第59回 WORKSHOP報告(5月3日) / 参加者72名

第59回 WORKSHOP報告(5月3日) / 参加者72名

 

1

(1:開場前の様子です。楽しく談笑中)

 

3

(2:GW中でしたが72名の方にお越しいただきました)

 

2

(3:6人グループは話しやすいですね)

 

4

(4:Mさんによる後半マテリアルの説明です)

 

5

(5:みなさんしっかりマテリアルを印刷して持参されています)

 

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《 今回のworkshop 》

 

○workshop参加人数:72名(うち新人の方:9名)

 

○【前半】:”Do you want to live in a foreign country after your retirement?”をテーマとしたディスカッション

○【後半】:”The evolution of computers”をテーマとしたディスカッション

 

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<英語サークル E’s club 第59回workshopのご案内>

 

E’s club幹事のKです。第59回workshopの詳細をお送りいたします。

今回の前半のマテリアルは、先日のworkshopにて「ディスカッションしてみたいテーマ」の3位となった

“Do you want to live in a foreign country after your retirement?”というテーマを元に、私の方で作成させていただきました。

後半のマテリアルはMさんに作成していただきました。テーマは”The evolution of computers”です。

 

[今週のマテリアル]

<FIRST HALF>

“Do you want to live in a foreign country after your retirement?”

 

(1) Do you want to live in a foreign country after your retirement? And why?

 

(2) What are the merits and the demerits to spend post-retirement life in a foreign country?

 

(3) Imagine that your friends asking for your advice about overseas emigration after their retirement. Which country do you recommend?

Choose one country and give a presentation to your group members. (2 minutes or less)

Be sure to include following contents.

Climate / Food / Prices / Medical services / Language

 

(4) After the presentations of everyone, choose the best country in your group.

And write the name of “the best country” and the reason (in 30 words or less) on the distributed paper.

(I’ll collect these papers after the first half and give you the result later.)

 

 

<LATTER HALF>

Hi, I’m M. I’m working in the University as an assistant professor in physics. In this workshop, I would like to employ the topic related to the evolution in the science and technology especially in computers.

 

In the history of computers, there is a famous Moore’s law. The law means that the number of electric devices in computers doubles approximately every two years. When I was a child, a memory for computers was a floppy disk (1.4 MB). Now, we are able to by a SD card (64 GB) and the laptop computers whose hard-disk-drive has 1 TB memory. (1 TB = 1,000 GB = 1,000,000 MB)

If the Moore’s law still exists in the future, the computer outperforms the human beings in 2045. I think the world is exactly like that in the movie “The Matrix.” Do you think the day will come? Do you expect it?

 

I have prepared two materials.

(1)Manuscript from scientific journal “Nature”

See the text described below or PDF file

(2)Graphs related to the Moore’s law from wikipedia

 

Questions:

1. Do you use “computer” in daily life? When and where do you use it?

(Note that not only desktop/laptop computers but smart phone, digital camera, and Blue-ray recorders etc… are also computers)

2. Do you think we should keep on developing “computers”? Choose one from the below, and explain the reason why.

(a) The life with no computer is the best

(b) Unlimited development of the computers is desirable

(c) Computer is necessary, but its reasonable performance is enough

3. What kind of products which utilize “computer” is expected in your daily life?

4. Recently, computers beat some professional players at Japanese chess (= shogi). When do you think computers will defeat the top Japanese chess players?

5. In 2045, do you think the “computer” will control the human being?

6. What kind of stuff do you expect scientist to realize in the future?

(e.g. “flying car” in Back to the Future, “Wherever Door” in Doraemon etc…)

 

 

Material (1):        Paul Davies, Nature 437, 421 (2006)

 

When computers take over

– What if the current exponential increase in information-processing power could continue unabated?-

 

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

Viking/Duckworth: 2005. 672 pp. $29.95/ 14.99

 

I recall reading a statistic from my student days to the effect that if physics journals continued to grow at the same rate, then by the end of the twentieth century, library bookshelves would have to expand at the speed of light to accommodate them. This absurdity is an illustration of what one might call the exponential-growth fallacy. Examples drawn from technology are legion. The Moon landing in 1969 was widely touted as the first small step on an escalator to the stars, with Arthur C. Clarke predicting huge lunar bases and a Jupiter expedition by 2001. The rapid uptake of robotics in the manufacturing industry after the Second World War led to predictions of cyborg servants and android armies within a few decades. In the event, these technologies became stuck or even slid backwards.

