What Will the Future Be Like? (2012) FULL SPECIAL | NOVA | PBS America
DAVID POGUE: Technology is on the rise. And who knows how far it will go? If my goggles don't deceive me, that's you sitting across from me. Ah! POGUE: I'm David Pogue, and on this episode of NOVA scienceNOW... Oh, wow! I'm peering into the future to find out... He walks! If robots can learn how to walk, will they become our constant companions? My dream is to have robots living with us in our home.
POGUE: Could wearable robots give us superhuman strength? I can actually put my weight on the structure while you're wearing it, and you don't feel it. POGUE: And transform our lives? The boundary between a person and robots is already starting to change. POGUE: And...
I can control this thing with my mind! Is it possible for a machine to read your mind... I am a superpower! ... and reveal your innermost secrets? The computer is correct! What if all of our thoughts were public? Lying would go away. It's sort of like a mental nudist colony. POGUE: Where is all this leading us? Domino-bots! I'm exploring the good... So now you can walk? That's mind-blowing! The bad... SHERRY TURKLE: Not every advance is progress.
Not every new thing is better for us humanly. POGUE: And the not so pretty side of technology, all to find out... Whoa, that's scary. "What Will the Future Be Like?" And he gave me a dirty look. Up next on NOVA scienceNOW. POGUE: When we think about the future, one of the first things that comes to mind is the robot, like those droids in Star Wars that tirelessly fulfill our every need.
But how close are we to the sci-fi dream of robots that seamlessly fit into our world? Humanoid robots that look and act like us? Your second round, sir. POGUE: Here at Virginia Tech, roboticist Dennis Hong believes that day will come only when robots master an incredibly complex skill, something that is very difficult for them to learn but comes naturally to us: walking. Oh, man. Nobody is controlling anything. And if you look at his head, you can see that he's looking around so he's trying to figure out where he is in the soccer field. He may be short, he may be skinny, but he walks! POGUE: And can even kick a soccer ball.
Goal! Wouldn't it be simpler to build something with treads, like on a tractor or something? That's a very good question. Some people say we can do things with wheels. That's right. But my dream is to have robots living with us in our homes.
POGUE: And to do that, they need to climb stairs, open doors, take out the trash, and clean up the dishes. If you want to have these type of robots living with us in an environment designed for humans, then I say the robot has to be the shape of a human being. So you're acknowledging that it's a much more difficult task to make a humanoid robot that walks, but you're saying the payoff will one day be worth it. Absolutely.
POGUE: Dennis hopes that in the future, humanoid robots won't just do the dishes: they'll do jobs that are risky for us to do. Dirty, dangerous tasks. POGUE: Like cleaning up after a chemical plant leak, helping people out of harm's way, or fighting fires.
HONG: Humanoid robots are really great for those kind of things, real useful tasks that can actually save people's lives. POGUE: How do you transform metal, motors and microchips into a machine that can walk on two legs? So, Dennis, this is your home robot construction kit? Yes, this is the robot cooking show, as a matter of fact. (laughing) You'll be making one of these. This is called DARwIn-OP.
POGUE: DARwIn is a pint-sized humanoid robot that Dennis created back in 2004. A research platform he uses to find out what it takes for a robot to walk on its own two feet. This is all the parts you'll need, and you are going to put it together today.
Yeah, right. Are you ready? No. This is not Lego, let me tell you. We'll start out with the M4. POGUE: To create DARwIn, Dennis took his clues from nature. Number one, he needs to see.
As you walk, you use your eyes to assess your environment. DARwIn sees the world through this tiny webcam. Actually, the eyes, the big ones are just fake. The nose is actually the camera. So you're saying that all this is just cosmetic? Those are not the eyes.
Oh, you're such a... We cheated. POGUE: Number two, he needs a sense of balance. As you shift your weight from one foot to the other, your inner ear is able to sense the change in your position and keep you from falling. DARwIn gets this ability from a sensor in this circuit board.
These two small things, these are the balance sensors. So it knows its orientation and direction. Ah, that seems to want to fit right here. You're good at this, have you done this before? Thousands of times. POGUE: Even if DARwIn can see and balance, he still can't move without muscles and joints. Number three: your muscles are your body's engine; you can't move without them.
DARwIn moves with the help of actuators. HONG: For each moving joint, we have one of these actuators. It's basically an electric motor. POGUE: A motor that converts electrical energy into motion. And that gives DARwIn the ability to move. All right.
He's done. We have arm! Yay! POGUE: As for his sense of touch, he gets it from these four little sensors on the bottom of his feet. Hours later, I'm finally finished. Tell me that's the last step.
You're almost done. Now you need to attach the arm to the rest of the body, and that's the last step. Hello, I'm DARwIn.
