Wolfram Alpha: Skynet in waiting
June 1, 2009
Intended for publication the week of May 31, 2009.
By Brian Zinchuk
With the new Terminator movie coming out, one’s mind wanders to just how close machines are getting to deciding they really don’t need us on this planet, after all.
The TV series Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles explored how little facets all came together to create Skynet – the artificial intelligence that decides to wipe out mankind. A supercomputer here, some networking there, and eventually, you get Skynet.
In the end of May, they may have gotten a little closer.
Enter Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com).
It’s not a search engine. It’s a computational engine. You ask it things, and it comes up with answers – not search results, but answers.
Not only that, but it comes up with things you likely hadn’t thought of.
The weekly podcast This Week in Technology (twit.tv) interviews the creator of Wolfram Alpha, Stephen Wolfram in its May 17 podcast. Alpha incorporates Mathematica, a Wolfram technology used for computation. A lot of that interview can be summed up from the “About” page on Alpha’s website.
The website is not in the least bit modest in its goals, stating,”Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
“Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.
“Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.”
If that’s not the foundations of Skynet, I don’t know what is. To hear Stephen Wolfram talk about it is to send shivers up your spine. It’s like John Connor explaining the end of the world in the 1984 Terminator movie. He talks of how answers in the coming days be become better as the program improves. In other words, it is learning.
I remember long ago when I was first introduced to Google. It was a friend, a very smart friend, an engineering physics honours student, who showed how Google was so far beyond what was then the leading edge search engines – Lycos, AltaVista, Hotbot.
Since then, Google has become all-encompassing, all knowing. Not sure about something? Google it. It’s even a verb now. This column was Googled with Google.
I strongly anticipate Wolfram Alpha will eventually be scooped up by Google. They all are, eventually. It’s like one of those monsters in an old horror movie – all consuming, unstoppable. Wolfram Alpha will become Google Wolfram Alpha Beta (because even Gmail is still in ‘Beta,’).
The scary thing is, what happens when you combine Google’s knowledge of, well, pretty much everything, with Wolfram Alpha’s capacity to apply an ever-growing number of algorithms? The reality of a truly powerful, real life artificial intelligence doesn’t seem that far off.
The Terminator movies tell us that Skynet began learning at an exponential rate. In the original movie, Kyle Reese, the good guy, describes Skynet as, “Defense network computers. New… powerful… hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.”
Spooky. Anyone want to go to a movie?
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News (www.pipelinenews.ca). He can be reached at www.zinchuk.ca.
