Artificial Intelligence
What Will Our Society Look Like When Artificial Intelligence is Everywhere?
By Stephan Talty
Smithsonian Magazine, April 2018
By Stephan Talty
Smithsonian Magazine, April 2018
In June of 1956, A few dozen scientists and mathematicians from all around the country gathered for a meeting on the campus of Dartmouth College. Most of them settled into the red-bricked Hanover Inn, then strolled through the famously beautiful campus to the top floor of the math department, where groups of white-shirted men were already engaged in discussions of a “strange new discipline”—so new, in fact, that it didn’t even have a name. “People didn’t agree on what it was, how to do it or even what to call it,” Grace Solomonoff, the widow of one of the scientists, recalled later. The talks—on everything from cybernetics to logic theory—went on for weeks, in an atmosphere of growing excitement.
What the scientists were talking about in their sylvan hideaway was how to build a machine that could think.
The “Dartmouth workshop” kicked off the decades-long quest for artificial intelligence. In the following years, the pursuit faltered, enduring several “winters” where it seemed doomed to dead ends and baffling disappointments. But today nations and corporations are pouring billions into AI, whose recent advancements have startled even scientists working in the field. What was once a plot device in sci-fi flicks is in the process of being born.
Researchers no longer speak of just one AI, but of hundreds, each specializing in a complex task—and many of the applications are already lapping the humans that made them. In just the last few years, “machine learning” has come to seem like the new path forward. Algorithms, freed from human programmers, are training themselves on massive data sets and producing results that have shocked even the optimists in the field. Earlier this year, two AIs—one created by the Chinese company Alibaba and the other by Microsoft—beat a team of two-legged competitors in a Stanford reading-comprehension test. The algorithms “read” a series of Wikipedia entries on things like the rise of Genghis Khan and the Apollo space program and then answered a series of questions about them more accurately than people did. One Alibaba scientist declared the victory a “milestone.”
These so-called “narrow” AIs are everywhere, embedded in your GPS systems and Amazon recommendations. But the ultimate goal is artificial general intelligence, a self-teaching system that can outperform humans across a wide range of disciplines. Some scientists believe it’s 30 years away; others talk about centuries. This AI “takeoff,” also known as the singularity, will likely see AI pull even with human intelligence and then blow past it in a matter of days. Or hours.
Once it arrives, general AI will begin taking jobs away from people, millions of jobs—as drivers, radiologists, insurance adjusters. In one possible scenario, this will lead governments to pay unemployed citizens a universal basic income, freeing them to pursue their dreams unburdened by the need to earn a living. In another, it will create staggering wealth inequalities, chaos and failed states across the globe. But the revolution will go much further. AI robots will care for the elderly—scientists at Brown University are working with Hasbro to develop a “robo-cat” that can remind its owners to take their meds and can track down their eyeglasses. AI “scientists” will solve the puzzle of dark matter; AI-enabled spacecraft will reach the asteroid belts, while on Earth the technology will tame climate change, perhaps by sending massive swarms of drones to reflect sunlight away from the oceans. Last year, Microsoft committed $50 million to its “AI for Earth” program to fight climate change.
“AIs will colonize and transform the entire cosmos,” says Juergen Schmidhuber, a pioneering computer scientist based at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Switzerland, “and they will make it intelligent.”
But what about...us? “I do worry about a scenario where the future is AI and humans are left out of it,” says David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at New York University. “If the world is taken over by unconscious robots, that would be about as disastrous and bleak a scenario as one could imagine.” Chalmers isn’t alone. Two of the heaviest hitters of the computer age, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have warned about AIs either destroying the planet in a frenzied pursuit of their own goals or doing away with humans by accident—or not by accident.
As I delved into the subject of AI over the past year, I started to freak out over the range of possibilities. It looked as if these machines were on their way to making the world either unbelievably cool and good or gut-wrenchingly awful. Or ending the human race altogether. As a novelist, I wanted to plot out what the AI future might actually look like, using interviews with more than a dozen futurists, philosophers, scientists, cultural psychiatrists and tech innovators.
