Hector Ruiz: The Evolution of Cognitive Computing | Big Think
Hector Ruiz: The Evolution of Cognitive Computing
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We are gaining the capability to create products that mimic how a brain works.
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Dr. Hector Ruiz:
Dr. Hector Ruiz is the former CEO and chairman of Advanced Micro Devices, with nearly 40 years experience in the information technology and consumer electronics sectors as an engineer, corporate strategist and chief executive. Before AMD, he spent 22 years at Motorola, rising to the position of president of the company’s Semiconductor Products Sector, and six years at Texas Instruments. A native of Piedras Negras in Mexico, Ruiz, as a teenager, walked across the U.S.-Mexico border every day to attend high school in Eagle Pass, Texas, where he graduated valedictorian just three years after learning English. More than a decade later, he had obtained a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Rice University.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Hector Ruiz: You know in the history of our industry there have been some real major events that transformed the industry and had a huge impact in our lives. The invention of the integrated circuit really opened up a huge number of opportunities to do things that were unimaginable back then. Then the creation of the personal computer, the PC, that was a huge impact on our lives. Not only in our own personal lives but in the way industry conducted itself in how to use computers to do the things that were important to them. Then the third thing was the introduction, of course, of the Internet. I mean that Internet with PCs and the integrated circuit you can see how all that is building and changing the world.
I believe that the next step is going to be what’s called cognitive computing. Because technology has changed so much that we have now so much power in our computing capability and so much memory that we can store that we’re able, for the first time, to actually create products that begin to mimic how a brain works.
And what that means is that the product can actually – on a very narrow, particularly expertise, could be as narrow as, let’s say, weather forecasting for example – something very narrow. That the product begins to learn as it is used and in a way that means it has some cognitive capability. So the more you use it, the better it becomes at a particular function. To the point where it actually gets to a point where it begins to actually ask questions of you. Think of it as a child. You know, when a child is born their brain is empty. It begins to get filled with stuff, hopefully mostly good. And there comes a point in time when the child touches a hot plate and the mother says, “Hot.” Then the child knows from then on every time somebody says “hot” he better be careful because now it’s programmed in his brain and he’s learning. He continues to learn.
But there comes that time in the child’s life that all of us that have been parents either dread or look forward to is when the child starts asking why. When you do something, you say “why, why, why.” And what the child’s doing is learning. He now has enough cognitive capability to understand enough of what’s going on but not enough so he’ll ask why. Well, in the same way these circuits get to a point where actually they begin to query back and say I need more information. Give me more information. Tell me about this. And there are some experiments going on today in health care, in oil exploration, in financial transactions where they actually begin to tap the power of cognitive computing. And I believe that when that happens we’re gonna enter an era that’s unimaginable today.
And in some ways it’s kind of exciting to think of the fact that we get surrounded by intelligence that helps us make our lives better. But it’s also somewhat frightening in the fact that you’re now surrounded by intelligence that begins to think they know more than you do. But we’re moving in that direction. I see it happening. I think we’re about ten years away from that being a real commercial reality.
However, the work I’ve seen done in healthcare and oil exploration and financial transactions tells me that this thing is very real. And I’ll give you one small example of how powerful it can be. I cannot disclose the names of the companies but in one particular example is they’ve looked at the data on a particular medicine that was used to treat patients.
Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/the-evolution-of-cognitive-computing/
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@erengasmith9106
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Are we going to see Cognitive Reproduction in Humans within coming decade?
@GlobalMaximumDegreesOfFreedom
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
So intelligence will be useful in several areas? Smart guy!
@scurry7
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Oil export
@bary1234
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Or we just fuck up this planet and die.
I dont share your pessimism, I'm sure humans will go to other planets even if we dont destroy the biodiversity of Earth.
@ninja250r2008
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Overpopulation doesn't need to be solved. If we humans didn't overpopulate and diminish resources in our environments we would most likely never venture out to new environments. I say keep having children, keep using up the resources, and keep having different views, that way we are "forced" to find new environments. It may be the only way we leave this planet.
@bary1234
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Whow, english is not your first language.
Humans are killing off the biodiversity of this planet, and fucking up the climate.
@z44sms
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Most environmentalist of killing humans population because that only takes 1 minute to teach. There is much space left if your not ignorant as environmentalist are.Scientists have warned us in past we can't support over 100 million yet here we are. As technology improves space is used better food made more nutritious. We could build islands on oceans or underground. I think that's not worth talking when your more likely to die or burdened by so many other things.
@pisanghangus2
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
WHY SHOULD BE SPELL HUAY
@TheSara90
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
if only those things like technology, medicine , economy,oil etc. wasent politically courrupted , then maybe what he is saying would be relevant
@Onedarknight
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
I was just thinking that… *shudder*
@theswayzeexpress1
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
This guy is clearly not a psychologist or neurologist. How can we make a computer of the human brain if we can not even understand how our brain works?
@TzarCowski
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Oh fuck. SkyNet
@CplDabu909
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
10 years from skynet 🙁
@bary1234
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Can you google?
/watch?v=kXN633–GE4
@47f0
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
I'm afraid you keep making blanket and sweeping statements with absolutely no provenance for your views. "Humans take up too much space" – how much space (and it is most certainly not 80%, BTW), and by what standards do you determine how much is "too much"?
Seems like a lot of emotional hand-wringing and appeals to "the human as evil" without a whole lot of facts or reason behind the words.
@bary1234
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Humans take up too much space.
@47f0
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
And 95% of your statistics are pulled from your nether regions.
What do you think food is, I wonder? I'll give you a hint – actually more than a hint.: food is energy. Nothing more or less. We have more energy coming into this planet than we know what to do with. We do not handle it well. But we are on the edge of handling it much, much better. Tissue culturing will replace plants and animals as a food source in the short term. Longer term, food will be synthesized by molecular assemblers.
