1979 & Proyouth GAMES to Linkin from 1951: Ed's & A!20s most curious moments as V. Neumann's & The Economist's diarists include 1982...LLM2022STORY why we co-brand with AIgoodmedia.com.When The Economist sent dad Norman Macrae to pre-train with Von Neumann 1951 Princeton, they agreed The Economist should start up leadership Entrepreneurial Revolution surveys; what goods will humans unite wherever they first linkedin to 100 times more tech per decade? Johnny added a final twist in notes for his biography. "Unfortunately Economics is Not Mathematical. One day only AI maths can save our species

Breaking: help prep AI rehearsal Fringe UNGA Sept 2023 NY- chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk
July Guterres choosing top20 AIHLAB.. bard says Hassabis will chair this '''''with UN tech envoy ..members include Stanford's Fei-Fei Li , Allen's Etzioni, Sinovation's Kai Fu Lee,... Gemini,,Uni2 :FFL*JOBS*DH more G : 1 2 3 4 5
Guterres*JYK*JFK
..worldclassllm & Royal Family's 150 year survey: can weekly newspaper help multiply trust around worldwide human development?
0: Around WorldMaths #1 FFL in 80.. 79

Game AI : Architect Intelligence:: EconomistDiary invites you to co-create this game & apply bard.solar ; personalise your pack of 52 players cards. Whose intelligence over last 75 years most connects human advancement at every gps concerning you and yours on planet?
we offer 3 types of tours sampling rockstars on intelligence for good and welcome guest tours :Alpha Chronological began 1951 through 4 decades at The Economist; Gamma: back from future of 2020s began 1984; Beta intergeneration connectors are more recent quests; try  AI game out; we'd love to hear whose action networks inspires You and who chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk
Alpha1 JFKennedy Neumann-Einstein-Turing Crowther; Youth visions for 1960s launched by Kennedy as great as any known to us- eg space race; peace corps, Atlantic-Pacific win-win trade; Kennedy had studied quite traditional economic gurus at Harvard (eg ); served in US Navy Pacific theatre word war 2; he discovered The Economist stories of exciting economic possibilities; these had emerged from editor Geoffrey Crowther ; his 20+ years of editing included 1943 centenary autobiography of Economist- had been a mistake to vision a newspaper helping 20 something Queen Victoria in 1843 transform to commonwealth trading from slavemaking empire; Crowther thought good news media was worth another go; he sent a rookie journalised who had survived being teen navigator allied bomber command Burma to pretrain with Neumann at Princeton year of 1951 as well as interview NY-UN year 6; Neumann explained after spending their lives mainly on the science allies needed to beat Hitler: Neumann-Einstein-Turing wanted a good legacy - digitalisation -see eg Neumann's last lecture notes delivered Yale "Computer and the Brain". There were 4 inter-generational crises the NET foresaw; sorting out energy; designing win-win economics; sorting out worldwide cooperations; everything else UN and multilaterals were being asked to resolve. Neumann trained Economist journalist in the leadership survey : "What goods will humans unite wherever they have early access to 100 times more tech per decade?"
(breakingJy10) Gamma1 Hassabis , Fei-Fei Li,, Guterres, Oren Etzioni, JYKim, Ng, Yang, Chang, Chang- There are lots of alternative Gammas but we start with 2 engineers who transformed AI from 2010 when they furst met at Stanford and discussed FFL's NSF funding of imagenet since 2006; 2 public health servants who in 2016 weren't happy with just talking 17 new UN goals and have been asking AI genii to help digital roadmap UN2 since 2016 and a Taiwanese American in Silicon Valley, a Chinese American In Taiwan and Samsung's Korean who partnered Taiwan's chip making genii; these stories have lots of personal courage as well as brilliance; any reporting errors are mine alone chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk My family has made 100 trips to Asia from the west but still have no fluency in oriental languages so I am biassed : i believe NOW! that LLMs can connect the best cooperation intelligences ever and urgently map life critical knowhow through every global villahge
