Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World Page #9

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Are you sorry we drifted apart?

Does your memory stray

To a brighter sunny day

The planetarium is the

only point of contact.

Inside, a monument for those

who have levitated and left.

Yes, things must be real good out there.

Do the chairs in your parlor

Seem empty and bare?

But then we met some

stragglers left behind.

They're all on their smartphones.

Have the monks stopped meditating?

Have they stopped praying?

They all seem to be tweeting.

Shall I come back again?

Tell me, dear, are you

lonesome tonight?

How could we communicate

with stars out there

that potentially have life?

Well, we can think of creating

a kind of long range internet

either through the use of radio waves

or perhaps visible light.

So these would be the kinds of signals

that we could generate in

the case of lower energy signals

like radio waves relatively cheaply

and we could broadcast,

if we came up with a suitable code

some way of transmitting information

over galactic and intergalactic distances.

But we would get an answer

back in 800,000 years?

Maybe 2.5 million years?

Well, I think that the more one looks for

planets in the universe

beyond our solar system

that are potentially places

that might be hospitable to life,

the more you appreciate

the wonderful planet

that we have here that

allows us to do things

like swim in an ocean,

breathe the air without

the help of our technology,

and so, while I would like us

to explore Mars more,

I think the only thing

that we've demonstrated is

that we're very good at

destroying the habitability of earth,

rather than improving the habitability

of a completely alien world.

The idea that Mars will somehow save us

from the decisions we've made

here is a false one.

And it's a little like saying that

you're going to go live

in the lifeboat when, you know,

even lifeboats need somewhere to land.

I don't think I have good dreams.

I'm sure I have good dreams sometimes,

but I don't seem to

remember the good dreams.

The ones that I remember

are the nightmares.

The Prussian war theoretician, Clausewitz,

Napoleonic times,

once famously said,

"sometimes war dreams of itself".

Could it be that the internet

starts to dream of itself?

Great question.

To think about dreaming,

there are maybe two aspects.

One is... what I'll call awareness,

when you wake up and you say

"I was just dreaming this" and you know it.

Another aspect is just...

some kind of pattern of

activity that emerges,

not because of some external stimuli

but just because of something going on

in unpredictable patterns.

I think already the internet

has the second of those,

has unpredictable patterns all the time.

They cause things like flash crashes

on the financial markets.

So we have plenty of kind of currents

running around in the internet

that are unpredictable,

in some cases unstoppable.

Imaginative?

Now it comes to what do

we mean by imaginative.

But if we mean...

We call a person imaginative

if they come up with ideas

that we didn't think of

and that we nevertheless admire.

If they can...

Usually admiration is part of it.

So for the internet, so far I think

it's mostly just unpredictable.

I haven't seen anything the internet

did on its own that I admire.

Does the internet dream of itself?

It does in the sense that it can beget

additional networks layered on top of it

that have the characteristics

of the underlying internet.

So just as the basic internet

is a series of computers

that happen to talk internet to each other

so that you can move

a bit from here to there,

there's a fellow named Sir Tim Berners-Lee

who could conceive of

something called the World Wide Web

and choose not to copyright it,

not to patent it, to allow

anybody to speak "server"

and some people speak "client"

and then before you know it,

you've got websites.

The web is the internet dreaming of itself.

Could it be that the internet

dreams of itself?

It's a fascinating idea.

In fact, there was a wonderful

science fiction story

which later got turned into a movie,

Blade Runner, and I think it was called

"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

The robot's dream,

but the internet is

nothing but connections.

Will it have its own consciousness?

Will it have its own set of rules?

And perhaps...

on an even more scary realm,

a science fiction realm,

will the internet therefore make

its own decisions?

And will the decisions about

how communication happens

go out of human hands?

That's certainly a possibility.

But since we don't even

understand consciousness,

I am hesitant to make any predictions

and I think anyone who claims

they know what's going to happen to

the internet, is not worth listening to.

Pittsburgh.

The Industrial Age...

the steel mills are long gone.

A new industry has established itself.

Here robots are being designed.

This one, named Chimp

is testing its limbs on its own.

Soon battalions of them

connected via internet

could perform rescue missions

in disaster zones.

I think it's gonna run through

the lift joints momentarily.

We're still a long ways away from a robot

having a complete understanding

of the world, of cause and effect,

of desires and hopes and dreams,

and those are the things that

still make humans human

and robots on a much lesser scale.

Well, you could think of this scenario

almost as robot dreaming.

This is, you know, a robot

conceptualizing what is gonna

happen in the future

and thinking about different scenarios

and for any of these

motions it's considering

thousands and thousands

of scenarios per second

that might happen,

especially when you get to the point

of robots exchanging information

with one another,

then you might have a robot

dreaming about places

it hasn't even been.

This is the Chimp view of the world now

using a high resolution laser scanner

and it has to really build up its...

its learning of what's going on

in the environment.

In this case it's a valve

that it's trying to turn

and we see the pre-planning...

this is like the robot imagination

of what's gonna happen:

where the gripper is gonna be,

how it's gonna come into that valve,

and how it can manipulate it.

It could have opened the valve in

Fukushima and prevented an explosion?

That was one of the key things

that spurred this research...

realizing that it was

too dangerous for humans to go in

but if you could have had a robot

go in and just do some simple things,

straightforward things that

the humans were unable to do:

open valves to change

the cooling flow patterns,

maybe turn on pumps again.

That would have made all the difference

in preventing the hydrogen build-up

and the subsequent explosion.

How valuable is the cockroach for you?

I think any insect is amazingly, uh...

advanced, compared to the state

of the art robots right now.

If you think about a cockroach, the fact

that it can scurry around on the floor,

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