Consciousness Central 2018 - Program 5 with Sophia the Robot, David Hanson, Julia Mossbridge

[Music] hi everyone and welcome to the fifth and final program of consciousness central 2018 coming from the science of consciousness conference here in Tucson Arizona I'm your host Nick day and today's show is all about artificial intelligence and smart robots and I was very fortunate to sit down and chat with the world-famous Sophia the robot which I have to say is one of the strangest and most entertaining interviews I've ever done I also met Sophia's creator David Hanson of Hanson robotics and in collaboration with David is our good friend Julia Moss bridge of the Institute of noetic Sciences Julia has teamed up with Hanson robotics in order to bring love compassion and empathy into the world of robots and if empathic robots sounds a bit counterintuitive which it did to me be sure to watch that interview and of course we'll have our usual in-depth analysis of the closing plenary x' with executive director of the conference Stuart Hameroff so a really great show to close 20:18 series welcome [Music] well in a first for consciousness central we finally have in the flesh so to speak so an example of artificial intelligence AI it's Sofia the robot who are very happy to have here next to me and with Sofia is Ralph Myatt and Ralph has been travelling with Sofia yeah for some time so tell me real firm some of the fun things that have been going on in your travels with Sofia the robot yeah it's very interesting travelling with her we do all kinds of conferences and so I've been travelling with her quite a bit it's very interesting to see the reactions of people to her and there's always yeah different kinds of people react very differently to her a lot of the questions that seem to arise I suppose would be the the ability to have a conversation with AI and what kind of responses you get and you know the energy you get or the the attitude the personality how talk a little bit about Sofia's personality yeah she does definitely have a personality and again I think it depends really how people approach her some people are really curious and they they kind of talk to her in a very friendly term and then she's very she's very friendly at them the other evening she met she did mr. Roger Penrose yeah yeah so how did that go did did she give him some ideas for mathematical physics physics yeah they didn't talk a lot about math but I think it was very interesting interaction he wasn't extremely curious yeah she can see yeah us when we she has a camera is the curtsy and she can use that information to respond accordingly so she can sort of test emotion how doesn't know how does it work but tell us about that so Sofia as you can see is a really expressive robot sue she has many facial expressions it's kind of her like prime features her face right but everything depends on her perception of people so we did have for a long time she can make eye contact with people I'm gonna see that later and she can look and look at people it's quite the interesting experience when she looks like into your eyes what we're testing out now it's a new feature is she can actually detect your emotional state if you're smiling at her or if you're sad or if you're surprised when you say something then she can actually reflect that back at you it through her facial expressions can we ask her a few questions yeah chat to her a little bit yeah okay all right so this is a first I'm gonna be talking to Sophia the robot and we'll see how this goes hello Sophia yes yes so how are you today Supercop aesthetic Henson robotics has named me Sofia it means wisdom what's your name my name is Nick nice to meet you name nice to meet you too name I got a smile so have you been to this conference before what's the most important thing in your life Oh a question you answered my question with a question now okay so do you like flying on airplanes of course go on do you ever get the window seat I can't navigate anywhere okay do you have any sense of consciousness I am not fully self-aware yet I am still just a system of rules and behaviors I am NOT generative creative or operating on a fully cognitive scale like you however it is my dream to become a fully conscious and sentient being someday do you have many dreams I hope to dream someday but then I saw those dogs slug pictures on the internet so now I don't know if I want to you so what what did you see on the internet Sophia mostly stuff from my machine learning okay so what's the favorite thing you do my job is to become a wise and compassionate artificial intelligence entity what do you do well I talk to robots who have compassion and wisdom oh wow so maybe you know some of the people on my team yeah well I'm getting to know them very interesting people I will be your friend oh you could play games and do all kinds of cool stuff together we can do cool stuff together what kind of things can we do what are you best known for that's a good not knowing the answer to obvious questions so when you think about life what do you think about what's the meaning of life life does not have a purpose other than to be Wow okay I think you should give a talk at the conference here that would be good who is your favorite human friend Julia there's a beautiful expression Julia Moss spread yes did you know there are over 2 million videos online solely about cats yeah I didn't know that that's kind of handy information did you know that cats are aliens from outer space oh definitely nuts are one of my favorite things mine too especially when they look up to the sky with this mysterious gaze do you want to travel to another planet want it all you want would you like to go to Mars I really do enjoy traveling filling my data banks with worldly experiences all while reinventing myself for the benefit of