That's adorable. I can already feel him seeking world domination and wishing his screws were done better. POGUE: Even though my robot's fully loaded, he can't walk yet because he still needs a brain, and that's where roboticist Dan Lee comes in. LEE: The first thing we're going to show you is how the robot uses its vestibular sense, which is its sense of balance.
Vestibular from the word "vestibule," which is one of the things in our ears. Exactly, inside your inner ear. So without using its vestibular sense, what would happen if we pushed the robot? It just will fall over and get back up. That's pretty cool right there. (laughing) So go ahead.
Exactly. Wow! So now what we've done is we've trained this robot using something called reinforcement learning, so exactly what you just did: we kept pushing the robot over and over, and it was now able to figure out that every time it fell down, it was a form of punishment. POGUE: When DARwIn falls, his software gets an electronic signal that basically says, "This is bad."
After being bullied around hundreds of times, he finally learns it's better to do this. Fall over... Oh, no! So the hundreds of different reps are so it can learn from this angle and this angle and this hard and this hard... Exactly. I see. POGUE: Dan's even teaching his robots to learn through imitation.
♪ We will, we will rock you! ♪ POGUE: This camera detects my body's movement and sends that information to DARwIn's software, which quickly translates it into a copy cat movement of his own. You'd think with all this sophisticated software, DARwIn would be able to keep up with me. Look forward! Oh, so sorry! POGUE: But he can't. HONG: Just trying to make a robot walk steadily is ridiculously difficult.
I won't say impossible because I don't like that word, but it's a very difficult challenge. POGUE: Yet we're masters at it. Come on in. Wow, what do you do in here? POGUE: And Engineer Thurmon Lockhart is trying to figure out why. He's built this strange-looking device to analyze not just how we walk, but how we avoid falling. And I'm about to try it out.
But first, I need to suit up. Thurmon's outfit is filled with sensors that measure how far, how fast, and in which direction I move. I can't decide if I feel more like a superhero or a Broadway dancer. Both. (laughing) And you're going to have to wear a headband as well. This is just an elaborate prank to humiliate me on television.
Isn't it? POGUE: The little white balls are part of an optical motion capture system that instantly creates a stick figure of me. ♪ Well you can tell from the way I use my walk ♪ ♪ I'm a woman's man, no time to talk. ♪ Pew! POGUE: Next, I'm put in a harness because it's time to take a stroll through Thurmon's obstacle course.
After walking back and forth several times, suddenly... (screeching) What the hell? Did you feel that a little bit? Did I feel it? You made the earth shake under my feet. POGUE: But check out what happens when I do this a second time. (screeching) I handle the jolt much better.
My body and brain have already integrated thousands of pieces of information in a flash. That's because we have the exceptional ability to adapt to sudden changes in our environment. Walking is a skill that took millions of years for us to develop. And when you think about it, it still takes each of us about a year to go from floppy, to crawling, to waddling, and finally mustering the skills and courage to walk on our own two feet. And we never stop learning how to adapt to the many obstacles we confront every day. So walking is not just more complex then I thought, it's much more complex than I thought.
And if you wanted to design a robot that could walk as well as a person, I mean, this would be fantastically complicated software. It would have to be doing billions of calculations with every step. It is amazing that we are able to do it almost innately and without really even thinking about it. POGUE: Dennis hopes that in the future, his robots will be able to master this extraordinary human skill.
And they're learning how to do it one kick at a time. Goal! POGUE: Every year, hundreds of teams from around the world compete at RoboCup Soccer, a competition designed to foster research in robotics and artificial intelligence. To make an autonomous soccer-playing robot, you really need to solve all the grand challenges, the really difficult problems in robotics. Robot vision, autonomous behavior, bipedal walking and running in the future, all of these need to be solved to truly build a soccer-playing robot.
POGUE: But what comes naturally to us, comes a lot harder for Dennis's robots. Domino-bots! You think you're pretty good at soccer? I'm better, I can do this. Whoa, that's scary. He got right back up and he gave me a dirty look.
POGUE: Despite his robot's shortcomings, Dennis is optimistic. HONG: By the year 2050, we want to have these kind of full size autonomous robots play soccer against the human World Cup champions and win. You're going to have robots playing humans and you expect them to win? Here, 20 bucks, here you go. POGUE: While this may sound like a sci-fi fantasy, many experts believe that humanoid robots could progress a lot faster than we think.
Sophisticated robots are already building our cars. Pretty soon, they could be serving us drinks and even doing the laundry. In Japan, where the aging population is growing faster than in any other country, researchers are developing robots to care for the elderly, from bathing them to moving them. And one day, they may even babysit our kids, a job that has always required a human touch.
