Weekly Insider (Nod to Hod for Robotics)

The future really is here, its just unevenly distributed. Today’s courier is robotics researcher Hod Lipson of my alma mater Cornell University. Our recently published Forbes interview is below. Hod is learning a lot about consciousness and creativity by teaching robots to work. And if you thought the Roomba was a consumer electronics novelty, give a nod to Hod and what he’s working on.

Hod Lipson is director of Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Lab (CCSL) at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Ithaca, N.Y. He focuses on novel ways for automatic design, fabrication and adaptation of virtual and physical machines. He has led work in areas such as evolutionary robotics, multi-material functional rapid prototyping, machine self-replication and programmable self-assembly. Lipson received his Ph.D. from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 1999, and continued to a postdoc at Brandeis University and MIT. His research focuses primarily on biologically-inspired approaches, as they bring new ideas to engineering and new engineering insights to biology.

Why don't we start with a quick overview of your research?
I am interested in robotics, specifically the questions of how we can make machines more adaptive to the environment, to other machines and to changes in themselves such as failures. Robotic systems today are superhuman in their accuracy, in their speed, in their ability to work 24/7 in hazardous environments and so forth. But, their inability to adapt to new situations is really their weak point. In contrast, biology is very good at adaptation.

So you think Darwin's mantra, survival of the most adaptable, applies to robots?
As environments and tasks become increasingly complex, it eventually boils down to adaptation, which is a key to sustained operation and to long-term viability. Traditionally in engineering, people focused on optimizing system performance and so-forth, but increasingly we need to shift the focus to the resilience of systems in the face of changing environments.

You recently published an exciting paper in Science summarizing some of your latest research. Could you give a quick overview of your results?
What we have done recently is created what we call a "robotic scientist." It's essentially an algorithm hooked up to an experimental system that performs experiments, collects data, and tries to distill the physics principles or physical laws that underlie the observed behavior. It doesn't just collect data, calculate correlations or make predictions--it actually tries to see if there is some simple underlying law that explains the apparently complex behavior. It doesn't quite replace scientists, but it's certainly a tool that I think will be necessary in order to make progress working on increasingly complex questions with large amounts of data, where laborious hand modeling falls short.

In a very primitive way, are you making robots self-aware and aware of their environments?
Well, the term "self-aware" is very touchy and controversial, but that's the direction we are heading. I think the ability of a machine to create a simulator of itself and its environment, and then use that simulator to plan and make predictions, is the beginning of what may be deemed self reflection, and I think it will be important in any kind of adaptive system. From a psychological point of view, you can argue that consciousness has to do with the ability to self-reflect and self-model. Of course, there is a huge gap between what we can do with machines and what primates and humans can do, but I think it's on the same path.

In taking inspiration from nature and Darwinian evolution and applying those lessons to robotics, what has really surprised you?
I'm always fascinated by the kind of solutions that you get when you allow something as open-ended as evolution to tackle a problem. What we have been doing extensively in robotics and other areas of engineering is using algorithms inspired from biological evolution to try to solve a challenging design synthesis problem. In other words, we have set of building block and we put them in a "primordial soup," so-to-speak. We then allow evolutionary processes of recombination and mutation to connect these pieces together, subject to some selection criteria, and let this evolutionary process brew for hundreds and thousands of generations until we get solutions that match our criteria of selection. We have been applying this to anything from designing robot bodies and brains to designing analog circuits and mechanical devices, and what's been really interesting to see are the kinds of results that come out of this process.

Can you give an example of a creative robotic invention?
In one case, we let it try to design a photonic structure, a structure that manipulates light at the submicron scale. The system came up with a new kind of design that we hadn't thought of before and that resulted in a publication in its own right. In another example, we let it design mechanisms to solve a particularly notorious challenge in mechanical design (making a machine that can create a perfect straight line--an engineering puzzle that took humans over a century to solve). Within about a day of computation, it came up with a number of different designs, some of them infringing on patents in this area.

