I love Ken Jennings. When people say negative things about his personality, or that he is stuck up, etc I wish they would see something like this which shows his personality and his dry sense of humor- he is much like many of us, except smarter than me!
There are people who learn a lot so that they can feel superior. And there are people who learn a lot because they want to share what they know. Ken Jennings is the sort of person who started as the first type, and learned to become the second type through careful self-analysis. Truly someone worth emulating.
I rarely feel this way after hearing someone talk, but it's like he spoke my mind. I've always strived to achieve as much knowledge as possible in a variety of fields. One of my many childhood memories was going into a place and asking questions about things on the desks or walls. I've always been called inquisitive by my elders. I try to encourage others to read and learn more rather than relying solely on their smart phones and/or computers. It's almost like they're disconnected from learning altogether. They'll look up a fact when it's needed but quickly forget about it once it's learned. I think it will cause problems, because knowledge is more than just a collection of facts; it's the ability to quickly access, process, and engage these facts to avoid a catastrophe. This will always be valuable skill to have and it can only be had if you practice using it. If you don't, like Ken said, you might atrophy parts of the brain that can only result is less functionality.
Asimov was a genius who other science fiction writers called when they had a science question. Asimov said he had only met two people whose intellect surpassed his own - Carl Sagan and computer scientist, Marvin Minsky.
It is sad. Imagine what this planet could be if humans were wise....or at least if the powerful humans were wise. One could only imagine the world it would be possible to create.
I found this a fascinating video, in that Ken invokes points from many facets of humanity in order to whet the listeners' appetites for not simply memorizing, but understanding and spreading trivia.
I grew up watching Jeopardy every single day. I saw your winning streak when I was 10 years old; You're my hero. I saw you go up against Watson. You're a cool dude. Thank you. Also, Arby's should put you in a commercial for that "I'd go play Jeopardy for Arby's coupons!" thing lol
One smart 10 year old saved 100 people. What would have happened if everyone had a computer personal assistant that could put things together as well as Watson? Nearly everyone would have been warned instead of just 100 out of over 5000 in Thailand.
@@palimdragonmaster3k it could have sent out an alert on your device that one was coming, so everyone who easily has their device within earshot would know it was coming before it happened. I get alerts on my phone for tornadoes, so I'm sure the same could be done today for tsunamis if it applied its power to analyzing current conditions, sending out alerts to those within the region, using GPS to track them.
@@palimdragonmaster3k Just FYI japan has an earthquake early warning system that picks up early patterns of earthquakes and tsunamis strike and sends nationwide alerts to brace for impact. It has saved many lives, and was the reason the devastating 2011 earthquake didn't have a larger toll. So yes, it makes sense to boot up Watson to see what we don't notice because patterns are right hidden within the data - and computers are unrivalled in finding patterns.
@@palimdragonmaster3k lol, tsunamis are not caused by weather (another fact that proves knowledge is power, aka the power to know not to try to analyze weather patterns for a tsunami LOL)
Actually there are many implications of "Moore's Law" and one of them is that the time it takes for computers to get faster actually accelerates itself, and today information technologies are actually doubling in power every 11 month which is pretty fantastic. (I would like to correct my mistake in a previous comment, a portion of matter smaller then a grain of sand has the potential computing power a quintillion times more powerful then the human brain not a quadrillion)
Glad I found this. Very informative piece and it really helps bind quite a few other videos I've seen discussing the implications of this kind of tech on the economy. Coldfusion approached it as an engineering marvel and CGP Grey's more economical approach was decidedly more negative.
I put this into action today hahaha. I watched this talk a few years back, and I brought it up in a reddit comment today. I was able to recall the story of the little girl and I found this talk again and linked it. so yeah I thought that was kinda meta hahahaha
oh dear.. i think that was his point.. what i got from his speech is exactly that just because we think that computers are Not evil(in a poetic sense), makes us vulnerable to be over dependent on them, easing and fueling our laziness, thereby ending up being counter productive to us.. in this speech i adored his humbleness and humor!
It's possible that Ken Jennings could be the next host of Jeopardy. Nobody could replace Alex, though, and whoever becomes the next host is likely going to be the first one to admit that. One argument I hear against Jennings being the replacement is that he is smug. Another is that he is boring. Both arguments can be debunked using this video alone.
Jeopardy fame Ken Jennings gives an inspiring talk about how losing human touch due to the advancement of technology, particularly the impact of Artificial Intelligence. To put it simply, he says stay hungry, stay foolish and learn everyday without heavily relying on your machines. A wonderful point. Highly recommended.
Obsolete? Sure, I understand this discussion about technology doing everything more efficiently than human beings and eventually replacing human labor. But Ken Jennings just WON the Jeopardy! the greatest of all time tournament against James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter! He's officially the greatest Jeopardy! player of all time! There's nothing obsolete about him.
You could not have missed the point of this video any harder if you tried. It's like you just read the title. Plus, if Watson were in the GOAT tournament he would've destroyed all of them. It killed Brad and Ken almost 10 years ago, it would be even worse today.
