Experts Predict the Future of Technology, AI & Humanity

  • last year
WIRED asked experts from all corners of society and academia to answer questions about the future of technology, artificial intelligence, and humanity itself.
Transcript
00:00 If space is expanding, WTF is surrounding space
00:03 for it to expand into.
00:05 It doesn't expand to end anything.
00:07 Everything is just spreading apart.
00:09 And what keeps it from spreading apart
00:11 are sources of gravity, like stars and planets.
00:14 Like where's it all going into?
00:16 What does this even mean?
00:17 Put it simply, nobody knows.
00:19 But maybe you'll be the astronomer that figures it out.
00:22 Whoa.
00:23 [upbeat music]
00:27 From Shubh Gautam 52, "Will AI replace lawyers?"
00:32 You probably don't want an AI lawyer anytime soon.
00:35 A lawyer is not just simply a machine
00:37 that knows what the law is.
00:39 A lawyer is a person with, theoretically,
00:42 years of expertise that can help you strategically
00:45 to achieve your goals.
00:47 And that's not something that AI is well-positioned
00:50 to replace anytime soon.
00:52 What I suspect is going to happen is that AI
00:55 is going to make a lot of the drudgery of practicing law
00:58 way easier, and it will allow lawyers to focus
01:01 on the really value-add stuff
01:03 and allow them to think strategically
01:05 and to better represent their clients in the future.
01:07 So I welcome our AI overlords.
01:09 - The next question comes from Hassan Babaji.
01:12 "Can light bend around corners?
01:15 "If yes or no, give one reason."
01:18 Yes, light can bend around corners.
01:20 In fact, that's why we have glass inside your glasses.
01:24 When light goes into glass, it slows down slightly.
01:28 Because it slows down, it deviates from a straight line.
01:31 And that's why we have your glasses, telescopes,
01:34 microscopes, because glass bends light.
01:37 Also, gravity can bend light, as Einstein showed us,
01:41 and we can actually see the bending of light
01:44 as it goes around a galaxy.
01:46 Then the next question is,
01:47 "Can you bend light completely around an object
01:50 "so the object becomes invisible?"
01:53 And the answer is yes.
01:54 It's well within the laws of physics
01:56 that if you could govern the atomic structure of glass,
02:00 then light would bend in a way
02:03 such that it would completely go around an object
02:07 so anything inside that object becomes invisible.
02:10 One day, we will build a metamaterial
02:12 out of nanotechnology that will bend visible light
02:16 so that anything inside that capsule will become invisible.
02:21 Harry Potter, watch out.
02:23 @Eggysalt asks, "What happens when you travel faster
02:28 "than the speed of light?"
02:29 You can't.
02:30 You can't travel faster than the speed of light.
02:32 I'm sorry, you just can't.
02:34 You see, as you get faster and faster,
02:37 as you approach the speed of light, you have more energy.
02:41 And in relativity, energy takes more work to accelerate.
02:45 So you end up requiring an infinite amount of energy
02:48 in order to travel faster than the speed of light,
02:50 and so it's just forbidden.
02:52 @NinoClutch asks, "Spider-Man is so raw.
02:55 "Maybe we should try that DNA biotech cross-gene splicing."
02:59 Well, I'm not sure we're gonna see Spider-Man anytime soon,
03:01 but there is a lot of interest from biotech companies
03:05 and academic labs to understand spider silk,
03:07 which is five times stronger than steel.
03:10 Spider silk is very biocompatible,
03:12 very good for wound healing,
03:14 especially for wounds of the eye and the brain.
03:16 And there's been many efforts to engineer spider silk
03:18 outside of spiders to make it in a recombinant way,
03:22 meaning not in spiders, but in other organisms
03:24 like bacteria or plants.
03:26 Probably the best known example
03:28 of a recombinant protein is insulin.
03:30 This has helped millions of people
03:32 across the last four decades
03:34 since the first insulin was produced in bacteria.
03:37 - Next question, what do you think?
03:39 How will our future cities look like?
03:41 A, B, or city?
03:43 Any highly advanced city is gonna need to make sure
03:46 that there is an integration of green spaces,
03:48 not only for our oxygen,
03:49 but just for our enjoyment and well-being.
03:51 The more that we get rid of our natural green spaces,
03:54 the less we are able to have that oxygen
03:56 naturally generated in our environment.
03:58 I see that they're all high vertical structures.
04:00 And that really speaks to the fact
04:01 that we're gonna need to get more and more comfortable
04:04 with building up, 'cause building out
04:06 isn't gonna always be an option.
04:08 - @pristinemartian asks, how far away
04:10 is superhuman intelligence with a brain-computer interface?
04:14 Currently, we are fairly close
04:16 to having brain-computer interfaces
04:19 really help a process called neuroplasticity in the brain.
04:23 And neuroplasticity is the brain's normal process
04:25 to learn and adapt to the outside world.
04:28 I think that's something that we're going to likely see
04:31 within the next several years.
04:33 The idea of having a Bluetooth implant in the brain
04:37 that helps you Google something on the fly,
04:40 we are talking decades upon decades
04:44 before we would see something like that occurring.
04:46 - @seochase, do you think robots
04:49 will one day take over all of our jobs?
