Forget the incremental stuff. Get ready for the big technological changes that will change our world. Billion-dollar spacecraft are being replaced by student-designed cubes that cost less than a luxury car. Robots are poised to take over driving and manufacturing, sure, but also design, cuisine, even romance. Military-funded research programs won’t just read your mind, they'll write new information into it. And when AI lines up alongside the technological ability to rewrite our genetic code, the combination could give us power over life and death itself. Jacob Ward, former editor-in-chief of Popular Science, has spent a career forecasting the future, and in this talk he describes the world’s most dramatic and disruptive technological breakthroughs, and what they’ll mean to you. 

For most of us, our own mind is a black box: an all-powerful and utterly mysterious device that runs our lives for us. And not only do we humans just barely understand how it works, science is now revealing that it makes most of our decisions for us using rules and shortcuts of which you and I aren’t even aware. Meanwhile, every area of human activity, from criminal justice to corporate hiring to military strategy, is turning to “black box” artificial intelligence systems for cost savings, efficiency, and moral clarity. Jacob Ward reveals the relationship between the unconscious habits of our minds, and the way that AI is poised to amplify them, alter them, maybe even reprogram them.

Until now, the broad assumption has been that any technology you can bring into your life will make it better, from time-saving productivity tools to lifesaving safety systems. But with the rise of technologies that can predict your behavior, write your wedding vows, and more or less run your friendships for you, we’re now, for the first time in history, at the point where we’ll need to use technology not to replace our human tendencies, but to defend them. From systems that turn online squabbling into a detailed policy paper to AI that tricks you into writing down your most important thoughts, we’ll look at the best ways to stay human in a highly technological world

Did you know that in a dogfight above a battlefield, the shorter pilot almost always wins? That’s because the G forces of the plane act more strongly on someone with a longer distance between heart and brain. It’s the human being that limits the performance of the aircraft, and that’s why the US Air Force plans to automate fighter jets from now on. Did you know that in car crashes the human driver is at fault nearly 90% of the time? That’s why car companies are willing to take over your car insurance payments to get you into a robot car. And did you know that defensive maneuvers like shooting down an incoming missile generally have to happen so fast that a human can’t even be involved? That’s why from cyberwarfare to missile defense, human beings are being replaced by robots. But when we remove human limitations from a system, we also remove human morals and human sensitivities. Jacob Ward discusses the tension between what we can build, and what we should build.