Ray Kurzweil: Get ready for hybrid thinking
Summary
TLDRこの物語は2億年前に遡り、哺乳類にのみ存在する新皮質(ネオコルテックス)の進化を追います。新皮質は、当初は切手ほどの大きさで薄かったものが、恐竜の絶滅とともに急速に発展しました。この進化により、哺乳類は新しい行動を発明し、環境に適応する能力を高め、最終的に地球上での支配的な生物となりました。講演者は、新皮質の構造と機能、および人間の思考や言語の発展におけるその役割を探求します。また、技術の進歩がいかにして人間の脳と相互作用し、将来的には生物学的な思考と非生物学的な思考の融合を可能にするかについても考察します。
Takeaways
- 😀 The neocortex allowed mammals to adapt behaviors within a lifetime rather than over generations
- 😯 The extinction of dinosaurs led to a rapid expansion of the neocortex in mammals
- 🧠 The neocortex grew quicker than overall brain size and is responsible for higher order thinking
- 🗺️ The neocortex has many folds and convolutions to increase surface area
- 💡 Our thoughts create connections in our brain and shape its structure over time
- 🔢 There are hierarchical modular structures in the neocortex for recognizing patterns
- 🤖 AI like Watson can now understand complex language and retrieve knowledge
- 🔬 Brain implants could connect our brains to cloud computing for enhanced cognition
- 🚀 Expanding our 'neocortex' with technology may enable further cultural evolution
- 🎉 Ray Kurzweil has been developing this theory of the neocortex for over 50 years
Q & A
新皮質はいつ、どのようにして発展しましたか?
-新皮質は約2億年前に発展し始めた。これは初期哺乳類、特に小型の齧歯類において観察され、彼らの脳の大きさはクルミほどであり、新皮質は郵便切手の大きさでとても薄い構造であった。
新皮質があるのはどの動物ですか?
-新皮質は哺乳類にのみ存在している。
新皮質の能力にはどのようなものがありますか?
-新皮質は固定された行動ではなく、新しい行動を発明する能力を持っており、その行動が成功すれば、それを記憶し、新たな行動パターンとしてコミュニティに広がる可能性がある。
恐竜が絶滅したのはいつですか、そしてそれは新皮質の発展にどのような影響を与えましたか?
-恐竜が絶滅したのは約6500万年前の白亜紀の大絶滅イベント時で、これにより哺乳類が地球上の主要な生態的地位を占めるようになり、新皮質はより発展し、大きくなった。
人間の新皮質はどのくらいの大きさですか?
-人間の新皮質を広げると、テーブルナプキンほどの大きさになり、その厚みもテーブルナプキン程度である。
脳のどの部分が我々の思考を担っていますか?
-我々の思考は新皮質で行われており、これは脳の約80%を占めている。
新皮質のモジュールはどのように機能しますか?
-新皮質のモジュールはパターンを学習、記憶、実行することができ、これらは階層的に整理されており、上位のレベルほど概念が抽象的になる。
脳内のどの部分がユーモアを感知しますか?
-脳の新皮質の特定の点がユーモアを感知する部分として機能することが、脳手術中に発見された。
未来の検索エンジンはどのように進化すると予想されますか?
-5~10年以内に、検索エンジンは単に単語やリンクを探すのではなく、ウェブ上や本にあるページを理解し、解釈する能力を持つようになると予想される。
2030年代には、私たちの脳はどのように進化すると予想されますか?
-2030年代には、ナノボットを介して私たちの新皮質がクラウド上の合成新皮質に接続され、私たちの思考能力が生物学的なものと非生物学的なもののハイブリッドになると予想されている。
Outlines
🧠 ネオコルテックスの進化とその影響
このパラグラフは、2億年前に遡り、ネオコルテックス(新皮質)の進化の物語を語っています。哺乳類にのみ存在するネオコルテックスは、初期の哺乳類で郵便切手サイズで非常に薄かったが、新しい行動を創造する能力を備えていました。固定された行動パターンを超えて、新しい解決策を模索することで、哺乳類は環境変化に適応する力を持っていました。この能力は、6500万年前の白亜紀の大絶滅イベントを生き延びた後、哺乳類が他の生物に取って代わり、ネオコルテックスがさらに発達したことで強化されました。著者は、ネオコルテックスが人間の脳の80%を占め、我々の思考と創造性の源であることを説明し、過去50年間にわたる自身の研究と最近の脳科学の進展を紹介しています。
👾 テクノロジーによるネオコルテックスの拡張
このパラグラフでは、人間の認識と思考のプロセスを模倣し、拡張する技術の進化に焦点を当てています。著者は、コンピュータが人間の言語を理解し始めていること、特に「ジェパディ」のゲームでのWatsonの成功を例に挙げて、この進歩を示しています。さらに、未来では、技術がどのようにして脳の直接の拡張となり、クラウドに接続された合成ネオコルテックスを通じて人間の認識能力を高める可能性があるかを説明しています。このセクションは、過去にネオコルテックスが拡張されたことで人類が言語、芸術、科学を発展させたことを引き合いに出し、今後数十年で再びこのような質的飛躍が起こる可能性があると結論付けています。
Mindmap
Keywords
💡新皮質
💡固定行動
💡白亜紀絶滅イベント
💡脳の進化
💡モジュール
💡階層的組織
💡人工知能
💡クラウド
💡加速するリターンの法則
Highlights
The neocortex allowed early mammals to invent new behaviors rather than rely on fixed behaviors like other animals.
