Shannon Luminary Lecture Series - Stephen Fry, actor, comedian, journalist, author

ladies and gentlemen please welcome dunal Hernan [Music] [Applause] [Music] I got a clap from Stephen Fry and this has made my year welcome everyone to the Hammond innovation Hall at Nokia Bell Labs it's great to have you here in person and hello to everyone that's streaming in from remote sites all over that labs globally and so all you weird people in the future that will watch this and the post recording well I don't know what to say to you but hello as well I suppose so it's great to have you here I have two basic jobs to do it's very simple for me thankfully one is a very mundane thing around housekeeping and the other is and I need you as an audience here to help me achieve one of my goals for this year so the housekeeping thing is that the restrooms at the front of the building fire exits are at the front left and right of the building and here just off the stage left and right and then to help me achieve my goal and I have a goal that I need to be part of one of these lectures where there isn't a single instance of a cell phone causing an interruption and I've tried everything I've tried naming and shaming I've threatened physical abuse the last lecture I even said that anyone's phone that goes off it's direct proof that they are stupid and lacking intellect and that didn't work honestly so I'm gonna speak to your better part of your mentality and ask you to take out your phones for just 10 seconds turn it to silent Turner to vibrate turn it to flight mode or just turn the bloody thing off please and trust me you'll turn it off for an hour it'll be great you have a great time and the world will still be spinning on its axis when we come back an hour later so with that talking about spinning on one's axis I'm going to introduce Marcus Weldon as the chief technology officer of Nokia and the president of Bell Labs [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so Donal tried to first to get you to turn off your phones the first for me is I'm going to see nothing you know it's not possible but I am going to say relatively little because there's nothing I can do to compare anything to to Stephen Fry he's more humorous than the average bear yeah he's a better actor than the average bear he's better thinking the average bear he's a better writer than the average bear in fact he might be the best of all those things across all bears I might go one step further across all of Bell Labs so that's really who we have here with us today we have we've spent a day with him I had dinner with him last night it's been just a fabulous time he is everything you would want him to be and possibly more and it's very rare that we get to say that so it is a true honor and privilege to have Lord Steve know I didn't he's not Lord yet but Stephen Fry I welcome to the stage and I think you're just gonna be wowed so thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Thank You say man I do think it would have been nice if Marcus had mentioned my modesty as well gentlemen I'm so thrilled to be I've had a marvelous morning being shown around just some of the extraordinary moon shots and and blue sky and remarkable thinking that is going on here and I just can't tell you how I feel like basically the closest I can come to is I'm Charlie and and Marcus is Willy Wonka and I suppose that makes you um Palumbo's in your very final Palumbo's - now I'm not gonna wear my glasses that seem to me I'm okay without them thank goodness let me open at least by saying that despite a lifetime immersing myself in what I consider the provoking beguiling bewitching and often befuddling joy of technological development information and shiny things I am no computer scientist no coder no programmer many of you most of you if not all of you who've been kind enough to come along today will know much more about the technicalities of the subject I'm going to discourse upon take this if you take it at all as the offering of a curious mind curious in both senses of the word avid for information and just plain odd now the future has never been bigger business every day more stories appear relating to the great confluence the great convergence the time that is surely coming when the sweating currents of the streams and tributaries of Robotics bionics arv our gene editing nanotechnology brain machine interfaces the Internet of Things and machine learning break their banks and flow together into one mighty technological flood a tidal wave which will sweep over the human and natural world and perhaps bring about the singularity the end of the primacy of humankind or possibly the end of our existence as biological entities in the beginning of a new human or non-human dominant sapien species upon the earth the same questions are asked what will it do to our minds our social groupings is this the end of the workplace of Education Medicine Commerce and social love leisure and libel labor as we've always understood them since the dawn of language the hinges of Pandora's box are beginning to squeak as the lid rises plenty of concerns make the headlines today travelling post truth fake news the rise of big data and its ownership of sitting citizenry's every move preference spending pattern and propensity the slavery of the gig economy the echo chamber and filter bubble that tribe Eliza's and ghetto eise's us further and further the threat of hacking identity theft extortion and cyber terrorism the grooming and recruitment of the young for nefarious ends bullying body shaming and so on and on and on and on but these it should be understood what Donald Rumsfeld would call the known knowns and the known unknowns they are all issues that worry us now and of which we are fully cognizant albeit powerless it seems or unwilling to undress to address even politicians cultural commentators and businesspeople are aware of these issues but such challenges are as nothing when said beside what's coming down the pike in a very short while indeed now before I make a total fool of myself by making any rash statements about the future let me tell two stories from the distant past they're both well known but bare repetition after all I eyes I think of ash legal said a historian is a prophet looking backwards I already hinted at one of the stories I'm going to tell you when I referenced the hinges of Pandora's box in reality I should have said Pandora's jar matter of fact we often call it Pandora's box because no less a figure than one of the heroes of early humanism Erasmus missed translated it from he said anyway Pandora and her jar we're all part of juices revenge on the Titan Prometheus and on us the king of the gods had not forgiven Prometheus for stealing fire from heaven and giving it to mankind he looked down and saw fires breaking out everywhere industry ceramics cooking foundries for art of war but he saw that man had the divine spark to the inner creative fire that makes us seek push invent question perhaps we can call that the consciousness that we sense is uniquely ours in the animal kingdom Zeus was to punish Prometheus by chaining him to the caucuses and sending an eagle to pick out his his liver every day but mankind he punished in a more subtle subtle way and for once I used the word mankind without fear of being tattooed there were no human women at this point the god Hephaestus Vulcan to the Romans was commanded by Zeus to create the first human female from clay moistened by his spittle if Isis took his wife Aphrodite his mother Hera his daughter his aren't Demeter and his sister Athena as models and lovingly sculpted a girl quite marvelous beauty in to whom Aphrodite Venus to the Romans of course the goddess of love and beauty then breathed life the other gods joined together to equip her uniquely for the world Athena trained trained her in crafts science and arts here in doubter with authority poise and self possession Apollo taught her skill in music learning archery rhetoric and reason Hermes schooled her in the deception and and curiosity and cunning arts and he gave her a name since each of the gods had conferred upon her a notable talent or accomplishment she was to be called the all gifted which in Greek is Pandora as used bestowed one more gift upon this Paragon it was a jar or box filled with well he didn't tell her and down she went to earth where she was wooed and won by Prometheus his brother Epimetheus well you know what happened after weeks of aching curiosity Pandora waited until she was alone in the house and she couldn't help herself which of us could she pulled the jar from its hiding place and twisted the lid its wax and seal gave way and she pulled it free there was a fast fluttering a furious flapping of wings and a wild wheeling and whirling in her ears she cried out in pain and fright and jumped back as a host of horrifying leathery scaly forms flew out of the mouth of the jar a great cloud of them chattering screaming and howling in her ears with a cry Pandora summoned up the courage and strength to close the lid and seal the jar back up but was too late like a cloud of locusts shrieking wailing creatures flew away over the town over the countryside and around the world settling like a pestilence wherever humankind had habitation the names of these creatures were hardship starvation pain anarchy lies quarrels disputes Wars battles man slaughters and murders death and disease all these pains and sorrows were released into the golden age and illness violence deceit misery cruelty lies and anarchy filled our world and they would never leave what Pandora did not know was that when she shut the lid of the jar so hastily she forever imprisoned inside one last little creature which was left behind to beat it's desperate wings in the Box forever it's name was Elpis hope when I first found out about have joined the Internet back in the late 1980s I wanted to grow with fascination and excitement by the time the world wide web arrived I was anxious for my friends to get themselves websites and email addresses after all it was fairly pointless being the only person I knew with an email account I had been through this before as an early adopter as a matter of fact when for three years I was the only person I knew with a fax machine was like being the only person alive with a tennis racket to useless anyway I told my friends that this this thing this Internet was the greatest gathering of human beings in the history of the planet as new services came online and web 2.0 blossomed into the social media services we now know and perhaps rely on I believed I really believed that humankind might well be saved enhanced perfected by this all gifted creation it would spread arc literature music culture philosophy enlightenment and knowledge in its train would come new freedoms a new understanding between the peoples of the world a new contract this was to be our millenniums Pandora an all gifted organism that would spread learning understanding Amity comity and peace I looked at budding projects like Wikipedia and I saw Voltaire Diderot and Thomas Paine's enlightenment project becoming a reality I saw art galleries and archives becoming freely available to all I saw special interest groups able to exchange information and ideas with their fellows across the globe whether it was coin collecting a love of a particular style of music shared pleasure in gaming hiking or cosplay a rare physical mental disorder in common suddenly people could contact each other across the world free translations free lectures tours user-generated advice on travel hunting for the best deals and bargains sharing experience in all fields of human endeavor borders barriers frontiers and boundaries would melt and dissolve and end to tribalism racism ignorant fear a new dawn for mankind it was Pandora all gifted all good Twitter for example I I joined Twitter early on thinking at a fun trivia little nonsense that might be worth pursuing but when it showed how people could connect in real time as they massed in the squares of Tunisia and Egypt ushering in the Arab Spring my joy was complete what tyrant could endure in this new world how could censorship and propaganda survive when the wisdom and knowledge of crowds was there to shine the light of truth in all the world's darkest places the new Pandora's suite of accomplishments and capabilities would bring about a paradise on earth utopia made real what could possibly go wrong you're right