We let it design some analog circuits, which usually take quite a bit of knowledge to design, and this algorithm, without any prior knowledge whatsoever about analog design, was able to create some really interesting designs, some again infringing on patents. What's most interesting is that when we added the requirement that not only must the design work, but it needs to be robust so that if you eliminate any of the elements it still works, and it was able to do that as well.

Most recently, in this robotic scientist challenge, we let this evolutionary process try to create models that explained the behavior of a double pendulum, which is a very complex and chaotic dynamical system. And just by looking at the behavior of this pendulum through a camera, it was able to generate Hamiltonians and Lagrangians (mathematical equations) that exactly explicate its behavior, something that would probably take someone with a major in physics to write down.

What have you learned about people and our own evolution in the process of working in robotics?
When you study robotics, it forces you to rethink, in a very quantitative way, the attributes we hold close and consider unique in our definition of what it means to be human. For example, what is creativity? If machines can create new things and ideas that infringe on patents, which humans have traditionally defined as being creative, what does that mean about creativity? When we have computers that can generate experiments and ask questions, what does that mean about curiosity? Traditionally, we use terms like creativity and self-reflection in a very loose way to cloak something we don't understand very well, but when you actually work with robots trying to emulate these very characteristics, it forces you to think about them in a very precise and quantitative way. Ultimately, I think it leads to deeper questions and better understanding of these concepts.

What innovations in robotics will change our lives 100 years from now?
We are heading toward increased automation, not just in terms of machines and robots performing automated tasks and chores, but automation in the design of those machines. That is, can we make machines that can make other machines? I definitely see an acceleration of these kinds of technologies showing up. It's a bit of a subtle point, but design automation gives you huge leverage to design other things faster. In parallel with that, I also foresee more automated manufacturing and personal fabrication taking over. I think personal fabrication is today, where personal computation was in the 1970s, and pretty soon we will see machines such as 3-D printers being used to fabricate things of increasing complexity at home and on-demand, replacing many traditional manufacturing technologies. And so this combination of robotic design and robotic manufacture is going to be one of the profound changes that we will see in the next couple of decades.

Weekly Insider (Nightmares, Delicate Machines & Strange Zoos; Of Keynes, Darwin & Cato)

Our new issue comes out next week with exclusive sit-downs with iconic

inventor Dean Kamen, ex-McKinsey veteran and innovation luminary Dick

Foster and Lux Research President Matthew Nordan. Their words are

breadcrumbs. Follow the clues...

Today, we'll follow the rational clues of Keynes, Darwin and Cato. And

then next week stay tuned for I will-unable to resist railing against

the foolhardy futility of prioritizing global warming as direr than

cancer, heart disease, AIDS or alzheimers-share two of the most elegant

and persuasive arguments I've heard yet on why curbing carbon isn't

worth the cost.

First some thoughts on time. The more time until a hoped-for-event

occurs, the more chance it won't happen. Or inversely the more chance

the undesired event does. When a target is in your sight, do everything

you can to seize it, for it can quickly flee your scope. Time is the

marshall of Murphy's Law; it paves detours to the undesired; it's a

bedfellow of uncertainty; an inept shepherd of the sought; an agent of

entropy and an enemy of the anxious.

Now for some soothsaying sages who are unusually un-anxious. Following

Warren Buffett's style, Bill Gates released his first annual letter this

week. Buffett passed Gates a quote from John Maynard Keynes on the

current environment. It said this:

"This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the

resources of nature and men's devices are just as fertile and productive

as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material

problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of

affording for everyone a high standard of life-high, I mean, compared

with, say, twenty years ago-and will soon learn to afford a standard

higher still. We were not previously deceived. But today we have

involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control

of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The

result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a

time-perhaps for a long time."

Meanwhile, on a similarly delicate machine-the human mind-and the animal

spirits swirling in us social primates which caused the current crisis,

professor Paul Seabright, says "If Darwin had been around to reflect on

the financial crisis, he might have reminded us, in his diffident way,

to think of human beings not as inadequate calculating machines, but as

remarkably well-adapted apes. As group living primates, they are

intensely competitive, alert to the narcissism of tiny differences in

status, navigating their social life through coalition formation.

