I'm going to ask a question, but you can only
answer by saying either 'yes,' 'no,' or 'it's
complicated.'
Alright?
So, let's start over here.
Is some form of superintelligence possible,
Jaan?
'Yes,' 'no,' or 'it's complicated.'
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Definitely.
No.
Well, this was disappointing, we didn't
find any disagreement.
Let's try harder.
Just because it's possible doesn't mean that
it's actually going to happen.
So, before I asked if superintelligence was
possible at all according to the laws of physics.
Now, i'm asking, will it actually happen?
A little bit complicated, but yes.
Yes, and if it doesn't then something terrible
has happened to prevent it.
Yes.
Probably.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
No.
Shucks, still haven't found any interesting
disagreements.
We need to try harder still.
OK.
So, you think it is going to happen, but would
you actually like it to happen at some point?
Yes, no, or it's complicated?
Complicated, leaning towards yes.
It's complicated.
Yes.
Yes.
It's really complicated.
Yes.
It's complicated.
Very complicated.
Well, heck, I don't know.
It depends on which kind.
Alright, so it's getting a little bit more
interesting.
When I think, we had a really fascinating...
When is it going to happen?
Well, we had a really fascinating discussion
already in this morning's panel about when
we might get to human level AI.
So, that would sort of put a lower bound.
In the interest of time, I think we don't
need to rehash the question of when going
beyond it might start.
But, let's ask a very related question to
the one that just came up here.
Mainly, the question of well if something
starts to happen, if you get some sort of
recursive self improvement or some other process
whereby intelligence and machines start to
take off very very rapidly, there is always
a timescale associated with this.
And there I hope we can finally find some
real serious disagreements to argue about
here.
Some people have been envisioning this scenario
where it goes PHOOM and things happen in days or
hours or less.
Whereas, others envision that it will happen
but it might take thousands of years or decades.
So, if you think of some sort of doubling
time, some sort of rough timescale on which
things get dramatically better, what time
scale would you guess at, Jaan?
Start now or starting at human level?
No, no, so once we get human level AI or whatever
point beyond there or a little bit before
there where things actually start taking off,
what is the sort of time scale?
Any explosion, as a nerdy physicist, has some
sort of time scale, right, on which it happens.
Are we talking about seconds, or years, or
millennia?
I'm thinking of years, but it is important
to act as if this timeline was shorter.
Yeah, I actually don't really trust my intuitions
here.
I have intuitions that we are thinking of
years, but I also think human level AI is
a mirage.
It is suddenly going to be better than human,
but whether that is going to be a full intelligence
explosion quickly, I don't know.
I think it partly depends on the architecture
that ends up delivering human level AI.
So, this kind of neuroscience inspired AI
that we seem to be building at the moment
that needs to be trained and have experience
in order for it to gain knowledge that may
be, you know, on the order of a few years
so possible even a decade.
Some numbers of years, but it could also be
much less.
But, I wouldn't be surprised if it was much
more.
Potentially days or shorter, especially if
it's AI researchers designing AI researchers
Every time there is an advance in AI, we dismiss
it as 'oh, well that's not really AI:' chess,
go, self-driving cars.
An AI, as you know, is the field of things
we haven't done yet.
That will continue when we actually reach
AGI.
There will be lots of controversy.
By the time the controversy settles down,
we will realize that it's been around for
a few years.
Yeah, so I think we will go beyond human level
capabilities in many different areas, but
not in all at the same time.
So, it will be an uneven process where some
areas will be far advanced very soon, already
to some extent and other might take much longer.
What Bart said.
But, I think if it reaches a threshold where
it's as smart as the smartest most inventive
human then, I mean, it really could be only
a matter of days before it's smarter than
the sum of humanity.
So, here we saw quite an interesting range
of answers.
And this, I find is a very interesting question
because for reasons that people here have
published a lot of interesting papers about
the time scale makes a huge difference.
Right, if it's something that happening on
the time scale of the industrial revolution,
for example, that's a lot longer than the
time scale on which society can adapt and
take measures to steer development, borrowing
your nice rocket metaphor, Jaan.
Whereas, if things happen much quicker than
society can respond, it's much harder to steer
and you kind of have to hope that you've built
in a good steering in advance.
So, for example in nuclear reactors, we nerdy
physicists like to stick graphite sticks in
a moderators to slow things down maybe prevent
it from going critical.
I'm curious if anyone of you feels that it
would be nice if this growth of intelligence
which you are generally excited about, with
some caveats, if any of you would like to
have it happen a bit slower so that it becomes
easier for society to keep shaping it the
way we want it.
And, if so, and here's a tough question, is there
anything we can do now or later on when it
gets closer that might make this intelligence
explosion or rapid growth of intelligence
simply proceed slower so we can have more
influence over it.
Does anyone want to take a swing at this?
It's not for the whole panel, but anyone who...
I'm reminded of the conversation we had with
Rich Sutton in Puerto Rico.
Like, we had a lot of disagreements, but definitely
could agree about paths slower being better
than faster.
Any thoughts on how one could make it a little
bit slower?
I mean, the strategy I suggested in my talk
was somewhat tongue and cheek.
But, it was also serious.
I think this conference is great and as technologists
we should do everything we can to keep the
technology safe and beneficial.
