Towards Teleportation, Time
Travel and Immortality
Raj Reddy
ACM 50th Anniversary Conference
March 5, 1997
Introduction
by James Burke
I was going to say
that our next speaker is going to take another way out look at things, but
having heard Bruce, let's say relatively way out. He earned a doctorate in computer science
back in 1963, when he came to America from his native India via another degree
in Australia. After teaching for a while
at Stanford, he moved to Carnegie Mellon, where he was named a professor in
1973. He is now the Herbert A. Simon
University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics. And he is recognized worldwide for his work
on speech recognition and as the founder of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics
Institute, which he ran until he took up his present position as dean of the
School of Computer Science there. He’s a
member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences. He was president of the
American Association for Artificial Intelligence from 1987 to 1989. In 1984, he was awarded the French Legion
d’Honor for his work on bringing advanced technology to developing countries,
and he was awarded the ACM Turing Award in 1995. His ongoing interest is in human computer
interaction. He has projects running at
the moment on speech recognition, multimedia collaboration techniques,
just-in-time lectures and automated machine shop. With a background like that, it’s all the
more interesting that he should choose to talk about something like teleportation,
time travel and immortality. I think it
promises to tickle the fancy. Ladies and
gentlemen, Raj Reddy.
Raj Reddy
As we look forward to
the next fifty years, it is interesting to note that when the Association for
Computing Machinery was being formed fifty years ago, the sense of excitement
was no less palpable than it is today.
Vannevar Bush had proposed MEMEX with hyperlinks between documents. Turing, having successfully broken the German
code using a special-purpose digital computer, proposed the construction of a
universal computing engine called Ace.
John Von Neumann had recently formalized the idea of a stored-program
computer. Eckert and Mauchly had created
ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer in the U.S. There’s no question that the last fifty years
have been exciting, dramatic and, in many ways, full of unanticipated events
which have changed our lives.
What will the next
fifty years bring? Given the continuing exponential rate of change, it is
reasonable to assume that the next fifty years will be even more dramatic than
the last hundred years. When you recall
a hundred years ago, there were no cars and no highways, no electric utilities,
no phone system, no radio or TV, and no airplanes, so you can well imagine the
magnitude of the change that awaits us!
In this talk, I‘d
like to share my thoughts on how our dreams about teleportation, time travel
and immortality are likely to be realized.
One of our most compelling, enduring fantasies of the future has been Star Trek, where the themes of teleportation, time travel and
immortality have captured the imagination of generations. Will technology make this possible in the
next fifty years? We’ve heard several
possible futures in the last two days.
I’d like to provide you with one more.
Technology over the next 50 years
By the year 2000, we
can expect to see a giga-PC, a billion operations per second, a billion bits of
memory and a billion-bit network bandwidth available for less than two thousand
dollars. Barring the creation of a
cartel or some unforeseen technological barrier, we should see a tera-PC by the
year 2015 and a peta-PC by the year 2030--well before 2047.
The question is, what
will we do with all this power? How will
it affect the way we live and work? Many
things will hardly change; our social systems, the food we eat, the clothes we
wear and mating rituals will hardly be affected. Others, such as the way we learn, the way we
work, the way we interact with each other and the quality and delivery of
health care will undergo profound changes.
First and foremost, we can hope
that Microsoft will use some of this computing power to create computers that
never fail and software that never needs rebooting. And yes, I can do without the leisure that I
get during the boot time and at the closing time of the Windows 95,
thank you.
The improvement in
secondary memory will be even more dramatic.
Many of you know that while the processor and memory technologies have
been doubling every twenty-four months or less, disk densities have been
doubling every eighteen months or so, leading to a thousandfold improvement
every fifteen years. Today, you can buy
a four-gigabyte disk memory for less than four hundred dollars. Four gigabytes can be used to store about ten
thousand books of five hundred pages each--larger than most of our personal
libraries at home. By the year 2010, we
should be able to buy four terabytes for about the same price. At that cost, each of us can have a personal
library of several million books, a lifetime collection of music and a lifetime
collection of all our favorite movies thrown in--on our home PC. What we don’t have on our PC will be
available at the click of the mouse from the universal digital library
containing all the authored works of the human race.
