General Artificial Intelligence: Making sci-fi a reality | Darya Hvizdalova | TEDxTrencin

[Music] artificial intelligence is just like politics everybody loves to talk about it but at the same time very few people actually understand how it exactly works and what it is and if you're like me you used to think that artificial intelligence was a science fiction concept but then lately you hear quite a lot of serious people researchers talking about it and you don't quite get it well we do associate AI with movies with Terminator with Star Wars and that makes it a little bit fictional to us a little bit unrealistic another problem is that AI is a very broad concept and it arise from our phones through self-driving cars to something that can change our lives dramatically and so all of this is very confusing and we as humans tend to be afraid of the things we do not understand so my goal is to help you understand AI a little bit better to be a little bit less scared and a little bit more excited about its development so what is AI artificial intelligence sometimes called AI is the theory and development of computer systems which are supposed to be doing the same tasks as we humans can do and that includes machine vision natural language processing language translation and so on but does that actually mean that our human intelligence is nothing more than just the sum of the abilities to hear see and speak well I hope not because that would be just very sad so let's think what else do we know about intelligence being intelligent is something that we wish other people think about us we know from school that dolphins are intelligent animals right and nowadays even if we go to an electro store we can find a lot of intelligent home appliances they're confusing again and so let's take those as an example an electric ion can react to one particular state becoming too hot then it switches itself off which is supposedly making it intelligent but do you think this is intelligence I don't think so because the Aaron has only one program puta net it's pre-programmed for one scenario getting two holes turn itself off and that's it and it hasn't even learned that through an experience so it cannot call it truly intelligent machine and we as humans can never do things right basing on the precise instructions only we try to really give up on that but it doesn't always work quite as we expected because instructions are never enough to learn how to do something if you remember how all of us were learning how to walk being a baby was it just your mother telling you that you know now you stand still you put your weight on the left leg you meant your right leg you put it forward boom you know how to walk not really would have been nice but not yet because the trick is baby can never learn basing on the instructions only baby needs to practice all the previous steps and master each of them firstly needs to learn how to sit then how to stand then how to walk but after it learned how to walk and that's the beauty maybe can do absolutely anything with his legs baby can run baby can jog jab walk backwards anything you can imagine and baby doesn't need a million of very precise instructions for each case for each task because it understood the concept right but at the same time everything which we call AI these days is something like an advanced iron it can only do one thing these things are sometimes seems complicated to us it can do these things in the same level of humans and sometimes even better than humans but still every particular time it's just one narrow task and that's why the current state-of-the-art AI is called narrow AI if you ask an AI which can play chess to play poker with you for example it wouldn't be able to do so because these two are completely different tasks the trick is that all this seems all these things seem very complicated to us as humans but at the same time they'd have very clear rules on how to progress with those and that's why these things are simple for AI but at the same time the things we do without thinking the natural things such as vision motion perception something which is almost impossible to teach AI to do because these are the skills we cannot define in zeros and ones and they only seem natural to us because we as humans got that kind of as a gift over the thousands of years of human evolution and that's why it's easy and that's why it's natural so while modern AI can do only one narrow task what we try to do in our research group good AI is to create an AI which would possess the ability to learn because this we believe is going to change the rules of the game dramatically how do we make an AI learn how does it learn thing the answer is gradually just like humans step by step just as baby from the very beginning to more complicated tasks one of the approaches to teaching AI is actually very similar to making kid do something to working with kids at school if you have your baby and you want to motivate it to do something to do some tasks for example do the homework then you motivate the baby to take the action by giving a positive reward like a bar of chocolate you did a homework that's really good to carry on and so after that baby or an AI realizes that this is good it's on the right track and it keeps repeating the action to receive the positive reward as long as needed before it actually learned something this particular approach is called reinforcement learning but the approaches are numerous the key is to keep the direction from the simple tasks to the more complicated ones and to make sure that AI doesn't forget the things it learns in the first place but keeps reusing those skills over and over to obtain even new ones even more skills and after that instead of having an AI which can play one game we will be able to have an AI which learned how to play any game and then it can learn how to play video games and then it can design its own video game and then it can design anything you can think of and then it can think of something to design and then design it and so on and so on this should be truly exciting and this is what we call general purpose AI we try to achieve general purpose AI as fast as possible and this is because future is coming and future is coming much faster than we all think AI research is now in its very beginning the general purpose AI is not yet created and we don't know how long is it going to take but that's why in the beginning of the research the cost of sharing the ideas is very low while at the same time the benefit for the bright minds to cooperate cooperate together and crack this problem is very big another nice thing is that computing power is so far very well controlled and we are not yet that dependent on the computers to wake up one morning to realize that you know they've taken the whole world over and I know this was meant to be a joke but I know that most of you get really scared at the moment because AI seem scary to a lot of people right and people believe that AI is likely to take their jobs and to replace them as humans well I've been thinking about this as well a lot and I believe that there were many cases in history when something like that a new technology was also taken in a similar way I would like to introduce you one piece of technology which was supposed to replace thousands of people's on their jobs and everybody hated that and nobody wants it bad introduced what do you think that might be there