Translator: Amanda Chu
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So, I want to tell you about a big idea
that I came across a little while ago,
that I can't stop thinking about,
and it's kind of a big idea
that's wonderful -
it's also slightly scary.
And I'm kind of not quite sure
where this big idea is going to take us,
but I think it's pretty important.
The other thing that's scary 
is that I'm going to finish my talk
with a little bit of singing
towards the end of this,
(Laughter)
so that's really
pretty frightening actually.
(Laughter)
So I was born in a pretty scary place
at a pretty scary time.
I was born in West Belfast,
the Shankill Road, in 1968.
And it was a scary time
because it was the start
of about a 30-year conflict
between Protestants and Catholics
about what would happen
with the north of Ireland,
whether it'd be British
or whether it'd be Irish.
Here's the mural from West Belfast
that kind of represents that conflict.
You can see that, actually,
the street's been renamed "RPG Avenue,"
which is "Rocket-Propelled
Grenade Avenue,"
and you can see that the Irish had this
and the British changed it,
that says "Made in Britain."
It was pretty bad time, pretty scary time,
when I was growing up.
Over that 30-year conflict,
we lost about 3,000 people
to bombs and guns
and different sorts of violence,
and that's what I grew up with.
When I was five or six,
I remember starting to think
this is what the world is really like.
The world is a scary place;
the world is a nasty place.
I remember my grandfather died
when I was six,
and I remember going to see
his body at the funeral
and starting to realize
what the world was really like.
And then sometimes
a small thing happens in your life;
someone does a small thing
that turns into a big thing later on.
My grandmother, when I was 9,
used to bring me comic books every week.
Now, she used to bring me
regular comic books.
And one week she brought me
this comic book,
and I don't know why she brought it.
I'd like to think she kind of
could see the future
and she knew
what she was doing to me.
I suspect it was
because there was the free gift
on the front of the comic book.
(Laughter)
And this is "2000 A.D.," issue No. 1.
It says, "Dateline: Feb 1977,"
so I know exactly where I was
when I saw this comic.
And it still gives me shivers actually
because for British science fiction,
this was a landmark,
this was an enormous publication.
"2000 A.D." is still running today.
It's where Judge Dredd came from;
it's where Alan Moore got a start.
And there were lots of stories,
and it's actually that
the new Dan Dare was in that comic.
And there was a lot of stuff about robots,
time travel, and science fiction,
that's sparked an interest
in science fiction
that's still with me today
and has never left me.
In fact, as I grew up,
I was a voracious reader.
I read so many books
my parents couldn't keep up
with the Doctor Who
and all sorts of things.
And I got into the more serious
science fiction as I got older.
So here's Philip K. Dick,
who's one of my favorite authors,
and this is the book that would later
become the movie "Blade Runner."
And this is a book
really about what it is to be human,
what it is to be real.
It's called "Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep?"
Of course I realized as I got older
that you have to grow up and get a job.
And I decided to study hard;
I did well at school.
And I went to Queen's University, Belfast,
and I studied medicine,
and I graduated 1993.
This is my class.
If you look very, very carefully,
I'm the guy in the very loud
Hawaiian shirt,
(Laughter)
right there,
so that's the kind of guy I was
when I was 25, I suppose.
I think, for me, the 1990s
was a decade of very good decisions
because I got married as well.
This is me and my wife.
We got married - and I always forget,
was it '96 or '97?
I forget my own wedding anniversary.
(Laughter)
I decided to become a surgeon.
And this is a picture of me
in the Royal Alexandra Hospital.
This is operating room number two,
and I was operating there
on Monday and Thursday this week.
Like this week, like on Thursday,
I had somebody on that very
operating table doing an operation.
This is what my life is like
at the moment,
and I have to say I have a very cool life.
I'm very grateful for the life
that I have here in Edmonton.
I get to use all sorts of crazy tools
and scalpels and guns and staplers
and all sorts of things,
but I also get to work
with fantastic medical students
and fantastic patients as well.
Having said that, it's not all fun
because there is some sadness
and there's some seriousness
to being a surgeon.
I deal with a lot of trauma.
I deal with people
who have come into the hospital -
it's the Royal Alexander,
it's on the north side,
not the south side of the river -
(Laughter)
and so, I see a lot of people
who get stabbed and who get shot
and who get hurt in car accidents.