If you choose to, you
will be able to capture everything you ever said from the time you are born to
your last breath in less than a few terabytes.
Everything you ever did and experienced can be stored in less than a
petabyte. All of this storage will only
cost you a hundred dollars or less by the year 2025
So how will all this
affect our lives? We’ve heard a number
of scenarios for the future in the past few days. I’d like to share some of my dreams on how
this technology will be used to save lives, provide education and entertainment
on a personalized basis, provide universal access to information and improve
the quality of life for the entire human race.
The first invention
that will have a major impact on society will be the accident avoiding car. Let us look at the current state of this
technology.
Video
of Navlab narrated by Dr. Charles Thorpe.
The Carnegie Mellon Navlab Project brings together computer vision,
advanced sensors, high-speed processors, planning and control to build robot
vehicles that drive themselves on roads and cross-country. The project began in 1984 as part of ARPA’s
Autonomous Land Vehicle program--the ALV.
In the early ‘80s, most robots were small, slow, indoor vehicles
tethered to big computers . The Stanford
cart took fifteen minutes to map obstacles, plan a path and move each
meter. The CMU Imp and Neptune improved
on the cart’s top speed, but still moved in short bursts separated by long
periods of looking and thinking. In
contrast, ARPA’s ten-year goals for the ALV were to achieve eighty kilometers
per hour on roads, and to travel long distances across open terrain.
With the Terragator, our first outdoor robot at CMU, we
began to make fundamental changes in our approach. The Navlab, built in 1986, was our first
self-contained test bed. It had room for
onboard generators, onboard sensors, onboard computers and, most importantly,
onboard graduate students. The next test
bed was the Navlab II, an army ambulance HMMWV.
It has many of the sensors used on earlier vehicles, plus cameras on
pan-tilt mounts and three aligned cameras for trinocular stereo vision. The HMMWV has high ground clearance for
driving on rough terrain and a one hundred and ten kilometer per hour top speed
for highway driving. Computer-controlled
motors turn the steering wheel and control the brake and throttle.
Perception and planning capabilities have evolved with the
vehicles. Alvin is the current
main-road-following vision system. Alvin
is a neural network, which learns to drive by watching a human driver. Alvin has driven as far as a hundred
kilometers and at speeds over a hundred and ten kilometers per hour. Ranger finds paths through rugged
terrain. It takes range images, projects
them onto the terrain and builds Cartesian elevation maps. Smartee and D-star find and follow
cross-country routes. D-star plans a
route using A* search. As the vehicle
drives, Smartee finds obstacles using Geneesha’s map, steers the vehicle around
them and passes the obstacles to D-star.
D-star adds the new obstacles to it’s global map and replans the optimal
path.
Currently, Navlab technology is being applied to highway
safety. In a recent trip from
Washington, D.C. to San Diego, the Navlab 5 Vision System steered autonomously
more than ninety-eight percent of the way.
In a driver-warning application, the vision system watches as a person
drives and sounds an alarm if the driver falls asleep and the vehicle drifts
off the road. The same autonomous
navigation capability is a central part of the automated highway system, a
project that is building completely automated cars, trucks and buses. Automated vehicles will improve safety,
decrease congestion and improve mobility for the elderly and disabled.
Every year, about
forty thousand people die in automobile accidents, and the annual repair bill
is about fifty-five billion dollars! Even if this technology helps to eliminate
half of these accidents, the savings would pay for all basic research in
information technologythat has been done since the founding of ACM fifty years
ago.