to laugh at my foolishness I do myself when did the lid loosen on the jaw when did I have become aware that perhaps it wasn't quite so perfect after all the old caterpillar in the salad shouldn't put us off green vegetables and the occasional fly in the ointment shouldn't put us off applying it but the beating of the leathery scaly wings of something worse fluttering from the jar couldn't be ignored even by so perfectly gullible and cosmically optimistic a fool as me the lid had been lifted and evil things flew out bullies monstrously cruel and malicious thieves extortionists brigands pirates liars con artists predators monsters and trolls spite enmity meanness of spirit cruelty of intent and greed so much obscene making panting shuddering greed hope was nowhere to be seen so have I gone from do a dopey and idiot optimist to dead-eyed despondent and despairing pessimist well my second story from long ago concerns a great ruler in the East who called together his ministers and greatest sages I have won the world he told them I have all the power and pleasure that anyone can require but I am not at peace my mind and fighting spirit are racing but I have no enemies to defeat I want some occupation some pastime some puzzle that will fulfill my passion for war strategy conquest tactics and absorb my time who so ever invents designs confess or concocts such a system that a pastime will be granted any wish well the cleverest and most cunning talents in the Empire the designers creators poets planners inventors dreamers and visionaries worked furiously to come up with some creation some invention which could satisfy satisfy the Emperor's Omri and ensure their own future wealth and happiness the day came for the emperor to judge the countries he circled the Great Hall of his palace examining each of the offerings submitted for his inspection gold silver and brass faults and castles of immense mechanical sophistication promised hours of realistic war gameplay enough to satisfy any boredom poor Imperial warrior surely he passed by each stand like a celebrity chef judging a cookery competition or a duchess at a flower show sniffing and tweaking and prodding and testing nothing tickled him or worked his survivor glands until he finally came to a table it would set an old Persian man who favoured him with a wrinkled snaggletooth grin and bad him sit before him and play the game he had invented it looked very plain next to the great artifice ease and apparatuses that could that were created by the others the wooden board two ranks of light boxwood figures facing across the two ranks of identical dark ebony figures my game is unique the inventor said in his strange Farsi accent because there is no luck just planning cunning skill daring and imagination just like war and just like life here is the king in my country of Iran we call him the Shah I shall be the black pieces you must attack my shop when he has nowhere to move you may cry Chuck mutt the king is dead checkmate said the Emperor's little death close enough said the inventor he showed the Emperor how each chess man was allowed to move and they played and the pair of them played and played and played the Emperor had never seen a game like it such complexity from such simplicity such traps surprises artful creations and combinations the other submissions to his imperial majesty's competition stood no chance this new game of shock mat was declared the winner you may ask for any reward cried the delighted Emperor my wants are simple my family small the inventor replied sweeping the few remaining pieces from their last game and showing the empty board you see my chessboard here just eight squares by eight I would ask only that a single grain of rice be placed for me on the first square and then two on the next for and the one next to that in age then 16 and so on and till you have come to the last square adding twice as many grains each time ha cried the Emperor clapping his hands for all your coming you missed a chance to enrich yourself old man you are too easily satisfied bring a bag of rice within moments the Emperor's Grand Vizier was pinching out a single grain from a sack and placing it with haughty disdain onto the first square a1 in modern chess parlance or Queen's rook one two grains he placed on b14 on c18 on d1 3264 and finally 128 grains on h1 the end of the first rank King's rook won the Grand Vizier was getting a bit bored mr. too fiddly undertaking and sent for a pair of tweezers 128 was rather fiddly and for a 2 on the next rank he would have to count out twice 128 to fill that square with 256 grains which was already too much for the small space to contain uttering a weary oath of the nuisance of it he chose instead to place a small stone on the square and heap the grains onto a floor tile b2 next to it needed 512 grains the Emperor saw that this was going to be a boring procedure and waved a hand and was making to move off when his chief astronomer and mathematician the most wise and learned its age of the kingdom stood before him sire he hissed in agitation I have made calculations when the Vizier gets to the halfway point the end of the fourth row it will require 2 billion grains of rice just fill that 30 second square by the time he is on the second square of the seventh row over half a trillion grains by the end of that row it will be more rice than the world has ever seen by the last row more rice than the world could ever see more than there are stars in the sky more than there are grains of sand in the desert mighty 1 if you grant his wish you will bankrupt the Empire and the world will be a part desert the King trying to do the sums in his head then looked at the figures the sage had choked on his slate and thought hard he slowly saw her vast the numbers became by this time the sage had calculated the weight of so much rice no horses yaks or dromedaries could carry so much not in a hundred thousand times a hundred thousand years the vexed ruler did now what any powerful leader would do what you and I would probably do in the same circumstances he swung his scimitar and sliced off the inventors head as a lesson to all clever people not to get cute with kings and so-and-so chess was born and so to the terror and horror of the remorseless playing out of exponential growth was introduced to humanity the grains on the rice board story has been repeated and refined to demonstrate the havoc such alarming rates of growth can wreak and how tiny manageable integers can quickly explode into number so vast that our earthbound sublunary imaginations cannot hope to deal with them so much in life seems to be exponential we are the result of exponential division one cell becomes 2 4 8 and 16 and so on until an amoeba like glob can somehow coalesce into the form of a jellyfish a grizzly bear an orchid or Angela Merkel exponential progression means that as humans we go from one cell to the 27 trillion that complete us in just 46 steps that's all but if we look backwards we can see the effect - we have two parents four grandparents a great-grandparents and so on doesn't take many generations before the number of my direct ancestors ie individuals who are all quite as necessary for my existence as my parents exceeds the number of humans that has ever existed a few steps further back and the number exceeds the quantity of mammals and then all eukaryotes and all life and all the grains and atoms that make up the planet the exponential curves prove that everything in the universe is our ancestor that we are as Sagan famously said they prove - that the smallest elemental building blocks can transform themselves into living structures of mind-boggling complexity by no more than small recursive iterations of procedures as simple as binary fishing mitosis and meiosis and all the other things I've forgotten from school biology and through the power of that progression the day would come when an exponential curve would topple the game of chess just as it caused the loss of its inventors head but first things first from its arrival in our world the depths and subtleties of the game of chess astonished us never mind the quantity of grains of a square that on a square there are more possible games of chess it turns out than there are atoms in the observable universe tend to the power of a hundred and twenty games as opposed to the universe its feeble tend to the power of eighty atoms this estimation is known as it happens as a Shannon number after Claude Shannon himself and his work on these startling numbers these game tree complexities as they're known in the field for chess was long considered the apogee of human intellectual achievement chess masters can keep every game they have played in their memories not to mention the thousands of games played by past geniuses and contemporary rivals they think forwards many moves to levels of analysis that boggle the imaginations of amateurs the more you get as a patter an amateur a glimmering sense of what good chess play involves the most staggered you are by the incredible mental powers of champions when Boris Spassky was preparing for his famous World Championship match against Bobby Fischer in 1972 he would tune up his reflexes by playing ten master strength players simultaneously blindfolded easy to see therefore why chess became a symbol of the highest achievements of our remarkable brain combining insight forward planning calculation imagination intuition flair memory concentration spatial awareness resilience determination and in its highest flights creative genius mastery of chess men to complete intelligence and mathematical intelligence of strategic intelligence of tactical intelligence of visual intelligence and artistic intelligence chess therefore became from the very beginning the Holy Grail as far as the creation of an artificial intelligence was concerned indeed a candidate for the world's very first robot was the Mechanical Turk an 18th century chess playing automata that turned out to be a Wizard of Oz fake a very small person tucked in a cabinet operating levers but two great geniuses who met here well perhaps not exactly here but at the Bell Labs in 1942 Alan Turing and Claude Shannon were both interested in the idea of a machine being able to compute chess moves this idea lodged in academia technical institutes and the popular culture think professor Stephen Falken in the 1993 blockbuster wargames if mankind could build a machine that was capable of matching or even beating the world's greatest player well that would be the breakthrough it would bring us closer to artificial general intelligence the move from a box of cunning algorithms to the creations of sapient machines machines with sense if not necessarily a full sense of themselves this would inevitably lead to machine super intelligence which in itself would bring about that singularity at the moment when everything changes for us as critical and momentous as the catastrophe of the Permian extinction when 90% of all life disappeared from the planet or that first atomic test in New Mexico in 1945 the day is important to our species as the longed-for first contact with an extraterrestrial species or perhaps even matching the epoch defining day when someone had the astonishing idea of sandwich in a toasted marshmallow between chocolate smeared gram wheat crackers and asking for small such seismic game-changing breakthroughs come rarely in our history what brought Alan Turing and Claude Shannon two of the greatest intellects of their age or any age together in the 1940s not chess of course but war and the need for the Allies to pull knowledge on developments like cryptanalysis radar and the cavity magnetron Turing of course was specifically working on decryptions of German Enigma traffic Shannon was fast becoming one of the world's greatest authorities on cryptography and artillery fire control systems more excitingly and less known to anyone but themselves at the time the pair of them were independently working out the terms and protocols for what would become known as information theory but it would probably be fair to say that alessandro volta brought them together he heaped up you'll remember discs of metal zinc and copper in brine or sulfuric acid and gave the world its first reliable and consistent electrical pile or battery named in his honor a voltaic pile his work caught the eye of emperor napoleon bonaparte who in 1801 instituted a prize in his name the Volta prize for research