Brian Roemmele

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I write often about The Intelligence Amplifier and Your Wisdom Keeper. I also present some specimen videos on how they work. The concepts are quite simple. The only intelligence humans currently understand, even if it is fleeting and partial—is human intelligence. We get excited over the speed of computers, but in no way is just speed any form of intelligence. Many very well educated folks have stated emphatically that Artificial Intelligence will bypass human intelligence “very soon”. This is like saying an automobile will go faster then a running human. Speed is not intelligence—ever.
So what is The Intelligence Amplifier? Simply put the primary path of the entire computer industry. Amplifying human intelligence.

I have been building these systems in my Garage Lab with the help of 1000s of folks that have created bits of software and hardware I use collected over decades. Although I have been on this solo adventure they have unknown to themselves helped me build this. I stand on some of the strongest shoulders that have afforded me a spectacular view of what is ahead.
I firmly believe in human Intelligence Amplification, and—I firmly believe everyone has Wisdom to be placed in a Wisdom Keeper. We are currently beguiled by “Artificial Intelligence” and many have discounted the sum total of human wisdom. Since the 1970s I saw this a feeble misunderstanding of the future.
We are drowning in data and information but we are starving for wisdom. I found a way to solve this.

The Journey From Data To Wisdom
We can find via a search, just about any form of data and information. We are awash with data and information. This is useful but only to a certain level. Most information is not truly organized in a semantical ontology and taxonomy, nor can we make much use of it with out sifting and sorting thought perhaps hundreds of resources.
What we truly seek is knowledge with insight and wisdom:

1. Information is processed data whereas knowledge is information that is modeled to be useful.
2. You need information to be able to get knowledge.
3. Information deals with the way data is related while knowledge examines patterns within a given set of information.
4. To get knowledge you need some cognitive and analytical ability while for information you do not need cognitive ability.
5. To get to insight you need to relate all of the data, information, knowledge to form a working postulation.
6. To get to wisdom, you require a working postulation of insights drawn from as many sources as possible. All of which must work their way up to experiences of insight via data, information, knowledge.

We can see that data and information without knowledge is nearly worthless on the grand scale. But there is more we also need insight and wisdom. Insight is a synthesis process of information and wisdom is the ability to make sensible decisions and give good advice because of the insights, experience and knowledge. Someone may have all the knowledge about a subject but may not have the wisdom to utilize this knowledge properly to be able to act in a sensible manner. That is why they say you can gain knowledge by educating yourself but you can gain wisdom only by experience. Let us break this down more succinctly:
Data– Data is raw. It simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence (in and of itself). It can exist in any form, usable or not. It does not have meaning of itself.
Information– Information is data that has been given meaning by way of relational connection. This “meaning” can be useful, but does not have to be.

Knowledge– Knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, such that it’s intent is to be useful. Knowledge is a deterministic process. When someone “memorizes” information, then they have amassed knowledge. This knowledge has useful meaning to them, but it does not provide for, in and of itself, an integration such as would infer further knowledge.
Insight– Insight is an interpolative and probabilistic process. It is cognitive and analytical. It is the process by which we can take knowledge and synthesize new knowledge from the previously held knowledge. The difference between insight and knowledge is the difference between learning and memorizing. People who have insight can undertake useful actions because they can synthesize new knowledge, or in some cases, at least new information, from what is previously known and understood. That is, understanding can build upon currently held information, knowledge and understanding itself.
Wisdom– Wisdom is an extrapolative and non-deterministic, non-probabilistic process. It calls upon all the previous levels of consciousness, and specifically upon special types of human programming of moral, ethical codes, etc. It try to give us understanding about which there has previously been no understanding, and in doing so, goes far beyond understanding itself. It is the essence of philosophical probing. Unlike the previous four levels, it asks questions to which there is no easily- achievable) answer. Wisdom is therefore, the process by which we also discern, or judge, between right and wrong, good and bad along with other elements of paradigms humans have created.
Consider:
I have a box.
The box is 3′ wide, 3′ deep, and 6′ high.
The box is very heavy.
The box has a door on the front of it.
When I open the box it has food in it.
It is colder inside the box than it is outside.
You usually find the box in the kitchen.
There is a smaller compartment inside the box with ice in it.
When you open the door the light comes on.
When you move this box you usually find lots of dirt underneath it.
Junk has a real habit of collecting on top of this box.

