AI, Robotics, Singularity and Deep Tech - The Next Frontier

hello and welcome to another fantastic session um and i'm particularly excited i think this is probably one of the highlights of this three-day summit and i'm actually very excited to be here together with these five panelists and the people that i consider some of the more inspiring people in the planet but as well people that have been doing things that uh i think uh probably can i light all the different directions of humanity as we speak um so we are talking about the panel that reflects artificial intelligence robotics singularity and deep tech the next frontier and definitely this is the next frontier and all the projects that everyone here is doing are as well touching the frontier of humanity and as well the most different things of what makes us humans so i will try to be synthetic my name is denis guard i'm the the founder of the open business council summit and this initiative with cities abc and world smart cities forum uh this is the second day of the summit is our second initiative i'm very proud that we've been achieving over 50 000 uh people in the last one day and a half and we have people from all over the planet joining us as we speak so i will speak i will start with small introductions to everyone because definitely um i think the the profiles of everyone here speak for themselves and we have definitely leading personalities but as well people that have been changing everything we do in technology in different areas so i'll start by without any particular forward um different areas so i'll start with the scott edward berinsky that is an american physician and a former uh nasa astronaut that is as well an entrepreneur and someone that has been reflecting in social impact in different areas and it was a couple of times on space and of course it doesn't need a lot of introduction for all the work he's been doing but as well all the impact he's been having um both in different areas of technology and uh as well humanity in general then we have ben garcia that is someone that i i well i respect a lot and as well been having fantastic talks that is of course uh is cv goes for all our various but one of the leading global artificial intelligence both thinkers but as well entrepreneurs and as well creators that has been creating a lot of different areas when it comes to technology when it comes to artificial intelligence both from the on the areas of frameworks but as well in terms of creating open ai and of course in singularity net and as well work has been doing with sofia the robot and a lot of other projects that is doing actually at the moment they created as well the dao for sophia and he's been working a lot of projects in terms of open artificial intelligence in general then we have aiden mallor that is a personality that touches a lot of different areas from the arts to technology and they created either the robot probably the most uh powerful creation of him but is as well a very considerate merchant of arts that has been working with some of the top uh artists in the world or in history from uh picassos to a lot of different other organizations but with either robot has been pushing the boundaries of what makes uh our next iteration of creating art and technology and in this case either has been um quoted in all the different media in the world from times to bbc as one of the leading cutting-edge projects in terms of ai robotics and as well as an android that actually creates art and is actually pushing the boundaries of art and last but not least john suite that is the one that is creating as well and being part of creating the first mainstream canine robot that is uh as well one of the most advanced blockchain ai robots that is considering make a lot of bridges in terms of our interact um somehow robots assistant robots a lot of different things which is going to be quite important for the next decades of humanity and of course we finish with the olivia gambling that is probably i would say the conscious of the group and she's been reflecting writing and as well researching in terms of the boundaries of artificial intelligence and our artificial intelligence and ethics can actually be used for both organizations she's been advising the likes of google and other big corporations but as well working with the world economic forum and a lot of other things and leading universities pushing the boundaries as well we can actually create frameworks that actually can avoid creating any kind of the risk that you see in science fiction or in in fiction but as well looking at concrete uh day-to-day uh systems so i'll start straight away because we don't have a huge time uh although we're going to be trying to use as much as possible so i'll pass the word to scott paranzinski that i'm particularly to hear uh thank you for being here that will talk about what he's doing in these areas and as well some of his present uh positions uh thank you dennis and i have to say it's it's a great honor to be with such a dis distinguished panel and to share this uh this event with you um let me pull up a slide here um let me get uh proper deck and hopefully you're able to see uh and present my my slide deck at this point talking to the back room there we go i'll go to the full screen here um it doesn't seem to there we go is that working for you yes okay wonderful well as i was saying it's it's a pleasure to be with you here today um and i have to say it's an exciting time to be alive um i've been very fortunate to live my life as an explorer and i've used extreme environments as a catalyst for my innovation so i'm an inventor product developer and entrepreneur and so i've touched on a number of these areas throughout my career and uh just wanted to to give you a quick snapshot of some of the things that i've been involved in and essentially how i got to be here um we find ourselves in essentially a new uh yes a second generation space age but i grew up in the first one i grew up looking up towards neil armstrong and buzz aldrin and and one to become uh the very first to set boot prints down on mars and in fact uh this poster rendition of someone rappelling down into the uh devalus marinara so that's who i wanted to be um it unfortunately didn't quite happen out that way for my my personal career but i did have the opportunity to fly in space on five wonderful occasions a wide array of very complex missions a number of space walks extraordinary science that we're able to accomplish on uh on my missions and uh and i've also been able to to visit some other extraordinary places on and above and below the surface of our planet um deep beneath our oceans uh inside an active volcano a messiah volcano in nicaragua to the south pole and even to the top of mount everest and all these places have been extraordinary uh opportunities to support life to extract more science thinking in different ways to do that safely and more efficiently and ultimately when we create technology to to expand our capacities in extreme environments they come back and they help us in the intensive care unit the operating room um help helping firefighters and and every industry that you can imagine so it's important that we continue to press the boundaries of human opportunity and of course the tools that we're here to talk about today uh really kind of accelerate that so my my own personal mantra in space as a physician by primary training is that all of us fortunate enough to be in healthcare have both an opportunity and an obligation to innovate and i extend that to all this who happen to be here in this uh this global room i think we have guests from all over the world participating in this this wonderful conference but all of us that are you know kind of leaning forward we have to always ask ourselves what are the ways in which we can do things better make things more cost effective in medicine we think about how can we improve outcomes uh reduce pain and suffering things of that nature but always asking how can we make things better because if we we're not asking those questions history will certainly repeat itself and so when we think about uh you know the climate uh our environment health healthcare space energy communications and just generally improving the quality of life the tools that we're here to talk about have extraordinary capacity so my my day-to-day job is as ceo and founder of a company called fluidity technologies and it actually hearkened from the very early space program back in the mercury program when we first sent astronauts into space there was concern that if the capsule were to lose pressurization their spacesuit would inflate like a big balloon they wouldn't be able to use their feet uh on the rudder pedals to to adjust the yaw or the the pointing of the spacecraft and so they invented a simple mechanical device called a rotational hand controller your kids probably have one at home a logitech control joystick on a base um so we we've had these things around for quite a while but my intellectual property has taken that several degrees further we have now the ability in a single hand to control with tactile feedback and many other features up to six or seven degrees of freedom and almost making movement through three-dimensional space a subconscious act so that when we're flying a drone when we're flying one of these flying cars or urban aerial mobility vehicles as are becoming very popular now in in development it's it's almost uh an intuitive act you're focusing on what you're out there to do rather than the mechanics of pitch jaw roll and thrust so these same sorts of tools will allow us by powering it through machine learning and ultimately deep learning to actually be better than the hands of a very skilled pilot or the the hands of a skilled surgeon you know steering a catheter through the human body with with intuitive ease and and having you know much much better outcomes to be able to potentially even tell operate some of these assets around the world and i'll talk about that in a moment but uh i think you'd have to be living under a rock to not appreciate all the wonderful things that are happening in space right now just yesterday um there was a sort of a kitty hawk moment when we flew the very first rotorcraft on another planet the ingenuity drone if if you will flew on on mars for a brief flight and there will be others that will follow additionally there are other opportunities not just for governmental astronauts to fly on large programs but even scientists engineers and tourists to fly in suborbital space on virgin galactic to fly orbital flight on spacex or blue origin there'll be independent space stations in the future it really is a time of great promise and and people are thinking really audaciously and in particular elon musk is his this long-range vision to not only send explorers to mars but send colonists and he's so dedicated to this vision that he's uh stated that he'd like to die on mars and i think that's certainly commitment to your your lifelong vision but uh the rocket ship on the left