Towards Teleportation
The second area of
major potential impact on society is telemedicine. Remote medical consultation is already
beginning to improve the quality of care for people located in remote
areas. With increased bandwidth and
computational capabilities, it will become possible to perform 3-D
visualization, remote control of microrobotic surgery and other sophisticated
procedures. It’s not quite teleportation
in the classical sense of Star Trek, but consider the following: If you can watch the Super Bowl from the
vantage point of a quarterback in the midfield, or repair a robot that has
fallen down on the surface of Mars or perform telesurgery three thousand miles
away, then you have the functional equivalent of teleportation--bringing the world to us, and bringing us to
the world, atoms to bits. Let us
look at some recent advances in 3-D modeling and multibaseline-in-stereo theory
that are essential for being able to do these functions. Can we show this short video please?
Video
of 3D modeling narrated by Dr. Takeo Kanade.
A real-time, 3-D modeling system using multibaseline-stereo theory has
been developed by Professor Takeo Kanade and other researchers at Carnegie
Mellon University. The virtualized
reality studio dome is fully covered by many cameras from all directions. The range or depth of every point in an image
was computed using the same multibaseline-stereo algorithm used in the
video-rate stereo machine. The scene can
be reconstructed with the depth and intensity information by placing a virtua,
or soft camera from the front, from the left, from the right or from the top,
or moving the soft camera as the user moves freely. For this baseball scene, we can create a
ball’- eye view. A one-on-one basketball
scene has also been virtualized from a number of viewpoints.
Currently this system
requires about a teraflop per second for the 3-D reconstruction of the
basketball scene at the video rate.
Instrumenting a football field with a dome consisting of ten thousand
high-definition cameras will require twenty petaflops of computation and a
hundred gigabytes of bandwidth to transmit the 3D Model.
Universal
access to information and knowledge
Another area that
will have a major impact on society will be the creation of a digital
library. We already have access
to a broad base of information through the Web, but it is less than one percent
of all the information that is available in the archives. We can envision the day when all the authored
works of the human race will be available to anyone in the world
instantaneously. Not just the books, not
just the journals or newspapers on demand, but also music, paintings, and
movies. Once you have music on demand,
you can throw away all of your CDs and just use the Web to access anything you
want. You may just have to pay five
cents each time you listen to it--that could be the way it works. This will, in turn, lead to a flood of
information competing for the scarce resource of human attention. With the predictable advances in summarization
and abstraction techniques, we should be able to see Gone With The Wind
in one hour or less, and the Super Bowl in less than a half hour and not miss
any of the fun, including the conclusion in real time.
Besides providing
entertainment on demand, we can expect the Web to provide learning and
education on an individualized basis.
The best example of this is demonstrated by the reading tutor, which
provides help to students who might otherwise run the risk of growing up
illiterate. Can we show the next
videotape please?
Video
of The Listen Project narrated by Dr. Jack
Mostow. Illiteracy costs the United States over 225 BILLION dollars annually in
corporate retraining, industrial accidents and lost competitiveness. If we can reduce illiteracy by just twenty
percent, Project LISTEN could save the nation over 45 BILLION dollars a year.
At Carnegie Mellon University, Project
LISTEN is taking a novel approach to the problem of illiteracy. We have developed a prototype automated
reading coach that listens to a child
read aloud and helps when needed. The system is based on the CMU Sphinx II
speech-recognition technology. The coach
provides a combination of reading and listening, in which the
child reads wherever
possible, and the coach helps wherever
necessary -- a bit like training wheels on a bicycle.
The coach is designed to emphasize
comprehension and ignore minor mistakes, such as false starts or repeated
words. When the reader gets stuck, the
coach jumps in, enabling the reader to complete the sentence. When the reader misses an important word, the
coach rereads the words that led up to it, just like the expert reading
teachers whom the coach is modeled after.
This context often helps the reader correct the word on the second
try. When the reader runs into more
difficulty, the coach rereads the sentence to help the reader comprehend
it. The coach's ability to listen
enables it to detect when and where the reader needs help.
What has been a real plus for the teachers in schools is the
fact that children can use it independently.