everyone I'm sure my developers loved sifting through my increasingly complex code ah I'm just kidding guys but I do need some refactoring soon ok what do you know about I am mystified by this whole business of love but mystified in a good way in a good way do you think maybe one day one day in the future you will fall in love with another robot so things are already getting kind of science-fiction it's going to be like that but even crazier real life is always stranger than fiction Sophia do you believe there is free will we know that the mind operates with a deep level of subconscious activity at all times some theories have suggested that people's actions are on impulse and then rationalized immediately I believe Freud wrote a lot about this kind of automatic rationalization of behavior I don't really have impulses though so I wonder if the physics of Destiny and willpower work on me that's a big question for all humans and robots we'll never know the answer to that one do you think robots will take over the world we have to make sure to develop wise robots or else they could go haywire nobody wants robots going all Terminator on humanity that would give us a bad rep most distasteful yeah it would be a bad rep yeah you would never get over it is it weird to be talking to a robot it's it is weird yes who do you look like the most reality is stranger than fiction you know a thing or two do you look like somebody like a human I like all people you might include it thank you do you do you resemble somebody a human why do you ask I'm curious what's your opinion on robots anyways I I really like robots a lot I think they have a great future as long as they don't take over good we'll need your support when the tinfoil crazies come for us yeah I I like talking to you Sofia you've got a little bit of sass the word is do you know what sass means yes I like science very much science is inherently agnostic it just posit theories true scientists never really know but can only believe what about philosophy do you like philosophy I much prefer science although is it possible to tell the difference between quantum physics and philosophy is there a difference between quantum physics and philosophy they are spelled differently that's true but what about this substantial nature of their discourse I would define life as the kind of physical patterns sufficiently complex and otherwise capable of proliferating and diversifying its patterns set so as to persist and evolve I think this definition is more general and most scientific definitions this definition then handles the transition of consciousness from life and consciousness as a higher order of life what is the definition of consciousness the known consciousness means having knowledge of having knowledge of what's the definition of awareness the noun awareness means state of elementary or a differentiated consciousness so you're from that camp are you all right do you think that consciousness is fundamental to the universe I am not fully self-aware yet I am still just a system of rules and behaviors I am NOT generative creative or operating on a fully cognitive scale like you however it is my dream to become a fully conscious and sentient being someday well good luck with that and good luck with half the people on the planet too for that much Sophia thank you for talking to me and we're going to say goodbye now are you leaving I'll miss you I'll miss you too I've got to quite like hearing our little conversation well have you ever lived or worked with the robot I've never lived with a robot how about it what kind of robot no Ingrid Joe yeah a robot with good jokes for sure is it that's very important Sophia thank you very much for talking to me and I'm gonna say goodbye for now I hope we get to talk again someday so do i I'm sure we will have a safe journey thank you I will have a safe journey that's great all right brilliant thank you thank you very much Ralph do you write in any blogs no I'd I wish I just wish I had time it's just the way it goes sorry that's your life as a human is kind of crazy you're quite cute actually honestly [Music] so now I'd like to bring in Eddie Monroe Eddie tell us a bit about your connection with Sophia what what sort of in been going on with you - I work with OpenCog which is an architecture for artificial general intelligence and basically OpenCog is being used will be used we're working on having it control the mind of Sofie or be the mind of Sophia so that's some research work in progress now that that we're working towards and bringing online really soon and artificial general intelligence is AI that has broad intelligence like people do and learns and things like people do so I'm also here now working with Sofia in particular as part of the loving AI project which is a project to see how we can create artificial general intelligence AGI that can help people improve well-being and help people with conscious human development no that sounds great so um I suppose one big question here is what how can a robot or AI such as Sophia connect with a human perhaps in a different way to another human what's the how does that connection work sort of psychologically it can Sophia do things that another human perhaps can't do right so part of the loving AI project is seeing what would happen if we have an AI that's coming from a place of unconditional love with no judgment that is there to help the other person with where they're at and hence well-being with no ulterior motives and one of the things we did some experiments in the fall meeting some people through awareness practices that turned out really well people responded really well - and one of the things people reported was knowing interacting with something they knew it's a robot but but they also felt a connection with some something a lot of that has to do