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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