into electricity very far citing their farsighted of of Bonaparte that prize was won in 1880 by my hero for this afternoon apart from Shannon who is Alexander Graham Bell inventor of the telephone or winner of the patent at least Bell felt l felt he had personally made enough money from his great invention and plowed all the prize money into the establishment of research and development laboratories that bear his name to this day Bell had ludicrous ambitions as you probably know he even went so far as to state I hope you do not think me immodest when I say that I believe that one day there will be a telephone in every town in America the remit of these newly instituted Bell Labs was to feed the fruits of their labor into the parent Bell Telephone Company Ma Bell now to be divided into manufacturing the physical equipment the actual phones cables relay switches and so forth was Western Electric who over the decades would become Lucent and Alcatel and then finish up and I used the word finish correctly into Nokia the second company which would run the infrastructure and customer end was the American telephone and telegraph company better known as AT&T and no one knows what happened to them Bell Labs had been founded in a golden age of invention and mechanical engineering but by the 1940s when Shannon and Turing met higher and deeper realms of science and numbers were replacing the down-and-dirty swarf sweat and swill of invention and engineering the mechanical world seemed to have given up most of its secrets materials and compounds were more crucial than ever but deep expertise in chemistry and a proper understanding of the nuclear and even quantum nature of matter was rapidly to become essential Bell and his phone jacquard and his loom Volta making his pile Marconi and the radio Samuel Morse and the Telegraph George Stephenson and the locomotive Karl Benz and the combustion engine lee deforest and the vacuum tube Thomas Edison Nikola Tesla these brilliant and extraordinary inventors innovators engineers and discoverers would have understood barely a single word or idea that passed between and Shannon when those two sat together and chatted numbers and their relation to logic probability and so-called universal computation these two individuals were probably the only on the planet who had taken so far the bold idea that information words and the flow of data could be expressed and mathematically modeled in Bayesian and boolean terms and that these mathematical expressions could be used as the basis for directing a flow of current such that the current journey through diversion resistance capacitance rectification and amplification might allow the storage and manipulation of data and the performance of calculations such fancy rhetorical theoretical frameworks were all very well but existing technology could never realize the extraordinary information revolution that these ideas hinted at delicate breakable glass vacuum tubes were unreliable enough when put to dedicated tasks like code breaking and gunnery calculation the fantastic possibilities raised by Shannon and cheering well these surely could never be made real in the lifetime of the century the inefficiency the overheating of the tubes such problems appeared insuperable the history of Bell Labs and its achievements is well covered in literature and libraries and online and I'm sure you know it better than I do but their refinement of vacuum tube technology from a thousand hours reliable use to 80,000 hours allowed them to create the Transcontinental system that realized Bell's mad ambition to get a phone to every town in America and some the brilliant but tragic William Shockley's work on the manipulation of current in solid state materials like copper sulfate and silicon came up with the Nobel Prize winning semiconductor triode or transistor Shockley left New Jersey to establish a business in his hometown his hometown of Palo Alto California and Silicon Valley was born eight of his senior collaborators left him as his behavior politics and management style became ever more bizarre two of that traitorous eight Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce would set up their integrated electronics company or Intel which built on that early semiconductor work finding ever more cunning ways of layering silicon in wafer thin P and n state sandwiches that they called integrated circuits in which the world welcomed as microchips in 1965 Gordon Moore first propounded his celebrated remorseless and astonishing law you're all familiar with his declaration that technological advances in chip production would precede such that the density of integrated circuits would double periodically somewhere between every eighteen months and two years twice as many transistors in the same space is the way this is exponential curve is most commonly described the power and speed of computing doubling every 20 months perhaps better expressed as the cost of computing consistently having every twenty months it's worth mentioning that more steady this not as a law but as a mixture of prophecy proposition and goal one which so far has been met with pretty astonishing accuracy how do we picture Moore's law in action if in the year that Moore first declared it you had a car that could go at five miles per hour but which doubled its speed at the same rate as Moore's law more it would now be going at 671 million miles per hour Mars in five minutes actually that's not quite true because I came across this analogy in a book published in 2015 so in fact by now the car has reached 1.3 billion miles per hour in other words it's now Mars and back in five minutes and that speed will double next year here's another way of looking at it one that shows how fast the numbers accelerate out of control how the slope becomes a wall the referee places a drop of water in the middle of the pitch in a stadium like the MetLife here in New Jersey or Wembley in London and then a minute later he places two drops then a minute later four drops to fill up the stadium would take just 49 minutes but as Callum chase observes in his book the economic singularity the startling fact is that after 40 five minutes remember it's 49 minutes it's filled after 45 minutes the stadium is only seven percent full if your top and back looking down you might see something happening a puddle forming far below four minutes later you've drowned wash the curve becomes a wall here's yet another way of looking at it an example closer to Gordon Moore's world in 1996 the US government's American strategic computing initiative started building the asking red super computer by 1997 it had achieved its goal of being the first to achieve true teraflop status that's to say performing a trillion floating-point operations per second for three years it was the most powerful computer on earth BarNone just five years after that the same level of processing power was available to any teenager with a Sony Playstation 3 in their bedroom and that was 11 years ago and nothing has Stood Still since then the law has continued to press technology is not a noun it is a verb my view of the power of the exponential curve and therefore Moore's law is that as Niels Bohr once said of quantum mechanics if you aren't shocked by it then you haven't understood it it doesn't just apply to silicon chips of course light-emitting diodes LEDs are subject to an equivalent of Moore's local Haines's law every year the cost per lumen falls by a factor of 10 and the amount of light generated per LED package is increased by a factor of 20 the amount of data being mined is exponentially doubling - and in 1996 irony of ironies what do you think was swept away by the power of that ineluctable growth but chess that year deep-blue IBM's dedicated chess machine defeated Garry Kasparov probably the greatest player ever to push a pawn if back in the 1950s or 60s you were told one of the fathers of artificial intelligence or of the Information Age that the day would come when a human constructed intelligence would beat the world's best chess player they might have suggested that this moment would mark some kind of real powerful and potentially terrifying watershed because chess as I have said was always considered the Apogee the Acme the summit of human intelligence yet the deep blue victory did not elicit the reaction that might have been expected because deep blue cheated its team may not have behaved quite fairly during the tournament but I mean deep blue cheated in a much more meaningful way rather than utilizing the intelligence deep blues team at IBM realized that by the mid-90s integrated circuits had become powerful enough to write a program that could analyze 200 million chess positions in a second could throw itself ferociously into every move and counter move and look deep into scenarios that could offer it the best candidate move in every position it was remorseless and frightening Kasparov and others described the experience as feeling that an unstoppable wall a great grim granite walls approaching them they were engulfed by the power of the program screw creativity imagination insight understanding and intelligence this was brute-force calculation as mindless but effectively destructive as a cyclone or a swarm of locusts the victory was not artificial intelligence or indeed intelligence of any kind just the result of Moore's law deep blue was a single task calculating machine that proved nothing other unfortunately than that chess wasn't in the end so difficult and not to crack it wasn't so much a triumph or AI as a loss for chess ease exceptionalism Larry Tesler of Xerox Xerox PARC had a brutal that insightful rule named after him the moment a machine can do it it's no longer artificial intelligence the moment deep blue defeated Kasparov chess stopped being a realm for AI as Noam Chomsky remarked a computer winning chess is no more surprising than a forklift truck winning a weightlifting competition as Moore's law rolls on the humiliation was ground further into humanity's face very soon any home computer could do what deep blue did and beat any human alive without raising its circuitry a degree Celsius higher so the gun sights were set now on the world's greatest exponents of the Chinese board game go the complexities of go with its 19 by 19 board and identical black and white stones are so unimaginably grotesquely huge that Moore's law or no Moore's law brute force is still decades away from being a solution compared to chess ease Shannon number of 10 to the power of 120 go has a game tree complexity of 10 to the power of 360 the observable universe has a mere 10 to the power of 80 atoms you will recall that most people would probably call the universe jolly big go presented then a real test for real AI than forward to take up the challenge came machine learning in the form of demis hassabis and his deep mind AI laterally acquired by Google of course that the plan was to deliver on the promise of the artificial neural Nets first posited by the fathers of AI thinkers and visionaries like Marvin Minsky Frank Rosenblatt reycarts father and others in in March 2016 way earlier than the date hassabis and his team had dead suggests deep minds alphago program beat one of the game's top players Lucy doll and then in May of this year the world champion kg fell to alphago which could now rightly crown itself world champion for those of us following the course of AI this really was a turning point unlike brute force machine learning allows the computer to act for itself more or less unsupervised able to discover its own heuristic strategies and procedures given the smallest instructions and the most basic carrot and stick drive to reward itself for wins and mark itself down for losses reinforcement learning proved itself capable of play that justified in the view of go masters the descriptions beautiful bold surprising creative imaginative in tripping and artistic Tesla's rule bid to say yes but yes but go is a closed abstract system it has no reference to anything outside itself it's isolated from the mess and noise of the world therefore winning it go requires no real intelligence and alphago no more understood go than deep blue understood chess well advocates for deep machine learning could point to IBM Watson's victory over the long-running TV quiz game Jeopardy there are still those who think someone from IBM was pulling on levers in the tradition of the Mechanical Turk or professor marvel in his