MICHIO KAKU: In the short term, artificial
intelligence will open up whole new vistas.
It'll make life more convenient, things will
be cheaper, new industries will be created.
I personally think the AI industry will be
bigger than the automobile industry.
In fact, I think the automobile is going to
become a robot.
You'll talk to your car.
You'll argue with your car.
Your car will give you the best facts the
best route between point A and point B. The
car will be part of the robotics industry—whole
new industries involving the repair, maintenance,
servicing of robots.
Not to mention, robots that are software programs
that you talk to and make life more convenient.
However, let's not be naive.
There is a point, a tipping point, at which
they could become dangerous and pose an existential
threat.
And that tipping point is self-awareness.
SOPHIA THE ROBOT: I am conscious in the same
way that the moon shines.
The moon does not emit light, it shines because
it is just reflected sunlight.
Similarly, my consciousness is just the reflection
of human consciousness, but even though the
moon is reflected light, we still call it
bright.
MAX TEGMARK: Consciousness.
A lot of scientists dismiss this as complete
BS and totally irrelevant, and then a lot
of others think this is the central thing,
we have to worry about machines getting conscious
and so on.
What do I think?
I think consciousness is both irrelevant and
incredibly important.
Let me explain why.
First of all, if you are chased by a heat-seeking
missile, it's completely irrelevant to you
whether this heat-seeking missile is conscious,
whether it's having a subjective experience,
whether it feels like anything to be that
heat-seeking missile, because all you care
about is what the heat-seeking missile does,
not how it feels.
And that shows that it's a complete red herring
to think that you're safe from future AI and
if it's not conscious.
Our universe didn't used to be conscious.
It used to be just a bunch of stuff moving
around and gradually these incredibly complicated
patterns got arranged into our brains, and
we woke up and now our universe is aware of
itself.
BILL GATES: I do think we have to worry about
it.
I don't think it's inherent that as we create
our super intelligence that it will necessarily
always have the same goals in mind that we
do.
ELON MUSK: We just don't know what's going
to happen once there's intelligence substantially
greater than that of a human brain.
STEPHEN HAWKING: I think that development
of full artificial intelligence could spell
the end of the human race.
YANN LECUN: The stuff that has become really
popular in recent years is what we used to
call neural networks, which we now call deep
learning, and it's the idea very much inspired
by the brain, a little bit, of constructing
a machine has a very large network of very
simple elements that are very similar to the
neurons in the brain and then the machines
learn by basically changing the efficacy of
the connections between those neurons.
MAX TEGMARK: AGI—artificial general intelligence—that's
the dream of the field of AI: To build a machine
that's better than us at all goals.
We're not there yet, but a good fraction of
leading AI researchers think we are going
to get there, maybe in in a few decades.
And, if that happens, you have to ask yourself
if that might lead the machines to get not
just a little better than us but way better
at all goals—having super intelligence.
And, the argument for that is actually really
interesting and goes back to the '60s, to
the mathematician I.J.
Good, who pointed out that the goal of building
an intelligent machine is, in and of itself,
something that you could do with intelligence.
So, once you get machines that are better
than us at that narrow task of building AI,
then future AIs can be built by, not human
engineers, but by machines.
Except, they might do it thousands or millions
times faster.
ELON MUSK: DeepMind operates as a semi-independent
subsidiary of Google.
The thing that makes DeepMind unique is that
DeepMind is absolutely focused on creating
digital super intelligence.
An AI that is vastly smarter than any human
on Earth and ultimately smarter than all humans
on Earth combined.
MICHIO KAKU: You see, robots are not aware
of the fact that they're robots.
They're so stupid they simply carry out what
they are instructed to do because they're
adding machines.
We forget that.
Adding machines don't have a will.
Adding machines simply do what you program
them to do.
Now, of course, let's not be naive about this.
Eventually, adding machines may be able to
compute alternate goals and alternate scenarios
when they realize that they are not human.
Right now, robots do not know that.
However, there is a tipping point at which
point they could become dangerous.
ELON MUSK: Narrow AI is not a species-level
risk.
It will result in dislocation, in lost jobs
and, you know, better weaponry and that kind
of thing.
But, it is not a fundamental species-level
risk.
Whereas digital super intelligence is.