Most humans in the modern world would guess refrigerator by state 4 or 5. A series of searches for each phrase without continuity or context would also be difficult to arrive at an answer. However we can arrive at an answer by the moving through the tree of data, information, knowledge, insights and perhaps some wisdom.
The journey of the entire computer age right up to the smartphone is to gain insights and wisdom. Up until just the last few years all we had was data, information and some knowledge.
There are variations to the Data->information- >knowledge->insights->wisdom. Originally called the DIKW theory, which suggested the path through understanding was made up of 4 parts: data, information, knowledge and wisdom. However the premises are the same.
The current cloud around any connected person is a data and information cloud that requires you to actively shift and sort to manage it. This is almost an entirely a visual process that takes nearly 95% of a typical human cognitive load. The only reason humans became the “last mile” of data and information sorting was because computers and network bandwidth was not powerful enough. Also computers only performed a minimal amount of knowledge and nearly no insights or wisdom. Thus we had to be the endpoint “computer”.
Artificial Intelligence (or more correctly, synthetic intelligence) and Machine Learning present the possibility to aid in solving the cognitive load “last mile” quagmire.
Rather than shifting and sorting a 20 million result Google search, we would just ask a question or issue a command. It all started with simple questions or commands like “What time is it?”, “What is the weather like?”, “Set a timer?”. The current Voice First systems must first use speech recognition, this converts the sound of what you say into text, this text is than searched for intents, those intents need to connect to semantic ontologies, this needs to find information to return back an answer. In the case of simple questions the results are nearly equal to things that are contextual “facts”. For example “What time is it?’, context is implied to be where the user is, fact is the current atomic time with-in a few seconds.
The whole process expands as the type of questions expand—from general questions like “What was the Civil War?” to “Who invented the automobile”. Again, these are usually very short answers derived from knowledge graphs with simple context.
Personal Assistants, Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Agents
Some call Alexa, Siri, Cortana and other Voice First systems are erroneously called “Intelligent Assistants” or worse “Personal Assistants”. I suggest these are inaccurate on a surface level and a deeper level. I call Alexa, Siri and Cortana Voice First devices or systems using a Voice OS. They are at best a very limited form of an “Intelligent Agent” by the guiding principles I will present. Many will use terms in a very general way early on, but over time all subjects get refined with better definitions. We can define them as a computer device that can monitor human speech, determine intent, some context, and commands and take action as well as a human would.
I present a more nuanced definition of what we current have and things I and others have been working on:
Intelligent Agent– Acts on behalf of Intelligent Assistants and Personal Assistants. Can be short lived for just a single task for one time, like find the time of a movie or a list of local events. They can be long lived and do this on a regular cycle. Intelligent Agent have no, or very limited information about the user and thus can generally be assumed to by like search terms used during a series of Google searches.
Intelligent Assistant– Acts on behalf of the Personal Assistant or the human user. This system forms a software (and sometimes a hardware) layer between the actual Voice First device and Voice OS and the user. It can be a layer on top of the Voice First system via the OS or Voice Apps. Intelligent Assistants should not hold any private, confidential or personalized information on the user. It can however hold context of the user.
Personal Assistant– Acts on behalf of the the human user. This system forms a software (and sometimes a hardware) layer between the actual Voice First device and Voice OS and the user. Personal Assistants will hold the most personal data on behalf of the user, every aspect of the users life. This includes health data, financial data, location data, shopping data, email data, phone data, web surfing data and more. The basis of which is to mediate interactions with other Personal Assistants, Personal Agents, Intelligent Agents and Voice First systems.