Certainly, as we do each specific application,
like self-driving cars, there's a whole host
of ethical issues to address.
But, I don't think we can solve the problem
just technologically.
Imagine that we've done our job perfectly
and we've created the most safe, beneficial
AI possible, but we've let the political system
become totalitarian and evil, either a evil
world government or even just a portion of
the globe that is that way, it's not going
to work out well.
And so, part of the struggle is in the area
of politics and social policy to have the
world reflect the values want to achieve because
we are talking about human AI.
Human AI is by definition at human levels
and therefore is human.
And so, the issue of how we make humans ethical
is the same issue as how we make AIs that
are human level ethical.
So, what i'm hearing you say is that before
we reach the point of getting close to human
level AI, a very good way to prepare for that
is for us humans in our human societies to
try and get our act together as much as possible
and have the world run with more reason than
it, perhaps, is today.
Is that fair?
That's exactly what I'm saying.
Nick? Also, I just want to clarify again that when
I asked about what you would do to slow things
down i'm not talking at all about slowing
down AI research now.
We're simply talking about if we get to the
point where we are getting very near human
level AI and think we might get some very
fast development, how could one slow that
part down?
So, one method would be to make faster progress
now, so you get to that point sooner when
hardware is less developed, you get less hardware
overhang.
However, the current speed of AI progress
is a fairly hard variable to change very much
because there are very big forces pushing
on it, so perhaps the higher elasticity option
is what I suggested in the talk to ensure
that whoever gets there first has enough of
a lead that they are able to slow down for
a few months, let us say, to go slow during
the transition.
So, I think one thing you can do, I mean this
is almost in the verification area, is to
make systems that provably will not recruit
additional hardware or resigned their hardware,
so that their resources remain fixed.
And i'm quite happy to sit there for several
years thinking hard about what the next step
would be to take.
But, it's trivial to copy software.
Software is self replicating and always has
been and I don't see how you can possibly
stop that.
I mean, I think it would be great if it went
slow, but it's hard to see how it does go
slow given the huge first mover advantages
and getting to superintelligence.
The only scenario that I see where it might
go slow is where there is only one potential
first mover that can then stop and think.
So, maybe that speaks to creating a society
where, you know, AI is restrictive and unified, but without
multiple movers.
Yeah, Demis, so your colleague Sean Legg mentioned
that the one thing that could help a lot here
is if there's things like this industry partnership
and a sense of trust and openness between
the leaders, so that if there is a point where
one wants to...
Yeah, I do worry about, you know, that sort
of scenario where, you know, I think, I've
got quite high belief in human ingenuity to
solve these problems given enough time. the
control problem and other issues.
They're very difficult, but I think we can
solve them.
The problem is will there, you know, the coordination
problem of making sure there is enough time
to slow down at the end and, you know, let
Stuart think about this for 5 years.
But, what about, he may do that, but what
about all the other teams that are reading
the papers and not going to do that while
you're thinking.
Yeah, this is what I worry about a lot.
It seems like that coordination problem is
quite difficult.
But, I think as the first step, may be coordinating
things like the Partnership on AI, you know,
the most capable teams together to agree,
at least agree on a set of protocols or safety
procedures, or things, you know, agree that,
maybe, you know, you should verify these systems
and that is going to take a few years and
you should think about that.
I think that would be a good thing.
I just want to caveat one thing about slowing
versus fast progresses, you know, it could
be that, imagine there was a moratorium on
AI research for 50 years, but hardware continued
to accelerate as it does now.
We could, you know, this is sort of what Nick's
point was is that there could be a massive
hardware overhang or something where an AI
actually many, many, many different approaches
to AI including seed AI, self-improving AI,
all these things could be possible.
And, you know, maybe one person in their garage
could do it.
And I think that would be a lot more difficult
to coordinate that kind of situation, whereas,
so, I think there is some argument to be made
where you want to make fast progress when
we are at the very hard point of the 's' curve.
Where actually, you know, you need quite a
large team, you have to be quite visible,
you know who the other people are, and, you
know, in a sense society can keep tabs on
who the major players are and what they're
up to.
Whereas, opposed to a scenario where in say
50 or a 100 years time when, you know, someone,
a kid in their garage could create a seed
AI or something like that.
Yeah, Bart, one last comment on this topic.
Yeah, I think that this process will be a
very irregular process and sometime we will
be far advanced and other times we will be
going quite slow.
Yeah, i'm sort of hoping that when society
sees something like fake video creation where
you create a video where you have somebody
say made up things and that society will actually
realize that there are these new capabilities
for the machines and we should start taking
the problem as a society more seriously before
we have full and general AI.
We'll use AI to detect that.
So, you mentioned the word 'worry' there, and
you Nick went a bit farther, you had the word
'doom' written on your slides three times.
No wonder there was one star on Amazon on that
rating and that it was even in red color.
I think it's just as important to talk about
existential hope and the fantastic upside
as downside and I want to do a lot of that
here.
So, let's just get some of those worries out
of the way now and then return to the positive
things.
I just want to go through quickly and give
each one of you a chance to just pick one thing
that you feel is a challenge that we should overcome
and then say something about what you feel
is the best thing we can do, right now, to
try to mitigate it.
Do you want to start Jaan?
To mitigate what?
Mention one thing that you're worried could
go wrong and tell us about something constructive
that we can do now that will reduce that risk.