here has 42 engines on the tail of it and with the capacity ultimately to take 100 people at a time to slowly colonize mars which is is really you know quite extraordinary to live in a time when a private citizen granted a multi-billionaire can have this this vision and and we take him quite seriously because he's already delivering uh not only a payload but astronauts to the international space station soon he'll be taking i believe uh cruise to the moon and ultimately to mars so this this rocket here on the left that's known as bfr which i think stands for big fun rocket or maybe it's something else i'm not exactly sure another thing that i've been involved with is is terrestrial exploration and this is a very interesting expedition that i took part in about uh four or five years ago it's a messiah volcano in nicaragua and it's the the youngest lava lake in the world and uh we we set the very first boot prints adjacent this lava lake and not just for the adventure of it it was certainly an extraordinary life experience but the goal was to implant the sensor network around the the lava lake as well as up at the at the crater rim and collect enormous data set to which we could then apply machine learning and deep learning tools to to develop models of eruptive activity there are over 800 million people around the world that live in close proximity to volcanoes and and so imagine the the ability to have this predictive capability to have an early warning system for the entire planet if we if we could listen to our our planet uh we could have better tools for tsunamis and earthquakes and and other natural disasters like this so the same sorts of approaches can and are being used of course to to look inward to look at the human body and so i've also had a great opportunity to use telemedicine not only up in space but at one point in my career i was the chief medical officer for the u.s antarctic program where we screened about 3 000 people who went to antarctica every year and then we would support them through telemedicine assets half a world away this is my facility in galveston in the lower right galveston texas in the united states and so imagine as we we advance our technologies not only in the communications but in the ability to tell operate but to use ai and signature recognition to to auto sequence if you will certain types of medical procedures it's going to be really extraordinary and i think the drivers again as we proceed outward you know beyond the moon and ultimately to to mars there's not really a capacity um to have real time uh interaction with a robotic asset so we can have consultants here on earth but if it takes 21 minutes for a one-way transmission and then another 21 minutes to come back that's really not a real-time solution so we need to have the ability for just-in-time training and then also tools that are powered by ai and robotic systems that that can work semi-autonomously so where do i stand in in all of this i think that the potential for automation for increased reliance upon robotics uh increasing power of our our ai is extraordinary but i i believe there's always going to be a need for a human in the loop and actually i'll restate that a human on the loop i think we can do more with our robotic systems and ai enabled systems but there's always a need when things go off script those unanticipated dynamic situations where you just need to take over control either out of choice or out of necessity in an emergency and so i think there's a great opportunity for innovators like myself and those on this panel perhaps who will be thinking about how can we best leverage these tools uh with advanced human machine interfaces so uh with that i think that concludes my my remarks and uh past baton over the next speaker thank you not hearing you sorry thank you so much scott is impressive all the work you've been doing but as well how you continue pushing the boundaries not only uh i think after going to space several times you are pushing boundaries in a lot of different areas of both innovation in different areas and your passion for life and from humanity is really impressive but as well is how this all goes because we need these narratives more than ever so i want to pass the word to you uh ben garcial so ben um i will just repeat a couple of things and i want to touch this so um as we see in your linkedin your twitter profile is benevolent agi so augmented general intelligence transhumanism and error cosmos singularity net open cog humanity plus ico glabs and as well a profit of ai so i want to pick these that know that you do a lot of things as we speak so you are as well serious entrepreneur not only with the ideas but as well a lot of things so um we've been having a lot of talks but i know that at the moment you are advancing with a lot of new things so can you tell us where you stand at the moment and in some of these topics that are talking here now you are mute as well a pleasure to uh participate in one of your uh events once again it's always always a fascinating combination of perspectives and as uh as the previous uh panelists said this is this is an incredible time to be alive and it's an incredible time to be working on advanced technologies like like ai and and robotics and you know i've been working on ai technology since 1980s before i got my pg and you know things are accelerating now in a way that everybody can see whether they're an expert in in the field or or not and i i think we're now in we're in the midst of a series of ai revolutions so i think we're well into what i think of as the the narrow ai revolution where we're seeing ais that can do highly specific things transforming specific vertical areas and next will be what i think of as the agi artificial general intelligence revolution where you get to ais that can really transfer knowledge to new domains of experience that they weren't trained your program for and then beyond that there's what we could call artificial super intelligence where you have an ai that is not just human level in general intelligence but going far beyond humanity and i think there's no scientific reason to believe we are the most intelligent possible system that could be created or evolved in accordance with laws of physics so right now we are well ahead of any of our ai's in terms of general intelligence imagination and creativity i don't think that's going to be the case for long we're going to move from their ai revolution to agi revolution to super intelligence revolution and what's more you know these transitions can happen potentially within our lifetimes and this is really unprecedented in human history right i mean we've we've been undergoing exponential change i think since civilization began and since humanity stepped out of you know steady-state hunter-gatherer society with the emergence of agriculture and cities and so forth but the exponential change hasn't been so fast relative to the individual human lifespan until quite recently whereas now we can see things being revolutionized repeatedly within within our lifetime and i mean if we look at just one example we can look at natural language dialogue systems which i'm working on now in a robotics context that i'll talk about in a moment i mean we had just a few years ago we had only very simplistic chat bots that kind of spat out canned phrases right and you know now with transformer neural networks we have dialogue systems that can sound like a human very very compellingly in some ways disturbingly compellingly for brief periods where you really you can't tell that it's it's an ai and not a human responding to your question from looking at you know the the concepts that the ai appears to be invoking in the pattern of language and that that's a huge step forward on the other hand the ai dialogue systems we have now still don't really understand what they're talking about i mean if you look at gary marcus's online essay gpt-3 bloviator i mean he he goes through pretty clearly some examples showing there's no cognitive understanding beyond gbt3 and other other modern transformer neural net approaches to natural language and i think but i i don't think that will be the case five years from now it might not even be the case three years from now so just as we transition from you know key phrase spouting chat bots to these cognitively limited but very fluid dialogue systems in a few years i mean it's going to be a few years more in my view and we're going to get to systems that can dialogue with real conceptual fluency and understanding not immediately the exact same kind of understanding as people have but perhaps exceeding people in some ways as well as initially not up to the level of of people in in some ways and you know i think the transition from narrow ai to agi it's going to require introduction of different ideas than the deep neural models that are currently most fashionable in the ai field so i've i have my own direction on on that i've been working on this system called opencog for quite some time we have a new version in the works called the hyper on opencog hyperon which brings neural nets together with logical reasoning engines and evolutionary learning in this sort of hybrid cognitive systems architecture so whether hyper on is the path or something else is the path i think we're going to see new ideas beyond current deep neural nets but i think we're going to see these come out pretty rapidly and we're going to see you know a revolution in general intelligence like the revolutions in computer vision and natural language processing that we've seen in in recent years and this absolutely will transform essentially every area of human pursuit i mean you could talk about almost anything people do and how this is being transformed by ai and will be transformed by by agi even before you get to super intelligence i mean in the robotics domain that itself is a huge field but i mean you're starting to see reinforcement learning take hold finally in in factory robotics and industrial robotics where you can show machines by example what to do rather than programming everything the the area of robotics i've been actively involved in is social robot so i led the software team behind the sofia robot which is the world's most realistic humanoid robot and the first robot citizen but we have sophia's little sister grace coming out shortly which is being created by awakening health a joint venture of my blockchain ai project singularity net with hanson robotics the the makers of sophia and grace and so the grace robot is a nursing assistant named it eldercare so we shall be deployed in senior senior living facilities and in the hospitals and elder care facilities to to bring you know human interaction and connection as well as a linguistic facility and cognitive understanding into into the the elder care process and you can do a lot there with diagnostics and therapeutics as well as just practical things like helping helping bring some of their medication helping them schedule lunch or connect connect to call with their with their family members and