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Do You Trust this Computer? (2018)
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What we're on the brink of is a world of increasingly intense, sophisticated artificial intelligence. Man: Technology is evolving so much faster than our society has the ability to protect us as citizens. The robots are coming, and they will destroy our livelihoods. You have a networked intelligence that watches us, knows everything about us, and begins to try to change us. Man #2: Twitter has become the world's number-one news site. Man #3: Technology is never good or bad. It's what we do with the technology. Eventually, millions of people are gonna be thrown out of jobs because their skills are going to be obsolete. Woman: Mass unemployment... greater inequalities, even social unrest. Man #4: Regardless of whether to be afraid or not afraid, the change is coming, and nobody can stop it. Man #5: We've invested huge amounts of money, and so it stands to reason that the military, with their own desires, are gonna start to use these technologies. Man #6: Autonomous weapons systems could lead to a global arms race to rival the Nuclear Era. Man #7: We know what the answer is. They'll eventually be killing us. Man #8: These technology leaps are gonna yield incredible miracles... and incredible horrors. Man #9: We created it, so I think, as we move forward, this intelligence will contain parts of us. And I think the question is -- Will it contain the good parts... or the bad parts? Sarah: The survivors called the war "Judgment Day." They lived only to face a new nightmare -- the war against the machines. Aah! Nolan: I think we've completely fucked this up. I think Hollywood has managed to inoculate the general public against this question -- the idea of machines that will take over the world. Open the pod bay doors, HAL. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. HAL? Nolan: We've cried wolf enough times... HAL? ...that the public has stopped paying attention, because it feels like science fiction. Even sitting here talking about it right now, it feels a little bit silly, a little bit like, "Oh, this is an artifact of some cheeseball movie." The WOPR spends all its time thinking about World War III. But it's not. The general public is about to get blindsided by this. As a society and as individuals, we're increasingly surrounded by machine intelligence. We carry this pocket device in the palm of our hand that we use to make a striking array of life decisions right now, aided by a set of distant algorithms that we have no understanding. We're already pretty jaded about the idea that we can talk to our phone, and it mostly understands us. Woman: I found quite a number of action films. Five years ago -- no way. Markoff: Robotics. Machines that see and speak... Woman: Hi, there....and listen. All that's real now. And these technologies are gonna fundamentally change our society. Thrun: Now we have this great movement of self-driving cars. Driving a car autonomously can move people's lives into a better place. Horvitz: I've lost a number of family members, including my mother, my brother and sister-in-law and their kids, to automobile accidents. It's pretty clear we could almost eliminate car accidents with automation. 30,000 lives in the U.S. alone. About a million around the world per year. Ferrucci: In healthcare, early indicators are the name of the game in that space, so that's another place where it can save somebody's life. Dr. Herman: Here in the breast-cancer center, all the things that the radiologist's brain does in two minutes, the computer does instantaneously. The computer has looked at 1 billion mammograms, and it takes that data and applies it to this image instantaneously, so the medical application is profound. Zilis: Another really exciting area that we're seeing a lot of development in is actually understanding our genetic code and using that to both diagnose disease and create personalized treatments. Kurzweil: The primary application of all these machines will be to extend our own intelligence. We'll be able to make ourselves smarter, and we'll be better at solving problems. We don't have to age. We'll actually understand aging. We'll be able to stop it. Man: There's really no limit to what intelligent machines can do for the human race. How could a smarter machine not be a better machine? It's hard to say exactly when I began to think that that was a bit naive. Stuart Russell, he's basically a god in the field of artificial intelligence. He wrote the book that almost every university uses. Russell: I used to say it's the best-selling AI textbook. Now I just say "It's the PDF that's stolen most often." Artificial intelligence is about making computers smart, and from the point of view of the public, what counts as AI is just something that's surprisingly intelligent compared to what we thought computers would typically be able to do. AI is a field of research to try to basically simulate all kinds of human capabilities. We're in the AI era. Silicon Valley has the ability to focus on one bright, shiny thing. It was social networking and social media over the last decade, and it's pretty clear that the bit has flipped. And it starts with machine learning. Nolan: When we look back at this moment, what was the first AI? It's not sexy, and it isn't the thing we could see at the movies, but you'd make a great case that Google created, not a search engine, but a godhead. A way for people to ask any question they wanted and get the answer they needed. Russell: Most people are not aware that what Google is doing is actually a form of artificial intelligence. They just go there, they type in a thing. Google gives them the answer. Musk: With each search, we train it to be better. Sometimes we're typing a search, and it tell us the answer before you've finished asking the question. You know, who is the president of Kazakhstan? And it'll just tell you. You don't have to go to the Kazakhstan national website to find out. You didn't used to be able to do that. Nolan: That is artificial intelligence. Years from now when we try to understand, we will say, "How did we miss it?" Markoff: It's one of the striking contradictions that we're facing. Google and Facebook, et al, have built businesses on giving us, as a society, free stuff. But it's a Faustian bargain. They're extracting something from us in exchange, but we don't know what code is running on the other side and