worth 10 - 25% of your expected yearly spending ability. Similarly your price at banks, insurance companies, etc. will depend on your profile. Your ability to inspire people in your network to buy the same brands as you do will affect your profile too. And a new industry will rise that will help you optimize your profile to create more value for you.

(oh, and by the way.... as in politics where swing voters are important, this is also true in sales of goods). So be aware that this new industry will be a double headed creature. And you never can tell if your agent is working for you or a company that are looking to increase market share or a political candidate who is looking for increased market share.

The next Bill Gates like billionaire will be he who finds a smart agent that can profile people well from information they are willing to give on request or is freely available on the net.

AND DON'T.... send your kids to collage any more. It is a waste of time and money. You need to teach them to learn from the net. I am 100% sure that they can learn minimum 10 times faster from the net, than from old fashion lectures. If you don't know where they should start; I suggest starting to read large parts of Wikipedia and watch TED videos. Find something they are passionate about and get a job related to that.

My final word of advice. If you don't want to invest your money in the top 10 ad serving companies. Then you should invest in Chine or India. Hans Rosling predicts that in 2048 Chinese and Indian economics will catch up with US and Europe. Thus investing in real estate in major cities in these countries may be a sure bet. By the way I recommend Hans Roslings talk at TEDas one of the best 15 minutes lectures on world economics and history combined. (Did you know that receiving standing ovation at TED is considered comparable to a Nobel price)

3 features could double the speed of software development

If the following 3 features was implemented in modern programming tools, then I would be twice as productive as a software developer:

§1.

When testing the software in debug mode and I hit an exception then the debugger should record all the steps and states that happened previously and I should be able to step back to any give step before the exception accrued and continue debugging from there.

It should also automatically set a break point at the line where the exception occurred and automatically jump right back to there. (today VS2008 jump to the catch statement when it hit an exception and the memory state is broken so that I cannot go back to before the exception occurred and get a view of the memory state of all objects.

§2.

When I create a new method, the software IDE should automatically generate an set of test cases for this method. Then I should be able to right click on the method and go directly to these test cases. And it should be easy to add new test input. Even if it is complex. (I.e. a DataSet or a Bitmap or a custom class)

Next the test cases shall be able to test the new method even when the entire project do not build. As long as the new method builds and the underlying classes etc. that it depend on builds.

I should not need to run the test cases manually. They should run in the background automatically every time I change something that relate to each method and the output (ok or not ok) should be listed in the same view as Errors and Warnings. Today VS2008 run the compiler in the background when developing VB.NET applications and continuously show a list of errors in the source code. I just want the same thing for method test cases.

When I am in debug mode, then I shall be able to right on a function call which has just completed and "Add to test case" and then the IDE shall automaticlly add that input/output as a new test case. Similar whenever an exception is caught in debug mode, then the IDE shall automatically add the test case of the function call, which resulted in the exception.

We would need this feature anyway if we want computers to be able to write their own software in the near future.

§3.

There should be an automatic refactoring feature. A tool that would be able to inspect a peace of source code and then be able to refactor it such that the same code was not written twice any where in the current project. (not one liners of cause, but it should inspect for patterns)

Then if some "stupid" programmer on my team, had copied my code from one method to another and just changed it a little in the second method. Then the computer should be able to automatically change this, such that the code would only be there one time. And me and the stupid programmer's code :-)), should be refactored to call the new common code snippet with parameters, which would allow them both to function as before.

- Next it should even be possible to also include one or several databases of code snippets in this pattern search. Such that the pattern search is not only done across my own project but also across one or several databases. (public or private)

--------

I think a small team of 3 - 5 programmers per feature above would be able to implement these as describe in approximately one year.

OK, so if it is true that these 3 features would save millions of hours for software developers around the world each year. Why are these features still not in our tools in 2009??

My conclusion is: Because we, mankind, have not found a good way to collaborate and push software innovation forward in faster and faster cycles each year.

One of the reasons for writing this blog, is because I want to present some of my suggestions on how we can collaborate and innovate much faster in the software industry.

What I want to talk about in this blog

I find technological singularity a very interesting subject. Now I made a decision to write down some of my thoughts on the topic in this blog .. and hopefully get some feedback.

This blog is going to talk about the technological development, primarily related to software development, law and politics, which will happen from today until we reach Technological Singularity. (period marked with green below)

Let me start out with some short statements. (I wanted to keep the format very short, since most of my readers are probably already familiar with Technological Singularity some of the folloing relations)

§1

Technological Singularity to me, is the point in time where computers take over the the control and development most of the technological development and innovation in the world. (Here after referred to as TechSing.)

§2

TechSing is man made, since clearly we humans must drive the development from today until we reach TechSing.

§3

It is inevitable that that we humans and our computer software will make big mistakes and dangers errors before we reach TechSing.