And I also have a lot of patients
who have problems with cancer;
I do a lot of work with colon cancer
and rectal cancer as well.
So I guess if I'm an expert
in anything at the moment,
I'm an expert in the body,
and I'm an expert
not just in the body itself
but how fragile it is
and how careful we have to be with it
and if you're not careful with it
or you're just unlucky enough
to be hit by a bus on the way home,
you're gone like that.
You know, we're fragile.
And we don't like heat.
We don't like pressure.
We don't like radiation.
And everybody here has a body.
Everybody knows
what it's like to be embodied
and located in a body.
You get one when you're born,
and you use it
for a variable period of time -
that time could be
very short or very long -
and then you're gone.
You don't get a second chance;
you can never take it back to the maker;
you can never have the battery replaced.
And if you live long enough,
you run into certain problems with bodies,
like they start to kind of get big,
and they don't do what you want,
and you wish you could be
lighter and eat less,
but your body seems
to kind of let you down.
Or you get cancer.
Your body starts to grow,
and it starts to kind of eat you,
and nasty things happen to you -
and then ultimately, of course,
even if you live the longest in the world,
even if you live that long,
you're still going to die.
As Jim Morrison would say,
"No one here gets out alive."
Everybody here is looking at being
a corpse at some point, unfortunately.
And if you look at it
from a philosophical point of view,
in fact, we're putting all
of our quite fragile philosophical eggs
in one basket, in that body,
which we can lose it at any moment.
And in fact, we might
like to stick around for a long time,
but in fact, our body very much
has a shelf limit.
It has a shelf life,
and it's not going to last forever;
it's going to run out at some point.
So that's what it's like to be embodied;
that's what it's like to be in bodies,
and we're all experts at having a body.
So, I'd like to say, "But …
what if it didn't have to be that way?"
What if there was another way
to look at bodies?
And what if there's something coming
that might change
all of this doom and gloom
I just talked about being in a body?
And I guess it must be
three or four years ago
when I came across this book
my wife got me for Christmas
by a thinker called Ray Kurzweil,
called "The singularity is near,"
and the subtitle at the top
is "When humans transcend biology."
I've read this one.
I've read the one that came before that,
"The age of spiritual machines,"
by Kurtzweil,
and it talks about
this Kant-capped concept
called "the singularity,"
which is actually a concept from physics,
about a singularity event,
like passing through
a wormhole or a black hole
and being unable to move
from one side to the other,
and being two separate sides of reality.
Here's a definition from an article
in The Guardian newspaper.
It's "the moment when technological change
becomes so rapid and profound,
it represents a rupture
in the fabric of human history."
So technology changes so much
that we start to change,
our history starts to change
very, very rapidly.
If you look at computers
over the last 50 or 60 years -
the blue line is super computers,
the green line is desktop computers,
and the red line on the right is mobile,
like phone devices,
and you're seeing this is
a logarithmic scale, an exponential scale,
on the y-axis here,
and then time is on the x-axis -
computers are getting faster and faster.
Even that logarithmic line
is not actually straight;
it's actually curved on a log scale.
And we're talking about, you know,
levels of an insect,
a mouse, a human, and then all humans.
And we're looking at a period,
perhaps sometime between 2020 and 2040,
where computers will have
the same processing power
as the human brain.
And that's quite a scary thing;
you're saying maybe a computer
will be able to simulate
or do all the things
that your brain currently does.
In fact, Kurtzweil's latest book is called
"How to create a mind:
the secret of human thought revealed,"
where he was starting to say
if we were to build the mind
in the computer,
this is what it might look like.
And really, we're talking
about the inflection point of the curve,
where there's advancement on the y-axis
and time on the x-axis,
and the singularity is where the curve
starts to get really crazy
and go up almost straight in the air.
So if you apply this idea
of the singularity
and technology advancing so fast,
what might that mean when we apply it
to the body and to biology?
What might it mean
to transcend our biology?
And I'm going to look
at five different ways
we could imagine that.
The first way -
and we're doing this already -
we can augment the things
that we currently have.
We can look at prosthesis.
This is Oscar Pistorius -
there's our "Blade Runner"
again, obviously -
and he's running on his blades.
We can take the deficiencies
we have of the human body
and build our way,
engineer our way around them
to make it better.
That's the first one: augmentation.
Secondly - and it's getting
more complicated now -
we can learn to control the body.
