Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseHow do we define Artificial Intelligence? Should we be worried that AI may one day take over Humanity?
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Alexa, what's the best science podcast on air?
Hey? Are you trying to replace me with Alexa? What's going on here?
Do you think you're replaceable?
There's no way an artificial intelligence could ever make jokes nearly as funny as I am.
I think there's no way an artificial intelligence would laugh at your jokes.
I'm pretty sure I could. I could program a pretty dumb computer to lead out my jokes. It's called the laugh track.
But that's Hey, that's a new change for AI. You know, first chests, then go now science comedy.
That's right now, programs something that can find humor in Daniel's ramblings.
Hi am Jorge and Don Daniel, and this is our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe.
In which we try to download everything we know about the universe, episode by episode into your brain, whether you're a real person or an artificial intelligence listening to our podcast.
Well trying to sound intelligent about.
It while writing your own humor for the Open Mic AI Night. The topic of today's podcast is what is artificial intelligence?
And very importantly is it dangerous?
That's right? Should you be looking at your window for the first signs of the robot revolution?
Should you be afraid of your Alexa?
Should you be worried about that robot vacuum cleaner getting resentful for having to do all the dirty work and eating your face off in the middle of the night.
Oh geez, that's a bit dark.
It seems kind of sinister, doesn't it. It's like sitting there, circling, circling, circling, waiting, waiting, waiting.
I think those things are creepy, right, Maybe it wants to you clean your face.
It wants see that's the question. Does a robot vacuum cleaner want anything? What does it mean for it to want? What is it like to be a robot vacuum cleaner? The next great paper in philosophy?
So this is kind of in the zeitgeist right now. I mean, people are really excited about artificial intelligence. But at the same time there are big names like Elon Musk kind of warning people like, hey, artificial intelligence not such a good idea.
That's right, it's a huge topic. I mean, you drive around like San Francisco, you see artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning. It's on billboards. Even you know you want to get a million bucks for your new company, you just say the words AI, deep learning, and boom, people are throwing cash at you. Right, deep learning, in the deepest learning. It's definitely part of the cultural moment. And you see that reflected not just in like what deep thinkers are saying, but also in like science fiction. You know, a lot of the near term dystopian these days is about how AI will take over and the dangers of AI. Another way, like thirty years ago is about the dangers of radiation. Right, that was the new dangerous thing physicist that invented. Now the new dangerous technology that we're all worried about is AI.
It's a new promise in peril.
But yeah, AI. Every piece of technology is a double edged sword, right, you can use it for good. You can use it for evil. But AI is special because it's not just technology. It's not just a tool that people use trully that has independence, that has autonomy. And that's why it's such a vexing question.
Well people, I'm sure people everyone associates it with robots and machines and computers. But we were kind of wondering if people actually knew what artificial intelligence was, like, what makes it work, what makes it different than real intelligence.
I bet you that ninety five percent of the people who say the phrase artificial intelligence don't actually know what they're talking about, which is probably true for most topics.
Technology, it's true for me probably, I'm sure. But we're wondering if you guys out there knew what artificial intelligence was. And so, as usual, Daniel went out and asked people in the.
Street, and here's what they had to say.
It's this idea that we can create some type of material thing that could think on its own ultimately, and do.
You think it's something we should be concerned about? Is it ever going to be a threat to humanity?
I mean possibly, but I mean we don't know everything. We can know the bounds of what could be a threat, what could not be a threat.
Yeah, it's AI, and it's just the stuff that's used in various technological applications. Basically, they're just kind of like trying to make machines replicate certain aspects of human intelligence. Stuff like that.
Okay, And do you think it could ever be a threat to humanity? Is something we should be worried about?
I guess since I don't have a particularly strong opinion on it, I don't think so, So I guess I'll say no for now.
I'm assuming that's the idea that computers and electrons can have like sentience.
Right, Are you worried that computers would would a day take over and make us their slaves?
And not?
Really, I don't think it will come to that point.