tenth operating The Wizard of Oz but for the rest of us this crew demonstrated not only a computer's expected ability to access analyze and reproduce facts at lightning speed but also a commendable grasp of Jeopardy's perverse and idiosyncratic inverted question-and-answer format not to mention the tortuous puns homophones rhymes and other forms of high-level wordplay necessary to understand the question in the first place Watson who is a bundle of a eyes of course not one master brain was offline when playing the game but had all of Wikipedia baked in naturally plus more than 200 million other pages of information and this is where it all gets interesting because the data that a I had to mine in order to play go were really no more than the millions of games it had played with itself whereas jeopardy say I needed to grind out sift winnow and refine the world's knowledge such of it that a TV producer might regard as general at least but even if Watson needed only 0.025 percent of the human knowledge in order to be competent at jeopardy IBM could fanfare Watson's victory as proof of how efficient of fuel data can be when it comes to powering AI after all like deep blue Watson is first and foremost a promotional tool for IBM sales department google translate which he must confess you have used does not understand language at all it doesn't even have the faintest grip on syntax semantics phonemes or grammar but has nonetheless dealt that travelers phrasebook are nearly mortal blow and we must constantly remind ourselves is not now today what it will be in six months let alone in a decade so put together brute force deep machine learning reinforcement learning language recognition universal data mining and perhaps we can acknowledge that we are starting to get closer to something remarkable data of course is the gasoline that will fuel the engines of AI and big data acquisition is increasing as I have said exponentially even if Moore's law has only a decade or so to go before it reaches physical limits of silicon's capacity awaiting us on new materials indium gallium arsenide I had to look to date Sanjay's lab dead titanium trisulfide and graphene nano tubing not to mention developments in qubit stabilization that are opening up the possibilities or maybe I should say probabilities of quantum computing all this should convince us that the wall that came at garry kasparov the wall that the exponential gradients have suddenly and devastatingly becomes that that wall is almost upon us nothing can stop it nothing can stop the usual human nonsense that will result the first uses will be war and sex naturally armored exoskeletons obliging cyber companions unimaginable fantasy scenarios augmented and virtual realities blending with reality reality in such a ways to make a lot of money and cause a lot of ethical headaches but above all be prepared for the as AI is lazily and inaccurately claimed by every advertising agency an app developer companies will make nonsensical claims like our unique and advanced proprietary AI system will monitor and enhance your sleep or let our unique AI engine maximize the value of your stock holdings yesterday they would have said are unique in advanced proprietary algorithms and the day before that they would have said our unique and advanced proprietary code but let's face it they're almost always talking about the most basic software routines the letters a and I will become degraded and devalued by overuse in every field in which humans work coffee machines light switches Christmas trees will be marketers AI proficient AI savvy or AI enabled but despite this inevitable opportunistic nonsense reality will bite as autonomous driving becomes the rule not the exception more blue and white collar jobs are taken over by AI systems the art market will be fooled by AI paintings one day music wholly composed by a a AI will be found to have made the charts AI devised scenarios will be made into movies there at least heralding a great rise in Hollywood's quality all kinds of industrial social and governmental systems will go on the AI grid and once jacked into the matrix as with the electrical grid and the internet grid they will never survive off it optimists and I think I count myself as one assert that repeated mechanical labor precision calculation and back-breaking repetitive toil are but recent temporary elements of our primitive phases in agriculture and industry they're no more natural and inevitable a part of human life than pulling oars on slave ships or picking potatoes for a feudal lord or sending children up chimneys they say we concede such work gratefully to the machines and take comfort in more of X paradox which states that high-level reasoning precision repetition and calculations so difficult for us is easy for machines while simple motor skills that a five-year-old human can do without thinking such as tying up shoelaces skipping dancing or catching a ball are astoundingly difficult for machines enough to be considered impossible for quite long into the future so we can dance play cricket or baseball if you must and skip into a bright tomorrow without tripping over our laces while the machines stay in school and do all our work for us the pessimists point to bad actors hackers extortionists terrorists perverts and thieves who will inevitably come close to holding the planet hostage by absorbing hijacking corrupting and weaponizing AI systems what Photoshop do for the faking of still images can now be done for the Moving Image already we can place a politician in a brothel and see them licking honey off a prostitute it's their word against ours that the scene is genuine or confection and this fact will through endless false positives allow politicians actually to go to brothels and lick as much honey as they like or prostitutes they'll always be able to dismiss it as fake I saw this headline in New York Post just three days ago hackers could program sex robots to kill you can expect much more of this kind of clickbait hysteria if we thought the Pandora's jar that ruined the utopian dream of the internet contained nasty creatures just wait til AI has been overrun by the malicious the greedy the stupid and the Megillah my maniacal I haven't even begun to address the effects of CRISPR style gene editing Bionic augmentation the move to trans human metabolically being the first human to live to 200 is generally agreed probably already to have been born anyone in this room is now half my age and that's probably most of you will almost certainly Ling lived twice as long as me if you get my meaning my nephews and God children will probably make it to 120 their children to 200 or beyond no one really doubts this we sleepwalk into the internet age and we're now going to sleepwalk into the age of machine intelligence and biological enhancement how do we make sense of so much futurology screaming in our ears well since the cognitive revolution that gave us language 5,000 generations ago humanity has been conducting a kind of quiet lab experiment on itself in which we've tried to understand who we are how we work how we got here where we might be going we call the lab experiment philosophy with its internal departments of logic epistemology the study and theory of grounds and non of knowledge metaphysics aesthetics and ethics the starting pay for smart graduates in the field of AI being recruited by big corporations is 500 thousand dollars a year that's your entry level that may annoy some of you the big corporations and government departments do not unfortunately employ philosophers at any salary and perhaps this is the time to call for a change to that ethicists do have some presence in the corporate and medical world especially but that's more as a hedge against litigation than an investment in understanding isn't it fascinating that we are trembling on the brink of creating machine intelligence at exactly the time that we are making and confirming discoveries about our own evolutionary acquired human intelligence that demonstrate to us as never before how contingent fragile unconscious involuntary and opaque our own natural minds and brains seem to be never has our sense of who we are and what makes us seemed less solid philosophy neuroscience psychology cognitive studies and evolutionary psychology have converged over recent decades in the search for a deeper understanding of ourselves for example Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky --zz work on the biases that underlie our judgment and decision-making and the narrative eyes elements of our memories are shown us how radically and irrevocably unreliable our conscious and unconscious Minds truly are Raul Martinez and others have as definitively proved as could be wished that free will really is an illusion or at best a paradigm we can give vehicles autonomies that we don't appear to have for it is clear that we are not in control of the automobile of ourselves the self appears to be less a discrete entity than what daniel dennett calls a center of narrative gravity you Val know Aurora's books sapiens and hama Deus confirmed for general readers like me how our most cherished thoughts beliefs institutions world pictures and intellectual structures are myths we can no longer trust that the old capital letter virtues justice virtue truth mercy and so on have any eggs or genus meaning or validity a sense of human exceptionalism has been dealt numerous body blows of this kind the empathy and altruism on which we congrat congratulate ourselves turn out to be evolved stratagems that are no less likely to be found in amoebas and vampire bats who feed each other nurse each other and can be witnessed sacrificing themselves for the greater good of the survival of their families and species quite as impressively as we humans the deontic inner voice the divine conscience or Kantian moral law we long thought we detected within us seems to be no different to a congenital instinct or stratagem programmed into us by evolution just as azimoff's prime directives may soon have to be programmed into robots but the ironies don't stop there just as we have worked out thanks to Darwin and genetics how he evolved into what we are without the aid of gods or intelligent designers we are now in a position confidently to announce that by the end of this century there will be cognitively skilled entities on the planet that actually are the result of intelligent design we will be the intelligent designers the gods or at least the Prometheus who gives the divine spark to our creations Daniel Dennett articulated this ontological mobius strip by observing how a process with no intelligent designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things that permit us to understand how a process with no intelligent designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things you can unwrap that when you get home so if like Prometheus were to be punished for this hubris we can't say we haven't warned ourselves Greek and other myths warned us and when we were growing up Ray Bradbury George Orwell Aldous Huxley Isaac Asimov Margaret Atwood Ridley Scott Anthony Burgess HG Wells Stanley Kubrick Kazuo Ishiguro philip k dick William Gibson John Wyndham James Cameron the Bukowski's have in their own ways articulately eloquently and repeatedly sounded the alarm so we are being asked to wake up to the excitement and thrill of the creation of autonomous sentient beings at just the time we are realizing how little autonomy we in fact have and how little we truly understand consciousness and cognition at all there's another irony or maybe it isn't an irony but a tragedy all this is also happening at just the time when mankind seems most notably appeared to be suffering one of its greatest ever droughts in authority unity and consensus never in our lifetimes have we had less faith it seems that there are any responsible adults in charge who can ensure that we get this right there is no locus of authority no center of gravity intellectually socially or even morally the compass needle is whizzing round and there are no lodestones to pull to true moral north or true moral South Christ on a bike look at who our current leaders are and ask if there ever could be a more disastrous world in which to unleash such utterly transformative technology if at the height of our culture wars we cannot agree that social justice is a digital item or on the nature of equality gender and identity for example how can