why. We have no idea. It does strike right at the issue of how much we should trust these machines. I use computers literally for everything. There are so many computer advancements now, and it's become such a big part of our lives. It's just incredible what a computer can do. You can actually carry a computer in your purse. I mean, how awesome is that? I think most technology is meant to make things easier and simpler for all of us, so hopefully that just remains the focus. I think everybody loves their computers. People don't realize they are constantly being negotiated with by machines, whether that's the price of products in your Amazon cart, whether you can get on a particular flight, whether you can reserve a room at a particular hotel. What you're experiencing are machine-learning algorithms that have determined that a person like you is willing to pay 2 cents more and is changing the price. Kosinski: Now, a computer looks at millions of people simultaneously for very subtle patterns. You can take seemingly innocent digital footprints, such as someone's playlist on Spotify, or stuff that they bought on Amazon, and then use algorithms to translate this into a very detailed and a very accurate, intimate profile. Kaplan: There is a dossier on each of us that is so extensive it would be possibly accurate to say that they know more about you than your mother does. Tegmark: The major cause of the recent AI breakthrough isn't just that some dude had a brilliant insight all of a sudden, but simply that we have much bigger data to train them on and vastly better computers. el Kaliouby: The magic is in the data. It's a ton of data. I mean, it's data that's never existed before. We've never had this data before. We've created technologies that allow us to capture vast amounts of information. If you think of a billion cellphones on the planet with gyroscopes and accelerometers and fingerprint readers... couple that with the GPS and the photos they take and the tweets that you send, we're all giving off huge amounts of data individually. Cars that drive as the cameras on them suck up information about the world around them. The satellites that are now in orbit the size of a toaster. The infrared about the vegetation on the planet. The buoys that are out in the oceans to feed into the climate models. And the NSA, the CIA, as they collect information about the geopolitical situations. The world today is literally swimming in this data. Kosinski: Back in 2012, IBM estimated that an average human being leaves 500 megabytes of digital footprints every day. If you wanted to back up on the one day worth of data that humanity produces and imprint it out on a letter-sized paper, double-sided, font size 12, and you stack it up, it would reach from the surface of the Earth to the sun four times over. That's every day. Kaplan: The data itself is not good or evil. It's how it's used. We're relying, really, on the goodwill of these people and on the policies of these companies. There is no legal requirement for how they can and should use that kind of data. That, to me, is at the heart of the trust issue. Barrat: Right now there's a giant race for creating machines that are as smart as humans. Google -- They're working on what's really the kind of Manhattan Project of artificial intelligence. They've got the most money. They've got the most talent. They're buying up AI companies and robotics companies. Urban: People still think of Google as a search engine and their e-mail provider and a lot of other things that we use on a daily basis, but behind that search box are 10 million servers. That makes Google the most powerful computing platform in the world. Google is now working on an AI computing platform that will have 100 million servers. So when you're interacting with Google, we're just seeing the toenail of something that is a giant beast in the making. And the truth is, I'm not even sure that Google knows what it's becoming. Phoenix: If you look inside of what algorithms are being used at Google, it's technology largely from the '80s. So these are models that you train by showing them a 1, a 2, and a 3, and it learns not what a 1 is or what a 2 is -- It learns what the difference between a 1 and a 2 is. It's just a computation. In the last half decade, where we've made this rapid progress, it has all been in pattern recognition. Tegmark: Most of the good, old-fashioned AI was when we would tell our computers how to play a game like chess... from the old paradigm where you just tell the computer exactly what to do. Announcer: This is "Jeopardy!" "The IBM Challenge"! Ferrucci: No one at the time had thought that a machine could have the precision and the confidence and the speed to play "Jeopardy!" well enough against the best humans. Let's play "Jeopardy!" Watson.Watson: What is "shoe"? You are right. You get to pick. Literary Character APB for $800. Answer -- the Daily Double. Watson actually got its knowledge by reading Wikipedia and 200 million pages of natural-language documents. Ferrucci: You can't program every line of how the world works. The machine has to learn by reading. Now we come to Watson. "Who is Bram Stoker?" And the wager? Hello! $17,973. $41,413. And a two-day total of $77-- Phoenix: Watson's trained on huge amounts of text, but it's not like it understands what it's saying. It doesn't know that water makes things wet by touching water and by seeing the way things behave in the world the way you and I do. A lot of language AI today is not building logical models of how the world works. Rather, it's looking at how the words appear in the context of other words. Barrat: David Ferrucci developed IBM's Watson, and somebody asked him, "Does Watson think?" And he said, "Does a submarine swim?" And what they meant was, when they developed submarines, they borrowed basic principles of swimming from fish. But a submarine swims farther and faster than fish and can carry a huge payload. It out-swims fish. Ng: Watson winning the game of "Jeopardy!" will go down in the history of AI as a significant milestone. We tend to be amazed when the machine does so well. I'm even more amazed when the computer beats humans at things that humans are naturally good at. This is how we make progress. In the early days of the Google Brain project, I gave the team a very simple instruction, which was, "Build the biggest neural network possible, like 1,000 computers." Musk: A neural net is something very close to a simulation of how the