There is not enough room to post to have conversations like this. I am leaving out a lot of what I want to post. Personally I believe art comes from people of all persuasions. I do not think there are wholly happy people. We have all been sad, angry, joyful, afraid etc. What makes art that I like is people who have the courage to honestly express themselves about things most of us keep private or are afraid to talk about.
For some reason he sees humans being able to access more knowledge then we have ever been able to access in all of human history as a problem. I personally think that is a great thing.
well you already see it today, people have all this information but with this information comes lots of lies and conspiracy theories that can rapidly lead people to be radicalized and become irrational like the men and women who stormed the usa capitol. and like he says, having all of this information means that when we need to know something, we can just google it and then forget, decreasing the value of knowledge.
Ken Jennings makes a good point on technology...Since that 2011 tournament against Watson, computing technology has gotten almost twice as fast at about half the size on the processors... Eight years later, we are now dealing with the likes of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, all in a manner of speaking, rough AI systems, all with the use of their own supercomputing server mainframes...
Totally agree. I don't believe the solution is only on the crop yield when over a quarter of the food that is produced is wasted as some point in the chain.
People seem to be unaware of the fact that we are slowly becoming one with our devices and with technology as a whole. It is not as is most oftenly depicted in sci-fi films where man and machine will be two separate entities, but rather, we are steadily merging with them. So it's not that we will inevitably rely totally on our technology, it's that inevitably we and technology will become one entity.
The two worlds presented at the end really are a false dichotomy. The two different worlds are represented as being mutually exclusive but their characteristics certainly aren't.
It should be noted that, if you need to look something up repeatedly (e.g. code syntax if you're a computer programmer), you will probably end up memorizing it to speed up your work. However, for something you only want to know once as a curiosity, Google is fine.
This is more a conversation about retention and less about how the information is found. Computers aren't bad, it's our ability to retain the knowledge we gain through technology. You could make the same arguments against frequent visits to the library.
Now, the fact that you watched the entire thing speaks to the idea that you are in fact a seeker of knowledge. The people that Ken Jennings is concerned about are the people that don't pursue knowledge, i.e. the high school teenager that says that math is crap and why do I need to know anything if I can just look it up. He never said that computers are evil. He just said that we aren't responsible enough to recognize their proper usage. We would rather unburden ourselves of all knowledge.
This is a perfect analogy for the future, a computer surpassed what Ken Jennings does best. In time technology will surpass what we are best at, and replace jobs with machines.
That is a good question. There have been several people that have claimed that a significant amount of these things that cost so much will be like the refrigerators or microwaves of their day. Vary expensive to start out but decreasing in price and increasing in availability to a point where it is virtually everywhere. Others have said that we need to redo our economic model.
He should have touched on the issue of a fact being largely pointless without a framework of understanding what that fact means and how it ties into other facts. That is why it is good to KNOW things.
You present some VERY good points, thank you! I still believe his argument for careful consideration of this rapid expansion of technology in our lives is highly valid. Unchecked growth is just never healthy, especially so in the case of technology and science because human ego is involved and grandiose persona's (like Craig Ventor), can take things too far. There is such a thing as too far - as in the case of gmo's for example, in my opinion.
On one hand, I agree with the values he espouses, but I don't know if I can agree with his message. If our knowledge is constantly doubling, and the very concept of being a renaissance person was last viable in the renaissance, then the fraction of knowledge we're capable of stuffing in our heads becomes a smaller and smaller slice of the pie- We either come up with a way to expand ourselves or we HAVE to export our knowledge to technology because nobody will know enough to expand it further.
Our nonexistent memory would turn our brains into processors, and this virtually unlimited cloud of information our hard drive, like computers. By integrating machines into our lives and thinking processes we would become one ourselves.
Knowledge prioritization is key. As my history instructor said, don't memorize dates, that's what the encyclopedia is for. Learn human behavior, learn to see through their eyes and understand their motivations. Then you have learned the fundamentals all all history, not a narrow list of dates.
he makes a good point personally I've resigned myself to living in a cave and waiting for the modern-world Infrastructure to melt so I can come out with guns-a-blazing and reciting Shakespeare with my Mule, like kevin Costner in the Postman. goodnight
I understand his point but it reminds me about a debate about books during ancient Greek times. They wrote down several exchanges about what books could bring to humanity, that is how we can know about them. Some were worried about keeping all of ones thoughts in a book or the ability to just look up knowledge that is not their own being a cheat sheet to life. I have a hard time listening to a statement like this and not thinking about excuses for being a Luddite.
Obviously, those commenting "know" little. However, they can still do more than the smartest computers enjoy a sunset, be in awe of the night sky, love someone, delight in winning a silly game, cry when ignorance devastates a species or destroys a natural wonder . As long as we humans realize what truly makes us different, we will never become obsolete.
i just watched the jeopardy episodes. watson is scary! on the bright side the bot can really help just as what the IBM folks said, for example in medicine, etc.Watson is so smart at finding answers from written documents like journals, articles..