you know the ability to make robots that can really be helpful in this kind of setting i mean this this is uh this is something we couldn't have done five years ago and it's something we'll be able to do way way better five five years from now so this is an important application as i said there's there's too many to name so i've talked to uh dennis who who has organized this amazing panel a number of times about ai for smart cities and really the cool thing there is that smart city isn't just one thing it's it's an integrated system and you you have ai for health care including elder care robotics you have ai for education you have ai first ai for smart power you have ai for traffic management which i've done in conjunction with with cisco systems before and so many different area ai for planning and scheduling of different operations and ultimately you need data integration you need the data about all these different aspects of the smart cities operation not to be siloed and you need the ai that's controlling these different and guiding these different aspects of the smart cities operations not to be stand-alone narrow ai systems but for these different reis to join together into sort of an overall intelligent intelligent control system right and that's uh so you but you could go over you know factory robots healthcare social robots smart city control systems and dozens of different things and we can see how each of these is being transformed by narrow ai will be transformed by by agi and then you get into the question of control like who controls all this our information systems in which we are embedded and will be physically embedded eventually as as we get chips in the brain and so forth right i mean the these ai systems in which our lives are all embedded who's controlling and guiding them and this this has to do with having humans in or on the loop as the previous speaker said i mean i don't i don't think that's going to be necessary for long actually for cognitive or decision making reasons but it's going to be important if we want the value systems of our ais and the value systems of humans to be evolving and growing in sync we want their eyes to be doing things coupled together together with people so that we're all all on the on the the same digital page going forward that controlling guidance issue also has to do with which sort of institutions and organizations are in charge of that in charge of the ais i mean human humans on the loop is is one thing but you know is it mega corporations is it only military intelligence agencies is is it is it only you know that a few economically and militarily leading countries or is it every nation in the world and i've long been a believer we need a a radically decentralized control network where say asia africa central asia south america and north america everywhere in the us is europe everywhere everywhere in the globe is is participating in all different social classes and cultural groups are participating in guiding the growth of the ai and so having having the right diversity of humans and human institutions in and on the loop is what's going to keep the evolution of ai as we go from their ai to agi to super intelligence synced up with human beings on the on the value system level right and i think the incredible thing is we're building all this right now right so i mentioned some of my own projects the greatest robot and the opencog hyper on and then there's singularitynet which is a blockchain based ai platform being developed in close coordination with the cardano blockchain which allows multiple ais owned by multiple people running multiple places to all network and linked together to cooperate to deliver ai functions to individuals or companies or government agencies so my own projects i'm hoping we can make a big impact but in in the end you know there are my own projects are just part of a large network of amazing initiatives that are unfolding all around the world now and you know influencing all of our actions and our ways of thinking you know as as we speak so it's a amazing time to be alive and and working on all this and i hope everyone will keep in mind not only the the pace with which these revolutions are likely to be unfolding but the the importance of sort of beneficial ethical decentral decentralized and democratic control and guidance as the level of intelligence amps up across all aspects of human pursuit thank you uh ben and i think uh uh i think you touch the most important thing so in partly singularity in partly all the different challenges but as well i think the most important thing is are we going to be managing these things that is a great time to be alive but this is a i would say as well probably the most radical time in history of humanity and in history as well of anything that we achieve as humans and an ecosystem so i'll pass right now to ayden that brings the perspective of history of art and the perspective as well of bringing artificial intelligence with either the robot that is building the first artist robot with the university of oxford and some of the leading global universities but as well right now um and i think this is particularly important i'm sure he's going to announce that but ida is going to be probably the first global artist to be in major global museums as an artist so we have not only sophia the robot that ben was the co-creator and he's been pushing the boundaries but now we have an artist robot that is actually becoming a global artist participating and some of the top museums in the world so i want to pass that to you aiden because it brings another uh facet for the robotics and ai that we are leaving as we speak not in future yeah thank you dennis it is uh like the tv both but scott and ben have said we are in absolutely remarkable times and it is thrilling to be engaged with what's going on in the world i'd like to do a quote from the future of life institute technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before or to self-destruct and as i look around me looking at the incredible advancements that are taking place it seems that the every time any um any kind of press comes to light they always take one of two angles either techno skeptics who say generally general agi will never happen and it will be uh it just can't happen in hundreds of years and it's an awful thing and we wouldn't want it in any case and there's very much a negativity or then you get the appeal of the people who swing the other way the digital utopians who think it's going to be the thing that's going to transform all of life and it's the best thing that's ever happened to humanity um i think it's likely to be somewhere probably in the middle but i do think that we do need to focus on the ethics like ben said in respect of safety for the future these are incredibly powerful technologies and and also you know we all focusing on the possibility of the singularity of having unprecedented computing power um but actually we can go quite a long way before we hit that moment so though we are have obviously got this goal of having super intelligence in actual fact half intelligence is quite good too and in fact is having a major impact on all areas you know we've got self-driving cars coming along which will be a hugely remarkable achievement to make safer roads and saving hundreds of thousands of peoples of lives every year we've got surgical bots coming in that are going to obviously be able to do much safer operations within hospitals and even ai diagnosis so that actually people are accurately diagnosed for their health but it goes into other areas such as the legal you know we've got robo judges where we can try and iron out some of the terrible um mis uh calculations of judgment uh in the legal system and hopefully we can get a fair assistant for all um but it also goes into other areas such as autonomous weapons and of course this is quite a frightening thought of having autonomous weapons we wouldn't want them to be in the groups of small groups of people who've got an axe to grind so this whole world that we're waking up to in this next decade is absolutely incredibly exciting exhilarating but i think what most people are looking at of course is the idea of the loss of jobs and actually as robotics and ai really get to grips in lots and lots of different areas we could have a remarkable response to that it could mean that we get a more an equal world where just the few are able to get harness this technology and do it for their own um benefit and we then be subjugated to the the way that the world is evolving and that actually this agi is going to be used against the large populations of the world or it could be a super intelligence explosion in a positive way where actually it's more democratized and more people have been able to get their hands on it and as a result of that have a much more remarkable future but i am concerned that obviously with small groups of people we don't want to dictate ship arising where people as i say are using it to a very much a negative effect we need to steer the direction so what does the future look like well it's exciting isn't it we're going to have these complex intelligent cities we're going to be able to have a better understanding of ourselves obviously you've heard already from scott about space exploration and the excitement of developing further things you know into other planets but we've also got a look at the backdrop of what's also happening we've got an environment that is collapsing we've got the rich getting ever richer and making a much more unequal world which could potentially make it unsafe and we don't want the scenario of 1984 where there is actually just people where they have to be part of a system so i guess it goes back to this question what is our goals where are we wanting to go and i think that's really important that we ask that question because all of this technology is all very well and good but it's only going to be developing where we take it so where do we as a public want to take it and i think the biggest thing for me in understanding of this is that we need to share the information so that people are understanding what's going on i think there should be more public debate i think there should be more governance getting behind the communication of it because we will get a safer world if more people are educated in this area and that's actually where the role of ada robot comes in she is a robot that has been created over two year period with a remarkable engineering from engineered arts but also incredible programming from oxford university and leeds university and we have particularly wanted to pioneer in the area of creativity an area that people did not expect particularly for robots to get into and when we launched ada in 2019 i've got to say the press hit for that was as dennis has already said unbelievably uh remarkable in respect that people's reaction was so great everybody expected robots to maybe deliver pizzas or doing amazon logistics they didn't expect robots to get into a very human activity of