The Truth Behind Artificial Intelligence | Andrew Zeitler | TEDxStMaryCSSchool

[Music] [Applause] imagine this you wake up in the morning and you take a breath of fresh air and you smell bacon eggs toast coffee your favorite breakfast already made for you and you didn't even have to go bed so then you get up and you go into your kitchen and you indulge yourself but as you're eating a screen pops up with your day already planned out for you and you didn't lift a finger so then as per your schedule you get up and you head into your car and as you open up the car door you realize something that there's actually not even any seats in fact there's not even a steering wheel just a couch for you to lay down on so you do as you lay down the car takes off already knowing where your work is without you having to say a thing so as it's speeding along the road you're talking to someone although you're not just talking to anyone you're talking to a friend the same friend that had made your breakfast this morning plan your schedule and is driving the car right now and as you're talking them you're talking down through a computer although through isn't really the right word because your friend is the actual computer have own side picture this it's dark you can't see anything and you're hiding from something whatever it is it's outside and it's attacking people and you're not sure why why why think think you remember now scientists you saw on the news the other day they created something although they didn't just create anything they created a mind am I inside a computer scientists were estatic it was working so well until it was working too well it was so fast that it was ahead of us at every step of the way that we made to try and delete it soon it copied itself through every single computer on the planet and it created an army an army to eradicate the human species now these are two very possible futures when it comes the idea of artificial intelligence and when I say artificial intelligence all I really mean is robots and stuff that we see all the time in Hollywood films except these robots would be more than just Hollywood because it would be a reality and the technology for it is much closer than you may think as human beings we think a lot right we do all the time in fact I'm doing it while I speak right now and when we think of thought we're not sure really what it is because what is thought well you may just think thought is something that our brain creates right but that's partly right but not completely true the thing that truly makes our thought is many smaller parts of the brain known as neurons these neurons carry electrical signals throughout the mind and once these connect it forms the basis of thought humans have over a hundred billion of them however recent studies by Michael Crosley Kevin sayers and Koji chemins found that snails only have two neurons in their brains when making decisions each of these neurons is responsible for a specific brain process one checks to see if it found food and if it found food then it then checks see if it's hungry this process looks a little something like this now when I first saw the study I was like who cares right I mean they're snails we already knew that they didn't think much in the first place but then something caught my attention for the study the way that these snails think is actually very similar to a fundamental concept we have in programming something known as an if condition we're in programming an if condition simply checks to see if a statement is found to be true if it is then it runs the block of code contained inside otherwise it just skips over and moves along so in the case of the snail this would actually be really easy to program if you found food then if there is if you are hungry then eat simple right but then again of course it's simple like I said before it's just a snail it doesn't think much but I want to push this a bit further if we think about human beings and snails we both have neurons in our brain in fact they're exactly the same so if we can program the neuron inside a snails mind then shouldn't we be able to program it in a human's mind now that may seem much more difficult to answer and really then you got to ask what is it that makes us human beings well one thing that we do all the time is that we break down information around us and understand what it is like if I think this I'm on a dot this is a crowd I can hear little noises from people and I can feel the clothes against my skin this type of idea has actually been done many if not thousands of times within programming in fact we have one very good example of this known as Google deep dream this program is able to break down images that receives and do key components until find certain characters or aspects of it that look similar to something else that has been trained on and after finding these things enhances it and you get some results like this this is starry night by Van Gogh or really Google deep dreams rendition on it if you can see Google deep dream actually found many aspects that look like a dog and then made it much more apparent as well different eyes and people along the bottom other examples include this landscape here and this very creepy background that I'm not too much of a fan of but hey it's computer art it's subjective right okay so if we can break down information what about learning from it right we learn all the time in fact that's why we're in school even though I may not like it you have to grow up get a job whatever right so we have some examples of this sort of learning but one of our best examples is known as IBM Watson this program was able to take thousands of Wikipedia articles and break it down and learn the entire human language from scratch in fact I didn't just learn it it mastered the language because soon it was pitted against the top two players in jeopardy and Watson won with both their points combined in a game that we thought revolved around too much of human language so a computer couldn't understand it so if we have the ability of break down information and learn from it then shouldn't I have a robot body right now someone I can throw my arm around because really that's all that we really are as