brain works. It's very probabilistic, but with contextual relevance. Urban: In your brain, you have long neurons that connect to thousands of other neurons, and you have these pathways that are formed and forged based on what the brain needs to do. When a baby tries something and it succeeds, there's a reward, and that pathway that created the success is strengthened. If it fails at something, the pathway is weakened, and so, over time, the brain becomes honed to be good at the environment around it. Ng: Really, it's just getting machines to learn by themselves. This is called "deep learning," and "deep learning" and "neural networks" mean roughly the same thing. Tegmark: Deep learning is a totally different approach where the computer learns more like a toddler, by just getting a lot of data and eventually figuring stuff out. The computer just gets smarter and smarter as it has more experiences. Ng: So, imagine, if you will, a neural network, you know, like 1,000 computers. And it wakes up not knowing anything. And we made it watch YouTube for a week. Oppan Gangnam style Ow! Charlie! That really hurt! Gangnam style Op, op, op, op Oppan Gangnam style Ng: And so, after watching YouTube for a week, what would it learn? We had a hypothesis that it would learn to detect commonly occurring objects in videos. And so, we know that human faces appear a lot in videos, so we looked, and, lo and behold, there was a neuron that had learned to detect human faces. Leave Britney alone! Well, what else appears in videos a lot? So, we looked, and to our surprise, there was actually a neuron that had learned to detect cats. I still remember seeing recognition. "Wow, that's a cat. Okay, cool. Great." Barrat: It's all pretty innocuous when you're thinking about the future. It all seems kind of harmless and benign. But we're making cognitive architectures that will fly farther and faster than us and carry a bigger payload, and they won't be warm and fuzzy. Ferrucci: I think that, in three to five years, you will see a computer system that will be able to autonomously learn how to understand, how to build understanding, not unlike the way the human mind works. Whatever that lunch was, it was certainly delicious. Simply some of Robby's synthetics. He's your cook, too? Even manufactures the raw materials. Come around here, Robby. I'll show you how this works. One introduces a sample of human food through this aperture. Down here there's a small built-in chemical laboratory, where he analyzes it. Later, he can reproduce identical molecules in any shape or quantity. Why, it's a housewife's dream. Announcer: Meet Baxter, revolutionary new category of robots, with common sense. Baxter... Barrat: Baxter is a really good example of the kind of competition we face from machines. Baxter can do almost anything we can do with our hands. Baxter costs about what a minimum-wage worker makes in a year. But Baxter won't be taking the place of one minimum-wage worker -- He'll be taking the place of three, because they never get tired, they never take breaks. Gourley: That's probably the first thing we're gonna see -- displacement of jobs. They're gonna be done quicker, faster, cheaper by machines. Our ability to even stay current is so insanely limited compared to the machines we build. For example, now we have this great movement of Uber and Lyft kind of making transportation cheaper and democratizing transportation, which is great. The next step is gonna be that they're all gonna be replaced by driverless cars, and then all the Uber and Lyft drivers have to find something new to do. Barrat: There are 4 million professional drivers in the United States. They're unemployed soon. 7 million people that do data entry. Those people are gonna be jobless. A job isn't just about money, right? On a biological level, it serves a purpose. It becomes a defining thing. When the jobs went away in any given civilization, it doesn't take long until that turns into violence. We face a giant divide between rich and poor, because that's what automation and AI will provoke -- a greater divide between the haves and the have-nots. Right now, it's working into the middle class, into white-collar jobs. IBM's Watson does business analytics that we used to pay a business analyst $300 an hour to do. Gourley: Today, you're going to college to be a doctor, to be an accountant, to be a journalist. It's unclear that there's gonna be jobs there for you. Ng: If someone's planning for a 40-year career in radiology, just reading images, I think that could be a challenge to the new graduates of today. Dr. Herman: The da Vinci robot is currently utilized by a variety of surgeons for its accuracy and its ability to avoid the inevitable fluctuations of the human hand. Anybody who watches this feels the amazingness of it. You look through the scope, and you're seeing the claw hand holding that woman's ovary. Humanity was resting right here in the hands of this robot. People say it's the future, but it's not the future -- It's the present. Zilis: If you think about a surgical robot, there's often not a lot of intelligence in these things, but over time, as we put more and more intelligence into these systems, the surgical robots can actually learn from each robot surgery. They're tracking the movements, they're understanding what worked and what didn't work. And eventually, the robot for routine surgeries is going to be able to perform that entirely by itself... or with human supervision. Dr. Herman: It seems that we're feeding it and creating it, but, in a way, we are a slave to the technology, because we can't go back. Gourley: The machines are taking bigger and bigger bites out of our skill set at an ever-increasing speed. And so we've got to run faster and faster to keep ahead of the machines. How do I look? Good. Are you attracted to me? What?Are you attracted to me? You give me indications that you are. I do? Yes. Nolan: This is the future we're headed into. We want to design our companions. We're gonna like to see a human face on AI. Therefore, gaming our emotions will be depressingly easy. We're not that complicated. We're simple. Stimulus-response. I can make you like me basically by smiling at you a lot. AIs are gonna be fantastic at manipulating us. So, you've developed a technology that can sense what people are feeling. Right. We've developed technology that can read your facial expressions and map that to a number of emotional states. el Kaliouby: 15 years ago, I had just finished