Artificial Intelligence and the future | André LeBlanc | TEDxMoncton
So, I'm going to talk to you guys about artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence is still I'm very excited about it. I'm very passionate about it. And uh it's it's growing at an exponential rate. And what's exciting about it is we're not even at 1% of what artificial intelligence is going to be. And but it is an exponential trend. So by the year 2035, a lot of experts are saying that computers will be just as intelligent as a human. So that's in in about 20 years and by 2045 Ray Curtzwell has has uh projected that computers will be more intelligent than all of humans combined. So this is an exponential trend just to give you a little bit of background about uh the evolution of technology and everything. We used to develop technology to replace our muscles, right? To do to pick up a bigger boulder to a bigger truck, a bigger this, a bigger that. And a lot of physical things have been uh replaced by technology in the past. In the last 100 years, we've been replacing we've been doing things to enhance our brains. So the calculator would be a simple example of enhancing our ways of doing math. And then we started automating things that were that were uh repetitive. And then Google's another type of artificial intelligence in the sense that if I had Google and nobody else here did I would seem like a very intelligent person. What what this does is it enhances our experience but it's not direct artificial intelligence. Now if you look at if you look at u right now in the stock market there's one company in the US they do 500 million automated trades per month. So, this is a robot that takes tons of information, makes decisions every millisecond, and makes millions, hundreds of millions of dollars every year. And so, this is just an example of some of the artificial intelligence that's coming. This is going to happen in every industry. There's no way that a human could do that. There's no way that a human could compete with that because there's so so much information going through this system and it's moving at the speed of light. So the next generation of AI is going to be more adaptive. It's going to be self-learning and it's going to be intuitive. So when things change, that's when automation kind of fails. But the next generation of uh of automation, what's going to happen is if something changes, it'll be able to change its own rules. And so just as an example, I have an artificial intelligence company and what what it does is if I give it a simple command like if I told a person to log into a website, intuitively we know how to log into a website. we know what to do and it's the same thing if you if you can record that pattern of behavior once you've seen enough websites a computer can do that as well and eventually basically anything that's done on a computer will be able to be emulated and eventually these computers will be so intelligent that it'll it will lead to the singularity which is what Ray Kerszwell calls it and that will mean that the human race as we know it will become obsolete Exciting, isn't it? So, a lot of people think this is what's going to happen when that happens. But the reality is this has happened before. 200 years ago, 90% of people worked in the agricultural age. They worked in agriculture. And so now 2% of people work in agriculture. Now, are we better off or are we worse off? We're better off. Things got better. And the same thing's going to happen in the next 40 years as all these technologies get faster and faster. They're going to be we're going to see we're going to have to shift to do something else, but it's going to be it's going to be good for the for the human race in general because the robots will be working for us. And what's also important to understand is the AI world will be virtual. Most people see AI as a robot, but really Google when you do a Google search, millions of algorithms are running in the background on servers somewhere else and it's going to be the same idea. But AI are going to be doing tests in a virtual world. And we can call that the matrix. We can call it whatever we want. But what's going to happen is that if you had if you wanted to get find the cure for cancer, what more effective way to do it than to test on a simulated human being a billion times with a certain drug, right? Instead of doing it on a rat or on a monkey or all these things, you're going to do it in a simulated environment a million times. And let's say this this AI is looking for a cancer drug. This one's looking for a Parkinson drug. And this AI will develop a theory on try to on trying to find a cure for that that disease and it may find something that helps out the Parkinson. So these billions of AIs will all be working together and in the next generation most inventions and most cures in the medical field will be found by AI and not by humans. Now when's this going to happen? Well, Bill Gates said, "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and we underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10." And the reason he says that is because of exponential growth. If you think about Moore's law where technology doubles every two years, technology now 25 or 50 years ago, if you had a cell phone, if you have a cell phone now, 50 years ago, it's more powerful than all the computers combined. And so computers getting faster and faster and faster and they're getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And so 25 years from now, they're projecting that computers will will be able to uh a cell phone size computer will be fit able to fit into a cell into a blood cell. So you'll be able to take a vaccine and maybe it'll go inside and repair your body. Who knows? With the techn nanotechnology is growing at an exponential rate as well. So nanotechnology, medical technology, all these technologies are growing exponentially and we're not even in the baby phase of what's going on. These trends are going to start to go up and things are going to change drastically and very quickly. 1500 years ago or 1500 years ago in the past before the year zero, it took about 1500 years to to double knowledge. So if every 1500 years you you would double knowledge, so you'd have two times the knowledge and then every 1500 years after that double again. And so we started writing books and we started to write things down and and language and things like that. And it started to happen every 250 years. And then we discovered science and then it started happening every 25 years. And then we created the created information technology. It happened every 8 years. And now we're in the information age and it's happening every year. So literally every 12 months human knowledge is doubling. And so we're getting to a point where the human brain can't comprehend all the information that's coming in. And so what's going to happen is 200 years ago, you could have been an expert in 10 different fields if you study them enough. Now you can barely be an expert in one field. You have to go into a section of a section of a section of a field and be an expert in that. And and to make an impact in that field will be very difficult. And so the human brain has about 86 billion neurons. It's about four times as much as a chimpanzeee. It's not enough. So this is where artificial intelligence is is going to come in. All this information that's coming in is going to get managed by artificial intelligence. But at the same time, human is the humankind is going to learn from this AI. So what if we could add 10 times the neurons that you have in your brain? What if you could add a 100? What if you had had a million a million times the neurons that you have right now into the cloud? So wirelessly connecting. Imagine if you had a doctor that says, "Ah, I don't like technology. The internet's not for me." And then you had another one where information is doubling every year. In fact, it's going to double every 12 hours at one point according to IBM. So imagine one month goes by. That one month it has doubled 60 times. So, you need to take an 8-year degree to learn what happened last month, right? Not going to happen. So, the doctor that's connected to AI, he's going to walk into the doctor's office. He's going to run a Windows update. Boom. He's learned everything that's happened in the last month. And this is how things are going to happen. They're going to accelerate at a dizzying pace. And it's going to be incredible. Now, my last slide here is the is the matrix. So, at some point, we're going to have to make a choice. Right? You take the blue pill and you believe whatever you want to believe. And I I don't believe that people will be forced into this system. You, you know, if you don't want to live in reality, you could go and and play something or play and it already exists. It's called video games, right? But if you wanted to be a World of Warcraft and be a fantasy fighter and do all that stuff, you could do it in a virtual world. Fill your boots. But if you want to take part in the next 50 100 years which 40 years from now we will look back to today and say I cannot believe we used to do that in the medical field in every in every field possible we'll we'll look back and we'll say I cannot believe the amount of advances that happen in the next 30 years there's going to be just as much change happen that happened in the last 2000 And technology is is exploding. And but it's going to be good. It's going to be good for all of us. We're actually going to benefit from it. We might even be able to work less, right? Uh we used to work 80 hours a week, right? When we used to work in the agricultural age. Now we work 40. Maybe we'll work 20, right? I'll probably still work 100, but that's just me. But it's going to be an exciting time. And uh I hope you're excited about the future. I'm excited about the future. Thank you very much. [Applause]