A New Philosophy on Artificial Intelligence | Kristian Hammond | TEDxNorthwesternU

[Applause] thank you thank you everybody I intensely appreciate you being here on a lovely day to be in a darkened room to listen to an academic I I don't know what you were thinking I I'm going to talk today about machines in fact in particular I'm going to talk about two machines computers and people the notion here is that I'm really going to talk be talking about what we are from the perspective in many ways of what we are now doing with computation and I think one of the more important things to start with is to realize Who I am and that is I build intelligent machines I'm a computer science but my focus is artificial intelligence that is building machines that think the way we do in particular it's important for you to understand that ever since I was a tiny child tiny child I love the idea of intelligent machines intelligent robots intelligent computers things that would help us things that would try to kill us and I love them even in those moments where people said they were trying to kill us and I believe at the time I was one of the very few people who after seeing 2001 Space Odyssey actually thought that how after trying to wipe out the entire ship he was on what about all the people on that ship got a bad rap it wasn't that he was evil he wanted to achieve his mission and no one told him by the way while you're achieving your mission don't kill everybody but we have a we have an interesting world ahead of us now and the thing I care about in looking at this world is the issue of intelligence intelligence in all of its forms because I really do believe that there are three big questions in the world the first is the one that we've seen for years and that is the note or the physical world physics and chemistry how do the things work at an atomic and molecular a field level the second one is the nature of life and how it arose biology evolution ecological systems and the third is intelligence the nature of intelligence the physical world the biological world the intellectual world those are the three big questions that we have in front of us and from my perspective looking at that the issue is cognition is cognition it doesn't matter if it's human cognition it doesn't matter if it's machine cognition all that matters is that it's cognition now it turns out that we have a horrible relationship with machine intelligence I mean a really devastatingly bad relationship with machine intelligence most of it has to do with bad press but we haven't we struggle with thinking about intelligent machines first of all we think they're going to kill us which is fine I mean we've been told this for years all the way from Colossus to how to the Terminator we've seen killer machines and you know in film all of our lives more recently we've got this notion also that they're going to take our jobs that is they are going to take over everything that we can do and we will be left alone in the dark with machines running everything one of the ways we fight this is we doubt it that is we think of ourselves as being different unique and that there will be nothing absolutely nothing that the machine will be able to do or that we get the machine learn to be absolutely nothing that we will be able to do to build machines that can do all of the things that we can do and so we defend ourselves and straightforwardly we look at examples of our own decision making and we talk about the machine making those decisions in terms of being a coal being a cold and calculated and and having absolutely no emotion or effect or anything while we develop emotional deep fundamental relationships with things because the reality is we are terrified of the idea that we will be able to program a thing that is like us because if we can program a thing that is like us then maybe we were programmed or are programmable and so we struggle all the time to protect what is different and unique about us but what is it about us what is it that makes us special what do we have that the machine will never be able to do well they're a bunch of things that we sort of start off with and when we think about our battle with the machine and I think you've probably heard most of them it's the idea that well machines will never have emotion or creativity or humor or intuition or consciousness but consciousness is always interesting because whatever you say oh and this machine became conscious the next sentence is and then tried to kill us all it's always the case but the thing is is that the others the other first three are interesting and important but today I just want to talk a little bit about intuition and consciousness because those are the things that we really think of as being fundamental that we all have we are able to make decisions intuitively and we have an awareness of the world now there is a kind of irony here in terms of these two features that are our protection in terms of us being human beings and that is that intuition thing about intuition intuition is the ability to make decisions without quite knowing why we're making a decision in consciousness consciousness is the notion that we are always aware of our thoughts we are aware of our thoughts we are aware of the external world we are sort of there in amongst ourselves but that means that we are in this funny position that we are not conscious by definition of the processes that give us intuition so these two are absolutely opposite sides of the coin of reasoning that makes us up so let's think about intuition for just one second we all know what it's like to sort of follow our gut we don't have enough evidence we're gonna have to make a guess and in fact it's often the case that there'll be that tension within people who are logical and people who are intuitive saying I don't want to hear the numbers I'm going with my gut I don't care