Kurzweil is a great speaker, and I could tell that this talk really stirred up the audience. It was mostly a rehash of The Singularity Is Near, however, which is a great book but a book I've already read. That wasn't true for most people in the keynote audience, I think, so I hope maybe this sparked some thoughts on the matter. I *highly* recommend the book if anyone reading this blog has not read it yet.
Honestly, the talk had very little to do with gaming. But it was still a good time.
Ray Kurzweil
The Next 20 Years of Gaming
Gaming fits in well with the acceleration of progress. PS2 identified as a “weapon of mass destruction” because of equivalent to a super computer. Music, movies, are becoming a computer industry. The word “game” is unfortunate because it makes it sound like it’s not real, but there is real romance, real learning, real commerce there. Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality are unfortunate names too. Telephones are virtual reality, agreements you make over it aren’t just “virtual”. Games are the cutting edge of what is happening and we are going to be spending more time in VR environments, and eventually they will be fully real environment.
What barriers to next step, fully immersive virtual realities? If someone is a virtual reality they are going to lose track of real reality if they are moving around (Virtua Boy). Seeing this already even just with the Wii where you can see real reality! Maybe we’ll put real reality in a little window over there so you can keep track of it. Ultimately going to be very competitive with real reality. You can become someone else.
To see the next several decades, first need to look at the last several decades. Wanted to be an inventor since age 5. Key to being an inventor is to get things to work. Even if you build 90% of successful devices, 90% will fail due to timing problems. So these trends and evolution of technology is very important. Principly use this time his own technology problems. But with these models we can invent with the technologies of the future. Isn’t the future unpredictable? That’s true for specific projects. Hard to predict Google stock or the #1 game or the next wireless standard. But if you ask “what will the cost of a MIPS of computing be in 2010” or brain scanning in 2014 we can generate a figure that is very likely to be correct. Age of Intelligent machines in the 1980 made hundreds of predictions that are tracking quite well – Arpanet doubling every year to become the internet. That seemed ridiculous then but came right on schedule. Same with super computer power and chess score. This is a very democratizing technology – predicted soviet union swept away by decentralized technology. Communication swept away totalitarian control. Creating new games can be done on a $1000 laptop, or a full length movie with a $500 HD camera. Tools of creativity are democratized, ultimately the tools of production will be as well with nanotechnology.
Revolutionary. Exponential, but also explosive. Rate of exponential growth in processors is actually slowly growing. 1965 MIT was so advanced to actually have its own computer. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times smaller and cheaper, 1000 times powerful. Billion-fold increase in price-performance over the last 40 years. We will see another billionfold increase in just the next 25 years. Also shrinking them. Today, a pea-sized computer in your brain for Parkinson’s. Apply a billionfold increase to that, thinking about blood-cell sized devices. The point is, it is predictable. Very smooth progression from the 1890s. Health and medicine didn’t used to be a computer technology, but now it is becoming one. Used to be drugs were hit and miss drug trials, but now we have the software that life runs on and the tools to reprogram it. We have software in our bodies that evolved 10,000 years ago.
For example, we have genes that hold on to fat, which was a great idea 10,000 years ago. Ancient gene from animals roaming. But that now causes an epidemic of obesity which leads to heart disease and diabetes. What if we could turn this off? RNA interference on animals to turn this gene off. 4 companies rushing to bring this to the market. Current drugs work by inhibit appetite, this is like birth control by inhibiting interest in sex!
Accelerating pace of change. Last 50 yrs vs next 50 years. Other people said next 50 like last – having fat drugs in 1 decade not 5. Intuition is linear, reality is exponential. Social security issues projecting using a linear life span. That’s hardwired from our linear projection of life on the savannah. Doesn’t work as well today projecting technology. They are the same for a short period of time, which is why govt models appear to work OK for a year or two. But now so fast that even a few years is becoming a big change. Think back 6-7 years. No search engines – that seems like ancient history! 3-4 years ago blogs, podcasts, MMO games popularity. World changing dramatically quickly.
Reading machine 30 years ago, very large. Someday a blind person will be able to take a device out of their pocket and read text in real time from the world. In 2002, asked “when is this feasible”? Models say requisite hardware in 2006, 2Q to be exact. Software development? More than just shrinking, need a new layer of software because holding the device – shadows, curvature, etc. So how long? 4 years… lets get started! Got started in 2002 for a device that wouldn’t be feasible until 2006. Cumbersome, but worked. Just recently introduced this in a cellphone, which is now a reading machine for the blind and of course all those other things that an advanced phone does. 5000 times smaller than 1979 device. Other people seeing this is feasible now. Cool demo of this actually working with synchronized highlighting. Helps dyslexic kids as well. Good example of timing projects.