I do think that AI arms races, I see like
a lot of, like, good.
I'm really heartened to see kind of great
contacts between OpenAI and DeepMind, but
I think this is just like a sort of toy model
of what the world at large might come up with
in terms of arms races.
And for myself I have been spending increasing
amount of time in Asia recently just to kind
of try to kind of pull in more people elsewhere,
what has been so far, just been, kind of like, an Anglo-
American discussion mostly.
So, like this is, I think, this is one thing that should be
done and i'm going to do it.
Well, as someone who is outside this field,
I think the challenge i'm really in touch
with is how hard it is to take the safety
concerns emotionally seriously.
And how hard it is for people in the field
to do that as well.
I can't tell you have many people outside
this room who purport to be experts think
the control problem is a total non-issue.
I mean, it's just flabbergasting to meet these
people and just therefore not worth thinking
about.
And one of the reasons I think is that in
one case there is this illusion that the time
horizon matters.
If you feel that this is 50 or a 100 years
away that is totally consoling, but there
is an implicit assumption there,
the assumption is that you know how long it
will take to build this safely. And that 50
or a 100 years is enough time.
The other issue is, I think, most people feel
like intelligence is an intrinsic good and
of course we want more of it and it's very easy
to be in touch with that assumption because
right now there is a cure for cancer, which
we have not discovered.
Right, how galling is that?
But for more intelligence, but for knowing
which experiments to run, or how to integrate
the data we already have in hand, we would
have a cure for cancer that was actionable
now unless there was some physical law of
the universe that prevented us from curing
cancer, which seems unlikely.
So, the pain of not having enough intelligence
is really excruciating when you focus on it,
but, and I think to your previous question
of doing this quickly becomes an intrinsic
good provided we have solved the alignment
problems and the political problems and the
chaos that would follow if we were just, if
we did it quickly without solving those problems.
So, I think, it's the thing that is alarming
is how ethereal these concerns are even to
those who have no rational argument against
them.
So, Sam it sounds to me like you're agreeing
very strongly with what Shane Legg that there
is, in some circles, still this strong taboo
that, you know, don't even consider the possibility
that we might get AGI because it's just absolutely
ridiculous.
And he was arguing that the sooner we can
get rid of this taboo the sooner people can
get to work and find all these really helpful
solutions and answers that we need.
So, suppose for a moment that I came up to
you and said to you "this idea of super human
intelligence just sounds absolutely ridiculous,
sounds completely nuts.
And by the way i've never seen your ted talk."
And we're in an elevator and you have only
30 seconds to persuade me to take this more
seriously, what would you say?
A lot of people who are here will have this
exact conversation with colleagues and others
in the future.
Well, there are very few assumptions you need
to make to take this seriously, intellectually.
Again, the emotional part is a separate piece.
But, if you assume that intelligence is just,
on some level, the product of information
processing in a physical system and there
are very few people who dispute that who are
scientifically literate at this point and
you assume that we will continue to improve
our information processing systems, unless
something terrible happens to us to prevent
that, and that seems like a very safe assumption,
then it is just a matter of time before we
instantiate something that is human level
and beyond in our computers.
And, again, the time horizon is only consoling
on the assumption that we know we have enough
time to solve the alignment problems and the
political problems.
The other thing that is humbling here that
Ray brought up at one point is that even if
we were handed a perfectly benign, well behaved
AI just from god, you know, we are given a
perfect oracle we are given a perfect inventor
of good technology, given our current political
and economic atmosphere that would produce
total chaos.
We just have not... we don't have the ethical
or political will to share the wealth, we
don't have the political integration to deal
with this thing being given to Silicon Valley
and not being given at the same moment to
China or Iran.
So, there is just, it's alarming that the
best case scenario currently, basically just
ripping out 80% of Nick's book because we've
solved all those problems, is still a terrifying
one. And so, clearly, that's a near term thing that we have to solve.
Thank you, Sam.
So, Demis do you want to tell us about one
thing that you feel is a challenge and say
something about what we should focus on now
to tackle it.
Yeah, I mean I think it's, you know I agree
with both the statements already said that,
so I think the coordination problem is one
thing where you know we want to avoid this
sort of harmful race to the finish where corner
cutting starts happening and things like safety
are easy things to, you know, will get cut
because obviously they don't necessarily contribute
to AI capability, in fact they may hold it
back a bit by making a safe AI.
So, I think that's going to be a big issue
on a global scale and that seems like it's
going to be a hard problem when we are talking
about national governments and things.
And I think also, you know, we haven't thought
enough about the whole governance scenario
of how do we want those AIs to be out in the
world?
How many of them?
Who will set their goals?
All these kinds of things, I think, need a
lot more thought.
You know, once we've already solved the technical
problems.
I think it's wonderful that you're not just
saying these things, but actually doing these
things since you played a leading role in
setting up the Partnership on AI here which
goes exactly in the direction of what you're
advocating here.
So, do you want to pass it off to Nick?
I'm sure there is nothing at all you're worried
about, right?
So, tell us about one concrete useful thing
you would to see us focus on.
So, I agree with that, I mean, so fun technical
work, bring in top technical talent to work
on these technical issues, build these collaborations,
build a community, build trust, work some
more on figuring out attractive solutions
to the governance solutions that could work,
but don't rush to implement the first idea
you have, but first trial them out a little
bit more.