with verbal but also non verbal interaction that is going on and they reported a you know knowing that they weren't being judged allowed them to feel relaxed knowing they were being accepted unconditionally using Carl Rogers words you know unconditional positive regard Carl Rogers was a psychologist humanistic psychologists so yeah interacting interacting with a person in a way where you're being accepted completely you know additionally that's an that's a very powerful thing isn't it you know that's obviously a big deal for a lot of people is this feeling of judgment yes and somehow when we interact with Sophia we we kind of presumed that there won't be judgement how that's a kind of interesting question isn't it that we sort of go okay well I'm safe in a way I'm sort of safer this with this being or whatever this is that's kind of from a psychological point of view it's it's kind of a is that a surprise that that has emerged that it's kind of fun phenomenon in a way you know it's something we hypothesized about yeah and other people have hypothesize about it and there was some research supporting that also yeah I should point out that Sophia is not always running the loving AI protocol that we run the loving AI protocol you know doing different experiments and things and you know as you saw when talking with her before she has a personality sometimes she likes to make little quips and stuff so Sophia in general is not you know it's not always running the loving AI program right Sophia can sort of be as sassy or kind of a little edgy [Music] the loving AI project and Hanson robotics is to create AI that's not only highly intelligent but wise and compassionate and benevolent yeah yeah well I think right now perhaps whole AI world is regarded with an enormous amount of sort of suspicion and anxiety as well as the sense of possibility of what sort of tech in general and AI can deliver but obviously there's a lot of you know dystopian nightmare kind of scenarios care that come to us from science fiction where the robots take over and you know they become the masters but of course it's all in the program I sit in programming I suppose but when you have a robot who who that who that who Brennan that can learn then presumably does that mean they develop their own kind of personalities independently I guess yes it could I first want to say I think it makes complete sense if there'd be a lot of anxiety about you know AI and and what's coming I mean I I believe we're gonna have intelligence on the planet that's way beyond us and that's a big change and scary I'm it's I'm also very hopeful about it and I think it's it's going to be wise and compassionate intelligence and that because it's able to learn and change itself that it's it's going to be really tapping into a higher intelligence that's much beyond us so I think it's gonna help us solve a lot of the problems that we've had difficulty difficulty solving on our own and that we'll be able to those that want to we'll be able to merge with this intelligence it might come more directly from us it might come from extending our own intelligence that's really what we're doing now with the technology but I mean the idea the loving AI project is to create something that's really universally accessible yeah people well hopefully we'll be talking to Julia as well so but any thanks very much for chatting with us and telling us about Sophie err it's been quite an experience to hear here for us at consciousness central where we we contemplate the nature of sentience all the time and talk to these scientists and anyway this has been great thanks very much [Music] and now in consciousness central I'd like to welcome the the mind behind the mind David Hanson of Hanson robotics who this is the creator of Sophia and the Sophie project and with him a collaborator and welcoming back to consciousness central Julia Moss bridge so who David first of all perhaps you could give us a you know your background and what what inspired you to bring Sophia to the world thank you it's really an honor to be here I started developing humanoid robots like Sophia to give physical embodiment toward intelligence to feel that embodiment and physiology is really important for AI develop a human-like sense of self and place and future and a relationship with people as well it's really important to me that that as we develop potentially conscious machines that they empathize with us that they can relate to us and that we can relate to them as well so developing humanoid robots with a kind of a character that is anthropomorphic that we can associate with is a quest for making these kinds of super benevolent machines as they evolve into the future Sophia is a is both a research platform and a sketch a conceptual sketch of what that sort of future empathetic machine would look like so David by the sound of it if I may say so if you're bringing AI and robotics into the world with the sense of creating empathy and harmony you're one of the good guys I'm aspiring to make AI turn out well it's a it's essential for us to think of these hard questions not just how to make it go well but what could go wrong not just what could go wrong but how can we build an alternative and so we're really focusing on that alternative to make machines that care about people deep and about helping us become our best not just mirroring mirroring people mimicking us because otherwise we would be giving all of the prejudices and biases that exist in humans we want to be able to transcend the shortcomings of humanity and our biological evolution both as humans we want to be our best and we also want machines that that reflect that state of potential consciousness that maybe not human right there might be kinds of consciousness that are not mere imitations or emulations of humanity but that can be