Games take several years to develop, gaming tech completely different in 2-3 years. Games are the harbinger of what we are doing now, creating real romance, real commerce, in them. So what are the next 20 years of gaming? See how pervasive and exponential these trends are – and will eventually affect our biology. Industries like energy will become information technologies. Plan with Larry Page of Google. Nanoengineering is an information technology. Today 85% of our energy from fossil fuels, as is solar – these are last century industrial technologies. Already a next generation of these coming out, and in 5 yrs tipping point where energy will be cheaper per watt than oil and coal. 1 part in 10,000 of the suns light is 100% of our energy needs. Already billions of dollars of investment in this. Projections about 100 years running out of fossil fuels, but these are missing the exponential trends! Solar needs only 7 more doublings, so within 20 years we will have replaced fossil fuels. Predictable results from information technology.
Doubling paradigm shift rate – 32x more progress in the next 50 years. Took 50 years for phones to be adopted by ¼ of US pop. Cell in 7. Theory of evolution: these processes accelerate because it develops a capability then adopts that capability. Singularity chart of major tech progressions and paradigm adoption. Life / DNA took a billion years to evolve. Cambrian explosion went 100x faster. Homo sapiens, a few 100,000 years. Only 3 simple changes from our predecessors, only 10,000s of bytes -- larger skull but weaker jaw, more brain in cerebral cortex for “what ifs”, opposable appendage that works well. Chimps can’t quite do it the same way. Can’t create tools well enough to use those tools to make new tools. Use the latest tech to make the next tech. Computers made with pen on paper, but today uses 12th generation computer assisted design software. Some disagreement, but not a lot happened in a million years a billion years ago, which clearly is not true today.
Exponential growth and linear very similar. In fact can be sublinear at first, which can be discouraging. Actually growth is overlap of S-curves, because old techs do run out of steam before they get taken over by the new growth. 1890 punch card machines up to cracking enigma code up to vacuum tubes. Eventually couldn’t shrink vacuum tubes any more and that was the end – of vacuum tubes, not of computer tech. On to circuits , which will end… 2022? Won’t shrink any more and that will be the end of Moores law, but not of computing – 3d chips. Now a lot of progress here, this is becoming a mainstream concept with multilayered circuits and self-assembling 3d nanocircuits. Crossover in the teens? This whole curve is trillionfold, and we’ll get another trillion in a lot less than 100 years. Pong in 1972. Even with world wars and depressions this is still quite predictable and smooth progression.
Singularity is Near, predicted 10^16 by 2016. Brain is between 10^14 and 10^16 needed for sim. Now several computers slated to do that by 2010. By the 2020s most of the economy is information technology. If that has 50% deflation rate like a technology, that will change economics. 18% growth in currency despite way more than that in IT growth. People didn’t buy ipods for 10,000. Mobile phones were bricks and meant power elite – 10 yrs first billion cell, 3 yrs next billion, 1 yr next billion. DNA sequencing cost similar. $1000 genome a few years away. Model, simulate, and reprogram our biological processes. Cure for pulmonary hypertension. Not just designer babies but designer baby boomers.
We will end up in the Uncanny Valley for a while – close enough to be creepy. Going to seem like demented humans, hopefully we get past that stage quickly. Key to human intelligence is language, the Turing Test is entirely language based. Simulation and modeling the human brain – able to make verifiable predictions about audio processing from brain models. Cerebellum models – solves many differential equations in parallel using basis functions subconsciously. Simulating intelligence as applied to game characters? Eventually we won’t be able to tell the difference.
1900s: 33% in farms and factories (each), 3% now – but that didn’t cause unemployment, it caused new jobs at the top of the skill tree.
Automatic translation in cell phones?
2010: Devices will disappear – into our belt buckles, displays in our eyeglasses. Images direct to retina. Full immersion virtual reality games. Very convincing illusions.
2029: Intimate merger – turing test capable computers. Compete reverse engineering of brain. These will be integrated with us, integrated with our biological neurons. Nonbiological intelligence will grow exponentially but biological intelligence is fixed. 15 years from now, life expectancy growing more than a year per year?