The next 100 years of your life | Pedro Domingos | TEDxLA

You'll live a lot longer than you think, thanks to the progress that medicine will make in your lifetime. And because progress is accelerating, you'll see a lot more new things in the next decades than in your life to date.
Pedro Domingos takes you on a whirlwind tour of the new superpowers you'll acquire, the technologies that will underpin them, and what you'll do with them. Fasten your seatbelt: from controlling the world with your mind to editing your own genes, the next hundred years of your life are going to be a wild ride.

Pedro Domingos is Professor at University of Washington and the author of “The Master Algorithm.” He is a winner of the SIGKDD Innovation Award, the highest honor in data science. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and has received a Fulbright Scholarship, a Sloan Fellowship, the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, and numerous best paper awards.

His research spans a wide variety of topics in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science, including scaling learning algorithms to big data, maximizing word of mouth in social networks, unifying logic and probability, and deep learning.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

I'd like to welcome each of you
to the next 100 years of your life.

What I'm going to describe
may sound like science fiction,

but it's not.

All the technologies involved
already exist in early form today.

So in the next ten minutes,

I'd like to give you a preview
of the next 100 years of your life.

It's coming, so get ready.

When we picture our future lives,

we tend to assume that we'll live
to maybe 70 or 80

because that's how long people live today.

But most of us in this room
will live far beyond that,

maybe even forever,

because of the progress
that medicine will make in our lifetimes.

Because technological progress
is continually accelerating,

we have a hard time picturing

just how much change
we'll see in the next decade,

let alone the next 100 years.

So perhaps for perspective,

we should first take a step back
into the distant past

because that's the world
that we'd have been born in

if technology had always progressed
at the current rate.

A decade's worth of progress now

is roughly equivalent
to the entire 18th century,

or to the entire first millennium AD,

or to the 10,000 years before that,

or to the previous 100,000 years.

Let's say, you're about 40 years old.

If you're 20,
just divide everything by two.

Then, if technology had always
progressed at the current rate,

you would have been born
into the world of a 100,000 years ago.

Picture that.

Your parents were hunter-gatherers,

and all they had
were stone tools and fire.

When you were a toddler,
the first big revolution happened.

Your tribe discovered language
just in time to teach you.

And you started wearing clothes
and making cave paintings.

Just as you entered puberty,
another big revolution, agriculture.

Your parents became farmers
and settled down.

Empires rose and fell.

You got married in a freshly built
medieval cathedral.

In your late twenties,
the Industrial Revolution happened.

You moved to the city
and worked in a factory.

Electricity, cars, television,
air travel, computers, the internet,

all of those things appeared
during your thirties.

In just the last year, you got
one of the first iPhones.

You're now a knowledge worker.

You live in the suburbs,

and you spend your free time on Facebook
and playing Minecraft.

Now, if that's what happened
in the first 40 years of your life,

imagine what will happen
in the next 100.

A decade from now,

a smartphone will look outdated
and slightly ridiculous.

The computer screens, large and small,
that we spend our time glued to today,

will have disappeared.

Cities will be very quiet.

There'll be no traffic jams.

No traffic lights,
no neon signs, no billboards.

Self-driving electric cars
will whisk you from place to place,

speeding through intersections
without ever colliding.

All reality will be augmented reality.

LED chips in your contact lenses

will project images
directly onto your retina,

seamlessly superimposing
computer-generated creations

onto the physical world.

And companies will bid
for every bit of what you see,

every pixel.

You control your world
not by typing and clicking

but through speech and gestures.

Twenty years from now,
speech and gestures will be outdated.

You'll control your world by thinking.

Computers won't project images
onto your retina,

they'll transmit them directly
to your optic nerve.

The things you create won't be virtual,

they'll be 3D printed on demand.

There'll be no more
distribution networks,

no trucks, no freight trains,
no merchant ships.

Just the pipes that pump
raw materials everywhere,

like blood pumps nutrients to your cells.

And just like all kinds of cells
build themselves out of those nutrients,

3D printers everywhere,

your home, your office,
shops, restaurants,

will assemble the raw materials at will
into anything you desire.

There'll be no highways, either.

Self-flying planes
and near-light-speed subways

will take you everywhere
on Earth in minutes.

