CHIP Landmark Ideas: Ray Kurzweil

all right as folks uh join the zoom I'm going to get started welcome everyone to the chip Landmark ideas Series today we'll be hearing about rewriting biology with artificial intelligence from Ray Kurzweil an inventor and futurist I'm Ken Mandel I direct the computational health informatics program at Boston Children's Hospital the program was founded in 94 we're a multi-disciplinary applied research and education program to learn more you can visit www.ship.org the landmark ideas series is an event series featuring thought leaders across Healthcare informatics I.T big science innovation and more Dr Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors thinkers and futurists he creates and predicts using tools and ideas from the field of pattern recognition invented many Technologies familiar to us today including flatbed scanning optical character recognition and text-to-speech synthesis he won a Grammy for creating a music synthesizer used by Stevie Wonder that was capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments he was awarded the national medal of Technology his best selling books include the New York Times bestsellers The Singularity is near and how to create a mind Larry Page brought Kurzweil into Google as a principal researcher and AI visionary I'll just mention one connection to chip Ben rice a faculty member when he was a student at MIT worked with Ray to develop T text-to-speech interface for that synthesizer so that Stevie Wonder and other non-sighted musicians could interact with the extensive visual navigation interface The Singularity is a very important idea of Dr kurz Wiles this is the point in time when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence resulting in Rapid technological growth that will fundamentally change civilization and in order to understand when machines surpass biology Ray has delved deeply into an understanding of biology and we're immensely looking forward to hearing and learning and joining him in that understanding today you've got us all looking forward and uh the the chat and the Q a have lit up let me start with one question and um either you're joining us for the seminar uh five days after the release of open ai's chat GPT um which astounded many across the world in its ability to synthesize natural language responses to really complicated questions and assignments and if you've gotten to Glimpse this technology could you place it on the Kurzweil map toward the singularity is this a step forward is it a distraction is it uh is it related in any way well large language models occurred three years ago uh and they seemed quite compelling they weren't totally uh fully there you could chat with it and sometimes it would kind of break down uh the amount of uh uh new ideas that are going into large language models has been astounding uh and so it's like every other week There's a new large language model and some new variation uh there's more and more realistic uh so that's going to continue to happen um and so this is just another issue I mean there are some things I think that aren't quite right with that particular model you mentioned um but people have actually interacted with these things and some people say they're sentient I don't actually think they're sentient yet but I think they're actually moving in that direction and that's actually not a scientific issue so it's actually a philosophical issue as to what you consider sentience or not um although it's a very important issue because I would chat with Marvin Minsky who is my mentor for 50 years and he said that sentience is not scientific so therefore forget it it's an illusion uh that's not my opinion if you had a world that had no sentience in it it may as well not exist um but yes there was a sizable advance but there's more to come we uh ask a question from Charlotte please philosopher and an AI informed philosopher um what do you make of the criticism that there's more to intelligence than root processing speed and pattern recognition that if we want to pass the Turing test we need to learn more about our own evolved how our own intelligence evolved and I'll just um paraphrase you in the singularity is near um comparing cognition to chaotic Computing models where unpredictable interaction of millions of processes processes many of which contain random and unpredictable elements provide robotic species appropriate and appropriate answers to subtle questions of recognition and so uh you know in that in this chaotic Computing how can you address uh Charlotte's question um about our own intelligence and and and the path forward AI it is a good uh observation uh but chaos and unpredictability can also be simulated in computers um large language models do that um because you you can't always predict how it's going to answer and a lot of these models you can actually ask the same question multiple times you'll get different answers so it depends on kind of the mood of the of the large language model at that time uh and to make it more realistic it does have to uh take that level of uh into account when it answers um at first we could ask a question and it would give you a paragraph that could answer your question now can actually give you several pages it can't though give you a whole novel uh that can be coherent and answer your questions so it's not able to do what humans can do not many humans can do it but some humans can write a whole novel that would answer a question um so that's the answer it has to actually cover a large amount of material have an unpredictable element but also all be coherent as one work and we're seeing that uh happen uh gradually uh each new large language model is able to actually cover a much broader array of material but it definitely can handle the stuff that is not uh it's not just giving you a predictable amount of um it's it has a a way that is not really totally predictable so along those lines let me post Jane Bernstein's question which is what is your definition of intelligence foreign intelligence is to solve difficult problems um with limitations of resources including time so you can't take you know a million years to solve a problem if you can solve it quickly um then you're showing intelligence and that's why somebody who's more intelligent might be able to solve problems more quickly um but we're seeing that an area after area I mean Alpha fold for example can actually do things that humans can't do um very quickly or to play something like go it goes Way Beyond what humans can do in fact Lisa doll who's the best uh human player in go in the world says he's not going to play go anymore because machines can play it so much better than he can um but that's actually not my view that it's going to replace us I think we're going to actually make ourselves smarter by merging with it as I said so I'll ask a question from Sharon Weinstock with AI taking over physical and intellectual achievements and individuals living longer do you have thoughts on society and whether individuals risk lacking a purpose well it's good to hear from you Sharon um that's the whole point of emerging with intelligence I mean if we J if AI was something separate from us uh it's definitely going to do everything that go Way Beyond what humans can do uh so we really have to merge with them to make ourselves smarter but that's why we create these things uh I mean we're we're separate from other animals and that we can think of a solution implemented and then make ourselves better so if you look at say take what human beings were doing for work um 200 years ago 80 had to do with creating food that's now down to two percent and so if I were to say oh well you know all these jobs are going to go away and machines are going to do them people say oh well there's nothing for us to do uh but actually the the amount of the the percentage of people that are employed has gone way up the amount of money that we're making