about the evidence I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do come on I've seen this a thousand times before I'm going for it and in fact almost every you know genuinely famous and successful person has said something about intuition about how wonderful intuition is how fantastic intuition is there is something that's something called survivor's bias and that is when you take a look at the people who do really well you ask what features actually are associated with them doing really well and many of them will say intuition of course intuition is also a feature that's associated with people doing badly that is making guesses turns out that smart people make really good guesses and not so smart people make bad guesses but it all comes down to it all comes down to coming to a decision coming to an understanding of what's happening in the world assessing what's happening without knowing why and we look at the Machine we think what machine's don't do that they're all based on rules but that's not the case machines are already incredibly intuitive I mean astoundingly intuitive which is to say a lot of the work that you're seeing nowadays in the world of what's called deep learning is all about building up machines intuition that is giving a machine an example after an example of an example and having it slowly learned from all those examples until it hits the point where it can look at a new situation and say know what's going on here and come up with an answer and this is what we see when we have things like image recognition on Facebook Siri being able to understand your words the self-driving car is knowing how to adjust themselves in the road now what's amazing is that these machines are intuitive in the sense that they can make decisions but they cannot articulate why they're making those decisions there are no rules there anymore there are networks of thinking that we've built and we train so people have the machines can make these decisions but the question is do we want machines that do that do we want machines to be able to make decisions without being able to explain themselves in general people the answer to that is no if I have a self-driving car that runs somebody over in order to save somebody else's life I actually would like it to be able to explain itself to me right if I have a system that's making a decision about somebody's future I want to be able to explain itself to me so for us we look at machines making decisions without knowing why this seems odd and the question is when we look at people perhaps we should consider that that's odd as well that is the ability to make a decision without understanding why you're making a decision might be a human ability but perhaps we should aspire to have it be the decisions we made our own make our understandable our explainable are brought into a different kind of realm that's not the gut but it's brought back up into the brain well along with intuition the other side of this is consciousness unconsciousness is very special for us it's this notion that we're aware you all have right now a conscious awareness of what you're seeing what I'm saying where you're sitting what you're thinking there are other things going on in your head besides what's going on in the outside world and this is what it means to be for you which is to say we're looking at the world outside us we're looking at the things inside us and we're hooked to those things so it's this awareness of the internal and the external another thing of it is as we are looking at that the question is what does this actually mean in our lives what is this consciousness do for us what role does it play and I says as things that exist in the world what does it mean to be aware of ourselves well for me so the pivot point in understanding this is push-ups so if you do 50 pushups every single morning for the rest of your life you'll be healthier and you will live longer justice the way it is my guess is that once you decide that you say I'm going to do 50 pushups every morning for the rest of my life the next morning you're gonna wake up and you're gonna go [Music] alright you know I got things to do I got it I got a brush but I got a shower I gotta get downstairs oh my god I'm late I'm not gonna do it and the next morning it's like hey I'm here so you're this odd situation where you know you want to do something and you still don't want to do something but if the part of you that wants to do push-ups it gets a little pushy and says to the part of you that's saying say no today we're doing push-ups damn it you're doing it 50 pushups today now you do footsie part supper today onion you forced that part of you to do 50 pushups the next day and the next day and the next day for 30 days or 45 days then the part of you that didn't want to do push-ups wants to do push-ups now it knows that you're supposed to get up in the morning and even when you don't want to do push-ups anymore but says we're doing push-ups today god damn but we're doing push-ups let's just say you can train yourself to do push-ups every day which is a little odd in terms of an allocution you're training yourself as though there's two pieces of you and then think about memory you've all had a moment where you couldn't remember the name of somebody it's like who play who played who played Commissioner Gordon in the Christopher Nolan Batman films this I can't remember his name he played he did he just did Churchill he won an Oscar I guess he did Sid Nancy years ago oh it's Gary Oldman which is to say yet you have a memory and sometimes when you ask him that your memory a question it can't quite get to the answer but you know how to manipulate that question and ask it more and more questions until you get an answer which is to say memory is not quite you you're aware of memory but it's not quite you it's a thing you can use and I would say the same