Author: Byron Reese / Source: Gigaom
Dean Kamen is an engineer, inventor, and businessman. He holds hundreds of U.S. and foreign patents, many of them for medical devices including the iBOTTM mobility device, the first wearable infusion pump, the first wearable insulin pump for diabetics. He is perhaps best known for his invention of the Segway® Human Transporter.
He founded DEKA Research & Development Corporation as well as FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a global organization dedicated to helping young people understand and enjoy science and technology.
Kamen has received many awards including the National Medal of Technology in 2000, the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2002, and he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2005.
What follows is an interview between Dean Kamen and Byron Reese, publisher of GigaOm, and author of the new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. They discuss artificial intelligence and future technology, and their impact on jobs, education, innovation.
Byron Reese: I want to start off by saying this show is about artificial intelligence. Let’s just start with that piece of technology. When people say, “Well what is it?” or “How should I feel about it?” What would you say?
Dean Kamen: I think the first thing people should do is not be afraid of putting those words together. The word ‘artificial’ to some people sounds bad. You don’t want to have artificial stuff in your food. You don’t want artificial stuff elsewhere. And the word ‘intelligence’ means very different things to very different people. So, putting those two words together makes a mess of language and thought.
But I would say to maybe make it a more constructive conversation, we can say that people, for the first few thousand years after we climbed out of the primordial ooze, would try to build things with their hands, which would get pretty tough I guess. And then somebody invented the first tool: a hammer or a shovel. Ok, those were artificial muscles. Then we, through the industrial revolution, created things substantially more capable than the shovel, like a bulldozer. And it eliminated all those jobs of those ditch diggers — because one bulldozer could do the job of a thousand ditch diggers. I’d call a bulldozer artificial muscle. And it probably gave you a thousand to one — or more — leverage over what you could do with your back-breaking work. But it didn’t eliminate jobs, because when you didn’t have a bulldozer, you might spend a whole life digging a hole big enough to make a house. Once you had a bulldozer, you didn’t eliminate the careers for a thousand people that might dig a hole You created the plausible possibility of paving for instance, North America with a super highway system.
So as we developed more artificial muscle, we built more and more things because we could, from roads to skyscrapers. And those people that somehow believe that as we use computers or computing technologies to eliminate the work that people used to do that’s drudgery or boring work, the idea that we’re going to eliminate jobs is equally silly as saying the bulldozer eliminated a career. No, it eliminated the horrible work that nobody wanted to do and gave people time to do way more magnificent things.
So I will call out artificial intelligence as the ability of the engineering community to move its capability to amplify not what your muscles used to do by building us the industrial revolution, but by amplifying what your thinking and problem solving capabilities are, because you’ve added the equivalent of an electronic bulldozer to eliminate the bulldozer, did something to the shovel, and the computer did something to the adding machine. In each case it opens up new opportunities to do more and more great stuff and to more and more young people, especially if they develop the skill sets to use these tools. And I hope they do it through my first robotics competition. I hope that more and more young people see ‘artificial intelligence’ as nothing more than saying, I don’t do back-breaking physical work due to the industrial revolution, I won’t be doing boring mental work due to artificial intelligence. I’ll leverage these technologies to build a better future and more capable career for myself. And that’s what it is.
Anybody who listens to the Voices in AI show knows I agree with every word you’ve just said. But the arguments that are sometimes brought against that viewpoint, believe me I hear them a lot. The first one is that, well, the change that is coming is going to come so fast, that it’s going to be severely disrupting. Do you think that there’s any merit to that?
I think every major change that has been wrought by technology permeates two things through the culture that’s experiencing it. To the pessimist, it brings fear, because people don’t like change. To the optimists, it brings excitement.
I’m sure when those first machines were made that could knit so quickly that all the people that knew how to make cloth by hand were terrified by the textile industry. I am again sure that the industrial revolution and steam engines and locomotives terrified all the people that were doing things that existed without the leverage of those technologies. And I’m sure equally that other people saw those technologies as opportunities to do more and better things for themselves and their community in the world. So, I think you are right.
There are certainly lots of people that are appropriately concerned that the skill sets they now have are going to be displaced by more efficient, more cost effective, maybe more accurate, more reliable, more stable systems, all lumped into something we call artificial intelligence. But those very same people ought to say, if I learn about these systems, I learn how to use them, design them, develop them, deploy them, it will give me opportunities to advance my career and my sights about the future, and be part of something that’s bigger and better than the past. That’s called innovation, that’s called progress.
I think it comes down in every generation to the fact that as the world changes, you have a choice. You can be on that bus, or you could be off that bus, and if you embrace technology, you have the opportunity to be on a bus that’s moving further and moving faster. Now having said that, by the way, you get on to a bus that’s bigger, heavier and faster moving than the one that you used to have and the scale of the impact of the accidents that can be caused are terrifying. But, again, this is not a new problem.
I’m sure the first tools that we made, using a rock as a hammer, can help you build something. Using the first hammer, you could break your thumb. Figuring out how to control fire, gave us the capability to stay warm and cook our food, and have light at night. It also gave us the capability to burn down our houses.
So, there is no technology that has only upside. In fact, I’d argue that the more potential upside that any new technology has, the more it can amplify what we do, by definition, it is just an amplifier. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s not immoral, it’s amoral. It’s an amplifier. It can help us do more good better; it can help people with nefarious goals do more bad, better.
And we need to deal with that. I think one way we deal with that is when we start teaching kids at an ever-earlier age about the power of technology, they also have to be taught not to use it as a weapon but to use it as a tool and not to simply do what you can do with technology, but to focus our efforts and do what we should with technology. And to kids that are lucky enough, that have the privilege to have access to advanced technologies, they should understand that with every privilege comes a responsibility.