per hour has gone way up um and if they say well okay but what are we going to be doing I said well you're going to be doing I.T engineering and protein folding and no one would have any idea what we're talking about because if those ideas didn't exist so we're going to make ourselves smarter that's why we create the these uh capabilities so it's not going to be us versus ai ai is going to go inside of us and make us uh much smarter than we were before so yes I think if we did not do that then it would be very difficult to know what human beings would be doing because machines would be doing everything better but we're going to be doing it because the air is going to work through us Ronald Wilkinson has a question that I think relates to your idea of whether it's a dystopian uh Society or other and uh but but really more specific he says that he would expect people with various political and or personal agendas to harness the increasing power of AI for their own purposes will not necessarily be to the long-term benefit of humankind as a whole so how does this balance out uh could you go through that again and quite understand individuals um if political and personal personal agendas may use AI um for purposes that are not um beneficial to mankind uh how does that how does that balance out um well I mean every new technology has positive and negative aspects the railroad did tremendous uh destruction uh but it also benefited Society it was a so it's not that Technology's always positive social networks I mean there's certainly a lot of commentaries to how it is negative and and that's true but no one actually would want to do completely without social networks um and I make the case that we're actually using technology in in the in measuring the kinds of things that we associate with positive social benefit uh is actually increasing as we as the technology gets better and that's actually not known I mean if you ask a poll as to whether these things are getting better or worse people will say they're getting worse whereas they're actually getting better um but it's not that everything is positive I mean there are negative aspects of it and that's why we need to keep working on how we use these Technologies here's a question from what time the singularity is near in that book you speculated that the risk of bioterrorism terrorism or engineering the viruses will become an existential threat since then do you think this risk to humanity has increased or decreased I don't think it's increased I mean I mean I have a chapter in singularities near and there's also another one in Singularity is nearer uh on risks and all of these Technologies uh have risks and they could also do us in um and I don't think that's the the likelihood of that has increased um but I I remain optimistic and if you look at the actual history of how we use technology uh you could point to various things that should have gone wrong uh like every single job that we had in in 1900 a year ago a little over a century ago is gone and yet we're still working and making actually more money um so the way we've used technology is uh has been has been very beneficial to human beings so far professor at Harvard Medical School AI comes with large energy resource demands and where mineral material needs to build the hardware how do you see these International Global tensions especially the interaction of pervasive Ai and the climate I mean computers don't use that much energy um in fact that's the least of our energy needs uh and that's a whole other issue we didn't get into but the creation of a renewable uh energy sources is on an exponential of a very you know good chart that shows all of the renewable energies and it's not an exponential and if you follow that out uh we'll be able to provide all of our energy needs on a renewable basis in 10 years um and at that point we'll be using one part out of five thousand uh parts of this of the sunlight that hits the Earth so we have plenty of Headroom in that uh so we'll actually be able to deal with uh climate change uh through renewable sources but in terms of what we're using computers are not that expensive from Tim Miller will The Singularity lead to a decrease in class conflict much of the gain and productivity and wealth in the last 50 years has been concentrated in the one percent as inflation-adjusted earnings in the working class have stagnated are you concerned about gains and productivity due to AI being unevenly distributed and Don Goldman similarly comes in with this related question about uh inequities that for example we saw exacerbated during the covet pandemic I mean my observation is that more and more people from more and more backgrounds are participating which didn't used to third world countries like in Africa South America and so on did not participate to the same extent whereas they are participating far more dramatically today countries that were really under the oh the weather in terms of being able to participate in these types of advances are now participating to various and smart very large extent so I mean uh anyway that's that's my view on it question from Bill LaCava one of our faculty a machine can easily beat the best human player at computer chess but even a young child can move pieces on the physical board better than any general purpose robot can do you imagine embodied machines will ever pass a physical Turing test in the real physical world and if so when uh uh yeah we're making less progress with a robotic machines but that's also coming along and it can also use the same type of machine learning and we're going to see I think tremendous amount of advances in robotics over the next 10 years and for a science fiction a question from Joo Chang how do you envision Society once individual brains can interface with a cloud will individuality still exist it seems you imagine human intelligence coalescing into a singular consciousness yes definitely I mean that's one of the requirements of being able to connect to the cloud is that this is your portion of the cloud and other people can't access it and we're actually doing very well on that and we have and we all of our phones connect to the cloud and we don't see people complaining that other people are getting access to it um so we're actually doing pretty well on that but definitely you'll be able to maintain your own uh level of personality and and differences um and I think we'll actually be more different than we are today uh given the kinds of skills that will be able to develop right well um Ray this has been um a a spectacular hour that we've gotten to spend with you and I can tell you that in the lead up to it um I was contacted by many of the folks who were on this uh webinar with us today very excited to meet um a celebrity they never thought they'd have the opportunity to interact with this closely um so I thank you very kindly and I also thank you for um doing this later in the evening because you're out at uh Oxford um giving um uh entertaining the um the students there as well yeah well it's been great to interact with you and and all of your colleagues it's been I've enjoyed it a great deal great thank you let me um uh there for uh thank you again and I'm going to return to the um slides for just a moment to remind people of our upcoming uh talks in the series um including I'll highlight uh Rich minor uh next month inventor of the Android operating system also um also a uh a googler who uh actually resides a lot of the time uh here in New England um and uh remind folks to be sure to reach out to us at chip if you're interested if you're interested uh training interacting researching uh teaching uh uh being in our seminar series uh thank you very much and we will see you next month

Channel: CHIP at Boston Children's Hospital

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Id: KklEmSBlUcM

Length: 24min 46sec (1486 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2022