my undergraduate studies in computer science, and it struck me that I was spending a lot of time interacting with my laptops and my devices, yet these devices had absolutely no clue how I was feeling. I started thinking, "What if this device could sense that I was stressed or I was having a bad day? What would that open up?" Hi, first-graders! How are you? Can I get a hug? We had kids interact with the technology. A lot of it is still in development, but it was just amazing. Who likes robots? Me! Who wants to have a robot in their house? What would you use a robot for, Jack? I would use it to ask my mom very hard math questions. Okay. What about you, Theo? I would use it for scaring people. All right. So, start by smiling. Nice. Brow furrow. Nice one. Eyebrow raise. This generation, technology is just surrounding them all the time. It's almost like they expect to have robots in their homes, and they expect these robots to be socially intelligent. What makes robots smart? Put them in, like, a math or biology class. I think you would have to train it. All right. Let's walk over here. So, if you smile and you raise your eyebrows, it's gonna run over to you. Woman: It's coming over! It's coming over! Look. But if you look angry, it's gonna run away. -Awesome! -Oh, that was good. We're training computers to read and recognize emotions. Ready? Set? Go! And the response so far has been really amazing. People are integrating this into health apps, meditation apps, robots, cars. We're gonna see how this unfolds. Zilis: Robots can contain AI, but the robot is just a physical instantiation, and the artificial intelligence is the brain. And so brains can exist purely in software-based systems. They don't need to have a physical form. Robots can exist without any artificial intelligence. We have a lot of dumb robots out there. But a dumb robot can be a smart robot overnight, given the right software, given the right sensors. Barrat: We can't help but impute motive into inanimate objects. We do it with machines. We'll treat them like children. We'll treat them like surrogates. -Goodbye! -Goodbye! And we'll pay the price. Okay, welcome to ATR. Konnichiwa. Gourley: We build artificial intelligence, and the very first thing we want to do is replicate us. I think the key point will come when all the major senses are replicated -- sight... touch... smell. When we replicate our senses, is that when it become alive? Nolan: So many of our machines are being built to understand us. But what happens when an anthropomorphic creature discovers that they can adjust their loyalty, adjust their courage, adjust their avarice, adjust their cunning? Musk: The average person, they don't see killer robots going down the streets. They're like, "What are you talking about?" Man, we want to make sure that we don't have killer robots going down the street. Once they're going down the street, it is too late. Russell: The thing that worries me right now, that keeps me awake, is the development of autonomous weapons. Up to now, people have expressed unease about drones, which are remotely piloted aircraft. If you take a drone's camera and feed it into the AI system, it's a very easy step from here to fully autonomous weapons that choose their own targets and release their own missiles. The expected life-span of a human being in that kind of battle environment would be measured in seconds. Singer: At one point, drones were science fiction, and now they've become the normal thing in war. There's over 10,000 in U.S. military inventory alone. But they're not just a U.S. phenomena. There's more than 80 countries that operate them. Gourley: It stands to reason that people making some of the most important and difficult decisions in the world are gonna start to use and implement artificial intelligence. The Air Force just designed a $400-billion jet program to put pilots in the sky, and a $500 AI, designed by a couple of graduate students, is beating the best human pilots with a relatively simple algorithm. AI will have as big an impact on the military as the combustion engine had at the turn of the century. It will literally touch everything that the military does, from driverless convoys delivering logistical supplies, to unmanned drones delivering medical aid, to computational propaganda, trying to win the hearts and minds of a population. And so it stands to reason that whoever has the best AI will probably achieve dominance on this planet. At some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI. AI? You mean artificial intelligence? A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don't know who struck first -- us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. Singer: There's a long history of science fiction, not just predicting the future, but shaping the future. Arthur Conan Doyle writing before World War I on the danger of how submarines might be used to carry out civilian blockades. At the time he's writing this fiction, the Royal Navy made fun of Arthur Conan Doyle for this absurd idea that submarines could be useful in war. One of the things we've seen in history is that our attitude towards technology, but also ethics, are very context-dependent. For example, the submarine... nations like Great Britain and even the United States found it horrifying to use the submarine. In fact, the German use of the submarine to carry out attacks was the reason why the United States joined World War I. But move the timeline forward. Man: The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the empire of Japan. Five hours after Pearl Harbor, the order goes out to commit unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan. So Arthur Conan Doyle turned out to be right. Nolan: That's the great old line about science fiction -- It's a lie that tells the truth. Fellow executives, it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the future of law enforcement... ED-209. This isn't just a question of science fiction. This is about what's next, about what's happening right now. The role of intelligent systems is growing very rapidly in warfare. Everyone is pushing in the unmanned realm. Gourley: Today, the Secretary of Defense is very, very clear -- We will not create fully autonomous attacking vehicles. Not everyone is gonna hold themselves to that same set of values. And when China and Russia start deploying autonomous vehicles that can attack and kill, what's the move that we're gonna make? Russell: You can't say, "Well, we're gonna