He invented OCR, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition and loads of other stuff. He popularised the notion of the "singularity", the point in time when computers become more intelligent than humans and all bets are off. He's probably the world's best know futurist.
I like that he takes a systematic approach to futurism. He doesn't seem to act on intuition like a lot of futurists do. His predictions often seem over optimistic, but end up uncannily accurate as he looks at hard numbers.
Over the years a lot of philosophers and psychologists have said we'll never get proper "human style" artificial intelligence because there's something "other" about it, something that is too complex for any computer to simulate. I remember when I was studying cognitive science in the early nineties that it was still thought by many that a chess computer could never beat the best in the world because there was some ill-defined humanness required. Kurzweil predicted that this would in fact happen in 1996, and it did. He knew it would because of the relentlessness of Moore's law.
Another great example was the sampling of the human genome. Having spent something like 10 years to do 10% of it, researchers thought it would take decades to finish. Kurzweil, taking Moore's law into account, said it would take another year or so, and it did.
So a recurring theme was this idea that people are over pessimistic about AI and technology in general because they fail to take into account the sheer power of exponential growth. Worries about being able to create the peculiarities of intelligence get blasted away by the massive increase in things like processor speed, bandwidth, materials etc.
The recent success of IBM's Jeopardy playing supercomputer, Watson shows just this.
It beat the World's two best human Jeopardy players. According to Kurzweil this isn't due to particularly new AI techniques, but more due to raw processing power. It gained it's knowledge by reading the internet, including the whole of wikipedia. It then selected articles via a fairly simple probabilistic algorithm. It worked because it had the speed to process the data in real time. Again it's down to Moore's law. The interesting thing that Kurzweil highlight though was that this is pretty much how we work in our own brains anyway. We are fundamentally probabilistic machines with a lot of processing power.
If you plot our intelligence on a graph against machines, they pass us in 2045. So that's it then, after that point we have no way of knowing what will happen next. Machines might not care to tell us what they are up to, and we may well not understand it if they did.
On the bright side, there will be no reason why we won't be augmenting our own brains with billions of extra neurons, so we may end up having a more symbiotic relationship with machines than some people fear. And at least we'll be able to back it up.
This is a subject close to my heart. We've done a fair bit of work with smart clothes and calm displays. It was introduced by Ping Fu, she's CEO at a company called Geomagic. They make high end 3D sanning software that's used everywhere for the space programme to archeology. This was about clothes though, and she had assembled a few leading people from the smart clothes community.
First Ping herself talked about how 3D scanning and printing is being used in creative and beautiful ways.
She gave the example of a beautifully crafted laser cut prosthetic leg. As she said, they usually look more like aircraft landing gear than anything you'd want to adorn yourself with. Why shouldn't they be beautiful and custom made and custom fitted. With todays 3D scanning and printing technology its possible.
Here's a sporty little number:
Fashion designer Iris Van Herpen uses 3D printing technology and other advanced processes to make clothes. Here's one where she wanted the model to look like she'd been splashed with water:
Next up, Sheridan Martin. She does research for XBox. She made this, "You are what you tweet" dress. I think you can tweet from the keyboard on it, and I think you can tweet it. It was projecting words onto the inside of the dress at least.
Alison Lewis from Agent of Presence was cool. She was definitely on the pure aesthetic side of things. This technology doesn't have to be useful, it can just be about beauty or emotion. I like that approach. She showed a pair of 3D printed Jimmy Choo shoes, which dispelled any ideas about technology and fashion necessarily being dorky.
My favorite thing of her's though was a dress she called "Presence of Heart" that lit up in unison with the heart beat of the wearer. Dead simple and quite sweet I thought. the method used for lighting this one up was a very powerful LED and optic fibres to spread the light through the fabric.
Last was Janet Hanson from Enlighted Design. She pretty much makes all the light up clothing you ever see in pop videos and gigs.
These are all great, but they are designed for one-off or limited use. She pre-empted people asking about whether consumer versions were possible, and she yes, but there are things to consider. The main problem with the Electro-Luminescent fibre is that it's quite fragile and they don't like being bent around much. So in her designs she tries to avoid bendy areas like knees and elbows. She reckons that consumer versions will be possible, but we have to really tailor them the the material. In fact she recommended wearable accessories like necklaces or bracelets etc. We'll see.
This was a panel discussion with all the main people at Funny or Die. It was chaired by Billy Eichner:
It was funny very funny. Actual facts to take away are:
They make lots of low budget films with small amounts of views each, as opposed to the TV model where you make very little but rely on massive viewing figures.
They are very quick to grab talented people, without them having to go through the usual process. Billy Eichner was just making funny YouTube videos when they rang him up and said, "come to LA". He's now one of there regular producers.
They are all very hands on, and have most equipment they need (gren screens lights etc) at their offices.
This enables them to have a very quick turn around. They will have something online a day or two after having an idea.
They do ads. Interestingly, Kia asked for the Funny or Die logo to be included in a recent ad. Pretty good cudos.
This was with Cyborg Anthropologist, Amber Case. She studies how we use technology to augment ourselves and our world. This stuff's right up my alley and a lot of what she talked about crosses over with our own R+D work into smart clothing.
Firstly, pretty much everyone reading this is a cyborg. We rely on devices to enhance our everyday experience. We're constantly connected to the web, we use location software to get around, we struggle when not able to connect. What I thought was funny was how she anthropomorphised the smart phone, i.e. we tend to it, feed it at night, protect it, sometimes it cries for attention. I wonder if we are pre-disposed to get addicted to caring for a thing like that. Maybe a smart phone is just and over complicated Tamagotchi.
This picture was taken in the early 80s. He was a pioneer of wearable computing. He's got a wireless connection, a camera, a big metal thing. I think pretty everything in this set-up is built into a modern start phone except the metal thing. So people have been thinking about this for a long time, but it's only now that the technology is allowing wearable computing to have it's "Steam Engine Time".
She then mentioned Mark Weiser, the father of ubiquitous computing. He came up with a few principles that should guide it:
The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
Technology should create calm.
This calm technology idea is what underpinned last years work with Queen Mary's university. Part of our social clothing platform was a heat sensitive dye display. We wanted to avoid LEDs and create an interface that felt more natural, like blushing skin or dilated pupils.
All this leeds to moving away from the screen as our interface for everything. This Haptic Compass belt vibrates when you point to a certain bearing.
It makes the user aware of which direction they are pointing at all times, without reference to a screen, it makes total sense to not have to continually get a thing out of your pocket and look it when trying to get around. It's been likened to the magnetic sense a bird has.
Then on to the product pitch.
Amber Case has a startup, Geoloqi.com. It looks pretty good actually. They are taking a new approach to location based apps. The focus is less on you actively having to check into places, and more on the app running in the background and doing stuff that depends on where you are. It's a more ambient, less invasive and calm approach. Apparently they've overcome some of the notorious battery issues associated with GPS apps.
Here's a game they made called Map Attack:
and here's a thing that shows you wikipedia articles about where you are called "bringing Wikipedia to life":
In some senses it's nothing new. GPS games and location based social networking has been around for a long time. I think the value in this though is that they've managed to package the thing in an easy to use platform, that uses "always on" GPS, which all stems from the idea that interfaces should be more transparent and less about actively looking at a screen. So I guess it all makes sense.