human beings we learn and as I talk to them I could be speeding along the road as it drives me to work without me touching a thing but we don't have that in fact we're nowhere near our best example is IBM Watson and that's not really much of a friend that you can talk to unless a little bit lonely so what is it that we're missing what is well that's where we got think what is it that truly makes us human beings now that may seem very difficult to answer especially when approaching it from a philosophical view however the answer has been in front of us the entire time we do it every single day everything from finding out what we want for dinner to solving the most complex math problems the thing that makes us unique as human beings is the ability to ask questions don't believe me well eight that have been shown sign language can speak a language fluently they can communicate effectively with not just other Apes but with humans as well to say things such as I'm hungry I want water or I am sleepy however in all of our years of study we have never once observed these Apes to ask a question never saying why or even pointing to an object for us to explain it now this phenomena is well documented and has been accredited the fact that Apes or any other animal really lacks something known as meta cognition the ability to think of the process of thinking now that definitely sounds meta to me but all that really means is that if I think of myself I know I'm feeling excited and slightly nervous and if I were to ask you how you were feeling some of you might say bored or others might be interested but most likely you would just say fine natural human response right and then if I were to ask you what the value of pi' is right some of you would know absolutely nothing and others would no way further into the string of digits than even I know and that's fine because as a human being I understand that I have my own mind and that within this mind I have my own feelings and my own sets of knowledge I also know that when I look at you anyone out there I know that you have your own mind as well something that thinks and can process information in a different way from me and that's all metacognition really is so why does this matter why am I talking about this metacognition all this other nonsense who cares well actually if we were to combine the abilities of metacognition and all these other fundamental concepts then we could create a true artificial intelligence something can that can think just like us such a program would have to be old break down information and learn from it much like Watson all right does except do this in a more general sense finding any patterns it can and after it finds these patterns it comes up with a question something like why does this pattern exist and after forming this question it demonstrates a form of curiosity where it strives to answer it and if it can't quite reach an answer on its own or with the information that has then it turns external sources such as human beings and poses that very same question or maybe even subsequent questions so the program can figure it out itself and that's all we need in fact a program like that would have no need for any language or anything built into it because it would learn very similar to that of a human child because a child has no knowledge of anything when is born it doesn't understand any language or numbering system and that's precisely why you can teach you any language and the child can still grow up and be as successful as ever although of course a program may learn much more rapidly than what a human child is capable of but that's still up for debate so if we can truly combine all these aspects together make them work in say harmony then we can get a form of technological singularity where the human aspect of consciousness communicates with the machine like ability and after doing this they fuse together and at that point machine becomes more than just a tool in fact that time period when this singularity occurs is expected to happen in 2029 and when this happened a new world will emerge so whether or not you choose to believe in the utopian world of luxury relaxation and enjoyment or the dystopian destruction of the human race all life everything you love anything that you knew it doesn't matter we're now in day and age our next biggest leap and technology would to be to create a program capable of consciousness something that can truly think and we will get there there's no doubt about that in fact computer scientists Edgar W distro once said the question of whether computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether submarine can swim the only way that we can try to stay alive when robots arrive is to say as cautious as possible learn as much as we can before it gets here because the only question left when it comes to artificial intelligence is when is it going to arrive thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 545,164

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Canada, Technology, AI, Cognitive science, Future, Industrial design, Interface design, Life, Life Development, Robots, Science, Self, Senses, Social Science, Society, Software

Id: clfFT1XOJKM

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/ideasware]

What a refreshing change! -- a high school boy, all fresh and nerdy and high-spirited, talking about the real significant facts instead of programming gibberish. Metacognition means ASKING QUESTIONS all the bleeping time -- which we can remember doing ad infinitum when we were little -- and robots are better at that too. Singularity is about to become real -- twenty years, maybe a little bit more, but everyone knows really that it's going to happen, and robots will take over and do unimaginable things; our robotic children, unless the military stops them by taking us back to the stone age first. It's that stark, but EVERYONE understands at a fundamental level what is happening, and this child crystallizes it and groks it fully. Well done.

[u/yogi89]

Good talk, the only thing that bugged me is that he said apes don't have meta-cognition. It's actually been proven to happen in rats, so I'm sure apes do it too

[u/mizmoxiev]

Why did you have to go :'(