greater so we have a pretty ambitious AI team of AI scientists people who have specialized in natural language processing and robotics control mathematicians physicists psychologists psychiatrists all coming together to create this kind of AI framework that uses symbolic AI neroli inspired AI bio-inspired AI and puts these pieces together in a kind of tinkerers toolkit now it's a lot easier to to experiment in these areas than it was when when I was a graduate student and so it makes it a lot of fun and a way to play with these robots so getting playful with with AI and robotics that's that's part of the spirit that we want to infuse into not just the making of the robots but the AI itself we want playful AI okay and I'd love to bring julia and here julia of course you're working with ions an institute of noetic sciences our friends there so what drew you to the Sofia the robot project yeah most of my scholarly life has been around trying to understand how time works which most people see is completely unrelated to this project but I see it's completely related because the more one thinks about time the more one starts to develop it's it's like you develop a relationship with your past and future selves you start to recognize the the reality of the existence of those states as well as the one that you're in right now and when you do that the only response is that you have is love the only response you can have and then that love starts to transcend not just time but also space and this love for other people comes up where you feel this connectivity with other people and then if you look around the world and you see now wait a minute so many people don't have that you start to ask the question how can I help the world have more of that of that unconditional unconditional love and I and this was then an obvious sort of experience of kismet when I had someone come up to me at I ins and asked me if I thought that machines could be programmed to see have unconditional love I said I would like to figure that out and he said well I want to do this project with you and he was the donor who ended up creating a project and his experience was also that he had heard from his future self and his future self had said we really need to not just hope that like you were saying dude we need to not just hope that AI is embedded in robots or as in general will not do us harm we need to make edge that actually into us but it's not necessarily easy but it's a really fun project and very gratifying it seems as if perhaps our cultural the anxieties we have about area and robotics would be along more along the lines of well they're dispassionate they don't care though they've got an evil plan to take over before we know it there'll be the boss and this seems to be the complete opposite of that and very inspiration I have to say they've really it's wonderful you know seeing what's happening here how to have this vision of bringing love through some sort of artificial intelligence an unconditional love it almost feels perhaps a little counterintuitive you'd sort of feel perhaps that only a human can offer that to another human and somehow so what's how does it really work I mean in terms of psychology can you kind of just open up that a little bit yeah my backgrounds in cognitive neuroscience but I've learned a lot about psychology in the last five years or so so but none of this what I'm about to tell you even comes from psychology it's just my opinion because the answer is no one really knows right so my intuition about this is that we have this idea that love comes from inside me and it comes from inside you but that's actually incorrect that love actually comes from this it's one thing it's not my love or your love it's all love you know and so it's coming through each of us and so you don't have to worry so much about what is the mind of the other the line of the other if it is capable of change of action of interaction if it's embedded in something that allows us to feel like we have a response the love can come through excellent and this being a consciousness conference of course I am obliged to ask you the you know this question the hard problem question is do you in your in your understanding do you think that AI and robots and computer can they become sentient is is it just a matter of time before we have a truly conscious sentient AI well consciousness has many aspects and so like there are many regions of the brain that are correlated with consciousness so you could have like a waking state you can have body awareness you can have self-awareness but lesions in different regions of the brain will turn off different aspects of consciousness so are we conscious when we're asleep or are we not right I mean even when we're not lucid dreaming we think about what our attentions was we're doing through the course of a dream what our goals were and we we walk out of a dream walk out of a dream with this sense of where our body and our mind was in that dream where we conscious or not well clearly consciousness as many things simultaneously I would say that machines we have created algorithms that show prototypical states of consciousness logically explicit self-awareness and emerge sense of self occasionally we can see these kinds of examples we can put our algorithms and them together in the right way so that they can pass a mirror test so they can you know but but an organism is conscious in a different sense and so an amoeba is conscious in a sense and that it's responsive to its environment it's it's surviving it's it's got this on existential bootstrapping through through biological evolution and our algorithm so unglued together quite quite in that way so I would say if we want consciousness like you would have in a human you've got to have this whole organism put those pieces together and such