- In this century probably,
we will be building this hugely consequential thing which is the first general intelligence that will be smarter than humans. This involves an enormous responsibility. This is like maybe the
most important thing that our species will ever
have done on this planet. Giving birth to this
new level of intellect. I'm Nick Bostrom, I am a
professor at Oxford University where I run the Future
of Humanity Institute. With the unusual mandate of
trying to think carefully about the really big picture
questions for humanity and the future of earth
originating intelligent life. AI has been a big focus of mine really since my teenage years. It always seemed that if you look around and ask what accounts for why
the world is the way it is? Our human world, a lot of it is because we humans have made it so. We have invented all
kinds of technologies. And so all these things
whether it's jet planes or art or political systems
have come into the world through the birth canal
of the human brain. That immediately made it plausible to me that if you could change that channel creating artificial brains, then you would change the thing
that is changing the world. (intense music) I think we have this
notion of what's smart and what's dumb. Whereas I think there is actually a huge amount of space above us between our level of
intelligence and God's. And once you go a little bit beyond human, then you get this feedback loop, where the brain's doing the AI research will become AIs themselves. Therefore I think there
is a significant chance that we'll have an intelligence explosion. So that within a short period of time, we go from something
that was only moderately affecting the world, to
something that completely transforms the world. All the things that we could
imagine human intelligence being useful for, which
is pretty much everything. Artificial intelligence
could be useful for as well if it just became more advanced. Whether it's like diseases
or pollution or poverty we would have vastly better
tools for dealing with if you had super intelligence
you could help develop better clean energy
technologies or medicines. So it does look to me like
all the plausible paths to a really great future,
involve the development of machine super
intelligence at some point. There are I think
existential risks connected with the transition to the
machine intelligence era. And the most obvious being the possibility of underlying super intelligence that then overrides the
earth, human civilization, with its own value structures. Another big class of failures would be if this technology were used
for destructive purposes. Then I think there is a third
dimension that has received less attention so far, which
is how good the outcome is for the AI stem cells. If we're going to construct digital minds that are maybe conscious or have moral status of various degrees. Then how can we ensure
that they are treated well? If you think about it, most
of us would acknowledge that various non-human animals
have degrees of moral status. Even something as simple
as a humble lab mouse. At that point it becomes
an active question of whether we have obligations to the AIs not to just make sure we don't misuse AIs against one another or
protect ourselves from the AI, but also make sure we
do what we ought to do with respect to the AIs. And if we succeed at
that and things go well, then we can imagine living lives, way beyond anything that is possible now. This is why there has been
so much interest in AI, in recent years because it
does look like it could be this fourth ground on
which the future depends. So on the one hand it does look from this kind of slightly abstract point of view that we might develop, in
the not too distant future greater than human AI and
it could change everything. On the other hand, it seems
kind of rather incredible that this world that we've
known for our whole lives, that, that will be a plausible scenario in which that changes
radically in our lifetime. And we become I don't know some sort of semi-mortal uploaded creatures,
with Jupiter sized minds. Like is it I actually take that seriously, like it seems to go against
day to day lived experience. So to keeping both of those in mind, creates this kind of interesting tension, between two different ways
of thinking about the world. I think rather than just
eliminate one of them, just keep them both there and
struggle with that tension. (intense music)
