Michio Kaku on The Future of Humanity (Google I/O'19)

Alright, welcome everyone. I'm Taylor Wilson for those who know I am. I am a nuclear physicist in my day job. I built a nuclear reactor and I was 14 years old. I think that's one of the many things we share in common. our interests and things of that nature and we're very young, so I'm excited to be here today to interview dr. Kaku about physics and the

future

, so I guess we'll get started. I will say that when we finish talking here we will take questions from the audience, so if you want to start thinking about some questions that you have for dr.

Kaku on the

future

of

humanity

or physics, we're happy to try to give you an answer, so thank you for joining us this morning, it's a pleasure, yes, I wanted to start with something that's been in the news for the last few weeks and I'm sure While a lot of people are really interested in that image of a black hole that was taken by the event horizon telescope, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you feel when you see that image and what that tells us about physics. of the good universe, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, black holes were considered science fiction, it was considered like finding a unicorn, it's a legendary animal, everyone talks about unicorns, but no one has seen one because they don't exist now.

On the bank, in fact, we photographed the silhouette, the shadow of a black hole, but that is just the beginning. You see that this black hole is spinning rapidly. We've clocked black holes at about a million miles per hour and if you look at Einstein's. equations and have a rotating black hole do not collapse at one point collapsed into a ring a ring of neutrons such that centrifugal force prevents it from collapsing is stable if you fall through the north pole of the ring you mathematically end a parallel universe and if you go a second time you end up in another parallel universe and you keep going through the ring it's like going through an apartment building hitting the elevator, each floor is another universe and we want to know if that's real or if it's just a mathematical fiction a unicorn, in other words, a hole of worm at the center of a rotating black hole and that's what we want to do with next-generation radio telescope technology.

Well, that's fascinating, so this idea that black holes 4050 years ago we were something. which we might have had theoretical evidence for or even direct observational evidence for, but now we have that first true direct observational evidence and so what you're saying is maybe what's next, what those other possibilities might be for the objects that we have. It hasn't been seen well yet, in other words, a black hole is a cosmic cockroach motel, aha, everything checks out, nothing checks out, but then the question is where does it go, where does it all go if it falls into a black hole? , some theorists have said. that's maybe exploding out the other end like a white hole, so maybe there's a white hole on the other side of a black hole that's spewing matter out now, doesn't that sound like the Big Bang?

Some people even think that maybe it is our universe. It is a white hole and we are connected with an umbilical cord to another, faster universe. This is the idea of ​​the multiverse that is now gaining an enormous amount of theoretical credibility although, of course, we have not yet tested this theory completely well. That's a good transition. about multiverses and about something you're pretty familiar with is string theory, so you might want to tell everyone about your background and how you ended up in physics. You are from this area originally correct. That's how it is. I'm a local kid.

I was born in San Jose I grew up in Palo Alto I went to school until high school in power but when I was 8 years old something happened that changed my entire destiny and that is that in the newspapers they announced that a great scientist had just died and They put a photo of his desk on the cover and the caption said: This is the unfinished manuscript of the greatest scientists of our time and I thought to myself why couldn't he finish it, if it is so difficult that a great scientist can't was able to finish this theory, it's a homework problem, right?

Why didn't he ask his mother what could be so difficult? So when did he do it in the library? I discovered that this man's name was Albert Einstein and that book, that book on the desk was the unfinished one. theory of everything, I wanted an inch-long equation that would allow you to quote, read the mind of God, so I said to myself, wow, that's for me, yeah, that's what I want to work on. I want to help finish this great theory that I understand. We couldn't finish well today we think we have it, it's called string theory, it hasn't been proven yet, but we think this could be the final unicorn, the final theory of everything, so that every neutron, every proton, every electron, There's nothing but little vibrations in a little one. string this is an electron that is a quark this is a neutrino nothing more than musical notes on a physical string therefore they are the harmonies you can write on a string chemistry are the melodies you can play on vibrating strings the universe is a symphony of strings and then the mind of God the mind of God that Einstein wrote about during the last thirty years of his life the mind of God is cosmic music that resonates through 11-dimensional hyperspace incredible, this is the mind of God, so this idea, this grand unified theory that is based on strings The theory is something that you have worked on your entire career, that's right, we want that equation when it's an inch long, now four strings, not membranes, but just four ropes.

