Ray Kurzweil: Get ready for hybrid thinking

Summary

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

00:00

🧠 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。

05:00

👾 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。

Keywords

💡新皮質

新皮質とは、哺乳類の脳に存在する最も進化した部分で、「新しい皮層」という意味を持ちます。このスクリプトでは、新皮質が約2億年前の初期哺乳類に由来し、思考や行動の新しいパターンを生み出す能力を持つことが説明されています。例えば、新しい行動を発明し、それをコミュニティ内で共有する能力が挙げられています。

💡固定行動

固定行動とは、非哺乳類動物に見られる、変化することのない行動パターンを指します。スクリプトでは、哺乳類が新皮質によって新しい行動を創出できるのに対し、非哺乳類動物はその生涯で新しい行動を学ぶことができず、何千世代にもわたって固定行動が進化することが説明されています。

💡白亜紀絶滅イベント

白亜紀絶滅イベントは、約6500万年前に起こった地球規模の大量絶滅イベントです。このスクリプトでは、このイベントが哺乳類がその生態的地位を獲得し、新皮質の発展が加速した転換点として述べられています。絶滅イベントは恐竜の絶滅と多くの種の消失を引き起こしました。

💡脳の進化

脳の進化とは、生物の脳が時間をかけて形態的、機能的に変化し発展してきた過程を指します。スクリプトでは、哺乳類の脳、特に新皮質が、サイズ、機能、そして複雑性の面で顕著に進化してきたことが説明されており、人間の脳が最も進化した形態であるとされています。

💡モジュール

モジュールとは、脳の構造や機能において特定のタスクを担う小さな単位です。このスクリプトでは、脳が約3億のモジュールから成り立ち、これらが階層的に組織されて複雑な思考や認識を可能にするシステムとして説明されています。例として、文字の認識から意味の解釈までがモジュールの連携によって行われます。

💡階層的組織

階層的組織とは、脳のモジュールが複雑性の異なるレベルで組織され、高次の認識や思考プロセスを実現する構造のことです。スクリプトでは、この概念が脳の働きを理解する上での鍵とされ、簡単な認識から高度な思考までがこの組織構造によって可能になると説明されています。

💡人工知能

人工知能とは、人間の学習や認識、推論などの能力を模倣するコンピューターシステムやソフトウェアを指します。スクリプトでは、将来的に人工知能がウェブページや書籍を理解し、人間の言語をマスターするとされており、「ジェパディ」ゲームでのWatsonの成功が例として挙げられています。

💡クラウド

クラウドとは、インターネットを通じてアクセス可能なリモートサーバー上にあるデータやサービスを指します。スクリプトでは、将来、人間が自らの新皯質をクラウド上の合成新皮質に拡張できるようになると述べられており、これによって人間の思考能力が大幅に向上することが示唆されています。

💡加速するリターンの法則

加速するリターンの法則とは、技術の進歩が指数関数的に速くなるという理論です。このスクリプトでは、非生物的な思考の部分がこの法則に従って指数関数的に成長し、人類の思考能力が飛躍的に向上する未来が示されています。

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)