How Exponential Technologies Will Impact Disabilities

How Exponential Technologies Will Impact Disabilities

Braille MonitorNovember 2016

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How Exponential Technologies Will Impact Disabilities
by Ray Kurzweil
From the Editor: Sometimes the struggle the blind have in dealing with technological evolution can be maddening. Often we know that something better is to come: devices that are more intuitive, easier to use, and cost less. But at times that message is dwarfed by the need to live in the here and now, to figure out how to do assignments today, how to find and buy household equipment we can use. So it is that each year a man who can see a bit further than we can tells us about the promises that wait just around the corner and reminds us how important our role is in seeing that we can use it.

Ray Kurzweil is currently the vice president of development at Google, and his long list of accomplishments, including the development of the KNFB Reader, is well known to Federationists. Here is what he said to the 2016 National Convention:
I don't think I've had a musical introduction before. It's an honor to be back with all of you: with President Riccobono, Jim Gashel, Mrs. Jernigan, and all of my other friends here.

How many of you came to your first National Federation of the Blind convention in 1975 or earlier, raise your hand. Well, I see a few hands here at the front table. But this is my forty-second convention, and it continues to be a highlight of my year.

I want to share a few reflections with you. I just came from an onstage dialog with Mitt Romney—we tried to avoid talking about politics, but that was hard to do in that case, and I'll try again to avoid politics—but there's one point I made which I think is relevant to this gathering. If we look at the intensity of the current presidential election, there seems to be a sentiment on the right and on the left that things are getting worse in the world. I've noticed this for a while. I travel around the world, talk to people, and people think the world is getting worse, which is not the case. Now there's still a lot of problems and a lot of suffering, but by every measure the world is getting much better. The problem is that our information about what's wrong with the world is getting exponentially better. A century ago there could be a battle that wiped out the next village, and you'd never hear about it. Now an incident halfway around the world—we not only hear about it, we viscerally experience it. That's actually a good thing because it motivates us to fix the problems in the world, but it gives people the wrong impression. The way they try to figure out if the world is getting better or worse is how often do they hear about some outrage, and how often do they hear about things getting better.

It's actually part of our evolutionary heritage that we're very attuned to problems, because, if you were aware of potential problems, that was good for survival. We don't really take notice of things that are getting better, but I'll mention just a few of the things that are getting better, and then I'll come to my experience with the National Federation of the Blind, where things are definitely getting better.

Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature documents an exponential decline in violence. I point out to people that this is the least violent period in human history, and people say, "What are you, crazy? Don't you pay attention to the news? There were just violent incidents yesterday and the day before that and so forth."

Well your chance of actually being killed in either interpersonal violence or state-sponsored violence is hundreds of times less than it was a few centuries ago when there was extreme scarcity of resources and disputes were settled violently. This is the most prosperous time in human history. The World Bank reported that poverty in Asia has been cut by 90 percent over the last fifteen years, and all societies, including Africa and South America, are making substantial economic gains.

This is by far the most informative period. I remember that I saved up for years from my paper route as a teenager to buy an Encyclopedia Britannica for $1,000, which was a lot of money to a teenager in the early 1960s. Today you get a far better encyclopedia for free, and this is one of the literally millions of resources we have at our fingertips that really don't cost us anything.

Economic statistics factor out the progress we're making. A kid in Africa who pays $30 for her smart phone: that counts as $30 of economic activity, despite the fact that it's a trillion dollars of computation, communication, and information technology circa 1968. We're actually doubling the value of information technology every year for the same price, but that's factored out of the economic statistics.