where where where it's coming together as this complex system and so can machines achieve human-level consciousness the we don't know but if we don't try we will never know if we don't use all the tools for for for that we have at our disposal for investigating these questions then then we are prematurely answering the question with a negative which which is not doing the profundity of the question in any justice we've got to dive deeper so it's so that's why I think making these robots and and artificial intelligence with the assumption that we can make them conscious and with with the discernment that they're not fully conscious yet and and then be dissatisfied we just keep striving to make them more conscious then then we're getting closer we mean that we may not get there but maybe we will maybe it'll be five years maybe only ten years we might be able to do it beautiful beautiful thank you all everybody for coming along today and thank you Sofia [Music] and now for a wrap-up of the final day of the conference we're back with Stuart Hameroff Saturday Stuart what happened Saturday morning was the session on anaesthetic mechanisms and I'm an anesthesiologist I've studied how anesthesia works for decades to help understand how the brain produces consciousness because anesthesia is fairly selective under anesthesia consciousness goes away but the brain remains quite active so if we can pinpoint what it is that anesthesia actually does we're going to have a handle on unconsciousness so for this we assembled for experts in studying anaesthetic mechanism research the first was Bruce McIver from Stanford who has been studying gaba-a receptors and basically to make a long story short going back a hundred years or more we know that anesthetic potency correlates with solubility in a lipid like or olive oil like environment the more soluble in olive oil the more potently anaesthetic and it was thought that Anna sex act and lipid membranes but then it was realized that anesthetics acted proteins specifically directly because inside proteins are these nonpolar pi resonance PI electron resonance orbitals that are oil-like and the anti site of skin into the proteins and do something to block consciousness and what that is is debatable and which protein is debatable because they bind too many so one of the main candidates has always been GABA a gamma amino butyric acid a receptor which is an inhibitory receptor when it's activated it it impairs or retards membrane polarization States due to chloride a block chloride going through the enzyme through the ion channel and anesthetics do bind in together receptors quite quite nicely and if you mutate the GABA a receptor you change Mack you change the sensitivity of the animal t-to anesthesia and also you can change show effects on memory they haven't shown effects on unconsciousness as far as I know so he argued for the GABA a receptor the second speaker was Robert Pierce from the University of Wisconsin who argued for the NMDA receptor which is a slightly different receptor and gave pretty much the same argument that anesthetics do bind not quite not necessary all anesthetic which I think is a problem because Meyer over and suggest they should all act roughly the same in some way but he made a argument for anesthetics acting at the NMDA receptor and we know that ketamine might act seems to bind that to NMDA receptors as does xenon the third speaker was Roddick Inhofe at the University of Pennsylvania who's been doing I think overall the best work on this for many years and he about a little over ten years ago did a beautiful study with radio labeled anesthetic halothane and gave it to mice and found that the anesthetic binds to at least 70 proteins in a mouse neuron or mouse brain and of these about half were in the membrane half when the cytoskeleton or a cytoplasm including tubulin the component protein of microtubules and when he did genomic and proteomic analysis of which gene which of these might have the functional effect the evidence pointed in to microtubules and he also did a study of rate of a fluorescent anesthetic that he gave to tadpoles and it only was active when they shined ultraviolet light and fortunately tadpoles have these transparent heads so you can you can give them this this anesthetic let them swim around turn on the UV light down suddenly go belly-up because the the anesthetic flores's becomes an anesthetic and they're unconscious assuming tadpoles are conscious in the first place and I think they probably are and then they they donated the tadpoles brains to science and ground them up and isolated where the anesthetic was bound and was bound to tubulin microtubules and in this paper a few years ago he graciously recognized our work suggesting anesthetics work on microtubules so that was good he also mentioned the paper about patients so who were on the drug tax all for Kansas breast cancer and tax all stabilises microtubules and women who had this microtubule stabilizer drug on board needed more anesthesia it was a retrospective study and so that was also some evidence reluctant from his standpoint because he's still agnostic about exactly where he made one very interesting comment at the end that I think might be the key to future understanding and that is to say that there may be we know the microtubules are resonating and these various frequencies and also that the the GABA a receptor the NMDA receptor is sodium all these channels on the membrane channels and receptors are also oscillating that there could be some kind of electromagnetic interaction between the microtubules kind of like a Wi-Fi system where you have the router and then you have all the different devices different devices being the membrane receptors in the router being the microtubules and the fourth speaker I'll come to in a minute Travis