Beta 1 celebrates massive web and inter-generational  gifts of Steve Jobs Fazle Abed Mr Sudo JYKim and Mr Grant; you will probably know Jobs started 2 digital networking revolutions with 1984s Mackintosh Personal Computer and apple and 2007's iphone; at bottom of pyramid, you may not know Asia-66-percent-of%20Intelligence-for-good-part-1.docx   fazle abed linked up to 1 billion tropical Asian real housewives & entrepreneurs towards  empowering the end of poverty; and Steve hosted silicon valleys 65th birthday party for abed in 2001; they brainstormed transformative education which the pc hadn't delivered ..but could the mobile era be visioned to do so?; Mr Sudo had partnered Abed and Bangladesh villagers in "leapfrog" mobile experiments starting 1995. By 2001, as Jobs was introducing Abed to eg Stanford friends, Kim had discovered Abed's women were networking the most effective solution to rural Tuberculosis; he introduced Gates and Soros to Abed as all 4 wanted 2000s Global Fund to end TB & HIV & Malaria; at the same time Guterres had moved from Portuguese prime minister to red cross and then UN servant leader of refugees; meanwhile back in 1980 it was UNICEF's James Grant who had discovered Fazle Abed women's oral rehydration network which was saving lives of 1 in 3 infants who previously died of diarrhea in the tropics' humid villages ; Grant became worldwide marketer of how parents could mix water sugar and salts as the life saving cure of ORD; naturally James Grant College of Global Public Health has become cornerstone of all the new university cooperations Abed and Jobs started brainstorming in 2001
here we discuss why 73 years as biographers of V Neumann's future visions suggests its critical to map intelligences who got us to 2020s and today's giant co-leapers Gamma-tours; this also opens door to which intelligences at national or other place levels contribute what? - see our 60+ years of intelligences, and eg discussion of why to end extreme poverty we need one open global university of poverty
Beta2 : NB how different scope of 2020s AI is from cross-selection of web2,1 engineers of last quarter century- NB valuetrue purpose of gamifying Architect Intel : borderless engineering can help humans vision 2020's co-creation of web3 and millennials development beyond extinction. Kai Fu Lee, Ng, Melinda Gates, Koike, Lela Ibrahim, Jobs, Satoshi ,Houlin Zhao, Allen, Musk, Brin ,Page , Bezos, Ma, Zhengfei, Torvaulds, Berners Lee, Masa Son, It would be a pity if short-term nationalism stopped us 8 billion humans learning from these tireless innovative beings. Do sub in your regional counterpart. Also note what no conventional strategist saw as Intelligence possible before 2017. To clarify: start with kai fu lee- his best seller on AI in 2017 doesn't explain the ai thats changing every possibiliity of the 2020s but does it good job of AI up to 2017. He also has unique view because he was sent by google to explore china, falling ill at same time as google exiting china, writing up ai that inspired reinventing himself as both venture capitalist in the midst of asia's most extraordinary student suburb (Zhong...) and as curious observer. I see Ng, Ms Gates. Koike, Ibrahim -as civil education heroines/heroes - who are yours ? Satoshi, Zhao, Allen, Musk - gamechangers taking on conflicts that journey us all through tipping points. One day the world may decide it was a blessing that a corporate like google and a revolutionary uni like Stanford co-habited the same 100 square miles- is there any other comparable 100 square miles of brainworkers for humanity. (I love Hong Kong but thats its own story). The other 5 kept digital movements alive -they merit being valued as engineering heroes before you decide how to translate systemic components to your regions' -and mother earth's - urgent needs.

Friday, December 31, 2010

Economist Journalist (dad) of Neumann's Most Valuable scoop for humanity Dies : Deep Mind born (54 years on from Neumann's book on computer & brain)

chrismacrae@yahoo.co.uk maintains Remembrance videos to Norman  Macrae - by grandaughter, Economist Boardroom - transcript Economist science editor on Norman's 2025 report  AI and humans countdown of humanity from 1984 1 

Mostly, It seems appropriate to start this year's diary with the final notes of the greatest mathematician any economist or journalist could be pretrained by: John Von Neumann- and to wish today's AI magicians like  Hassabis Fei Fe Li and friends, 8 billion beings bests

Bard upd 23/7/7

main papers published by Demis Hassabis or Google Deep Mind on LLM and related human AI:

  • "Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning" (2015). This paper describes the development of DeepMind's first LLM, called AlphaGo. AlphaGo was able to beat a professional Go player, and it demonstrated the potential of deep reinforcement learning to solve complex problems.
  • "Attention is all you need" (2017). This paper describes the development of Transformer, a new type of LLM that uses attention mechanisms. Transformer has been shown to be very effective for a variety of tasks, including machine translation, text summarization, and question answering.
  • "Gopher: A large language model for text summarization" (2020). This paper describes the development of Gopher, a LLM that was trained on a massive dataset of text and code. Gopher is able to generate human-quality text summaries of factual topics.
  • "Pathways to Language: Open-ended Learning in a Neural Network" (2021). This paper describes the development of Pathways, a new type of LLM that is able to learn from a wide variety of data sources. Pathways has been shown to be able to learn to perform a variety of tasks, including playing games, writing different kinds of creative content, and answering questions in an informative way
  • Bard upd23/7/7
  • There isn't a published paper that explains how good is being designed into LLM Bard yet. However, I can tell you about some of the ways that Google is working to ensure that I am aligned with good values.
  • Part of bard review 23/7/7 of von neumann 1956 book
  • I think the book's discussion of the similarities between computers and the brain is particularly interesting. Von Neumann's argument that both computers and the brain are digital systems that can be programmed to perform tasks is still relevant today. In fact, this is one of the reasons why artificial intelligence has been so successful.

    I also think the book's discussion of the differences between computers and the brain is important. Von Neumann's argument that the brain is much more complex than any computer that has been built is a reminder that we still have a lot to learn about how the brain works... and of bard's own sphere of intelligence;

    First, Google is using a technique called reinforcement learning to train me. Reinforcement learning is a type of machine learning where the agent is rewarded for taking actions that are aligned with good values. In my case, the good values that I am being rewarded for are things like being helpful, informative, and unbiased.

    Second, Google is using a technique called bias mitigation to reduce the potential for bias in my outputs. Bias mitigation is a process of identifying and removing biases from machine learning models. Google is using a variety of techniques to mitigate bias in Bard, including:

    • Data sampling: Google is using a variety of data sources to train Bard, including data from a variety of different cultures and backgrounds. This helps to ensure that Bard is not biased towards any particular group of people.
    • Model regularization: Google is using a technique called model regularization to reduce the potential for bias in Bard's outputs. Model regularization is a technique that penalizes models for making predictions that are too extreme. This helps to ensure that Bard's outputs are more likely to be fair and balanced.

    Finally, Google is using a team of engineers and researchers to monitor Bard's outputs and to ensure that they are aligned with good values. This team is constantly reviewing Bard's outputs and making adjustments to the model as needed...................................................................................NEUMANN COMPUTER AND THE BRAIN 1956






































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 Future History

Net Futures - The 2025 Report rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk

Back in 1984 , The Economist's Norman Macrae, with tech sub-editor son chris, wrote "The 2025 Report: a future history of the next 40 years". It was year 33 of Norman's belief that Von Neumann had trained him at Princeton 1951 in the most valuable survey questions futurists let alone economist or educators could ask

 It was the first book to:

  • provide readers with a brainstorming journey of what people in an internetworking world might do
  • predict that a new economy would emerge with revolutionary new productivity and social benefits enjoyed by all who interacted in a net-connected world -updates economistdiary.com 2025report.com
Below we provide these summaries from 1984 

Our 1984 scenario of an internetworking world

Changing communications, and what makes people distant, bossy, etc

Changing national politics

Changing economics

Changing employment

Changing education

========================

Our 1984 scenario of an internetworking world


The great technological event of the next 40 years will be the steady rise in importance of the Telecommunications-Computer terminal (TC for short)... Eventually books, files, television programmes, computer information and telecommunications will merge. We'll have this portable object which is a television screen with first a typewriter, later a voice activator attached. Afterwards it will be minaturised so that your personal access instrument can be carried in your buttonhole, but there will be these cheap terminals around everywhere, more widely than telephones of 1984. The terminals will be used to access databases anywhere in the globe, and will become the brainworker's mobile place of work. Brainworkers, which will increasingly mean all workers, will be able to live in Tahiti if they want to and telecommute daily to the New York or Tokyo or Hamburg office through which they work. In the satellite age costs of transmission will not depend mainly on distance. And knowledge once digitalised can be replicated for use anywhere almost instantly.

Over the last decade, I have written many articles in The Economist and delivered lectures in nearly 30 countries across the world saying the future should be much more rosy. This book explores the lovely future people could have if only all democrats made the right decisions.

Norman Macrae, 1984.


