The Choice Is Ours Page #9

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that say "There's an infection in the toe."

And the brain says

"We're going to do a three-month study."

By that time, the infection is up to your knee.

(Narrator) To achieve the

intelligent management of resources,

technologies are used to

monitor and track goods and services.

This is similar to industrial processes of today,

but updated, to equitably distribute

goods and services to all.

This is the basis for a

Total Global Systems Approach.

(Erik) I can imagine an abundance economy

where robots do most of the work,

where our food, our clothing, our shelter

are created by machines.

And I think it's very realistic

for us to eliminate,

completely eliminate absolute poverty worldwide,

not just in the United States, by the year 2035.

Nobody needs to starve ever again.

That could be an enormous milestone

that is achievable because of technology.

(Jacque) When we computerize everything,

and start producing things

and make things available,

it'll be too cheap to monitor.

(Narrator) With the most capable computers

we can arrive at more appropriate decisions

on a global scale.

(Jacque) I have no doubt that

machines will eventually

be assigned more and more decision making.

For example, years ago,

a pilot would look out of a plane and say

"I think I'm about a mile high."

But today, they have doppler radar

and they know exactly how high they are.

So, we don't want human guesswork anymore,

when a machine can do it.

So I see the future as

using very sophisticated computers

that make decisions.

Now how do computers make decisions?

They have their tentacles out

into Transportation,

Agriculture..., so they can tell you

when the soil is depleted,

when it has less water,

because it has sensors built into the soil.

The computer will be connected

to weather departments,

earthquake zones, everything.

So I feel that eventually,

government will become computerized.

(Narrator) Today, the world's

fastest computer is in China.

The Tianhe-2 supercomputer is capable of

33.86 quadrillion floating point

operations per second.

[Fareed Zakaria, CNN Host]

Eighty percent of what doctors do

is going to be done by computers.

Is that really true?

[Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems]

Absolutely. I have zero doubt.

You won't want a doctor to do your diagnosis

or monitoring, or pick your therapy.

That's why IBM's Watson

is trying to pick cancer therapies,

because it's too complex for humans to do.

There's 15,000 diseases, 15,000 devices,

drugs, therapies, prescriptions...

You think if you're a cardiac patient,

your cardiologist has read even a hundred

of the last 5,000 articles

published last year on cardiac disease?

Not a chance!

- But the computer can go through it all?

- Absolutely!

(Erik) You may have seen IBM's Watson

defeat the world champion in the game of Jeopardy.

Well, that same technology can also be used

to solve legal problems,

to answer questions in call centers,

to make medical diagnoses...

These are just wondrous technologies

that are having enormous implications

going forward.

Recently, I got a chance

to ride in a self-driving car.

Ten years ago,

I would have said that's impossible.

But, of course, it did happen,

and riding down route 101 in California

was a breathtaking experience for me.

At first, it was a little frightening.

Then it was a little exhilarating.

And, ultimately,

I felt quite comfortable in that car.

(Vinod) Humans have accidents.

Google's driverless car has driven

700,000 miles without an accident.

Even the best humans have accidents

before they get to 700,000 miles.

(Erik) All of us are beginning

to be able to speak to our machines,

whether they're cell phones, or computers

and have them understand what we're saying.

That would have been science fiction

a few years ago,

but now the machines

are able to carry out our instructions

and even respond back to us

with computer synthesized voices.

(Vinod) I think 10 - 20 years from now,

there will be very few areas,

maybe none, where human judgement

is better than machine judgement.

(Jacque) So the computers will

eventually be put in charge of everything,

except human behavior.

(Reporter) Technology can eliminate

critical life-or-death errors.

A machine, instead of humans,

fills the prescriptions.

The robot gives a huge amount of confidence

because we know that

pharmacists and pharmacy technicians

are incredibly skilled people,

but they're humans,

and they will occasionally make mistakes.

We give something like

3 million doses of drug, in 3 months here,

so even a 1% error rate is far too high.

(Jacque) So, eventually you're going to

get to computerized government.

And that's the end of corruption,

because they don't have ambition.

Computers don't say

"I'd like to be President of the World."

"I want to control people."

They don't have a gut reaction.

(Narrator) If utilized in this

global systems approach,

we could surpass

the practice of political decisions

based on power and advantage.

(Jacque) Even computer experts

are writing books now

on the 'machine takeover - watch out!'

They're not going to take over.

They're going to be assigned to decision making.

(Erik) I'm not worried about the

machines getting angry and taking over,

I'm worrying about people maybe getting angry

if we don't figure out an equitable way

to use these technologies

to create shared prosperity.

(Narrator) The Venus Project

proposes ways to achieve this.

Inter-connected sustainable cities

utilize cyber-centers

which coordinate industries,

transportation systems,

public health care,

and the flow of goods and services.

These cybernated centers would connect all cities

and help with environmental reclamation.

In the beginning,

interdisciplinary technical teams

would manage productivity

until even these tasks are automated.

Mega-machines, directed by AI,

could excavate canals,

construct bridges,

viaducts,

and dams.

Self-erecting structures would be expedient

in the construction of industrial plants,

apartments

and eventually,

most of the global infrastructure.

(Jacque) We study all of the

negative effects before we build anything.

So there's a whole group of

engineers and computers

doing long-term studies of

all of the negative retroactions.

(Narrator) With the threat of climate change,

we may be forced to take large engineering feats.

The Venus Project proposes

automated canal diggers

to bring rising seawaters

into below sea level deserts,

enabling them to bloom.

The cities would only use clean sources of energy.

Some say this is not possible,

but even today,

Professor Mark Jacobson

is demonstrating otherwise.

(Mark) So, our goal is to replace all fossil fuels.

There's 30 times more solar available, worldwide,

over land and high solar locations

than we'd need to power the entire world

for all purposes in 2030.

And there's seven times more wind

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