creativity and i think increasingly we're seeing that actually artificial intelligence can indeed get into the worlds of creativity so we're really excited about that we've got an exhibition at the design museum in may in london of ada's artwork and she's doing some self portraits and again what is a self-portrait by a robot when there is no self behind it it's it's a problematic thing right from the very beginning the devising of these paintings of a robot by themselves which isn't conscious so what is it off is it just a machine doing a portrait or is it actually more of a a reflection of where we are because we are actually also doing a digital double of ourselves every time we go on the internet we are also doing a self portrait of ourselves and giving that data to big corporations that are using our self portraits of digital information that is then able to be harmed and actually then sold so that we can be targeted for more product so i guess my question is um if we don't have more public debate we are going to eventually end up in a zombie apocalypse we are just going to be following what is being told to us and that would be a great shame i think in actual fact i am really excited by everybody on this panel but also what we are doing as a world exploring these areas we are in a period of time of fantastic innovation and we as innovators in this particular field are very very excited where this could go but i do think we need as i say those ethical considerations and those abilities to really ask those bigger questions of where are we going what goals are we trying to achieve because without that we are just going to be blindly going into something that perhaps we can't foresee now and actually end up with something we don't want remember that brave new world in 1984 were fictions when they were written they are now pretty much fact so what we can dream of what we can vision what we can hope for does come around and if we are always going towards our fear of being controlled that's where we'll exactly end up and so we do need to have big vision areas this is a time for big visionaries to rise and actually explore what beneficial ai could be for us all and that's where i think the excitement could really be where people are with big visions can actually share that and actually do then incredible pioneering work and we as a organization ada has been devised by a whole team male and female team that have been able to put forward their abilities to create this uh artistic robot and likewise we are excited by the other innovations that are coming up through now and we can see that actually this is going to be an exciting exciting time for us all um so yeah coming to come and see us at the design museum come and see ada she's actually doing a whole number i've got so many ndas i can't say but aida's got quite a few exhibitions coming up internationally and it would be really exciting come along see her and enjoy the innovation that we're we're exploring with her thank you uh aiden it's really impressive and i think it's great that you're looking at it from a perspective of history of art a perspective of ethics and the perspective as well of bringing an um an art uh robot that actually can actually disrupt the way we see robotics because probably is not something that appears normally on science fiction and all the narratives that we have so um now next we have john suit so jean so it is as well working with a very advanced ai blockchain robot that is coda that is a a utilitarian robot which touches another area of robotics that is critical and normally probably is mod what the narratives are coming from is is that robotics to assist people and cod is particularly important because it's interesting the way you're building it because it's not just about the robot utilitarian but as well emotional intelligence robot to support families and to have a huge amount of different touches between these so i know that you have limited time john so i'll pass the word to you hi guys my name is john su i'm the advising uh cto of coda us i joined coda specifically because a friend of mine is one of the founders of cody us and he was familiar with my experience in nano network engines and and also in traffic analysis and building large scale ontological systems for turning basically chaos into knowledge very quickly and um one of the things that uh attracted me to this was you know it wasn't that when i first heard about kodar saw it it wasn't what i expected i you know i've seen all the videos just like you guys have of other robotic dogs out there you know on youtube and the like and you know they look very kind of scary and intimidating you know usually for uh defensive purposes and that's all fine but but um coda is a very cute robotic dog it's it's a endearing and it's intended to be um because the you know the very first applications of coda you know for visually impaired children uh to be able to have a companion that's capable of doing you know obviously what an organic dog would do but but uh but a lot more on the technology side and it's become very useful codas are in in you know they're not pre-production but um pre-release and they are uh they are um you know uh being made available to those who need them most uh at the moment so you know my my interest in robotics and certainly in in the case of coda decentralized artificial intelligence um obviously using blockchain for the for the reasons we all use blockchain but decentralized intelligence um specifically around its learning capability um you know this i'd spend a lot of time uh pursuing uh the ability to take vast amounts of knowledge and turning it into into ultimately you know wisdom and you know the question i had when i first was introduced to this is is this something where you know as a cuda learns independently and ultimately we'll be able to share that information with other codas you know with the permission of their users is it something that we can learn you know from a human perspective you know there's a lot of you know self-introspection that's going on in humanity for a very long time and there are some you know very common themes that come out of you know not just the world religions but you know philosophy in general and one of them is you know this concept of constraint in order to learn or to grow and be presented challenges in order to grow and you know a coda you know a robotic anything but a coda is really designed to be able to learn new things and i think that's where a lot of a lot of um you know pursuits end in robotics at least historically not necessarily with the ones we're talking about today um but it's this it's this concept of ephemeral memory loss in order to grow through ephemeral memory loss you know do can i you know can i have i'll give a simple example uh you know coda needs to learn to walk up the steps of where it lives you know steps are different sizes different um depths in different countries and you know you can pre-program that kind of thing and that's great and it will learn but it's learning all the time and can it uh can it forget what it learns uh while retaining the essence of what it learns can it forget what it learns and then try again and then try again because ultimately you don't necessarily want it to learn um and you know basic conclusion on the first thing it does or the first thing it learns you want it to you know keep trying and learn and get better and be presented challenges that are harder each time so that's that's really been of of my interest um my background is in cyber security um the last 25 years um i spent a lot of time understanding not just you know virtual systems cloud systems and coming up with innovations for securing those environments but also um concentrating on you know what are you what are you actually trying to protect you know it's not the perimeter trying to protect you're trying to protect the thing that either processes something or or the data and and um i spent a lot of time on the you know quantum resistance side of cryptography on how can you treat information so that it is um you know not just uh from a date at rest restorative motion perspective but it is something that can be used while it is in a protected state and i think that's going to be important for robotics specifically you know obviously there's a lot of angst around i mean we've even talked about today what you know potentially robots can do it can go either way it can benefit humanity um or or not and there there needs to be a protection mechanism not just for privacy that's obvious but a protection mechanism so that robots uh can advance and they can grow and and i and and cyber security has been part of that and the kind of the usual things we do in cyber security i don't think are going to be sufficient in any way um you know i think ipfs for example goes a long way obviously blockchain goes a long way um but you're going to need to implement things like reference secret sharing and things like that uh at the core of the systems in order to ensure that robots you know have a chance uh something that ben said um i thought was particularly interesting is this concept and i share this concept of mutual growth uh of humanity and and uh and robots and i think the i think the real opportunity there is um you know if you have this kind of growth food constraint sorry there's a lot of background noise i'm having a big giant storm that's happening and if you see me looking this way because trees are going wild and there's all kinds of crazy noises so sorry about that um and now there's some banging going on i don't know but anyway um i really think i really think this this idea of you know when there is a singularity and and a robot that has some level of you know consciousness it doesn't necessarily have to be human consciousness it can be uh you know robot consciousness or if you're robot dog doggy consciousness you know it's it's what am i here for am i a you know this is the you know the question we expect them to ask themselves when they can is am i a servant of humanity or am i in it with humanity in order for our mutual growth and i think if they can reason that answer especially if it's not you know a pre-programmed answer that's going to go a long way you know once we get there that's that becomes self-motivating on their part and obviously it's self-motivating for us as as human beings so this this and there's always a question on you know um of consciousness uh we're going to be talking about this for a long time we don't even know you know necessarily uh with certainty what our you know origin of our consciousness is let alone you know a robotic system that can achieve some level of you know inner thought and and uh ability to separate itself from you know it's uh you know it's its main you know uh programming or instinctual programming and things like that so uh i'm i'm optimistic uh certainly uh at coda we make great strides to um provide a robotic dog that is a companion and is super helpful uh and obviously is just the neatest thing you've ever seen if uh