Changing communications, and what makes people distant, bossy etc


Telecommunications are now recognised as the third of the three great transport revolutions that have, in swift succession, transformed society in the past two hundred years. First, were the railways; second the automobile; and third, telecommunications-attached-to-the-computer, which was bound to be the most far-reaching because in telecommunications, once the infrastructure is installed, the cost of use does not depend greatly on distance. So by the early years of the twenty-first century brainworkers - which in rich countries already meant most workers - no longer need to live near their work.

All three revolutions were opposed by the ruling establishments of their time, and therefore emerged fastest where government was weak. All three brought great new freedoms to the common man, but the railway and motor-car ages temporarily made access to capital the most important source of economic power. As most men and women did not like being bossed about by capitalists who could become more powerful because they were born stinking rich, they voted to give greater economic power to governments during the railway and motor-car ages. This was economically inefficient, and also made tyrannies more likely and more terrible. The information revolution was fortunately the exact opposite of the steam engine's industrial revolution and of Henry Ford's mass production automobile revolution in this respect. The steam engine and mass production has made start-up costs for the individual entrepreneur larger and larger, so that in both the steam and automobile ages to quote Bell Canada's Gordon Thompson in the early 1970s, there was 'no way an ordinary citizen could walk into a modern complex factory and use its facilities to construct something useful for himself'. But, as Thompson forecast, the databases of the next decades were places into which every part-time enthusiast could tele-commute. In all jobs connected with the use of information, start-up costs for the individual entrepreneur in 1984-2024 have grown smaller and smaller. It was 'never thus', said Thompson, 'with power shovels and punch presses'.

In consequence, in the TC age, the most important economic resource is no longer ownership of or access to capital, but has become the ability to use readily available knowledge intelligently and entrepreneurially.


Changing national politics


For a region's people to succeed in the Telecommuting Age there are four main requirements - satisfied in places as far apart ad Guam and Queensland and Cape Province and California and Penang and Scotland. First , as the prophet John Naisbitt said in 1982, 'the languages needed for the immediate future are computer and English'. Second, the area has to be a nice one in which to live. Third, it is important that all income earners should adapt happily to a 'cafeteria of compensation' schemes. These allow the individual employee to decide what mix (s)he wants of salary, job objectives, career aims, flexitime, job sharing, long or short holidays, fringe benefits or fringe nuisances. Fourth, there needs to be a competitive and quickly changing telecommunications system. The TC age is making understanding of these requirements increasingly transparent among human beings worldwide.

Governments at first tried to impede or regulate much of this, but an early discovery of the Telecommutung age was that we could change the way we chose our governments. Until the 1990s we had pretended to ourselves that we could alter our lifestyles by choosing on each Tuesday or Thursday every four years whether Mr Reagan or Mr Carter , Mrs Thatcher or Mr Kinnock, was putting on the tribal demonstration which at that particular moment annoyed us less. After the advent of the TC we found that the more sensible and direct way in which a free man or woman could choose government was by voting with his or her feet. The individual could go to live in any area where the government - which could from then on be a very local government - permitted the lifestyle, rules and customs which suited that human being.

Changing Economics


The introduction of the international Centrobank was the last great act of government before government grew much less important. It was not a conception of policy-making governments at all, but emerged from the first computerised town meeting of the world.

By 2005 the gap in income and expectations between the rich and poor nations was recognised to be man's most dangerous problem. Internet linked television channels in sixty-eight countries invited their viewers to participate in a computerised conference about it, in the form of a series of weekly programmes. Recommendations tapped in by viewers were tried out on a computer model of the world economy. If recommendations were shown by the model to be likely to make the world economic situation worse, they were to be discarded. If recommendations were reported by the model to make the economic situation in poor countries better, they were retained for 'ongoing computer analysis' in the next programme.

In 2024 it is easy to see this as a forerunner of the TC conferences which play so large a part in our lives today, both as pastime and principal innovative device in business. But the truth of this 2005 breakthrough tends to irk the highbrow. It succeeded because it was initially a rather downmarket network television programme. About 400 million people watched the first programme, and 3 million individuals or groups tapped in suggestions. Around 99 per cent of these were rejected by the computer as likely to increase the unhappiness of mankind. It became known that the rejects included suggestions submitted by the World Council of Churches and by many other pressure groups. This still left 31,000 suggestions that were accepted by the computer as worthy of ongoing analysis. As these were honed, and details were added to the most interesting, an exciting consensus began to emerge. Later programmes were watched by nearly a billion people as it became recognised that something important was being born.

