Speaker: Ray Kurzweil
[Aside: One of the best talks I’ve ever been to…ever]
Rough notes below
Acceleration of Progress
- Studying exponential growth of technology * Games are the cutting edge, VR will be more competitive * VR advantages - become someone else, Ray became 25 year-old female named Ramona
Perspective of next several decades
- Study last several decades to make forward looking predictions * 1980’s book, predictions tracked very well (Arpanet doubling) * Predicting world wide web connecting world * Chess supercomputer doubling power and beating machines * Decentralized electronic communication - effect on Russian totalitarian control * Democratizing tools of creativity - Kid in dorm room can build full HD video * What are the trends? * Became inventor at 5 years old - key is timing * Tools of production will also be democratized (Nano technology) * 1 billion fold increase in computation in the last 40 years * Another billion fold increase with same costs in next 25 years * Pea-size computer today * Apply 1B and 100K-fold size shrinking, expand intelligence, will be platelet size and AI inside your body…“but I’m getting ahead of myself” * Fat insulin receptor gene * Hold on to every calorie, hunting may be bad, we live in an area of abundance, obesity is the problem * What would happen if we turned gene off (RNA), rats 20% longer lives, thin * Companies rushing to bring to market for humans * Appetite suppressants - Like a birth control pill that inhibits sex * People make linear projections instead of exponential * Acceleration is so fast, things change radically in just a few years * 6/7 years ago, people didn’t use search engines, blogs, podcasts, MMOs, social networks didn’t exist
Kurzweil Reading Machine
- Got started in 2002 for device that would be possible, * 5,000 times smaller, now the size of a cell phone * Takes a screenshot of a document, does real-time TTS
Game Technology will be completely different
- Games becoming harbinger of technology
Apply IT through energy
- nanotechnology * 19th century * New generation of nano-engineered solar panels, less expensive per watt for crossover * Is there enough sunlight? * Within 20 years to capture 1/10,000 of Sun fuels * V/C - Pet interest of Larry Paige * Doubling amount of solar energy every two years
Paradigm Shift Rate is now doubling every decade
- Phone 50 years to be adopted * Countdown to singularity - theory of evolution * Life 1 Billion years * Biologic evolution accelerating * homo sapiens (100K years) * Technology builds on technology * Leads to technological evolution
Exponential growth
- Looks very similar to linear when it starts, can even be sublinear, but growth is exponential * History of computation follows exponential growth * Vacuum tubes exponential growth did end * Transistors took over to exponential growth will end by ~2020, transistors are 2D only * Switch to 3D chips, multilayer circuits, Intel is prototyping 3D * Despite unpredictable history (world wars, depression, etc), technological advances stayed on exponential growth
Transistor Price
- Logarithmic decrease in transistor price, cost of transistor cycle gone down by half 1.1 years, massive deflation through technology * Tech deflation helps drive lack of economy inflation
10 years for first billion, 3 years for next billion
DNA sequencing - Govt program (15 years) - 1% in first 7 years is correct growth as exponential growth will hit 100%
Respirocyte - releasing oxygen in blood cell, could sit in bottom of pool for four hours
**“Creepy valley” **- Really intelligent, but not all there, will seem like demented humans
A complex system can’t be so complex as to understand itself - Not what we’re seeing
- Seven of the dozen separate movies that the eye extracts from a scene and sends to the brain (7 low res images)
Within 20 years, be able to model and simulate all parts of the human brain
- Simulate human intelligence
Exponential progression
- B2B and B2C growing exponential (would be 5/6th largest country) * 2 trillion dollars on Internet
[aside Question: How does Microsoft stack in terms of exponential growth? Do our products/adoption follow this curve? ]
Video of a real-time translator for cell phones, within a few years, we will be able to talk to anyone regardless of their language.
2010 - Computers disappear
- Images written directly to our retinas * Ubiquitous high bandwidth connection to the the Internet at all times * tiny electronics that can be embedded * Interaction with virtual personalities as a primary interface * Effective language technologies
2029: Predictions
- Reverse engineering of the human brain * Computers can pass the Turing test * $1,000 of comp = 1K times the human brain * Enhances human, not evil robots * non-bio intelligence will continue to grow exponentially whereas biological intelligence is effectively fixed * Don’t stay within confines of biology * 15 years from now will be adding a year every year to human life