Eduardo Lazzati - A soul for the web
Maybe some of you know or remember the case of my friend Jorge Rivas.
Jorge was the victim of a robbery
and in that robbery he suffered from a head injury which first caused him to lose consciousness
and to be admitted to hospital with his life at risk.
When he woke up he could not move.
For some weeks or months, weeks first and months after
I waited for his recovery so I could visit him.
And by the seventh month of not leaving the clinic
I decided to visit him, and when I did
I was surprised to find that, not only could he not move,
but he could not talk either.
And I found a situation I had never seen or imagined before,
A lucid man with all the intelligence, with that glow in his eyes
of intelligence when I or someone else talked to him,
who could not express himself.
I spent half an hour with him, not knowing what to do, and when I was to say goodbye
I thought of saying it to him in the conventional way, but I couldn't
so I said to him just what I felt: "I'm off to see if I can find a solution".
Well, that night I thought of the possible solutions.
My specialty was artificial intelligence, or rather my field of interest,
and although I was busy with other things
and I started thinking of an application to solve him problem.
By the next day I had a prototype in mind, I called some friends, we started working.
And by the next weeks while we were coding
we found in many university ready-made modules
which we could gather up and in only two weeks we had built a prototype that Jorge could use.
A web cam followed the direction of his eyesight,
and that movement of his eyes moved the pointer
and by moving the pointer in the screen he could choose a position in it to navigate
or click on a letter in a virtual keyboard.
That solution which Jorge had available in two weeks
made that he could send his first email in less than a month
that was to me, and started with "Dear Eduardo" and made us all cry.
And by the second month he could write and article for a newspaper,
and less than a year later, he assumed as a congress representative.
That occasion had something odd to it, it was curious that an outsider
from health care, like me,
someone from I.T., had given the solution.
In fact, I had just put together knowledge that was not common
for the discipline he was being treated with. That was the novelty.
And as a consequence of the phenomenon Jorge's case created,
hundreds and later thousands of people started to approach him,
or the chamber or representatives asking if the software was available for them,
because, in fact, there were many people in similar situations.
Since then, we had to take care of helping all that people,
the software had been left available for free where Jorge was being treated at,
but to help people from other places
what we did was to leave it available for downloading in a small site dedicated to it.
The software was downloaded in more than 6 thousand places since then,
the majority in Argentina but up to 23 different countries,
obviously always for free.
And we had to start a foundation in order to, with volunteers,
give support to the inquires we got,
so we could make the most of those tools in each particular case.
But in addition, we developed other complementary software. For example,
in this picture we are seeing one of the last treated patients,
a young woman from Luján
who not only cannot move any of her limbs, neither use her voice,
but cannot control her neck either, that is why her head is being held by a belt.
Not being able to control her neck, she can't control her sight
but her intelligence is intact.
Well, we built a little program called Opticlic
which allows, with a wink,
a web cam to determine that you want to click,
and by those subsequent clicks you go, with a bar that scans down the screen
and another one that scans vertically from right to left
you choose any point on the screen and click on it, with 3 subsequent clicks.
Well, all this work went on for two or three years,
and produced a curious phenomenon as a consequence of bringing together
two pieces of knowledge related to minorities.
A minority that involves the disabled and disability in general,
and some knowledge about artificial intelligence and human-machine interfaces.
Disability is an issue that affects minorities and that we know little about.
In fact, it is a term that is often ommited.
There is an specific terminology to explain disability,
but I like to interpret it as what we say there.
A situation of disability is what reaches an extreme point.
You can have poor eyesight or hearing,
but disability is a state in which
a human subject is in an extraordinary need
of completing the experience of a being a human being.
And completing the experience of being human
must be everybody's basic right.
This is why when you get to know a case in which a person overcomes this circumstance,
it is deeply moving.
I am now going to show you the case of a 29-year-old woman,
that has been recently circulating on the web, born deaf,
and that, through a cochlear implant, is allowed to hear her own voice for the first time.
In two seconds, I ask we share, you are going to see the impact it has in her.
Well, disability is an issue I had arrived to through a personal experience.
25 years ago, my wife and I had a beloved son,
who, when he was around 2 or 3 years old, started showing unusual behavior,
expressions of a kind of behavior that had no diagnosis by then,
and that we would later get to know as Asperger's syndrome.
It is a mental characteristic among the so-called autistic spectrum
and that by then we could only find references to in some films
as was the case in Rain Man or others that are shown there.
And well, for the last ten years, it has become a well-known and well-worked-on issue,
but which involves a group within humanity
with some characteristics that are the same as all of us,
and some that are different.
These different characteristics make them, from an intellectual point of view, uneven.
They can have an astonishing memory, as my son did,
spectacular color recognition,
but not be able to know how to give back change,
or how to recognize whether somebody is mocking them,
or get to have a good social interaction.
In fact, while he recognized each country's flag, he was not capable of playing.
Some of these people can even reach university,
some of them, a very famous vet in the USA, for example,
was even a speaker at TED last year: Temple Grandin.
And these people, those who achieve a great development, have helped us
to interpret what happens to them. And one of the things that happens
is that they do not have the ability to learn through imitation or games,
they cannot develop what we call common sense.
And I was getting involved, because of this family proximity,
in disability and the use of technology because, on the other hand,
I worked in technology professionally.
I was the manager of a health company,
but furthermore, being a computer scientist who was keen on artificial intelligence,
I had built up a team of specialists that had been accompanying me for years,
mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists,
in the development of decision-support systems applied to health.