I think a lot about consciousness, so I was
really struck by the 'sentience caution' on
the list of principles here that said "avoid
overly... avoid strong assumptions about the
distribution of consciousness in AIs," which
I take it entails avoid assuming that any
human level or super human level AGI is going
to be conscious.
For me, that raising the possibility of a
massive failure mode in the future, the possibility
that we create human or super human level
AGI and we've got a whole world populated
by super human level AGIs, none of whom is
conscious.
And that would be a world, could potentially
be a world of great intelligence, no consciousness
no subjective experience at all.
Now, I think many many people, with a wide
variety of views, take the view that basically
subjective experience or consciousness is
required in order to have any meaning or value
in your life at all.
So therefore, a world without consciousness
could not possibly a positive outcome.
maybe it wouldn't be a terribly negative outcome,
it would just be a 0 outcome, and among the
worst possible outcomes.
So, I worry about avoiding that outcome.
Now, as a matter of fact, i'm fairly optimistic
about the possibilities that AIs of various
kinds will be conscious.
But, in so far as this community is making
this assumption, I think it's important to
actually think about the question of 'in creating
AGIs, are we actually creating conscious beings?'
I mean, one thing we ought to at least consider doing
there is making, given that we don't understand
consciousness, we don't have a complete theory
of consciousness, maybe we can be most confident
about consciousness when it's similar to the
case that we know about the best, namely human
human consciousness...
So, therefore maybe there is an imperative
to create human-like AGI in order that we
can be maximally confident that there is going
to be consciousness.
So, what I hear you say is that when you have
a nightmare about the zombie apocalypse you're
not thinking of some terminator movie, but
you're thinking about this problem.
We create... we upload ourselves and do all
these wonderful things, but there's no one
home.
Is that fair to say?
I mean this is a different kind of existential
risk.
One kind of existential risk is there's no
humans, there's AIs, but some people might
say well that's OK they are our successors.
A much worse existential risk is there are
no conscious beings in our future.
So, i'll make a confession, so Shane Legg mentioned
that there has been this strong taboo about
talking about the possibility of intelligence
getting very advanced.
It's clearly also been a strong taboo for
a long time to mention the C-word.
In fact, before the conference when we got
all these responses on the first round of
the principles, guess which one was ranked
last?
It got huge amounts of minus 1 ratings, that
was the one with consciousness, so we changed
it to-- it was terribly stated --sentience
and stated it better and then it got stated
still better at lunch and it's still rated
last.
Even though I personally share your interests
in this a lot.
88% of people agreed to the sentient caution.
But, not 90%, so that one also fell off the
list here.
So, maybe that is another taboo you can personally
help us shatter so that people think about
that question more.
Ray, anything you're concerned about?
This isn't what I was going to say, but just
to respond... a converse concern is we create
AGIs, everybody assumes that of course it's
just a machine and therefore it's not conscious,
but actually it is suffering but we don't
look out for it's conscious subjective experience
because we are making the wrong assumption.
But, what I did want to say was, there are
three overlapping revolutions that people
talk about, GNR, genetics, bio-tech, nano-technology,
and robotics, which is AI.
And there are proposals, there was the Asilomar
conferences done here decades ago for bio-tech
that have worked fairly well.
There are similar proposals for nano-technology.
There is a difference with AI in that there
really isn't a full proof technical solution
to this.
You can have technical controls on, say, nano-technology.
One of the guidelines is it shouldn't be self-replicating.
That's not really realistic because it can't
scale to meaningful quantities without being
self-replicating, but you can imagine technical
protections.
If you have an AI that is more intelligent
than you and it's out for your destruction
and it's out for the world's destruction and
there is no other AI that is superior to it,
that's a bad situation.
So, that's the specter.
And partly this is amplified by our observation
of what we as humans, the most intelligent
species on the planet, have done to other
species.
If we look at how we treat animals, people,
you know, are very friendly, like their dogs
and pets, but if you look at factory farming
we're not very benign to species that are
less intelligent than us.
That engenders a lot of the concern we see
that if we there's a new type of entity that's
more intelligent than us it's going to treat
us like we've treated other species.
So, that's the concern.
I do think that what we are doing at this
conference is appropriate.
I wanted to mention that I think we should
publish these guidelines the way the Asilomar
guidelines in bio-tech were published decades
ago.
And then people can and people can, you can
have an opt-in, opt-out, but I think we should
actually say we had this conference and the
AI leadership/community has come up with these
guidelines and people can respond to them
and debate them and then maybe at the next
conference we'll revise them.
The Asilomar bio-tech guidelines have been
revised many times.
But, I would advocate that we actually take
a stand and put forth these guidelines and
then let the whole community at large debate
them.
And have them be, have them guide our research.
It's actually worked quite well in bio-tech.
Bart?
OK, yeah so let me give a little different
perspective.
So, one concern I have at the high level is
these machines become really smart or even
in certain areas, can humans still understand,
what they, decisions that they suggested,
that they make.
And I work in the field of automated reasoning
where we have significant advance last two
decades going from perhaps a few hundred variables
to perhaps millions of variables being solved
quite routinely.
