Noam Chomsky on AI: The Singularity is Science Fiction!

the security my name is Nicola aka Socrates and you're watching singularity one on one singularity one on one is a regular podcast feature of singularity weblog where you can go and listen to it or download it in full today my guest on the show would be faint linguist political activist prolific author and public speaker dr. Noam Chomsky dr. Chomsky thank you so much for being with us today Loosli with you fantastic so my goal here today is to hopefully ask you a few questions that perhaps you don't get to be asked very often so let's jump right in in our very limited time here with this one imagine that you meet a person who has never heard of you before and they ask you to introduce yourself and what you do how would you do that in a couple of sentences let's say um I teach it MIT I've been there for 60 years sideline my main work is in on language cognition thinking philosophy I also have another life which I'm a political activist and writer on the contemporary affairs social political issues historical questions and so on so two lives is there a dominant what life there one takes over the other or they kind of fairly balanced depends on the period depends on what's happening the political life tends to be more urgent their urgent issues all the time so that tends to take priority mm-hmm you have been at MIT for about 60 years perhaps and among other things mit is very famous for research in artificial intelligence what in your view is artificial intelligence in what are our chances of ever creating it well it's a strange notion I mean in a certain sense what I do is or until the what is the term is usually used for is the effort to programme machines maybe computers maybe robots and so as to mimic or approximate certain aspects of human behavior that can be understood as a scientific project namely trying what you might try to construct a model of say insect navigation to try to understand is it navigation better to be as an effort to produce something of the utility like a robot that will clean your house for you and those are basically the two thrusts of artificial intelligence AI they do not they work in the fields now but also about 60 years has not really given any insight into the nature any speak of into the nature of thought and organization of action and so on and I don't think that's very surprising even to understand the insect navigation is extremely difficult in fact even to understand how the neuron of a giant squid distinguishes a food from the danger even that's a very difficult problem but to try to capture the nature of say human intelligence or human choice is a colossal problem way beyond the limits of contemporary science so ething is a colossal problem does that mean it's insurmountable we don't know we never know how much how far science can reach the human beings are organic creatures we're not angels and there's a it's generally believed often believed that humans can solve any problem but that would be true only if we were angels since we're organic creatures like all others we have certain capacities and the capacities have scope and they also have limits and the scope and the limits are tightly related if we didn't have limits we wouldn't have scope the limits determine what kind of a cognitive creature we are and that gives us the capacity to explore to inquire and create in certain ways but not necessarily in others now there will be problems that are simply beyond our comprehension and in fact in the history of science and philosophy there are quite interesting examples that have come up now this may be a very long journey and you have been in the past very critical of the approaches taken by many or most of the researchers working in the field of artificial intelligence would it be fair to say do you think that AI research is still headed in the wrong direction in your view well some of the leading researchers in the field and colleagues of mine I do believe and have said that the pressure to create commercially viable and useful devices to achieve certain ends has somewhat overtake overcome the field and driven the more science oriented aspects of it into the margins and I suspect that that's correct actually if you look at the what I call the science oriented parts like the say analogous to developing a model of the navigation that's the kind of work that I and many others do it's not called artificial intelligence but it's basically an effort to develop a theoretical understanding of the nature of fundamental elements of human intelligence and human cognitive capacity my cabins Li primarily on language which is central to many such much of which makes us human but the same would be true people studying vision or the children's acquisition of concept the other problems of the choice and the conditions that under which is undertaken and reasoning zone so in other words it seems that you think that project such as for example the Google autonomous self-driving car or IBM's Watson have kind of hijacked the research to produce other products like those and and and are in that way costing the research into the more proper artificial intelligence it's not a question more proper but which one do like I have nothing against self-driving cars yeah could be make it easy to park my car so far they want to do that it's ok just like I have nothing against a bigger bulldozer they're probably better so applied work that you did to achieve some humanly sensible goal is perfectly fine either right or wrong Watson I think it's somewhat different story I think that's mainly of PR gimmick frankly I don't see what's changed by the acceptor maybe selling computers by showing that if you spend a lot of time packing it's a takes a deep-blue it was perfectly obvious sixty years ago that sooner or later if you get 50 grand masters together to plan to take as much time as they want planning strategies for more you know imaginable occasions a sooner or later that will reach a point where they can do better in there than a particular a single grandmaster who's restricted is a 45 minutes that's almost obvious from the nature of the game so having shows nothing except that you did what is known could be done nothing that's learned from it in fact this was pretty well understood by the founder of the field Alan Turing great mathematician who was also the one of the founders of computer science but he did write a famous paper back around 1950 on can machines think some kind of like that a very short paper I think it's eight pages and that basically set off the field of artificial intelligence there still to this day our prizes every year for a hundred thousand dollars or something like that of he asked what's called the Turing test he called it his imitation game now however touring in that paper did point out as a sentence in which he says the question whether machines can think is too meaningless to deserve discussion so let's put that aside let's not talk about thinking machines of course machine to your means program it doesn't mean the computer on the physical object on your desk it means the program that's written for that's what the term machine means so