not uh probably sure you know not necessarily to compete with any of the robots we're talking about today but in terms of a robot dog it's it's absolutely uh amazing and um and it does benefit from you know decentralized artificial intelligence because coders will learn at different rates and they will be able to share what they've learned through different disparate environments and and that's huge and if we were using centralized ai i think that would get watered down pretty quick so uh there's there's a lot of important elements i know i'm limited on time i think the first conversation that denise and i had uh dennis and i had was an hour and a half or something and there was i think it started with one question and that's as far as we got so uh so i'll leave it at that um but uh i look forward to uh all of you uh being introduced to coda when it's released and uh it's uh it's a great um being in this company thank you thank you uh john and uh appreciate as well your inside especially in the way of this druid so olivia last but not least you you come as the ai ethicist and as well someone that is reflecting precisely all these different things and i think just a as a a preamble um if scott went to space when ai was probably in a very tiny percentage of what you have now and since then we never actually we still didn't go to moon for a long time so i'm sure that you're going to right now accelerate all of these things but the point right now like you mentioned aiden is that 1984 is happening as we speak whether we like it or not i think the point is that are we seeing it from the more sunny part or less sunny part and as ben mentioned is we are getting into singularity even if it's just a tiny part of singularity um but this is happening as we speak i think right now is how we're going to be taking it forward so olivia how do you look at this especially working and researching but as well on the commercial side working with big global organizations that are leading this and i think i know that it's not easy to go to a google and tell them okay guys be careful because you have all the of the plants and other people like this but as well how do you make the bridge with this project because i think all the projects here are independent projects that are quite strong on ethics but i know that when it comes to some of the work you're doing is much more complex yes thank you dennis and uh yeah all of these projects are fascinating and usually in these kind of talks um the initial question i'm asked has to do with self-driving cars i've done a significant amount of research into more responsibility and the effects of probability in terms of how we praise and blame our machines and the people behind them um however i'm not going to start there this time since i know it's a bit more high level and it kind of connects in but i actually want to start simply with ethics itself since we were hearing from a couple of the other panelists the importance of having ethical technology the importance of bringing ethics into our technology the importance of human growth and i want to start actually by posing a simple question of what is ethics i myself am a trained ethicist i have done my education in ethics i work with startups and big corporations in ethics i of course have many answers that i've heard in response to what is ethics and it always changes but through this time and through this experience and working with other people in the field ethics is simply the study of right and wrong now again that sounds very high level and vague which tends to frustrate technologists especially like the men that i'm sitting on this panel with it tends to frustrate when you have an ethicist coming in saying well we're studying right and wrong right now so i'm going to take a step further and we're actually going to go into details today so ethics again study of right and wrong there are actually frameworks ethics is logic based which fun fact so is computer science if you trace it all the way back critical thinking stemmed into mathematics or it stemmed into logic which is ethics ethics is based in logic so when we are talking about ethics and computer science we're actually not that far apart what we're doing computer science wise is much more black and white ones and zeros we're looking at straight answers ethics we're dealing with kind of that vague fuzzy area in between where we don't necessarily have straight answers so as an ethicist what i'm doing is i'm actually taking these high level principles such as accountability transparency uh human dignity i'm naming off a bunch of these buzz terms i'm actually looking at how they apply specifically to concrete situations and taking down this high level abstract into concrete um concrete context which is why and i'll give you a little bit of a trade secret we'll say here um whenever you're asking an ethicist a vague question you will get a vague answer we cannot give concrete answers unless we have a context that's the kind of missing step in terms of ethics that we see a lot of times here ethics is contextually based i cannot give you a blanket answer i cannot tell you this is exactly how accountability works in every single situation this is exactly how more responsibility works in every situation i need your context i need your technology to work with otherwise you're not going you're going to get a vague answer from me in return so this is all to say ethics from my perspective and from my work and i've worked with all sorts and shapes and sizes of organizations ethics can't be automated this is something human-based it's very closely connected to our understanding of what it means to be human at the end of the day and one of the very cool things about ethics i'll say um my little intellectual nerd moment is ethics can yes be used for this risk mitigation and it's very important a lot of the work's going into their into that direction right now where we're trying to understand the impact of the technology that we're creating on humanity and to have the foresight to prevent some of these harms that we're seeing start to see pop up but ethics also works in terms of innovation which from my perspective is actually the new frontier is this ethical responsible technology what ethics does is it aligns our our creativity our innovation our creative process and thinking and developing features of our technology and developing new technology it aligns it with the expectations of your users it aligns it with our expectations and our values of our communities so from my perspective ethics is actually the new frontier in technology which seems a bit counter-intuitive after listening to this entire panel but let's let's take a look at something actually called moral growth just real quick since i was picking up a lot from the other panelists this concept of growth of human growth which is true these technologies are helping us grow in terms of humans and understand our humanity better but i want to emphasize that ai is not a magic wand it's not something that we can just plop into a situation and it will fix all of our problems if we don't fix a lot of these human-based rooted problems then our technology is only ever going to reflect our capabilities as humans we can have the motivation to let's say de-bias a system since that seems to be a big topic nowadays we have the motivation to de-bias the system that will never be accomplished if we don't first de-bias our society in the way however we want to uh define an unbiased society um there's a lot of debate there if that's ever actually even possible but that's all to say our data reflects our ourselves and our actions and if our systems are built off of our data then our systems are going to reflect our our actions and our behaviors and our understanding as people which is all leading back to the point of moral growth and this is why i want to focus on regulation is important automation and technology is important but we don't ever want to solidify our understanding of morality to the point where we stunt our moral growth and moral growth is literally just the understanding as society grows and as we're put into new situations we our understanding of morality our understanding of our ethics of humanity itself grows with us but if we solidify this into our technology to the point where we can't grow we can't look we can't release a system into society and go well that didn't work let's go back and fix it in terms of the ethical principles then we're stunting our growth we won't ever be able to expand beyond our current understanding of what it means to be ethical what it means to be moral so in that sense laws are important to reach our baseline technology is important to reach our baseline but there's still always going to be that heavy lifting to be done which is beyond that and that's in the ethical gray zone um and i'm going to end on just one point real quick site i know this has been joking that i'm the conscious of the group um and i like to whenever i work with clients i always start with i'm human i'm messy i'm going to make mistakes and that is a good thing in this situation as an ethicist i am not morally superior i get those jokes all the time i'm not morally superior i am trained to recognize certain situations as ethically laden as having high impact for humans and then i am trained in frameworks logical frameworks about how to work through those situations to come with the best answer does not mean that i know best it does not mean that i come in saying i've got the best values in the world no i just know how to recognize the values of the society or the user base that that a system is being deployed on and how those are incorporated into the technology itself so i'll end there on that point that ethics in my opinion is the new frontier is actually um we have this amazing technology that's developing and we're at the point where we can do better and it's time that we do better thank you olivia that's very inspiring as well very i think powerful so um i i know that we have limited time and there's a lot of powerful minds here but that's why i want to put everyone here i think synthetic sometimes is a great way to come up with very capacity of of summarizing the challenges so i want to go to you scott and i know that you have a limited time but one of the things is when you were in space or flying planes or flying spaceships you had to deal with a lot of decisions because a bad decision first of all could cost your life or could actually destroy the entire spaceship or plane because you've been flying planes for a long time as well but you are as well a physicist so you have the science in a lot of different ways both as a pilot and and as well right now you have your own technology company so how do you look at all these different areas because in one end you have quite you are one of the few humans they were they went to space but at the same time you are still doing technology dealing with a lot of different things and the looking at a lot of the the next borders of this both as someone that has