Experts Predict the Future of Technology, AI & Humanity

If space is expanding,

WTF is surrounding space for it to expand into?

It doesn't expand into anything,

everything is just spreading apart,

and what keeps it from spreading

apart are sources of gravity,

like stars and planets.

Like, where's it all going into? What does this even mean?

Put it simply, nobody knows,

but maybe you'll be the astronomer that figures it out.

Whoa.

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From Shubhgautam52, Will AI replace lawyers?

You probably don't want an AI lawyer anytime soon.

A lawyer is not just simply a machine

that knows what the law is.

A lawyer is a person with, theoretically,

years of expertise that can help you strategically

to achieve your goals,

and that's not something that AI

is well-positioned to replace anytime soon.

What I suspect is going to happen is

that AI is going to make a lot

of the drudgery of practicing law way easier

and it will allow lawyers to focus

on the really value-add stuff

and allow them to think strategically

and to better represent their clients in the future,

so I welcome our AI overlords.

The next question comes from Hassan Babaji.

Can light bend around corners?

If yes or no, give one reason.

Yes, light can bend around corners.

In fact, that's why we have glass inside your glasses.

When light goes into glass, it slows down slightly.

Because it slows down,

it deviates from a straight line,

and that's why we have your glasses, telescopes,

microscopes, because glass bends light.

Also, gravity can bend light, as Einstein showed us,

and we can actually see the bending

of light as it goes around a galaxy.

Then the next question is,

can you bend light completely around an object

so the object becomes invisible?

And the answer is yes.

It's well within the laws of physics that

if you could govern the atomic structure of glass,

then light would bend in a way such

that it would completely go around an object

so anything inside that object becomes invisible.

One day, we will build a metamaterial out of nanotechnology

that will bend visible light so that anything

inside that capsule will become invisible.

Harry Potter, watch out.

@EggSoph asks, What happens when you travel faster

than the speed of light?

Well, you can't.

You can't travel faster than the speed of light.

I'm sorry. You just can't.

You see, as you get faster and faster,

as you approach the speed of light, you have more energy,

and in relativity, energy takes more work to accelerate,

so you end up requiring an infinite amount of energy

in order to travel faster than the speed of light,

and so it's just forbidden.

@NinoClutch asks, Spider-Man is so raw.

Maybe we should try that DNA, biotech, cross-gene splicing.

Well, I'm not sure we're gonna see Spider-Man anytime soon,

but there is a lot of interest from biotech companies

and academic labs to understand spider silk,

which is five times stronger than steel.

Spider silk is very biocompatible,

very good for wound healing,

especially for wounds of the eye and the brain,

and there's been many efforts to engineer spider silk

outside of spiders, to make it in a recombinant way,

meaning not in spiders,

but in other organisms like bacteria or plants.

Probably the best known example

of a recombinant protein is insulin.

This has helped millions of people across

the last four decades since the first insulin

was produced in bacteria.

Next question. What do you think?

How will our future cities look like? A, B, or C?

Any highly advanced city is going to need to make sure

that there is an integration of green spaces,

not only for our oxygen,

but just for our enjoyment and wellbeing.

The more that we get rid of our natural green spaces,

the less we are able to have

that oxygen naturally generated in our environment.

I see that they're all high, vertical structures,

and that really speaks to the fact that we're gonna need

to get more and more comfortable with building up,

'cause building out isn't gonna always be an option

@PristineMartian asks, How far away

is superhuman intelligence with a brain-computer interface?

Currently, we are fairly close

to having brain-computer interfaces really help

a process called neuroplasticity in the brain,

and neuroplasticity is the brain's normal process to learn

and adapt to the outside world.

I think that's something that we're going to likely see

within the next several years.

The idea of having a Bluetooth implant in the brain

that helps you Google something on the fly,

we are talking decades upon decades

before we would see something like that occurring.

@SEO_Chase, Do you think robots

will one day take over all of our jobs?