This is the picture
from Wired magazine a few years ago,
and if you look carefully,
it's a medicine cabinet,
and it says, "TumorEx 30MG.
Take one tablet by mouth
3x daily for the treatment of lung cancer.
Tumor should disappear by Day 20."
And that's what it would be like
if we actually understood
how cancer works,
if we got a real molecular handle on it
and could control the body
and turn things off
when they start to go wrong.
The third option is backing things up.
So if all of your important
functions are in your brain
and you've got a computer
that can simulate brain function,
then why not back yourself up?
Why not make a copy
of yourself every morning?
And this is a cover from Time magazine,
and they're talking about perhaps
this happening in 2045.
So in the morning, you wake up
and you back yourself up;
it doesn't matter
what happens later that day.
You get killed in a bus crash;
you just go back
and you back yourself up later on
onto some other substrate.
And that brings me on to number four,
which is if we're able
to take brain function out of body
and have ourselves backed up,
what if we considered
abandoning bodies completely,
what if we considered
going to something else
and running on some other substrate?
That's the fourth way
the singularity could possibly occur.
In the last way - it's where
it'd get really trippy -
which is transcending.
And Kurtzweil talks
about this in his book.
He talks about the ultimate goal
of the human race:
civilization itself being to saturate
the local space-time continuum
with consciousness.
In fact, this is the hardest part
of the book for me
because I don't quite understand
what he's talking about.
He talks about actually existing
outside the physical reality,
existing in the space-time continuum,
at a quantum level,
so it is kind of trippy -
even I'm tripped out with it.
(Laughter)
So I guess I want you
to get thinking about:
"What would it mean
if we move to something
that was better than biology,
something that, like your iPhone,
was reliable and upgradable -
you get a new version
when you're bored with the old one,
with a low rate of breakdown
and a simple backup function?
And how would that change your life?"
Maybe it's like Terminator 2,
and it'll be our Judgment Day,
where robots would take over
or we'll all be robots,
and it would be very strange.
Or maybe it will be like
what Kurzweil talks about,
about spiritual machines;
maybe we're going to merge with machines
and become something
called posthuman or transhuman
or something that actually
is the next evolutionary step
of the human race.
To come back to some
of the science fiction I read
when I was a teenager,
if you want a good reference,
look up this one,
"Greg Bear, Blood Music."
It's kind of a biological singularity,
where a virus spreads
through the human race
and we all become
one organism, eventually.
As I said, some of these ideas
are kind of freaky and trippy.
(Laughter)
It does leave you with some
interesting questions, though,
about why you might have to die
or what maybe you would do
if you didn't have to die.
So let's say - and this happens
to people all the time -
you're diagnosed with something
that's rapidly advancing and incurable
and no one can help you,
and your doctor says,
"I would like to upload you
into a new body
which we can grow from your own DNA -"
Yeah, "I'd like to upload you
to a new body with your own DNA,
and I guarantee
I will be able to replicate
80% of your consciousness."
Would you take that deal?
Is 80% of what you are today
better than 0%, when you're dead?
You have to decide what you want to do
when that question comes
because that question might come.
The other question
is kind of in the longer scale,
back to that cosmic galactic scale,
which is "What would you do
with your time if you didn't have to die?"
What would you do
with the next 10,000 years?
How would we as a species
react to that?
Would we go off planet?
What would it be that we would actually do
if you didn't have to die?
And I was born in 1968,
so in 2048, I'll be 80 years old.
So probably this isn't
going to happen for me,
but there may be some people
in the room here,
who don't die, potentially,
who end up backing themselves up
or moving to a different
substrate in the future,
which is quite a scary prospect.
The singularity has all sorts of problems,
and there're different questions
about what's going to happen
or if it's going to come.
But I think your guarantee for the future
is that whatever happens
as technology advances,
it is going to be very interesting.
So I promised you a little song.
So, I'd like to close with the words
of Jonathan Coulton,
from a song called "The future soon,"
one of my favorite song
to do with the future.
He says,
♪ Cause it's gonna be the future soon ♪
♪ And I won't always be this way ♪
♪ When the things that make me weak
and strange get engineered away ♪
♪ It's gonna be the future soon ♪
♪ I've never seen it quite so clear ♪
♪ And when my heart is breaking ♪
♪ I can close my eyes
and it's already here. ♪
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheers)