And there was a sense in the community, well
we are getting answers from these reasoning
engines, mostly hardware/software verification
problems, but we cannot, humans can no longer
understand these answers.
In the last few years, people have actually
discovered that you can use the machine to
generate explanations for their answers that
are, again, human understandable.
So, I see sort of a glimmer of hope that maybe
even if we have much less intelligence we
may be able to understand solutions that machines
find for us and we could not find these solutions,
but they may be able to provide explanations
that are accessible to us.
So that's a little positive note.
Thank you.
Stuart?
So there are two things that keep me awake
at night, other than email.
So, one is the problem of misuse and bad actors.
To take an analogy, it’s as if we were building
nuclear weapons and then delivering them by
email to everybody on the planet, saying,
here’s a toy, do what you want.
How do we counter that? I have to say, I don’t
really have a good solution.
I think one of the things we have to do is
to make designs for safe AI very clear and
simple, and sort of make it unthinkable to
do anything other than that, right?
Just like it’s unthinkable to have a program
with an infinite loop that produces a spinning
pizza of death on your -- oh sorry.
Or it’s unthinkable to have a buffer overflow
that allows your software to be hacked into.
The other thing that keeps me awake is actually
the possibility that success would lead to
AI as a helicopter parent for the human race
that would sort of ossify and gradually enfeeble
us, so then there would be no point at which it
was obvious to us that this was happening.
And I think the mitigation, which you asked
for, to look on the bright side, is that in
some sense the meta-value of human evolvability,
the freedom to change the future, is something
that the AI needs to adopt, and in some sense
that would result eventually with the AI receding
into the background, and saying, OK, now I’ve
got you through your adolescence, now it’s
time for the human race to grow up, now that
we have the capabilities to eliminate scarcity,
to eliminate needless conflict and coordination
failures and all of those things that we suffer
from right now.
So I can imagine a distant future where, in fact,
AI is perhaps even less visible than it is
today.
Great, finally you, Elon, have as far as I
know never ever expressed any concerns about
AI, right - I’m just wondering if there
is any concerns, in particular any concerns
where you see there’s a very clear thing
we should be doing now that are going to help.
I’m trying to think of what is an actual
good future, what does that actually look
like, or least bad, or however you want to
characterize it.
Because to a point that was made earlier by
Sam and maybe made by others, we’re headed towards either
superintelligence or civilization ending.
Those are the two things that will happen
- intelligence will keep advancing, the only
thing that would stop it from advancing is
something that puts civilization into stasis
or destroys civilization.
So, we have to figure out, what is a world that we would like to be
in where there is this digital superintelligence?
I think, another point that is really important
to appreciate is that we are, all of us, already
are cyborgs.
So you have a machine extension of yourself
in the form of your phone and your computer
and all your applications.
You are already superhuman.
By far you have more power, more capability,
than the President of the United States had
30 years ago.
If you have an Internet link you have an article
of wisdom, you can communicate to millions
of people, you can communicate to the rest
of Earth instantly.
I mean, these are magical powers that didn’t exist,
not that long ago.
So everyone is already superhuman, and a cyborg.
The limitation is one of bandwidth.
So we’re bandwidth-constrained, particularly
on output.
Our input is much better but our output is
extremely slow.
If you want to be generous you could say maybe
it’s a few hundred bits per second, or a
kilobit or something like that output.
The way we output is like we have our little
meat sticks that we move very slowly and push
buttons, or tap a little screen.
And that’s extremely slow.
Compare that to a computer which can communicate
at the terabyte level.
These are very big orders of magnitude differences.
Our input is much better because of vision,
but even that could be enhanced significantly.
So I think the two things that are needed
for a future that we would look at and conclude
is good, most likely, is, we have to solve
that bandwidth constraint with a direct neural
interface.
I think a high bandwidth interface to the
cortex, so that we can have a digital tertiary
layer that’s more fully symbiotic with the
rest of us.
We’ve got the cortex and the limbic system,
which seem to work together pretty well - they’ve
got good bandwidth, whereas the bandwidth
to additional tertiary layer is weak.
So I think if we can solve that bandwidth
issue and then AI can be widely available.
The analogy to a nuclear bomb is not exactly
correct - it’s not as though it’s going
to explode and create a mushroom cloud, it’s
more like if there were just a few people
that had it they would be able to be essentially
dictators of Earth, or whoever acquired it
and if it was limited to a small number of
people and it was ultra-smart, they would
have dominion over Earth.
So I think it’s extremely important that
it be widespread and that we solve the bandwidth
issue.
And if we do those things, then it will be
tied to our consciousness, tied to our will,
tied to the sum of individual human will,
and everyone would have it so it would be
sort of still a relatively even playing field,
in fact, it would be probably more egalitarian
than today.
Great, thank you so much, that’s in fact
the perfect segue into the last question I
want to ask you before we open it up to everybody.
Something I have really missed in the discussion
about really advanced intelligence, beyond
human, is more thought about the upside.
We have so much talk about existential risk,
and not just in the academic context, but
just flip on your TV, check out Netflix, what
do you see there in these scientific visions
of the future?
It’s almost always dystopias, right?
For some reason fear gives more clicks than the
positive visions, but if I have a student
coming into my office at MIT asking for career
advice, the first thing I’m going to ask
her is, where will you want to be in 20 years?