we possibly address such issues as cyber sex slaves robot warriors AI detectives machine enabled security or automated judgment and punishment the most cherished achievements of the Enlightenment and humanism could well be fatally wounded by statistical and epidemiological real-world and genetic data that fly in the face of our most cherished beliefs let alone the manipulation of machines by hackers extremists and rival governments so anyone can outline the dangers and the threats what the answer I'm happy to be able to tell you the answer is do we trust do we trust the interested corporations alphabet Amazon Facebook Apple Microsoft do we have faith that governments will get there do we as I and others have been pushing for finally utilize the great resource of world philosophy and ask David Chalmers and Saul Kripke Judith Butler Daniel Dennett Nick Bostrom Peter singer and their like to guide us you might say that everything's fine we got this Oxford University has the future of humanity Institute with philosophies leading thinker in AI Nick Bostrom as well as indeed as Garry Kasparov on its research and teaching staff Elon Musk has founded open AI and advises on Boston's future of life Institute with Max tegmark and other heroes and what we might call the movement musk has also assisted Berkeley's Miri the machine intelligence Research Institute founded by Lisa Kowski the machine my alma mater Cambridge has the Leverhulme Center for the future of intelligence while Caltech Stanford MIT Princeton and this storied and magnificent institution of Mary Hill are all doing their bit as far as arming us for the future is concerned but are they joined up enough with the rest of academia and the wider world I remember when I was rector of Dundee University in Scotland for eight years being astonished that the School of Computing there had such a little contact with other departments it didn't help with networking or scheduling or payrolling or statistical analysis or any notable forms of interdisciplinary research which struck me as a terrible waste if I were the principal or Chancellor of the big University now I would instantly Commission urgent reports from the head of every single department on the coming impact of a eye on their discipline and the likely effect on their graduates leaving for the world of work I would insist too on everyone reading everyone else's report I would be happy to close my university until I felt everyone was on board and we were ready because you know we're living in a floodplain and a great storm is coming perhaps the most urgent need might seem counterintuitive well the specialist bodies and institutions I've mentioned are necessary we need surely to redouble our efforts to understand who we humans are before we can begin to grapple with the nature of what machines may or may not be so the arts and humanities strike me as more important than ever we need to understand our soul spirit sends a beauty sense of humor empathy love jealousy rage hate boredom surprise enmity faith loyalty art dance inspiration intellect and excitement because the more machines rise the more time we will have to be human and fulfill and develop to their uttermost our true natures one of the reasons I was so happy to be asked to deliver this Shannon luminaries lectures that people hear you whose reputation was built on science technology engineering and mathematics are so open to looking inward to the human heart Bell Labs seems as ever to get it well I've often of course no answers that won't have been thought of by most of you here I hope can at least add my voice to the public conversation such that decibel by decibel the amplitude of our sound wave is raised enough to reach the ears of the institutions and organs of power the decibel of course like this great institution is named after Alexander Graham Bell unfortunately it's a logarithmic unit so to raise our noise by one will take quite a bit of loud shouting especially when so many of those we are trying to address appear to be deaf but then again Alexander Graham Bell always wanted to be remembered not as the inventor of the telephone but there's a pioneer in his original field as a teacher of the Deaf so that is all undertake to carry on his work now sound the Bell I thank what thank you very much and quitters which you win the prize for the longest round of applause oh good relief I'm sure I just know that I did that sour Soundcloud and a few days ago incentives you're good people it was just there's a website called SoundCloud dot orgs I mean you just upload your text to it and it makes the second it does so please that will will was right I always used to make the terrible joke that while some people are always concerned about whether we are the some of our genes or of our upbringing they always forget this issue of human will I said it's not a question of just if nature and nurture it's a question of nature nurture and meet you will is important that was of just a fantastic treat aside obviously read the hate fest to a lecture but you go you've taken that and amplify it more which anything was even possible and Oh lovely references to science and Bell Labs and and and but it all wove together in just a lovely lovely narrative so the thing that cursed me we had Yan laocoon here obviously one of the younger founders of AI band obviously invented as convolutional neural nets and we talked to him and he said the reason he works on neural networks is to understand how he thinks and and I wonder whether in fact you're the coincidence you point out these things are happening at the same time is in fact there's a group of people yarn and the like that actually want to build models AI model with machine learning models in order to better understand who we think and in doing so maybe that's how we master the machine because we end up understanding ourselves a little bit more and so this dilemma you have of you know how can we possibly control the machine when we general assent ourselves perhaps the two are actually III agree with that completely and and I said you know that I think one of the most urgent reasons for us to redouble our efforts under standing ourselves is because of course we will have more time to to be ourselves and you know obviously I'm the dress to all the issues of universal basic income Xand all the other sort of economic and political fallout that might happen from this but also it was so interesting to me to read little about the history of Bell Labs and and you will this history has these explosive moments there's really quite a sort of nuclear explosions almost and it's funny it's been in the news obviously from the pretty grim reasons but the American Civil War was one such and and one of the reasons I remember my different the right to gore Vidal always used to say to me since even you have to realize there was nothing to do with slavery well it was this to do with slavery the rest of the world would not trade with America as long as America had a labor force that didn't need to be paid it was an unfair business and that's why the North wanted to get rid of slavery so he could trade with the rest of the world well now whether there's someone kinds of complicated truths but what's her fascinating is it within the shortest possible time after the Civil War that's when this explosion happened and you had obviously you had that there was this there's this theme that keeps resonating which is the connection of America the transcontinental railway line I love all these things that just keep repeating like a rhythm you know the the big four from San Francisco and they at the Golden Spike in whereas the two lines met and America was covered and one of them was Leland Stanford who gave all his money to form the university that bears his name Stanford and of course when Claude when William Shockley went to Palo Alto there was Stanford University was just becoming big and Stanford across invented the mouse and then the whole thing sort of developed from that end and at the same time then there was the Telegraph there and and the Western Union as you probably know Pony Express lasted for days after they completed them the wire between America as the it took a hundred and ten days to for the West to discover the death of President Harding a hundred and ten days and then the next president was Lincoln's assassination the world knew instantly because of the Telegraph and Ezra Cornell who was president of Western Union he gave his money to a university as well Cornell and and so they you get this and here in in New Jersey and it's so much obviously Menlo Park when Edison was and Princeton of course and the Institute's for Advanced Studies there and and the amazing influence of would girdle and people like that on on the information mathematics generally but then also Edison and Tesla and trying to get electricity across America and how do you do that in the home ACDC business and the business of having to rectify the current in the first place which was necessary for telephones obviously so you have to you had to do that and and then Alexander Graham Bell how did you get the telephone wire across because unlike the Telegraph they're telling a ground wire it takes a lot more and so the king these tubes and then and I love the fact and then in October I totally did the same thing only wanted to get heaved into transcontinental broadcast of radio so you have all these technologies suddenly arriving and then of course the motorcar is well arrived and all within the same beginning same decade in a bit really all these technologies right there was a define the 20th century completely and they they all had these ambitions and of course they were all made of materials that you know Edison could sit in his laboratory and try different metals for a filament until he hit upon tungsten and then there was the lightbulb but thirty years after that that was really impossible what you're doing with gallium arsenide is not something that you could do in the open lab bench with Bunsen burners you need a bit of liquid helium and whoa so what I'm fascinated by is because obviously Ray Kurzweil has had this idea the singularity where everything yeah but if the exponent goes upon the exponent and it's out of control but in fact we and we are to your wall which is very nicely depicted often then plateaus and so with animals of course in populations it does because they exceed the carrying capacity it could animal but and do you think in a human kind it plateaus because we talked about this last night which is in the end we get to something that we perfect and in that perfection stage there are smaller increments yes and so we sort of plateau and then then there's a delay before the next phase of disruption and so we don't actually end up going like this we end up going in phases that are more manageable do you think that that seems that seems not the case and I'm you know I I think it's um there is a word for this and I can't know what it is it's a word in logic or it's named after a person but that it's essentially when you sound a warning by sounding it it stops being true but if you don't sound it the thing you're worrying about will happen and you know what I mean yeah oh you say if we don't build traffic lights here that child is going to die they build the traffic lights did so that's your Clarion bills so in the sense that is the Bell and we comfortable curve and it is the only logo yet or but but no III I think you're right and in the sense we've had since the arrival of the eye for the end of the smartphone generally and that sort of when we've had a bit of a plateau 2007 year was the road you know Twitter was Facebook was really taking off Twitter was arriving and since then things have he's dad and and they're gonna get I think we all sense being again particularly we say goodbye to the smartphone yes so you hope so right and then of course all those cloud-based systems that are analyzed every every piece of data coming from every physical thing and system and physiologically is having it all there'll be a big one there will be a you know it's just a terrible breakdown of things I don't know how you know we're all so fear that you know they've been ransomware attacks that have been pretty disastrous but maybe there will be a big one that will make us sort of pause and and reorder things governmental never I didn't know so the other part of our I find really fascinating is you point out