been piloting planes and spaceships but as well building a lot of the technology doing and as well as the physicist and that's the one that has been researching this well that's a very expensive question uh thank you for that and uh i also wanted to you know thank all of our other panelists i i've learned a lot today and it's just been fascinating um i i think um we're at a point where we have access to so many more uh technologies so many more people so many more capacities to solve ever more complex problems and so i'm sorry uh like uh like john uh or um uh aiden uh was i think commenting i i now have some noise out of the leaf blowers which is i think the worst invention of all time uh is right outside my my window um but uh i think uh as we continue to think bigger and bolder uh there are more opportunities to leverage the uh uh the science the engineering the technology the uh the software tools that they ai to to take them on so um i i don't do anything as an individual i as an innovator develop multi-disciplinary teams and so i i work with lots of different smart people who come at problems in very different ways and in in aggregate you can take on very difficult problems in health care and in aerospace and uh so i i think it's just a time that's right for ever greater innovation fantastic and i think i think definitely what i see right now and i want to pass right now to ben so ben in terms of uh someone that is building so much different things and i think i i respect a lot both you and scott because you guys have continuing never stopping but as well in your case then you have a very strong bridge between ideas thinking and action and that's not an easy task because especially when you are in the realm of ideas or research or or all these areas is very complex but in the other parts is much more difficult so uh ben in terms of one of the things you touch and i think we touched this previously but i think now uh so first of all you're working in a lot of projects in terms of open ai and making sure that ai is not controlled by one person two and i know that this is kind of the biggest challenge we have when i say one person or two or at least the boards of corporations which is big problem but at the same time we are even if in a very inceptional ai in the verge of singularity uh it's our phones that start interacting with us and even just sensors very narrow ai these things are already happening but i would say the next five years we're going to have a jump because suddenly we can actually make a leapfrog and there was actually a conference you were speaking recently and as well david um johnson you were talking that we can actually leapfrog in the point that suddenly we can actually buy a whacking completely ourselves and that that is happening because last week just uh there was a research between using dna of the monkey and a lot of the species there was actually some people talking about the possibility of creating a jurassic park that in theory is already practiced or is already possible so how do you see this especially on the time frame and on this vision how we can actually make sure that you don't get in the 1984 dystopic vision but at the same time we can actually as society organize ourselves you mentioned a lot of important things uh what what time frame are you probing about specifically so i think i want to ask your time frame let's ask yours for singularity oh time frame for the you know i i think so my friend ray kurzweil who's so uh active and working toward agi though he's uh he was uh absorbed into the broader google initiative some time ago i mean he articulated his time frame of 2029 for human level agi and 2045 for massively super artificial super intelligence the singularity massively superhuman ai and he he reached this based on a bunch of fairly careful curve plotting activity now my argument with that was always the second part like i felt like 2029 is probably a reasonable stab at human level agi i mean i i would love to get there even faster saying three to five years from now i don't think that's outrageously impossible i don't think it's outrageously impossible it could take till 2035 either but i think that's around the right i think that estimate remains about right then you ask why why did he forecast 16 years from human level agi to super intelligence right if you have if you have an agi that can read math books and develop new mathematics and can modify its own software code and invent new hardware i mean then then why does it take 16 years to upgrade its intelligence and the best answer i could come up with to why he might be right about that is the agi itself wants to advance its intelligence at a measured pace like if if if if i could improve my brain unlimitedly i wouldn't do it at the most rapid possible pace right because it that's a very unpredictable thing you could do and i'm i'm quite a risk taker but i'm not an infinite risk taker like you you you start adding in these new neurons you may screw something up so you may you may want to merely double your intelligence see how it worked out then double it again instead of increasing it by a factor of a million all at once so we we may reach a point where actually the rate it's not the case now whatsoever because now ai is developing mostly from parties developing it for their own narrow economic or defense or surveillance interests anyway but we might we may reach a point where the rate limiting factor in development is is actually ethics and wanting to wanting to wanting to keep things in some settlements i won't say control but at least comprehensible evolution right and so that's a and anyway that's my rough thinking about timelines of course we could hit an obstacle i mean i think it's not likely but let's say we discover that quantum computing is needed for human level general intelligence i'm i'm i'm assigning that a less than five percent chance of being true right now but more than zero percent right so if if if that turns out to be the case we're delayed on the other hand the crime computing is also advancing fast i don't think we're delayed by centuries then like like maybe maybe by decades but i i raised that just to make clear like this is not a determinant process right we're making our best estimates about about a plunge into the into the great unknown which is a lot of uh inherent uncertainty and risk associated with it so one question before i pass to the other panelists is so you've been working with dao that was the first decentralized autonomous organization in the case for sofia the robot so that is as well quite uh an accelerated way of first of all decentralize the data of probably the most advanced known military robot in the world in parallel with either and others so in terms of the dao can you tell us a bit about that because i think i think that is particularly interesting uh in a different level as well to look at how to look at data and ethics and ownership of data and as well the way you fund that project yeah i think i mean again this is a huge number of different topics each of which could be its own its own whole whole panel right so i mean i think for dealing with data of course we'll all be better off if we can move to some mode of organization of the information sphere in which data sovereignty plays more of a role and the individuals who generate certain data have more agency over the utilization of that data and this has to do with our the data regarding our our writing and our social media usage it has to do with our our medical data that's used for drug discovery and pandemic tracking and so forth i mean in one case our purchase history like in one case after another wouldn't it be nice if we had ownership over our data choice over how it's used and transparency over over over how it's used and i mean this this would not only prevent abuses but it would increase the level of collective intelligence that can go into the into the use of all this data and one of the nicer uses of blockchain is to enable decentralized data economies and the technology is there for that now so it's it's more a matter of gaining adoption because the the utilization of data for either statistical or advanced machine learning uh purposes is is it's dominated by big companies now whether you're in the pharma domain or the social media domain or or whatever so there's there's a problem with adoption and with you know business model transition but fundamentally we have the tools now to allow decentralized and transparent data management which is is pretty interesting and and important and then the notion of a dao a decentralized autonomous organ organization it ties in with that because dao of course is not just about data a dao is about how do you how do you make an organization which is has a sort of scripted and programmed set of bylaws and as one of the affordances that you get from scripting your corporate bylaws in a programming language and being able to program the operation of this corporate organization one of the benefits you get is you're able to explore more decentralized ways of organization right i mean i mean corporations are decentralized in a sense you have shareholders who vote and they're they're they're in they're voting on the people who lead the company but but there's in practice a highly centralized mode of of operation there and you can you can lose something loosen things up a bit with a dao i mean you can make you can make a corporate organization that has no fixed legal jurisdiction you could make one that doesn't have a fixed leadership it determines things by by liquid democracy mechanisms like you can you can do whatever you can program right and so actually with singularitynet our blockchain basic i platform we're exploring a number of different dow structures for for different projects we have something called singularity dial which is a decentralized finance project that we're actually in the midst of launching now which is which is is aimed at sort of increasing the intelligence of the financial ecosystem around around tokenized projects that's singularity now then we have sophia dao which is a different decentralized autonomous organization centered around benevolent ai and the the sofia robot and then avatar is inspired by her we're also actually getting getting deep into ai generated creative arts there i didn't talk about that but i mean since we have ada on here i mean we we did an nft drop on the uh on some art that was co-created by andrea a human artist and and by sophia the robot both with her robot hand and with some neural algorithms and then this was this was was auctioned off and then a bunch so a bunch of this human ai hybrid artwork was sold on the blockchain as nfts for one point something million dollars not not long ago so i mean this is uh this this sort of thing right now was done by andrea as an artist together with david hansen and sophia on their own but if you have a a dao that is is configured to organize you know creative collaboration between say human artists and different media and ai's doing creative