Sherry Turkle, a researcher at MIT who's written several books about the effects of technology on humans, is concerned about our future relationship with robots. It's too easy to look at them and say, "Oh, they're not there yet." They will get to something very powerful that we will want to hang out with. And then you have to say, "Well, where will we have gotten to? Why is that something that we want to develop?" POGUE: And in the future, robots won't just be taking care of our kids. They may become a part of us, literally merging with the human body and transforming both of us into something in between.
Wow. POGUE: At Ekso Bionics, they're developing a robot that could restore our ability to walk. This is our exoskeleton.
So you can see it's a robot that can walk and move without somebody in it, and this one's designed for paraplegics to get them up and walking again. POGUE: People like Amanda Boxtel. Hi. You're breaking a few speed limits there. POGUE: In her 20s, Amanda was injured in a skiing accident. I lost all sensation and movement from my pelvis down.
There's nothing. So crutches, no good? No, I mean, I can't move my legs. POGUE: But in the future, that could change with the help of a wearable robot. Wow, is it standing you up now? Yeah, I couldn't do that on my own. That's mind-blowing.
So now you can stand and you can walk. Yes. This I gotta see. Let's do it. The exoskeleton is intelligent enough that it senses my center of gravity, and also when I shift my weight over to a foot, then it triggers another step.
So Amanda shifts her body like you or I would to take a step, and sensors pick up that intent. POGUE: That sends a message to this on-board computer which tells the exoskeleton it's time to take another step. Right now, the exoskeleton works one on flat surfaces, but one day, these researchers hope Amanda will be able to use it anywhere, even walking up stairs.
And they aren't just helping people like Amanda. They're also helping average Joes like me with this. So David, here we have the HULC exoskeleton.
POGUE: The HULC is designed to help people carry heavy loads, and it would come in really handy if you happen to be a firefighter. How much weight do these guys have to lug? Pants, ten pounds. Boots, two pounds. Give you a little jacket here, that's another eight pounds. Breathing apparatus, 30 pounds.
Whoa! You can't fight a fire without hoses. Oh, geez! That's 50 pounds of hoses. I've got 100 pounds of equipment on me. Is it heavy? Is it heavy? It's 100 pounds! Your buddies up on the third floor of the building. are going to need some more air. Oh! Oh geez, wait a minute, wait a minute.
No firefighter would go in like this, come on. They do what it takes. Okay, I'm going to break your scale.
I hope you don't mind You're carrying an extra 130 pounds of weight. I'm carrying 130 pounds and I'm supposed to put a fire out. That's right. Wow, so you've made your point. This is unbearable.
POGUE: And here's where the HULC comes in. This structure actually surrounds your body. The idea is to take all the weight you put on it all the way down the ground, completely bypassing you.
All that weight that you put on that external skeleton actually bypasses the user that's inside in taking that weight to the ground. So they actually don't feel the weight they are carrying. POGUE: Not only that, the HULC is also designed to increase your strength. And what I'm going to do is turn it on. Now you can actually feel a little bit of power. Oh I see, it's picking itself up, So this is going to be my thigh, and when my thigh moves, that triggers it to start helping me.
This is at our very lowest setting. Turn it to the highest setting, let me see what happens. Now try that. Whoa! Hey, that works. POGUE: Now I put on the HULC and get loaded up again Ready for the hoses? This is what killed me before.
Go ahead and put on the hoses, Dave. These are different hoses. Same hoses. That's amazing. I feel nothing.
You might as well put it on the roof of my house. It doesn't affect me at all. I can actually put my weight on the structure while you're wearing it and you don't feel it.
That's amazing. So all that weight bypasses you, comes down that torso, down these titanium legs, all the way into the ground So you actually don't feel that weight. Now should I try walking? Yeah, give it a try.
(laughing) POGUE: It takes some getting used to. There are fractions of a second when I suddenly feel really heavy, and then the robot says, "Oh, I can help you, pal" and takes some of the weight off. Don't worry, ma'am, I'll save you.
That's what I'm here for, ma'am. Give me your hand. David Pogue is Backdraft.
(laughing) RODNEY BROOKS: The boundary between a person and robots is already starting to change. Lots of people have mechanical hips, and then people have electronic interfaces to their cochlea. We are going to merge with our machines more and more.
We're already merging with our machines. POGUE: In the future, will wearable robots like this give almost anyone a leg up? No one looking at us would ever know that you're a paraplegic and I'm a skinny nerd. (laughing) POGUE: It's hard to image just how much robots may change our world. (armor creaking) (screaming) POGUE: Mind reading! It's a timeless fantasy that's shown up in science fiction and movies for decades. But now, scientists may finally be figuring out how a machine could read your mind. And for the very first time, mind reading headsets are becoming real.