use autonomous weapons for our military dominance, but no one else is gonna use them." If you make these weapons, they're gonna be used to attack human populations in large numbers. Autonomous weapons are, by their nature, weapons of mass destruction, because it doesn't need a human being to guide it or carry it. You only need one person, to, you know, write a little program. It just captures the complexity of this field. It is cool. It is important. It is amazing. It is also frightening. And it's all about trust. It's an open letter about artificial intelligence, signed by some of the biggest names in science. What do they want? Ban the use of autonomous weapons. Woman: The author stated, "Autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare." Woman #2: ...thousand artificial-intelligence specialists calling for a global ban on killer robots. Tegmark: This open letter basically says that we should redefine the goal of the field of artificial intelligence away from just creating pure, undirected intelligence, towards creating beneficial intelligence. The development of AI is not going to stop. It is going to continue and get better. If the international community isn't putting certain controls on this, people will develop things that can do anything. Woman: The letter says that we are years, not decades, away from these weapons being deployed. So first of all... We had 6,000 signatories of that letter, including many of the major figures in the field. I'm getting a lot of visits from high-ranking officials who wish to emphasize that American military dominance is very important, and autonomous weapons may be part of the Defense Department's plan. That's very, very scary, because a value system of military developers of technology is not the same as a value system of the human race. Markoff: Out of the concerns about the possibility that this technology might be a threat to human existence, a number of the technologists have funded the Future of Life Institute to try to grapple with these problems. All of these guys are secretive, and so it's interesting to me to see them, you know, all together. Everything we have is a result of our intelligence. It's not the result of our big, scary teeth or our large claws or our enormous muscles. It's because we're actually relatively intelligent. And among my generation, we're all having what we call "holy cow," or "holy something else" moments, because we see that the technology is accelerating faster than we expected. I remember sitting around the table there with some of the best and the smartest minds in the world, and what really struck me was, maybe the human brain is not able to fully grasp the complexity of the world that we're confronted with. Russell: As it's currently constructed, the road that AI is following heads off a cliff, and we need to change the direction that we're going so that we don't take the human race off the cliff. Musk: Google acquired DeepMind several years ago. DeepMind operates as a semi-independent subsidiary of Google. The thing that makes DeepMind unique is that DeepMind is absolutely focused on creating digital superintelligence -- an AI that is vastly smarter than any human on Earth and ultimately smarter than all humans on Earth combined. This is from the DeepMind reinforcement learning system. Basically wakes up like a newborn baby and is shown the screen of an Atari video game and then has to learn to play the video game. It knows nothing about objects, about motion, about time. It only knows that there's an image on the screen and there's a score. So, if your baby woke up the day it was born and, by late afternoon, was playing 40 different Atari video games at a superhuman level, you would be terrified. You would say, "My baby is possessed. Send it back." Musk: The DeepMind system can win at any game. It can already beat all the original Atari games. It is superhuman. It plays the games at superspeed in less than a minute. DeepMind turned to another challenge, and the challenge was the game of Go, which people have generally argued has been beyond the power of computers to play with the best human Go players. First, they challenged a European Go champion. Then they challenged a Korean Go champion. Man: Please start the game. And they were able to win both times in kind of striking fashion. Nolan: You were reading articles in New York Timesyears ago talking about how Go would take 100 years for us to solve. Urban: People said, "Well, you know, but that's still just a board. Poker is an art. Poker involves reading people. Poker involves lying and bluffing. It's not an exact thing. That will never be, you know, a computer. You can't do that." They took the best poker players in the world, and it took seven days for the computer to start demolishing the humans. So it's the best poker player in the world, it's the best Go player in the world, and the pattern here is that AI might take a little while to wrap its tentacles around a new skill, but when it does, when it gets it, it is unstoppable. DeepMind's AI has administrator-level access to Google's servers to optimize energy usage at the data centers. However, this could be an unintentional Trojan horse. DeepMind has to have complete control of the data centers, so with a little software update, that AI could take complete control of the whole Google system, which means they can do anything. They could look at all your data. They could do anything. We're rapidly heading towards digital superintelligence that far exceeds any human. I think it's very obvious. Barrat: The problem is, we're not gonna suddenly hit human-level intelligence and say, "Okay, let's stop research." It's gonna go beyond human-level intelligence into what's called "superintelligence," and that's anything smarter than us. Tegmark: AI at the superhuman level, if we succeed with that, will be by far the most powerful invention we've ever made and the last invention we ever have to make. And if we create AI that's smarter than us, we have to be open to the possibility that we might actually lose control to them. Russell: Let's say you give it some objective, like curing cancer, and then you discover that the way it chooses to go about that is actually in conflict with a lot of other things you care about. Musk: AI doesn't have to be evil to destroy humanity. If AI has a goal, and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course, without even thinking about it. No hard feelings. It's just like if we're