 

The key point about exponential growth is that it never lasts. The conditions for runaway expansion are always peculiar and temporary (with the possible exception of the expanding Universe). But this sobering fact has not stopped futurologist and author Ray Kurzweil from invoking exponential, and even hyperexponential, growth in the realm of information processing. There is no doubt that the rise and rise in computing power has dazzled us all. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, famously predicted about 30 years ago that computer processing power would double every 18 months, and so far his prediction has come true. Kurzweil invokes ‘Moore’s law’ as if it were a law of nature, and extrapolates from it into a not-so-distant future in which burgeoning information processing transforms and transcends life as we know it. He refers to his culmination point, at which familiar human culture is obliterated by a tidal wave of unrestrained computation, as the ‘singularity’. The word is loosely analogous to the mathematician’s singularity, at which the rate of change of a quantity becomes infinite.

 

If the sky’s the limit when it comes to processing information, it isn’t hard to think of startling applications. Tired of deciding what to eat? Let a swarm of sensors patrol your innards and order the right nutrients automatically through your personal wireless network. Concerned about dying? Then achieve immortality by flooding your body with smart nanobots to monitor and maintain your failing biosystems. Or better yet, ‘upload’ your mind into cyberspace, where you can have more fun, untrammelled by a material body.

 

The question is not whether these wild ideas should be taken seriously, but whether the premise on which they are founded – unbounded exponential growth in information- processing power – somehow escapes the strictures that eventually curtail all other cases of headlong expansion. One obvious reason why accelerating growth in computation might stall concerns the availability of resources. What happens when the Earth’s entire surface has been converted into a gigantic informationgarnering, bit-churning system? Kurzweil is ready with the answer: we move into space. (“We” here is a generic term. The sentient beings that will soon wrest control from humans, and which are destined to supervise the cosmic phase of development, will be some sort of superdupercomputers.) But by the remorseless logic of exponentiation, pretty soon thereafter the resource-hungry system will find

itself spreading across the galaxy so fast it hits the speed of light. Like the physics journals on the bookshelves, exponential growth stops here. Or does it? Kurzweil toys with the idea that the speed-of-light barrier is there to be broken, which opens up the giddy prospect of the entire Universe being taken over by an omniscient superintelligence within just a few centuries.

 

Such exhilarating speculation is great fun to read, but needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt. The biggest lacuna in Kurzweil’s argument is the tacit assumption that if we liberate enough information-processing power, then nature will succumb to all our desires. Control the Solar System? Just double the bit rate a few times and it will be within our grasp. Create life? Simulate consciousness? It all boils down to making a cheaper, faster processor. Unfortunately, the laws of physics may well dictate otherwise. Technology can harness physical laws but it can’t bend them. No amount of information processing will suspend the law of gravity or create perpetual-motion machines.

 

When it comes to discussing the physics that underpins his predictions, Kurzweil is apt to be vague or even misinformed. The stupendous power demands implied by the rampant growth in computation and nanotechnology will be met by a concomitant ‘law of accelerating returns’ in power-generation technologies, such as fuel cells and high-temperature superconductors. And if these run into technical problems, well, just send in the nanobots to sort them out. “All technologies,” claims Kurzweil, “will essentially become information technologies, including energy.”

 

On the vexed issue of the speed of light, Kurzweil cites evidence that the fine-structure constant, which expresses the strength of the electromagnetic force and contains the speed of light as a factor, may have increased very

slightly over the past 6 billion years. The primary evidence comes from an analysis of quasar spectral lines by John Webb of the University of New South Wales in Australia and his collaborators, not from a study of the Oklo natural nuclear reactor in Gabon, as Kurzweil states. Furthermore, even if the observations opened the way to manipulating the value of the fine-structure constant, that is not the same as increasing the speed of light and leaving everything else unchanged. Indeed, the manipulation would involve a reduction of the finestructure constant, which would slow the rate

of information processing at the atomic level, and so prove self-defeating.

 

These technical hiccups are irritating, but the book should not be read as a scientific treatise. Rather, it is a futuristic and somewhat breathless romp across the outer reaches of technological possibility, limited only by human imagination. Kurzweil coins the horrible term ‘singularitarian’ for someone who embraces his vision with alacrity. If Kurzweil is to be believed, we will all be singularitarians in just 29 years’ time. Hang in there.

 

Paul Davies is at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales 2109, Australia. His latest book is How to Build a Time Machine

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