04:51 The real benefit of robots is taking over the three Ds,
04:55 the dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs
04:57 that we probably don't want human beings to be doing anyway.
05:00 People are working on underwater robots
05:03 that can detect underwater landmines.
05:05 Some people have worked on robots
05:07 that can go into nuclear facilities after an accident
05:11 and shut off different valves.
05:13 But I do hope that robots are able
05:16 to make people better at their jobs
05:18 and free people up to do things
05:19 that they're actually good at
05:21 and that they actually want to do.
05:22 - @nick asks, will computer programming jobs
05:25 be taken over by AI within the next five to 10 years?
05:28 This is such a frequently asked question nowadays,
05:30 and I don't think the answer will be yes.
05:32 And I think we've seen evidence of this already
05:34 in that early on when people were creating websites,
05:37 they were literally writing out code
05:38 in a language called HTML by hand.
05:40 But then of course software came along,
05:42 tools like Dreamweaver that you could download
05:44 on your own computer that would generate
05:45 some of that same code for you.
05:46 More recently though, now you can just sign up
05:48 for websites like Squarespace and Wix and others
05:51 whereby click, click, click,
05:52 and the website is generated for you.
05:54 So I dare say certainly in some domains
05:56 that AI is really just an evolution of that trend,
05:58 and it hasn't put humans out of business
06:00 as much as it has made you and I much more productive.
06:04 AI, I think, and the ability soon
06:05 to be able to program with natural language
06:08 is just gonna enhance what you and I
06:10 can already do logically but much more mechanically.
06:12 And I think too it's worth considering
06:14 that there's just so many bugs or mistakes
06:16 in software in the world,
06:17 and there's so many features that humans wish existed
06:20 in products present and future
06:21 that our to-do list, so to speak,
06:23 is way longer than we'll ever have time
06:25 to finish in our lifetimes.
06:27 And so I think the prospect of having
06:29 an artificial intelligence boost our productivity
06:32 and work alongside us, so to speak,
06:34 as we try to solve problems,
06:35 is just gonna mean that you and I and the world together
06:38 can solve so many more problems
06:39 and move forward together at an even faster rate.
06:42 - @SmokeAway asks, "What is the best case scenario for AI?"
06:46 Well, the reason I work on AI
06:47 is because I think it could revolutionize science
06:49 and technology, especially biological science.
06:52 Biology is really complicated.
06:54 You have something like 20,000 genes,
06:56 and they make something like 100,000
06:58 or a million different proteins.
06:59 AI could help us make much better solutions for medicine.
07:02 We have things like Alzheimer's.
07:03 We've been working for 50 years.
07:04 We don't have a good answer.
07:06 AI could probably help us, if we had a better AI,
07:09 help us figure out how the brain works.
07:10 That would be awesome.
07:11 AI could help us with climate change
07:13 by helping us build better materials.
07:15 Another case, I think, is eldercare robots.
07:17 So we're getting to a point
07:19 where we have a lot more elderly people than young people.
07:22 If we could have robots that are smart enough
07:23 and trustworthy enough that they could really take care
07:25 of the elderly people, I think that would be a big win.
07:28 Last case is tutors.
07:29 Of course, people are using ChatGPT as a tutor,
07:31 but you could imagine really fantastic
07:34 individualized tutoring once the systems understand
07:36 the people who are learning better
07:38 can help figure out where are they having a problem.
07:41 @start_soul asks, "How will the human species evolve?"
07:45 The future of our species is a big question
07:49 and open to question, but we know a lot
07:51 about human evolution from looking at the past.
07:54 And the story of human evolution is really, in many ways,
07:58 the story of brain size.
08:00 And each time we've seen some increase
08:03 in the capacity of our brains,
08:05 biologists and anthropologists
08:07 have associated that with some change in human behavior
08:11 that allowed us to gain more calories.
08:14 Because brain tissue is what physiologists call
08:18 metabolically expensive.
08:20 It takes a lot of fuel to run a brain.
08:23 As many as 20% of our daily calories go to fuel something
08:27 that's only 2% of our body weight.
08:30 So if you want a bigger brain,
08:31 you're going to have to have more calories to run it.
08:34 And we've seen that through time
08:36 as our species has adopted new characteristics,
08:40 new traits, new habits that have given us more to eat.
08:44 Those things include tool use and social behaviors
08:48 and cooking the food.
08:49 So now we are at a period of time
08:52 where food for many people is plentiful.
08:54 Calories are plentiful.
08:55 One question for future biologists then will be,
08:58 how did that change the human brain?
09:01 @enterobang_2, will humanity ever leave the solar system?
09:06 Probably not, but some future species maybe,
09:10 you know, humanity may evolve and change
09:12 where we couldn't breed with ourselves.
09:14 That species may leave the solar system.
09:16 Not sure where they would go or what they do.
09:19 We might send an instrument,
09:21 a spacecraft to another star system.
09:23 I could imagine that easily.
09:24 We'd use a solar sail
09:26 and we'd give it a push with a laser.
09:28 Be cool.
09:29 [buzzing]
09:31 Except it'd be in space, there wouldn't be any sound.
09:33 It would just be.
09:34 [upbeat music]
09:39 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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