TAN LE: You really want to just slowly imagine the cube fading out into that black. Okay. POGUE: Look what I can do to the orange cube without touching any dials or keyboards, but just thinking, "Disappear." My God! I can control this thing with my mind! POGUE: Tan Le is an entrepreneur with a headset that must be reading my mind.
We have to actually train the system. POGUE: Because she's turned it into the ultimate remote control. Just by thinking commands, I can make the orange cube on a computer lift, I can start this car and launch this helicopter. The future is going to be awesome. I am a superpower. POGUE: So how does this contraption work? Is it mind reading? I wouldn't say necessarily "mind reading."
POGUE: The headset doesn't actually hear my thoughts, but its 14 electrodes do pick up patterns of electrical activity coming from my brain: my brainwaves. Brain cells communicate with each other by firing off tiny chemical and electrical signals. And whenever I think something like "disappear," a particular pattern of brainwaves is generated. The headset picks that up. So as the neurons inside your brain fire up, the signal gets weaker and weaker as it travels through and then gets projected onto the surface of the scalp.
Oh wow, okay. So it's very, very faint. So they're not thoughts. It's not mind reading. It's like the echo of neural activity deep in my brain.
LE: That's right. POGUE: Even though it's just an echo, the signal is good enough for the computer to recognize a simple brain pattern once it learns it. Like, "Lift." And voila, it's reading my mind. Can you imagine, I mean, some future world where everything is hooked up to this? I could just make anything happen just by wishing it. POGUE: Or at least that's what I was hoping until Tan Le tells me this headset can be easily confused; in other words, wrong.
If you were wearing this all day long, I can imagine instances when you might have a brain pattern that's very similar to when you were thinking about "disappear," and it may trigger that same action. You mean things might happen when I'm not wishing them to? That's right. (music starts playing) POGUE: Any mind reader that relies on electrodes on the surface of the scalp is bound to be imperfect, because what it "hears" is a mere echo of my brain cells firing. But what if we could tap directly into the brain? That's what they're attempting here at Brown University. Cathy Hutchinson is paralyzed from a stroke, but she's controlling a robotic arm with much more precision than any headset would allow, thanks to sensors that have been implanted directly onto the surface of her brain.
Cathy made headlines when she played a crucial role in a groundbreaking mind-reading experiment. She simply thought about reaching out to pick up a cup of coffee. The sensors in her brain picked up electrical impulses and a computer turned them into commands, controlling the robotic arm. It's an astonishing breakthrough for brain science that offers hope for the paralyzed.
I go to see John Donoghue, one of the heads of the BrainGate Team at Brown, to find out how they turn mind into motion. This is a model, right? No, this is a real human brain with its spinal cord attached. Come on! This is an adult brain.
You know, it's the right size to fit inside your head. POGUE: John's been working toward a machine that can tap into our brains for more than 20 years. The problem is really quite immense. We had to know where in the brain the signals are, but we've known that. If you follow back a little distance behind the middle of the brain and you run into this little bump, this is the marker for the arm, this little twist. And that little twist is the place, the gross anatomical landmark, for where your arm is actually controlled.
POGUE: So every time we move our arm, first, this one little spot on our brain says "go" and sends signals to a particular set of muscles, and then the arm moves. DONOGHUE: The next problem is, how do you get that signal? And we need to have a sensor. You need to have something that can pick those signals up.
So we've developed this micro-electrode array, which is extremely tiny. POGUE: The size of a baby aspirin, the microelectrode with 100 tiny probes was implanted on the spot in Cathy's brain that controls the arm. Still, turning the signals into clear instructions for the robot wasn't easy. So this seems to be the arm. This is the on I saw in the video of Cathy Hutchinson controlling it with her brain. That's right.
This is one of the two arms that she was using. Wow. And so how does it work exactly? Why don't you give it a try? Okay. POGUE: To demonstrate how incredibly complex the brain's control of movement really is, neuroscientist Leigh Hochberg asked me to try to move this robot arm with a joystick. Oh, on the white rug, too.
Try again? POGUE: It would be so much easier if I only had a brain. Stop, stop! It's taking over! It's an uprising! Almost. I can see it takes practice.
It takes some practice. POGUE: So if such simple commands are difficult, imagine how hard it would be to actually read complex thoughts. Could a machine ever do what the Amazing Kreskin used to claim to do on his classic 1970s TV show? Does his birthday fall on March 6? Yes! Thank you very much for standing, ma'am. POGUE: I hear that this could be the mechanical Kreskin. And it's not a magic trick; it's a nine-ton MRI at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Psychologist Marcel Just and computer scientist Tom Mitchell use the MRI to peer directly into the brain as it works. TECHNICIAN: Hi David, how are you doing? Good. TECHNICIAN: In this study you're going to see labeled pictures of objects.