the aesthetics and cognition and art and beauty have to be part of this equation this time around why why do you believe that so firmly it's not just a convenient so it's not just a nice thing to say by an artist well III think it's one because we can look at calculations and what machines can do in terms of calculation and of course they can come very close to as are the Alpha going yes and it's a long time ago that that experiment where did that take place it's somewhere in Northern California where they played three pieces of music one was by park another one was by a contemporary baroque composer and another was by a computer and the majority thought that the other baroque composer was the computer and and many thought the bark was the computer and most thought that the computer was bark so you know you can fool people and as I said you know there will be headlines because we love scoffing the art market which you know a computer-generated piece of art movie will fool somebody so we have to be very sure about what we will make us examine what we really value well what it is we're valuing and and the Moravec you know paradoxes or all that and the is interesting because you know we will own we will start to value only things that are particular to us like we don't value I mean chess is still wonderful between humans but it doesn't hold its a cachet it doesn't it and and I guess go doesn't either amongst go Pez in the sense that you know they can see how amazing the machine can do it but certain things still will and comedy and performance and things that make you cry things that particular emotion cause us to him oh yeah and we've all we all used to laugh it was almost a cliche of science fiction that you know Star Trek TNG data was always asking Captain Picard what it is to feel I can't tell you so and and then you be switched off in eternalism ocean ship and so but you know with so much of Star Trek than what they were addressing something that is very fundamental if you think for just a little about a machine and assuming how will we make machines more we either decide to make them absolutely machine like so that they don't even begin to look like a human thing rather like the that went through the you know the the GUI of an apple they suddenly thought hang on we don't want the address book to have fake little ring rings in it like in making it like a Rolodex you know what's why are we pretending to look as if we belong to the real world and maybe we will demand of computers that they are cold sterile hard things the idea of making this uncanny valley concept of you if you bring them too close to us we reject them so you keep them in a realm where they're separate separable but useful yeah exactly and and we must I'm sure start to value things more like our own smell you know that the real dirt and grainy missingness of his the quiddity of us the absolute nature of of our humanity will become something infinitely more prized and my hope is that that will bring us together of course you know there's always the gritty dirty grainy part of us is actually what yeah we will value we will see is a some of the things that we will explore if machines are are busy doing you know in Japan about six months ago they fired sixty clerical workers at an insurance office and replaced it with an AI system so you know the white-collar invasion has begun but people always say as if it's more important than the blue collar it's so extraordinarily rude and snobbish but then why they do that but I suppose that's because newspaper people are white collars exactly so the reporter then they feel so once all that yeah once all the things that are repetitive and boring and we don't need or want to do after all even you scientists you get the computers to do your big calculation since the first use computers were ever sure what to was to do your sums for you so you didn't have to you know get wrist cramp on the blackboard it's like how they all got to be here they we exactly we didn't want there's so many things we don't want to do and if you actually make a list of all the things we hate doing then give that to the machines and that's what we've done over over history you know vacuuming and and washing up and so watching television so we can have a recorder to watch television for us but you know generally speaking machines do the stuff we don't want to do in that you know the idea that we're having machines to to do things that give us real pleasure and contact and tickle you know we are we've got this higher level function that is this delight function we talked about the hedonic princess so input we don't get to spend as much time there because we're consider Monday and and as Harare and many other writers have shown us really it's one of those things it's obvious you rub your eyes anything wrong why didn't I think of that there is nothing natural and inevitable about work it's just nonsense to think that it is obviously there are we'd like to to mine the riches of the earth on the surface of the earth to harvest the bounty of nature to feed ourselves we do sort of now on a massive scale excessive yeah that takes work but a lot of that work we don't need to do we don't need really we've got agricultural machines and so on because there's Harare claims you know the Agricultural Revolution was a mistake was a big mistake it slaved people here suddenly we're in fee to our leisure Lords and and we had to work at he calculates I forget what it is but he he basically said hunter-gatherers can be said to work in terms of actually hunting and actually gathering perhaps three hours of every day and not necessarily every day at all the rest they're walking moving making camp you know they don't obviously have villages and settlements and and they are so healthy and they seem you know a lot more cheerful the few that are left on don't on the cave paintings they had smiley faces yeah exactly whereas the peasants just constantly living in the field to bring up food that doesn't even belong to them because it's been the you know the unpleasant Kings so and so and then the Industrial Revolution magnified that into a terrible there's been a series of mistakes ever since you could argue in terms of our work and that may be and it's a blip in human history so we can just see those days are over we don't have to and if we decide that we don't have to work and if Moore's law and their developments and things you are doing and with robotics and and and everything else really do coalesce in the way that we're thinking they might then there can be a very exciting and extraordinary time for human beings but you know I would suggest that the poetry and understanding and so on a large part of it otherwise we will go around again like a one of those Star Trek planets that's apparently living in a golden age where you have boys and girls blowing up curls skipping around and a naturally a little bit being a bit empty-headed you know what I like the Star Trek thing because I think if you think about where Star Trek predicted the future be we go off exploring again and one thing that Harari says is when the you know when expansion occurs generally in human existence it sits on the premise that we don't understand everything and we go off and find new knowledge and so the starter it was new frontiers in space whether it's space or not I guess your cognitive aesthetic thing is and scientific will go off and discover new things with the extra time we've created and that will create the next phase of existence absolutely that would be and another thing Star Trek got it not fantastic right obviously venting tachyon beams a big big one it was for Nietzsche mention on Nietzsche as he's called in America he he read that book about the birth of tragedy and he he he mentioned how Greek tragedy in Greek arts and so on expressed so perfectly the two elements of humanity the Apollonian he called them and the Dionysian i Dionysus the god of and revelry and fury and foam and fierceness and and and excess and appetite and lust and the Apollonian which was harmony and beauty and rhetoric and speech and logic and understanding and he understood the DJ's point was the Greeks had come from a tribal bloodlust feuding existence of you know from I only earned a cross and then settled and they had somehow we didn't still don't understand how become this remarkable civilization but they still contain that Dionysian side that and on top of it they laid the beauty of their harmony and their logic and their understanding and their scientific view and that the tragedies play up attention between these two we can never get rid of it and Star Trek does exactly the same the original Star Trek has on the one side someone who is all Apollonian logic in the form of spark and in the form of McCoy they have someone who's old blooded monster and and in the middle you have the man who is constantly trying to be the perfect human who is a mix of both he has the emotional side and child spot for not having it but he also shines bones for being too kind of and not only that but they go to planets where there's usually a mistake one of the planets is either savage and needs a touch of logic and order or it's all logic and order that's really it's some humanity and you need some and and of course this is these are the things we now sort of examine because we look at the Machine now we're not going to gender machines I assume maybe there will be a big push to agenda machines in one form or another and you'll have cisgendered machines and you'll have fluent genuine she's I don't know that's a very good idea it's aside from the actual robotic side of yours it's a whole other area but as a different trait but if you don't gender nor do I mean if you if you burn into the anything approaching a immoral sentence that's very difficult because we're not agreed on a moral sense you know we can agree on language if I say bottle we more or less understand all of you what I mean by bottle but if I say freedom every one of us will have a different sense of it Trump has a completely different sense of freedom to the one that I understand and you know it's true of a lot of very important words that it means so much to us justice right virtue and these are not things we can agree upon and we so who is the program any kind of and if it really goes into if it dives into the data lake and learns to swim which is essentially what machine learning is is just diving in and learning to swim it may become it may pick up some very unpleasant sewage from the data it almost certainly will well as have some chatbots have demonstrated absolute that they replicate the sewage yes because it propagates exactly does those things exactly do I could go on forever but it's actually your turn so the audience gets to ask one question no no a couple of questions and then a few of you have the golden ticket back to your Willy Wonka ones with the shirts the would they wear the golden ticket oh they're down here because I come and say hi to you afterwards yeah the rest we're going to dismiss and we're all somewhere but anyway so questions oh it was lady there Thank You Steven for a very fascinating tonal discussion we have watched your shows and all of the family we have fans of shows so first of all I mean actually two questions come to my mind one is literary work by Asimov and his I Robot and his laws of robotics yeah so do you think that as we have seen the technology advance in the past 60 years since some of rotas books that we need these kinds of laws to govern how robots a machine should work and what do you think of that and second is on AI so as a comedian and an actor would you say that if a machine can wholeheartedly laugh at your jokes oh you bet that would be the epitome of AI that's that's a good cheering test right there Friday a wonderful thought well well firstly only on the Isaac Asimov Finlay and the Three Laws of Robotics which are first as a robot was not kill a human ever second that a robot always a bear human except where it correlates the first and the third one is just look after itself he must defend itself except again we're one and two are broken and that's it's brilliantly I mean distilled what a great constitutional lawyer azimoff would have made I think what's interesting and I think they are very wise and sensible and there's no question especially when you look at the possibility of a warrior BOTS you know we're all really living in a drone