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The
Edge 
Annual Question — 2009
 
WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?
 
151 CONTRIBUTORS
 
(107,000 words)
 
Alan Alda,Stephon H. Alexander,Alun Anderson,Chris Anderson,Mahzarin R. Banaji,John D. Barrow,Patrick Bateson,Gregory Benford,Yochai Benkler,Jesse Bering,David Berreby,Jamshed Bharucha,Susan Blackmore,David Bodanis,Stefano Boeri,Lera Boroditsky,Nick Bostrom,Stewart Brand,Rodney Brooks,David Buss,William Calvin,Leo Chalupa,Nicholas A. Christakis,Andy Clark,Gregory Cochran,M. Csikszentmihalyi,Austin Dacey,David Dalrymple,Paul Davies,Richard Dawkins, Aubrey de Grey, Daniel C. Dennett,Emanuel Derman, Betsy Devine,Keith Devlin,Eric Drexler, Freeman Dyson,George Dyson,David Eagleman, Brian Eno,Juan Enriquez,Daniel Everett,Paul Ewald,Christine Finn,Eric Fischl,Helen Fisher, Kenneth W. Ford,Richard Foreman,Howard Gardner,Joel Garreau,James Geary,David Gelernter,Neil Gershenfeld,Marcelo Gleiser,Daniel Goleman, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster,Brian Goodwin,Alison Gopnik,April Gornik,John Gottman,Jonathan Haidt,Haim Harari,Henry Harpending,Sam Harris,Marc D. Hauser,Marti Hearst,Roger Highfield,W. Daniel Hillis,Donald D. Hoffman,Gerald Holton, Verena Huber-Dyson,Nicholas Humphrey,Marco Iacoboni,Eric Kandel,Stuart Kauffman,Kevin Kelly,Marcel Kinsbourne, MD, Brian Knutson,Terence Koh,Bart Kosko,Stephen M. Kosslyn,Kai Krause,Laurence Krauss,Andrian Kreye,A. Garrett Lisi,Seth Lloyd,Gary Marcus,Ian McEwan,Thomas Metzinger,Oliver Morton,David G. Myers,P.Z. Myers,Steve Nadis,Monica Narula, Randolph Nesse,Tor Nørretranders,Hans Ulrich Obrist,James J. O'Donnell,Gloria Origgi,Dean Ornish, M.D.,Mark Pagel,Bruce Parker,Philippe Parreno,Gregory Paul,Irene Pepperberg,Clifford A. Pickover,Steven Pinker,Ernst Pöppel,Corey S. Powell, Robert R. Provine,Lisa Randall,Ed Regis,Howard Rheingold,Carlo Rovelli,Douglas Rushkoff ,Karl Sabbagh,Paul Saffo,Scott Sampson,Robert Sapolsky,Dimitar Sasselov,Roger Schank,Stephen H. Schneider,Peter Schwartz,Charles Seife,Gino Segrè, Tino Sehgal,Terrence Sejnowski,Martin Seligman,Robert Shapiro,Rupert Sheldrake,Michael Shermer, Kevin Slavin,Barry Smith,Laurence C. Smith,Lee Smolin,Dan Sperber,Maria Spiropulu,Paul J. Steinhardt,Nassim Nicholas Taleb,Timothy Taylor,Max Tegmark,Frank J. Tipler,John Tooby & Leda Cosmides,Joseph F. Traub,Sherry Turkle,J. Craig Venter,Alexander Vilenkin,Frank Wilczek,Ian Wilmut,Lewis Wolpert,Anton Zeilinger
 
New tools equal new perceptions.Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreateourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislativebody, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.
 
Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever votedfor radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever votedfor penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallelcomputing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, theWeb, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towardsthe redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may notbe the only news, it is the news that stays news.And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do isplay catch up.Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the DNA double helix, and genomicspioneer J. Craig Venter, recently were awarded Double Helix Awards from Cold SpringHarbor Laboratory for being the founding fathers of human genome sequencing. Theyare the first two human beings to have their complete genetic information decoded.Watson noted during his acceptance speech that he doesn't want government involvedin decisions concerning how people choose to handle information about their personalgenomes.Venter is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. He has alreadyannounced transplanting the information from one genome into another. In otherwords, your dog becomes your cat. He has privately alluded to important scientificprogress in his lab, the result of which, if and when realized, will change everything.
WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?
 
"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live tosee?"
 
— John BrockmanEditor and Publisher
 
KEVIN KELLY
 
Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author
, New Rules for the New Economy
 
A NEW KIND OF MIND
It is hard to imagine anything that would "change everything" as much as a cheap, powerful,ubiquitous artificial intelligence — the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself. Avery small amount of real intelligence embedded into an existing process would boost itseffectiveness to another level. We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity.The ensuing change would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than even thetransforming power of electrification. We'd use artificial intelligence the same way we'veexploited previous powers — by wasting it on seemingly silly things. Of course we'd plan toapply AI to tough research problems like curing cancer, or solving intractable math problems,but the real disruption will come from inserting wily mindfulness into vending machines, ourshoes, books, tax returns, automobiles, email, and pulse meters.This additional intelligence need not be super-human, or even human-like at all. In fact, thegreatest benefit of an artificial intelligence would come from a mind that thought differentlythan humans, since we already have plenty of those around. The game-changer is neither howsmart this AI is, nor its variety, but how ubiquitous it is. Alan Kay quips in that humansperspective is worth 80 IQ points. For an artificial intelligence, ubiquity is worth 80 IQ points. Adistributed AI, embedded everywhere that electricity goes, becomes ai — a low-levelbackground intelligence that permeates the technium, and trough this saturation morphs it.Ideally this additional intelligence should not be just cheap, but free. A free ai, like the freecommons of the web, would feed commerce and science like no other force I can imagine, andwould pay for itself in no time. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that supercomputerswould first host this artificial mind, and then perhaps we'd get mini-ones at home, or add themto the heads of our personal robots. They would be bounded entities. We would know where ourthoughts ended and theirs began.However, the snowballing success of Google this past decade suggests the coming AI will not bebounded inside a definable device. It will be on the web, like the web. The more people that usethe web, the more it learns. The more it knows, the more we use it. The smarter it gets, themore money it makes, the smarter it will get, the more we will use it. The smartness of the webis on an increasing-returns curve, self-accelerating each time someone clicks on a link orcreates a link. Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, thereare billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillionhyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes thesupposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web — encompassing all its connectedcomputing chips — will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.As more commercial life, science work, and daily play of humanity moves onto the web, thepotential and benefits of a web AI compound. The first genuine AI will most likely not be birthedin standalone supercomputer, but in the superorganism of a billion CPUs known as the web. Itwill be planetary in dimensions, but thin, embedded, and loosely connected. Any device thattouches this web AI will share — and contribute to — its intelligence. Therefore all devices andprocesses will (need to) participate in this web intelligence.Standalone minds are likely to be viewed as handicapped, a penalty one might pay in order tohave mobility in distant places. A truly off-the-grid AI could not learn as fast, as broadly, or assmartly as one plugged into 6 billion human minds, a quintillion online transistors, hundreds of exabytes of real-life data, and the self-correcting feedback loops of the entire civilization.When this emerging AI, or ai, arrives it won't even be recognized as intelligence at first. Its veryubiquity will hide it. We'll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, includingscientific measurements and modeling, but because the smartness lives on thin bits of code
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