thing when you're thinking about driving a car because sometimes when you're driving a car you kind of go along then you forget you're just driving along you're not thinking about which lanes you're moving in your nothing about what's in front of you but something's taking care of business for you particularly if you've got a route that you go along every day you'll just drive it and you can think about other things while you're driving and we have these activities we do that we don't think about we just let something else take care of those things sometimes though when there's suddenly something stopping in front of us we see a a pedestrian right in front of us our consciousness comes into play and takes control again but often we're sort of moving through the world not automatically just not in a way that we're aware of which is to say what we're really looking at is a world where we don't have one unified mind what we have is a set of different components that make us up and a consciousness that brings those components together and the notion is is that for things like memory we ask memory our memories a question over and over and over different kinds of questions until we get an answer when we're looking at things like perception perception comes at us and gives us information and sometimes we ignore it so sometimes you forget exactly where your legs are while you're sitting until it matters and then you're aware again and then the actions we take in the world most of them are automatic but sometimes we can train and retrain our body and our emotion or our body and our control and what we end up with of these things that look like black boxes that we access and we can program but think about that black boxes that we access in program things that look like devices that are part of us that we don't completely understand my guess is you can all you all see but you don't understand how vision works you're here but you don't understand how your auditory system works you can remember but you don't know how your memory works you can move your arms and legs and go throughout the world but you don't know how that works but something in you does but your consciousness controls that thing and talk to that thing so we have all these things that we do that look like a central unit and all these subsystems that it interacts with but that's how computer programs work now I'm not talking about intelligent programs I'll talk about any program it has them core and then subsystems that interact with it and in particular when we're talking about intelligent systems we're looking at things where you've controlled and then these subsystems that are almost always opaque that is what we call api's that are opaque to the core system and so you might think of a machine as just having a whole bunch of data and analytics but the reality is it's got these sensors and it doesn't know how they work but it gets information it's got actors things that can take action in the world it doesn't know how they work but I can tell it what to do combined with things that make decisions and draw inferences that understand language that generate language and now in the current world do machine learning and deep learning use evidence to base its reasoning have to text analysis all these things coming together into a central repository and so the structure of how we build intelligence in a machine not unlike at all the structure that allows intelligence to exist for us and this relationship between a controller and the things being controlled a central unit that is aware of what's happening but doesn't know exactly how every single component works is core to intelligence now the reason why I care about this the reason why I care about this is straightforward our future is our partnership with these machines our future is actually interacting with these machines and in order to have that future work we have to think about how to humanize them make them more and more like us every day because if we don't make them like us we have to be like them the less human the machines are the more mechanised we have to become and so by humanizing them we save ourselves from being mechanized now doing this does not diminish us the fact that we can build intelligence and do a thing that is like our intelligence does not take anything away from us in fact it's part of the celebration of being intelligent that we can turn that gift into a gift for others a gift for machines and I always like to go back to Carl Sagan in terms of thinking about this Carl Sagan said a beautiful thing at one point and that is we are made of star stuff we are made of all the things that are part of the cosmos I think it's much more important to understand that we are made of the same things as rocks and dirt and mud and trees we are made of the things that are at the base of creation but what's astounding is that although we are made of those things we can reason that is we can think we can do this astounding thing and it's not because of the glorious stuff we are made of it is in spite of what we are made of and we are now in a place where we can take that that marvelous gift of intelligence of reasoning of consciousness of the ability to look at the world and know what to do to decide and think and infer and know and bring it to the Machine and that that will be for us I think one of the pinnacles of what it means for us to be intelligent as a species that's it [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 294,468

Rating: 4.6454811 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, AI, Computers, Education, Higher education, Robots, Science

Id: tr9oe2TZiJw

Length: 20min 53sec (1253 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 08 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/8BOXX]

we are made of star stuff, we can reason.

machines are made of star stuff, machines can reason.