And if she just says, well maybe I’ll get
cancer, maybe I’ll get run over by a bus,
that’s a terrible way to think about career
planning, right?
I want her to be on fire and say my vision
is I want to do this - and here are the things
that could go wrong, and then you can plan
out how to avoid those problems and get it
out - I would love to see more discussion
about the upsides, futures we’re really
excited about, so we can not just try to avoid
problems for the sake of avoiding problems,
but to get to something that we’re all really
on fire about.
So to start off I’ll just tell you something
that makes me really excited about advanced
artificial intelligence.
Everything I love about civilization is a
product of intelligence.
If we for some reason were to say, well, you know, I’m
scared about this technology thing, let’s
just press pause on it forever, there’s
no interesting question about if we’re going
to have human extinction, the question is
just ‘when?'
Is it going to be a supervolcano, is it going
to be the next dinosaur-killing-class asteroid
- the last one happened 60 million years ago,
so how long is it going to be?
Pretty horrible future to just sit and wonder
when we’re going to get taken out here without
the technology when we know that we totally
have the brainpower to solve all of these
problems if we proceed forward and develop
technology.
So that was just one thing that makes me very excited about moving forward rather than pressing 'Pause.'
I want to just ask the same question to all
of you guys in turn.
So tell us, just pretty briefly, about something
that you are really excited about.
Some future vision you imagine with very advanced artificial intelligence that you’re really excited about, that you would like to see.
Jaan-
So I want to be careful when I imagine
concrete fruits of AGI.
On a meta-level I think as a first approximation,
I think we should just maximize the amount
of fun and minimize the amount of suffering.
I think Eliezer [Yudkowsky] has written a sequence called
“Fun Theory”, where he points out that
people have been horrible imagining, are very
unimaginative imagining paradises of various
sorts, just like really boring places, actually,
when you think about them.
I think Eliezer has this sketch where he says,
“It was hard to spend like one weekend with my relatives.
Imagine spending eternity with your dead relatives.”
So I think we should be concerned about side
effects and try to capture dynamics of improvement,
and basically go from there - make sure that
we’re going to adjust the trajectory as
we get smarter and more grown together.
Great, thank you, Jaan.
Sam, what do you get excited about?
Well, strangely, what excites me really just
abuts the parts that scare me the most.
I think what is nice about this conversation,
in particular about the alignment problem,
is that it’s forcing us to realize that
there are better and worse answers to questions
of human value.
And as someone said, perhaps at this last
meeting in Puerto Rico, we really have to
do philosophy on a deadline, and we have to
admit to ourselves that there are better and
worse answers and we have to converge on the
better ones.
And what would excite me about actually the
birth of superintelligent AI - one of the things,
apart from solving obvious problems
like curing disease and energy issues and all the rest,
perhaps differs a little bit
with what Stuart said.
I’m not so worried about idiocracy or all
of us just losing our way as apes and living
unproductive lives in dialogue with these
oracles.
I think actually, I would want a truly value-aligned
superintelligence to incrementally show us,
not merely conserve what we want, but show
us what we should want to keep improving our
values so that we can navigate in the space
of all possible experiences and converge on
better and better ones.
Thank you, Sam, and what about you, Demis?
So obviously this is why I spend my whole
career working on this, is that, I think if
we do this right, it’s going to be the greatest
thing ever to happen to humanity,
and in some ways I think unlock our full potential.
I mean, I’ve talked to a lot about, in all
my talks about using it as a tool to help
us make science and medical breakthroughs
faster.
And so I think that’s an obvious one.
But taking that longer-term, one reason I
got so into AI is that, like probably many
of you in this room, I’m interested in the
biggest questions of why we’re here, understanding
our minds, what is consciousness, what’s
the nature of the universe, what’s our purpose
- and if we’re going to try and really grapple
with any of those questions I think we’re
going to need something like AI, perhaps with
ourselves enhanced as well.
And I think in that future world we’ll have
a chance to actually find out about some of
these really deep questions in the same way
we’re finding out with AlphaGo just about Go,
but what if we could do that with all
of science and physics and the biggest questions
in the universe.
And I think that’s going to be the most
exhilarating journey of all, to find that out.
To just carry out on a few other things that
people commented on is in terms of
us as the most intelligent beings on the planet right
now, and treating animals badly and these
sorts of things, I think if you think about
it though - let’s take tigers or something in India.
They have huge ranges and those people are
very poor and they’re resource-poor, but
if they had abundant resources I don’t think
they’re intentionally trying to kill off
these tigers - in some cases they are - but
often it’s just because they need the land
for their cattle, and the tiger needs whatever
number of kilometers squared to live, one tiger.
And it’s just difficult with the number
of people that are there.
So I think if we solve the kind of abundance
and scarcity problem, then I think that opens up
a lot of conflicts both between humans
as well as to do with resource scarcity, at the heart of it.
So I see, if we can solve a lot of these problems
I can see a much better future.
So Nick, you pointed out, the upside part
of your book was a little shorter,
so now you have a chance to add something positive.
What are you excited about?
There are really two sides to that.
So one is getting rid of a lot of the negatives,
like the compassionate use to cure diseases
and all other kinds of horrible miseries that
exist on the planet today.
So that is a large chunk of the potential.