building a road and an anthill happens to be in the way... We don't hate ants. We're just building a road. And so goodbye, anthill. It's tempting to dismiss these concerns, 'cause it's, like, something that might happen in a few decades or 100 years, so why worry? Russell: But if you go back to September 11, 1933, Ernest Rutherford, who was the most well-known nuclear physicist of his time, said that the possibility of ever extracting useful amounts of energy from the transmutation of atoms, as he called it, was moonshine. The next morning, Leo Szilard, who was a much younger physicist, read this and got really annoyed and figured out how to make a nuclear chain reaction just a few months later. We have spent more than $2 billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history. Russell: So when people say that, "Oh, this is so far off in the future, we don't have to worry about it," it might only be three, four breakthroughs of that magnitude that will get us from here to superintelligent machines. Tegmark: If it's gonna take 20 years to figure out how to keep AI beneficial, then we should start today, not at the last second when some dudes drinking Red Bull decide to flip the switch and test the thing. Musk: We have five years. I think digital superintelligence will happen in my lifetime. 100%. Barrat: When this happens, it will be surrounded by a bunch of people who are really just excited about the technology. They want to see it succeed, but they're not anticipating that it can get out of control. Oh, my God, I trust my computer so much. That's an amazing question. I don't trust my computer. If it's on, I take it off. Like, even when it's off, I still think it's on. Like, you know? Like, you really cannot tru-- Like, the webcams, you don't know if, like, someone might turn it... You don't know, like. I don't trust my computer. Like, in my phone, every time they ask me "Can we send your information to Apple?" every time, I... So, I don't trust my phone. Okay. So, part of it is, yes, I do trust it, because it would be really hard to get through the day in the way our world is set up without computers. Dr. Herman: Trust is such a human experience. I have a patient coming in with an intracranial aneurysm. They want to look in my eyes and know that they can trust this person with their life. I'm not horribly concerned about anything. Good. Part of that is because I have confidence in you. This procedure we're doing today 20 years ago was essentially impossible. We just didn't have the materials and the technologies. So, the coil is barely in there right now. It's just a feather holding it in. It's nervous time. We're just in purgatory, intellectual, humanistic purgatory, and AI might know exactly what to do here. We've got the coil into the aneurysm. But it wasn't in tremendously well that I knew that it would stay, so with a maybe 20% risk of a very bad situation, I elected to just bring her back. Because of my relationship with her and knowing the difficulties of coming in and having the procedure, I consider things, when I should only consider the safest possible route to achieve success. But I had to stand there for 10 minutes agonizing about it. The computer feels nothing. The computer just does what it's supposed to do, better and better. I want to be AI in this case. But can AI be compassionate? I mean, it's everybody's question about AI. We are the sole embodiment of humanity, and it's a stretch for us to accept that a machine can be compassionate and loving in that way. Part of me doesn't believe in magic, but part of me has faith that there is something beyond the sum of the parts, that there is at least a oneness in our shared ancestry, our shared biology, our shared history. Some connection there beyond machine. So, then, you have the other side of that, is, does the computer know it's conscious, or can it be conscious, or does it care? Does it need to be conscious? Does it need to be aware? I do not think that a robot could ever be conscious. Unless they programmed it that way. Conscious? No. No. No. I mean, think a robot could be programmed to be conscious. How are they programmed to do everything else? That's another big part of artificial intelligence, is to make them conscious and make them feel. Lipson: Back in 2005, we started trying to build machines with self-awareness. This robot, to begin with, didn't know what it was. All it knew was that it needed to do something like walk. Through trial and error, it figured out how to walk using its imagination, and then it walked away. And then we did something very cruel. We chopped off a leg and watched what happened. At the beginning, it didn't quite know what had happened. But over about a period of a day, it then began to limp. And then, a year ago, we were training an AI system for a live demonstration. We wanted to show how we wave all these objects in front of the camera and the AI could recognize the objects. And so, we're preparing this demo, and we had on a side screen this ability to watch what certain neurons were responding to. And suddenly we noticed that one of the neurons was tracking faces. It was tracking our faces as we were moving around. Now, the spooky thing about this is that we never trained the system to recognize human faces, and yet, somehow, it learned to do that. Even though these robots are very simple, we can see there's something else going on there. It's not just programming. So, this is just the beginning. Horvitz: I often think about that beach in Kitty Hawk, the 1903 flight by Orville and Wilbur Wright. It was kind of a canvas plane, and it's wood and iron, and it gets off the ground for, what, a minute and 20 seconds, on this windy day before touching back down again. And it was just around 65 summers or so after that moment that you have a 747 taking off from JFK... ...where a major concern of someone on the airplane might be whether or not their salt-free diet meal is gonna be coming to them or not. We have a whole infrastructure, with travel agents and tower control, and it's all casual, and it's all part of the world. Right now, as far as we've come with machines that think and solve problems, we're at Kitty Hawk now. We're in the wind. We have our tattered-canvas planes up in the air. But what happens in 65 summers or so? We will have machines that are beyond human control. Should we worry about that? I'm not sure it's going to help. Kaplan: Nobody has any idea today what it means for a robot to be