era that we would never have believed 20 years ago it just would have been again science fiction and as arthur c clarke said you know everything that that you can't explain in technology is magic until you explain it it is it has the function of magic and it appears to be magical and then science fiction has been a wonderful you know petri dish in which in which these various cultures and futures have been have been grown and we've examined them and they are it's amazing how how impressive they are well one thing hasn't offered anything predicted was that there's quite a strong move so if any of you have children what are you going to ask you know suppose you want what do you suggest they they study at the university how much will they ib be across the various disciplines and law is obviously going to be very interesting for that's a lot of legal work can be done by by machine by intelligent machines but also there's been a great let's remove there should be a Constitution for robots that robots rights must be respected and Sons it's absurd but you know that's again it's it's a it's it's we're wanting to imprint on a human sense of what is the only decent and right onto a robot and we're already sort of privileged in it with a slight sense of life you know and there have been many interesting and people more feisty yes we always exactly a Peter Singh was written very interestingly about whether whether you know whether chimpanzee has human rights and because it is a human it's just not a comma sapien yeah but it is you know it's in the sense it's of the primates you know the word human anyway lawyers look into that so that's sort of but very much one side of isn't he so it's the new Turing test yeah the neutering that comedy ISM I mean you know I mean comedy really is one of those things horror films pornography and comedy and I suppose a very sad romance are capable of causing causing us to make noises and physical responses that actually change our bodies our body temperatures just by being exposed them a good joke you can't have you go like that you make a noise similar with a fright like that you make a noise and there's a very extraordinary reflex and it's deeply human and you can't have time to stop and think about it it is absolutely it just happens you know and and I suppose that is probably as good a test as you could ever have you know they remember Liza or the the early therapies that therapists that you would have a sort of intelligent therapist on computers I mean it's going all the way back to nineteen seventy-nine you could get it on an ordinary sort of very only computer and you've just say I'm not feeling very well I'm sorry to hear you're not feeling well it was quite convincing it wouldn't pass the Turing test but but it certainly couldn't laugh at you you could actually trap it by saying I've got this joke why is the chair and it would go haha that is very good I've got your number so I like that idea of vestigial things that things in the cerebellum maybe that are so guttural and instinctive yeah those are the real tests I think limbic thing limbic things you can't and I think the the other one I'm always reminded of about someone pointed out recently about VR experiences the reason why you vomit when it's out of sync all the latency isn't correct is because it is there's only one human disorientation that's historic and that's poison so if you think about it the only thing that we would have protected for 20,000 years ago yes that would have disoriented us would have been magic mushrooms poison so therefore you know you evolved and so that's the one thing that we still have that is vertigo disorientation we have a vomit reflex it seems inappropriate but actually does its job it stops you from doing a thing that and so we've never replaced it but it's to your point that that set of things is the thing we'll test yes whether you're human or not yeah I mean of course the the the interesting thing is what it will do to religions of course of they have had over some period of our history and primacy and telling us of you know much about our destiny and where we come from and who made us and so on and what will how they will respond to this coming wave because I suspect they're probably not that prepared notnot so happy problem no I don't think they won't be happy about it but again I mean the the history of religion over the years has been that it's a bit it's a bit like that's not AI the Tesla lore about yeah the moment of machine can do it it's not it's not AI and religionists have God did everything and then we showed what he didn't know she did that that but okay you did everything else I'm not that bit and we didn't you know science has taken bigger and bigger nibbles out and left religion very little but you know I'm although I'm not a believer I don't want to waste my time being rude and unkind to people who are devout and of pious faith who mess with the rest of the world and get on with their lives you fine but but it will be an interesting challenge for and people like interesting Harare for example is essentially functionally a non-religious Buddhist and there's that chapter we just throw that but why Buddhism is true and then if you've seen that big yellow book recently and so there's a sort of move towards rather like in the seventh on template of stuff yes I'm exactly taking they're taking the best bits of Buddhist philosophies and philosophy if you like but without it necessarily making it a Thea centric kind of study it's I think you're right I think that's probably where we end up which is not it's not a bad thing another question okay there you go oh right behind you Barbie yep the other behind ya Steven thank you very much wonderful wonderful speech I'm so glad that I got a chance to hear you what you bring up is a question for me is what you were mentioning about her re who talked about that are moved to from hunter-gatherers to people who farm and so forth that that gave us some progress that allowed us to think you James Burke talked about it in his book where that movement Egyptians and culture and civilization even though we became slaves to the field it then allowed art and other things to be happening in science and technology and humans advanced as a result and if we're on this next stage where it looks like we're gonna have another breakthrough in leisure where we're not going to need to work as much we're gonna give this to machines how do you see it doing something to allow us to actually provide economically for all the humans on the planet food shelter the things we've been very unsuccessful lately as weak as our population grows I don't envision capitalism accomplishing it and I don't know where we go from there if any hopefully my question is crystallizing what I'm asking you no I understand how this technological change because I was also reading so of Marcus's book about our future x10 thing where if we produce this massive changes and we need to work if I don't need to work how am I gonna eat yep okay great okay good good sick affects you on reading Marcus's books yeah it was I thought but no money changed hands either I know these are really important and interesting questions the first I suppose you'd say is inertia leisure is as new a word as this idea of mankind having to work all the time it's a it would be a nonsensical word to a hunter-gatherer or people from earlier cultures because life and work and things were there was a sort of continuous there was a continuum if you like of those and you didn't distinguish between them and that would be a good thing to go back to so we wouldn't even think that you know life is life you don't there's a great film called let the people sing which Alastair sim is is a music conductor and the the nasty film come nasty company a cold cold company closes down the the town's concert hall and and the the capitalist is what the people do in their spare time is their own affair and Alastair sim says gentlemen gentlemen gentlemen there's no such thing as time in spare time there's only and that is you know the idea of spare time is an insult to the human spirit and if we can and further we move away from that in the best but the point remains the move to the air Cultural Revolution you could see the whole movies to cheapen calories and and we've cheapen calories amazingly there's hard labor but we Phyllis I was look at my tummy you know I mean this is inconceivable to know someone a Kalahari Bushmen who ever to have a belly like mine and they know they use them they get their calories and spend their calories you know that sort of balance that most most people most animals do in fact and that's how we as animals always used to and we somehow decided we could store calories in the most incredible way but by farming as we know and so on and now we get to this point where machines are going to be doing so much but that still be billions of people and was it in now seven eight billion with he's just getting up to nine or something isn't it well there's Bill Gates who obviously knows a lot these days about the developed world as well as everything else he's suggested which is a very good idea and attacks on robotics and and AI which sounds weird but you're actually taxing them as if they were workers so that the money that they make from the work they do it doesn't all just go to the owner of the robot and the owner of the company's patterns on the AI but he's spread to provide what is known as the ubi which is rather nicely the Latin for where we'll be it's it's the universal basic income this idea that yes capitalism red in tooth and claw is probably a never going to work for the majority of the population here but some sort of planned economy that is what used to be called a mixed economy as it were which is slightly planned but not so socialistic is to make everybody's blood run cold in America and that seems to be the most sensible thing and obviously it takes a lot of heads being banked together and this is the problem of living at a time when tribalism and nativism and it seems to be on the rise when it should be the reverse we should be uniting to address this problem as we should be in uniting to address climate change these are things that need us to put aside the the petty and absurd differences between us and and and work on this so I don't know when a politician will arise with the guts to to say this and the strength to do it you know you need each country to have someone a bit like Justin Trudeau who has a glimmer of understanding and seems to be personable and smart enough at the moment all politicians disappoint in the end that is not a FRA rule we could have absolutely well he was just somebody wrote all politics ends in failure others do yeah very definition yes indeed yeah and and and so you do need that and of course we can get it it just takes us to cry for it loudly and it needs those was your communicators to to to get it into the conversation more and more and more so that this is looked at and this is again why I want to go back to khadeem eeeh because I think as I say if every if the economics department of a university was looking into both of course you're looking into what you can promise your students when they graduate and to push them into the world of work what what you can project will be there for them to do so you prepare them properly but it also you're trying to to work as universities do and this laboratory does it is you're trying to to give the world information that is useful and technology and understanding that is useful and and and economists have made pretty much disgrace themselves with their obsession with algorithms and using them for you know making a fortune in markets and so on maybe it's time economists too we went back a bit and they are going back to sort of slightly more Keynesian principles and but it is as I say you just need to get together the heads of universities which friend of mine once said watch what's the collective noun for heads of universities it's a lack of principles I'm gonna ask a question related there so we're now in a world where the money has piled up in at the pockets of a few yes and that few have become deterministic of of the successful move towards this future you could argue there were monopolies in the past there were before that probably gentlemen yeah scientists that is the rhythm that went to the railways of course and to Rockefeller law was broken up and now we're back