The way to get ahead is to join powerful groups. The key to social life

is not unfettered competition, nor universal cooperation, but a subtle

mix of the two: competing fiercely to join up with the most attractive

cooperators. And the cognitive capacities they deploy involve a capacity

for strategic reasoning of the second, third, even the fourth degree.

You have to be impressed how well they have adapted to life in the wild.

The problem is that many primates do not adapt well to life in zoos, and

Wall Street is the biggest and strangest zoo of them all. It presents

our large primate brain with vast challenges, of which the greatest has

been solving strategic reasoning of the thousandth degree.

Faced with evidence that a housing boom can't continue forever, we do

not unravel it back to the beginning but try to ride the boom till the

very end, to do just a little better than the very best of the others.

Those differences in status, you see.....Though Darwin's name is often

wrongly associated with admiration for the outcomes of natural

selection, the man who wrote "what a book a devil's chaplain might write

on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of

nature!" would doubtless have been less than surprised at the kinds of

terrible games Homo sapiens gets up to when he spends too much of his

time in the zoo."

One advocate of avoiding the zoo as much as possible has been Vanguard

fund founder and advocate of indexing, John Bogle. John recently said,

"We can't say that we haven't been warned about the perils of ignoring

the past. More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman orator Cato noted that,

'there must be a vast fund of stupidity in human nature, or else men

would not be caught as they are, a thousand times over, by the same

snares . . . while they yet remember their past misfortunes, they go on

to court and encourage the causes to what they were owing, and which

will again produce them.'"

Have a great weekend and enjoy the Super Bowl.

Weekly Insider (Airbrushing Airwaves & The Adjacent Possible)

Happy New Year, Welcome Back.

First off: the “adjacent possible”. Then: “airbrushing airwaves”.

For many years in this column I’ve applauded and espoused Nassim Taleb’s philosophy (as put forth in “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Black Swan”) of not only not knowing what we don’t know, but not knowing (or accepting) that it isn’t possible in many instances to know the future. We mistake luck for skill and often mistakenly attribute success to genius when it’s mere luck.

Being pattern-seeking mammals (remember: the non-pattern seekers got eaten by tigers, having sat still when the bushes rustled), we’re uncomfortable processing randomness. We look at puffs of clouds and see faces and animals. We’re hardwired for it. We can’t help ourselves.

Now I bring to you another idea that I consider as important. It’s from complexity theorist and physicist Stuart Kauffman and it’s called “the adjacent possible.” In my words it’s this: Stuff happens. That stuff might be useless. Until it isn’t.

In longer form: Some stuff (whether in nature or business or science) might randomly get invented (either by accident or byproduct of an original intent) and that stuff might have an attribute that has absolutely no apparent use, you can’t even predict a use way into the future for it. But then lo and behold, sometime in the future, something happens and suddenly a use for that attribute, by itself or in combination with another thing, gets discovered.

Some of you immediately are thinking: Ah, it’s evolution! Random mutation and natural selection. And that’s true. But it’s more than that. The idea of the “adjacent possible” is about the possibility space of all the things that might happen as some new biological trait, technology feature, molecule have pathways that might one day be taken.

Here’s Stuart Kauffman in his own words:

“You might look at a heart and ask, what is its function? Darwin would answer that the function of the heart is to pump blood, and that's true—it's the cause for which the heart was selected. However, your heart also makes sounds, which is not the function of your heart. This leads us to the easy but puzzling conclusion that the function of a part of an organism is a subset of its causal consequences, meaning that to analyze the function of a part of an organism you need to know the whole organism and its environment. That's the easy part; there's an inalienable holism about organisms.