question whether the program in your computer can think is too meaningless deserve discussion annex quite variety deals so but nevertheless thought this was a useful project for two reasons the one he said it might be an incessantly imitation game test notes called the Turing test might be an incentive to construct better machines and I suppose that could be true about deep blue I don't know the details but it's possible that in constructing deep blues and ideas were developed about how to create your memories or more accessible memories and so on if so it's fine it's like your bulldozer but and he also said that he thought maybe in he said in fifty years past we would change our concept of thinking well that hasn't happened and I don't expect it to happen in the foreseeable future we haven't gained that kind of insight into the nature of whatever it was on thinking so you believe that what's on his symbolize no progress or embodied no progress whatsoever I mean one potential application that's been trumpeted lately in the media was the medical applications in Diagnostics where Watson would be supposedly much more accurate than any number of experienced doctors from a number of variety of fields and thereby would potentially democratize medicine by uploading the water Watson in the cloud and then allowing access to its knowledge or to its Diagnostics ability via a simple smartphone for example anywhere in the world no that's fine it's certainly objection to that just like developing a surgical techniques which change a gallbladder operation from something that used to hospitalize person for a week to something you do well in a walk into the office and walk out that's great and if collecting a lot of data what you're referring to is a system that collects a lot of data it has a rapid search procedure and so that it can discover for - and algorithms that enable it to discover particular things in the data that's fine you know it's like a it's like a program that searches a document to find a word you're looking for I have no objection to that check that hangs nice idea but that's different from understanding something about the nature of diagnosis let's say it's not telling you that it's simply accumulating the understanding that has been achieved and running through it rapidly comprehensively moreso than say a single individual do in particular individual without much Fran so for example something like when I look at an x-ray I don't see anything if a trained radiologist looks at it they see something no it's conceivable that whatever a trained radiologist is doing could be programmed in such a way that I could put it into my computer and then it would enable me to see what the trained radiologist see that's fine that could be useful not for me but for a doctor somewhere it's not a training video but what about everything else that that trained radiologist is doing is it not conceivable that we can program that everything else that they are doing could be potentially programmable one way or another just as it's perfectly possible that robots can replace human labor on assembly lines if they can it's fine frees humans up to do more creative things and isn't that the sign of progress in some sense or another it's a sign if it depends what it's used for safe let's take robots on assembly lines if it's used to free up the workforce for more creative work say controlling production making decisions about it finding creative ways to act and so on Dennis to the good if it's used as a device to maximize profit and throw people into the trash can then it's not good mm-hmm I hope I have the chance to comment back on that topic a little later but let me just rush through here and ask you what's the what's the importance of reverse engineering the human brain is perhaps arguably a way of getting insights into making more progress for artificial intelligence as for example another famous alumni of MIT records were almost notably argues records were made some useful device and he's a future who's what's called a futurologist he develops elaborate speculations about what might happen but if people find that stimulating okay I don't particularly but I don't see any particular achievement there other than creating the devices are used that's fun that may be a speech analysis device all right let me just tell you a personal story when I was appointed at MIT in 1955 160 years ago I basically had no recognized profession but I was they're willing to appoint me and in the research lab electronics but to work on a program on machine translation in my interview with a director of the laboratory in Durham Wiesner we talked about work I was doing thought that project I told him happy to have the position like the research there but I told all not going to work on machine translation because this is totally pointless the way to do machine translation I said is just by brute force and talked about some ways to do it by brute force they were still a belief at the time that if enough was understood about what a translator does you could program it and that would get you to do machine translation I felt then as I feel now that that was the pion sky just illusions we didn't understand that much and over the years that I think is turn to have be true at Google has a translator which is kind of useful if you want to get the rough idea of what's in say some scientific articles in some language you don't know it's kind of helpful but it's done by brute force it doesn't give any insight into the nature of translation that's a hard problem just as it's a hard problem to figure out how a bee can navigate these are not trivial questions and for humans the problems are much greater that for insects for a lot of reasons that one reason is that we're just a lot more complex you know be say has maybe eight hundred thousand neurons we have ten billion to be different the other reason is that with other organisms we allow ourselves to do invasive experimentation with humans we don't it's not a short distinction but significant distinction so there are plenty of questions you can ask about say the kind of problems I'm interested in let's it language acquisition make your mind up fill ins Maddox or plenty of questions you can think of asking but you can't and you can even design an experiment to pursue them and if you were say Mengele you could carry out the experiment that but fortunately we're not all Nazi doctors so you can't carry out the experiment which means you have to study human intelligence you bring it in much more indirect ways and that is a added difficulty over say setting beat there you can do an experiment Eli so what's your take generally speaking about race technological singularity it's science fiction I don't see any particular reason to believe it you want to play games with it okay because they are Co Institute's fearing for example the creation of artificial intelligence like the machine Meiri machine intelligence Research Institute previously the singularity Institute who are fearing that once there is a artificial general intelligence smarter than humans that would pretty much signal the end of our species we shouldn't be concerned about that