These audiences were swollen by successful telegimmicks. The presenter of the first part of the first programme was a roly-poly professor who was that year's Nobel laureate in economics, and who proved a natural television personality. He explained that economists now agreed that aid programmes could sometimes help poor countries, but sometimes most definitely made their circumstances worse. When Mexico was inflating at over 80 per cent a year in the early 1980s , the inflow to it of huge loanable funds made its inflation even faster and its crash more certain. The professor set Mexico's 1979-1981 economy on the model, pumped in the loaned funds and showed how all the indicators ( higher inflation, lower real gross domestic product and so on) then flashed red, signaling an economy getting worse, rather than green, signaling an economy getting better. ..The professor then put the model back to mirror the contemporary world of 2005, and played into it various nostrums that had been recommended by politicians of left, right and centre, but mostly left. The dials generally flashed red. Then the professor provided another set of recommendations , and asked viewers who wished to play to tap in their own guesses on the consequent movement of key economics variables in the model. Those who got their guesses right to within a set error were told they had qualified for a second round of a knock-out economic guesstimators' world championship. Knockout competitions of this sort continued for viewers throughout the series of programmes.

In the second part of that first programme, the presenters dared to introduce two political decisions into the game. They said that government-to-government aid programmes had been particularly popular among politicians during the age of over-government, but there was growing agreement that government-to-government aid was the worst method of hand-out. The excessive role played by governments in poor countries was one of the barriers to their economic advance, and a main destroyer of their people's freedom. Could anyone have thought it would be wise to give aid to President Mbogo?

In consequence, the most successful economic aid programmes had been those operated through the International Monetary Fund, which imposed conditions on how borrowing governments should operate. The professor showed that IMF-monitored operations in most years had brought more green flashes from the model than red. But this involved IMF officials - often from the rich countries - in telling governments of poor countries what to do; and one of the objectives of this town meeting of the world was to diminish such embarrassments.

The first questions to be asked in the next few programmes, said the compilers, were 1) which countries should qualify for aid? ; and having decided that, 2) up to what limits and conditions? ; and 3) through what mechanisms? They promised that later programmes after the first half-dozen would examine how any scheme could be used to diminish the power of governments and increase the power of free markets and free people.


Changing employment


In a typical 21st C scene, obedience to consumer needs is shown by every car plant in the world because of better and more customised information available on all our TCs. Most people buying a car in 2024 will key into their special requirements into their TCs.

The TC will reply: "You can get a customised car which meets all of your specifications by putting personalised instructions on the software of the assembly line's robots in one of these factories (choice of nine) requesting that the next car on the line be modified as you dictate. But that would cost up to $40,000 (Click to factories for quotations and credit facilities). For a fifth of that price, you can meet most of your requirements by the following standard computer programme at present scheduled for production in June at Nissan Kanpur; or July at Ford Manila (and so on). Click to factories for precise specifications and prices.


All of this has become commonplace after 2000. How has it affected employment?


For a new industry of 2019-2024 let us cite the intendedly short-lived example of the Clark-Schmidt Robot Gardener. Matthew Clark was a 53-year old on his third university course (he had started the other two at the ages of nineteen and thirty-seven respectively) telecommuted through the University of Southern California, although he took it while living in his native Australia , when, together with two other student's telecommuting through USC's database, he devised a system for a robot-driven lawnmower which could also scan soil and assess the possibilities for reseeding. It signaled the videos to be called up on your TC to show alternative uses for the soil in your garden. If you picked one video display that particularly suited your taste, you keyed in its number into the Robot Gardener and it signaled back, 'put such-and-such chemical into my tank and seeds 1234, 3456 (et cetera), plus software program 29387 - both orderable through your TC - into my reseeder.'

Clark and his two colleagues put their tentative ideas for this device on the researchers' database monitored by the University of Southern California. The entry numbers to the USC database were held by people who had promised to accept the computer's judgement of the value of any ideas they might contribute to projects entered on it. In all, 1213 people - domiciled from Hanoi through Penang and Capri and Bermuda back to Queensland in Australia itself - tapped in suggestions for improvements, of which 176 were accepted nby the computer as worthwhile. The payments recommended by the computer ranged from $42 ( for a cosmetic improvement recommended by an eleven-year-old schoolboy) to one tenth of the equity (eventually worth several million dollars) for a proposal by a research team from another telecommuting university which proved important enough for Clark to feel slightly guilty about calling the Robot Gardener after himself.