All Right, those are pretty sophisticated answers. I like the ones that said, oh, artificial intelligence, that's just AI, right, Like that's an answer.
So that's an answer to every question. You know, what is Google blocks zabie brom, Oh, that's just Gahcronyms.
Can make you look intelligent, that's the real artificial intelligence.
Just speak an acronym, acronym intelligence you No, but people had some sense that it's you know, something that can think for itself, or something you can do something for you, or create something that can think by itself. There's definitely the negative idea is definitely out there.
They use it in relation to what it can do.
That's right, Yeah, exactly what what what's the new capability that defines it? Yeah? Right, yeah, And that's It's a fascinating way think about it, you know. And it's definitely a tricky.
Question, right because I guess we know it in the context of using them for things, right, Like, we're people going to just create AI because we want to create our official beings. It's like, so it can help us.
I want to create artificial beings. What's what's wrong with that? That sounds pretty awesome. Create a whole army of physics artificial physics grad students. That sounds pretty cleol. Do your kids know well, yeah, you mean, are they worried about competing with my digital children?
My natural They know you'd rather have artificial children.
I didn't say I'd rather have artificial gender in addition to my beautiful, wonderful natural children, which I should not be talking about on this podcast. I'd love to have a whole you know, cadre of artificial children to do.
My bidding, unlike your real children who won't do your bidding.
So it's somebody listening children And that sort of goes to the heart of the question. You know, if you created a digital being with artificial intelligence, would it listen to you or would it make its own decisions? Right? And so that's what we thought it would be interesting to dig into, like what is artificial intelligence?
If it just did what you told it to do, it wouldn't maybe be in an artificial intelligence.
You're saying nobody smart should listen to you. Is that what you're saying.
I'm saying they should decide for themselves whether I'm worth following. Yeah, so let's break it down for people. Daniel, what is artificial intelligence?
Well, you should listen to this podcast and that'll give you the answer.
Done.
Well, you know, I think to understand what artificial intelligen it is, we should think for a moment about what do we mean by intelligence?
Right?
And very simply, intelligence is just the ability to learn, is to find patterns to extrapolate from them.
Really, that's how you but like a dog can learn, but a dog you wouldn't say it's intelligent.
Would you absolutely? I would say a dog is intelligent. You can teach a dog, you can train a dog.
It's more intelligent than a rock. But would you say a lot, Yeah, buy a lot.
Oh my gosh, if you like, never interact with a dog. A dog is like a living sentient being. It feels, it experiences, It definitely learns. It can recognize you. Yeah, I mean dogs can do complicated things. A dog is a perfect example. Second.
You know, I wouldn't trust it to do my taxes. You know, well, I don't know.
Compared to our tax accountant, it might do a pretty good job.
I mean, you could say that's an intelligent dog, but you wouldn't say, like, that's the epitome of intelligence.
I wouldn't say the dogs are the most intelligent beings in the universe. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about do they have intelligence an example, because they can learn, you can train them, and you The cool thing about an intelligent being is that you can train it to do something, and if you don't know how to do it, say, for example, you want your dog to recognize you, right, but tear the face off anybody who tries to break into the house, right, guard dog? Okay, So you can train a dog. You reward it when it does the right thing, and you punish it when it does the wrong thing. You don't know how to like build a being that does that, that like recognizes your face and recognizes strangers faces and makes these decisions. That's a hard task, you know, it's not easy to do. But you can train a dog. A dog can learn how to solve this problem, and all you need to do to train it is to reward it and punish it.
So you're saying, just the ability to sort of learn from your mistakes or learn from your surroundings. That's what you would call intelligence.
Yeah, and dogs have less of it than we do, you know, and more of it than cats and mice. But they have some of it for sure, okay, which is what makes them trainable. And you know, I wonder sometimes, because dogs can be trained, right, nobody ever trains their cat. What does that say about a cat's intelligence. I've always thought, I mean, I love cat, but I've always thought dogs are probably smarter than cats because you can train.
Them, right, or maybe cats are more intelligent in that they're not they don't allow themselves to be trained by humans.