What the scientists were talking about in their sylvan hideaway was how to build a machine that could think.
The “Dartmouth workshop” kicked off the decades-long quest for artificial intelligence. In the following years, the pursuit faltered, enduring several “winters” where it seemed doomed to dead ends and baffling disappointments. But today nations and corporations are pouring billions into AI, whose recent advancements have startled even scientists working in the field. What was once a plot device in sci-fi flicks is in the process of being born.
Researchers no longer speak of just one AI, but of hundreds, each specializing in a complex task—and many of the applications are already lapping the humans that made them. In just the last few years, “machine learning” has come to seem like the new path forward. Algorithms, freed from human programmers, are training themselves on massive data sets and producing results that have shocked even the optimists in the field. Earlier this year, two AIs—one created by the Chinese company Alibaba and the other by Microsoft—beat a team of two-legged competitors in a Stanford reading-comprehension test. The algorithms “read” a series of Wikipedia entries on things like the rise of Genghis Khan and the Apollo space program and then answered a series of questions about them more accurately than people did. One Alibaba scientist declared the victory a “milestone.”
These so-called “narrow” AIs are everywhere, embedded in your GPS systems and Amazon recommendations. But the ultimate goal is artificial general intelligence, a self-teaching system that can outperform humans across a wide range of disciplines. Some scientists believe it’s 30 years away; others talk about centuries. This AI “takeoff,” also known as the singularity, will likely see AI pull even with human intelligence and then blow past it in a matter of days. Or hours.
Once it arrives, general AI will begin taking jobs away from people, millions of jobs—as drivers, radiologists, insurance adjusters. In one possible scenario, this will lead governments to pay unemployed citizens a universal basic income, freeing them to pursue their dreams unburdened by the need to earn a living. In another, it will create staggering wealth inequalities, chaos and failed states across the globe. But the revolution will go much further. AI robots will care for the elderly—scientists at Brown University are working with Hasbro to develop a “robo-cat” that can remind its owners to take their meds and can track down their eyeglasses. AI “scientists” will solve the puzzle of dark matter; AI-enabled spacecraft will reach the asteroid belts, while on Earth the technology will tame climate change, perhaps by sending massive swarms of drones to reflect sunlight away from the oceans. Last year, Microsoft committed $50 million to its “AI for Earth” program to fight climate change.
“AIs will colonize and transform the entire cosmos,” says Juergen Schmidhuber, a pioneering computer scientist based at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Switzerland, “and they will make it intelligent.”
But what about...us? “I do worry about a scenario where the future is AI and humans are left out of it,” says David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at New York University. “If the world is taken over by unconscious robots, that would be about as disastrous and bleak a scenario as one could imagine.” Chalmers isn’t alone. Two of the heaviest hitters of the computer age, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have warned about AIs either destroying the planet in a frenzied pursuit of their own goals or doing away with humans by accident—or not by accident.
As I delved into the subject of AI over the past year, I started to freak out over the range of possibilities. It looked as if these machines were on their way to making the world either unbelievably cool and good or gut-wrenchingly awful. Or ending the human race altogether. As a novelist, I wanted to plot out what the AI future might actually look like, using interviews with more than a dozen futurists, philosophers, scientists, cultural psychiatrists and tech innovators.
Superhuman Rights
One thing I kept asking the scientists was: Can an AI experience deep emotion? I was hoping it couldn’t—if a machine does intelligence and emotions better than us, what’s left? We need a niche. And I was encouraged by what I heard. “If a computer tells you, ‘I know how you feel,’ it’s lying,” says Thomas Dietterich, professor emeritus of computer science at Oregon State. “It cannot have the same experiences that humans have, and it is those experiences that ground our understanding of what it is like to feel human.”
The so-called “black box” problem—how can we know what’s going on inside an AI?—seems unsolvable to me, and I find that unnerving. How can you ever trust that an AI is telling the truth? “By definition, we have no idea what a superintelligent AI will think, feel or do,” says Patrick Lin, director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University. “That’d be like our pets trying to anticipate what we’ll do and control us.”