You'll be able to live in Hawaii
and commute to work in New York,

and spend the weekend on Mars or Venus.

In 30 years, you won't need to think
to control your world.

High-resolution brain scanners

will sense the electromagnetic field
generated by each one of your neurons,

and the world around you
will adapt continuously in response.

And thanks to machine learning,

which lets computers predict the future
based on past experience,

the world will guess what you want
before you even want it,

and have it ready for you

just as the thought
is about to enter your mind.

Light will shine wherever you look.

Walls and ceilings will be covered
in LED panels, and as you walk around,

the panels you're about
to look at will light up.

You'll control your world
the same way you control your hand.

When you want to move your hand,
you just move it.

You don't need
to consciously tell it to.

You won't need to look stuff up
on the web anymore

because you'll just know it.

When you go on a date,

you and your date will create around you
a world that you both like,

trying different things
and experiencing the results.

You'll conjure up a romantic restaurant,

and your date will tweak it
and add a view,

and you'll change the season.

And that's how you'll know
whether you're compatible.

(Laughter)

The idea that only a decade or two before,

the only way you had of getting to know
each other was by talking

will seem hard to fathom.

All of these changes
will pale in comparison

with what comes next,
in 40 or 50 years' time:

the ability to control your own biology.

We already know how to edit genes,

but knowing which combination of genes
to edit to get the desired result

will take a while

because of the extraordinary
complexity of biology.

But we'll get there, step by step.

First, we'll make ourselves immune
to all known diseases,

and then to all unknown ones.

As soon as a new virus appears,
its DNA is sequenced,

a vaccine is developed,

and your immune system
downloads the recipe

and starts making it.

Health problems will be an oxymoron.

Then we'll become as beautiful
as we want to be,

at which point, maybe ugly
will be the new beautiful.

(Laughter)

And then we'll start
to control our own traits.

How smart do you want to be?

Do you want to be
hardworking or laid back?

After a few years of being cautious,

you'll decide to be
adventurous for a while

and then back to cautious.

When you fall in love with someone,

you'll change your personality
to become their ideal partner.

At least until you decided
it's gone too far

and fall out of love again.

(Laughter)

But you'll also discover
that there are trade-offs.

You can't be all the things
you want at the same time,

because some of them
are biologically incompatible.

If you increase your ability to focus,
you decrease your ability to multitask;

become more empathetic
and you also become less assertive.

So even though you'll have
almost unimaginable power,

you'll still have to make hard choices

and your life will be
more complicated than ever.

Finally, 5,200 years from now,

you'll have the ability
to control your genes

and their expression in real time.

If you're angry and you don't want to be,

you'll be able to calm yourself
with a single thought.

If you're sad, just wishing you weren't
will bring back joy.

Your heart will beat faster
or slower, as you desire.

Each night you'll be fertile
or sterile, as you choose.

You'll acquire new senses
and new brain regions to process them

and associate them with the old ones.

As our ability to communicate
with each other expands,

far, far beyond the few words
per second we can speak today,

the boundary between self and other
will begin to dissolve.

With your new senses, your mind-sharing,

and the growing reach of computers
into the very large and the very small,

your consciousness will expand

to encompass more and more of the universe

until it's as far beyond
your consciousness today,

as your consciousness today
is beyond the consciousness of an ant.

In the past, evolution
was closely tied to reproduction.

Offspring differed minutely
from their parents.

Some did better than others.

And significant change only happened
over many generations.

New species took eons to emerge.

But in the future,

evolution will be completely
decoupled from reproduction.

Evolution will happen
within each one of us.

You will evolve when you want to,
because you want to.

Each day you'll try out something new,

and if you'll like it, you'll keep it.

Homo sapiens, whose evolution
has been slowly picking up speed,

will branch out into an infinity
of different species.

In the first 40 years of your life,
the human condition changed,

but human nature did not.

In the next hundred years,

human nature itself
will change many times over.

The question,
"What does it mean to be human?"

will no longer have an answer.

But then again, maybe it never did.

Are we immortal?

I don't know.

But even if we're not,

you'll live so much in the next decades
that you'll feel like you are.

Everything you've done,
everything you've seen,

is only a brief prelude
of what's to come.

Enjoy the next 100 years of your life.

Thank you.

(Applause)