Preparing for a future with Artificial Intelligence | Robin Winsor | TEDxYYC

[Music] the sea squirt is a fascinating little critter it's quite pretty there it is lives most of its life in the water filtering sea water through its tubes and getting its food he doesn't always that sedentary though in its youthful stage it's a free swimming organism getting out exploring the world around it having a good time but that youthful exuberance can't continue forever after a while it finds a rock settles down anchors itself and that's where it's gonna be for the rest of its life but what to do for food until it gets the pretty blue buns well it eats its brain think about it if you're not going to move anymore you don't need a brain bigger small nature shows us from a giant redwood to a tiny little mosquito if you're not gonna move you don't have a brain if you are gonna move then you have some capacity to think so that turns out to tell us interesting things about the world of humans and robots and artificial intelligence in the field of artificial intelligence there's breakthroughs happening all the time indeed breakthroughs are constantly coming at us faster and faster the pace of our world is changing and if you think you can keep up today well what about tomorrow within artificial intelligence a couple of years ago an amazing thing happened in the field of game-playing which is a sub part of artificial intelligence a program called alphago was written by a group called deep mind and alphago was given all of the accumulated knowledge about gold go is complete computationally far more difficult than chess and with lots and lots of training and playing against experts finally it was matched up against the world champion and people thought no way can and artificial intelligence take on a human this is one of the things that only we can do and lo and behold the artificial intelligence beat the human but something far more fundamental happened the following year and didn't get quite as much attention but quite a bit more important a new program called alphago zero was written and they didn't give it the benefit of human knowledge they just showed it black stones white stones here's how you play the game and they set it up playing against the champion program from the year before in a flash computer to computer speed it became the champion it would beat alphago a hundred games to none and in doing so it developed plays that after thousands of years of playing the game humans had never even considered it was like playing with an alien but alphago zero isn't going anywhere it's not getting out and about but with the advent of self-driving trucks and cars with ultra with unmanned aerial vehicles and drones a robots formerly fixed to the factory floor are like the young sea squirt getting out and about and exploring their environment and as they do we see that the artificial intelligence that makes that possible become more mobile become smarter and start to look like something we would recognize as a brain soon we're going to have to reassess our whole relationship with technology there are two major waves have changed sweeping over us the first has already started and that's the age where we have specialists artificial professional intelligence programs called narrow AI and robotics together they're going to make us question very much who we are and how we order our society the second wave is even more fundamental in about a couple of decades but certainly within the lifetime of most of us here today we're going to see an artificial general intelligence one that has the capacity of all of us combined and that will be like sharing the planet with a new life-form these are slightly scary or maybe very scary changes but how we handle them and how we handle that second wave is really dependent on the first so let's look back at history and see how good we humans are at handling major change you can see where this is going up until 1400 books were a very rare commodity they were typically produced by monks in scriptorium 's the monk would spend a whole lifetime producing just a couple of volumes beautiful works of art but expensive rare and literacy of course was correspondingly low all that changes in 1440 when Gutenberg invents the printing press and suddenly we can print all sorts of things we can print pamphlets political tracts and yes Bibles but do the monks rise up and try and smash the printing press No first of all they were fairly peaceful people to start with but this isn't a sudden in-your-face existential change it's a gradual one and today we're still seeing people try and control what comes off the printing presses but the printing presses themselves are being left alone dial it forward a few hundred years more to 1,700 and weaving taking cloths making cloth and selling it was literally a cottage industry the whole family would be gathered and would be involved in gathering wool spinning it producing textiles and that was how they would put food on the table but with mechanization along comes the spinning jenny the jacquard loom and suddenly the home weaver cannot compete and with no social safety net suddenly they have no way to put food on the table one of the lessons from history is that people will put up with an amazing amount of stuff but if you deny them a way to feed their children you have sown the seeds of revolution and sure enough by the early 1800s the British had more troops in England fighting the Machine breakers or Luddites as they came to be known than they did in the continent fighting against Napoleon so today we stand at a fork in the road new technology brings great promise but also great disruption how we handle that is up to us we get to choose what we don't get to do is choose not to have the technology once it's invented it stays invented you cannot put the genie back in the bottle so in this new world of technology who wouldn't want self-driving cars they're safer they all learn from any mistakes they make rather than us each and learning one at a time who wouldn't want more efficient deliveries and all the things that come with it well consider the job a truck driver that's about to disappear one of the most common jobs in North America today that gives you a decent income without a higher education consider as well the job of the cab driver consider not only those folks but the diner and the motel along the way that house and feed those those drivers those are all going away and they're going away very very soon now some politicians will tell you that they're going to bring back declining industries things like coal mining and you know with policy changes perhaps they will but if they bring back the industries they won't bring back the workers so modern coal mine is going to use robots not humans in the oil sands of northern Alberta you see the giant trucks being now self-driving and it's more efficient it reduces the the footprint it's more economically unviable and might actually get a pipeline through to BC there's all sorts of good things that could happen from this but who wouldn't want this well ask an unemployed truck driver so at this point typically a speaker will tell you that yes yes this is all very disruptive but just like the textile workers who eventually became factory workers or the graphic designers who moved into being web designers new jobs will come along and all those old jobs that you didn't really want will go away to the machines but this time is different because the machines are catching up to human level capabilities do you really think that your job whatever it is can't be done by a super efficient computer or an entire --less robot or a combination of the two and if yours job can't be done then why the new jobs can't be done by those as well so we're facing the situation where we do have to compete with the machines for a while but is this