ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this latestteaching session on the course of technology and the future of medicine. there is a meetingin new orleans in mid-july that a number of former students from this course are goingto with me. we're giving, i think, nine presentations. three are in this young researcher's, i mean,six are in the young researcher's forum, where they get a ten minute presentation. thosepresentations can have no senior author. they're student authors only and then there'll bethree other presentations there of a more usual sort. and suddenly my name and faceand everything was sort of all over the meeting. when you go to the website for the meeting,and i don't know quite how that happened, but i have this fantasy that the people fromthis course who are going to that meeting
are basically taking over the meeting. andwe're going to have it be the first meeting that seriously discusses such things as regenerativemedicine pathology. what is that? tissue engineering pathology. it has never been described atany meeting. it's a logical next step and a bunch of other things like that. the studentsare as young as 22 and it will be interesting to see how this all comes off. the other thingis the flipped teaching session on march 24th. that's more than two months away, but jasonwertheim...i told him what marvellous students we have in this course, so he's really expectingthis session to be good. so i thought you might want him whatever way makes sense toyou to use those two months to kind of prepare. if you already know a lot about regenerativemedicine and creating new organs from stem
cells, then you might not need to do muchreading, but if you don't know much about that, you might want to prepare. and the pdfthat i sent you is an article that he mentioned of me at the same time that he accepted theidea of teaching in this course by skype. so it's a very simplistic article. like alot of you don't know anything about pathology, really. and that article, cells are eitherthere or they're not. you'd look at areas of an organ that's supposed to have a continuouspattern of cells and in certain circumstances, a lot of the cells have simply missing. andi think it's the easiest kind of pathologic process to possibly, you know, imagine, asa kind of starting point. so just the absence of cells that are usually there. okay, sothis teaching session today, osmar zaiane
is doing the main teaching and it's the beginningof a series of three lectures about artificial intelligence. the objectives are to introduceyou to the basic elements of ai, machine learning and data mining, to introduce you to basicconcepts of the influence of ai on the exponential future, including the concept of unfriendlyai and the technological singularity. you've heard that before. to provide you with concreteexamples of ai in everyday life and in medicine. now you may have walked into this room thinkingthis is just another lecture in the course, but that is not the case, because it is quitepossible that ai represents the ultimate existential risk, that it's more likely that unfriendlyai would do in our human race than any other risk out there. that's what stephen hawkingthinks. a number of other...elon musk and
other bright people are extremely worriedthat dr. zaiane's subject is going to mean the end of mankind. so if that's true, thisis sort of like way more important than the other lectures so far in this course. thetechnological singularity is crucially dependent on ai developments. ai is very important tothe singularity, but that does not mean that all ai researchers believe in the concept.it does not naturally follow, so you can find a whole spectrum of people working in ai whodon't really believe that there will be such a thing to those who believe in it very strongly.some believe that it will occur very soon, others that it will take a really long time,like over 100 years. you can read about ai in books. but the five or ten minutes thatyou spent playing with the sony aibo robotic
dog before class, i think give you a sortof a tangible, you know, feeling of maybe what ai is really like. and it's amazing howmuch that dog can do when you figure that the last production run was 10 years ago.so think of what sony could have done with this product if they kept on going. this presencein the course is a rather popular part of the course. in previous years, these are thevarious features that that dog has. it's wifi compatible. it can be your, you know, alarmclock. people can send you messages through the dog. there are all sorts of things youprobably don't want as features but that the dog can do for you. and its conversation withyou is never quite the same. it has a remarkable vocabulary and it never says anything unkind.it tells you that it loves you. it tells you...it
asks you if you're tired at the end of theday. all the things that a good friend should do, that dog does. and what about the sonyaibo robotic dog in canada? well, it seems not to be a canadian thing. in that i purchasedthe first aibo here, but as i tried to purchase the other models, they were no longer soldhere. but they were very popular amongst ai researchers like dr. zaiane, and they usedthem for many things, but that includes robo-soccer. and you would think, robo-soccer, that theyrun around on their paws. but that's not true, they run around on their elbows, so it's avery interesting kind of locomotion. and the aibo can keep going forever, as long as youkeep the charging station plugged in so it can automatically sense when its voltage islow, seek out the charging station, sort of
sleep on the charging station as it rechargesand then when it's fully charged, get back off and so on. just like you. so it knowswhen it needs to go to bed and it knows when it needs to get up and all that sort of thing.it can keep going forever. it was much less interesting, the aibo in canada, than in theus, and the only way i got this one, you wouldn't believe that i did this, but i flew to a hotelin the u.s., simply for the purpose of getting a sony aibo robotic dog, waited until thepackage arrived and then flew back home. and because sony has these buying around rules,where if you're in canada, you can't buy from sony u.s. and vice versa, that was the onlyway to get it. and it arrived with all sorts of stickers, "do not forward. if the recipientis not present, send it back to sony." so
anyway, that's how i got that dog. and whois it for? this is not for kids. it's not for a child. the ears and tail, as you'vealready seen, come off within seconds, so in the hands of a child, this is completelyimpractical. it looks really stupid without the ears and tail. so it's for you. it's foryoung adults. specifically for female young adults, for affluent young adults, to a certainextent, for asian young female. so the main market in the u.s. and japan was affluentyoung women. even the men who bought them tended to buy them for the women in theirlives. asia will lead the way in the development of robots for consumers. as you probably know,robotics in the u.s. is heavily organized around the military, saving wounded soldiersin battle with all sorts of clamshell-like
robots and stuff like that, whereas in asiathere's a strong orientation around useful robots in the home and care of the elderly.so the first robots that really be...enter your life and are practical and helpful toyou will probably have come from asia. and it's good not to get confused. the classicai movie "blade runner", is part of everybody's consciousness in this area. the replicantsin that movie were not silicon based. they were the result of genetic engineering. theywere biology based, flesh and blood beings, not silicon and circuit boards. whereas therobots in the movie "a.i." were like this dog. they are silicon based. okay. that'sit. so now dr. zaiane will get set up and present the first of his three lectures.