Why Not Just One “Thing”?
We will have many, if not countless Intelligent Agents, some operated on our behalf by companies. One can see Intelligent Agents like a form of an app. They will be performing multiple tasks over time to a single task with a life of just a few seconds. They exist to seek out information or monitor information for changes or looking for a combination of events or information to change or take place.
We will have a few Intelligent Assistants that we operate directly, however by their nature they will be likely rarely held by a third party outside of Banking and Medical with clear legally defined relationships mediated by Federal and State privacy, medical and financial rules and laws. Intelligent Assistants will interact with Intelligent Agents and the Voice First hardware or Voice OS. In some cases the Voice First hardware company will supply some of these agents. Intelligent Assistants will at times hold contextual information about you and perhaps simple payment information. In both cases it will be situational and temporary.
You will likely only invest into one Personal Assistant as it represents a big investment and perhaps something worthy of the highest security in your life. The Personal Assistant will be one of the most important stores of personal information you will ever have in a computer. It will allow for the ability of the AI to know you and to understand your context. I call this The Intelligence Amplifier.
For The Intelligence Amplifier to be of the greatest use, it will needs to know the context about you to the deepest detail. The Personal Assistants I have created have followed just about any data point that can be determined. Here are some examples:
What I do on all of my devices and computers
What my geolocation is at any moment
Who I meet with (physical world)
Who I talk to (online chat, Skype, iMessage, Phone)
Some content of my conversations (I have this turned off)
What I eat (homemade and restaurant)
What I buy (online and Internet)
My entire schedule
My social graph
My family tree
Who Owns The Intelligence Amplifier And Where Does It Live?
My The Intelligence Amplifier, I use sixteen today in my research, have been following me on a steady basis for about five. One system has followed me intermittently for over fourteen years. None of these systems are actively connected to a network and when they are it is discreetly controlled for seconds with full monitoring and verification of outgoing data. It is behind a firewall that changes virtual location ever few seconds. Finally there is triple encryption between the Personal Assistant and the Intelligent Assistant.
I think it is clear to see need for security. In the history of human existence there has never been a more pervasive potential intrusion into our life than the creation of a true Personal Assistant. You would never allow or agree to consciously to have one central intrusive database of this nature living in a cloud computer. One can just examine the last 5 years of hacker intrusions into databases, networks and email systems of public figures and private figures just how deeply impactful just these events are. The Personal Assistant is an order of magnitude larger in how it would impact a life if it was in the hands of anyone, with ill will or otherwise.
There are a number of ways you could have and build The Intelligence Amplifier. The most logical way ultimately will be in an abstraction layer above the Voice First OS and system/device and we will explore this in more detail shortly.
It should be clear why calling Siri and Alexa a Personal Assistant or even an Intelligent Assistant under the definitions I use woefully misses the mark. It should also be very clear that once one understands just how much central data that will be accumulated on you and the greater circle of relationships one may have, there would be no desire to commit to a Google Gmail model of “You get to see my private life in hopes that you keep it protected and anonymous”.
This particular point I believe will be one of the largest issues in technology we will face over the next 25 years. It will become more clear to first adopters in the next 3 years as true Personal Assistants become available on a more wider basis. There will be debates and valid arguments on every side. It is one reason I presented the security issue of Personal Assistants before I speak to why they are so important to the Voice First revolution.
Compounding this all is governments, spy agencies, law enforcement, courts and investigators requesting or demanding access to your Personal Assistant. For example in December, 2017 police requested access to data from the Amazon Echo speaker belonging to James Bates of Bentonville, Arkansas, who was charged earlier this year with first-degree murder to examine the audio it recorded to provide clues about what happened inside Bates’ home on Nov. 22, 2015, when a man was found dead in his hot tub. Amazon did release the data and in this case it was just a snippet of audio that was recorded when the wake word “Alexa” was said and perhaps the questions asked. One could find gallows humor in the possibility that Mr. Bates may have asked “How can I hide a dead body”.
Privacy is the greater debate of our epoch and the Personal Assistant privacy debate will be one of the most challenging. Consider the Personal Assistant that has the sum total of twenty five years of your life? Fifty years of your life? Access to this data would only require a question “Where was Bill on January10th, 2025 at 11:22pm?”. Anyone with access to your Personal Assistant has access to the elements of your life that creates you. They have access to the chain of events that built your life experiences. They have access to the pain, hurt, joy and ecstasy that defined you. They have access to the great things you have done and the things you have regretted. They have access to a window into your soul.
The Intelligence Amplifier That May Live On After You Leave
One can argue that even in the most successful relationships we do not know ever single deep element of our significant other’s life details nor do they know ours. Today we see some relationships meet a test or milestone when they allow a significant other have full access to our smartphones or computers, search history, pictures, email, text messages and all. This has caused conflict, confusion and hurt since the dawn of the personal computer and the smartphone. Granting access to a life of data from your Personal Assistant will become perhaps the ultimate test for some and more likely the further decline of deep personal relationships.
When you pass away, who gains access to your Personal Assistant? Your significant other? Your children? The State? A museum? An organ donor? Would you want after 100 years of following you since the day you were born, what would be a close representation of how you would answer just about any question to remain? What are the upside effects? What are the downside effects? Consider a tragic accident that take away a Dad from a 10 year old boy. Would you want your son to be able to ask at a crucial point in his life “Dad, what would you do?”. Does it help the future or does it hurt the future.
How I would love to be able to ask my Dad a question today. How I would love to ask Albert Einstein how he would view our era. The balance of the good it would do vs. the potential harm is a big challenge to fully appreciate and understand today. The results of a life-long personal assistant combined with synthesizing of a statistically accurate response could allow you to be in the mind of another person. Let us imagine if Einstein’s Intelligence Amplifier never stopped seeing the world long after he passed away.