We had that equation, yeah, that's my equation. I am the co-founder of string field theory. allowing you to summarize this vast body of knowledge into an equation an inch long, but today we have the m-theory of membranes, which complicates things so it's unfinished, so if any of you in the audience ever find out the final theory, be sure to tell it. Me first, we'll split the Nobel Prize together, not a bad deal for you, that's really interesting, so this is the idea of ​​taking big physics, like the laws that govern gravitation and things like that, and unifying them with the theories that govern it. small and very hot are the quantum rules of the universe, then your idea is that the best way to solve this problem is through string theory, that is correct, nature has a left hand and a right hand, left tennis What you said is a theory of the same big black holes, the Big Bang, Einstein's theory of gravity, but the other hand of God is the quantum theory, the theories are very small, so why should we have two hands?

Yes, but they do not coordinate with each other and that is what we believe there is. One last theory, yes, and we are going to test it. Lauren's change in the collider has given us the Higgs boson, which gives us the so-called divine particle, but now we are going to build a successor to the Japanese Large Hadron Collider with the international linear one. collider the Chinese with a circular collider and the European Union three Three companies have been proposed for the successor to the Large Hadron Collider, but unfortunately not from the United States we are left in the dust once again, yes, but that is the way To actually test the theory is to build a very large collider, collide the particles and see what comes out.

Our super collider was canceled in the 1990s to be built outside of Dallas, Texas. One reason it was canceled is because a congressman asked the physicist in the final days of the hearing. Will we find God with your machine? If so, I will change my vote. Well, the physicists didn't know what to say. Ten billion dollars to find God. Then he said, "Let's find the Higgs boson." Well, all jaws hit the floor. The United States Congress voted ten billion dollars for another damn subatomic particle and it was canceled. Yes, since then we physicists had to ask ourselves how we would answer that question.

Yes, next time someone asks us, will we find God with your machine? We answer it mm-hmm I would have answered it differently I would have said God, but whatever signs or symbols you attribute to the deity, this machine, the super collider, will take us as close as humanly possible to his greatest creation. Genesis, this is a Genesis machine. will recreate on a small scale the most incredible event in the history of the universe: its birth unfortunately we said that the Higgs boson is not that exciting wrong answer wrong answer and you have a little personal experience with colliders you might want to talk a little about why you built it when you were in high school, yeah, well, just like you when I was a junior at Cubberley High School, which is just two miles from here.

I decided to build a particle accelerator and an atom smasher in my mom's garage, so I went to my mom. and I said mom, can I have permission to build a two point three thousand electron volt betadrone electron accelerator in the garage? And she looked at me and said: yes, why not, no, and don't forget to take out the trash, yes. so I went to Westinghouse, got 400 pounds of transformer steel. I went to Varian, got 22 miles of copper wire and on the football field over Christmas, we used 22 miles of copper wire. I finally finished it. Soot consumes six kilowatts of energy.

I plugged it in and closed my ears and heard this crackling sound it's all this surge of power in the capacitor bank and then I heard this pop pop pop sound as I blew all the fuses in my mom's house yeah then the whole house would be submerged in the dark and my poor mom must have told herself why couldn't she have a son who plays basketball huh maybe if I buy him a soccer ball and for the love of God why can't he find a nice Japanese girlfriend why build these machines in the garage I think our parents would get along well I think they have similar opinions on these things so that's really exciting, that was something you did in high school and then you went to college to study theoretical physics and develop string theory and now I guess you spend a lot of time thinking about the future and what all this science and technology means for our species and our evolution, which leads me to a kind of transition away from basic theoretical physics, The brain thing is something that I think a lot of people are interested in knowing what the nature of consciousness is and this thing inside our head that controls our lives, but it's something that we know very little about today.