art in in different media then then you can crystallize this sort of collective cyborg creativity in a way that isn't isn't tied to any centralized auction house or or or any or the whole centralized art world right so that sofia dao and singularity dao they're different different scripted bylaws and modes of organization and we can have a huge number of other things too right because the the modes of corporate structuring and organizational structuring that are out there in the world right now i mean they're a tiny percentage of the possible ways of of organizing groups of humans which are dominant through historical momentum right and i mean just as fiat currencies are a small percentage of the possible ways of of denominating and exchanging value and just as the human brain's cognitive architecture occupies a very small percentage of the space of possible minds so i mean the ability to program stuff opens up possibilities all over the place congratulations first of all for all these excellent initiatives that are actually fantastic and i think as well are opening a lot of borders in terms of the possibilities like you mentioned i know that this could take a lot of couples and definitely i want to back to you especially which as well as smart cities in ai and all other different things so evan in terms of um in the case of ida you are right now uh taking either to some of the leading museums in the world you mentioned the design museum that is probably one of the design museum's premium in the uk and in europe and worldwide but as well this is the first time that we actually are bringing a robot uh artist with his pieces or our pieces in this case to a museum and that same time for instance i uh uh ryan abbott that is uh professor uh ryan obi that is one of the global experts in in patents it says that at the moment a robot doesn't have uh any kind of jurisdiction so of course the jurisdiction is who owns the robot but by all means you're creating art that is going to museums and right now is starting to somehow uh compete and and as well participate with other global artists and leading personalities so how do you see that in your experience as well as working with christie's previously sophist but as well in history of art where you've been actually studying and so forth yeah we're in interesting times aren't we i've got to say a lot of people have said oh does this mean the end of the artist as the algorithm is going to get so sophisticated that actually there's not going to be the ability for artists to express because an algorithm would be able to do it better the reality is for me i think more historically similar to when the camera came in i actually have at home some newspapers from the 1850s where they say that actually the artist's role is all over this camera's coming in they're going to do better likenesses than a painter can do more accurate our lives are all over and actually i think the rise of creativity in technology is going to be having a similar effect where rather than rival or challenge the concept of having artists in the world i think they're going to be very much setting up a new area of exploration and it's going to be very exciting we wouldn't think now of having an art world without photography and the greatest museums in the world have some of the finest photography collections uh in existence and so they see it as very much a complementary aspect but i know i'm aware that without a cutting-edge thing it's very pioneering and so people are very worried that you know suddenly all the artists jobs are going to go i think it will change it just like photography has changed art photography has definitely had a massive impact on the way that paintings are produced but i don't think it's going to stop artists people will still want to express themselves and touch the souls of each other which is quite an interesting expression when you think of robots touching souls i am well aware of the words i'm using here there's a very problematic area to discuss you know but the idea that art speaks art communicates art touches lives and the the great thing about art is that it it feeds us it nourishes us it makes us think sometimes on areas that we don't want to think about and i think artists are primarily prophets of their time digging into questioning those deep universal questions we all have of existence why are we here where are we going what are we worth what is our purpose and art is a fantastic mirror to humanity to be able to ask our deepest fears our deepest excitement and i see ada's role is to do exactly that to open up our deepest dreams but also our deepest fears and i think the rise of technology is also doing that we have the ability to build a better world we also have the worry that that could take out be out of control and actually deliver something negative i am so happy to have olivia on this panel we need ethics in all of this and i am excited about where we will be going with this so um yes to answer your question an exciting time an explosion as explosive time and i look forward like i said before to seeing how this all unveils we don't know where we're going but we do need to ask those big questions and we need to say what goals do we want where where do we want to go if we could have the way that we want to go forward and i think very inspirable as well very uh important for all of us to understand that the next steps so olivia i wanna i wanna come back to you and nothing special to make the breed so creativity and ethics are always related because ethics you need the ethics and creativity normally is what drives you to do things and it's what makes us human special and the ethics normally is what makes us having and the understanding if even if you like to do something that something can actually earth or can do something of course when you put this together with the with all these areas especially with birds it's like what ben is doing and aiden and john this brings a lot of things for us in the case of john for instance putting a robot uh in a house that can actually have emotional intelligence because it's a dog representation with a child but as well as is a robot that actually is programmed to to protect so you can actually open a lot of different areas especially if there's a fight between actually there's one of the questions i asked john if there's a fight between the family of the there's an argument and the robot wants to take a side so how do you see these things and i know that you've been doing parallel quite cutting-edge research in terms of self-driven vehicles with global companies which is i know that is one of the basic things of ai but it's kind of the most mainstream thing so i want to touch this and now you see these the different dualities well for me ethics is actually a very creative endeavor so i do see them connecting quite closely um and why ethics is such a creative endeavor right now is because we're still beginning to understand ethics and how these principles are applied into specific contexts for example self-driving cars we've never been in the the position where we're going okay well what if someone else causes a death that and that someone else is a car how can we blame that car or can we blame that car um can we blame the people that created the car there's a lot of intricacies there that take creativity that take that creative mindset to dig into and try and understand well how are these different aspects of humanity coming into play um so for me ethics and creativity go hand in hand since we're on such a cutting edge of trying to understand what ethics means in in the context of technology it requires a lot of creative thinking a lot of innovation a lot of well let's push ourselves even further i mean ethics itself is a field that is thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years old there's more information to read on ethics than you'll ever be able to there's more research on ethics written than you you'll ever be able to dig into but now it's like we're opening up the door all over again um and opening it up into okay well let's add in a whole nother component and that is the ai component that's a computer component and we're going to have to be creative by taking these these older frameworks and concepts of ethics that go back that are ancient really these ethical frameworks go back back to the ancient times how do we then bring them into the future and become creative with how these can actually apply looking at how for example you can how do you code for utilitarianism is that the right framework to be using or should we be looking at a different framework um it takes a lot of creativity and a lot of mind-bending moments people joke that philosophers will sit in their chairs and just think well an ethicist is on the ground trying to do that thinking in real time while communicating across multiple different fields at the same time so it's it's uh armchair thinking on steroids and kind of a seems like a game show uh i'm describing it like it's a game show right now like it's a bunch of ethicists sitting around trying to shout out the answer but a lot of us are working and we're coupling up with uh programmers and technologists to understand better at that gap that we've been missing up until now in in the ai industry thank you nothing it's very good points that you made but as well i think there's a sense of urgency on that so john and i think is one of the last things we are almost wrapping up and i appreciate all the time so john in terms of your head so you have a head right now building a very advanced being part of a team building one of the most advanced um robots utilitarian robots let's put it that way but at the same time you haven't had as cyber security and and the point right now is that of course um one of the biggest challenges that we have when we face as humans of course the attics are in the base of all of that is that as humans we have different ways of looking at things different philosophies even different approaches um in a culture uh taking something might be okay in another culture is a crime for instance just raising the voice in the culture might be uh very intense and other culture is different sometimes the way we speak sometimes the way you communicate so how do you see that part especially building the emotional intelligence of koda and that same time your head is cyber security to make sure because in the other day there's the part of the emotional intelligence of the robot but this is part that if someone biowax a robot is in a family that is playing with a child or playing with the family the implications are very very dimensional like like self-driven cars and because of ada is probably slightly different because ada is creating art so it's not so probably risky but but i think on that level it touches differently especially as you create mass utilitarian with the with coda being more mass circulating yeah i think there's a number of things that you mentioned um i think at the most basic level you know there's there are things that are you