The real benefit of robots is taking over the three Ds:

the dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs

that we probably don't want human beings to be doing anyway.

People are working on underwater robots

that can detect underwater landmines,

some people have worked on robots that can go

into nuclear facilities after an accident

and shut off different valves,

but I do hope that robots are able to make people better

at their jobs and free people up to do things

that they're actually good at and

that they actually want to do.

Nick asks, Will computer programming jobs be taken

over by AI within the next five to 10 years?

This is such a frequently asked question nowadays,

and I don't think the answer will be yes,

and I think we've seen evidence of this already

in that early on, when people were creating websites,

they were literally writing out code

in a language called HTML by hand,

but then, of course, software came along,

tools like Dreamweaver that you

could download on your own computer,

that would generate some of that same code for you.

More recently though, now,

you can just sign up for websites

like Squarespace and Wix and others,

whereby click, click, click,

and the website is generated for you.

So I dare say, certainly in some domains,

that AI is really just an evolution of that trend,

and it hasn't put humans out of business as much

as it has made you and I much more productive.

AI, I think,

and the ability soon to be able

to program with natural language,

is just gonna enhance what you

and I can already do logically,

but much more mechanically, and I think too,

it's worth considering that there's just so

many bugs or mistakes in software in the world

and there's so many features that humans wish existed

in products present and future

that our to-do list, so to speak,

is way longer than we'll ever have time

to finish in our lifetimes,

and so I think the prospect of having

an artificial intelligence boost our productivity

and work alongside us, so to speak,

as we try to solve problems is just gonna mean

that you and I and the world together can solve so many

more problems and move forward together

at an even faster rate.

@SmokeAwayyy asks, What is

the best case scenario for AI?

Well, the reason I work on AI is because I think it

could revolutionize science and technologies,

but actually, biological science.

Biology is really complicated.

You have something like 20,000 genes

and they make something like 100,000

or 1,000,000 different proteins.

AI could help us make much better solutions for medicine.

We have things like Alzheimer's.

We've been working for 50 years.

We don't have a good answer.

AI could probably help us, if we had a better AI,

help us figure out how the brain works.

That would be awesome!

AI could help us with climate change

by helping us build better materials.

Another case, I think, is elder care robots.

So we are getting to a point where we have a lot

more elderly people than young people.

If we could have robots that are smart enough

and trustworthy enough that they

could really take care of the elderly people,

I think that would be a big win.

Last case is tutors.

Of course, people are using ChatGPT as a tutor,

but you could imagine really fantastic,

individualized tutoring once the systems understand

the people who are learning better

can help figure out, like,

where are they having a problem.

@StartSOLE asks, How will the human species evolve?

The future of our species is a big question,

and open to question,

but we know a lot about human evolution

from looking at the past,

and the story of human evolution is really, in many ways,

the story of brain size,

and each time we've seen some increase

in the capacity of our brains,

biologists and anthropologists have associated

that with some change in human behavior

that allowed us to gain more calories,

because brain tissue is

what physiologists call metabolically expensive.

It takes a lot of fuel to run a brain.

As many as 20% of our daily calories go to fuel something

that's only 2% of our body weight.

So if you want a bigger brain,

you're going to have to have more calories to run it,

and we've seen that through time as our species

has adopted new characteristics, new traits, new habits,

that have given us more to eat.

Those things include tool use and social behaviors

and cooking the food.

So now, we are at a period of time where food,

for many people, is plentiful,

calories are plentiful.

One question for future biologists then will be,

how did that change the human brain?

@Interrobang_2,

Will humanity ever leave the solar system?

Probably not, but some future species, maybe, you know.

Humanity may evolve and change

where we couldn't breed with ourselves.

That species may leave the solar system.

Not sure where they would go or what they'd do.

We might send an instrument, a spacecraft,

to another star system.

I could imagine that easily.

We'd use a solar sail and we'd give it a push with a laser.

Be cool.

[Bill making a buzzing noise]

Except it'd be in space. There wouldn't be any sound.

It would just be.

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