I know you've spent a lot of time thinking. and writing about the brain and human consciousness I was recently in China with what China calls the father of the quantum Pangean pathway and he was talking about this idea of ​​quantum consciousness or the quantum mechanics that underlies consciousness, so I give you that question for your thoughts. What are the possibilities of quantum mechanics underlying the functioning of the brain and consciousness? Well, the two greatest mysteries in all of science in all of science. The two greatest mysteries are: What happened before creation? Why did we have a Big Bang?

What exploded? Are there other universes? A multiverse before the Big Bang that is outside of space. So the second mystery is the inner space. Yes, what happens behind your eyes. We have one hundred billion neurons in your brain, as many as there are stars in the Milky Way. Every neuron is connected. to another 10,000 neurons and then, what is the brain? We made a mistake fifty years ago and we are still paying the price for it today. Fifty years ago we made a big mistake, we thought that the brain was a computer, a digital computer, but you see the brain does not have an operating system it does not have programming it does not have windows it does not have a GPU it does not have a Pentium chip it does not have subroutines the brain has nothing similar to the brain except neural activity fifty years after this futile search we now have understand that the brain is a pattern searching neural network, a learning machine, and it learns and reconfigures itself every time it learns something new, for example, its laptop today is as stupid as it was yesterday, your laptop never learns anything except now we have deep learning but our brain is constantly rewiring itself and that process can be recreated with MRI machines with physics.

We can now observe blood flow in the brain and see thoughts as they move in the brain. It's amazing that we can test Freudian theory. We can try old wives' tales. For example, there is an old wives' tale that everyone believes but no one has been able to prove until now that when a man talks to a pretty girl he starts to act stupid. Yes, everyone believes it now. No, but now we know why when a man talks to a pretty girl. it drains from the prefrontal cortex and they begin to act mentally absolutely true, now we can quantify this effect.

Yes, we can actually measure this blood drop in the prefrontal cortex thanks to MRI machines. Now we can extract images. Images can be extracted from the living brainwith an MRI machine, which means that artistic design will be revolutionized. Artists of the future will simply think of a conception and print it on a 3D printer. Hmm, building designers, architects will dream about their creation and a 3D printer will then print it and When you go to sleep, the MRI machine continues to connect and will print your dream in the future. When you wake up in the morning, you can press a button and see the video of the dream you had the night before, but don't say it. your wife or your husband so these are things that were considered science fiction but now we can put them on the Internet the future of the Internet is a brain network instead of sending digital signals it will send emotions memories feelings on the Internet the first memories were recorded three years ago years ago at Wake Forest University also in Los Angeles you can now record animal memories, next will be memories in monkeys that we are making, next today are Alzheimer's patients and Alzheimer's patients will press a button and the memories will flood their minds and after that who knows maybe we will be able to upload calculus or learn learning disciplines inside our mind and by the way, let me ask you a question, let me ask you a question, one day we will be able to upload reality itself like in the movie The Matrix, how many early, late at night, late at night, just before you go to sleep, how many of you have ever had that strange feeling, that strange feeling that maybe life is an illusion, maybe everything has been loaded into your mind, maybe you are the only thing real and life is? an illusion raise your hand raise your hand if you ever had that feeling oh my god you're all crazy we have so many crazy people in this audience how can you be the only person in the world when I'm the only person in it? world I'm just dreaming I'm here on Google I'm just dreaming I'm I'm in New York right now you know I am I'm about to go to sleep in New York I mean, come on, give me a break, but this is this idea of ​​a type of

humanity

and our brains interacting with machines and that being a kind of future step in our evolution as a species, I think it is a very interesting topic to think about what the implications of that are, both positive.

We're talking about being able to learn things at a fast pace or download memories, but you know potentially the negative consequences of that that we can definitely see with the digital architecture today, the problems that we face, so imagine if we are part of that architecture. there is good news and bad news the good news is that the information will be everywhere no, we are almost free the internet can be in your contact lenses you will simply blink and then the internet will appear inside your contact lenses and who were the first people to buy lenses contact via Internet.

