Your future world, and how you can prepare

Jonathan Mugan

Technology is moving fast

Indeed
Your moms iPhone is more powerful than the NASA computers that sent the astronauts to the moon.
Computers get faster every year, and they get faster by more every year, due to exponential growth.

More than faster, more

Once, computers could only produce numbers Now, they see with video cameras and can understand the human voice to:
Recognize faces Read your chicken-scratch handwriting Ticket your parents for running a red light Have a conversation

Turing test: When is a computer intelligent?

When you cant tell the difference between a human and a computer (via a text terminal), you know the computer is smart Siri: the first mass-market voice interface
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP1YAatv1Mc

Chat bot (annoying)

http://cleverbot.com/

Chat bots talk to each other (hilarious)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY

Watson on Jeopardy!
Watson from IBM does better than humans at the game of Jeopardy! Austin news coverage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Puhs2LuO3Zc

More of Watson in action

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE

Watson answers questions

Next application is health care

RoboCup: build a robot soccer team by 2050 that can beat the human World Cup champions

Kid Size championship, Mexico City

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg4FWN4vx0c&fe ature=player_embedded

UT wins Standard Platform!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B_sB0q4IDU&fe ature=relmfu

Watching robots play reminds me of coaching kindergarten soccer

Walking robots: walking is actually controlled falling

BigDog: useful, disconcerting, walking robot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZPRsrwumQ

Asimo can run!

Running requires having both feet off the ground at some point in the gait
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9p7-OPvs1c

Kiva warehouse robots

Another step in the evolution towards an automated workforce
Getting goods off the shelf for packing is notoriously labor intensive

Kiva Company
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxZDJ1HiPE&feature=r elated

History channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvQKGev56qU

What happens to society when no one works, and therefore no one has money to buy goods?
Robotic Nation, http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm/

We are now cyborgs

Our smart phones contain everything that humans know
We no longer need to memorize anything

People dont get lost anymore because navigation has been offloaded to the smart phone Google Glass
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4 Parody with ads: http://gizmodo.com/5899828/the-five-funniestgoogle-glasses-parodies/gallery/2

Cyber war
Our computer systems are so complex that no one knows everything about how they work If the internet went down, food would not make it to grocery stores or restaurants If they wanted to, foreign governments could shut down our electricity grid
America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare, Brenner, 2011.

The great filter

In the last thousand years, we have advanced significantly
In the next thousand, we may colonize the solar system, and the Milky Way Galaxy in the next hundred thousand years 102 thousand years is nothing in the time span of the universe

Why havent we met other intelligent life forms?

Is there some sort of filter that keeps life from progressing to that point?

Is the great filter behind us or in front of us?

If it is behind us, and the hard part is developing brains like ours, then we have gotten lucky. If it is in front of us, and the hard part is not destroying ourselves and our planet before we can escape it, then our fate is uncertain.

The Singularity
Computers get smarter every year
They are quickly catching up to us What happens when they pass us? No one knows, its called The Singularity

Kurzweil guesses this will happen in 2045

When you are about my age

To me, the singularity seems both impossible and inevitable

In this new world, you can be a creator or a consumer

There is a convergence between the physical and the virtual

GIMP is a free photo editing tool

People used to say that pictures dont lie
Now we see pictures as just a bunch of dots called pixels, and they can be anything

Download GIMP
http://www.gimp.org/

Many tutorials online

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RtFt6axp5 s&feature=related

Even the shapes of letters themselves can be made on a computer

Type light is a free font editor

You can create your own font and use it in homework assignments or on your web site Download Type light
http://www.cr8software.net/typelight.html

Programming and incantations

Learning to program allows you to:
Use the power of computation, like a sorcerer uses spells Understand what computing is and what it can do

When it comes to sorcery, its hard to beat Python

There are Python books here at this library http://www.python.org/download/

API calls: computers talking to computers

https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=taco&type=post Call to Facebook to search for posts about tacos. Such calls can be made directly in Python.

Tigers wont eat you, but there are new concerns

Privacy and security

Advertisers track you as you move around the web Unfamiliar websites often have malware
Can drain your parents bank account, So stay out of dark corners

Statements made on Facebook and such can still be visible years later to anyone
Remember that when you are angry

Get out in the sunshine

Our brains are not designed to stare at a screen all day We get smarter by:
1. Taking in new information 2. Mulling it over and making connections with other things we already know

If you are always tied to the web, you never make it to step 2
Your brain needs down time to process information

Thanks for listening