(gentle music)
- So for the most part,
these robots that you see in the movies are fake.
There's a man inside, a remote control device.
Real robots are on Mars.
The Mars rover is a genuine robot,
and how intelligent is the Mars rover?
Can you have a conversation with the Mars rover?
I don't think so.
It takes time for the Mars rover
to recognize a pattern.
Now, if you have a cockroach on your kitchen table,
and you raise your hand,
that cockroach scans your hand
and instantly says danger, danger,
and runs into the corners of the room.
I know, I live in New York City.
(audience laughing)
However, the Mars rover,
if you were to raise your hand to the Mars rover,
the Mars rover would scan your hand,
compare it to all the patterns in its memory,
and the Mars rover would say,
is that a giraffe?
No, not a giraffe.
Is that a spoon?
No, not a spoon.
Six hours later.
What is that thing?
That's how far we have to go
before we have true robots, okay.
So true artificial robots are simply not around the corner.
Maybe in the future, we'll have robots
smarter than a bug.
So if robots have the intelligence of a bug,
why not make them look like bugs?
These are the bug bots.
Their descendants are on the planet Mars now.
So, what about emotional robots?
It turns out that you really want robots
to have emotions.
Now why is that?
Certain people have brain legions in a car accident,
or they have disease.
The front part, the reasoning part of their brain
is disconnected from the emotional part of the brain.
So they have no emotions that are connected
to the front part of their brain.
If you ask them to make a decision,
they are paralyzed.
They cannot make decisions.
Decisions require value judgments.
What is beautiful?
What is expensive?
What is nice?
What is convenient?
What is inconvenient?
These are value judgments, emotional judgments.
When you ask these people,
when is the good time to have the next appointment,
they spend hours debating Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
If you go shopping with these people, they're paralyzed.
Everything is the same.
Expensive, inexpensive, pretty, not pretty.
So why do we have to have robots with emotions?
Otherwise they cannot decide on anything at all.
So you want data to have emotions,
otherwise they cannot make any decisions.
So in the future, we will have robots
that are emotional.
Plus the fact you wanna bond with your robot.
'cause if you have an unpleasant robot,
the first thing you're gonna do is your gonna sell it
to the junk heap.
So you want robots that are cute
and robots that you can bond with,
otherwise you're gonna sell them as soon as you buy them.
And here is the governor of California in a bad mood.
(audience laughing)
Real bad mood.
And the question is, well, are they dangerous?
Well, in the coming decades,
I expect them to be as intelligent as a dog or a cat.
Eventually, they'll be as intelligent as a monkey.
At that point, they might be dangerous,
'cause monkeys have an independent agenda
independent of us,
and so yeah, we should put a chip in their brain
to shut them off if they ever get any murderous thoughts.
The other possibility however is to merge with them.
One day, we will have a possibility of
waking up in the morning with a robotic body,
part genetically engineered, part robotic,
such that we live forever.
Now you may say to yourself,
that's an unpleasant choice, but hey.
If you're about to die,
if your body's been decaying,
and you see the end, and you are about to die.
And someone gives you the choice of waking up the next day,
immortal, superhuman body, beautiful, handsome,
what choice would you make.
Duh.
Now let's talk about time travel.
This is a class two impossibility
because we are talking about a technology thousands of years
perhaps in the future, when we'll be able to bend
the fabric of space and time.
Isaac Newton said that time is like an arrow.
Once you fire it, it never comes back,
it uniformly goes in a straight line.
That's time.
Einstein comes along and says not so fast.
Time is a river.
It speeds up, it slows down, going around stars.
We measure it every day.
Your GPS system.
GPS satellites would be incorrect without corrections
from Einstein's theory of relativity.
And the new wrinkle is the river of time
may have whirlpools.
Whirlpools in the river of time
and the river of time may fork.
Fork into two rivers.
And so then the question is
what happens if you go backwards in time,
and meet your teenage mother
who then falls in love with you.
Well, you're in deep doo doo.
But what happens if such a thing happens.
Well, there are many philosophies.
My personal philosophy is that the river of time forks
into two rivers.
You go backwards in time to another fork in the river,
you meet your teenage mother before you were born,
but she's not really your teenage mother.
She has the same genes, the same memory,
the same behavior, but you're in
a different parallel universe.
So when you go backwards in time, you hop stream.
You go from one stream to the next stream
then there are no paradoxes.
All paradoxes are resolved.
In this future, it is possible to go
backwards in time and change your sex.
Go backwards in time, meet yourself,
and give birth to yourself.