The main feature of a decision-support system applied to health
is that the expert system, instead of having as a content
treatments and diagnoses, it has
questions and statistics. It asks questions to the patient
or to whom is treating the patient, and according to their answer
it starts looking for matching stories.
This system, that, as a consequence, is adaptive,
it learns from experience,
had a very successful development,
first in Argentina and later in the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
and finally in 2004 at the Barcelona 2004 Forum.
And we sold it, with the company I was managing, to the Catalan government.
What made it be implemented in Europe,
and brought us, between Argentina and Europe, more that 3 million cases.
The system learned, learned and learned and had more medical answers every time,
to more questions, and it is a proactive system.
And an idea started growing in me: That the main worry of a parent
of someone who has a disability, which is: "Who will our child lean on
when we are no longer here?", could have an answer.
Because it occurred to me, as in the case of the Asperger
-what they lack is common sense, who they can ask questions to if the parents are not there-
that something could be built, something like a 'mentor oracle'.
A machine that would store the advice of every parent to their children,
similar to Wikipedia, except that instead
of the explorer having to search for the article,
there would be an engine like the ones I used for the expert decision support systems,
that started asking questions to the person that went to the oracle
to find out their needs and give them a consistent answer.
I therefore started working on that and I decided to put it into practice,
and thus built up a little company,
named, it has a website, Hadasoft,
and that was the one that offered the service to Jorge Rivas.
Because I was imagining a mentor oracle
that would provide answers to naive questions
or those from anyone who had doubts.
And as 'oracle' was a very used word in the computer world, because of Oracle,
I searched in folklore and tradition for something similar
and I thought of a fairy godmother [hada in Spanish], like in Pinocchio
that could offer support to anyone who needed it.
What we thought of, in short, what we started working on and developing
was a software that had an inference engine, similar to the one I mentioned,
in other words, that was inquisitive and proactive, that asked the person
yes-or-no questions, and, according to that, follow the path
of the possible alternatives until it could find the problem and offer a solution.
And a second thing that was a collaborative database,
in a wiki format, such as Wikipedia,
where parents could record, throughout the planet,
the problems that their children had to face and the advice they gave them
or the ones they imagined they could face, and the advice they would give them.
Naturally, the interface was very obvious to think about,
it had to be an audio interface, it is available this way,
with a voice interpreter and a voice synthesizer
that asked the questions to the person who called the Fairy
and that the Fairy asked yes-or-no questions.
I had the project ready and Jorge's situation, the one I told you about, started,
it took some time but, moreover,
an issue arose in me, a strong ethical conundrum,
that led me to even take some courses on Philosophy, Sacred History, to try to answer it.
Because I started worrying that if I was successful and there were, in the global community,
parents from organizations for children with some kind of intellectual issue,
and each of them put two or three pieces of advice, and there were a million of parents connected,
we would build a universal common sense machine.
Who were required for this?
The software is done, we just needed the parents' collaboration
and some collaboration from the people of the computer community to offer support
to those who needed help in order to understand how to load a wiki.
At this point, the situation with Jorge happened, and that made me delay my decision
while I kept wondering what to do.
Because a universal common sense machine, apart from being a marvel
to those who needed it, such as the case of our children,
could also entail danger.
Maybe I read Phillip K. Dick too much, but a common sense machine
could be an instrument that supported intellectual indolence.
Or that maybe, in the hands of a tyranny or a dictator, would try to determine
canons of normality and what is right.
Therefore those questions started stopping me.
However, Jorge Rivas's situation came up, we used the company
and part of the software we had developed to support him.
We had six thousand downloads of people who were helped, assisted, all over the world,
and meanwhile, the web world evolved a lot,
and the web community, the computer or AI community started developing,
around the world, the certainty
that in the next thirty, forty, fifty years, really strong
human-machine convergence phenomena are going to take place.
Not only will there be translators that synthesize a translation properly,
but there will also be direct interface possibilities between people and data banks.
There will be symbiosis between minds and physical mechanical bodies,
and there may be AI mechanisms that would take on increasingly
sophisticated roles. Who would have imagined, ten years ago,
that there would be someone inside our car showing the way and telling us when we are wrong?
So, everything that seemed forbidden for human nature,
sorry, for the machine imitating human nature,
starts to be quickly infringed.
And in the computer community such an acceleration is noticed
that deadlines are starting to be speculated.
The term Singularity describes a phenomenon that is imagined within the century it started
and in which human history will reach a turning point.
A singularity that will happen because, from that point onwards,
human society will have the integrated, symbiotic support of technology,
circuits and logical algorithms.
Well, and given such circumstances, there are people all over the world working,
getting ready for the singularity and this made me decide that I had to start.
Because, given the fact that my ethical worry was just a demonstration
of some fear I once had and that everybody is having, that has to do with forefront technology,
and it is being worked on,
so my ethical worry turned to be a solution instead of a problem.
Because the characteristics of the web have caused that if someone looks through it,
most part of its content is sex. The second part of the content
is business and trade, the third part is entertainment,
and the fourth, the smallest, part is science.
There is no room for ethics or morality.
And what can be more ethical than what a group of parents would desire for their children?
So building the data bank
with the advice that a generation would like to pass on to the following one
not only becomes, in my opinion, an opportunity for the children of those parents,
but it also represents an opportunity for the web to start having a soul.
In this possible transformation, that the web has a moral content.
Well, that was all. Thank you.
(Applause)