Michio Kaku: Big Think Interview | Big Think

Michio Kaku: Big Think Interview

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A conversation with the CUNY theoretical physicist.

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MICHIO KAKU:

Dr. Michio Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely recognized scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best Sellers, is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted numerous science specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio show broadcasts to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as New York University (NYU).

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What are some futuristic inventions that we’ll see In our lifetime?

Michio Kaku: So you ask a simple question. Invisibility: just decades away we will have something resembling Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak.

Something equally astonishing is shape-shifting. When you see science fiction movies like "Terminator II" and you see the evil robot turn into jelly and then ooze its way through obstacles, you say to yourself "No way, no way can that happen." Believe it or not, we scientists are making huge inroads into that area. It’s called programmable matter. Matter itself that can rearrange itself, change color, change shape, change conductivity by pushing a button. And here is how it works: Why is it that certain substances can turn liquid and ooze its way across the room like in the movie "Terminator II?" It’s because of atoms. Atoms can slide over atoms, rearrange themselves, but what happens if atoms are replaced by chips, chips that are so small they’re smaller than the head of a pin. And you can change their electric charge. By changing the electric charge they bind and reform in different ways and they’re intelligent because each dot is a computer chip perhaps as powerful as a PC. These are called catoms and who is pushing this technology? The Intel Corporation, the makers of the famous Pentium chip that drives your laptop. The same company is now investigating the next several steps in the future, the ability to have programmable matter.

Now think about it. It means that if I have a clump of clay made of thousands of millions of little dots I push a button then the charges rearrange themselves to form a statue, a car, whatever you want. This means that I can push another button and this clay turns into a house or I push another button and a whole city, a whole city rises out of the desert. Sounds like science fiction, but the basic steps are being done today. And in fact, with a television crew I went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and photographed it. Of course these catoms are quite large. They’re about the size of a head of a pin, but it’s only a matter of time before these catoms become so microscopic and so powerful that they’ll be able to rearrange just like what you see in "Terminator II," just like what you see in the "Transformers," just like what you see in X-men comics.

Question: Do you believe in the coming singularity?

Michio Kaku: There was a conference out of Sylmar that made headlines around the world. The brightest minds of artificial intelligence converged onto Sylmar and a reporter asked them a question" "When will this fabled singularity take place? When will the machines take over? When will machines become smarter than us?"

Well the answer was quite interesting. Among the top people assembled in one place the answers were anything from 20 years in the future to 1,000 years in the future—with some AI experts saying never. Some people put it at 2029. They even give you an exact date. 2029, that’s going to be the moment of truth that one day a robot will wake up, wake up in the laboratory, look around and say, “I am aware.” “I’m just as smart as you.” “In fact, I could be even smarter if I put a few more chips in my brain.”

Other people say: "Not so fast, not so fast because Moore’s law is going to break down." The reason why many people are so confident about this prediction of the so called singularity is because of Moore’s law that computer power doubles every 18 months and it’s a curve that has held sway for 50 years. If you go back 100 years back to the time of mechanical hand-crank computers...

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