§4

Such errors will create resistance, which will for some periods cause certain technologies to be banned or otherwhise place obsticals for the technolgical development.

§5

The fundamental building blog, which computer software must master on its own is: It must be able to create a simplified model of systems or processes, which emulate the same behaivour of the system from the real world. (in the following I will refer to this as modelling or just make a model)

§6

The computer must be able to model on it's own and even be better than humans to do so. (until this day I have never seen the computer model on its own. Not even very, very simple system.) I think we will see this happen within the next 50 years, but I must admit that it is also possible that it will never happen)

§7

My belly feeling tells me that the acceleration towards TechSing will not happen until:

A. We humans can bring forward a sequence of the probable development steps, which we need to accomplice between 2009 until we reach TechSing.

B. We humans start a war that can be won if humans create a computer that model on its own. :-(

§8

To avoid confusion I want to point out that: For many years it has been possible for computer programs to write other computer programs. These can even be made very complex and base on dynamic statistics, libraries and databases. But somehow they are not able to compare the resulting system model to the real world and improve it's own model to match the world better.

(if the reader want to argue that Neural Networks do this, then I don't agree. Neural networks can optimize there settings to better match input and output. But they can't change the topology of the network to make it more optimal to solve a new problem)

§9

I have worked professionally with software development for more than 10 years. My experience tell me that Moors law have very little influence on when we reach TechSing. If you look at how little operating systems or search engines has change during the last 5 years, then it is obvious that it can easily be 20 years before our computers will be able help us make the most simple decisions or work on its own.

If the computer shall even be able to out perform the human in innovation and development. Then we need to make some tools which enable programmers to develop and debug VERY, VERY complex software systems in short time. Today more than half of the time in software projects are used on test and debugging. If we were able to get this below 5% then we would have taken a huge step towards TechSing.

But note: For many years there have been invested huge economical resources to reduce this, but still progress is VERY, VERY slow. It is my hope that this Blog will help us discuss and come up with some better ideas for this subject.

§10

Before I end this first blog entry, I want to list a number of software technologies, which I think may be some of the important stepping stones on the road towards TechSing. (not listed in a particular order)

• Spellchecker software which can correct the text (without asking questions) just as good or better than if I send the same text to another human for proof reading.
  [How difficult can that be.... my guess is that we will see this problem solved within 10 years]
• Search engines which only give one answer (the right answer).
  [This already exists, but it needs to get much better during the next 20 - 50 years]
• Computers which does not give error messages. But instead fix the error it self and only ask if it is in doubt which of two possible options to select.
  [This already exists, but only for very simple problems, it must improve extensively next 20 - 50 years]
• Software tools which can automatically port software applications from one platform (i.e. operating system or programming language) to another.
  [Technically this is already possible to implement, but there needs to be a profitable market for it to develop]
• Software which can make text, graphics and speech in video search-able and relate this to all the knowledge you already have. This of cause require that the computer monitor everything you do through your computer.
  [Development in this area is already started and I think we will see the first solutions which can relate new information you acquire to stuff that you have already learned in 5 - 10 years. (through the computer that is)]
• Applications to give you suggestions, where to buy the same or substitute product at a lower price near by every time you make a purchase.
  [I have already seen the first of such applications. But I expect that this will grow very big within the next 10 years]
• Cars which can drive by them self and airplanes which can fly by them self's.
  [There are already experiments with both, but I doubt that we will see this in our everyday life within the next 15 years]
• Systems which can give us cheaper insurance and minimize the security check in airports etc... If we allow the software to monitor our behaviour every day in our life and record who I meed, who I know, where I go, what I use my money on, what I read and see. Based on this the software will easily be able to establish a risk profile and allow me to save time and money.
  [Technically it is not a problem to implement this today. But there must be a market for it to happen.]
• Systems which monitor what you use your time on and try to suggest how you can become more productive on your computer by comparing how you work to how others work. E.g. suggest which software application or services you could purchase to increase your own output.
  [This type of products will typically start in a niche, improve over time and spread to other niches. Today similar software exist, which record computer usage and behaviour in large organizations and consultants use the output to suggest action to management]
• Systems which can optimize the way limited shared resources are distributed among members in the community. Like hospital waiting lists and traffic congestion. Today we rely on fixed rules or market economy to govern how to distribute limited resources. Potential this can be done better with an adaptive software application, which can model how different distribution models will maximize the joint community value.
  [You probably already noticed that this is similar to what a chess computer does. Maybe it would be possible to make a general toolbox, which would make it easy to create application for many such related problems. Anyway if we expect that computers shall take over all decisions in the future, then we must start with such systems. In the beginning politicians will make the rules for how the system shall govern the resources. But as the models become more complex and relate on more and more input, then the computers will be used to simulate and suggest different possible models for the politicians to choose between. In the end the computer will only give one suggested model --- it's own favorite choice ;-)) ]