how many of you
are creatives designers engineers
entrepreneurs artists or maybe you just
have a really big imagination
show hands okay that's most of you
i have some news for us creatives
over the course of the next 20 years
more will change around the way we do
our work
than has happened in the last 2000
in fact i think we're at the dawn of a
new age in human history
now there have been four major
historical errors defined
by the way we work the hunter-gatherer
age lasted
several million years and then the
agricultural age
lasted several thousand years the
industrial age lasted
a couple of centuries and now the
information age has lasted just
a few decades and now today
we're on the cusp of our next great era
as a species
welcome to the augmented age in this new
era
your natural human capabilities are
going to be augmented by computational
systems that help you think
robotic systems that help you make and
digital nervous system
that connects you to the world far
beyond your natural senses
let's start with cognitive augmentation
how many of you are augmented cyborgs
i would actually argue that we're
already augmented
imagine you're at a party and somebody
asks you a question that you don't know
the answer to
if you have one of these in a few
seconds you can know the answer
but this is just a primitive beginning
even siri is just a passive tool
in fact for the last three and a half
million years
the tools that we've had have been
completely passive
they do exactly what we tell them and
nothing more
our very first tool only cut where we
struck it
the chisel only carves where the artist
points it
and even our most advanced tools do
nothing
without our explicit direction in fact
to date
this is something that frustrates me
we've always been limited
by this need to manually push our wills
into our tools like
manual like literally using our hands
even with computers
but i'm more like scotty in star trek
i want to have a conversation with a
computer right i want to say computer
let's design a car and the computer
shows me a car
i say no more fast looking and less
german and bang the computer shows me an
option
now that conversation might be a little
ways off it's actually probably less
than many of us think
but right now we're working on it tools
are
making this leap from being passive to
being generative
generative design tools use a computer
and algorithms to synthesize
geometry to come up with new designs all
by themselves
all it needs are your goals and your
constraints i'll give you an example
in the case of this aerial drone chassis
all you would need to do
is tell it something like it has four
propellers you want it to be as
lightweight as possible and you need to
be aerodynamically efficient
and then what the computer does is it
explores the entire
solution space every single possibility
that solves
and meets your criteria millions of them
takes big computers to do this
but it comes back to us with designs
that we by ourselves
never could have imagined and the
computer is coming up with the stuff
all by itself no one ever drew anything
and it started completely from scratch
and by the way it's no accident that the
drone body looks just like the pelvis of
a flying squirrel
it's because the algorithms are designed
to work the same way that evolution does
now what's exciting is we're starting to
see this technology out in the real
world
we've been working with airbus for a
couple of years on this concept plane
for the future now it's a ways out still
but just recently we used a generative
design ai
to come up with this this is a 3d
printed cabin partition
that's been designed by a computer it's
stronger than the original yet half the
weight
and it'll be flying in the airbus a320
later this year
so computers can now generate they can
come up with their own solutions
to our well-defined problems
but they're not intuitive they still
have to start from scratch every single
time
and that's because they never learn
unlike maggie
maggie's actually smarter than our most
advanced design tools
what do i mean by that if her owner
picks up that leash maggie knows with a
fair degree of certainty that it's time
to go for a walk
and how did she learn well every time
the owner picked up the leash they went
for a walk and maggie did
three things she had to pay attention
she had to remember what happened and
she had to
retain and create a pattern in her mind
interestingly that's exactly what
computer scientists
have been trying to get ais to do for
the last 60 or so years
back in 1952 they built this computer
they could play
tic-tac-toe big deal
then 45 years later in 1997
deep blue beats kasparov at chess
2011 watson beats these two humans
at jeopardy which is much harder for a
computer to play
than chess is in fact rather than
working from predefined recipes
watson had to use reasoning to overcome
his human opponents
and then what a couple of weeks ago
deepmind's alphago
beats the world's best human at go which
is the most difficult game that we have
in fact in go there are more possible
moves
than there are atoms in the universe
so in order to win what alphago had to
do was develop
intuition and in fact at some points
alphago's programmers didn't understand
why alphago was doing what it was doing
and things are moving really fast i mean
consider in the space of a human
lifetime
computers have gone from a child's game
to what's recognized as the pinnacle of
strategic thought
what's basically happening is computers
are going from being like spock to being
a lot more like kirk
[Applause]
right from pure logic to intuition
would you cross this bridge most of you
are saying
oh hell no and you arrived at that
decision
in a split second you just sort of knew
that that bridge was unsafe
and that's exactly the kind of intuition
that our deep learning systems
are starting to develop right now very
soon you'll literally be able to show
something that you've made you've
designed to a computer
and it'll look at it and say sorry homie
that'll never work you have to try again
or you could ask it if people are going
to like your next song
or your next flavor of ice cream
or much more importantly you could work
with a computer
to solve a problem that we've never
faced before for instance climate change
we're not doing a very good job on our
own
we could certainly use all the help we
can get that's what i'm talking about
technology
amplifying our cognitive abilities so we
can imagine and design things that we
were simply out of our reach
as plain old unaugmented humans
so what about making all of this crazy
new stuff that we're going to