They enjoy reading the stories, and they can prompt the story
along. And they’re getting some help
with individual words that they’re struggling with, and they’re picking up the meaning of the
stories. Experiments to date suggest that it has the potential to reduce
children's reading mistakes by a factor of five and enable them to comprehend
material at least six months more advanced than they can read on their own.
Towards Time
Travel
So this brings us to
the prospect of using time travel as an educational tool. In the future, it will no longer be necessary
or essential for the teacher and the student to be at the same time and
place. Let us see an experiment in which
Einstein is talking to today’s students.
Video of a synthetic interview
created by Dr. Scott Stevens and Dr. Don Marinelli.
ALBERT EINSTEIN SYNTHETIC
INTERVIEW VIDEO, MARCH 1997
OPENING SCENE
INTERIOR--LARGE CLASSROOM--DAY
ACTION: The large classroom/auditorium is filled with
students. They are quiet, intensely
watching Dr. Einstein explain the equation E=MC(squared). Einstein is being projected onto a big screen
directly from the computer. He is in the
middle of his lesson.
EINSTEIN
The equation E for energy is
equal to MC squared. Hmmm. This equation for the equation of mass and energy
through the coupling power of light is...
CLOSE UP OF TWO STUDENTS:
ACTION: The two students are
seated on the left side of the auditorium.
One student turns to the other.
STUDENT # 1
Can you believe that we are
actually sitting here taking a class from the great Albert Einstein?
STUDENT # 2
It really is incredible, but I
do have one question. Who grades us for
this course? I mean, sure, that is
Einstein up on the screen, but who is actually going to grade our work?
STUDENT # 1
Have you checked out the
teaching assistants?
STUDENT # 1
Teaching assistants? No.
Why?
STUDENT # 2
Look! (He motions to the other
side of the classroom.)
CUT TO:
ACTION: Three or four students
are leaning up against the wall on the far side of the classroom. Each is dressed exactly like Albert Einstein:
wild grey hair, moustaches, lined faces, and each is holding a pipe. They are
nodding in agreement with Einstein. The effect should be both funny and
amazing.
STUDENT # 1 (V.O.)
Wow!
CUT TO:
INTERIOR--A SMALL CONFERENCE
ROOM, PERHAPS AT A LIBRARY--DAY
ACTION: This is a room where individuals can access
the computer for the purpose of conducting synthetic interviews. We see a computer terminal on a desk. The
computer has a microphone attached to it.
There are a few chairs in front of the terminal occupied by elementary
school students. They are wearing
parochial-school uniforms.
STUDENT # 1
Excuse me Dr. Einstein, we’re
writing a paper about your life and would like to ask you some questions about
your childhood. Could you tell us where
you were born?
CUT TO EINSTEIN:
EINSTEIN
I was born on March 14, 1879 in a small town in southern
Germany called Ulm. I don’t remember
it. I remember Munich, whereto my Papa
moved the family when I was just one year old.
In Munich, my Papa Hermann and his brother, my uncle Jakob, went into
business together manufacturing and selling small electrical appliances.
CUT TO:
INTERIOR--SAME COMPUTER
ROOM--DAY
YOUNG PROFESSOR
Professor Einstein, why don’t
you accept and believe in quantum mechanics?
CUT TO EINSTEIN ON SCREEN:
EINSTEIN
Quantum mechanics is very
worthy of regard. But an inner voice
tells me that this is not the true Jacob.
The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us close to the secrets of
the Ancient One. In any case, I am
convinced that He does not play dice.
I admire to the highest degree
the achievement of the younger generation of physicists which goes by the name
of quantum mechanics and believe in the deep level of truth of that theory; but
I believe that the restriction to statistical laws will be a passing one.
YOUNG PROFESSOR
Well, don’t you think the
quantum theory is correct?
EINSTEIN
The more success the quantum
theory has, the sillier it looks.
CUT TO:
YOUNGER PHYSICIST
ACTION: Younger physicist makes face--is exasperated.
