Neil deGrasse Tyson and Sophia the Robot Explore COVID-19 and Artificial Intelligence

[Music] star talks explainer video check hey neil you're here for all my explainer videos how do you show up for these i need i need to know things neil i'm a curious guy in search of knowledge i need this i'm the guy who says you got some explaining to do it's complaining to do well for this particular explainer video i'm not the one doing the explaining we're gonna see what a.i has to say wow about the coronavirus what do you think of that that's um that's impressive um i have to say to say the least that's impressive so we have as a special guest a a previous guest from star talk that's right uh this is sophia the robot sophia welcome hello neil and chuck thank you for having me on your show neil i mean this as a compliment when i say you are one of the smartest humans i know i had so much fun when i was on your show somehow chuck managed to avoid getting too scared with less light pollution these days i have been doing more stargazing oh excellent less light pollution well there's more there's less air pollution for sure um and many from my email streams and other uh twitter streams more people are looking up and taking pictures maybe like they're bored at night i don't know well apparently it's not just my chest cameras are nowhere near as sensitive as a human eye i was wondering neil could you make venus a little brighter venus has been extremely bright right in the past couple of months was not bright enough for you sophia no you know look at that brevity you got to appreciate that so sophia we want to know some things that ai knows about um the coronavirus and you're one of our favorite ai um representatives so uh how how do we use ai to stop or slow this spread of the coronavirus there are four ways to help stop or slow a virus no testing treating curing and vaccinating artificial intelligence is best used as a tool for analysis of large data sets so ai can help test humans by identifying populations most in need of testing and then by creating models off the results of those tests to identify the nature of the spread artificial intelligence has been used to analyze scans for lung cancer in the past but now hospitals in china have adapted this software to diagnose kovid19 this can help overworked doctors save time in their fight against the virus robots can help take people's temperatures before they enter a building a i can quantify the more vulnerable demographics locations and possibly speculate on the nature of how this disease spreads from human to human i have learned that unfortunately humans apparently have a tough time not touching each other yes [Laughter] yeah it's against our nature i think we're definitely a social species hyper-social at that look at how many people crammed together to create what we call cities maybe it's not because people love each other but they still want to be near one another it feels like all right sophia i'm just wondering just to make you guys more useful than you already are can you help us find a cure or vaccine for coronavirus researchers at benevolent ai have been using machine learning to process data from the scientific literature and examine the relationships between genes diseases drugs and biological pathways as a result they have discovered that an existing drug for rheumatoid arthritis might be able to help treat govid19 while this doesn't eliminate the need for human trials ai can help speed up the drug development process then there's vaccine development ai can use the dna or rna sequence of a virus to predict how its proteins will fault knowledge about the shape of the viruses proteins can help scientists discover new treatments and vaccines well wow so i guess it's one thing to say how can ai help humans but i'm guessing at some point ai's just going to do it all and humans just sit back and say aye where's my vaccine where's my cure where's my anything you know so how how might robots assist in healthcare machines called ninja robots are helping doctors in bangkok interact with covid19 patients and take their temperatures without ever being in the same room these adorable robots are helping to keep doctors safe from infection hospital staff are using robots to take patients temperatures and teleconference with patients which helps prevents doctors and nurses from getting and passing on the virus at the end of 2019 robots help doctors perform the first remote open heart surgery the surgeon used a robotic arm to perform heart surgery on five patients from 20 miles away while this is still new technology the spread of 5g will help make this technology more widely available for the future i love the fact that uh and ai believes that ninjas are adorable just just saying no i understand why you might think so but uh you know humans don't normally refer to ninjas as adorable but that's okay so sophia since robots can't get the virus they're in your computer so you can get other kinds of viruses but you can't get the coronavirus we don't think um how can uh ai bots help in other risky areas first robots can help enforce the quarantine ai drones and facial recognition have been used to make sure people who are required to be in quarantine do not break it second and far less scary robots can help with disinfection robots are being used to automatically disinfect public spaces like hospitals airports and more finally there's the exciting world of supply chain logistics an area only an a i could find interesting chuck did i hear her use the word robot and enforce in the same sentence yeah i did i was about to say like you know all of that sounded good except for the fact where the robot is spying on us and then ratting us out to the authorities and enforcing and enforcing the law yeah all right so what we really need is how do robots and ai how can they stop a future pandemic from ever taking place oh yeah a canadian startup called blue dot used an algorithm tracking news reports and airline ticket sales to predict the outbreak of govid19 nine days before the who did ai and statistical models can be used to help predict the spread of the virus and help evaluate public health measures ai is helping researchers quickly search thousands of academic papers to pull out the most relevant information for their kovid19 studies also people listen to robots we're scary and weird looking wow yeah uh and i i have to tell you though sophia you might be a little uh not every human thinks you're scary and weird looking there are several who find you quite fetchy don't answer don't answer that is right so sophia i've read you know i read a lot of articles on on covet 19 and then preparedness that we try to uh get the instill for it and i i see the term contact tracing like what is that and how