invent and design i think the era of
human augmentation is just as much about
the physical world
as it is about the virtual intellectual
realm
so how will technology augment us in the
physical world
robotic systems okay there's certainly a
fear
that robots are going to take jobs away
from humans and that is true in certain
sectors
but i'm much more interested in this
idea that humans and robots working
together
are going to augment each other and
start to inhabit a new space
this is our applied research lab in san
francisco where one of our
areas of focus is advanced robotics
specifically human robot
collaboration and this is bishop
one of our robots and as an experiment
we set it up to help a person working in
construction doing repetitive tasks
tasks like cutting out holes for outlets
or light switches in drywall
so bishop's human partner can tell what
to do in plain english and with simple
gestures
kind of like talking to a dog and then
bishop executes on those instructions
with perfect precision we're using the
human for what the human is good at
right awareness perception and decision
making and we're using the robot for
what it's good at
precision and repetitiveness here's
another cool project that bishop worked
on
the goal of this project which we called
the hive
was to prototype the experience of
humans computers
and robots all working together to solve
a highly complex design problem
the humans acted as labor they cruised
around the construction site
they manipulated the bamboo which by the
way because it's a non-isomorphic
material is super hard for robots to
deal with
but then the robots did this fiber
winding which was almost impossible for
a human to do and then we had an ai that
was controlling
um everything it was telling the humans
what to do was telling the robots what
to do
and keeping track of thousands of
individual components
what's interesting is building this
pavilion was simply not possible
without human robot and ai augmenting
each other okay i'll share one more
project this one's
a little bit crazy we're working with
amsterdam-based artist joris larman
and his team at mx3d to generatively
design
and robotically print the world's first
autonomously manufactured
bridge so jorus and an ai are designing
this thing right now as we speak in
amsterdam
and when they're done we're going to hit
go and robots will start 3d printing in
stainless steel
and then they're going to keep printing
without human intervention
until the bridge is finished so
as computers are going to augment our
ability to imagine and design new stuff
robotic systems are going to help us
build and make things that we've never
been able to make before
but what about our ability to sense and
control these things
what about a nervous system for the
things that we make
our nervous system the human nervous
system tells us
everything that's going on around us but
the nervous system of the things we make
is
rudimentary at best uh for instance a
car
doesn't tell the city's public works
department that it just hit a pothole at
the corner of broadway and morrison
a building doesn't tell its designers
whether or not the people inside like
being there
and the toy manufacturer doesn't know if
a toy
is actually being played with how and
where and whether or not it's any
fun look i'm sure that the designers
imagined this lifestyle for barbie when
they designed her
right but what if it turns out that
barbie is actually really lonely
if the designers had known what was
really happening in the real world with
their designs
the road the building and barbie they
could have used that knowledge to create
an experience that was better
for the user now what's missing is a
nervous system
connecting us to all of the things that
we design make and use
what if all of you had that kind of
information flowing to you
from the things you create in the real
world
with all of the stuff we make we spend a
tremendous amount of money in energy in
fact last year about
uh 2 trillion convincing people to buy
the things that we've made
but if you have this connection to the
things that you design and create
after they're out in the real world
after they've been sold or launched
or whatever we could actually change
that
and go from making people want our stuff
to just making stuff that people want in
the first place
the good news is we're working on
digital nervous systems that connect us
to the things we design uh we're working
on one project
with a couple of guys down in los
angeles called the bandito brothers and
their team
and one of the things these guys do is
build insane cars
that do absolutely insane things
these guys are crazy in the best way
and uh what we're doing with them is uh
taking a traditional race car chassis
and giving it a nervous system
so we instrumented it with dozens of
sensors
and then we put a world-class driver
behind the wheel took it out to the
desert drove the hell out of it for a
week
and the car's nervous system captured
everything that was happening to the car
we captured four billion
data points all of the forces that it
was subjected to
and then we did something crazy we took
all of that data
and plugged it into a generative design
ai that we call dreamcatcher
so what do you get when you give a
design tool a nervous system
and you ask it to build you the ultimate
car chassis
you get this
this is something that a human could
never have designed
except a human did design this but it
was a human that was augmented by a
generative design ai
a digital nervous system and robots that
can actually fabricate something like
this
so if this is the future the augmented
age
and we're going to be augmented
cognitively physically and perceptually
what will that look like what is this
wonderland
going to be like i think we're going to
see a world
where we're moving from things that are
fabricated
to things that are farmed where we're
moving from things that are constructed
to that which is grown we're going to
move from being isolated
to being connected and we'll move away
from extraction
to embrace aggregation i also think
we'll shift
from craving obedience from our things
to valuing autonomy
thanks to our augmented capabilities our
world is going to change
dramatically we're going to have a world
with more
variety more connectedness more dynamism
more complexity
more adaptability and of course more
beauty
the shape of things to come will be
unlike anything we've ever seen before
why because what will be shaping those
things
is this new partnership between
technology
nature and humanity
that to me is a future well worth
looking forward to
thank you all so much