Susan Schneider and others are actually working on a test for AI consciousness. In one model of the test, an AI under development would be quarantined away from the internet so that it couldn’t discover what humans mean by “consciousness” and then fake it. Then it would be tested: Does it have the markers of consciousness—a sense of self? The ability to mourn? Other thinkers have doubts about such tests. “AI minds would have a radically different neurophysiology than ours, so their behavioral clues don’t tell us anything,” says Patrick Lin. “Behavior alone is not evidence of a mind.” I have to admit I agree with him on this point.
Live Long and Prosper
When I’m not reading about zombie AIs, I dabble in another disaster genre—epidemics. I was relieved to find that the combination of superintelligence and the cloud might save us before the next big one arrives. “AI systems can teach other AI systems,” says Hod Lipson, director of Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab. “So when an AI doctor encounters a rare case, it can share that information with all other AI doctors, instantly. Overall, this pattern of ‘machines helping machines’ leads to an exponential growth in the learning rate, in a way that is very alien to the way humans learn.”
People like Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and author of The Singularity Is Near, are entranced with the idea of living forever. It’s something I’ve always found depressing, but I wouldn’t mind having several lives packed into one. And that seems reachable. “AI won’t lead to immortality, because there will always be accidents,” says Susan Schneider, “but it will lead to extreme life extension.” Of course living longer will be cool only if you live in one of the nice parts of the world. “I think [curing diseases] would be wonderful,” she says, “especially if we had cheap energy and were able to end world resource scarcity. I imagine some societies will come closer to achieving that than others.”
Bigger Brother
As I learned about AI, the doomsday predictions piled up. Nanobot attacks! Gray goo! But most of the people working in the field were skeptical of such doomsday predictions. “AIs will be fascinated with life and with their origins in our civilization, because life and civilization are such a rich source of interesting patterns,” says Juergen Schmidhuber of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “AIs will be initially highly motivated to protect humans.”
The biggest surprise in reporting this piece, hands down, was the role AI might play in governance. I’d never thought of leaving political decisions to Solomon-like machines, but in this increasingly fractious world, I’m all in. “Humans are actually quite poor at making compromises or looking at issues from multiple perspectives,” says Bart Selman. “I think there’s a possibility that machines could use psychological theories and behavioral ideas to help us govern and live much more in harmony. That may be more positive than curing diseases—saving us before we blow ourselves up.”
Brave New World
Scientists aren’t normally very excitable, but most of the ones I spoke to were expecting fantastic things from AI. That kind of high is contagious. Did I want to live to be 175? Yes! Did I want brain cancer to become a thing of the past? What do you think? Would I vote for an AI-assisted president? I don’t see why not.
I slept slightly better, too, because what many researchers will tell you is that the extreme scenarios are extremely unlikely. We’re not going to get the AI we dream of or the one that we fear, but the one we plan for. AI is a tool, like fire or language. (But fire, of course, is stupid. So it’s different, too.) Design, however, will matter.
I slept slightly better, too, because what many researchers will tell you is that the extreme scenarios are extremely unlikely. We’re not going to get the AI we dream of or the one that we fear, but the one we plan for. AI is a tool, like fire or language. (But fire, of course, is stupid. So it’s different, too.) Design, however, will matter.
What Will Be the Next Big Thing to Come Out of Silicon Valley?
By Adam Fisher
Smithsonian Magazine, April 2018
KEVIN KELLY author, most recently, of The Inevitable: The biggest invention in Silicon Valley was not the transistor but the start-up model, the culture of the entrepreneurial start-up.
MEGAN SMITH chief technology officer of the United States, 2014-17: I grew up in it. It’s extraordinary. An entrepreneurial culture of, like, “Hey, how can we solve this?” And really caring about helping each other.
CAROL BARTZ former CEO of Autodesk and Yahoo: It really is just this need to change as fast as possible to enable the next great thing. We don’t even have to imagine the next great thing yet. We just have to get the tools to do something and use trial and error until we have the next great thing.