“But here's the strange part: Darwin talked about pre-adaptations, by which he meant a causal consequence of a part of an organism that might turn out to be useful in some funny environment and therefore be selected. The story of Gertrude the flying squirrel illustrates this: About 63 million years ago there was an incredibly ugly squirrel that had flaps of skin connecting her wrists to her ankles. She was so ugly that none of her squirrel colleagues would play or mate with her, so one day she was eating lunch all alone in a magnolia tree. There was an owl named Bertha in the neighboring pine tree, and Bertha took a look at Gertrude and thought, "Lunch!" and came flashing down out of the sunlight with her claws extended. Gertrude was very scared and she jumped out of the magnolia tree and, surprised, she flew! She escaped from the befuddled Bertha, landed, and became a heroine to her clan. She was married in a civil ceremony a month later to a very handsome squirrel, and because the gene for the flaps of skin was Mendelian dominant, all of their kids had the same flaps. That's roughly why we now have flying squirrels.

“The question is, could one have said ahead of time that Gertrude's flaps could function as wings? Well, maybe. Could we say that some molecular mutation in a bacterium that allows it to pick up calcium currents, thereby allowing it to detect a paramecium in its vicinity and to escape the paramecium, could function as a paramecium-detector? No. Knowing what a Darwinian pre adaptation is, do you think that we could say ahead of time, what all possible Darwinian pre adaptations are? No, we can't. That means that we don't know what the configuration space of the biosphere is.”

The more tinkering society does, the better the chance that someone else will pick up that tinkered thing and run with it in a way never imagined. Kevin Kelly founder of WIRED has made a persuasive argument that there’s a moral imperative to invent. Consider if the piano hadn’t been invented by the time of Mozart. Consider if organized basketball leagues hadn’t been invented before Michael Jordan. Or what if the PC hadn’t been invented before Bill Gates? The more “instruments” we invent, the better the odds that a genius picks one up, tweaks it or masters it and carries it further, advancing society.

Sometimes the uses of an instrument end up being even more useful in a completely different field. Someone recently shared with me how a geophysicist used sound waves to map oil wells in the 1990s. A singer friend new this geophysicist was an expert with sounds waves and asked him to tune her singing. Not only did it work, it worked so well, the music industry has now been secretly using it for a decade, it’s called “AutoTune”. Cher's hit song "Believe", Madonna's "Music", current rap star T-Pain. The pitch for the technology: correct your pitch, or tweak it. What about hip-hop’s mantra of "Keep it real"--yeah, right. It’s now airbrushing the airwaves.

Viewed through the lens of history, you shouldn’t be surprised by this. The history of technology has been one of displaced labor. New jobs are birthed as old ones die. Talent is embedded in technology. And technology gets further embedded in advanced materials. Where the molecules are the device I’ve long called this “Simplexity”.

Consider Hollywood and videogame developers who use CGI. They are eliminating the need for actors (or at least managing egos of live ones). Olympic athletes are stripped of medals for doping and enhancing. Milli Vanilli were fully mocked (one of them attempted suicide) for lip-synching. Will discovery of digital doping lead to stripping Grammy medals? Unfortunately, it’s probably no more likely than false economic ideas will lead to stripping Nobel medals.

As Tom Clancy said, “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” Art imitates life. The science fiction of Blade Runner with Replicants now seems a future possibility.

In the music business I can envision lyrical Luddites leading a cultural revolution against the inauthentic and engineered while demanding the analog, true and slightly out of tune. Where will true talent come from? Statistically speaking: Asia. As a case in point: see Charisse, 15 year old Phillipine phenom discovered by Oprah, promoted by David Foster, already doing duets with her own hero, Celine Dion.

A once obscure girl in Asia, with a once randomly invented technology (webcam) on a once obscure website (YouTube), that gets randomly watched by another once obscure woman, Oprah Winfrey. As I always say, we cannot predict the future, we can only invent it.

