1. Your future world, and how you can prepare
Buda Public Library
July 31, 2013
Jonathan Mugan

2. Technology is moving fast

3. Indeed
Your mom’s iPhone is more powerful than the NASA computers that sent the astronauts to the moon.
Computers get faster every year, and they get faster by more every year, due to exponential growth.

4. More than faster, more Once, computers could only produce numbers
Now, they see with video cameras and can understand the human voice to:
Recognize faces
Read your chicken-scratch handwriting
Ticket your parents for running a red light
Have a conversation

5. Turing test: When is a computer intelligent?
When you can’t tell the difference between a human and a computer (via a text terminal), you know the computer is smart
Siri: the first mass-market voice interface
Chat bot (annoying)
Chat bots talk to each other (hilarious)

6. Watson on Jeopardy!
Watson from IBM does better than humans at the game of Jeopardy!
Austin news coverage
More of Watson in action
Watson answers questions
Next application is health care

7. Kid Size championship, Mexico City
RoboCup: build a robot soccer team by 2050 that can beat the human World Cup champions
Kid Size championship, Mexico City
UT wins Standard Platform!
Watching robots play reminds me of coaching kindergarten soccer

8. Walking robots: walking is actually controlled falling
BigDog: useful, disconcerting, walking robot
Asimo can run!
Running requires having both feet off the ground at some point in the gait

9. Kiva warehouse robots
Another step in the evolution towards an automated workforce
Getting goods off the shelf for packing is notoriously labor intensive
Kiva Company
History channel
What happens to society when no one works, and therefore no one has money to buy goods?
Robotic Nation,

10. We are now cyborgs
Our smart phones contain everything that humans know
We no longer need to memorize anything
People don’t get lost anymore because navigation has been offloaded to the smart phone
Google Glass
Parody with ads:

11. Cyber war
Our computer systems are so complex that no one knows everything about how they work
If the internet went down, food would not make it to grocery stores or restaurants
If they wanted to, foreign governments could shut down our electricity grid
America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare, Brenner, 2011.

12. Robot war
The Onion is not real but is often close enough.

13. Self-driving cars Imagine how many jobs will be lost.

14. 3D Printing
Image Credit: Creative Tools/Flickr (featured, banner)

15. The Singularity Computers get smarter every year
They are quickly catching up to us
What happens when they pass us?
No one knows, it’s called The Singularity
Kurzweil guesses this will happen in 2045
When you are about my age
To me, The Singularity seems both impossible and inevitable

16. In this new world, you can be a creator or a consumer

17. There is a convergence between the physical and the virtual

18. GIMP is a free photo editing tool
People used to say that “pictures don’t lie”
Now we see pictures as just a bunch of dots called pixels, and they can be anything
Download GIMP
Many tutorials online

19. Even the shapes of letters themselves can be made on a computer

20. Type light is a free font editor
You can create your own font and use it in homework assignments or on your web site
Download Type light

21. Programming and incantations
Learning to program allows you to:
Use the power of computation, like a sorcerer uses spells
Understand what computing is and what it can do
When it comes to sorcery, it’s hard to beat Python
There are Python books here at this library

22. Learning to code You can use Khan Academy computer science
What it uses underneath is something called processing. See this cool video, the first part of which is about Processing
You can download processing directly here
This is a great tutorial on how to get Khan academy code to run in your browser
Also, Code Academy (but it is a little buggy)

23. API calls: computers talking to computers
Call to Facebook to search for posts about tacos.
Such calls can be made directly in Python.

24. Tigers won’t eat you, but there are new concerns

25. Privacy and security Advertisers track you as you move around the web
Unfamiliar websites often have malware
Can drain your parents’ bank account,
So stay out of dark corners
Statements made on Facebook and such can still be visible years later to anyone
Remember that when you are angry

26. Get out in the sunshine
Our brains are not designed to stare at a screen all day
We get smarter by:
Taking in new information
Mulling it over and making connections with other things we already know
If you are always tied to the web, you never make it to step 2
Your brain needs down time to process information

27. Thanks for listening 27