SCOTT HASSAN co-author of the code for Google’s search engine, founder of the research lab Willow Garage: I try not to predict the future very much, but the one thing I know for certain is that in the future, there are going to be more computers, they’re going to be faster, and they’re going to do more things.
TONY FADELL co-inventor of the iPod, founder of Nest Labs: You’re going to see every single industry, no matter how behind the times they are, adopting technology—deep technology.
HASSAN: Eventually computers are going to do everything. I don’t think anything is safe. Nothing.
KRISTINA WOOLSEY known as the “mother of multimedia” for her work as director of Atari’s research lab and co-founder of Apple’s multimedia lab: Technology is changing fundamental things. It changes where you can live and work; it changes who you know; it changes who you can collaborate with. Commerce has completely changed. Those things change the nature of society.
FADELL: Change is going to be continual, and today is the slowest day society will ever move.
HASSAN: Never, ever try to compete with a computer on doing something, because if you don’t lose today, you’ll lose tomorrow.
BARTZ: We are very arrogant out here that nothing can change unless technology is involved, and technology will drive any business out there to a disruption point.
ANDY HERTZFELD one of the software engineers behind the Macintosh computer, a co-founder of General Magic: Right now the Valley is particularly excited about two things: one of them is machine learning; incredible progress has been made in machine learning the last three or four years. A broader way of saying it is artificial intelligence.
MARISSA MAYER Google employee number 20 and the last CEO of Yahoo: I’m incredibly optimistic about what AI can do. I think right now we are just at the early stages, and a lot of fears are overblown. Technologists are terrible marketers. This notion of artificial intelligence, even the acronym itself, is scary.
TIFFANY SHLAIN futurist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, founder of the Webby Awards: There’s all this hysteria about AI taking over. But here’s the thing: The skills we need most in today’s world—skills like empathy, creativity, taking initiative and cross-disciplinary thinking—are all things that machines will never have. Those are the skills that will be most needed in the future, too.
MAYER: If we’d had better marketing, we would have said, “Wait, can we talk about enhanced intelligence or computer-augmented intelligence, where the human being isn’t replaced in the equation?” The people who are working on artificial intelligence are looking at how they can take a repetitive menial task and make a computer do it faster and better. To me, that’s a much less threatening notion than creating an artificially intelligent being.
HERTZFELD: The second thing Silicon Valley is particularly excited about right now is artificial reality, or you might say mixed reality or whatever you want to call it.
KELLY: That VR [virtual-reality] vision of the alternative world is still there, but the new thing is this other version of “augmented” or “mixed” reality, where artificial things are inserted into the real world, whether they be objects or characters or people.
HASSAN: VR blocks off your field of vision, and everything has to be reconstructed digitally. And so MR, which is mixed reality, is a technology that can selectively draw on any part of your vision. It can actually include all your vision, if that’s what’s required. MR is, I believe, the next step in how we interface with computers and information and people. It’s all going to be through mixed reality. And VR is a special case of mixed reality.
NOLAN BUSHNELL founder of Atari and, with it, the video-game industry: All of this is on a continuum, and right now augmented reality is a little bit harder than virtual reality, technically.
STEVE WOZNIAK the technical genius behind the Apple II computer and leader of the personal-computer revolution: Because of Moore’s Law, we always have more bits and more speed to handle those more bits on the screen. Well, we now have finally gotten to the point where we have enough computer power that you can put the screen on your head, and it’s like you’re living in a different world; and it fools you. It’s enough to fool the brain.
BUSHNELL: I’ve seen how technology has moved from Pong to what we’re playing today. I expect the same kind of pathway to virtual reality, and I think that 20 years from now we will be shocked at how good VR is. I like to say we are at the “Pong phase” of virtual reality. Twenty years from now, VR is going to be old hat. Everybody will be used to it by then. Maybe living there permanently.