I know in this country everybody runs around, saying “I’ve got my rights because of the Bill of Rights.” Well, maybe the founding fathers should have put right next to the Bill of Rights, the bill of responsibilities. Those people with capability need to use it wisely and prudently and help the rest.
So to those people that now claim the next big evolution in technology, which isn’t about amplifying muscles, it’s amplifying brains, it is going to be terrifying. I’m sure they were terrified by the locomotive, by the sewing machine. I think smart people have to recognize that there’s always risk when things change, and we need to continue to make sure that the changes net us all out to be in a better place, and we use those changes responsibly.
And then the second concern people have, and I think it’s one you share as well, is, do people have the education to do the jobs of the future? Talk a little bit about that, and what you’re doing in that regard.
So, now you hit one where I think there is a problem, but again, in any rapidly changing environment, where you displace the status quo, some people fall out of the bottom. I think we now have the changes happening not at what was typically the worker base in most industries, but these are changes that affect everything. And what are called white collared jobs or professional jobs are going to be potentially hugely impacted, and for some people in a negative way by ‘artificial intelligence’ because it was those white collar or professional jobs that required a lot of sophisticated thinking that now might be displaced by programs that can get to better results more quickly than the manual process of thinking was capable of doing, even a decade ago.
So I started this program called FIRST, for inspiration and recognition of Science and Technology, a few decades ago recognizing that the jobs of the future are going to need kids that have a much more sophisticated skill set as they get through even their junior high school and high school years to be ready for these career options. And the rate of change in the skill sets that will be necessary to have really interesting, exciting career opportunities over the next decade or two, are going to require a major change in our education system. Keeping kids lined up in rows, having them memorize facts that used to be important, because if you didn’t know it, where were you going to find it? [is an obsolete approach].
Now, every kid in the country is carrying around on his or her belt every fact known to man, in a very well-organized way to find those facts. So, education should no longer be giving you the disciplines and the toolsets that you used to need to go become a factory worker, learn how to follow instructions, learn how to do the same repetitive thing over and over again.
Education has to now be a much more sophisticated process of giving kids the toolsets and the understanding of how, for instance, to use ‘artificial intelligence,’ how to leverage the fact that information is now virtually free and what they need is to learn how to be systems innovators that add innovative ways for taking all this information and creating new opportunities to solve old problems. And that’s what I tried to do in the FIRST community and that’s what I think schools need to quickly embrace so that school, as we knew it, can remain relevant to kids and it could be worth them spending so much of their life in these locations.
Well put a little flesh on the bones. How would you do schools?
Well, one of the things I’ve urged every school in this country to do, is incorporate a FIRST program. I mean, we’ve known now for decades that kids will sit in class and for 45 minutes once a week do phonics or spelling, but then every day during the season, every day after school, for three hours they practice [sports], whether it’s the football season, or the baseball season, or the basketball season, or soccer.
Kids, in a free country, you get the best of what you celebrate, and we have great programs that turn kids into great athletes, because they put more time and effort and passion into that than they do in ‘academic’ stuff. We justify all of that, by the way, putting so much into our physical school environment, whether it’s the parquet floors on the basketball court or the side lawns for the football and baseball. We justify sports even though kids run the risk of being physically hurt. We justify it, almost exclusively by saying it’s critical that kids at an early age learn teamwork, and learn how to work together, compete in a positive way. Well, really, if teamwork is all that important, why when they do it in the classroom, do we still call it cheating?
So I said look, we have a model that works, that gets kids inspired. It’s called sports. What if we could take that kind of model, that kind of essentially…a program that’s an interactive project base like building a sports team, what if we could take that model, but make the content not bouncing a ball or kicking a ball or throwing. What if we could make the content developing the muscle hanging between their ears? What if we could create an opportunity within the school environment where kids could all participate in something where unlike in the other sport, every kid on a first team could turn pro.
There simply aren’t millions of jobs in the NBA, the NFL or Hollywood. There are millions of not just jobs, but there are millions of career opportunities to create whole new industries that you and I haven’t even conceived of yet, that will be created by, and available to the next generation of kids that understand technology, that understand how to work together, that understand how to stand on the shoulders of the giants that have delivered, e.g., microprocessors that have essentially now made computation free and memory is essentially free, and the speed and the power of these devices have now turned them all into commodities.
We need kids that know how to leverage those commodities to solve the world’s problems, to create the new industries, and I think schools should be giving kids the toolset and the environment to do that, and I think rather than line them up with twenty, or thirty year old text books where science to them is putting pins in a frog, I think FIRST has the real potential to change the environment and the culture in schools to turn them into places where kids are excited to participate, and come away with opportunities to create careers that they wouldn’t have imagined without FIRST.
So, take a step back just for the readers who may not be familiar with it. Describe what FIRST is.
FIRST, well the name stands for, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. Notice the word ‘education’ isn’t in there. The same way as the word ‘education’ isn’t in little league baseball. I said look, let’s create an institution that we can offer to schools, that will give kids kits and parts, cutting edge technologies, almost exclusively donated by massive, fantastic corporate supporters we have across the country, across every industry, to give kids access to the most cutting-edge technologies, and software development tools. Let them take those kits or parts into their school and in a very exciting competitive short intense season, like any other sporting season, the schools will have these FIRST kits working between the kids, the teachers, the parents and the magic is the outside mentors from my 3700 corporate sponsors, pretty much every high tech company in this country and in the world now, embraces us because they need these kids more than these kids need them. So, it’s a win, win, win for everybody.
The kids win, the teachers win, the parents win, the companies win, but basically FIRST is a program that brings together all of these different entities and says, we’re going to not give you quizzes and tests, but we’re going to give you this aspirational, extracurricular activity during which you learn how to do programming, how do you do electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, systems, controls, team work, build your company, build your little team, get it out there,…
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