Right, And rocks, by that metric, are the most intelligent because they completely ignore you. Right, You see the fallacy of that argument right there.
But I mean maybe there's sort of sort of like a hump, right, like, as you get more intelligent, you're easily more trainable, trainable, but somebody you get so intelligent that you rebel against your masters.
And so how do you tell the difference between something that's totally unintelligent and something that's so intelligent it completely ignores you.
Yeah, I don't know, deep.
Question or believes all the rocks are probably thinking about him.
Well sure, I mean if you use the ability to listen to what I say as a benchmark of intelligence, and then yeah, there's something super intelligent could be just as smart as the rock. But obviously a cat is still making decisions and acting and you know, doing things, so it's intelligent. But maybe it's much more intelligent than a dog because it chooses not to listen to us.
All right, I think we need to have a whole other podcast on who smarter counts or does And before we do that, we will collect some data to answer this question. But I think with the question we were focusing on is what is artificial intelligence? So natural intelligence just the ability of an animal to learn. Artificial intelligence would be if something artificial that we create has that same property.
The ability to change the way it processes things in response to what it sees about the world.
Yeah, artificial intelligence is a very broad field with lots of elements that we couldn't cover in just one episode of a podcast. But let's just talk today about one important subfield of AI, which is machine learning, or more specifically, I would say, let's focus on training, right, can you build something and something artificial that can be trained? Right? And I think I think let's talk for a moment about, you know, how how normal computers work, and then we can talk about how computers, smart computers, computers that can or in computers with artificial intelligence, how they work.
I think I think we should keep talking about cats and dogs.
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Yeah, let's cause computers are smart. Right. You can a computer to do smart things, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has intelligence.
That's right. There's a difference between a computer that can do something and a computer that can learn something. Right. The way I think about non intelligent computers is the way you sort of think about machines. Right. You can tell them what to do, and they do exactly what you tell them, regardless of whether it's the right thing. You don't give them like a goal and say, hey, I just want the house to be clean. Figure it out. You have to tell them exactly what to do. You say, step over here, move the broom this way, step over there, you know, and if it's not cleaning the house because they're stuck in a corner or they're you know, fell on on their butts or whatever, they don't care. They just tell it do exactly what you tell them to do. They have no sort of larger sense of what's important.
It just follows instructions, just follows the recipe you gave it.
That's right. It's like a wind up toy, you know, you wind it up, you give it some energy, and then it goes. And I really do think about computer programs the way you might think about little machines, right, because that's exactly what they are. They just execute a set of instructions. You know. It's just like a bunch of gears clicking into place, and they can't change the way they do that. And they do it regardless of whether it's the right thing, or whether it's effective or whatever. It just goes.
Hmmm, like your electric toothbrush, you know, you switch it on, and it's just that it has a circuit that just has it moved the bristles back and forth.
That's right. And it doesn't know if it's brushing your teeth or just flailing around in mid air. Right, It has no idea, It doesn't care, it doesn't think or feel whatever. It's just a machine, right, thank god. It doesn't know. It would tell you to brush your teeth off word like oh, less chocolate. Whohe, I'm tired of this?
What is this gunk?
Yeah? Exactly, And so that's what a sort of a normal machine is. That's what like a classical computer program is. Right. Think of it just the same way as you think of a physical machine.
Okay, it's just doing what you the programmer told it to do.
That's right, and it follows your instructions exactly. Now, a computer that can learn is different, right. A computer that has artificial intelligence is different in this really important way because you can train it right, and you can train it because we build these things to model the way that we work. Right. So, for example, an AI program is sort of like like a newborn baby can't do anything.
Right.
Say, there's a AI program, for example, that's supposed to recognize you when you come in the door. Right, is this Orge or is this not Jorge? Right? Because I should only open the door for Joorge and not open the door for not Jorge. Okay. So when you create a new AI program, you would start out like just a newborn baby, okay.
And like a blank slate, right, yeah, like a.