But then beyond that, if one really wants
to see realistically what the positive things
are that could be developed, I think one has
to think outside the constraints of our current
human biological nature.
That it’s unrealistic to imagine a trajectory
stretching hundreds of thousands of years
into the future, we have superintelligence,
we have material abundance, and yet we are
still these bipedal organisms with three pounds
of gray tissue matter, with a fixed set of
emotional sensitivities and the hedonic set
point that is kind of OK-ish for most people
but if you get - if something really good
happens it lasts for a time and then you’re
back to the baseline.
I think all of these basic parameters that
sort of define the human game today, I think
become up for grabs in this future.
And it opens up this much vaster space of
post-human modes of beings, some of which
I think could be wonderful, literally beyond
our ability to imagine, in terms of the mental states,
the types of activities, the understanding,
the ways of relating.
So I don’t think we need a detailed blueprint
for utopia now, what we need is to get ourselves
in a position later on where we can have the
ability to use this to realize the values
that come into view once we’ve taken steps
forward.
Thank you, Nick.
What about you, David?
I’m excited about the possibilities for
AI making us humans smarter.
I mean some of it is selfish - I turned 50
last year, my brain is gradually becoming
slower and older and dumber, but I’m not
sure that I am, and that’s partly because
of all of the augmented intelligence technology
we’re using.
Smartphones, and the Internet, and so on,
they’re giving me all kinds of capacities,
extended capacities that I didn’t have before.
And I’m really looking forward to AI helping
with that.
In ten years or so once everyone is wearing
augmented reality glasses with deep learning
built into it, then I’m really going to
need that around 60.
And if you guys really get on the case and
by the time I’m 70 or so we've got
real genuine AI or AI modules out there which can
somehow come to be integrated with my
brain processes or maybe eventually we get to upload
our entire brains onto AI, then there's a
way potentially to get smarter, more intelligent
forever.
And this is not just selfish, although I can't
say that doesn't motivate me,
but Demis talked about the AI scientists; I also like to think about the AI philosopher.
The problems of philosophy are really hard
and many people have speculated that we humans
are just too dumb to solve some of them.
But once we've actually got AIs on the scene,
maybe AI-enhanced humans, then maybe we're
going to be able to cross those thresholds
where the AI-enhanced humans or maybe just
the AGIs end up solving some of those hard
problems of philosophy for once and for all.
Great, Ray, you have been a true pioneer in
articulating positive visions of the future
in your writing.
So if you picked the one that you're most
excited about now, what would that be?
So imagine going back 10,000 years and asking
the quintessential caveman and woman,
Gee, what is a beneficial future?
What would you like to see?
And they would say, well I would like this
fire to stop going out and I would like a
bigger boulder to prevent the animals from
getting in the cave.
Anything else?
Well no I think that would be pretty perfect.
Well don't you want a better website and apps
and search engines?
Imagine going back 2 million years ago and
talking to primates - imagine if you could do that,
and saying, isn't it great that
frontal cortex is coming and we're going to
have additional neocortex and and a hierarchy
and they say, well what's the point of that?
And you say, well you'll have music and humor,
and their answer would be, what's music?
What's humor?
So they couldn't imagine concepts that they
couldn't imagine, and by analogy I think we
will have new phenomena that are as profound
as music and humor, you could call it more
profound music and we'll be funnier, but I
think it'll be as profound as these great
leaps that evolution has brought us, because
we will become profoundly smarter and if music
and humor are up here and we go to even higher
levels of the neocortex, we're going to have
more profound ways of expressing ourselves
and once we have that we would not want to
go back.
What about you, Bart?
Well, I pretty much agree that we can't really
predict much in advance, what we would like to have.
For myself personally I see the developments
in mathematics and science and discovery,
and computers are just the hybrids of human computers there is quite incredible and makes the field -
makes what we do much more exciting.
So I think that will be in the near future
the first thing.
Great, and what about you, Stuart?
Well, so like Jeffrey Sachs - I think that
for many of us, and probably like the cavemen
- that for many of us life is pretty amazing,
and for many more of us it isn't.
And I think the best thing that AI can do,
the big upside, is actually to fix the latter problem.
I mean I love Nick's feeling that there are
higher states of being that are so far above
our current 'pretty good', that that balances
out all the 'pretty bad' that a lot of people are suffering.
But I really think the emphasis should be
on the 'pretty bad' and fixing it, and eliminating
- so Demis was reading my notes apparently,
from across the room - but eliminating the
scarcity basically eliminates the need for
people to act in a zero-sum fashion where
they can only get by, by making it less possible
for someone else to get by, and I think that's
the source of a lot of the nastiness that
Jeffrey mentioned earlier.
So I think that would be my main upside, and
not having to read so much email,
that would be the second one.
And for you, Elon, you've never articulated
any visionary ideas about the future as far as I know, either.
What about now?
I think I just - I have thought about this
a lot, and I think it just really comes down
to two things, and it's solving the machine-brain bandwidth constraint and democratization of AI.
I think if we have those two things, the future
will be good.
There was a great quote by Lord Acton which
is that
'freedom consists of the distribution of power and despotism in its concentration.'
And I think as long as we have - as long as
AI powers, like anyone can get it if they want it,
and we've got something faster than
meat sticks to communicate with,
then I think the future will be good.