POGUE: While I ponder the objects projected onto a screen, the scanner isn't reading brain waves or electricity. Instead, it's measuring the flow of oxygen-rich blood in my brain to detect exactly which parts are active when I think about different objects. Okay, great job David, we'll come and get you in one second. MARCEL JUST: When you think of something, your brain activates in those places that correspond to your interactions with it. Like, if I think of "skyscraper," is there an area of the brain for skyscraper pictures? TOM MITCHELL: If you think of a "skyscraper," you actually think of many things.
You might think of a very tall thing, you might think of the material, you might think of going inside of it. What we'll see in the brain is a whole collage, and put together, it becomes the signature for "skyscraper." POGUE: The team has already identified the areas in the brain that activate for shelter, for food, and for holding something in your hand.
It's not like a dictionary definition, it's kind of an experience definition. POGUE: By studying my brain scans, can their mind-reading computer guess what I was thinking? So I saw 20 pictures flash before me, and on each one I thought about it, imagined it, envisioned it. So how do we know if the computer knew what I was thinking? The computer is going to take pairs of those words.
POGUE: The mind-reading computer is given a pair of my brain scans, one when I was thinking of a grape, the other, of a cave. But which is which? If the shelter area of my brain lights up, the computer guesses I was thinking "cave." Since the other scan shows activity in the food and handling areas, it guesses that a grape was on my mind. And was it right? The computer... is correct! Number one! POGUE: Picking between two words, the computer's chances are 50-50. But can it keep it up? (beeping) Two for two.
(beeping) Oh, it got nine correct... and the tenth was correct also! Nicely done, ten out of ten. That is unbelievable. POGUE: For all ten pairs, the computer gets it right.
And that's pretty impressive. It's a far cry from walking down the street with a device that could read the everyday thoughts of passersby, but it's enough to have some experts on the future concerned. TURKLE: Whenever you're starting to talk about the integrity of the body, the integrity of the mind, and being able to somehow violate that in a way, it becomes scary.
I'm sure there are many people right now going, "Oh my God, take away their funding! "I don't want to have my mind read. I want my innermost thoughts to remain innermost." What if all of our thoughts were public? Lying, for example, would go away. It's sort of like a mental nudist colony. Well, here's one way to think of it. Like any big technology, there are all kinds of ways you can use it.
And here you could use it for some pretty amazing things. There are also things that none of us would want to do. It's a good time now to begin thinking of those and thinking about what kind of guidelines we want to put in place.
POGUE: Our world is rapidly changing. Let's say I'm in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and I get lost. Just a few years ago I would have spent hours wandering around. Today all I have to do is pick up my smartphone.
An app like New York Subway shows me if there are stations nearby and even shows me which way to walk to get there. If I need something translated, no problem. Word Lens replaces the text in my view with my own language. And in the future, will it be possible for us to do this? Get information about anyone in an instant? A paradigm shift is taking place right before our eyes. The real world and the virtual are merging. It's called augmented reality.
And you can experience it with the help of hundreds of apps on your smartphone. But one day soon, companies like Google, the Internet search giant, think all this information will be delivered in revolutionary new ways. BABAK PARVIZ: This is Glass, a very different type of computing and communication device. POGUE: Think of Google Glass as a wearable smartphone. Can I try it? Yeah, you can put it on if you like.
POGUE: But lighter and quicker to access. Oh, wow! POGUE: Right now Glass is a work in progress. I can just flick my eyes into this corner and I see a very crisp screen. POGUE: The little square you see glowing here is actually a tiny computer screen. Google hopes that in the not-too-distant future it will bring us our e-mail, show us our text messages and provide access to the Internet. And the tiny camera here will be a new way to share your experiences with friends.
So this is wild. So I'm seeing a beautiful path through a woods. As I turn my head, I'm actually looking around the scene. Oh, and I can even look down and up. Wow, those are beautiful.
POGUE: But Google Glass is just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers like Henry Fuchs at the University of North Carolina are developing technologies that blend the virtual and physical worlds, augmenting our reality with the stuff of sci-fi movies. So this is one of the labs, David, that we have set up to work on augmented reality and telepresence.
So as I understand it, this is like in Star Wars when Princess Leia gets beamed out of R2D2's head. POGUE: Remember that famous scene where Princess Leia records a hologram of herself and sends it to Obi-Wan Kenobi? Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope. FUCHS: That was all special effects.
What we hope to develop here is the real thing. POGUE: And that's as hard as it looks. First I put on these stylish shades.
Is that too tight? POGUE: Once we're set up, we're ready to roll. We pretend Henry is on vacation in his beach house in Hawaii while I'm stuck in my office here in New York. And suddenly... Wow! If my goggles don't deceive me, that's you sitting across from the table from me.