@bary1234
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Humans occupy 80 percent of land and harvest 100 percent of the oceans. We kill off 60 percent of earths biodiversity in a decade, because there is no more room for other species.
@47f0
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Not so fast, Bucko. Yes, we have expert systems. But we know, and have known for some time, that expert systems are a good way to drown in conditionals in any complex environment.
In short, teaching the computer only goes so far. We have to teach the computer to learn, and that is precisely where the current research is at a fundamental phase change. We are getting far better through a variety of techniques, like evolutionary algorithms, at developing systems that not only learn, but synthesize.
@47f0
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Please. Read your Malthus. He was wrong in 1800 – hes was still wrong in 1900 – and you're wrong today. We do not have a population problem. We have a resource utilization problem, and smarter machines and better technology have always provided solutions to the imagined problem of "overpopulation". Drive through West Texas and explain "overpopulation" to me.
@Walley666
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Ironically very few seem to understand this, so the notion that we might have cognitive computing is considered plausible by most. But keep in mind we can't even prove whether we ourselves are sentient (we can only know for ourselves if we are), meaning we couldn't even prove if a computer was, so it's a ridiculous notion at present.
@Walley666
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Imitating the operation of the brain may not give rise to "sentience". That final layer of some "thing" or "space" which actually *experiences* something isn't particularly quantifiable. It's very naive to expect that it just magically arises when we reach a certain complexity, or out of the operation of the brain, given its atomic nature (aka, you can't divide it into parts). At "best", it may be something the brain taps into it, meaning we could too, but at "worst" we may never grasp it.
@deathcheater90moc
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
I robot i knew its goin to be real one day
@josefsmith6345
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Quhy
@JeannaDillon
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
All this technology guarantees is without 20 years of college and an IQ of 180 you will have no purpose in the realm of thought. Doctors are already becoming obsolete with IBM's new robot doctor that uses similar programming to its jeopardy model.
@jeanintubed
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
The world like it is today this kind of TECH will only create more harm to less power full people…
@composting_names
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
exactly, and it's retarded to think babies are born without external information! Babies are part of this world, and will hear our voices and be affected by the social and psychological climate of the world outside of its mothers belly. Tabula Rasa is a philosophy of the middle ages, and doesn't belong in a modern world.
@luciddeception
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Or was it just implied?
@gha23ify
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
The example of pharmaceuticals is bullshit .
@mymojorisin
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Cognitive computing is not a thing of the future, it is here now and we interact with it every day. I am in Internet Marketing and I use computer programs every day that learn the patterns of website visitors and suggest changes based on those patterns. This is not new stuff and most industries have it. Most people interact with cognitive computing programs every day without knowing it.
@DynamicUnreal
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
It is not necessary to produce overall (renaissance man) A.I. to replace humans. All you need is great A.I. for specific fields and you start displacing humans.
@DanielBellezza89
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
HAL 9000 will soon come to existence!
@MR3LIXR
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
i would it would be better than being a weak ass human who could die for a random reason you ever saw that show 1000 ways to die that shit is retarded ppl die for the dumbest of reasons
@doublemountainman3043
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
The transcript is not complete
@MattMillerRealComedy
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Yo, Check out my parody of "V Sauce" called "P Sauce"
My first video is about farts so you may like it!
@JohnBastardSnow
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
It's actually kinda scary, if you think about it.Right now we are apes with a set of innate emotions that drive us.That's the only thing that makes us who we are.But imagine you can make yourself feel 9999 times better than you feel on the peak of orgasm.A rat will press a button to release a direct pleasure signal to her brain until its body fails to do it.It's better than sex, water, food, sleep or being alive. I already imagine some silly brain hacker dead with a button underneath his finger.
@JohnBastardSnow
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
I see AIs as a way out for us, as a way to bring us closer to real human values. Right now we work so much that we don't even have time to stop and think about where we are going and most importantly to enjoy that journey. When AIs will replace humans on their jobs, humans will actually have a chance to do fully express themselves. I'm not against jobs, but I'm against unhappiness. And I see so many ppl wasting most of their lives doing something that makes them unhappy.
@JohnBastardSnow
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
We are already living in some sort of simulacrum. We do things that we forget why we like doing. We say sentences that linguistically correct, but do not represent anything in reality. Our main goal as a society is to grow the economy, some abstraction that we made for ourselves. We do not even check whether what it accomplishes in reality. Checking abstract concepts like GDP is enough. Getting pieces of paper, money, make us as happy as getting a tangible item. We live for a token.
@JohnBastardSnow
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
The point of life is being pointless.Right now we have a set of innate emotions that drive our livesThose emotions were designed to help us reproduce. Are those emotions efficient in the current environment?No.Later the whole idea of reproduction(aka gene preservation)won't make sense,because we'll change our genes.So we are left with brains that do not longer serve the goal they were designed for.We are already pointless animals. But that's the beauty of it.The life is like a dance with no goal
@Sopherion
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
What's out point now?
@cmyanmar13
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
Absolutely horrifying. It will certainly be the end of human dominance of Earth. We will become pointless animals.
@philmahoney7422
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
One transistor based computer is not powerful enough for an AI, just as one neuron is not powerful enough for a human consciousness it's when you put dozens or hundreds of small computers together that you can start to see the beginnings of an AI. On another note, Viable quantum computers capable of even the tasks we do on desktops are still decades if not a century away(the most complex equation as of yet is 5×3=15). A more viable option for AI would be molecular or biological based computers
@stephennielsen8722
February 20, 2026 at 9:09 pm
The beginning of cognitive computing is here now in IBM's Watson
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