Your future world, and how you can prepare Buda Public Library July 31, 2013 Jonathan Mugan

Your future world, and how you can prepare

Buda Public Library

July 31, 2013

Jonathan Mugan

Technology is moving fast

Indeed

• Your mom’s 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 can’t 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– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GniV1qdFYWg

• 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=rel

ated

• 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 don’t 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-funniest-google-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.

Robot war

http://www.theonion.com/video/predator-drone-courtmartialed-for-afghani-civilian,20316/

The Onion is not real but is often close enough.

Self-driving cars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE

Imagine how many jobs will be lost.

3D Printing

Image Credit: Creative Tools/Flickr (featured, banner)

The Singularity

• Computers get smarter every year– They are quickly catching up to us

– What happens when they pass us?

– No one knows, it’s 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 don’t 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=3RtFt6axp5s&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, it’s hard to beat Python– There are Python books here at this library

– http://www.python.org/download/

Learning to code

You can use Khan Academy computer science https://www.khanacademy.org/cs

What it uses underneath is something called processing. See this cool video, the first part of which is about Processinghttp://video.pbs.org/video/2322911761

You can download processing directly herehttp://processing.org/

This is a great tutorial on how to get Khan academy code to run in your browserhttp://www.petercollingridge.co.uk/blog/running-khan-academy-programs-your-computer

Also, Code Academy (but it is a little buggy)http://www.codecademy.com/

API calls: computers talking to computers

https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=taco&type=post

Call to Facebook tosearch for postsabout tacos.

Such calls can bemade directly inPython.

Tigers won’t 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