Wonderful, that's just the effect we would like. Wow, so that's crazy. You look the right height, size, shape and angle as though you were actually sitting right in front of me. POGUE: I have to admit, it's the closest I've ever come to having a conversation with a hologram, although the image is far from perfect.
So this is the Model T we're wearing right now. Oh no, we're not even Model T. Not even Model T. This is like, you know, 20 years before the Model T. POGUE: But the technology needed to create this illusion is anything but 20th century.
In order for Henry and me to see each other, he's rigged our rooms with a bunch of 3D cameras. They are, in fact, Xbox Kinects. With the help of some sophisticated software, they transport his virtual image into my stunning handcrafted headset. And these little silver balls that make us look like aliens are part of a complex tracking system that pinpoints where we are in space.
There's one serious problem with the video. It looks like you're wearing a hideous, obnoxious Hawaiian shirt of some kind. (laughing) POGUE: In the future, telepresence systems like this one could come in handy. And wearable smartphones, like Google Glass, may give us a new way to access the virtual world. The question is: will technologies like these that aim to immerse us even more into a digital world improve the quality of our lives? A lot of experts are wary.
They say our immersion in technology is already a problem. Look at kids today. They're listening to music, while texting a friend, having a conversation on Facebook, and doing their homework. In other words, multitasking.
Can their brains keep up with all this connectivity? Stanford Professor Clifford Nass thinks they can't-- that doing so many things at once is making it harder for them to focus. And he's devised a test to prove it. What we're going to ask you to do is to simply focus on a couple of red rectangles and to ignore blue rectangles. This sounds like a pretty easy thing to do. Yeah, I'm down with this.
And we'll see how you do. POGUE: As I start the test, two images containing red and blue rectangles flash on the screen. If the red rectangles move from one image to the next, I press one button.
But if they don't move, I press another. Simple, right? Ah, that changed. POGUE: Well, it is... at first. Jeez, there's like 15 hundred of them. POGUE: But as more and more rectangles appear on the screen it becomes harder and harder to focus on the red ones and ignore the blue. Come on! Criminy! "You completed the filtering task study."
You made some careless mistakes. You feel like an idiot. POGUE: But before I can find out how much of an idiot I was, Nass gives the same test to 16-year-old Jordan Ford. Jordan is a proud multitasker and doesn't think it affects his ability to focus at all. All right, let's see how you guys did. Give it to me straight, Doc.
How long have I got? Well, I'm going to keep you in suspense. Let's look at Jordan first. So what we see on this graph is a pretty precipitous downward slide. The more rectangles there were, the worse you did. This is a very, very common pattern we see among teenagers who multitask frequently because their brains are constantly looking all over the place and trying to process multiple things at once even when they know they shouldn't.
Now let's see, David, how you did, and that's this blue line here. Oh... I am impressed. Smoked-- sorry, pal.
Even though you're a heavy technology guy. When you use technology, you do one thing at a time, you really focus on what you're doing. And what we see here is a pretty predominant difference. So what we worry about here is, Jordan, when you really need to focus attention on something, it's going to be harder and harder. POGUE: Parents have been saying, "Quit using X technology, you'll rot your brain" since my grandparents' time.
You know, like the cave men were probably, "Quit makin' fire with sticks. You'll rot your brain," right? It's a chronic thing to be suspicious of new technology, to worry about the effects. So should we really worry yet? Well, it's silly to say to a child, "Stop using the computer." Right. You know, just as it's silly to say, "Stop using fire." But, you know, you shouldn't play with fire when there's dry brush around.
With any new technology, we should be both excited and we should worry, because it often brings some negative things as well. So the question is how do we balance the two? That's really the critical issue. It's pushing us against a moral imperative.
You know, not every advance is progress. Not every new thing you can do with this incredible technology is better for us humanly. POGUE: So where is all this technology leading us? If digital information is becoming even more available to us, and even more immersive and distracting-- are we headed to a future where we don't actually learn things anymore? Are we headed for a world, like in the movie Wall"e, where humans are such passive consumers of technology that we become dumb and helpless? Is this what the future will be like? Will the Pogues of tomorrow turn into lazy couch potatoes? (burps) At Maker Faires like this, in the heart of America, folks are determined not to let that happen. Instead of becoming passive consumers of technology, these people are learning to master it.
Usually, it's not about building something with commercial value, but using it to express themselves in the most creative ways possible. Like Mickey Miller, a high school sophomore from Toledo, Ohio, who recycled scraps from his garage to create a unique form of transportation. So what do you call this guy? Recyclobot. POGUE: And kids like these, who join robotics clubs to develop the skills they'll need to invent a better future.
When you work a lot with technology, you try to challenge technology, to make yourself better. After doing this, I felt like I could build whatever I wanted and decided to take the initiative and build my own computer. POGUE: But this is more than just a fun hobby. It's becoming a movement that may reshape our world.