BRENDA LAUREL virtual reality’s first theorist and one of its inventors: The only way I can see that happening is if we completely trash this planet.
JIM CLARK co-founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and other companies: Nolan is a good friend, I know him well, and he can get hyperbolic. I do not think people are going to be living in virtual reality. That might be true in a hundred years—not in 20.
BUSHNELL: So when is VR indistinguishable from reality? I’ve actually put a little plot together on that. I think we’re about 70 percent of the way there visually. I think we’re 100 percent of the way there with audio. I think we’re 100 percent of the way there in smell. I think we’re just scratching the surface on touch and fooling your inner ear, and acceleration, and the thing that I think will break the illusion will be food. I think that’s going to be the hardest one to simulate in VR. So when you see the guy in The Matrix having a great bottle of wine and steak? That’s going to be hard.
JARON LANIER coiner of the term “virtual reality” and a founding father of the technology: On some spiritual level, it seems terribly wrong to say, “Well, we know enough about reality that living in this simulation is just as good.” I'm not giving up that mystery of the real world.
HASSAN: Think of this device as a set of arms that rolls around, that’s able to do stuff—two hands that can be manipulated from afar. Let’s say it fits where your dishwasher used to be, and whenever you need it, it comes out of there and it unfolds and it’s operated by somebody else in another location that has expertise that you want at that time. You want dinner made? Well, it’s just remote-operated by a chef, in some type of rig, so that when they move their arms, the robot moves its arms, in the exact same way....Then that same Waldo, when that person is done with making dinner for you, instantly switches over to this other person who loves to clean up, and then they go and clean up the whole kitchen for you.
BUSHNELL: In 20 years, 80 percent of homes will have some kind of a robot.
BARTZ: Every inflection point really followed from the fact that you could make something affordable, so that the public or industry could do something with it. You could get this in the hands of more people, which meant it was a bigger market, and on and on, and off you went.
HASSAN: They’ll probably be the same price as a refrigerator. It’s going to be one of those things: You got your car, you got your house and you got your Waldo. But the cool thing about that is, once that kind of stuff comes out, then people will write all these applications that help those people do certain tasks. So you would install an app so that you click on the potato, and then your Waldo takes over and does it for you automatically, really fast, right? So you would have all these application makers making little things that can make someone’s job easier, and then eventually you get to a point where you’re not just controlling one of these Waldos, you will be controlling maybe 3 or 10 or 100 of these simultaneously, and you’re more managing these Waldos now, not controlling them individually. Does that make sense? So you’ve got this huge scaling effect.
CLARK: Yeah, I don’t get excited about the virtual reality stuff, the car driving and robotics and stuff like that. It’s just going to happen. The parts that really get my juices going are the human-computer interface, through the nervous system, and biology transformation. If I was a young man just getting a PhD, I would definitely do biology, because I think that’s where it’s going. A biologist armed with all this knowledge of computer science and technology can make a huge impact on humanity.
ADELE GOLDBERG former manager of the Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC: If you were to predict the future based on seeing what is in the labs today and extrapolate, you would believe synthetic biology is the future, not electronics.
HERTZFELD: Because the idea of bio being the next frontier is based on the silicon, really. There’s about one hundred billion neurons estimated in most people’s heads, and the world knew that 30 years ago and I remember thinking, “Boy, a hundred billion, that’s enormous!” And now I think, “A hundred billion? Hey, that’s not so much!” Right? ...It’s just that Moore’s law has gotten us to the point we’re up to dealing with the biological scale of complexity.
ALVY RAY SMITH computer-graphics pioneer and co-founder of Pixar: Moore’s law means one order of magnitude every five years—that’s the way I define it. And so what do you do with another two to three orders of magnitude increase in Moore’s law? We humans can’t answer that question. We don’t know. An order of magnitude is sort of a natural barrier. Or another way to say it is, if you’ve got just enough vision to go beyond the order of magnitude, you would probably become a billionaire.
