Regarding the future study of gait and human movement in 10 years.
. . . . he has now developed "Talk to Books", which is a program where by you ask a question, and within a half a second (0.5 seconds) it will read 120,000 books (yes, 120 thousand books) on the verbiage you asked it to look into, and give you the most in-depth answer based on that 120,000 book wisdom. This is search based on meaning, context, not on key words and hashtags. This is the future of information acquisition. . . . .
"Semantic Search" is quite possibly going to take over things. Forget key words and hashtags, perhaps. But what does this have to do with gait and us at The Gait Guys.
I recently re-listened to a Ray Kurzweil interview where he discussed the predicted technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence in 10 years (2030). Kurzweil is an odd visionary in this regard, he is often very close to spot on which is the reason for his ground breaking inventions. If you do not know about Ray Kurzweil, you should see his ahead-of-the-rest inventions on his Wikipedia page, the man has been ahead of the curve most of the time. There is a good reason Google hired him several years ago.
Kurzweil was hired to deepen several projects, one namely, "semantic research", to deepen the meaning behind the data and the facts, which is largely what the internet now provides. So in essence, he was hired to take the internet's data and place meaning behind it and within it, semantics. Semantics are the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning, they are the meaning behind words. This is sort of what we are referring to as AI, Artificial Intelligence.
According to Kurzweil, this is where "the web" is headed, some would argue it is already upon us, it is inevitable in his opinion and it is hard to argue. "Semantic search" will lead us, meaning no longer will we be searching the web, "googling" key words, rather we will be searching by meaning and conversing with the web. He has been successful in this endeavor according to this latest TED talk interview; he has created "Smart Reply". This is already tapping into Google Smart Home, Google Assistant etc. What this means for a computer is that it models the intent and various nuanced elements of language and data. Kurzweil projects this to be full on board by 2029, 10 years from now, which is why he believes AI will be fully on board by that date. It is not hard to see that this is an accurate and a foregone conclusion. For example, he has now developed "Talk to Books", which is a program where by you ask a question, and within a half a second (0.5 seconds) it will read 120,000 books (yes, 120 thousand books) on the verbiage you asked it to look into, and give you the most in-depth answer based on the contents of the 120,000 books. This is search based on meaning and context, not on key words and hashtags. This is the future of information acquisition. And if you are lazy, and have the time for 6 seconds, it will read 1 million books and offer you and even more in-depth answer. No longer will memorizing data, facts or anything of the sort, be necessary, our questions will be answered, and answered deeply. This is what Kirzweil refers to as "the singularity" once it is integrated into our human physiology. And as Ray suggests, we are basically already there, we just merely hold this AI (our smart phones) in our hand right now, soon it will be fully integrated. Rather than in our hand or pocket, we will be "Bluetoothed", or "Wifi'd" in to the system. We already have seen this technology implemented in circumventing spinal cord injuries. Ivo and I discussed this in a podcast long ago.
(https://www.nytimes.com/…/wireless-brain-spine-connection-p…)
So where does this leave Ivo and myself, The Gait Guys?
Well, in 2009 we bought into the deeper web design, launching our initial voyage into the AI to come. We knew that if we were one of the initial teams of people and/or researchers putting volumes of integrated thoughts on the web based on research, clinical trials and our own integrated clinical insights that we "could" be one of the main platforms that others would follow, and build further upon. We could not have seen or known the depths that companies like Google could go to dive into a "semantic search" on "gait problems" or "gait analysis" or "gait and hallux rigidus" or anything of the sort that we #hashtagged or Key Worded. But we did know that a data base of all things gait and human movement needed to be developed and we decided to see what we could build on that front. At the time things like #hashtags were not even present, but that eventually sped up the basis of "key word" search, which has lead us to the now developing "sematic search". Back then we hoped that if we could consistently, over the next 10 years, amass a data source large enough, that we could ensure that our work and the known and validated research we based most of our writings, podcasts, videos, and even web-based teaching courses upon (onlineCE.com) could provide part of the template for other things to come, things that Kurzweil has now termed this "semantic search" and "talk to books". Certainly, obviously, we didn't see any of this Kurzeil-ian stuff coming, but we saw that the web provided more up to date and faster moving sources than our libraries of books, and as we no longer were able to acquire the answers we needed from our dated libraries, we found the internet was our go to source, and we realized that it was going to be the way for everyone very quickly.
Ivo and I have been filling the Internet with our research and thoughts on gait and related systems for 10 years now (145 podcasts, 1600+ posts and articles, research reviews and deep dive discussions and tangents taken off of the current research). Companies like Google and their "deep mind" project, and other related projects as discussed here, integrate all pieces of data.
So, it is our greatest hope that we are in fact helping to provide a great network of information for the development of gait and human movement knowledge.
In 2019 we will continue to do as we have, taking small piece research ideas and broadening them into the bigger terms and correlations and relationships with gait and human movement so that things like "Semantic Search" can help others find the information they are seeking. We hope that what people will read in 10 or 20 years is going to be partly based off of the honest framework that we have tried to provide. We hope that this heavy lifting is valuable to you. In turn, we have learned a lot from our own writings and assimilation of what is out there in the web-o-sphere and from our discussions amongst ourselves, and wit you all.
In 2019 you will be seeing some new additions to our mission here to source out good information and deep discussions. Things like live WebEx seminars, new OnlineCE.com seminar offers, AMA (Ask Me Anything) discussions with you, and we are starting up a vlog as well, hopefully bimonthly. Patreon patrons at, and above, the 10-20$ subscription levels will get many of these for free we anticipate, plus we will add on a new subscriber platform as well since Patreon seems to be challenging some "Free speech", or so it seems. So another platform with different terms of service will give you all choices in how you donate to our mission to bring you the best of what we know, and are learning.
Happy New Year to all !
Shawn & Ivo
The Gait Guys
free photo courtesy of Pixabay.com
Listen to Ray Kurzweil on what the future holds next from The TED Interview in Podcasts.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ted-interview/id1437306870?mt=2&i=1000425101600&fbclid=IwAR2wdHQiaaUBOoFtz02Nu9BRLnvQnkfkDck3_iHnAd7moponZT3HcBsw-Mc