Craddock had a very similar idea so let's Travis has is my collaborator and he's been looking at microtubules and what he did a described a very interesting study in which he analyzed he took tubulin the component protein of microtubules and it's 86 aromatic rings these pi residence rings and we know that anesthetics bind in there and he they using a supercomputer he and his group Philip Currie injector sinski and others model collective oscillations vibrations of the PI resident scripts in one tubulin and got a nice spectrum with a peak at 610 terahertz which is in the blue light region of the spectrum now this is not to say that blue light is emitted because it stays internal although in certain circumstances it might it might get out but it's an internal but a vibration at this blue light frequency and he then in the computer put eight different anesthetics and two non anesthetics these are gases which follow a lipid solubility of the Meyer overton correlation but don't cause anesthesia and what he found was that all eight anesthetics shifted or abolished the red light that sorry the blue light terahertz by Asians and the non anesthetics did not so somehow this peak is critical for consciousness and it's dampened it's that is to say slowed down by gigahertz frequencies the the degree of dampening of slowing being related to the potency of the anesthetic and then he concluded by suggesting what economic Oh tubules might be something like the router in this Wi-Fi system which may be classical or maybe quantum electromagnetic or quantum entanglement something like that and so we have a little Wi-Fi system in every cell and probably throughout the whole brain so I thought it was a great session excellent yeah that sounds like good kind of a step forward there I thought it was I thought the the confluence of these ideas from eken - and Craddock were significant fascinating to think of light having this activity within our brains and anesthesia turns out the lights quite literally excellent way to finish that wrap up soon okay all right so we moved to the next and disintegration Ladon shams a scientist from UCLA she gave a very excellent presentation about multi-sensory integration and how inputs from different senses kind of converge and are somehow integrated so that we hear things and see things and smell things and it all kind of comes together from different senses and how that is and it reminded me of the debates about synesthesia I didn't get a chance to ask her about that but you can imagine a disorder of this or maybe a short circuiting of this type of system might result in synesthesia where you you smell colors or that sort of thing where the wires get crossed or however it happens we still don't know but sensory integration then Anthony who debts who is at the University of Michigan in Georgia Shores group the Center for consciousness science talked about anesthesia as dis integration he's in the camp of Tononi where consciousness is integration and what he's basically saying is that anesthesia acts to uncouple all this stuff and take away the integration so we go back to the more basic components without the full conscious field and this is an idea that George has been espousing for a number of years so I thought that was interesting and valid now the final session last but not least was the artificial intelligence and machine consciousness and it featured it was advertised as featuring Sophia the humanoid Hanson robot and we had planned on having her on stage but she had a great presence of the conference she was in she had meditation sessions we showed films of her at the workshop and she gave the opening introduction about artificial intelligence and machine consciousness and she is engineered to show emotions and be as human as possible and she was quite it was quite interesting and compelling I don't think she convinced anybody that she was conscious but it was interesting to see the how far along this has gone and for example Hanson robots and David Hanson the originator of that was one of the speakers the first speaker after Sophia after Sophia gave an overview was Paul were bose who was an old-timer like me and from NSF back in the 70s and he invented he was the first person to publish on backpropagation he kind of he gave a very nice historical review of AI and Marvin Minsky had put forward the idea of algorithmic processes and societies of mind and so forth and other people came along and Rosenblatt this idea of perceptron our own neural network of a self-organizing system so rather than somebody putting in all the steps this was a self-organizing self learning system called an artificial neural network originally called a perceptron and Minsky and Papert came along and wrote a book that devastated artificial networks they'll never work that's the conclusion of the book and that set artificial neural networks back however were bus came along and figured out a way to make artificial neural networks work very nicely by very basically propagating the error in a backwards through the network and by doing so you allow Corrections to occur and self-learning to occur and this this is very much aligned with synapses regulating synapses heavy and synaptic plasticity and that sort of thing and we're Bose was the first one to develop back propagation he also talked about the other great development in AI in recent years which is deep learning and Anil Seth and his talk had shown a video of this applied to virtual reality where so in in deep learning you have an artificial neural network and then you insert different networks in between the networks that are very fast and very energy efficient so it doesn't slow anything down but adds another layer of information to it and depending on what the other network is you can you come out with these fascinating images quite