CLARK: I think that connecting humans to computers, having that interface, is increasingly going to be possible with a helmet that’s measuring neurological signals from the brain and using that to control things. I’m pretty sure that 20 years from now we’re going to be well into getting the human-computer interface wrapped around a direct kind of brain-fed interface.
HASSAN: We’re going to tap right into the optic nerve, and insert things that you don’t see, but your brain doesn’t know that you don’t see them. We’re just going to insert it right into your optic nerve. We really don’t understand how memory works and stuff like that, but we understand somewhat how the optic nerve works, because it’s just a cable going back to your brain, and, you know, we know in theory how to insert things into it, so it’s just a bunch of engineering work to make that happen.
CLARK: And, as time goes on, I think we’ll get more and more refined at being able to map and infer and project those signals, on the cortex, on the brain, and I feel as certain about that as I feel about anything.
LARRY PAGE co-founder of Google: Eventually we’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.
HASSAN: It’s maybe 20 years away. I mean it depends on how well the market takes up MR, mixed reality. If it really loves it, then it’s going to be sooner, so if it’s slow to pick up, then it’s going to be longer. But I think eventually it’s going to be there.
CLARK: We will for sure be controlling computers with thoughts, and I think increasingly we’re going to have kind of hybrid systems that are kind of biological- and computer-like, and they’re going to be there to make humans more effective at whatever.
KELLY: Then I would say that in 30 years people will be beginning to get used to the idea that you can have artificial consciousness....Yet we’re already there in a sense; it’s already begun and we don’t even recognize it. The first part of it has already been completed, the sense that three billion people are online, so it has begun.
HASSAN: If any one of the technologies that I know of that are being developed right now in Silicon Valley does really well, the world is going to be an amazing place. But the really amazing thing that I think is probably going to happen is that they all are going to do well. So, I’m a superoptimist.
KELLY: What we’re really making here is something that is humanity plus: It’s us, plus the machines, plus the planet.
MEGAN SMITH chief technology officer of the United States, 2014-17: I grew up in it. It’s extraordinary. An entrepreneurial culture of, like, “Hey, how can we solve this?” And really caring about helping each other.
CAROL BARTZ former CEO of Autodesk and Yahoo: It really is just this need to change as fast as possible to enable the next great thing. We don’t even have to imagine the next great thing yet. We just have to get the tools to do something and use trial and error until we have the next great thing.
SCOTT HASSAN co-author of the code for Google’s search engine, founder of the research lab Willow Garage: I try not to predict the future very much, but the one thing I know for certain is that in the future, there are going to be more computers, they’re going to be faster, and they’re going to do more things.
TONY FADELL co-inventor of the iPod, founder of Nest Labs: You’re going to see every single industry, no matter how behind the times they are, adopting technology—deep technology.
HASSAN: Eventually computers are going to do everything. I don’t think anything is safe. Nothing.
KRISTINA WOOLSEY known as the “mother of multimedia” for her work as director of Atari’s research lab and co-founder of Apple’s multimedia lab: Technology is changing fundamental things. It changes where you can live and work; it changes who you know; it changes who you can collaborate with. Commerce has completely changed. Those things change the nature of society.
FADELL: Change is going to be continual, and today is the slowest day society will ever move.
HASSAN: Never, ever try to compete with a computer on doing something, because if you don’t lose today, you’ll lose tomorrow.
BARTZ: We are very arrogant out here that nothing can change unless technology is involved, and technology will drive any business out there to a disruption point.
ANDY HERTZFELD one of the software engineers behind the Macintosh computer, a co-founder of General Magic: Right now the Valley is particularly excited about two things: one of them is machine learning; incredible progress has been made in machine learning the last three or four years. A broader way of saying it is artificial intelligence.
MARISSA MAYER Google employee number 20 and the last CEO of Yahoo: I’m incredibly optimistic about what AI can do. I think right now we are just at the early stages, and a lot of fears are overblown. Technologists are terrible marketers. This notion of artificial intelligence, even the acronym itself, is scary.