The neocortex grew rapidly after the Cretaceous extinction event 75 million years ago, allowing mammals to overtake ecological niches.
The neocortex is where humans do our thinking and sublimate basic drives into creative and intellectual pursuits.
Data about the brain from neuroscience is doubling every year, allowing unprecedented understanding of how thoughts create the brain.
The neocortex consists of around 300 million hierarchical modules that recognize patterns and concepts at different levels of abstraction.
Humor and irony detection modules were identified in one patient's neocortex through stimulation of very specific areas.
AI systems like Watson are mastering natural language, signaling a time soon when computers can read and understand content.
In the 2030s, cloud-based synthetic neocortex extensions may allow us to access additional brain power on demand.
Expanding our biological and non-biological neocortex may enable a qualitative leap in culture and technology.
The frontal cortex expanded our brain power 2 million years ago, enabling the rise of language, art, science and more.
Soon we won't be limited by a fixed brain architecture - cloud-based neocortex will expand without limit.
Our thinking will become a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence, the latter growing exponentially.
Adding computing capacity to biological intelligence may power innovations as impactful as the rise of humankind.
Brain-computer integration can lead to human cognition enhanced without theoretical limit.
Expanding neocortex drove mammals' rise; now technology allows us to continue the exponential growth.
Transcripts
Let me tell you a story.
It goes back 200 million years.
It's a story of the neocortex,
which means "new rind."
So in these early mammals,
because only mammals have a neocortex,
rodent-like creatures.
It was the size of a postage stamp and just as thin,
and was a thin covering around
their walnut-sized brain,
but it was capable of a new type of thinking.
Rather than the fixed behaviors
that non-mammalian animals have,
it could invent new behaviors.
So a mouse is escaping a predator,
its path is blocked,
it'll try to invent a new solution.
That may work, it may not,
but if it does, it will remember that
and have a new behavior,
and that can actually spread virally
through the rest of the community.
Another mouse watching this could say,
"Hey, that was pretty clever, going around that rock,"
and it could adopt a new behavior as well.
Non-mammalian animals
couldn't do any of those things.
They had fixed behaviors.
Now they could learn a new behavior
but not in the course of one lifetime.
In the course of maybe a thousand lifetimes,
it could evolve a new fixed behavior.
That was perfectly okay 200 million years ago.
The environment changed very slowly.
It could take 10,000 years for there to be
a significant environmental change,
and during that period of time
it would evolve a new behavior.
Now that went along fine,
but then something happened.
Sixty-five million years ago,
there was a sudden, violent change to the environment.
We call it the Cretaceous extinction event.
That's when the dinosaurs went extinct,
that's when 75 percent of the
animal and plant species went extinct,
and that's when mammals
overtook their ecological niche,
and to anthropomorphize, biological evolution said,
"Hmm, this neocortex is pretty good stuff,"
and it began to grow it.
And mammals got bigger,
their brains got bigger at an even faster pace,
and the neocortex got bigger even faster than that
and developed these distinctive ridges and folds
basically to increase its surface area.
If you took the human neocortex
and stretched it out,
it's about the size of a table napkin,
and it's still a thin structure.
It's about the thickness of a table napkin.
But it has so many convolutions and ridges
it's now 80 percent of our brain,
and that's where we do our thinking,
and it's the great sublimator.
We still have that old brain
that provides our basic drives and motivations,
but I may have a drive for conquest,
and that'll be sublimated by the neocortex
into writing a poem or inventing an app
or giving a TED Talk,
and it's really the neocortex that's where
the action is.
Fifty years ago, I wrote a paper
describing how I thought the brain worked,
and I described it as a series of modules.
Each module could do things with a pattern.
It could learn a pattern. It could remember a pattern.
It could implement a pattern.
And these modules were organized in hierarchies,
and we created that hierarchy with our own thinking.
And there was actually very little to go on
50 years ago.
It led me to meet President Johnson.
I've been thinking about this for 50 years,
and a year and a half ago I came out with the book
"How To Create A Mind,"
which has the same thesis,
but now there's a plethora of evidence.
The amount of data we're getting about the brain
from neuroscience is doubling every year.
Spatial resolution of brainscanning of all types
is doubling every year.
We can now see inside a living brain
and see individual interneural connections
connecting in real time, firing in real time.
We can see your brain create your thoughts.
