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