conscious. There is no such thing. There are a lot of smart people, and I have a great deal of respect for them, but the truth is, machines are natural psychopaths. Man: Fear came back into the market. Man #2: Went down 800, nearly 1,000, in a heartbeat. I mean, it is classic capitulation. There are some people who are proposing it was some kind of fat-finger error. Take the Flash Crash of 2010. In a matter of minutes, $1 trillion in value was lost in the stock market. Woman: The Dow dropped nearly 1,000 points in a half-hour. Kaplan: So, what went wrong? By that point in time, more than 60% of all the trades that took place on the stock exchange were actually being initiated by computers. Man: Panic selling on the way down, and all of a sudden it stopped on a dime. Man #2: This is all happening in real time, folks. Wisz: The short story of what happened in the Flash Crash is that algorithms responded to algorithms, and it compounded upon itself over and over and over again in a matter of minutes. Man: At one point, the market fell as if down a well. There is no regulatory body that can adapt quickly enough to prevent potentially disastrous consequences of AI operating in our financial systems. They are so prime for manipulation. Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate. That's the type of AI-run-amuck that scares people. Kaplan: When you give them a goal, they will relentlessly pursue that goal. How many computer programs are there like this? Nobody knows. Kosinski: One of the fascinating aspects about AI in general is that no one really understands how it works. Even the people who create AI don't really fully understand. Because it has millions of elements, it becomes completely impossible for a human being to understand what's going on. Grassegger: Microsoft had set up this artificial intelligence called Tay on Twitter, which was a chatbot. They started out in the morning, and Tay was starting to tweet and learning from stuff that was being sent to him from other Twitter people. Because some people, like trolls, attacked him, within 24 hours, the Microsoft bot became a terrible person. They had to literally pull Tay off the Net because he had turned into a monster. A misanthropic, racist, horrible person you'd never want to meet. And nobody had foreseen this. The whole idea of AI is that we are not telling it exactly how to achieve a given outcome or a goal. AI develops on its own. Nolan: We're worried about superintelligent AI, the master chess player that will outmaneuver us, but AI won't have to actually be that smart to have massively disruptive effects on human civilization. We've seen over the last century it doesn't necessarily take a genius to knock history off in a particular direction, and it won't take a genius AI to do the same thing. Bogus election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than top real stories. Facebook really is the elephant in the room. Kosinski: AI running Facebook news feed -- The task for AI is keeping users engaged, but no one really understands exactly how this AI is achieving this goal. Nolan: Facebook is building an elegant mirrored wall around us. A mirror that we can ask, "Who's the fairest of them all?" and it will answer, "You, you," time and again and slowly begin to warp our sense of reality, warp our sense of politics, history, global events, until determining what's true and what's not true, is virtually impossible. The problem is that AI doesn't understand that. AI just had a mission -- maximize user engagement, and it achieved that. Nearly 2 billion people spend nearly one hour on average a day basically interacting with AI that is shaping their experience. Even Facebook engineers, they don't like fake news. It's very bad business. They want to get rid of fake news. It's just very difficult to do because, how do you recognize news as fake if you cannot read all of those news personally? There's so much active misinformation and it's packaged very well, and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television. Nolan: It's not terribly sophisticated, but it is terribly powerful. And what it means is that your view of the world, which, 20 years ago, was determined, if you watched the nightly news, by three different networks, the three anchors who endeavored to try to get it right. Might have had a little bias one way or the other, but, largely speaking, we could all agree on an objective reality. Well, that objectivity is gone, and Facebook has completely annihilated it. If most of your understanding of how the world works is derived from Facebook, facilitated by algorithmic software that tries to show you the news you want to see, that's a terribly dangerous thing. And the idea that we have not only set that in motion, but allowed bad-faith actors access to that information... I mean, this is a recipe for disaster. Urban: I think that there will definitely be lots of bad actors trying to manipulate the world with AI. 2016 was a perfect example of an election where there was lots of AI producing lots of fake news and distributing it for a purpose, for a result. Ladies and gentlemen, honorable colleagues... it's my privilege to speak to you today about the power of big data and psychographics in the electoral process and, specifically, to talk about the work that we contributed to Senator Cruz's presidential primary campaign. Nolan: Cambridge Analytica emerged quietly as a company that, according to its own hype, has the ability to use this tremendous amount of data in order to effect societal change. In 2016, they had three major clients. Ted Cruz was one of them. It's easy to forget that, only 18 months ago, Senator Cruz was one of the less popular candidates seeking nomination. So, what was not possible maybe, like, 10 or 15 years ago, was that you can send fake news to exactly the people that you want to send it to. And then you could actually see how he or she reacts on Facebook and then adjust that information according to the feedback that you got. So you can start developing kind of a real-time management of a population. In this case, we've zoned in on a group we've called "Persuasion." These are people who are definitely going to vote, to caucus, but they need moving from the center a little bit more towards the right. in order to support Cruz. They need a persuasion message. "Gun rights," I've selected. That narrows the field slightly more. And now we know that we need a message on gun rights, it needs to be a persuasion