Translator: Mary Kay Reviewer: Denise RQ
I stood up here two years ago at TEDx Boston,
shout my mouth off about technological progress,
and made one very clear prediction.
I said, "We ain't seen nothing yet."
Alright, is that an accurate prediction? Let's look at what's happened since then.
Just a couple of weeks after TEDx Boston 2012,
Google announced cats existed on the Internet.
(Laughter)
I'm lowballing this; this was a really impressive achievement.
What happened here was Google took cutting edge AI software,
put it on a million dollars worth of hardware,
fed it a huge amount of YouTube video,
and said, "You figure out what the motifs or the themes are in all of this content."
And the system came back and said things like,
"There appear to be things like human faces and human bodies,
and little furry cat things over there."
AI researchers call this unsupervised learning.
We can think of it as something a lot more like inference or induction.
Digital technology has historically been terrible at that. Now it's getting good.
Also in 2012, Baxter was unveiled by Rethink Robotics here in Boston.
Baxter is an entirely different category of industrial robot.
He costs about 20,000 dollars. You take him out of the crate.
You plug him into the normal electrical outlet on the wall.
You grab those arms and teach it the motion you want.
No programming required.
And then Baxter goes to work for the rest of the day.
The next year Andrew Ng, the guy behind the Google cat video project,
realized not everybody has a million dollars worth of hardware to play with,
so he tried to replicate his work on a cheaper platform.
He was able to do it on 20,000 dollars worth of gear.
That's a 50 fold improvement in one year.
Also that year,
there was another great demonstration of unsupervised learning.
A team had a system go try to learn to play old Atari video games.
They didn't even teach them the rules of the games.
They just said, "You see that number up there on the corner called the score?
Your job is to maximize it. You figure out how."
The system went to work,
and on three of those old fashioned, classic video games,
it learned to beat an expert human player,
which tells me that I could've saved
all those hours I spent playing Battlezone in the early 1980s.
In 2014, Microsoft announced
Skype will offer almost instantaneous, automatic machine translation
between human languages during Skype calls.
And MIT unleashed the cheetah robot throughout campus.
When I was an undergraduate there, my biggest worry was flunking a midterm.
There's a lot more scary stuff happening on campus these days.
When I recite a litany like this, one of the things I very often hear back
is "OK, but computers are still lousy at interpersonal work."
So every time we need a connection or empathy, we still need a person.
Meet Ellie. Ellie is a completely digital therapist.
She responds not only to what we're saying, but how we're saying it:
our visual, facial, and body cues.
We're learning
that people are actually more likely to open up and disclose to Ellie
than they are to a human therapist.
My point with all of this is that technological progress these days
remains extraordinarily broad, deep, rapid, and kind of all encompassing.
When I talk about that with people,
they immediately bring up one big issue and one really big non-issue.
The big issue they bring up has to do with,
as technology can do more and more,
aren't we going to need human labor to do less and less?
I believe the answer is yes. That's obviously a problem.
Most of us are not professional capitalists. We are not investors.
We don't offer our capital to the economy. Instead we offer our labor.
We used to do it on places like assembly lines.
You see a lot fewer of those in America these today.
The year of peak manufacturing employment in the U.S. was 1979.
And even though we make a lot more stuff than we did then,
we do it with about 40% fewer people in the country.
You might think it's a globalization story;
manufacturing employment is on the decline everywhere in the world.
With the advances that we've seen in the past couple years,
the same kind of automation, the same kind of progress is going to come
to the service sectors, and the knowledge sectors
and watching that happen, helps me understand
why our labor force really can't seem to get on and it's stuck,
and why we are not putting a lot of people back to work?
This is obviously a problem.
Unemployment is a scourge
for a human being, for a person, for a community.
And if we don't play our cards right, we could wind up back
in the kind of misery and stagnation that we saw during the Great Depression.
So this is a real challenge.
At the same time, though,
I honestly believe that it is the best economy news on the planet
for one very simply reason.
What technological progress lets us do is more with less.
So imagine that our farms, our factories, our mines, our warehouses,
and our offices were automated.
Think about what that would do.
It would allow us to generate
an extraordinary variety of goods and services, of offerings for all of us.
With no human labor, basically.
No human drudgery, no human toil.
We've not been here before,
this is an extremely exciting possibility,
it opens up the idea of something like... you can call it a digital Athens.
It's an exulted place where the citizens are free to engage
in high level discourse and study the arts and sciences,
and they are supported
not by an army of human slaves, like Athens was, but instead,
by an infrastructure of technology and of automation.
Now, about that non-issue.
One of the things that people bring up
when we talk about automation,
is this dystopian view, there's almost a fear,
that what's going to happen is technology will get in between us
and it's going to mess up our wiring,
and we are going to stop relating to each other
because the technology is so powerful and so beguiling.
I actually don't buy that for a minute.
I don't think it gives us nearly enough credit,
and it ignores the fact
that we've had non-human close companions for a long time
without getting too messed up.
How many of us have a pet?
How many really think that the pet is honestly kind of part of the family?
How many of us have ever confused the pet with a spouse, a husband, or a child?
(Laughter)
No, no, come on!
Our wiring is much better that that, we are a deeply social species,
we have been formed by evolution to respond to each other as human beings,
we have these incredibly powerful, social drives,
I don't think even a few decades of tech progress
are going to befuddle those in any deep way.
And in fact, what we are seeing instead, is innovators using technology
to overcome some of the problems that come along with these deep drives.
Remember Ellie?
The reason she works so well
is exactly because the people know she is not a human being.
Very often, we are ashamed, we don't want to speak out loud,
things we really do need to talk about.
You could think about a war fighter who is struggling with PTSD,
but is too ashamed, he needs to appear too tough to ever vocalize that.
It turns out
that with a non-human therapist that shame goes away,
and people are going to be a lot more forthcoming
and a lot more honest, help themselves out a great deal.
When I look at this kind of progress, I am firmly convinced
that we are heading into a new chapter of our history.
And I don't want to pretend for a minute
that there are not going to be challenges along the way,
but to meet them and to address them properly,
we have to be really clear about what those challenges are.
I want to end by putting up maybe, my favorite quote about technology.
I am not at all worried
that the machines are going to pervert our nature,
that they are going to mess us up somehow.
What I am a lot more concerned about is that we might do that to ourselves,
and we might make a choice to be so small hearted, or so mean as a people
that we stop having compassion, and we stop looking after
the people who are left behind as technology raises ahead.
Let's not do that, OK?
Thanks very much.
(Applause)