TIFFANY SHLAIN futurist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, founder of the Webby Awards: There’s all this hysteria about AI taking over. But here’s the thing: The skills we need most in today’s world—skills like empathy, creativity, taking initiative and cross-disciplinary thinking—are all things that machines will never have. Those are the skills that will be most needed in the future, too.
MAYER: If we’d had better marketing, we would have said, “Wait, can we talk about enhanced intelligence or computer-augmented intelligence, where the human being isn’t replaced in the equation?” The people who are working on artificial intelligence are looking at how they can take a repetitive menial task and make a computer do it faster and better. To me, that’s a much less threatening notion than creating an artificially intelligent being.
HERTZFELD: The second thing Silicon Valley is particularly excited about right now is artificial reality, or you might say mixed reality or whatever you want to call it.
KELLY: That VR [virtual-reality] vision of the alternative world is still there, but the new thing is this other version of “augmented” or “mixed” reality, where artificial things are inserted into the real world, whether they be objects or characters or people.
HASSAN: VR blocks off your field of vision, and everything has to be reconstructed digitally. And so MR, which is mixed reality, is a technology that can selectively draw on any part of your vision. It can actually include all your vision, if that’s what’s required. MR is, I believe, the next step in how we interface with computers and information and people. It’s all going to be through mixed reality. And VR is a special case of mixed reality.
NOLAN BUSHNELL founder of Atari and, with it, the video-game industry: All of this is on a continuum, and right now augmented reality is a little bit harder than virtual reality, technically.
STEVE WOZNIAK the technical genius behind the Apple II computer and leader of the personal-computer revolution: Because of Moore’s Law, we always have more bits and more speed to handle those more bits on the screen. Well, we now have finally gotten to the point where we have enough computer power that you can put the screen on your head, and it’s like you’re living in a different world; and it fools you. It’s enough to fool the brain.
BUSHNELL: I’ve seen how technology has moved from Pong to what we’re playing today. I expect the same kind of pathway to virtual reality, and I think that 20 years from now we will be shocked at how good VR is. I like to say we are at the “Pong phase” of virtual reality. Twenty years from now, VR is going to be old hat. Everybody will be used to it by then. Maybe living there permanently.
BRENDA LAUREL virtual reality’s first theorist and one of its inventors: The only way I can see that happening is if we completely trash this planet.
JIM CLARK co-founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and other companies: Nolan is a good friend, I know him well, and he can get hyperbolic. I do not think people are going to be living in virtual reality. That might be true in a hundred years—not in 20.
BUSHNELL: So when is VR indistinguishable from reality? I’ve actually put a little plot together on that. I think we’re about 70 percent of the way there visually. I think we’re 100 percent of the way there with audio. I think we’re 100 percent of the way there in smell. I think we’re just scratching the surface on touch and fooling your inner ear, and acceleration, and the thing that I think will break the illusion will be food. I think that’s going to be the hardest one to simulate in VR. So when you see the guy in The Matrix having a great bottle of wine and steak? That’s going to be hard.
JARON LANIER coiner of the term “virtual reality” and a founding father of the technology: On some spiritual level, it seems terribly wrong to say, “Well, we know enough about reality that living in this simulation is just as good.” I'm not giving up that mystery of the real world.
HASSAN: Think of this device as a set of arms that rolls around, that’s able to do stuff—two hands that can be manipulated from afar. Let’s say it fits where your dishwasher used to be, and whenever you need it, it comes out of there and it unfolds and it’s operated by somebody else in another location that has expertise that you want at that time. You want dinner made? Well, it’s just remote-operated by a chef, in some type of rig, so that when they move their arms, the robot moves its arms, in the exact same way....Then that same Waldo, when that person is done with making dinner for you, instantly switches over to this other person who loves to clean up, and then they go and clean up the whole kitchen for you.
BUSHNELL: In 20 years, 80 percent of homes will have some kind of a robot.
BARTZ: Every inflection point really followed from the fact that you could make something affordable, so that the public or industry could do something with it. You could get this in the hands of more people, which meant it was a bigger market, and on and on, and off you went.