We can see your thoughts create your brain,
which is really key to how it works.
So let me describe briefly how it works.
I've actually counted these modules.
We have about 300 million of them,
and we create them in these hierarchies.
I'll give you a simple example.
I've got a bunch of modules
that can recognize the crossbar to a capital A,
and that's all they care about.
A beautiful song can play,
a pretty girl could walk by,
they don't care, but they see a crossbar to a capital A,
they get very excited and they say "crossbar,"
and they put out a high probability
on their output axon.
That goes to the next level,
and these layers are organized in conceptual levels.
Each is more abstract than the next one,
so the next one might say "capital A."
That goes up to a higher level that might say "Apple."
Information flows down also.
If the apple recognizer has seen A-P-P-L,
it'll think to itself, "Hmm, I think an E is probably likely,"
and it'll send a signal down to all the E recognizers
saying, "Be on the lookout for an E,
I think one might be coming."
The E recognizers will lower their threshold
and they see some sloppy thing, could be an E.
Ordinarily you wouldn't think so,
but we're expecting an E, it's good enough,
and yeah, I've seen an E, and then apple says,
"Yeah, I've seen an Apple."
Go up another five levels,
and you're now at a pretty high level
of this hierarchy,
and stretch down into the different senses,
and you may have a module that sees a certain fabric,
hears a certain voice quality, smells a certain perfume,
and will say, "My wife has entered the room."
Go up another 10 levels, and now you're at
a very high level.
You're probably in the frontal cortex,
and you'll have modules that say, "That was ironic.
That's funny. She's pretty."
You might think that those are more sophisticated,
but actually what's more complicated
is the hierarchy beneath them.
There was a 16-year-old girl, she had brain surgery,
and she was conscious because the surgeons
wanted to talk to her.
You can do that because there's no pain receptors
in the brain.
And whenever they stimulated particular,
very small points on her neocortex,
shown here in red, she would laugh.
So at first they thought they were triggering
some kind of laugh reflex,
but no, they quickly realized they had found
the points in her neocortex that detect humor,
and she just found everything hilarious
whenever they stimulated these points.
"You guys are so funny just standing around,"
was the typical comment,
and they weren't funny,
not while doing surgery.
So how are we doing today?
Well, computers are actually beginning to master
human language with techniques
that are similar to the neocortex.
I actually described the algorithm,
which is similar to something called
a hierarchical hidden Markov model,
something I've worked on since the '90s.
"Jeopardy" is a very broad natural language game,
and Watson got a higher score
than the best two players combined.
It got this query correct:
"A long, tiresome speech
delivered by a frothy pie topping,"
and it quickly responded, "What is a meringue harangue?"
And Jennings and the other guy didn't get that.
It's a pretty sophisticated example of
computers actually understanding human language,
and it actually got its knowledge by reading
Wikipedia and several other encyclopedias.
Five to 10 years from now,
search engines will actually be based on
not just looking for combinations of words and links
but actually understanding,
reading for understanding the billions of pages
on the web and in books.
So you'll be walking along, and Google will pop up
and say, "You know, Mary, you expressed concern
to me a month ago that your glutathione supplement
wasn't getting past the blood-brain barrier.
Well, new research just came out 13 seconds ago
that shows a whole new approach to that
and a new way to take glutathione.
Let me summarize it for you."
Twenty years from now, we'll have nanobots,
because another exponential trend
is the shrinking of technology.
They'll go into our brain
through the capillaries
and basically connect our neocortex
to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud
providing an extension of our neocortex.
Now today, I mean,
you have a computer in your phone,
but if you need 10,000 computers for a few seconds
to do a complex search,
you can access that for a second or two in the cloud.
In the 2030s, if you need some extra neocortex,
you'll be able to connect to that in the cloud
directly from your brain.
So I'm walking along and I say,
"Oh, there's Chris Anderson.
He's coming my way.
I'd better think of something clever to say.
I've got three seconds.
My 300 million modules in my neocortex
isn't going to cut it.
I need a billion more."
I'll be able to access that in the cloud.
And our thinking, then, will be a hybrid
of biological and non-biological thinking,
but the non-biological portion
is subject to my law of accelerating returns.
It will grow exponentially.
And remember what happens
the last time we expanded our neocortex?
That was two million years ago
when we became humanoids
and developed these large foreheads.
Other primates have a slanted brow.
They don't have the frontal cortex.
But the frontal cortex is not really qualitatively different.
It's a quantitative expansion of neocortex,
but that additional quantity of thinking
was the enabling factor for us to take
a qualitative leap and invent language
and art and science and technology
and TED conferences.
No other species has done that.
And so, over the next few decades,
we're going to do it again.
We're going to again expand our neocortex,
only this time we won't be limited
by a fixed architecture of enclosure.
It'll be expanded without limit.
That additional quantity will again
be the enabling factor for another qualitative leap
in culture and technology.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
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