possibility in your view I think we should be concerned about the end of our species without the batteries it should be concerned about it because we are very busy dedicating ourselves to destroying the possibility for in survival I think we should worry about that but could most recent IPCC report but the singularity stories are science fiction for one thing there's knowing that we remember when people come when you talk about machines kinda misleading people have a feeling well it's this cute little robot that had in Star Wars r2d2 a machine the reference to machines is a reference to programs the program that you put into a device that's ping on your desk the device itself is of no use for anything other than maybe holding down papers and said paperweight but it can execute the program now what's a program the program is a series as a theory it's a theory written in a and an arcane complex notation designed to be executed by the machine but about the program you ask the same questions you ask about any other theory does it give insight and understand it well in fact these theories don't they're not designed with that in mind and not surprisingly they don't not much maybe marginally so what we're asking is can we do that design a theory of being smart and we're Yeon's away from that no we only have probably a couple of minutes at most so I just want to ask you do you think you've mentioned the sort of fundamental challenges that we're facing as humanity different in your view than the technological singularity do you think we've made any progress as a civilization plenty of progress in all sorts of ways I mean things that were taken for granted as normal in the 18th century would today be considered as utter Barberton in fact we don't to go back that far it picks a half the species women and when the American Constitution was established women were not people they were property and took over British common law which was the most advanced of the day and which a woman was the property of her father transmitted to her husband that continued until pretty reasonably in fact it was as recent as 1975 that long ago that the US Supreme Court granted women the right the right to serve on juries meaning of their peers that's what a jury is supposed to the jury of your peers people like you that's a generation ago and that's progress very slow progress agonizing and in many ways is regression but over time the the tendency is towards progress like I mentioned animal experimentation before until very recently if the atom mammals a cat's primates monkeys were subjected to just about any kind of experimentation you wanted to do that's no longer the case they're pretty sharp restrictions on ethical restrictions on animal experimentation okay I think all of this whether it's the women african-americans immigrants whatever there's a slow expansion of the moral sphere slow but detectable so for example just a couple of weeks ago the state of California agreed to allow undocumented immigrants to serve on juries that's a little bit like allowing women to serve on juries it's beginning to admit them barely into the category of human beings well one way to go on that now but these are small steps of progress there's also a regression so take say the climate destruction which are talked about but not only are the are we carrying out the process of destroying the environment for decent existence but we've become aware of it so she go back say 250 years it was happening but there wasn't it's very little awareness of it I remember myself very well in the early 1970s two friends personal friends one of them happened to be the head of meteorology at MIT the other the head of earth sciences at Harvard both of them at about the same time started warning that there's a problem developing that we hadn't recognized with regard to the lesson about global warming that could be very serious in future but twenty years earlier that was not known then it was beginning to be understood now any rational person that recognizes to be extremely serious and unfortunately any rational person doesn't happen to include a large part of the US Congress so that when the leading commentator on the television recently done when asked about this said well we'll leave it in the hands of God okay then Rickon we're saying let's consign our grandchildren who were kind of living that's substantial but there's a long way to go and not much time to do it that's all a lot more significant than idle speculations about some potentials in you Larry in my view if said that there has been some slow but still notable progress does that make you cautiously optimistic about our future despite all the difficulties and challenges that we're definitely going to face putting aside the singularity from environmental degradation from nuclear proliferation and things like that I think an objective observer from Mars let's say looking at the human species it would conclude that they're they're an evolutionary error that that they're designed in such a way that leads them to destroy themselves and probably much else along with them the irrational conclusion we can decide whether that conclusion is right or wrong the fate that choice is in our hands so I don't think it's a question of optimism or pessimism but do we make the choice the effort to show that what looks like rational inclusion is nevertheless mistaken that's up does last two questions do you think that a resource-based economy and The Venus Project for example or the zeitgeist movement provide an alternative structure where as you say perverse short-term incentives for maximizing profits will not end up making otherwise good people being forced to make bad choices its pleasant ideas when I read it I think that would be nice but there are many other suggestions about what would be nice for spin them offering with your favorites yeah my favorite of the ones I talk about the Democratic control of every aspect of social life the production consumption distribution represent political representation long way to go on that and simply the creating the expanding sphere of human and in fact animal rights all of that's important the ending there are very specific things that have to be dealt with which is why I'm not much interested in these kind of Airy speculations one of them we've talked about so the destruction of the environment which is extremely serious the other you mention it's kind of a miracle that we've escaped a nuclear war literally a miracle and you can't expect that miracle to continue so something quickly and urgently has to be done to eliminate this curse yeah dr. Tomsky my last question is what is your most important message that the most important thing that you would like our viewers and listeners to take away from this conversation with you today I'd like them I think people what take a clear-eyed look at the world around us where it's going where it's likely to go if we are remain passive and obedient and conformist and that's a grim future that's the conclusion of the observer from Mars and then to decide what we can do to avert that interaction thank you very much dr. Chomsky really appreciate your time today thank you security