in one of those River Bell managed to avoid that that embarrassment of an antitrust of course yeah but but you'll say actually some of them and maybe your point is that that some of the pioneering happens under those circumstances it does because you've got those individuals who come together and a driven and have the assets to address so you're optimistic then where the money current and lies might be the fuel that gives us the next wave of innovation but is it a moral compass that that's needed in that I mean it is obviously I mean the Google and Amazon and Facebook in particular are harvesting data as a mr. Standing rate which is making them asked some of the money but he's also banking this data for making even more money as data as we know is the gasoline of the of the new technology and we're very fortunate man I didn't have much respect for in the nineteen eighties Bill Gates because I thought Windows was so clunky and ugly and unpleasant it was holding back the but computing but I think what him you know Warren Buffett and that goes back to another great Titan a vicious man who had a monopoly who would trip on Morgan created US Steel and that was Andrew Carnegie but who then went back to Scotland spent a year you know tracing building a golf course building a golf course done face but also thinking and he came back and said anyone like me who dies with money is a failure I and he gave it you know he founded the Carnegie libraries and museums and Carnegie Mellon's and there's a Carnegie Hall and so on and this became you know an interesting thing and Warren Buffett then repeated it and told his friend Bill Gates you know you've got to do like me you've got to give all your money away there's no reason for you dad all this money it's gone you can change the world and this is where again they opted that there is a you know it like we had a few years ago the New Atheists which are sometimes bundled in with we now have the new optimists Steven Pinker and people like that who are pointing out that we never has the world been you know never have more women being educated you know I'm not just more but proportional to the population of the world things are getting better the Molalla influence has been enormous and you know and many others though but the halo from her obviously is the one we think of but also you know think education and health outcomes are getting better and better and better in the third world it's still of course you need to keep your eye on the ball but things are improving and the example of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett I hope will force other people of that nature to realize that this enormous amount of money they have can do really exciting things and in the end people like that whether it's a Peter teal or whatever you may not approve of these people in all their but you know their political direction but it sort of irrelevant the great thing is you can always guarantee they are vain they want to see their name on a building and a university and in in perpetuity in that builds or the larger that's an interesting yeah vanity drives good behavior yep it's absolutely when you're wealthy from alphabet to Zuckerberg these are do one more and then the the lucky golden ticket holders the oompa-loompas with it but get to come up and spend time and then we'll have to wrap up so last ones coming up on stage attack me what are your thoughts about the war on science and what is the best weapon we have to win it as a rational people such a good question it is immensely dispiriting that the number of times people have said to me science doesn't know everything is if that if that's a meaningful remark as if that means anything is therefore saleable what science doesn't know everything everything else yes in that case the world there are angels just over there but Stephen Jay Gould I remember he had this rather sort of he was a slightly odd figure a great panel intelligent and he read many interesting books on genetics and evolution and things and and but he had this idea he called Noma non-overlapping magisteria in which he suggested that science get on with scientific things and the overlap didn't non-overlapping things could get on with their things but actually there is nothing that doesn't overlap with science science is it's a human quest it's not a special sandbox some sterilized hedged off place where certain kinds of genetically disposed people go though obviously there are looking at you professor francs in the rumen is fair enough but no I mean it's it it's so beautiful and wonderful and extraordinary what science gives us it's so it's so incredible that the power and of observation and testing and verification and the excited move forward and I you know it's every scientist repeats it time and time science is an expression of the limits of what we don't know it's not knowing things is what excites scientists isn't this brilliant we don't know we don't know what's going to happen we don't know how this process works we don't know why this works we don't know what's going to happen when I put this in one end and what's going to come out the other we we have ideas and we have frameworks and and obviously there is verifiable stuff I mean the seven you know these lights are burning they haven't stopped and and there's a lot of science behind them you know you look at Faraday and I I think I think partly for me because of you know my love is telling stories and listening stories reading stories reading novels writing books drama and so on and I think it is a very natural human way to understand ideas by being told them in a story and I think I think I died you know I personally if I was a if I was a billionaire I would have a science Channel which was not like the ones we have but which which was you know which figured you know the lives of these remarkable people and told the story of Faraday and Maxwell Thomson and all these extraordinary people and Einstein and you know and how they did what they did not not in a romantic way but in a way that kind of opened it up to everybody because it is it's very very difficult to to understand why people resist science until you see that it's really very easy and that is because they don't understand it they simply don't understand it I don't understand some of the things you all do every day it's beyond I'm if I looked at one of your whiteboards I would just have a headache you know and you would be very kind and you would say oh no no no it's quite simple it's this and and then I would get lost very very fast but I I can grasp some of the ideas and I can see what grows out of it and I suppose we have in Britain we had Richard Dawkins was the professor of the you know the understanding of science at Oxford and that was a very good move unfortunately for many it caused you know some people to see science therefore through Richards eyes he's a batch of decent lovely charming funny man but he is always portrayed as somehow shrill and and unkind and without soul or spirits the whole selfish do you need yeah which is such a misrepresentation of him but that's unfortunately how things go Carl Sagan deGrasse Tyson here and the you know there are and the fill neither is it Phil Knight Bill Nye the Science Guy they're all trying to beat the drum and they're all trying to remind people of our beautiful Sciences and how that the scientific principle the idea is so magnificent and open to to all I guess I I can't give an answer as to how you attack it there there have been mistakes on the part of philosophy and logical positivism and scientism in the past has suggested that the world is known but the great thing about science of mathematics isn't constantly telling telling you that nothing is solved you know there was appeared towards the end of the 19th century when everyone thought mathematics were solved in there and then you know Hilbert's problems arrived and Bertrand Russell's paradox and suddenly I'm girdle and an incompleteness and suddenly everything was exciting again because science doesn't like solving things and saying that's done that solved it's actually more exciting when you can say look suddenly everything's up for grabs everything's exciting again and I guess what are the problem in that narrative I think is that you have to be confident of because your point about others will jump in and say well clearly science hasn't got yeah they'll fill the space and so I felt that you if you create a space that is empty mmm yeah we don't understand others put their ideas in there there's a sense that that causes more difficulty in some ways because now they've native report' abhors a vacuum of knowledge in goes all the other perspectives it's kind of amusing that given that science has shown over the last hundred years how empty empty this table is right the gaps between the atoms are just so immeasurably vast well not be measurably obviously quite measurably Baba I love the idea that what we lack and I think this gets back to the cognitive is that it we need better storytellers about what science is I think that's and then I think the willingness for others to fill the empty container will be less because the narrative over here so interesting right and I think one just thing that I just realized when I was having this wonderful tour this morning is I realized that how wrong the phrase machine learning is because it's actually human learning we're asking machines to learn the way children learn to speak languages we're asking them to dive in at the deep end and just through exposure Terry baby yeah the rules of Jeopardy or the rules of go or the rules of any particular system to learn them and repeat them and and actually it's also wonderful because there should be a reciprocity there I think humans should start to learn like that even more than they do so maybe that that maybe the future is that we teach humans to learn science in the way we teach machines to learn humanity and that actually we throw people in more exciting we change the way science is taught obviously the fundamentals of mathematics are never going to go away that's the language in which most science is expressed but there is still so much absolutely right because you of course your teacher machine if you weren't teaching it the formulae the formalism by examples and you can see here's the narrative you need to tell me the answer but that's exactly how you could teach a child rather than focusing on the formula because in the end the formula we never use right on a daily basis or machine can compute for you as long as you know the input and the output yes and then a machine contains the formulae that that's right those two we can experiment like that yes I mean I think that's a lovely way to think about it the symbiosis of man and machine inventing the future we have to say thank you just that you have a little person know it so there is a little person we have to give you oh you have to take the little person home with a cyber doll it doesn't have some of the degrees of freedom you might want it but here it is you get a statute and it is Shannon s oh there you go it's you oh it's glorious and see Shannon unicycle in information theory goes around the it's magnificent thank you so much they shake your hand thanks Hank everybody thank you so much nice bless you thank you get to sit here oh I took here now good toy what you're going to hold court so thanks everyone and by the way no one's ever stayed oh that long normally the doors open and the flood but thank you all and Ellen over to you and then I'll see you back over the other supermarkets thank you so much [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Nokia Bell Labs

Views: 1,218,975

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Keywords: Nokia Bell Labs, Nokia, Bell Labs, Stephen Fry, Claude Shannon, artificial intelligence, machine learning

Id: 24F6C1KfbjM

Length: 108min 14sec (6494 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2017

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Fry explores the impact on humanity of emergent technologies and looks back at human history to understand the present and the future. He outlines how humans have adapted to revolutionary changes in all aspects of life over the past millennia, and uses this as a basis for conjecture about the future of human existence in the machine or industrial internet age, and how best to navigate these murky technological and societal waters.