message, and it needs to be nuanced according to the certain personality that we're interested in. Through social media, there's an infinite amount of information that you can gather about a person. We have somewhere close to 4,000 or 5,000 data points on every adult in the United States. Grassegger: It's about targeting the individual. It's like a weapon, which can be used in the totally wrong direction. That's the problem with all of this data. It's almost as if we built the bullet before we built the gun. Ted Cruz employed our data, our behavioral insights. He started from a base of less than 5% and had a very slow-and-steady- but-firm rise to above 35%, making him, obviously, the second most threatening contender in the race. Now, clearly, the Cruz campaign is over now, but what I can tell you is that of the two candidates left in this election, one of them is using these technologies. I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States. Nolan: Elections are a marginal exercise. It doesn't take a very sophisticated AI in order to have a disproportionate impact. Before Trump, Brexit was another supposed client. Well, at 20 minutes to 5:00, we can now say the decision taken in 1975 by this country to join the common market has been reversed by this referendum to leave the EU. Nolan: Cambridge Analytica allegedly uses AI to push through two of the most ground-shaking pieces of political change in the last 50 years. These are epochal events, and if we believe the hype, they are connected directly to a piece of software, essentially, created by a professor at Stanford. Kosinski: Back in 2013, I described that what they are doing is possible and warned against this happening in the future. Grassegger: At the time, Michal Kosinski was a young Polish researcher working at the Psychometrics Centre. So, what Michal had done was to gather the largest-ever data set of how people behave on Facebook. Kosinski: Psychometrics is trying to measure psychological traits, such as personality, intelligence, political views, and so on. Now, traditionally, those traits were measured using tests and questions. Nolan: Personality test -- the most benign thing you could possibly think of. Something that doesn't necessarily have a lot of utility, right? Kosinski: Our idea was that instead of tests and questions, we could simply look at the digital footprints of behaviors that we are all leaving behind to understand openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism. Grassegger: You can easily buy personal data, such as where you live, what club memberships you've tried, which gym you go to. There are actually marketplaces for personal data. Nolan: It turns out, we can discover an awful lot about what you're gonna do based on a very, very tiny set of information. Kosinski: We are training deep-learning networks to infer intimate traits, people's political views, personality, intelligence, sexual orientation just from an image from someone's face. Now think about countries which are not so free and open-minded. If you can reveal people's religious views or political views or sexual orientation based on only profile pictures, this could be literally an issue of life and death. I think there's no going back. Do you know what the Turing test is? It's when a human interacts with a computer, and if the human doesn't know they're interacting with a computer, the test is passed. And over the next few days, you're gonna be the human component in a Turing test. Holy shit.Yeah, that's right, Caleb. You got it. 'Cause if that test is passed, you are dead center of the greatest scientific event in the history of man. If you've created a conscious machine, it's not the history of man-- That's the history of gods. Nolan: It's almost like technology is a god in and of itself. Like the weather. We can't impact it. We can't slow it down. We can't stop it. We feel powerless. Kurzweil: If we think of God as an unlimited amount of intelligence, the closest we can get to that is by evolving our own intelligence by merging with the artificial intelligence we're creating. Musk: Today, our computers, phones, applications give us superhuman capability. So, as the old maxim says, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. el Kaliouby: It's about a human-machine partnership. I mean, we already see how, you know, our phones, for example, act as memory prosthesis, right? I don't have to remember your phone number anymore 'cause it's on my phone. It's about machines augmenting our human abilities, as opposed to, like, completely displacing them. Nolan: If you look at all the objects that have made the leap from analog to digital over the last 20 years... it's a lot. We're the last analog object in a digital universe. And the problem with that, of course, is that the data input/output is very limited. It's this. It's these. Zilis: Our eyes are pretty good. We're able to take in a lot of visual information. But our information output is very, very, very low. The reason this is important -- If we envision a scenario where AI's playing a more prominent role in societies, we want good ways to interact with this technology so that it ends up augmenting us. Musk: I think it's incredibly important that AI not be "other." It must be us. And I could be wrong about what I'm saying. I'm certainly open to ideas if anybody can suggest a path that's better. But I think we're gonna really have to either merge with AI or be left behind. Gourley: It's hard to kind of think of unplugging a system that's distributed everywhere on the planet, that's distributed now across the solar system. You can't just, you know, shut that off. Nolan: We've opened Pandora's box. We've unleashed forces that we can't control, we can't stop. We're in the midst of essentially creating a new life-form on Earth. Russell: We don't know what happens next. We don't know what shape the intellect of a machine will be when that intellect is far beyond human capabilities. It's just not something that's possible. The least scary future I can think of is one where we have at least democratized AI. Because if one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they can take over the world. At least when there's an evil dictator, that human is going to die, but, for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape. Woman on P.A.: Alan. Macchiato. Woman: Hello? Yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah Hello? |
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