Channel: undefined

Views: 487,458

Rating: 4.5662651 out of 5

Keywords: Noam Chomsky, Technological Singularity, Artificial Intelligence, AI

Id: 0kICLG4Zg8s

Length: 29min 46sec (1786 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Check out the backlog of interviews... bigshots like Kurzweil, Minsky, and Wolfram are there, along with 100+ others - most with fewer than 1K views. I'm going through them now. The guy had an unsuccessful fund-raising campaign last year but decided to keep producing these. I added him on FB too. This is a valuable service he's doing, and I'll link his stuff where appropriate in the future. Thanks for posting, OP.

[u/TruthBite]

Yes Nikola does a great job. I highly recommend his channel. Everyone should subscribe.

[u/[deleted]]

I love Chomsky, it's rare that I see him speaking in a non-political context.

[u/ajsdklf9df]

Great interview, the more Chomsky avoids talking about politics, the more interesting what he says tends to be.

Hearing him talk about machine translation way back then was great. Thanks to his expertise he knew brute force was the way to go. But computer scientists thought a clever algorithm was the way to go.

Well now we know what works. Google translate is decent. And more work on brute force statistical translation could make it a lot better. Strong AI on the other is nowhere to be seen in 2013.

And yet because the bottom up engineering approach to AI is working, the top down strong AI bullshit is starting to make a return. Oh well, best of luck to them.