know pre-programmed and there are constraints and there are uh you know while also making sure coda or anywhere about has the ability to to grow and and progress in its learning you know if there's a specific instance you know where you know any robot has the isn't has the char has a charge has a individual uh that it looks after or is that minimum of a companion of and it's given notice that uh you know some event is taking place where it needs to make a decision you you know you expect it to govern itself accordingly but that governance you know may be a little fuzzy you know and it you know it may say i you know i protect the child at all costs um and you know that that's primarily a defensive thing um you know you have to be very careful on instructions you give any any computing system uh and certainly that that is guided uh by ethics and it's certainly specifically the logical you know side of that but i think the core or at its core is you know a coda can learn and exist and grow uh but it can't infringe on another entity's uh ability to do the same thing so this is this is you know the the core of really all of it is you know we as individuals you know you know need to pursue happiness you know for you know you you use the words um but we don't have a right to do that at the expense of others and we don't have the right to do that uh you know specifically infringing on others ability to do that and when we assert that that's where you're going to have problems with people especially but with robots as well you know one robot asserting itself over another you know an infringing on on its ability to do what it's supposed to do and its ability to do that with uh you know other humans um especially ones that are are its companions and known to it uh but also ones that it's not you know a coda will know who the family is there you know there's a myriad of sensors on a coda and and it knows from you know the the collaboration and correlation of those sensors um but not limited to single things like voice and and and you know visual cues and things like that you have very sophisticated uh camera and depth system um but it still will recognize an entity it doesn't know and just because it doesn't know it doesn't mean it can infringe on that other entity's ability to do what a coda knows is the core of what an individual is and can and can't do and i know that gets real tricky because and it does um but it's it's it's it's you know there's the constraint side of of what you're expected to be able to do and not do as a as a robot but there's also the growth side and and that's a balance and that's an equilibrium that has to be established and that's tough that's tough for all of us and or anywhere near this this space um so that's but it's definitely worth pursuing i think yeah completely and i think it's i think as well the challenge is that are we going at the moment until this is small pieces is one thing as we start having a lot of repetition of robots uh among humans then we have a lot of challenges that we had in the past as well and that brings us to history so to wrap up the panel i would like if you can actually it has to be synthetic but at least one minute each uh to just put some ideas about how do you see these things and i kind of a message of hope i think one of the things we try to do in this summit is always try to get hope and try to get a narrative that can actually help us and i know that all of you are very positive people and as well very conscious as well and ethics on these things but i think in the other day a lot of people listening to us might think this is science fiction still but it's reality and we are all on this together so i think just a wrap up for this about some of the things that we do i'm starting with olivia or the last one now the first one thank you dennis and thank you again for having me on today it's been really fascinating hearing all of these new technologies coming into play um and the new frontier and really pioneers working on that frontier as well um and for me i'm going to leave with a message of hope which is uh i often surprise people considering i'm an ethicist and a lot of times ethicists are seen as very risk and doomsday focused i'm actually very hopeful one so i i will stand out a bit from that and my hope for the future is i think it was ben talking about earlier about the goals the end goals of our society and goals of our technology it's time that those change and update we set goals what 10 years ago when tech was first exploding it's time to update those and actually focus those end goals back onto humanity back onto good for people and it's going to take small acts of bravery to slowly shift those end goals back to concentrating on the person so for my my hopeful rallying call is to actually be brave when you're creating your technology not brave and brave new world sense but brave in the sense of you're going to have to go against the grain we need new business models we need new technology approaches we need new we need new focuses we need new end goals and those are going to be different than the ones we have now and you're going to stand out from the crowd and it may be painful for a little bit but that is something that we need to we're at the time where we need to stop and go okay there are certain directions that our technology is going that we don't like and we want we are still in control and we can stop that it's going to take us a significant effort to pull us back onto the track that we want to be but it's going to take a lot of self-reflection uh as a as a society and that is scary and uh we're gonna have to be brave in that so that is my ending point is be brave in this new wave of technology thank you hey then um i am a positive hopeful person but i would say we need to have great caution uh massive technological rise was in the 30s and 40s and that ended in world war knowing the human species we are we're not always great at making decisions and in actual fact the abuse of power that is ever present in this world um i would not like to be complacent and think that those sorts of things are those terrible catastrophic things can't happen again i think that would be extremely naive knowing the human condition so although i do want to leave on a positive note i would like to really end on a note of caution that we do need mass education we need to have people really engaged informed thoughtful and with that we will be able to then have a safer world because combined when humans combine on a global scale then great positivity can happen when small pockets use the abuse of power we need to be very mindful of that so um a cautionary ending although with that cautionary ending we will hopefully then get the the world that we actually want john that's hard to follow from these two um i think the you know one of the first things and and i think when i come across by the way when i talk about this stuff i think i probably come across pretty optimistic and and i am uh but one of the first questions i asked uh coda when they talked to me about you know advising was uh i said does it have a physical on off switch the first thing i asked um because i've seen all the movies and read all the books just like everybody else um you know i saw an article about you know the ability to emp proof uh you know robots in the field on you know for for uh robots for defense and and that's in a chill down my spine i'm sure it does a lot of people who uh who read it because you kind of think that's kind of the last resort you know uh if there's an issue i but i do think if if we are instrumenting uh you know a level of of ethics uh to olivia's point in these systems but we ourselves are examining just what we mean by that you know that's the real trick you know i can talk about infringing on rights and things like that but it's a lot more complicated than that and there's a lot of decisions that fall on those same lines um where you could say it's either or you know you could say i'm not infringing on rights but i still have a thousand decisions to make it's getting down into the noise on that stuff that's going to make the difference and i think the willingness is to do that has got to be there right up front and it's got to be you know kept up front because it's you know as soon as a robot is so exceedingly not that you know i'm sure it's actually it's already happened but but it will continue to happen is so exceedingly valuable in what it does you know and it causes you know yet another paradigm shift um you know you know you're not going to you're not going to question its underlining ethics so much when it does something that you know it becomes so um intrinsically valuable to either convenience or to health or whatever um you know things like that get forgot you know you think about systems you know whether it's smartphones or even the original dvrs or whatever you know no one's asking what's going on in security in those things when those things are being introduced um you know the cloud in general wildly unsecure for a very long time the you know but nobody asked because it was extremely uh costs uh you know cost productive and convenient and all these things and there's a minimum level out there that people just basically assume and i think for you know for us it is very important to not just think of the ethics which is a huge thing but also how do we secure these things because you don't want the ethics being removed from the thing that you spend all the time putting ethics into and i think security is a huge part of that you know because if if the underlining knowledge or or ultimately wisdom that we have pre-programmed these things with and allow them to then produce knowledge and hopefully ultimately wisdom if they if people start messing with the core of that you know they're going to come to conclusions while might benefit you know individuals or individual organizations it's going to wreak havoc and you gotta you got those things come are have to go hand in hand so you can ensure those ethical systems are still there when these things are ultimately deployed in the world and i'm not talking about code i'm talking about robots in general and really automated systems so that's uh that's that's why i think i think we can absolutely get there but we definitely need to be mindful to adrian's point or 80s point fantastic john and fantastic olivia aiden scott left a bit early and ben but uh it's been amazing um i'm actually very excited to continue collaborating with all of you i think it was a big panel a lot of minds but i think was great to confront all our different initiatives and all different things very grateful to have you here thank you to everyone listening to us around the world and um i welcome you and i'm i'm sure you're going to continue with other talks with other provocative themes thank you so much thank you thank you thank you

Channel: Dinis Guarda

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Id: wGCUBvJb1vU

Length: 97min 14sec (5834 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021