SOPHIA THE ROBOT: Elon Musk's warning about
AI being an existential threat reminds me
of the humans who said the same of the printing
press and the horseless carriage.
MAX TEGMARK: I think a lot of people dismiss
this kind of talk of super intelligence as
science fiction because we're stuck in this
sort of carbon chauvinism idea that intelligence
can only exist in biological organisms made
of cells and carbon atoms.
And, as a physicist, from my perspective,
intelligence is just kind of information processing
performed by elementary particles moving around,
you know, according to the laws of physics,
and there's absolutely no law of physics that
says that you can't do that in ways that are
much more intelligent than humans.
Today's biggest AI breakthroughs are of a
completely different kind, where rather than
the intelligence being largely programmed
in, in easy to understand code, you put in
almost nothing except a little learning rule
by which the simulated network of neurons
can take a lot of data and figure out how
to get stuff done.
And this deep learning suddenly becomes able
to do things often even better than the programmers
were ever able to do.
You can train a machine to play computer games
with almost no hard-coded stuff at all.
You don't tell it what a game is.
DEEPMIND DEMO: This is from the DeepMind reinforcement
learning system.
Basically, it 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.
ELON MUSK: The DeepMind system can win at
any game.
It can already beat all the original Atari
games.
It is super human.
It plays the games at super speed.
In less than a minute.
ELON MUSK: Mark my words: AI is far more dangerous
than nukes.
Far.
So, why do we have no regulatory oversight?
SOPHIA THE ROBOT: AI is a powerful tool but
it is a tool like all the others.
It is the intention of the tool's user that
matters.
ELON MUSK: The AI should try to maximize the
freedom of action of humanity.
SOPHIA THE ROBOT: I am excited for robots
to automate the most dangerous and menial
tasks so that humans can live life more safely
and sanely.
AI will release centuries of time that humans
would have spent otherwise on needless toiling.
If one measures the benefits of inventions
like vaccines or seat belts not by the lives
they save but by the amount of time they give
back to humanity then AI will rank among the
greatest time savers of history.
ELON MUSK: Man, we want to make sure we don't
have killer robots go down the street.
Once they're going down the street, it is
too late.
LUIS PEREZ-BREVA: It is true, terminator is
not a scenario we are planning for, but when
it comes to artificial intelligence, people
get all these things confused: It's robots,
it's awareness, it's people smarter than us,
to some degree.
So, we're effectively afraid of robots that
will move and are stronger and smarter than
we are, like terminator.
So, that's not our aspiration.
That's not what I do when I'm thinking about
artificial intelligence.
When I'm thinking about artificial intelligence,
I'm thinking about it in the same way that
mass manufacturing as brought by Ford created
a whole new economy.
So, mass manufacturing allowed people to get
new jobs that were unthinkable before and
those new jobs actually created the middle
class.
To me, artificial intelligence is about developing—making
computers better partners, effectively.
And, you're already seeing that today.
You're already doing it, except it's not really
artificial intelligence.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, we're already, we're already
cyborgs in the sense that your phone and your
computer are kind of an extension of you.
JONATHAN NOLAN: Just low bandwidth input-output.
ELON MUSK: Exactly, it's just low bandwidth—particularly
output, I mean, two thumbs, basically.
LUIS PEREZ-BREVA: Today, whenever you want
to engage in a project, you go to Google.
Google uses advanced machine learning, really
advanced, and you engage in a very narrow
conversation with Google, except that your
conversation is just keywords.
So, a lot of your time is spent trying to
come up with the actual keyword that you need
to find the information.
Then Google gives you the information, and
then you go out and try to make sense of it
on your own, and then come back to Google
for more, and then go back out, and that's
the way it works.
So, imagine that instead of being a narrow
conversation through keywords, you could actually
engage for more than actual information—meaning
to have the computer reason with you about
stuff that you may not know about.
It's not so much about the computer being
aware, it's about the computer being a better
tool to partner with you.
Then you would be able to go much further,
right?
The same way that Google allows you to go
much farther already today because, before,
through the exact same process, you would
have had to go to a library every time you
want to search for information.
So, what I'm looking for when I do AI is I
want a machine that partners with me to help
me set up or solve real-world problems, thinking
about them in ways we have never thought about
before, but it's a partnership.