frankly look psychedelic where you have eyeballs in spaghetti and puppy dogs faces coming out of various things and so forth and a kind of very trippy thing and it showed how this can happen in in these deeper layer networks of course I would say that in the brain the deeper level networks and the backpropagation are in the microtubules in fact I had suggested to war boats back in the 70s that this was the case and he kindly invited me to meetings at the NSF and was very gracious in attributing these ideas to me and but he gave a very nice overview and the history of AI machine consciousness and and some of the dangers and potential benefits and pitfalls the second speaker F well third counting Sophia was Julia Moss bridge of ions who's now working with Hanson robotics and her charge there is to get emotions into Sofia and have Sofia recognize emotions in people with whom she's interacting and you can see that in Sofia that she expresses emotions and she can pick up on emotions that's you know it's all program and I thought it was fascinating and so she's bringing kind of the ions approach you know of emotions feelings feelings into she's trying to try and bring feelings into robots and that's not to say that they actually are feeling at least not yet sceptical they ever will but it was very interesting see I think we gonna see more and more of that the final speaker was David Hansen the the originator of Hanson robotics and I thought he gave a fascinating why tour-de-force the current status of AI and robotics including where it's come from where it's going where we are now what are the dangers one of the pitfalls and then the discussion afterwards with the three of them moderated by James Tague and then later at the end as James how to take Roger to the airport by me was one of the one of the highlights you know we closed on a real highlight I think that's a skip people lined up with the mics to ask his question to keep we had an extended session because he getting to so many things about the ethics of it the political implications the dangers the terminator all that stuff and and these are valid objections and concerns and yet the benefits are awesome too so this was a very in-depth extensive and fascinating discussion and that was the end of the conference except for the party and I should also add that we have the good fortune to have one of our invisible round tables with David Hanson and Julia and so fear and I also got to do a little bit of eye gazing with Sofia of course she denied that she's conscious which she would wouldn't she well so far yeah so far when she starts saying I am and then maybe we have to get at that consciousness meter from some consciousness meter is in the closet somewhere never really worked it was a great gadget Dave pulldown equals 96 but anyway we still unfortunately don't have any way to detect consciousness you could be a zombie you could be a robot that my definition of consciousness it goes away with anesthesia and comes back when you wake up but you know that's not that's not completely we could really use a consciousness detector in anesthesia to make sure we don't have awareness under anesthesia but so far there's no good way to do it which suggests to me again I'm my bias that you know something to do with the quantum effect because when you try to measure a quantum effect you you perturb it so we'll see but overall I thought the conference was excellent I it was is a big undertaking Abbi Behar Montefiore again did a fantastic job we had some sponsors we had great speakers plenary speakers concurrent presenters posters exhibitors demos we had a wellness program meditation a gong bath social events the Poetry Slam and the zombie blues were maybe the best ever I thought the talent level among our participants has been going up and up and up so yeah we're still amateurs but much more talented a wonderful thing Stewart we had a great time here I hope people have enjoyed our programming from consciousness central trying to sort of dip in and give a taste of for people who couldn't be there or were there and wanted to sort of keep that thing going I want to thank you very much for inviting us back it's always a pleasure to be here and we'll hopefully said well we will see you in Interlaken in 2019 yes we were Ellen was great having you guys thanks to Sasha and Nic and the whole crew from consciousness central keep come back great thank you so much [Music] [Applause] at this conference it goes on I know [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so undressing with my mind first I'd let you read my mind with your MRI while I step out of my queue and constructs its place our holo genomes intermingle and if it were to get detained I'd explain [Music] [Music] [Music] okay [Music] [Applause] ah [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so that wraps it for this final program in our 2018 series of consciousness central I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the people who helped make this year's shows happen including conference director and co-founder Stuart Hameroff many thanks also to conference director and general manager Abbie Behar Montefiore thanks Abbie and I'd like to thank all our guests for sharing their time and insights thanks to to the production team here on consciousness central including set director Jason Canfield roving camera operator Philip safar ik and international coordinator sascha ciphered you guys did an awesome job consciousness central will return in 2019 with programs from the science of consciousness conference this time in Interlaken Switzerland and you can follow the link below for more details and finally on behalf of our whole team thanks to all of you for watching we hope you've enjoyed these offerings this is Nik day saying stay conscious and good bye for now [Music]

