APEX keynoter Kaku says term “computer” will vanish from our vocabulary
San Diego, CA. “Imagine, and Create, the Future”—that was the title of Dr. Michio Kaku's IPC APEX EXPO keynote address as well as the advice Kaku presented to a standing-room-only crowd of conference attendees this morning.
The physicist, author, and media personality noted the dangers forecasting, citing the well known views from Yogi Berra that predictions are hard to do, especially about the future, and from Woody Allen, that eternity seems like an awfully long time, especially toward the end.
Nevertheless, he dove in, beginning his talk with a comparatively easy review of the past. Physicists, he said, have invented the laser and the transistor and wrote the World Wide Web. Regarding this last point, he noted that one physicist early on predicted that the World Wide Web would be a forum for high art, culture, and society, a prediction that has fallen somewhat short.
Kaku described science as the source of wealth—science proceeds in waves of innovation that produce wealth but also, unfortunately, unsustainable bubbles that ultimately pop. He noted that the development of the physics of thermodynamics led to the steam engine, which in turn led to factories and locomotives, creating wealth on a scale never seen before. Unfortunately, pursuit of even more wealth resulted in the floating of an unsustainable number of shares of railroad stocks, leading to the first great crash of modern capitalism, which in turn contributed to the philosophy of Marxism.
A second great wave of innovation stemmed from research in electricity, magnetism, and the internal combustion engine—that wave led to a bubble that popped in 1929. A third wave included the innovations of the electronics age—it financed an unsustainable investment in real estate, creating a bubble that popped in 2008, Kaku said.
Despite the recent collapse of the third bubble, Kaku said, Moore's Law has brought us to the point where one cellphone contains all the compute power available to all of NASA in 1969. Riding such advances, he said, we are now entering the fourth wave, which involves biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.
In 2020, he said, a chip may cost a penny. Computer power will be everywhere and nowhere—that is, it will be ubiquitous and employed largely without thought, much as electricity is today. No one speaks of electricity today when entering a room and turning on a light switch, he said—the word has largely disappeared from our vocabulary.
Similarly, Kaku said, the term “computer” will largely disappear from our vocabulary—compute power will be everywhere and nowhere, largely residing in the cloud, and people will interact with the cloud through largely disposable devices.
He cited some specific forthcoming innovations. Glasses and contact lenses that will help you identify conference attendees whose names you've forgotten, for example. Such glasses will present you with subtitles when conversing with people speaking a language you don't understand. And if you are looking for a job, the glasses identify important people you should approach at social events. “Your glasses will tell you whom to suck up to at any cocktail party,” he said.
Who might be early adopters for such glasses? College students taking final exams, he suggested facetiously. They can simply blink to go online and find answers. Also, he said, the glasses would enable President Obama to forgo the teleprompter, and associated criticism from his political adversaries, and the glasses could help keep Vice President Biden on message.
More seriously, he said that children are already demanding, and expecting, enormous amounts of computer power and are prospective early adopters. Fashion models will be early adopters too, he suggested, which might seem to be another facetious prediction, although it echoes comments of a keynoter at last fall's International Test Conference—Krisztián Flautner, vice president of research and development at ARM, who looked to a future where the current emphasis on phones will give way to computerized fashion accessories like watches, necklaces, and rings. “I would like to see the next computer revolution be something that looks good,” Flautner said during that address.
Industry after industry, Kaku said, is undergoing the process of what he called “digitalization.” In fact, he said, we are seeing the digitalization of capitalism itself, with cash being replaced by bits. We will see the emergence of intelligent paper, and even intelligent wallpaper that can dispense medical or even dating advice. And when the wallpaper successfully arranges a date between a two people, the wallpaper can show them Casablanca with the couple's respective faces replacing those of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
Kaku noted that the music industry was one of the first to get digitalized, putting Apple Computer in a strong position vs. traditional players who resisted digitalization. “If you resist digitalization, you become yesterday's bankruptcy,” he said.
Other industries undergoing digitalization include the automobile industry, with the advent of driverless vehicles, he said. He expects that in eight years autonomous vehicle technology will make it unnecessary for 30,000 Americans to die needlessly on the road each year.
In addition, the digitalization of retail sales will make it possible to buy clothes in the right style and in the right size. Digitalization will shift power to the consumer, he said, but producers will fight back with better data mining (big data), consumer targeting, product positioning, and branding. Trademarks will become more important, he said, as will customer relationships. The bottom line is courtesy, he said, with a one-to-one relationship with the customer being the trump card even in the computer age.
Some of his most interesting predictions centered on biotechnology and medicine. He cited as a specific example a tricorder-like device that performs the function of an MRI. He asked, why is an MRI machine so huge? Because with today's technology the machine's magnetic field must be uniform. But in fact we know Maxwell's equations, he said, and therefore we can use supercomputers to compensate for magnetic-field fluctuations, enabling MRI functionality to fit into a cellphone-sized device.
Citing other biotechnology examples, Kaku said that sensors in your toilet will be able to tell you if you have too much fat in your diet. Other bathroom sensors will be able to identify cancer cells years before the disease becomes untreatable. Your bathroom, he said, will ultimately have the compute power that a university hospital has today. “One day we will banish word tumor from our vocabulary,” he said.
Kaku said he elaborates on these predictions in his latest book Physics of the Future.