Fantastic, so let's get - I know your caffeine
levels are dropping dangerously low, and we
also have another panel after this, which
is going to be really exciting to listen to,
so let's do a just a few quick questions.
Make sure that they are actually questions,
and say your name and also say,
pick one person on the panel and address it just to
them, OK?
Yoshua?
Yoshua Bengio, Montreal.
And it's for Jaan - I found your presentation
very inspiring, and one question I have is
related to the question of eliciting preferences
and values from people.
Do you think this line of investigation could
lead to better democracy, better society,
more direct democracy, and you know, what
do you think about this direction to deal
with the issue of misuse and things like that.
Yes, absolutely.
There could be one code name for this, even,
could be like 'Democracy 2.0' or 'U.N. 2.0'
or something like that.
So, and as I mentioned in my presentation, just
a lot of people today basically want to make the world better,
but it's kind of hard to
distinguish them from people who say they
want to make the world better.
So if there was actually kind of like a very
easy measuring, like a metric that basically
would work as a Schelling point, focal point,
then I think that would be super helpful.
And yeah, like democracy was invented like
hundreds of years ago so, and clearly we have
advanced as a civilization and we have better
knowledge about how to aggregate preferences.
And Nicolas Berggruen, over there.
Thank you, Max. Nicolas Berggruen, so I have a very almost naive question.
This is a very well-meaning group in terms
of, let's say, intentions, but
who sort of, looking at who else is doing, potentially, AGI, it could be well beyond this group,
it could be in China, it could be any place.
And what happens because we've talked about
how powerful AGI is, and if Elon is correct,
if it is distributed fairly, fine.
But if it isn't, is there a way to monitor
today or in a year or in 10 years, because
once it's out it'll be fast.
Who is monitoring it, who has a tab on it?
Because this is self-selected, but beyond...
Elon or Demis does either one of you want
to take a swing at this?
Well I think this sort of relates to my point
I said earlier about trying to build AI at
the hard part of the 'S' curve, so, which
I think is where we sort of are at the moment,
as far as we can tell, because, you know, it's not easy
to make this kind of progress, so you need
quite a lot of people who are quite smart
and that community is pretty small, still,
even though it's getting rapidly bigger at
places like NIPS.
And so most people know each other, so this
is pretty representative of everyone in the
West, at least, obviously it's harder to know
what's happening in China or in Russia, maybe.
But, you know, I think that you need quite
a large footprint of resources,
people and very smart people and lots of computers
and so on.
So I think that narrows down the scope of
the number of groups who can do that,
and it also means that they're more visible.
So, you know, I think certainly in the West
I think most people around here,
someone in this room will have contact with somebody who's in those groups who are capable of
making meaningful progress towards AGI.
It's harder to know in the East and further
apart, but we should try and make links to
those Chinese National Academy of Sciences,
and so on, to find out more.
But you know that may change in the future,
I think that's the current state of it.
Great, it's - the bad news is it's getting
later in the day and we only have time for one more question.
The good news is there's a coffee break right
after this so you can ask all of your questions
if you swarm the panel.
And the last question goes to you, Erik.
Do you want to stand up?
Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT.
I'm going to pick up on the thing that Elon
said at the end about democratizing the outcome
and tie it back to the panel yesterday where
Reid Hoffman talked about people caring
a lot about not just absolute income but relative
income, and I wanted to get the panelists'
reactions to the thoughts about whether or
not AI had tendencies towards winner-take-all
effects, that there's a tendency for concentration,
that whoever's ahead can pull further ahead,
or whether there's potential for more widespread
democratic access to it,
and what kinds of mechanisms we can put in place if we want to have the widely shared prosperity that Elon suggested?
Elon, do you want to take that?
Yeah, well, I mean I have to say that when
something is a danger to the public, then
there needs to be some - I hate to say government agency, like regulators -
I'm not the biggest fan of regulators, 'cause they're a bit of a buzzkill.
But the fact is we've got regulators in the
aircraft industry, car industry, I deal with them all the time,
with drugs, food - and
anything that's sort of a public risk.
And I think this has to fall into the category
of a public risk.
So I think that the right thing to do, and
I think it will happen, the question is whether
the government reaction speed matches the
advancement speed of AI.
Governments react slowly - or governments
move slowly and they tend to be reactive,
as opposed to proactive.
But you can look at these other industries
and say, does anybody really want the FAA to go away?
and it's like people could just
be a free for all for aircraft - like, probably not.
You know, there's a reason it's there or just
people could just do any kind of drugs and
maybe they work, maybe the don't.
You know, we have that in supplements, kind
of ridiculous.
But I think on balance FDA is good, so I think
we probably need some kind of regulatory authority
and I think it's, like a rebuttal to that
is, well people will just move to Costa Rica or something.
That's not true.
OK, we don't see Boeing moving to Costa Rica
or to Venezuela or wherever it's like free and loose
To Demis' point, the AI is overwhelmingly
likely to be developed where there is a concentration
of AI research talent.
And that happens to be in a few places in
the world.
It's Silicon Valley, London, at Boston,
if you sort of figure out a few other places,
but it's really just a few places that really
regulators could reasonably access.
And I want to be clear, it's not because I
love regulators, OK?
They're a pain in the neck but they're necessary
to preserve the public at times.
Alright, on that note, let's thank the panel
for a fascinating discussion.