Weekly Insider (Doug Adams & The Ages of Sand)

This is a long one. And it’s not even my own words. A few years ago I profiled Hewlett-Packard’s nanotech gurus Stan Williams and Phil Kuekes. I remember Phil telling me a favorite book of his was David Deutsch’s ‘Fabric of Reality’. That reminded me of a speech given by the late Douglas Adams (he of Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy fame) at a conference nearly 10 years ago. I’ve copied an excerpted text of his speech below. It’s about the “four ages of sand”. It’s colloquial and conversational and all the more impressive that he gave it off the cuff. In it he reminds me of Paul Romer’s new growth theory, which says all new growth comes from combinations of existing things. And Douglas Adams speech also reminds me (in fact he basically predicted) of IBM’s manipulation of atoms from an internet connection 3,000 miles away. Here it is:

 

….The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand.

 

From sand we make glass, from glass we make lenses and from lenses we make telescopes. When the great early astronomers, Copernicus, Galileo and others turned their telescopes on the heavens and discovered that the Universe was an astonishingly different place than we expected and that, far from the world being most of the Universe, with just a few little bright lights going around it, it turned out - and this took a long, long, long time to sink in - that it is just one tiny little speck going round a little nuclear fireball, which is one of millions and millions and millions that make up this particular galaxy and our galaxy is one of millions or billions that make up the Universe and that then we are also faced with the possibility that there may be billions of universes, that applied a little bit of a corrective to the perspective that the Universe was ours.

 

I rather love that notion and, as I was discussing with someone earlier today, there's a book I thoroughly enjoyed recently by David Deutsch, who is an advocate of the multiple universe view of the Universe, called 'The Fabric of Reality', in which he explores the notion of a quantum multiple universe view of the Universe. This came from the famous wave particle dichotomy about the behavior of light - that you couldn't measure it as a wave when it behaves as a wave, or as a particle when it behaves as a particle. How does this come to be? David Deutsch points out that if you imagine that our Universe is simply one layer and that there is an infinite multiplicity of universes spreading out on either side, not only does it solve the problem, but the problem simply goes away. This is exactly how you expect light to behave under those circumstances. Quantum mechanics has claims to be predicated on the notion that the Universe behaves as if there was a multiplicity of universes, but it rather strains our credulity to think that there actually would be.

 

This goes straight back to Galileo and the Vatican. In fact, what the Vatican said to Galileo was, “We don't dispute your readings, we just dispute the explanation you put on them. It's all very well for you to say that the planets sort of do that as they go round and it is as if we were a planet and those planets were all going round the sun; it's alright to say it's as if that were happening, but you're not allowed to say that's what is happening, because we have a total lock hold on universal truth and also it simply strains our personal credulity. Just so, I think that the idea that there are multiple universes currently strains our credulity but it may well be that it's simply one more strain that we have to learn to live with, just as we've had to learn to live with a whole bunch of them in the past.

 

The other thing that comes out of that vision of the Universe is that it turns out to be composed almost entirely and rather worryingly, of nothing. Wherever you look there is nothing, with occasional tiny, tiny little specks of rock or light. But nevertheless, by watching the way these tiny little specks behave in the vast nothingness, we begin to divine certain principles, certain laws, like gravity and so forth. So that was, if you like, the macroscopic view of the universe, which came from the first age of sand.

 

The next age of sand is the microscopic one. We put glass lenses into microscopes and started to look down at the microscopic view of the Universe. Then we began to understand that when we get down to the sub-atomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that wherever we do find something it turns out not to be actually something, but only the probability that there may be something there.

 

One way or another, this is a deeply misleading Universe. Wherever we look it's beginning to be extremely alarming and extremely upsetting to our sense of who we are - great, strapping, physical people living in a Universe that exists almost entirely for us - that it just isn't the case. At this point we are still divining from this all sorts of fundamental principles, recognizing the way that gravity works, the way that strong and weak nuclear forces work, recognizing the nature of matter, the nature of particles and so on, but having got those fundamentals, we're still not very good at figuring out how it works, because the math is really rather tricky.

