Daily Debrief: Smart humans, smarter machines? Video

Daily Debrief: Smart humans, smarter machines? Video Transcript

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>> How long before computers become smarter than people. Some might argue we're already there but however you come out in this debate, one thing is certain, we're clearly on the road. Welcome to the CNET News Daily Debrief, I'm Charlie Cooper here with my colleague Stephen Shankland. And you we're over listening to the folks from Intel at the Intel Developer's Forum. It's taking place this week in San Francisco. And they we're talking about this process of computers becoming smarter than human beings, but it all revolve around or it all goes back to Ray Kurzweil and the singularity. So maybe a good thing to do right now is briefly recap what is the singularity and why it is important.

>> Sure, so what the singularity is is this idea by Ray Kurzweil, who is this futurist visionary guy who's made a lot of money in various earlier phases of his career, but the singularity is his term for this moment in time when computers become more intelligent than people. He thinks this is inevitable given the current rates of progress and, you know, processing ability, communications, speed, things like that. So the human brain has gotten better over the last, you know, few hundred thousand years, but computers are advancing a lot faster. He calls it singularity. It's kind of a relativistic reference to black holes where you can't see beyond the event horizon, there were black holes. So he thinks this is gonna be this big transformative moment and nobody can predict what's gonna happen after that, you know. Maybe we'll be able to download French, so we can speak French or something like that. That's an easy, obvious, you know, possibility for, you know, very complicated, you know, computer human interface, but beyond that it, you know obviously, it gets pretty complicated, pretty fast. So nobody can predict it.

>> French is easy, Finnish is tough. [ Laughter ]

>> So what's Intel's angle on this and what's the connection here?

>> Well Intel's CTO, Justin Ratner, got up on stage to talk about -- to talk about his ideas for the glorious future that lies ahead of us. So it's very optimistic, bullish talk and, you know obviously, Intel has a strong interest in all of us being excited about technology and the wonderful future that lies before us. So --

>> Because everything presumably would have an Intel chip inside and therefore the more stuff you buy the more --

>> Right.

>> Intel chips, okay.

>> Not just processors but radios and all that stuff. So it's basically it was a convenient little idea for them to hang a cons, you know, to hang out speech about a lot of technological change that's in the works right now.

>> But they did have technology demonstrations.

>> Yes.

>> To back this up, can you talk about a few of the more interesting ones.

>> Sure, so I thought one of the more interesting ones was some technology called catoms, C-A-T-O-M-S, which was a term that came out from Carnegie Mellon. These are basically very small programmable elements, physical elements. You build them, you put them together, and you assemble things out of them, the way you might assemble atoms, things from atoms. But Catoms are programmable, they have detectors. They have little electromagnetic devices so they can expand and contract and things like this. So they have this idea that you'll be able to build shape shifting objects out of catoms. For example, a cellphone that shrinks down so it's very small when you want to put it in your pocket and then it gets bigger when you wanna hold it up so it doesn't, you know, fall into your ears or something like that. So that was kind of an interesting idea, I thought. There was also a demonstration from some guys at the company called Emotive who have a neural interface. It's a special helmet that goes over your head, picks up some brain waves and if you're skilled enough, you can actually convert -- it can understand motions like lifting motion or an angry face and it actually can --

>> I like that. That was pretty good.

>> Thanks, I've been working on my angry face, anyway, as you can control basic video game with that, it's a direct neural interface and in fact.

>> They also talked about radio that might become cognitive.

>> Yeah, this is actually from a Berkley professor. His point is that the current regulatory and technological framework for wireless communication is this crazy hotchpotch of protocols and different parts of wireless spectrum that, you know, your wireless network can use or your cellphone can use or the TV transmissions can use. And his idea is that radios become very smart and they can shift very rapidly to wherever the spectrum is least cluttered. So you can get the most transmissions. So basically smart radios that quickly adapt to changing circumstances.

>> Did Intel give you any indication when all of these different elements might actually come together?

>> Well yeah. The theme of the show was what's coming in the next 40 years. So it's a pretty big time horizon they're giving themselves. Some of these things are nearer to reality than others. The catoms look pretty like sci-fi to me but I think smart radios is something that's actually probably in the nearer term, you know, depending on how sophisticated development you're talking about.

>> AM or FM? [ Laughter ]

>> I'm only joking. On behalf of Stephen Shankland, I'm Charlie Cooper. [ Music ]