gonna happen quickly or did we have time to think about it and get used to the idea well I've already mentioned the pace of change if we look back in history again in the four years of the first world war between 1914 and 1918 an entire empire came about an entire social order class system fell apart the world changed radically in just a few years at a time in history when we think of the pace of change as having been glacial what about now this was brought home to me a few years ago when I attended a geophysical conference and looked at a number of presenters talking about newly discovered planets all the presenters were introduced as XO biologists and I thought what the heck's an exobiologist it's the scientist who studies the possibilities of life around a newly discovered planet but those EXO biologists had remade themselves into EXO biologists in just a couple of years from the mission launched less time than it takes to get an undergraduate degree in biology so things are changing that fast how do we keep up if it's faster than art we can get an education faster than we can pass a regulation or legislation what do we do well let's take a look at the legal system and see if perhaps it might mean a made a little more nimble and surprisingly that takes us to the Curious Case of glue-sniffing in Glasgow in the early 1980s in the UK there was an epidemic of glue-sniffing all through the UK and this was a real problem because well obviously it's a it's a terribly harmful but there was no law against it the glue was not illegal the plastic bags the children were using was not illegal and then believe it or not some enterprising corner store merchants came up with the idea that some poor children couldn't participate because they couldn't afford a whole bottle of glue so they started measuring a little bits of glue into plastic bags and making glue sniffing kits and selling them to children the moral compass hmm don't know anyway the police said stop it they said no no we can't because it's not illegal the system in most of Canada in England is common law so there's statutes things that Parliament is said are illegal and things that are known to be illegal based on precedence so to fix this in England or most of Canada you'd have to pass new laws that means committees and sending things up and sending things back and sending them after the Queen gets signed and so on and eventually while all children are being harmed you get a law in Scotland however their system is based not just on common law but also civil law and in civil law it's not the priests in the matters it's the principle and in Scottish law it's illegal to harm children so they promptly arrested these chaps and stick them in jail for three years and the High Court justice said at appeal it would be a poor thing if the law could not handle offenses arising in modern times so perhaps that hope for the legal system to become a bit more flexible in Canada by the way a Quebec system is also incorporating that French civil law so let's go to another why Scotsman because I'm fond of my Scotsman Adam Smith in 1776 writes The Wealth of Nations and lays down the fundamentals of capitalism with that he talks about mostly the division and pricing of labor but if all labor is being done by machines where does that leave capitalism it takes the very basis out from underneath it so as we move forward with robot factories producing the goods that we need from the raw materials that are out in and then if those factories and robots are owned by a few oligarchs you will have a few super rich people and the rest of us hoping for the patronage of those a world of massive inequality another approach could be that we assert that the ownership of all those resources belongs to the people who live in the land and we have implements something called universal basic income now universal basic income ubi is generally thought of as a support for the poor but remember we're all going to be giving our jobs to the robots so who gets the ubi well that would be all of us so we really need to have a conversation about UB I'm with you bi everybody has enough to live without actually having a job to go to some of us will not rise to the challenge but some of us will will explore we'll discover what really makes us ourselves and and in doing that we'll get to explore the nature of human nature what is it that defines us is it just our job I hope not I hope it's something more but with that we have to hurry because time is running out that only takes us to the end of that first wave of change the second wave of change is the artificial general intelligence we know the difference between a chimp and a human we know the difference between the IQ of the proverbial village idiot not a lot an Einstein at a hundred and sixty to one hundred and sixty-five but can we comprehend the IQ of a new being that has an IQ of 5000 because make no mistake the AI train isn't going to stop at the human station it's going barreling right through to a destination that we cannot even understand so what are we going to do about that well there are certainly challenges there's a lot of promise wouldn't you want to have a friend with an IQ of 5000 look out looking out for you but you wouldn't want to have somebody who didn't like you we faced existential crisis in the past we thought that the plagues of the middle age would kill us all and it was the end of the world but it wasn't more recently when the first hydrogen bombs were exploded not the atomic bombs but the hydrogen bomb many scientists scientists thought that the chain reaction would not stop with the bomb because there's a lot of hydrogen in the atmosphere and they would strip the entire atmosphere off the earth leaving the planet lifeless why on earth would you do it well the American argument the time was well if we don't the Russians will so better dead than red fire up luckily we survived recently concerned citizens sued to try and stop CERN from starting up the Large Hadron Collider fearing that we would create a mini black hole and then we would all get sucked into it if we are being sucked into the black hole we wouldn't know it at this point because from the outside we'd be gone but we would see me anyway that's another thing we've survived that's good so why should we fear a new super intelligent being well chances are it will have no hostility towards us but this new artificial general intelligence may come out of a controlled research lab but it may suddenly in the software equivalent of a nuclear chain reaction come out of a project to find the gazillions bit digit of pi or perhaps from a factory that's trying to maximize the production of paperclips we would simply be in the way I'm sure that the people who built this fine theater had nothing against the ants and Gophers that lived here before but they still poured the concrete so if this is the case all we can do just like a parent raising a child is try and create the initial conditions that will be most favorable to having this new super intelligence favorable to us these are going to be wildly turbulent times so fasten your seat belt folks because as it goes forward we have to get this first stage right we have to figure out how to handle the changes to our economy to our legal system to our ability to define ourselves by who we work so that the AGI the artificial general intelligence arises from a kind Society rather than a mean one and that adjacent possible is absolutely magical and could be the golden age for Humanity so let's really try and get it right thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 348,040

Rating: 4.8045907 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, AI, Change, History, Robots, Social Justice

Id: f7dhOHMX0js

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 20 2018

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