 

So, we tend to come up with almost a clockwork view of the way it all works, because that's the best our math can manage. I don't mean in any way to disparage Newton, because I guess he was the first person who saw that there were principles at work that were different from anything we actually saw around us. His first law of motion - that something will remain in its position of either rest or motion until some other force works on it - is something that none of us, living in a gravity well, in a gas envelope, had ever seen, because everything we move comes to a halt. It was only through very, very careful watching and observing and measuring and divining the principles underlying what we could all see happening that he came up with the principles that we all know and recognize as being the laws of motion, but nevertheless it is by modern terms, still a somewhat clockwork view of the Universe. As I say, I don't mean that to sound disparaging in any way at all, because his achievements, as we all know, were absolutely monumental, but it still kind of doesn't make sense to us.

 

Now there are all sorts of entities we are also aware of, as well as particles, forces, tables, chairs, rocks and so on, that are almost invisible to science; almost invisible, because science has almost nothing to say about them whatsoever. I'm talking about dogs and cats and cows and each other. We living things are, so far, beyond the purview of anything science can actually say, almost beyond even recognizing ourselves as things that science might be expected to have something to say about.

 

I can imagine Newton sitting down and working out his laws of motion and figuring out the way the Universe works and with him, a cat wandering around. The reason we had no idea how cats worked was because, since Newton, we had proceeded by the very simple principle that essentially, to see how things work, we took them apart. If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was god given - and that's the only explanation we had.

 

The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well. But also, we have no opportunity to see this stuff at work. In a sense Darwin was like Newton, in that he was the first person to see underlying principles, that really were not at all obvious, from the everyday world in which he lived. We had to think very hard to understand the nature of what was happening around us and we had no clear, obvious everyday examples of evolution to point to. Even today that persists as a slightly tricky problem if you're trying to persuade somebody who doesn't believe in all this evolution stuff and wants you to show him an example - they are hard to find in terms of everyday observation.

 

So we come to the third age of sand. In the third age of sand we discover something else we can make out of sand - silicon. We make the silicon chip - and suddenly, what opens up to us is a Universe not of fundamental particles and fundamental forces, but of the things that were missing in that picture that told us how they work; what the silicon chip revealed to us was the process. The silicon chip enables us to do mathematics tremendously fast, to model the, as it turns out, very very simple processes that are analogous to life in terms of their simplicity; iteration, looping, branching, the feedback loop which lies at the heart of everything you do on a computer and at the heart of everything that happens in evolution - that is, the output stage of one generation becomes the input stage of the next. Suddenly we have a working model, not for a while because early machines are terribly slow and clunky, but gradually we accumulate a working model of this thing that previously we could only guess at or deduce - and you had to be a pretty sharp and a pretty clear thinker even to divine it happening when it was far from obvious and indeed counter-intuitive, particularly to as proud a species as we.

 

The computer forms a third age of perspective, because suddenly it enables us to see how life works. Now that is an extraordinarily important point because it becomes self-evident that life, that all forms of complexity, do not flow downwards, they flow upwards and there's a whole grammar that anybody who is used to using computers is now familiar with, which means that evolution is no longer a particular thing, because anybody who's ever looked at the way a computer program works, knows that very, very simple iterative pieces of code, each line of which is tremendously straightforward, give rise to enormously complex phenomena in a computer - and by enormously complex phenomena, I mean a word processing program just as much as I mean Tierra or Creatures.

 

I can remember the first time I ever read a programming manual, many many years ago. I'd first started to encounter computers about 1983 and I wanted to know a little bit more about them, so I decided to learn something about programming. I bought a C manual and I read through the first two or three chapters, which took me about a week. At the end it said 'Congratulations, you have now written the letter A on the screen!' I thought, 'Well, I must have misunderstood something here, because it was a huge, huge amount of work to do that, so what if I now want to write a B?' The process of programming, the speed and the means by which enormous simplicity gives rise to enormously complex results, was not part of my mental grammar at that point. It is now - and it is increasingly part of all our mental grammars, because we are used to the way computers work.