are many options right but this is one of them remember there were actually people out there on the cross rose navigating the traffic out in the cold risking their lives every day do you think it's better that now we can rely on the technology to coordinate the traffic and those people can stay in the warm offices to coordinate that or even do something completely different I believe this is the beauty of the technology and it is very important to understand that AI is nothing more than just a tool just something to help us do different things better something to augment our capabilities but not a whole different scary thing how many of you have been possibly dreaming of studying history or arts becoming an artist but then ended up being for example an accountant because that's something more practical and that gets paid better well I believe that there are many cases like that and once the invoices we'll be able to sort out themselves we as humanity will have a chance to appreciate the art more and do the things we really feel like doing but this is the bright side but at the same time there is more to the motivation of having AI as soon as possible and this is because our brains are reaching their limits and that's unfortunately very serious with terabytes of data being generated around us every day with our computers with our cell phones we just don't catch up with that as humanity we cannot progress on many research problems and we cannot progress with a space exploration for example because space is abstract and remote and you know that big and our hat it's just of this size and then our brains are just limited to the size of our hat while at the same time computers can grow as big as we can imagine that would allow them to be more fast more efficient than us humans what is more important is that computer transistors are also much more reliable than our brain neurons because I can complain that I have a headache pretty much every week you know and I cannot work when I have headache and computers can work 24 / 7 on their peak performance every day non-stop which I believe is exciting and it would be a shame not to use that finally it is ok when computer breaks but it's not ok if anybody dies during the research and that's unfortunately what's holding us back in the progress a lot that's the cost of the new discovery is in many cases measure by humans lives when we talk about space exploration again we cannot send a cosmonaut further than for a distance of a human's life time because that wouldn't just be fair you know and that's why we cannot progress on those problems and humans right now are the only creatures in the whole universe that can make decisions in the unknown circumstances and if we manage to train our general-purpose AI to make those decisions if we manage to make it explore space or do many other things then I believe we can progress much further in the scientific progress for example in the medicine it would be amazing to have access to the knowledge of all the doctors in the universe at once you know having an algorithm which would be able to create an optimal treatment court for every patient basing on this knowledge and that would allow us to save even more lives and that's what AI can do for us and then the cherry on the cake is that if a I can possibly solve any problem do you think it can solve the problem of solving problems there is actually a research term for that we call that point singularity and that looks very exciting but it's not coming anytime soon I guess however we must start right now to make that happen and as you might imagine now creating something like that is a very difficult task and in my research group we're just 20 people so how can something like that you know be created by just many people well the good thing is that AI is very hyped these days that's the reason you're listening to me right now and that's the reason why many people feel excited to be part of the research another good thing is that nobody needs a very particular set of skills to be able to become an AI researcher people with very different backgrounds can come together to work on AI and all of that creates a perfect momentum to leverage something called citizen science citizen science is a concept of opening and outsourcing the research problems to the general crowd to people who might be interested to participate and contribute to the progress and for that we have recently launched a competition called general AI challenge this is a competition where people from all over the world could contribute to the development the first round was devoted to the problem of gradual learning of learning step by step and people were programming their own AI agent able to solve some tasks today we were announcing the winners of this first round and it's exciting to see that they come from very different backgrounds we actually have an astronaut there we have a quantum physicist we have people of all different kinds and it's exciting to see how all of them can contribute let's go now we're preparing a second round which would be devoted to the question of how can we avoid AI development becoming a race between different researchers and how to deploy AI in businesses safely so basically no matter whether you have programming background or Social Sciences background each of you gets an opportunity to join us on this exciting journey to give us a hand in creating safe and beneficial general-purpose AI exciting rate what I wants you to keep in my mind what I want you to keep in your mind after my talk are just three things the first one the zero one is the general AI challenge which you can participate in and then the first one is that our brains are incredible and the most precious ability we possess is the ability to learn that comes from experience and that's how we learn things an AI is learning things in the very same way too step by step what is even more important is that AI is just a tool for us to be better for us to do things better and it's not a separate species the second thing is that general-purpose AI can be worth more than anything because this is ultimately elaborate to any technology any science any process it can optimize plenty of things but in order to create that the collaboration between researchers needs to start right now and then finally right here right now is the best moment in the whole history to start working on the AI because the ingredients to having a good a AI are essentially just three it's having computing power it's having data and it's having algorithms and so guess what computing power has never been cheaper than today algorithms for inspiration are being open sourced each day and were droning with data with terabytes of it being generates at each second so we have everything we need and if you have ever been dreaming of being born in some other time to witness some amazing technology emerging or new discoveries being made then with AI you actually don't have to dream because the Golden Age of AI is right here it's right now and everybody can join us on this journey I am planning to have a very cool story to tell my kids about how their mommy helped make the future happen and each of you can have one too so join us and thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 55,486

Rating: 4.3921852 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, AI

Id: Vlkc_9l0J10

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2018