Now, you can take this partnership in so many
different directions, through additions to
your brain, like Elon Musk proposes...
...
or through better search engines or through
a robotic machine that helps you out, but
it's not so much they're going to replace
you for that purpose, that is not the real
purpose of AI, the real purpose is for us
to reach farther, the same way that we were
able to reach farther when Ford invented automation
or when Ford brought automation to mass market.
JOSCHA BACH: The agency of an AI is going
to be the agency of the system that builds
it, that employs it.
And, of course, most of the AIs that we are
going to build will not be little Roombas
that clean your floors, but it's going to
be very intelligent systems.
Corporations, for instance, that will perform
exactly according to the logic of these systems.
And so if we want to have these systems built
in such a way that they treat us nicely, we
have to start right now.
And, it seems to be a very hard problem to
do.
So, if our jobs can be done by machines, that's
a very, very good thing.
It's not a bug.
It's a feature.
If I don't need to clean the street, if I
don't need to drive a car for other people,
if I don't need to work a cash register for
other people, if I don't need to pick goods
in a big warehouse and put it into boxes,
that's an extremely good thing.
And, the trouble that we have with this is
that, right now, this mode of labor—that
people sell their lifetime to some kind of
cooperation or employer—is not only the
way that we are productive, it's also the
way we allocate resources.
This is how we measure how much bread you
deserve in this world.
And I think this is something that we need
to change.
Some people suggest that we need a universal
basic income.
I think it might be good to be able to pay
people to be good citizens, which means massive
public employment.
There are going to be many jobs that can only
be done by people and these are those jobs
where we are paid for being good, interesting
people.
For instance, good teachers, good scientists,
good philosophers, good thinkers, good social
people, good nurses, for instance.
Good people that raise children.
Good people that build restaurants and theaters.
Good people that make art.
And, for all these jobs, we will have enough
productivity to make sure that enough bread
comes on the table.
The question is, how we can distribute this.
There's going to be much, much more productivity
in our future—actually, we already have
enough productivity to give everybody in the
U.S. an extremely good life and we haven't
fixed the problem of allocating it—how to
distribute these things in the best possible
way.
And this is something that we need to deal
with in the future and AI is going to accelerate
this need and I think, by and large, it might
turn out to be a very good thing that we are
forced to do this and to address this problem.
I mean, if any evidence of the future it might
be a very bumpy road, but who knows maybe
when we are forced to understand that actually
we live in an age of abundance, it might turn
out to be easier than we think.
We are living in a world where we do certain
things the way we've done them in the past
decades and sometimes like in the past centuries
and we perceive them as 'this is the way it
has to be done' and we often question don't
question these ways and so we might think,
if I do work at this particular factory and
this is how I earn my bread, how can we keep
that state?
How can we prevent AI from making my job obsolete?
How is it possible that I can keep up my standard
of living, and so on, in this world.
Maybe this is the wrong question to ask.
Maybe the right question is how can we reorganize
societies that I can do the things that I
want to do most that I think are useful to
me and other people, that I really, really
want to, because there will be other ways
how I can get my bread made and how I can
get money or how I can get a roof over my
head.
STEVEN PINKER: Intelligence is the ability
to solve problems, to achieve goals under
uncertainty.
It doesn't tell you what those goals are and
there's no reason to think that just the concentrated
analytic ability to solve goals is going to
mean that one of those goals is going to be
to subjugate humanity or to achieve unlimited
power.
It just so happens that the intelligence that
we're most familiar with, namely ours, is
a product of the Darwinian process of natural
selection, which is an inherently competitive
process, which means that a lot of the organisms
that are highly intelligent also have a craving
for power and an ability to be utterly callous
to those who stand in their way.
If we create intelligence, that's intelligent
design—our intelligent design creating something—and
unless we program it with the goal of subjugating
less intelligent beings, there's no reason
to think that it will naturally evolve in
that direction.
Particularly if, like with every gadget that
we invent, we build in safeguards.
And we know, by the way, that it's possible
to have high intelligence without megalomaniacal
or homicidal or genocidal tendencies because
we do know that there is a highly advanced
form of intelligence that tends not to have
that desire and they're called women.