I worked in aviation maintenance for a long time and we were always taught to know where an answer is but not the answer, because if you remember it wrong just once you'll kill someone.
Now that we have moved away from the straight physics of fitting something like Watson within the size of a human head. I agree with you completely. Sophisticated programs allowing people instant ACCESS rather than STORAGE of a vast quantity of information, certainly possible. Straight processing power and miniaturization may be reaching a limit notwithstanding a fundamental theory of physics recontextualization; as Moore's Law goes, innovation in computer science is only just getting started.
That is the reality we’re all facing now. Our system is increasingly telling the middle class ‘we don’t need you anymore.’ We will have to rethink the relationship between humans and work.
Its also important to realize that we did suffer as a species. No one besides mentalists use Loci's Mind Palace anymore. No one remembers the entire oral histories of their ancestors or 100,000 words of an epic poem verbatim. These feats used to be commonplace. Yes we've grown comfortable in our new world or stored information but it is important to remember what we lost and what we can still lose.
Listen, it all depends how you use the search engine, the machine, the super computer. Personally, I believe technology enhances the speed, access and availability to information. It all depends on what you do with the information: discard it from your memory or retain it for fast accessing and creative usage later on.
I thought it a well prepared lecture Pretty dynamic guy that went 39 games without losing in what is considered he holy grail of knowledge mastery that has become an iconic staple in trivia game shows. Jeopardy!
The more immediate risk most of us face is not that computers, AI & automation might displace our usefulness; but rather that ownership & control of those might likely be usurped by a tiny group of people obsessed with power. Recent moves by banksters, corporatists & corrupt politicians portend such a frightening scenario of disenfranchisement & disempowerment of the vast majority of us. I mention this concern as a long-time automation engineer.
I wish I had the "know it all" type memory I am way too forgetful and often not as energetic. I spend a lot of time critically thinking and trying to learn things but very little seems retained.
I agree with you a 100% but it looks to me that you forgot Google isn't only a search engine. Stuff like Google glass are the type of thing that would make knowing stuff obsolete. Imagine a future where we all have a Google lens on our eyeballs, perhaps it would be able to recognize people in the streets for us, remind us things that we already know about stuff we use quite often and so on. Then we would become more and more dependent on these technologies.
I'm not sure you can help those kinds of people. I remember kids in high school who were exited about shorter classes because they wouldn't learn as much. This was back when cellphones were just becoming main stream and the internet was something most people had only heard about. Back then I loved watching documentaries on TV, now I watch them on RU-vid. If people don't want to learn, then they won't.
I think this is the point this Ted talk is trying to make: we must not allow ourselves to become so reliant on technology that we become dis-empowered and dependent. It weakens our position as members of planet earth. I loved his story of the little girl who saved an entire beach by remembering one geographic fact.
The look on Jen's face when he lost is coming soon to many. Ken believes his fame will be that he went for a year on Jeopardy, but it will be among the few world experts that lost to a computer. Garry Kasparov was famous in the chess world, but he entered history when he lost to a computer.
I personally don't remember being more happy as a kid although I was plenty happy. As a kid I lacked any experience of responsibility so the fact that I was saddled with very little didn't mean to me then what it would to me now. As far as I can remember the problems I perceived then were as distressing as the ones I face today. Of course they wouldn't have the impact on me now as they did then but to my mind there is a relativity to our experience at different ages where we look at past...
I think there is a difference between our shared body of knowledge and intelligence. Intelligence is our ability to creatively find solutions to problems. At the end of the talk I think Ken offers a false dichotomy between accessing our knowledge either by committing it to memory or by searching for it on computers. Maybe we could a commit a more superficial yet broader set of information to memory that might prompt us to ask questions that wouldn't of occurred to us otherwise which could be...
Actually, Moore's law is already slowing down: the number of transistors on integrated circuits has less than doubled in the past 2 years. There is a limit as to how small and efficient transistors can get before quantum mechanics comes into the picture and makes everything a lot more complicated.The "competitive free market" cannot force breakthroughs in physics to sustain Moore's law, thus the assumption of enhanced intelligence by means of merging with AI is unlikely in the near future...
I think that if you want to know something, if you have interest in it, then the internet will help you learn whatever you want. For those people who don't see any value in learning, they will not learn things no matter how much you try to force them. It will be crammed for a test and then promptly discarded.
I started watching this about 17 min ago...at that time there were 0 up and 0 down votes with 109 views and no comments...now there are 17 up votes and 5 comments.
It's not that computers are evil, it's just that computers and future technology is so new we don't know what consequences they may posses, so it's better to just proceed cautiously.
It's too bad Watson only won because it could click faster. I had watched this when it happened and Ken went to click most of the times but the computer barely beat him every time, even though some of it's answers were ridiculous haha. Although I found that a little discerning it was still amazing to watch, and I'm really happy Ken can poke fun at his "loss" and still be proud.