You and I are going to have to actively lead in the direction of how this will play out. I have thought about this since I wrote my Voice Manifesto in the 1980s. I can say this, The Intelligence Amplifier will at some point so closely represent how we would react to almost any situation, one may argue that in itself it is a sentient representation of ourselves. This technology, ready or not is here now in its very basic form. It will be orders of magnitude more useful in decade. I call this Your Wisdom Keeper.
Why We Really Want The Intelligence Amplifier
With the aspects and implication of privacy The Intelligence Amplifier presented first, what are the upsides? The computer was designed to be a human Intelligence Amplifier (IA). The more data and information we gave a computer the more it amplified on our behalf. In the 1950s it allowed for a room full of people on manual calculators working on a calculation that could take weeks to replaced by a program that duplicated and amplified this work to be a few minutes. These early computers calculated the arc of a missile or the yield of a nuclear explosion. They calculated the amortization tables for mortgages and interest rates at banks. These early computers knew nothing of humans an we adopted to them.
During the 1960s, it was thought there would only be the need for a few dozen computers. By the 1970s, there were just over 50,000 computers in the world.
Computers have grown in power by orders of magnitude since. They have become more intelligent in the way they interact with humans, starting with switches and buttons then punch cards and on to the keyboard. Along the way, we added joysticks, the mouse, track pads and the touch screen.
As each paradigm replaced the last, productivity and utility increased dramatically. In some cases, we cling on to the prior generation’s system to such a degree we think the replacement is little more than a novelty or a toy. For example, when the punch card was the fundamental input system to computers, many computer engineers thought a direct keyboard connection to a computer was “redundant” and pointless because punch cards could move through the chute guides 10 times faster than the best typists at the time. The issue is we see the future through the eyes of the prior paradigms.
Today we feel that we are the peak of advancement because we can gesture on an iPad and perhaps wave our arms in a simulated Virtual Reality game to move things. The end result is we are still, in a majority of the cases doing all of the “important” work. We have, just about all of us, for better or worse become like our forbearers in the agricultural age, spending over 80% of our waking hours establishing food and water supplies. In our modern world this is systematically placed upon an entire infrastructure. We do not toil in most of the developed world over gathering water and food for the day. Nor do we generally need to go into the fields and forests to gather food.
In our epoch, our computers will make a huge leap in The Intelligence Amplifier. By contextually “knowing” us personally and human activities in general the idea of use shifting and sorting in the manner we have trained ourselves today will be looked upon in the future in the same manner as we look to our forebears spending countless hours gathering seeds, roots and water to survive. We are the endpoint of a Google search, even with all of the advanced algorithms, AI and tracking of our general search and perhaps email behavior. We are still confronted with perhaps millions of results that we must shift and sort. As presented earlier, we are awash in data and information but little true knowledge or insight.
Our Intelligence Amplifiers, because they will gather our ultimate context will have a far easier task to determine the right answer or answers than we have ever experienced before. Each day our Personal Assistants will learn from us in countless situations based on observing the choices we make. Over time the Personal Assistant will make suggestion in real-time. We will guide and correct these suggestion also in real-time much like we would teach a child. And much like the investment we make in our children, we may see a greater good in teaching our Intelligent Assistants. We will be educating them to do better on their own.
In the classic 1950s style office structure the Secretary or Assistant would be nearly 100% focused on the creating an environment where their executives could thrive. The work duties were almost unending. In the most serious and elemental sense, the Secretary became irreplaceable to the executive. In fact there hundreds of examples where notable executives lost their momentum after losing a long term Secretary.
Although the concept of a human Secretary seems antiquated it presents just a small element of the reliance we will have on our Personal Assistant. Consider the case of the phonebook on your smartphone. Most people do not actually remember phone numbers, they just remember the name of the person and call or message them. Consider the case of the GPS based map. Most people have become so reliant upon these mapping systems, they would find it nearly impossible to find locations in even familiar locations.
Finally consider the simple use people use Google or their Gmail account, to search for things in a past epoch, they would be require to remember, but in our epoch, they just do a quick search.
Our Intelligence Amplifiers will become orders of magnitude more important to us than any Google search or old email. This is because this data and information is already not only considered but built into a neurons that will constantly grow with new data and information over time.
Google, Bing and others have created a vast almost incompressible data and information. As we presented above Data->information->knowledge->insights- >wisdom chains require the user to do most of the heavy lifting to draw knowledge and insights and perhaps some wisdom. Our Intelligence Amplifiers will have the context and have cognition that will emulates strengths of the human brain, including parallel processing and associative memory to develop a context-based hypotheses on us as we relate to the world. If we can use it, see it, hear it our Intelligence Amplifier will not need any custom API permissions to access search results, social networks, GPS data, phone logs, banking sites, investment sights we would give it implicit and explicit permissions.
We live in a world where we have folks that “are here to help” by “debunking” and “fact checking” data and information in real-time. They offer up what is really a form of editing of the raw data into a clearly biased (intended or not) insight. They always do this for the best of intentions because we are at a place of information overload and we are looking for a data and information savior. Your discernment is your only savior and this is one reason I have built The Intelligence Amplifier. It is my deep wish to be sure that one day if anyone wants one, they can own one for life. If you agree, we just need to help the venture capitalists and the rest of the world to understand the real future before it happens.
I will be writing much more about this and I will also present The Last Interface symposium to members soon. I will dive into far more details but not give away my life work for big technology companies to cut and paste and call it their own but in the cloud for all to “share”. In this I also need your help, lets keep this our own.
Stay aware and stay curious,

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