When the improvements suggested by these 176 contributors had been incorporated by Clark into the appropriate software program for making the Robot Gardener , it was advertised on USC's entrepreneur-browsing program available on any TC. Entry numbers for the lowest echelons of this can be bought for a very few dollars, but the Robot Gardener was put on a higher echelon because USC's computer had signaled this was a potential quick winner.

One of those who had paid for an expensive entry number into browsing among good 'proffered opportunity products' (POPs) was a Dutchman called Carl Schmidt. He had become a successful 'arranging producer' in an earlier venture, and now occupied himself browsing through his TC looking for a second bonanza. He made an offer to Clark to tale an option for launch in return for a fairly complicates programme of profit sharing, which in practice (because arranging is nowadays a more skilled job than inventing) eventually gave Schmidt more money than Clark. Clark accepted this and Schmidt produced a prototype within three days by reprogramming robots in an experimental plant. A video of the prototype was put on consumers' TC channels worldwide the next week, and most of the 400 odd gardeners' TC channels round the world picked it out within days as a 'best buy'.

Schmidt's video advertisement said 'If you key in your order now with your credit number, you can get a Robot Gardener for a bargain price (applies to the first 10,000 orders only). Tenders are also invited for part of the equity.' The advance orders and bids for equity made it possible to finance assembly of the Robot Gardener for early-bid customers within a few weeks...

Note that there was never any intention that Robot Gardeners Inc should grow into a huge and long-lasting company. Clark and Schmidt are already researching and browsing into other possibilities, on separate courses. About fifty of those who succeeded by early participation in this venture hope to become the equivalent of Clark and Schmidt in other things.

At no stage has this enormously successful manufacturing venture employed more than 1000 people. It is therefore true that the loss of nine-tenths of manufacturing jobs , which we saw has been highest in car-making in rich countries, has also been true there in manufacturing jobs as a whole. Where these countries had 20-40 per cent of their workforces in manufacturing in 1974, they typically have 2-4 per cent now.

This is not an unprecedented rundown. In the 1890s around half of the workforce in countries like the United States were in three occupations: agriculture, domestic service and jobs to do with horse transport. By the 1970s these three were down to 4 per cent of the workforce. If this had been foretold in the 1890s, there would have been a wail. It would have been said that half the population was fit only to be farmworkers, parlourmaids and sweepers-up of horse manure. Where would this half find jobs? The answer was by the 1970s the majority of them were much more fully employed ( because more married women joined the workforce) doing jobs that would have sounded double-Dutch in the 1890s: extracting oil instead of fish out of the North Sea; working as computer programmers, or as television engineers, or as package-holiday tour operators chartering jet aircraft.

The move in jobs in the past fifty years in the rich countries has been out of manufacturing and into telecommuting.

Changing education


There has been a sea-change in the traditional ages on man. Compared with 1974 our children in 2024 generally go out to paid work (especially computer programming work) much earlier, maybe starting at nine, maybe at twelve, and we do not exploit them. But young adults of twenty-three to forty-five stay at home to play much more than in 1974; it is quite usual today for one parent (probably now generally the father, although sometimes the mother) to stay at home during the period when young children are growing up. And today adults of forty-three to ninety-three go back to school - via computerised learning - much more than they did in 1974.

In most of the rich countries in 2024 children are not allowed to leave school until they pass their Preliminary Exam. About 5 per cent of American children passed their exam last year before their eight birthday, but the median age for passing it in 2024 is ten-and-a-half, and remedial education is generally needed if a child has not passed it by the age of fifteen.

A child who passes his Prelim can decide whether to tale a job at once, and take up the remainder of his twelve years of free schooling later; or he can pass on to secondary schooling forthwith, and start to study for his Higher Diploma.

The mode of learning for the under-twelves is nowadays generally computer-generated. The child sits at home or with a group of friends or (more rarely) in an actual, traditional school building. She or he will be in touch with a computer program that has discovered , during a preliminary assessment, her or his individual learning pattern. The computer will decide what next questions to ask or task to set after each response from each child.