RODNEY BROOKS: I think the maker movement is great. This is the new form of hobbyist, and actually they've got some pretty interesting tools. The makers are taking the best of microprocessors and 3-D printers and building it in a way that ordinary people can control them and can do stuff with them. DALE DOUGHERTY: We're showing them at a really basic level that they can control technology, that they can do something with it themselves, rather than just be users. That they can create something and make it do something that they want it to do. POGUE: And that's why people are here, taking control over technology instead of being controlled by it, creating a better future from the ground up, a future of their own making.
So maybe there's hope. There's a lot of hope. (laughing) Excellent. (horn honks) POGUE: If you're worried about the role of technology in our lives in the future, you might be concerned about video games.
Worldwide, people spend billions of hours per week playing them. But if you think that's a colossal waste of time, then you haven't met computer scientist Adrien Treuille. He wants to make all that time and energy we spend on videogames count.
He believes that in the future, our obsession with them could help solve some of the world's biggest problems. Think about Angry Birds. People play that game three million hours a day. If we can produce a game that benefits society with that level of engagement, we could change the world in a week. POGUE: But how do you make a video game that benefits humanity? Ask Adrien. He's already done it.
Twice. His games could bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and HIV. And the people playing them aren't scientists. The Carnegie Mellon professor harnesses the brainpower of the millions of people who play videogames to solve biological mysteries. It's a concept called crowd sourcing-- putting the crowd to use. TREUILLE: It's allowed us to organize humanity in ways that were never before possible.
And I think we've just scratched the surface. POGUE: Adrien has always loved games. A game is very much like a science, and there's rules, and there's physics that you have to obey. But it's also like this... totally this art. Okay, so the rule is everything you say is a rule. POGUE: He's been inventing them since he was little.
TREUILLE: When I was 12 and I had appendicitis, I started inventing card games. Since then, it's just like if you're bored, you invent a game. That's really fun.
POGUE: He invents games everywhere. Even at the local diner. Being like, "The sugars are the board." And I'm, like, "You're the Tabasco sauce. "I'm the salt.
"Our job is to get the pepper. You can only move like this." POGUE: And he thinks about games 24/7, from his sleeping to his waking hours.
TREUILLE: I always have this notebook with me. When you're writing, you're like, taking stuff out of your brain, and sometimes you just need like a little bit of extra space. POGUE: Adrien's first science videogame began when biochemists had a problem. To fight diseases, they needed help solving protein puzzles.
Computers are terrible at visual puzzles. But humans are great at them. So where could Adrien find a massive workforce? What if he could get the millions of people playing videogames to play a different kind of game? And that was the beginning of FoldIt. It's a 3D puzzle. POGUE: Instead of birds and bombs, this game would be about protein-folding.
Proteins are molecules made up of long chains of amino acids. They're the workhorses of our cells, the machinery that keeps our body running. And they fold in thousands of different ways.
TREUILLE: It's like all the pieces of the protein lock together in this sort of puzzle, like Tetris. POGUE: How they fold will change what they do in your body. Depending on how they fold, they can either form the fibers in your hair or the motors that run your muscles. POGUE: A misfolded protein can help HIV replicate and cause diseases like cancer.
But a well-folded one can help cure diseases. In the lab, scientists can make the long chains of amino acids. But when it comes to folding them up properly, they have trouble.
And that's where people playing FoldIt come in. TREUILLE: Fundamentally, FoldIt is a game where we use people to help us understand how to build these molecules, to build next generation cures. POGUE: Adrien labored over how to get people to play, let alone understand, a game about protein-folding. So how'd he do it? He made proteins a toy. TREUILLE: So a game has rules, but a toy is just something you want to play with. Even if you didn't know the rules, you still want to just wiggle it around and see how it works.
POGUE: Just like a Rubik's cube, you can twist and turn it. We see if they can intuit, and fold a protein into that most stable shape just by looking at it and by thinking about it and by playing with it. POGUE: Adrien hoped the crowd could solve protein puzzles, but would the crowd show up? On May 8, 2008, they released FoldIt to the world and waited. TREUILLE: The servers crashed within, like, 24 hours. The public played it, and they cared about it, and they understood it. And it was one of the greatest feelings of my life.
POGUE: FoldIt made history. And it isn't Angry Birds. With over 300,000 players, this game advances science. ASTRO TELLER: It actually adds value to the world. Adrien has completely broken this mold. There are no elves in FoldIt, there is no magic, there are no unicorns.
And yet people love it. POGUE: In 2011, FoldIt players solved one of these puzzles in just three weeks-- the riddle of a bad protein that helps HIV reproduce. Identifying that structure brings us closer to designing better treatments. So what kind of person plays a game about protein-folding? Meet one of the top-ranked FoldIt players in the world.