College students taking final exams. College students will blink and see all my test answers right there in their contact lenses. This could be very useful. Your contact lenses will recognize people's faces and tell you their background. translate from Chinese to German to English, so let's say you are at a cocktail party and there are some very important people at that cocktail party, but you don't know who they are, in the future you will know exactly who to please at any cocktail party. party on a blind date find out if your blind date says he's rich he's single he's loaded but his contact lenses say no, it's three times of course he pays child support payments he's a loser could be very useful now that's the good news yes bad news although the future has bad news the bad news is that in the future we will have lawyers importance because only a human can argue before a jury only a human can argue before a judge robots cannot do that robots cannot understand death ixora moral, so yes, people involved in person-to-person relationships, such as lawyers, teachers, mentors, will have jobs in the future, yes, but the more monotonous tasks will probably disappear.

The most monotonous tasks will probably disappear, well, those dirty and dangerous ones. yes, boring 3ds jobs, dirty, dangerous, repetitive jobs, jobs that involve danger, those jobs will be done by robots in the future, yes, that's interesting, so okay, we have talked a little about the brain, we have talked a little about artificial intelligence, when to do it. Ask your opinion on something that I think is very dear to both of our hearts, which is space exploration and we're going beyond Earth. You've written a lot on this topic about missions to Mars and the planets. Beyond some of the most exciting things we can imagine seeing in our lives and then maybe even beyond that, the fundamental problem with space travel has been a four-letter word COST: It costs $10,000 to put a pound of any thing in orbit around the Earth that's your weight in gold your weight in gold that's how expensive space travel is until recently prices are dropping like a rock now for example how many people here in this room have seen the movie The Martian with Matt Damon raises his hand Wow that movie cost a hundred million dollars, but the Indians sent a probe to Mars for 70 million dollars, so going to Mars costs a Hollywood movie about going to Mars costs more than going to Mars, that's what space travel has diminished and when you drive a car and commute to work you jump out of your car after a trip no car would be expensive if you throw it away after a trip but that's what we do with rockets yes, rockets garbage of the week after a single use we throw them all away that is changing with reusable rockets Now that the billionaires of Silicon Valley are fulfilling their dream of creating fantastic devices in space, we are entering the second golden age of space exploration.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of your grandchildren had their honeymoon on the Moon. I think it's only three days until the Moon. Yes. or travel, as costs go down, yes, I think our grandchildren can spend their honeymoon on the moon. It's a great location for the weekend, it's not great scenery but it looks like you've got craters and dust, that's cool and we were talking backstage. You're one of the interesting things that comes out of a grand unified theory and string theory is the explanation of what happens in these very extreme conditions where you have incredible amounts of energy, incredible amounts of heat in a limited space and we were talking about whether This could be a way to travel vastly. distances that we can't travel today maybe you could talk a little about that well, a lot of people want to know how in Star Trek can you break the light barrier?

Can you go faster than the speed of light? Well, it was Einstein himself in 1935 who opened the door to faster than light travel when he introduced the wormhole which was the first article written on wormholes the first book on wormholes was written in the 19th century by Charles Dodgson Mossberg mathematician who wrote a children's book Alice in Wonderland now this Oxford mathematician could not write under his name Charles Dodgson yes, it was a children's book, so he wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, but the mirror It's the wormhole, you put your hand through the mirror and you end up in a different space and time, so we think so, that would be a way to go faster than the speed of light.

What is the problem? There is always a problem somewhere. First of all, the energy needed to punch a hole in space and time is that of a black hole you are talking about. fantastic amounts of energy, second you have to stabilize it, that means negative energy, positive energy to open the door and then negative energy to prevent it from collapsing, in other words stability and this has not been solved yet, it would take a very advanced civilization to make it. I am now on the radio and I broadcast it every week and some people call me on the phone and tell me professor, you are wrong, you are totally wrong, the aliens are not very, it is not a space with a warp drive, the aliens are here . the earth and then I asked them how do you know and they say well they have been kidnapped kidnapped by flying saucers they know they are out there well I have some advice next time you are kidnapped by a flying saucer for For the love of God, steal something, there is no no law against theft from an extraterrestrial civilization.

Yes, there is no law. An alien ship. An alien hammers an alien. Anything so you can brag about going to outer space. It's a good advice. It's a good advice. Okay, I guess you can start opening it up to questions if you want to get on the microphones. Start aligning us. We will try to do our best to answer any questions you have. Around here, you were the first doctor. Thank you very much for coming. I'm really inspired. I wanted to hear some of your thoughts on ethical development and how we could help machines uphold ethics in our society.