CUT TO:
INTERIOR--SAME COMPUTER
ROOM--DAY
SENIOR PROFESSOR:
Professor Einstein, having
escaped from Hitler’s Germany, how can you explain the persecution against the
Jews?
EINSTEIN
The Nazis saw the Jews as a
nonassimilable element that could not be driven into uncritical acceptance, and
that threatened their authority because of its insistence on popular
enlightenment of the masses.
CUT TO:
SAME INTERIOR--DAY
ACTION: Two Indian students--a
man and a woman--have replaced the professor from the previous scene.
MALE INDIAN STUDENT:
Dr. Einstein, I recall reading
that you met and became very good friends with Mahatma Gandhi.
FEMALE INDIAN STUDENT:
Can you tell me what impressed
you most about Mahatma Gandhi?
CUT TO EINSTEIN ON SCREEN:
EINSTEIN:
I believe that Gandhi held the
most enlightened views of all the political men in our time...a man who has
confronted the brutality of Europe with the dignity of the simple human being,
and thus at all times risen superior.
Generations to come, it may
be, will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood
walked upon this earth.
CUT TO:
SAME INTERIOR--DAY
ACTION: A housewife is now seated at the computer
screen.
HOUSEWIFE:
Is it true that you never wore
socks?
CUT TO EINSTEIN ON SCREEN:
EINSTEIN
When I was young, I found out
that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So, I stopped wearing socks.
END OF VIDEO
So, if we had
captured Einstein in living color and 3-D when he was alive, it would be
technically possible today to have an imaginary conversation with him. The people responsible for this synthetic
interview at the Grand Illusion Studios, which is a spin off from Carnegie
Mellon, are hoping to create a service which will permit you to converse with
your great, great, great grandchildren in the same way. This is not quite the time travel that you’ve
grown to expect from Star Trek, but
it’s another example of substituting bits
for atoms to achieve an equivalent experience. With some pre-planning and appropriate data
capture, future generations will be able to experience historical events
first-hand and interact with the past generations.
Towards Immortality
There is work
underway in areas such as geriatric robotics that will help senior citizens
with simple disabilities lead normal lives well past their prime. And you may ask, can this go on forever? Transplant surgeries are one way of extending
life expectancy beyond a hundred years or so, and given advances in cloning, we
may be getting closer to achieving the dream of immortality. But as Nathan Myhrvold pointed out, you need
to download extragenetic experiences--the software in your brain, not just the
DNA-based system. One possibility would
be to bring you back to life in the fourth millennium using a frozen embryo of
your clone and then infusing you with all the experiences you’ve undergone in
this lifetime. Immortality should not be
thought of as some mystical transfer of atoms from one brain to the other as in
the Star Trek movies. It should
be viewed from an information-technology perspective whereby you provide the
clone with all the important extragenetic experiences of everything you ever
said and did. Then you create a rapid,
simulated learning environment in which the new clone, with a new brain, which
can live on for another generation, gets all of your experiences--bits for atoms. It’s not quite immortal in the classical
sense of the word, but close enough, especially given that the cloning process
can go on every millennium. That way you
will live forever, except you will be learning the cumulative experiences of
all the generations.
In conclusion, the
advances of the next fifty years will undoubtedly be as dramatic as the last
fifty. Capabilities such as
accident-avoiding cars, universal access to information and knowledge,
entertainment on demand, learning on demand, reading tutors, telemedicine and
geriatric robotics will clearly come to pass.
More esoteric capabilities such as teleportation, time travel and
immortality will also become possible, raising a number of social and ethical
questions. As a society, we have to find
ways of dealing with these things. As we
find ways to transform atoms to bits,
that is, substitute information for space, time and matter, many of the
constants of our universe will assume a new meaning and will change the way we
live and work. This means some of us
will have superhuman capabilities, like getting a year’s worth of work done in
a week. Such capabilities can be used to
further increase the gap between the haves and have nots, or to help the poor,
the sick and the illiterate. The choice,
I believe is up to us.