The Online Investing AI Blog

Happy New Year. Welcome to 2010.

The next decade promises to be the most revolutionary period in our history.

Researchers and scientists believe that the theory and technology is already there to make technological leaps in energy, medicine, computing and communications. And they should know. They’ve seen behind the screen that separates the laboratory and the marketplace.

The technology and the theory are already in place. The last decade included some of the biggest laboratory breakthroughs ever. These are called transformative technologies.

Once these innovations filter from the labs into the marketplace, they’ll change–if not revolutionize–the economy.

Based on the work of some great bloggers, like Next Big Future, Future Current, Singularity Hub, Kurzweil AI, and Future Pundit, here are some exciting ideas that are poised to make dramatic changes to our world in the next decade.
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As artificial intelligence–or machine intelligence–makes strides to become a powerful tool of the future, it’s interesting to read this article from a Wired blog.

Scientists are using AI as a tool to unlock the mysteries of symbols found in the Indus Valley. This 4,000-year-old script may represent a spoken language. But linguists have found the script so hard to decipher, they weren’t sure if it was just a bunch of pictures.

It wasn’t…

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For many people, Automated Trading is a strange and mysterious idea. Like any new technology, I suppose it takes some getting used to. Imagine how many people have trouble understanding Twitter. And Twitter is a multimillion dollar company and a behemoth of the Internet.

Automated Trading is the idea of using a computer program to buy and sell stocks or other assets. These assets could be currency, options, or futures. It turns out that since computers are very good at following directions and running a program, there’s a great potential to create systems that make money through trading these assets. The idea is fairly new and not yet popular. But we believe in just a few years it will become very common.

What about kaizen? Kaizen is the idea of making big progress over time through tiny incremental improvements. The Japanese economic miracle was driven directly with kaizen. The first Toyota Corollas and Honda Accords that came to America were a far cry from the comfortable machines they are today. They were tiny, uncomfortable and very economical. Yet this metamorphosis was created through a tiny improvement each year. After 10 or 20 years, it’s hard to recognize the original model.

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We had an interesting chat about a post that George wrote about whether an Automated Trading system can outperform human traders.

The argument is a classic man versus machine debate that’s been going on, probably since the first time a wheel rolled out of a cave. And it reminds me of a story.

My friend was in one of those boring business meetings where a talking suit tells you how competitive the industry is. This speaker said the competition was circling like a lion around a herd of gazelles.

He then said, rhetorically, “If the industry is a gazelle, we have to be what?”

“Be the fastest gazelle,” he said, answering his own question.

My friend, who is pretty sharp, replied (as dozens of eyes fell on him), “That’s not true. We just have to be faster than the slowest gazelle.”

Everyone cracked up and even though it’s funny, it brings up my point about Automated Trading systems. Can an Automated Trading system beat every human trader? Maybe not.

What I want it to do is beat my trading returns, though, right? And I think a properly developed Automated Trading system can do that. After all, it has several advantages. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t get bored of looking at charts and stock quotes. It doesn’t take bathroom breaks or decide it would rather go running when it should be researching Forex patterns.

So, I think, I may not be the slowest gazelle on the trading floor, but I think there are Automated Trading systems that are a little bit faster and, if they’re offering to carry my on their back, why not take a ride?

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Shock jocks and pirate broadcasters won’t be the only ones who will twist radio waves. According to a team of Swedish physicists, it may be possible to twist radio waves and embed even more data in the resulting wave.

You can check out an article on this at New Scientist.

According to the article, the radio frequency ranges between 3 kilohertz and 300 gigahertz. It’s a range that’s crowded with wireless computer signals and cellphone traffic and other informational tech and telephonic periphery.

Even satellite signals, like the ones used to beam the Howard Stern show, are affected.

What’s In It For Us?

If more data can be encoded in a radio wave, as these scientists have demonstrated, there may be more spectrum available for use.

The idea isn’t exactly new, according to the researchers.

Physicist Thomas Leyser, one of the physicists conducting the research said:

“Twisted laser beams have been researched since the 1990s, but it has only now become possible to create twisted beams at the much lower radio frequencies,” he says.

But the team has added their own technique to the earlier research that may open up vast new territories in the spectrum.

How Does It Work?

According To Leyser, the signal is twisted by firing antennas in sequence to “describe a circle.” They don’t fire at once like normal radio operations. As a twist on the twist, the team fed all the antennas in the array slightly different current.

And the radio twist was born.

One hurdle remains.

No one is sure how much information this new antenna can send and receive. Technically, the article indicates vast quantities of information could be packaged and broadcast by a twisted radio beam.

But cell phones are outfitted with dipole antennas, which can’t sent twisted radio signals.

We’ll just have to see how these challenges can be overcome.

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According to this recent article, researchers have started to overcome the last challenge to unlimited Artificial Intelligence. They succeded in creating a very simple robot and use an evolutionary algorithm so that the robot can learn to walk (or jump, as the case may be) just like a human child learns. But then they added a little bit of magic:

MacLeod’s team took this idea a step further, however, and developed an incremental evolutionary algorithm (IEA) capable of adding new parts to its robot brain over time.

What this means is that when the robot’s performance and learning has stopped, then another system takes over and modifies the robot’s brain. This is an incredibly powerful and promising approach, and the challenge in the past has been limited computing power. The reason is that you need an exponentially faster processor to carry out this brain modification functionality.

Fortunately for us, accelerating technology will remove this challenge. Right now computer power is doubling approximately every year. The result is that in just three or four years we can buy a computer 10 times as powerful for the same money. The really exciting part is that it will make it possible to create artificial intelligence of unlimited power.

The researchers are working on creating a simple robot that moves along the tabletop. However, they will be able to apply the systems that control brain modification to all future robots that they create. It’s only a matter of time before this technology is applied to a more complex system such as vision recognition or stock trading. This will create a system that actually works better than the human counterpart.

Many of these ideas may sound silly today, but just 20 years ago our current level of technology could be imagined by only a few people. Anyone who is aware of the power of accelerating technology can visualize Artificial Intelligence systems that are more powerful and work much better than their human counterparts.

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The University of Edinburgh has developed a new technique that selects the best sperm cells for fertilization.

The technique uses a special laser beam that analyzes DNA and checks on any damage to the DNA. When DNA breaks, certain chemicals form on that break, which then serve as a marker for the laser to detect.

DNA damage can lead to male infertility, research suggests.

Primarily researchers are indicating this breakthrough could be used to improve vitro fertilization. Researchers also say this can improve fertility rates.

It’s easy to imagine that this is a first step toward supplanting natural selection.

But it also leads me to some interesting speculation:

Could detection become so precise that it selects the best sperm for fertilization? Or, could it repair DNA so that all cells are optimized?

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