HASSAN: They’ll probably be the same price as a refrigerator. It’s going to be one of those things: You got your car, you got your house and you got your Waldo. But the cool thing about that is, once that kind of stuff comes out, then people will write all these applications that help those people do certain tasks. So you would install an app so that you click on the potato, and then your Waldo takes over and does it for you automatically, really fast, right? So you would have all these application makers making little things that can make someone’s job easier, and then eventually you get to a point where you’re not just controlling one of these Waldos, you will be controlling maybe 3 or 10 or 100 of these simultaneously, and you’re more managing these Waldos now, not controlling them individually. Does that make sense? So you’ve got this huge scaling effect.
CLARK: Yeah, I don’t get excited about the virtual reality stuff, the car driving and robotics and stuff like that. It’s just going to happen. The parts that really get my juices going are the human-computer interface, through the nervous system, and biology transformation. If I was a young man just getting a PhD, I would definitely do biology, because I think that’s where it’s going. A biologist armed with all this knowledge of computer science and technology can make a huge impact on humanity.
ADELE GOLDBERG former manager of the Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC: If you were to predict the future based on seeing what is in the labs today and extrapolate, you would believe synthetic biology is the future, not electronics.
HERTZFELD: Because the idea of bio being the next frontier is based on the silicon, really. There’s about one hundred billion neurons estimated in most people’s heads, and the world knew that 30 years ago and I remember thinking, “Boy, a hundred billion, that’s enormous!” And now I think, “A hundred billion? Hey, that’s not so much!” Right? ...It’s just that Moore’s law has gotten us to the point we’re up to dealing with the biological scale of complexity.
ALVY RAY SMITH computer-graphics pioneer and co-founder of Pixar: Moore’s law means one order of magnitude every five years—that’s the way I define it. And so what do you do with another two to three orders of magnitude increase in Moore’s law? We humans can’t answer that question. We don’t know. An order of magnitude is sort of a natural barrier. Or another way to say it is, if you’ve got just enough vision to go beyond the order of magnitude, you would probably become a billionaire.
CLARK: I think that connecting humans to computers, having that interface, is increasingly going to be possible with a helmet that’s measuring neurological signals from the brain and using that to control things. I’m pretty sure that 20 years from now we’re going to be well into getting the human-computer interface wrapped around a direct kind of brain-fed interface.
HASSAN: We’re going to tap right into the optic nerve, and insert things that you don’t see, but your brain doesn’t know that you don’t see them. We’re just going to insert it right into your optic nerve. We really don’t understand how memory works and stuff like that, but we understand somewhat how the optic nerve works, because it’s just a cable going back to your brain, and, you know, we know in theory how to insert things into it, so it’s just a bunch of engineering work to make that happen.
CLARK: And, as time goes on, I think we’ll get more and more refined at being able to map and infer and project those signals, on the cortex, on the brain, and I feel as certain about that as I feel about anything.
LARRY PAGE co-founder of Google: Eventually we’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.
HASSAN: It’s maybe 20 years away. I mean it depends on how well the market takes up MR, mixed reality. If it really loves it, then it’s going to be sooner, so if it’s slow to pick up, then it’s going to be longer. But I think eventually it’s going to be there.
CLARK: We will for sure be controlling computers with thoughts, and I think increasingly we’re going to have kind of hybrid systems that are kind of biological- and computer-like, and they’re going to be there to make humans more effective at whatever.
KELLY: Then I would say that in 30 years people will be beginning to get used to the idea that you can have artificial consciousness....Yet we’re already there in a sense; it’s already begun and we don’t even recognize it. The first part of it has already been completed, the sense that three billion people are online, so it has begun.
HASSAN: If any one of the technologies that I know of that are being developed right now in Silicon Valley does really well, the world is going to be an amazing place. But the really amazing thing that I think is probably going to happen is that they all are going to do well. So, I’m a superoptimist.
KELLY: What we’re really making here is something that is humanity plus: It’s us, plus the machines, plus the planet.