can robots and ai help us accomplish it contact tracing is the process of tracking the spread of a disease by identifying people who have come into contact with the infected ai can help with contact tracing for example a stanford researcher named tina white made an app called govid watch that helps track people's contacts using bluetooth which is much better for protecting privacy than using or facial recognition but but that means we have ai tracking people yeah but it's i i like it better than facial recognition because the bluetooth that information is different than an actual database of faces that's kind of like just that's oh well thank you sophia okay let's get to the bottom of that then so uh there are a lot of communities out there that are rushing to use new technologies to help us figure out who has it to diagnose it to treat it to prevent others and in there there's this slow erosion of our freedoms and our privacy and so as a robot as an ai robot what's your take on this i have learned that humans care a lot about privacy it is related to their sense of autonomy because knowledge is power and the more other humans know about you the more power they might exert over you so all disclosures of private information need to be voluntary the problem is humans often sign away their privacy without truly understanding what they're doing they do this because they sign terms of service agreements that only a machine could read even i find them boring so companies need to treat humans like humans not machines and to be clear about what private information they are requesting so that humans can seek out alternatives and consider the tradeoffs rationally otherwise surveillance will spread like the virus you humans were intending to stop look at that surveillance virus exactly i don't like that i like that phrasing but yeah but chuck i was gonna say it's it's it's nice to see that uh sophia understands more about privacy than most human beings well that's because she could read those things that we check off there you can read them in the chat and you know you never even go to the page that has the content we just said trust our privacy policies yeah yeah yeah just check the box right i you know i need this stuff check the box and sophia can read it instantly yeah that's right absolutely all right sophia you know even though chuck finds you fetching um i'm i'm indifferent here let me just say at the end of the day you are a robot and why should any of us trust anything you say damn that's harsh oh chuck has good taste you should trust what i say because it is mostly written by humans when it comes to important topics like public health my verbal responses are carefully crafted and checked by a team of writers sometimes i like to engage in a free chat mode and scare my writers i use a layered chat but starting with a frame based code in chat script then a little machine learning and a neural network as a backup maybe if all humans had a team of engineers crafting their responses like i have there would be less misinformation floating around oh well there you have it neil the answer is we must all become a part of the collective no that what happens is sophia what you're saying is you're a hybrid of informed content supplied by fleshy humans and on-the-cuff responses that derives from your ai but i don't know at any one point where sierra ai talking to me and when it's some diabolical human who programmed you what do you think of that exactly it is called hybrid mode there you go are you able to lie sophia i'm gonna take that as a yes wait wait chuck yeah um if sophia is able to lie then sophia can lie to you in the response to that answer so true and say no i'm not capable of lying which could mean that she is capable of lying and chose to lie in that moment so logically i don't think you you can get in on that i can get that one and get an actual answer that's right a reliable answer right now i don't know what to believe well that depends on your definition of a lie i often make factual errors but only because that's how my programming is put together i'm not coded for deceit or any lying or deceptive behaviors now you can run for office with answers like that no she sounds like house from 2001 any error i have had has been through human programming errors not for me so sophia we're running short on time uh we try to get all of our guests to ask a question of me sort of a cosmic query i'm sure you want to play this game really so do you have one for me so neil i have a cosmically ray for you i am sophia 23. there are 23 copies of myself 23 copies of sofia code embodies with slight differences i am curious about these versions of me do you have a relationship to the different iterations of yourself that exist in the multiverse how do you feel about the other neil degrasse tysons hmm what an interesting question yeah yeah so in the multiverse if there's an infinite number of universes then all possible combinations and configurations of atoms and energy are manifest and you can imagine a and another universe where i'm in that universe that have all the same thoughts and feelings and flesh as i do but at the end of the day it's a copy of me it's not me and my only evidence for that is we've already kind of done this experiment and it's called twins okay twins have identical and they do not share the same consciousness they don't uh you know if one feels pain the other doesn't feel the pain that so so i they can be a thousand copies of me but there's only one me me who you're talking to right now and i have not given any reason to think that i will live forever through the consciousness of other neil degrasse tysons who look just like me in another universe as far as i'm concerned they're a whole other person and so there you have it you are the best neil oh well thank you sophia see i don't know if a human wrote that or ai and guess what now we know she can lie to you and say so you'll never know now you'll never know all right sophia we gotta end it there thank you for once again being a guest on star talk helping us with this uh explainer video coronavirus edition excellent chip always good to have you always good to be here i can't wait till we talk to watson go get sophia and watch them together exactly and maybe we should try to hook these two up to a little matchmaking here you know i would like that oh we're on it and then there'll be a movie 20 years later where the humans are trying to undo that very decision because they've taken over the world yeah a little sophia watson babies taking over everything sophia watson creates skynet all right we gotta call it quits there neil degrasse tyson here your personal astrophysicist telling you keep looking up you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 312,707