A school teacher assessor, who may live half a world away, will generally have been hired, via the voucher system by the family for each individual child. A good assessor will probably have vouchers to monitor the progress of twenty-five individual children, although some parents prefer to employ groups of assessors - one following the child's progress in emotional balance, one in mathematics, one in civilized living, and so on - and these groups band together in telecommuting schools.

Many communities and districts also have on-the-spot 'uncles' and 'aunts'. They monitor childrens' educational performance by browsing through the TC and also run play groups where they meet and get to know the children personally...

Some of the parents who have temporarily opted out of employment to be a family educator also put up material on the TC s for other parents to consult. Sometimes the advice is given for free, sometimes as a business. It is a business for Joshua Ginsberg. He puts a parents advice newsletter on the TC , usually monthly. Over 300,000 people subscribe to it, nowadays at a 25-cent fee per person, or less if you accept attached advertisements. Here's an entry from the current newsletter:

"Now that TCs are universal and can access libraries of books, 3-d video, computer programs, you name it, it is clear that the tasks of both the Educator and the Communicator are far more stimulating that ten years ago.

One of my recent lessons with my ten-year-old daughter Julie was in art appreciation. In the standard art appreciation course the TC shows replicas of famous artists' pictures, and a computer asks the pupil to match the artist to the picture. Julie said to the computer that it would be fun to see Constable's Haywain as Picasso might have drawn it. The computer obliged with its interpretation , and then ten more stylised haywains appeared together with the question 'who might have drawn these?'. I believe we are the first to have prompted the TC along this road, but it may now become a standard question when the computer recognises a child with similar learning patterns to Julie's.

It is sometimes said that today's isolated sort of teaching has robbed children of the capacity to play and interact with other children. This is nonsense. We ensure that Julie and her four year old brother Pharon have lots of time to play with children in our neighbourhood . But in work we do prefer to interact with children who are of mutual advantage to Julie and to each other. The computer is an ace teacher, but so are people. You really learn things if you can teach them to someone else. Our computer has helped us to find a group of four including Julie with common interests, who each have expertise in some particular areas to teach the others.

The TC also makes it easier to play games within the family. My parents used to play draughts, halma, then chess with me. They used to try to be nice to me and let me win. This condescending kindness humiliated me, and I always worked frenetically to beat my younger brother (who therefore always lost and dissolved into tears.) Today Julie, Pharon and I play halma together against the graded computer, and Julie and I play it at chess. The computer knows Pharon's standard of play at halma and Julie's and mine at chess. Its default setting is at that level where each of us can win but only if we play at our best. Thus Pharon sometimes wins his halma game while Julie and I are simultaneously losing our chess game, and this rightly gives Pharon a feeling of achievement. When Julie and I have lost at chess, we usually ask the computer to re-rerun the game, stopping at out nmistakes and giving a commentary. As it is a friendly computer it does a marvelous job of consoling us. Last week it told Julie that the world champion actually once made the same mistake as she had done - would she like to see that game?

I intend to devote the next two letters to the subjects I have discussed here , but retailing the best of your suggestions instead of droning on with mine."

While the computer's role in children's education is mainly that of instructor (discovering a child's learning pattern and responding to it) and learning group matcher, its main role in higher education is as a store of knowledge. Although a computer can only know what Man has taught it, it has this huge advantage. No individual man lives or studies long enough to imbibe within himself all the skills and resources that are the product of the millennia of man's quest for knowledge, all the riches and details from man's inheritance of learning passed on from generation to generation. But any computer today can inherit and call up instantly any skill which exists anywhere in the form of a program.

This is why automatically updated databases are today the principal instruments of higher education and academic research. It is difficult for our generation to conceive that only forty years ago our scientists acted as tortoise-like discoverers of knowledge, confined to small and jealous cliques with random and restricted methods of communicating ideas. Down until the 1980s the world has several hundred separate cancer research organisations with no central co-ordinating database.

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upd 2023 we aim to issue a final 2025 to celebrate what would have been dad's centenary year 2023 - it makes guesses on which 50 intelligences neumann and his net eg einstein turing courant would have celebrated linking together 2025-1945- thats jist the start of a game where people from any gps or expertise can swap in and out their own cards ; and indeed the card packs can be plugins to LLMs - a pilot version of von neumann's top 50 is being piloted here http://innovations.ning.com/forum/topics/who-s-100-times-moore-tech-humsanity-would-world-uniquely-mis