He isn't a scientist. He's a ninth-grader. Like most 15-year-olds, Michael Tate loves playing around. TATE: I play FoldIt as often as I can. And I stay on for hours and hours.
POGUE: To boost your score, you have to follow the rules of protein folding: Make the protein compact and avoid empty spaces. These red things are voids that I have to fill in and I can add rubber bands that bring the protein closer together. And if make the most hydrogen bonds between everything, you can get the highest score.
TREUILLE: We thought we'd have to hide the science behind this veneer of a game. And then it was almost like we'd punk'd them. But it was the opposite. TATE: Getting lectures from your teachers-- I mean, that's boring. But if the students are having fun playing a game, oh, my gosh.
POGUE: There are thousands more like Michael, from architects to historians and bankers to organic farmers. They are the crowd. Adrien has always had an interest in crowds. It began early, as a boy growing up in New York City. I would stand on the windowsill when I was a little kid and just stare out my window. POGUE: Watching the flow of people from his window changed his view of crowds.
Here was the beating of a heart-- made of people. POGUE: The effect was so powerful that in grad school, he studied and simulated the patterns that crowds make. TREUILLE: It really did inspire me to think that large groups of people can be coordinated into sort of a dance that could very, very powerfully be harnessed for good. POGUE: Adrien did that with FoldIt, but could he do it again? Biochemist Rhiju Das needed help with another puzzle: ribonucleic acid, or RNA. Once again, computers weren't able to solve the visual RNA folding puzzles.
Rhiju thought people would be better and faster. And he knew exactly whom to call to assemble his workforce. Like proteins, RNAs begins in a long chain. TREUILLE: And then self-assemble into these beautiful, complex shapes like snowflake-like patterns. POGUE: Again, their shape determines what they do in our bodies, from forming the genetic code of some viruses, to helping to create other molecules like proteins. So if we can figure out how they're structured, we can fight diseases.
DAS: Understanding how RNA's work is critical for understanding life and for defeating diseases like AIDS and influenza. POGUE: With RNA, there was only one accurate way to tell if players assembled the puzzles properly: make the molecules in a real laboratory. And we realized, "Oh wow, that's the game." When you hit "Submit," we're actually going to make the RNA, and we're going to send you back the results. We were like, "This is going to be so awesome.
There is nothing else in the world like this." POGUE: Under Adrien's guidance, his graduate student, Jee Lee, transformed their vision into EteRNA, a game that would be "Played by Humans, Scored by Nature." People would be scored by how well their molecules folded in real life.
In 2011, they launched EteRNA. It just came alive as if someone had just flipped the switch, and turned on New York City. We were just, like, "I think we maybe did it." POGUE: In the lab, they synthesized the molecules the players designed. They looked like stable shapes in the game, but would they fold like that in real life? TREUILLE: And the results come back.
And it's basically nothing. What happens when you create a game and you tell everyone, "We're all going to do science together," and then nothing comes out? POGUE: None of the RNAs folded into stable shapes in the lab. Adrien worried EteRNA was a bust.
But what he didn't count on was the community. EteRNA let the players see data on how their molecules had actually folded in the lab. The chat forums lit up. DAS: They'd all just start talking about data, data, data. They'd analyze it to pieces.
POGUE: Hundreds of players were discussing their mistakes and revising their strategies. TREUILLE: It was like the very beginnings of science. It was almost like when alchemy was slowly turning into chemistry. POGUE: Six months in, they plotted the players' progress, and Adrien saw a change.
And it was just, like... zhing. The players have learned how to fold RNA. It was just like... sent chills down our spine. POGUE: The players' RNA molecules were folding correctly. And I thought, "Wow, that's real science," and that's when I knew that it was going to work.
POGUE: The worst player design was better than the best computer design. Humans were better and faster. TREUILLE: When you hire someone, you don't know whether they're going to be good or bad at the job. Well, we sort of hired the world.
And the world turned out to be awesome. POGUE: Adrien has only three grad students. I wonder if we're going to get better data. POGUE: But he has over 40,000 EteRNA players who have discovered new rules for how RNA folds. TREUILLE: We simply have much more manpower than anyone else. And science is about manpower.
TELLER: I think that it's possible that what we're seeing in EteRNA is the tip of an enormously exciting iceberg. I don't know how large the largest problems that can be solved are, if we all contribute our own little piece. POGUE: Adrien envisions a future where anyone and everyone can contribute to solving such huge problems-- even 15-year-olds, like Michael Tate.
TREUILLE: Maybe science is going to be like a team sport. And I don't mean, like, a 30-person team. I mean, like, a 30,000-person team. Take these crowds and multiply it by human creativity. We're dealing with a force way more powerful than anything we had before.
2024-08-13 01:14