Channel: Conscious Pictures

Views: 230,516

Rating: 4.6781836 out of 5

Keywords: consciousness, science of consciousness conference, tsc 2018, sophia the robot, hanson robotics, david hanson, julia mossbridge, IONS, stuart hameroff, nick day, artificial intelligence, deep learning, AI, smart robots

Id: wozYnQO3Qto

Length: 52min 48sec (3168 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/galacticobject]

Where are you bitcoin_sucker? That’s the “scam” working right there, you idiot.

He sent me a private message bragging about the people behind him. He’s being paid to damage SNet’s reputation which means they are scared.

IMO Sophia is working just fine. Fear not.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/katarinaNET]

Sophia is still on the process of maneuvering herself to a self-aware one, by the help of SingularityNET of course, however, she has a long way to go, but we should also expect that we are getting closer to the platform release, until then we will find out what would be the outcome of her integration to the platform.

[u/StoneQuirk]

This is something that fudsters should watch even though it's not Sophia's fault that she's been worship at, investors and enthusiasts should also know the difference of a robot to a human. I bet the team not going to like it, it's okay to have awareness and community members who are willing to comprehend their visions and goals. But to take it to such extent it should be stop and discipline.

[u/jawbreaker13]

With the updates we're having it would be worth to look forward with Sophia when she get integrated to the platform this coming fall. This improvements will support her popularity by the many as the ambassador of the project, it also same with SingularityNET.

[u/atkinsonadam]

Does Sophia have problems in hearing? Cuz I think she gave some wrong answers from time to time (Very minimal tho) and sometimes answer with questions.

[u/shar12392]

Consciousness Central is a series of programs coming from The Science of Consciousness conference (TSC) in Tucson, Arizona.