Technological Singularity: Warning in disguise? - [Part 1]

I was recently reading about technological singularity that a lot of who's-who in the field of AI/Robotics (Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Vernor Vinge etc.) are talking about. The June'08 IEEE Spectrum runs a special feature on this called "Rapture of the Geeks". Reading through the articles (and also having read Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is near) i have a few questions on some of the predictions that futurists are making. I am trying to get feedback on these issues from some well known folks in the field and will post them as and when they become available.

• One popular view of technological singularity predicts that machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence in the next few decades and we will have machines building more intelligent machines presumably not under human control. This means that humans would have succeeded in building something which can replace us at the top of the intelligent species list. If this is indeed true, then wouldnt it make human existence meaningless and eventually result in our extinction? Or worse, we may end up being pets to a superior intelligent species :) . My point
  is, if humans are smart, why would they let this happen?
  
• Ray Kurzweil predicts that singularity is just 3-4 decades away. He builds up his arguments based on the technological revolutions in Genetics, Nanotechnology and robotics. Innovations in these areas may help us build machines smarter than ourselves but they all would lack the consciousness that sets humans apart. Thus they can all be efficient than us but presumably not "street smarter" than us. Some scientists also predict that we will be eventually able to give our consciousness to these machines. But what would that help us achieve? Will it will help us better our own lives or extinct us?
  
• Assume that the singularity does eventually happen, what makes us feel that we will be able to build a set of guiding principles under which our intelligent innovations will work? And why would those conscious intelligent beings follow our guidelines instead of inventing their own efficient guidelines? Isn't this similar to humans having children, children growing up and then deciding themselves on whats right and wrong? The only difference here being that these android offsprings would be far more capable (and lethal) than human children.
  
• The final question is, if our technological progress is indeed pointing towards a singularity, then should we take it as a sign of progress or a warning for our future?

Security is all about breaking assumptions !

Anyone with a slight understanding of security would appreciate the fact that security is all about breaking assumptions. Any system is always built with certain assumptions because otherwise the system requirements will tend to be infinite. Hackers always target the assumptions to break the system. It thus becomes very important for system and process designers to be very careful about the assumptions they make for their system. I believe that systems which stand the test of time are the ones that have their assumptions clearly laid out and which provide their users a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the system.

While one may say that the above is clearly very logical and there is nothing surprising about it, reality indicates that not many get this simple axiom right. But there seems to be a paradoxical situation here. I said that a system cannot be built without assumptions and also that security is all about breaking assumptions. So that would imply that there is nothing called 100% secure !!! And as it turns out, that is precisely the point.
Vendors who claim that their products provide 100% security or are 100% secure are essentially trying to fool the customers or maybe even themselves.

A case in point, there was a very recent incident in the US involving the company LifeLock (read this). LifeLock is a company which guarantees protection against identity theft. Infact, its CEO advertises his own Social Security Number on the website and claims that their service guarantees complete protection against identity thefts. They do this by setting fraud alerts at the three major Credit Bureaus namely, Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. They thought that by doing this , anyone who tries to use a SSN not belonging to himself will get caught. But they made a very very big assumption here that any of the outfits like CreditCard companies, banks etc. will always run a credit check before activitating services for an individual. Guess what ! they were proved wrong in a really stupid way. Someone stole the CEO's own identity from his website and took a $500 loan in the CEO's name. The reason the fraud alerts did not get tripped was because the loan company did not bother to run a credit check at all !!

The take home message from this post is thus two-fold

1. If you are a customer, carefully evaulate the security assumptions yourself without getting sold to the vendors advertising.
2. If you are vendor, make sure that all your assumptions are clearly stated and avoid hidden ones.
   

30th Anniversary of SPAM

As per this BBC news article, 3rd May 2008 is the 30th Anniversary of email SPAM. The first spam message was sent to 400 users on the ARPANET by a DEC employee on 3rd May 1978. But, this was not yet the beginning of the commercial SPAM era. It was only in April 1994 when a group of immigration lawyers sent the first commercial spam message to more than 6000 USENET discussion groups thus,spawning a new rogue business model using the internet.

Nature at its best !

Famous three laws !

Clarke’s Three Laws (from the book "Profiles of the Future" by Arthur C. Clarke) [1]

1. “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
2. “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
3. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Asimov's Laws of Robotics [2]

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

References
[1] NYT Article
[2] Wikipedia Article