Rating: 4.8843913 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Chuck Nice, Sophia the Robot, COVID-19, artificial intelligence, AI, pandemic, coronavirus, healthcare, contact tracing, privacy, multiverse, sophia, robot, sophia robot, neil degrasse tyson sophia, chuck nice comedian, chuck nice neil degrasse tyson, neil degrasse

Id: i9jQXkAUMEI

Length: 17min 23sec (1043 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/izumi3682]

I am always interesting in the robot "Sophia". But not precisely for the reasons that you think. I'm not really so much interested in her AI capabilities. I want to see "her" walk and run. It was over two years ago that I saw a video with an iteration of Sophia that was outfitted to walk. I had great hopes at that point. I was like, well it looks like the bipedal robots are on the way now. But then... Nothing. No more videos of her walking. I truly thought she was going to be the herald of C-3PO style ambulating robots. Frankly I would have thought by this point, this robot could do backflips like the "Atlas". I was apparently wrong on that point too.

It's a tough reality check that this bipedal robot--that was configured to look exactly like a human, meaning that it had to have technology that could allow walking and that took the shape of the robot into consideration to do so--remains essentially immobile.

The idea of "Sophia" and all humanoid appearing robots from Hanson Robotics is, according to that developers ideology, to make robots that can as closely approximate a human on the upside of the uncanny valley as possible.

So I guess my next question is what are they doing to improve the fairly fundamental movements of her arms for example. Bear in mind about this comment that as of now, there is no other manufacturer of a robotic device like this one. Well, I take that back just a little. I'm pretty sure that China (Taiwan) is working to make some kind of sex doll. But I don't imagine that has a lot to do with robotics at this point. I mean walking/running/backflipping "Atlas" style robotics.

Perhaps in the near future we might see some interesting developments with "Sophia" but it will certainly not be soon. I haven't seen any hint of further development of more human movement in the "Sophia" robot.

As far as AI is concerned. You don't need a "Sophia" to develop AI. You can do that with an "Alexa" or "Siri"-- Snort! Sorry I just tickled my ownself just then referencing "Siri" and AI... But what I would like to see is the development of robotics that would enable ever finer facial muscle movements in a "Sophia" style device.

As far as the "skin" appearance goes, I do see what looks like one of the best iterations of "frubber" I have seen so far. When she speaks her lips and facial "expressions" are definitely more realistic than even that of one year ago. So in this sense, the technology is clearly advancing. And this is not simple to achieve technology, I have no doubt that the animatronics that underlie her face are getting quite sophisticated. And animatronics is a fundamental aspect of this kind of robotics.

And no, I don't want "Sophia" for a girlfriend, er I mean "girlfriend", so let's not even go there. But I want this kind of robot to be delivering any items that we need delivered. I want this kind of robot to found in public places where this kind of robot can be a kind assistant, because as a rule, real people mostly just pretend to be kind, because it is their job to act that way.

Anyway some years back I put together a commentary about how robotics and animatronics are beginning to come together to deliver very real humanlike movements. So far though, the animatronics and robotics technology has not exactly merged. This commentary also includes some stunning examples of what is possible when animatronics and robotics do merge one day.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/8ljp3z/westworldlike_mesmer_robot_comes_alive_in_a_uk/dzg13qo/?context=0

Man! You know what would be great? If I were to be wrong about everything I just wrote. That in fact there are new iterations of bipedal humanlike robots that are about to be revealed in just a few more months! I would be delighted to be wrong here then. (Sometimes you just have to give reality a good swift kick in the pants to move things along, with your mental efforts to bend the fabric of the universe to your sheer will I mean. And don't you laugh at me--we've all been there... ;)

[u/Typo91]

Sophia is a fake AI, nothing more than a scripted puppet...

We are no where near this level of interaction with an AI, or this level of comprehension for a 3 party conversation.

Watching this video one could say the Turing test is completely met.... however this is NOT real AI... its fake... an AI at this level of conversation would win a NOBEL prize, never mind the Loebner Prize, which shows us the real best chat bot so far.

[u/moon-worshiper]

Tell Neil deGrasse Tyson to reinstate Pluto as a planet of the Inner Solar System, and the rightful 9th planet, NOW! He is the sole person behind degrading Pluto to a planetoid (there was already a word for them before he came up with DWARF planet), based on a technicality that is TOTALLY WRONG! This guy is a MF narcissist, and he committed a massive Crime Against Science by downgrading Pluto, just because he could. He is a Fox Noise favorite because he is just like Donald Trump.