But you've essentially jumped ship.
You've gone through a different river each time,
so there are no contradictions.
This is done by something called wormholes.
Now, where have we seen wormholes before?
The first wormhole was introduced in English literature
150 years ago.
There was a mathematician at Oxford,
a well-known mathematician at Oxford
who wrote the first monograph
for the public about wormholes.
Does anyone know the name of this professor
of mathematics at Oxford University?
- Caroll, Lewis Carroll. - Alice in Wonderland
- The book was Alice in Wonderland.
What his name?
- [Woman] Lewis Carroll.
- Charles Dodson.
Professor of mathematics, he could not write this book
under his own name, so he wrote it under a pen name
that he made up called Lewis Carroll.
Alice in Wonderland is the first introduction
of multiply connected spaces in the English literature.
Queen Victoria was so enchanted by Alice of Wonderland
that she wrote Professor Dodson a letter.
Please, please, she said, give me your next book.
Which he did.
It was a treatise on higher mathematics
that was sent to Queen Victoria.
So the looking glass gives you one representation
of multiply connected spaces.
So what is the shortest distance between two points?
Usually we say a straight line, right?
A straight line is the shortest distance
between two points.
But if you could fold a sheet of paper.
Fold the paper and bring these two points
together til they touch,
then you realize that a wormhole is the shortest distance
between two points.
These wormholes are solutions of Einstein's equations.
They have exactly the same topology as Alice in Wonderland.
If you have a black hole that is spinning,
a spinning black hole,
it does not collapse to a dot,
it collapses to a ring.
A ring of neutrons.
And if you fall through the ring,
you wind up on the other side of forever.
So the ring is the rim of the looking glass.
The frame of the looking glass is the rim,
the ring at the center of a rotating black hole.
Now of course, there's a debate
among physicists as to whether or not
you could actually make the trip.
Some people think the wormhole is gonna be unstable.
Some people think that you're gonna die
when you go through the wormhole.
All I'm saying is that yes,
they are solutions of Einstein's equations.
Laser implosion, in fact, professor Paul Davies
is an authority on this question.
You can ask him all the hard questions after the lecture,
about creating such a machine that may one day
open such a gateway to perhaps, hyperspace.
And this gets us into what I do for a living.
What I do for a living
is work in something called string theory.
And we believe that string theory may be,
we're not sure, the theory of everything.
With the option perhaps of one day, perhaps,
opening up a gateway to travel to another universe.
Okay, and now, we're gonna answer some questions
that many people ask.
For example, if there are aliens in outer space,
then where are they?
How come they don't visit us?
Well, there are many ways of looking at that question.
One is, perhaps they're invisible.
Another way is if you're walking down a country road
and you bump into an anthill.
You go down to the ants and say,
I bring you trinkets.
I bring you beads.
I bring you nuclear energy.
Take me to your leader.
Or do you have a strange urge to step on a few of them?
Well, if they're type three, if they're galactic in scope
and we're type zero, we're like ants on an anthill to them.
There's another way however
to explain the reason for perhaps why they're not here.
Our earth radiates, our earth radiates radiation
for 50 years, radio and television.
There is a sphere,
a sphere surrounding the earth,
50 light years in radius,
expanding at the speed of light
containing the finest of our cultural archives.
The noblest achievements of the human creative spirit
like "I Love Lucy," "Leave it to Beaver,"
and now joined by the immortal classics,
Beavis and Butthead part two,
and Dumb and Dumber part two.
And if there's a star within 50 light years of the Earth,
they will pick up our cultural emissions,
and they'll be convinced there's no intelligent life
on the Earth.
(audience clapping)
So let me just now end on one final note
and then we'll throw it open to questions.
I spoke at the Einstein centennial a few years ago,
and my favorite Einstein story is this.
When Einstein was an old man, he was tired
of giving the same talk over and over again.
So one day, his chauffeur came up to him and said,
professor, I've heard your speech so many times,
I've memorized it.
And I'm a part-time actor.
Why don't we switch places?
I'll put on a mustache and a wig
and I'll be the great Einstein giving the talk
that I memorized, and you can take a break.
Well, Einstein thought wow, I could take a rest.
So they switched places.
The chauffeur put on a mustache and a wig
and he gave brilliant talks.
But one day, there was a mathematician in the back
who asked a very difficult question,
and Einstein thought oh, the joke is up.
But then the chauffeur said,
that question is so elementary, that my chauffeur here
will answer it for you.
(audience laughing)
Thank you very much.
Thank you.