Together with these exponential gains in technology, we're also seeing gradual progress in human understanding, freedom, liberty, equality, recognition of equal rights. My family's been very involved in these movements. It goes back to the nineteenth century. My mother's mother's mother started the first school in Europe that provided higher education for girls. This was the Stern Schule in 1868 in Vienna. If you were lucky enough as a girl to get an education at all in 1868 Europe, it went through ninth grade; this went through fourteenth grade, from kindergarten all through high school and the first two years of college. She went around Europe lecturing on the importance of girls' education, and that was very controversial. People did not understand: "What's the point of educating a girl?" That was a difficult question to answer, but she answered it, and then her daughter became the first woman in Europe to get a PhD in chemistry and went around Europe lecturing on chemistry and on girls' education and took over the school. Between the two of them they ran it for seventy years and then fled Hitler in 1938.

I came along in 1948 and in the 1950s went with my mother to civil rights marches in Washington and the South. I was actually at several events—marches—lead by Dr. Martin Luther King, and I felt fortunate that I could live in a period with such a great leader and to actually directly experience such inspiring oratory. I felt the same way in 1975 coming to my first National Federation of the Blind convention to hear the equally inspiring oratory of Dr. Kenneth Jernigan [applause]. I really felt the same way—that I was fortunate to be able to experience the inspirational leadership of these two great leaders.

That brings me to this theme of the world getting better, but not reaching perfection. I just heard Amy's [Buresh] inspiring story. I remember when I came to the NFB in 1975 that people were warning me, "Are you sure you want to get involved with this organization? They're really quite a radical organization." I thought to myself, gee, that's a good thing. I'd gone to lots of other organizations with my technology for reading for the blind, and they all were very friendly and wished me well. It was actually Dr. Jernigan and the NFB that provided the resources—including eight blind scientists and engineers that worked very closely with us under the leadership of Mike Hingson, and we would not have succeeded without the National Federation of the Blind [applause].

Things are certainly far better for blind people. Blind people are now reaching the top levels of success in every field; that was really much more limited when I became involved with this organization in 1975. Tremendous progress has been made in the human realm of equal rights and tolerance and equality, but, like everything else, we haven't reached perfection. You can see from Amy's litany—I'm sure we'll hear from Mr. Riccobono's inspiring talk tonight—that there's still a lot of progress to be made, still a lot of intolerance and lack of understanding. But the world has come a long way in terms of understanding the ability of all people to contribute.

Remember that we have the exponential gains of technology. Very briefly, the first reading machine cost $50,000, but we brought it down quickly to $20,000. Now we have a reading machine for $20, and it's far better than the one back then for $20,000. That comes from the exponential gains of information technology. We basically double price performance every year in every type of information technology. We put some of that improved price performance into price, so prices come down by a factor of one thousand in this field for example, while at the same time performance goes up.

People say, "Okay, well that's true of that sort of strange area of the economy having to do with devices and electronics and information, but you can't eat information technology, you can't build a house with information technology." All of that's going to change as well. We're applying information technology to medicine, understanding the information processes underlying biology, so we'll have great advances in our health. This is actually now starting to influence clinical practice. We're going to see a great revolution in improving our health over the next decade. We're developing three-dimensional printing, so we're going to be able to print out the things we need, including food and clothing. In fact, the first house to be snapped together in a couple of days was recently put together in Asia with little modules snapped together like LEGO bricks printed out by a 3-D printer. That was an experiment, but that's the kind of thing we're going to see in the 2020s.

This revolution of price performance is going to transform everything we care about. But we still need human understanding, first of all to apply these advances so they really benefit people. The Kurzweil Reading Machine would not have really succeeded if we hadn't worked very closely—not just getting general advice but working intimately with the blind engineers and scientists of the National Federation of the Blind, and that's continued to be a collaboration of forty-two years, which is really the aspect of my career that I'm most proud of [applause].

We're going to have some fantastic capabilities emerging over the decades ahead. We'll be able to transmit information directly from our brains and into our brains. How should we apply that to people who are visually impaired? It's a very good thing that we have the National Federation of the Blind to guide us in that endeavor.
So this has been the first forty-two years of my relationship; I look forward to the next forty-two years, and we'll continue with our exponential progress both in technology and in human understanding. Thank you very much.

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