 

So, suddenly, evolution ceases to be such a real problem to get hold of. It's rather like this: imagine, if you will, the following scenario. One Tuesday, a person is spotted in a street in London, doing something criminal. Two detectives are investigating, trying to work out what happened. One of them is a 20th Century detective and the other, by the marvels of science fiction, is a 19th Century detective. The problem is this: the person who was clearly seen and identified on the street in London on Tuesday was seen by someone else, an equally reliable witness, on the street in Santa Fe on the same Tuesday - how could that possibly be? The 19th Century detective could only think it was by some sort of magical intervention. Now the 20th Century detective may not be able to say,  He took BA flight this and then United flight that  - he may not be able to figure out exactly which way he did it, or by which route he traveled, but it's not a problem. It doesn't bother him; he just says, 'He got there by plane. I don't know which plane and it may be a little tricky to find out, but there's no essential mystery.' We're used to the idea of jet travel. We don't know whether the criminal flew BA 178, or UA270, or whatever, but we know roughly how it was done. I suspect that as we become more and more conversant with the role a computer plays and the way in which the computer models the process of enormously simple elements giving rise to enormously complex results, then the idea of life being an emergent phenomenon will become easier and easier to swallow. We may never know precisely what steps life took in the very early stages of this planet, but it's not a mystery.

 

So what we have arrived at here - and although the first shock wave of this arrival was in 1859, it's really the arrival of the computer that demonstrates it unarguably to us - is 'Is there really a Universe that is not designed from the top downwards but from the bottom upwards? Can complexity emerge from lower levels of simplicity?' It really isn't a very good answer, but a bottom-up solution, on the other hand, which rests on the incredibly powerful tautology of anything that happens, happens, clearly gives you a very simple and powerful answer that needs no other explanation whatsoever.

 

What is the fourth age of sand?

 

Let me back up for a minute and talk about the way we communicate. Traditionally, we have a bunch of different ways in which we communicate with each other. One way is one-to-one; we talk to each other, have a conversation. Another is one-to-many, which I'm doing at the moment, or someone could stand up and sing a song, or announce we've got to go to war. Then we have many-to-one communication; we have a pretty patchy, clunky, not-really-working version we call democracy, but in a more primitive state I would stand up and say, 'OK, we're going to go to war' and some may shout back 'No we're not!' - and then we have many-to-many communication in the argument that breaks out afterwards!

 

But the fourth, the many-to-many, we didn't have at all before the coming of the Internet, which, of course, runs on fibre-optics. It's communication between us that forms the fourth age of sand. Take what I said earlier about the world not reacting to us when we react to it; I remember the first moment, a few years ago, at which I began to take the Internet seriously. It was a very, very silly thing. There was a guy, a computer research student at Carnegie Mellon, who liked to drink Dr Pepper Light. There was a drinks machine a couple of stories away from him, where he used to regularly go and get his Dr Pepper, but the machine was often out of stock, so he had quite a few wasted journeys. Eventually he figured out, 'Hang on, there's a chip in there and I'm on a computer and there's a network running around the building, so why don't I just put the drinks machine on the network, then I can poll it from my terminal whenever I want and tell if I'm going to have a wasted journey or not?' So he connected the machine to the local network, but the local net was part of the Internet - so suddenly anyone in the world could see what was happening with this drinks machine. Now that may not be vital information but it turned out to be curiously fascinating; everyone started to know what was happening with the drinks machine. It began to develop, because in the chip in the machine didn't just say, 'The slot which has Dr Pepper Light is empty' but had all sorts of information; it said, 'There are 7 Cokes and 3 Diet Cokes, the temperature they are stored at is this and the last time they were loaded was that'. There was a lot of information in there, and there was one really fabulous piece of information: it turned out that if someone had put their 50 cents in and not pressed the button, i.e. if the machine was pregnant, then you could, from your computer terminal wherever you were in the world, log on to the drinks machine and drop that can! Somebody could be walking down the corridor when suddenly, 'bang!' - there was a Coca-Cola can! What caused that? - well obviously somebody 5,000 miles away! Now that was a very, very silly, but fascinating, story and what it said to me was that this was the first time that we could reach back into the world. It may not be terribly important that from 5,000 miles away you can reach into a University corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can but it's the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating. So that, I think, is the fourth age of sand.