People & R&D & Science & Talk Andrew Kun on 18 May 2008 09:14 pm
Ray Kurzweil on grand challenges for engineering
Ray Kurzweil is well known for his work on optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition. Recently, he was invited by the National Academy of Engineering to be part of a committee charged with outlining the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. Last Thursday, Ray gave a talk on this subject at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA, and four of my students and I went to hear him speak.
A good portion of the 2 hour talk was devoted to two ideas. One is that careful analysis of data can allow you to predict the growth of particular technologies. The second is that the growth of most, if not all, (successful) technologies is exponential. E.g., the number of Internet hosts has risen exponentially over the years (see slide below). Note that the slide tells us that this trend wasn’t perceptibly altered by the boom and bust of the dot-coms. Ray’s take on this: Wall Street didn’t realize that the Internet was growing exponentially, extrapolated the seemingly linear growth of the early exponential curve and came to the wrong conclusion that the Internet is not a viable place to make money.
The rest of the talk was devoted to several technologies that in Ray’s opinion will make a difference in the next 20-25 years (note that he prefers to talk about this shorter time horizon rather than the next century). One set of technologies is related to biology. To frame this discussion, it’s worth taking in this quote:
“As remarkable as biology is, it’s full of downsides, and needs to be improved upon.”
That’s the spirit! So how will we do this? Well, in Ray’s opinion, our computational powers are rising fast enough that by 2029 we’ll have computers that will be able to pass the Turing test (btw, this will be OK, we’ll use them to extend our own abilities and the whole thing will not result in some takeover by the machines). Our abilities to simulate biological processes are already very powerful, and will only get more powerful, which in turn will allow us to engineer new cures rapidly. We’re in the process of developing miniature robots to be deployed in our bodies to fight disease and generally make us stronger (e.g. provide us with an extra boost of oxygen). And we also need to develop a way to quickly respond to any viral outbreak (man-made or natural).
Ray also predicted that ubicomp will play a central role in our future, since we’ll be “online all the time with augmented reality.” This was fun to hear for my students and me, since our Project54 research relies heavily on the ubicomp field. And, talking about students, the topic of education also came up. Ray pointed out that “passion, desire and skill to learn is what we nan give our students.” Very well put.
Overall, the talk was inspirational. Now I want to read this book! Thanks Ray,
Andrew Kun