Ethics and how we help machines uphold the ethics that we as a society uphold is that right. several things, first of all, we have to make sure that this technology is used by the greatest number of people, but when the technology is first available, it is always for the rich when the telephone appeared over a hundred years ago, who had personal phones. They were rich people, but eventually we have things like Moore's Law, computer power doubles every 18 months and therefore over time the cost of the phone goes down. We once thought there was going to be a digital divide when the rich would have laptops.

The poor would have nothing more. We now know that most children are the first to be connected because if a child is not on the Internet they do not exist on the Internet, but there is also another ethical problem for the coming decades: some people wonder when robots will become more and more intelligent. Are they going to have a civil rights movement? Maybe because in the future robots can be programmed to feel pain. Today we feel pain because it is good for us. Otherwise we lose our fingers. Our fingers burn. Cutting the pain is good because it prevents us from destroying. ourselves eventually the robots will have to feel pain otherwise we will tell them to jump off a cliff and they will destroy themselves they have to feel pain at that point it has to be regulated so we can have a robot civil rights movement to limit the amount of pain a teacher can impose on his robot now that of course is many decades away, but eventually robots can also be part of our ethical understanding of technology when they feel pain interesting here, dr.

Kaku, one of my earliest memories is watching the Discovery Channel and seeing you there, thank you for the role you played in shaping that part of the executives of my early childhood and related to that, I wanted to know what excites you when it comes to. to expand the scale and accessibility of science communication in the future, well, before the media stayed away from science because, quote, science is not for sale, so in those days we only had three networks and science was invisible for the most part. and most people when they learned about science they learned about science in school but there is a problem there first of all we are all born scientists when we are born we want to know why the sun shines we want to know where we come from but then we hit the killer of scientists known for science the biggest destroyer of scientists known to science is high school while we beat you up in your high school it's all over we lose scientists to them hundreds of thousands why because scientists made you boring It made you repetitive We have to learn to name things instead of learning the big principles, the big concepts of science and that's why more recently we have the Internet, we have cable that brings science to an audience.

Now it turns out that about a million people subscribe to Scientific American, that's what. the hard core, these people will pursue science even when there is no science, about a million people, the hard core, but then there are another five to ten million people who will sometimes tune in to the Discovery Science Channel National Geographic if something really interesting happens. , so we know that we can reach five to ten million people with a good program and then with the discovery of the black hole, we can reach a hundred million people. When we reach the residents, we resonate with the people of the world, so we need more people to write books. more people on television to do radio shows we need more people like that instead of less people to become role models for a new scientific revolution definitely exchange advice, it's okay up here I think sir, thank you for coming today.

I was wondering what you think about NASA's recently announced plan to return to the moon in 2024, do you thinkIt is feasible? First of all, I think we will have a traffic jam around the moon very soon. First, NASA has the SLS booster rocket next year we will orbit the Moon. moon, then we have Elon Musk of SpaceX, who sells tickets to the general public. The tickets have been sold out, a Japanese billionaire bought all the tickets for the Falcon Heavy rocket, which is also fully capable of going around the moon, and then we have Amazon's Jeff Bezos formally the richest man in the world, he has a whole spaceport, the Blue Origins rocket program to go to the moon with the new Armstrong rocket and then we have the Chinese, the Chinese have announced that they will plant the Chinese flag on the moon, so I think we are going to have a traffic jam with three American rockets, one Chinese and maybe one European rocket fully committed to returning to the moon and the question is why, because costs have been coming down, the technology is catching up, you realize, your phone cell phone, your The cell phone has more computing power than all of NASA in 1969, when we put two men on the moon.

That's right, your mobile phone today has more computing power than the entire NASA. In fact, I think what they were doing in 1969 is criminal. The criminals say they are human. to space backed by a cell phone Would you go to outer space knowing that your rocket is backed by a cell phone? That's what we did in 1969. I think it's criminal, so I think we will witness a second golden age of space. exploration as costs start to come down, not 10,000 dollars a pound, ninety to a thousand dollars a pound, but eventually a few hundred dollars a pound, that's the goal, oh, that's great, okay, it's an honor to be here with you, dr.

Kaku, I have a simple question: do you think humans will reach a type one civilization? Well I'm a physicist, we classify civilizations by two things, energy and information, that's how we classify anything, energy information, a planet's energy eventually reaches type 1, so the earth becomes planetary, we for example , we can control the weather, we can worry about type 2 oceans being stellar, where then you start consuming the power of a star like Star Trek. Star Trek would be a type two civilization where they have colonized some solar systems. but not much more type 3 is galactic, a galactic civilization like Star Wars where you can wander the Galactic space lane now what are we?

We write one that can care about the oceans, it plays with the weather, well we write two that play with stars, we write three that play with black holes, no, we are type zero, we don't even rate on the scale we get our energy from dead plants , oil and coal, so we have all the savagery of a type 0 civilization, sectarianism, religious hatred, racism, all the rubbish of the past, but by the year 2100, a hundred years from now, we will become type one and that will da we have room for hope that we will be a planetary civilization by the year 2100, for example, what language will they speak?

The two languages ​​on the Internet are English and Mandarin Chinese. Look at the Internet. What is Internet? Internet is the first type one technology to arrive. in this century that is what the Internet is the first type one technology to arrive that we have the type one economy of the European Union we have the beginning of a type one sport Olympic Games football we have the beginning of a type one music rock and roll rap music how disgusting we have the beginning of a type one culture, but we are not guaranteed to transition to type one because we still have all the savagery, all the backwardness of our ancient past, the way I once spoke in London in the planetary and that little boy comes up to me a little boy says teacher "you are wrong, you are wrong, there is type four, so I told them look boy, look boy, there are planets, stars and galaxies, that's all, friends, planets, stars and galaxies, therefore, we have type 1, type 2." type 3 and said professor, you are wrong, this type 4 I said what energy is beyond the galactic and he said the continuum now who here is a Trekkie who understands what I just said what is the only type 4 civilization in the chain of television the signal if you did not understand what just happened, go with the program, the signal is extra galactic and what is that energy, dark energy, dark energy is beyond galactic, that is the energy of a type 4, hmm, interesting, okay, we'll answer one more question here, ok.

First of all, thank you for being here. Secondly, thanks for being another person who had a question about the Kardashev scale, so I had to think of something new that followed along the same lines, so my question would be how long do you think? it will be before we really start registering on the scale and what can each of us do as individuals to do our part in society to push it forward that way before we destroy ourselves as a civilization? Well, on this question I really differ with many other scientists, most scientists would say that technology has no direction or moral direction, science is a weapon, a double-edged sword, one side can cut against diseases, ignorance, poverty, the other side can cut against people.

I disagree. I believe that technology does have a moral direction because the Internet spreads information information gives you empowerment empowerment gives you democracy and democracies do not make war with other democracies let's do a scientific experiment write down every war that you had to memorize as a child since you were in elementary school every war every war has been It was fought between kings, emperors, queens, dictators, but never between two major democracies, so I think we are entering a new moral dimension in which technology is changing the way we that humans interact with other humans so that we do not tolerate dictatorships as much when I was young in our country.

In history class we learned something called a dictator for life, you had Russia, you had the United States, whether you were a pawn of Russia or a pawn of the United States, you were there forever, the only way to get you out of power is through a coffin dictator for life. today we laugh about it, I mean dictators for life, I mean come on, we have the internet, we have empowerment, we have knowledge, so dictators are now endangered species, so I think technology has a fix morality that I believe is liberating. empowering and changing world history a new chapter is being written in world history as individuals leave their mark on human history great, thank you all, it was great, thank you all for joining us, it was great fun getting to talk to you about physics and the universe and I think this is a great audience for that because you are all involved in technology, you are all involved in that quest to advance us as a civilization, so I hope this has inspired some interesting questions and ideas and, hopefully, it helped lead us towards that type one civilization that we so need, so thank you very much, dr.

kaku

thanks