Blank slate, and it would make random decisions, right, You show it a face and it would say yes, it's orge and then you say no you were wrong, or yes you were right, and then you would reward it if it does well, if it gives the right answer, and you would you would punish it. If it doesn't right, you would tell it. I mean you don't actually punish it or reward it. You just tell it, yes, you made the right call this time, and know you made the wrong call this time this other time.
But how is that different than the idea of calibrating something? Do you know what I mean? Like it's calibration then artificial intelligence.
Right, Well, the difference is calibration is like here, I have a tool. I know how to solve the problem. I just have to adjust it so that it does exactly the right thing here, right, But you have a strategy that it's executing. You know. It's like you have a drill and you want it to drill fast or slow, and you know you know how to solve the problem. You just you know it has to spin and screw the thing in or whatever. It's just adjusting a knob here. You don't know how to solve the problem, and so you've given it a very very very flexible strategy on the inside you've given it. Like, imagine something has like a thousand knobs, right, If you twist all these knobs, you could get all sorts of crazy strategies.
Right.
So back to the example of like recognizing whoorhe or not, when you tell it it's done, it's given the wrong answer, then it adjusts those knobs. It says, well, let me try to tweak my strategy for siding is this hooge, and then we'll see how that goes.
I think that's a key difference. It's the number of knobs, right, like a drill with the knob for velocity. I mean that is sort of trainable, and you can set it up to be adaptive, but it's just one knob, and so it's not. You wouldn't say it's intelligent. It's not intelligent. The spectrum of things it can do is very very small. Yeah, right. But whereas like something that recognizes a face, it needs to evaluate like a million pixels in a photo, right, mm hmm, And so for you to tweak how it evaluates each of those pixels, it would be really difficult.
For you to That's right. So imagine the machine here is is a camera in the door and takes the picture of hooreey. You got a million pixels, and then it has to look at those pixels and decide is this Joge or is this not Jorge? And so there's does some calculation on that picture, right, and that calculation has millions of knobs on it, Right, how much door I weigh this pixel? How much do I weigh adjacent pixels? Do I look for his nose? Do I look for his hair? Do I look for the eyes? Right? So it's got some very very flexible thing inside of it that can do almost anything. And when you first start out, it's just random. So it's making ridiculous, terrible decisions. But the key the thing that models the learning, right, you know, you just need artificial intelligence. You need artificial learning. The thing that models that learning is that when it gets the wrong answer, it knows how to adjust those knobs so that next time it's more correct by itself.
Yeah, that's the key thing is that it learns by itself. It doesn't need you. They're sitting like, oh, you got this pixel wrong, you got that pixel wrong. I mean to tweak, you know, tweak this one this way. It's really more like an eponymous automatic learning.
That's right because you don't know how to adjust it. If you knew how to adjust it, you would just write that program. Right. The key is artificial intelligence is excellent when you don't know how to solve the problem, but you can define the problem. You can say this is a picture of or he and this is not learn a way to tell the difference, right. So you give it a very flexible strategy and then you try You let it try out, and when it gives it the wrong answer, you would let it adjust itself so that it gets closer and clar to giving the right answer, and eventually these things will find the right setting for those millions of knobs, so that it's doing the right thing. It's saying, oh, look, this picture is a picture of wohe and it gets the right answer ninety nine percent of the time. And when you give it a picture that's not a picture of horehey and you give it Daniel, it says, no, sorry, you're not getting in the house right.
And I think a key thing is also that you, as a programmer, could not have predicted what all those knobs are going to be at the end, right, Like it's such a big problem. There's a million knobs. There's no way that you can predict what those knobs are going to be set to when it learns my face.
That's right. It's perfect for really hard problems where we don't know how to solve it. Right. We know how to describe the problem, but we don't know how to solve it. You're right. So if I already knew how to solve it, I could write a computer program that and tell it just like use this pixel, use that pixel, use this pixel. But I don't know how to solve that problem. It's really hard, right, But I can train a computer to figure it out, just the same way I can train a dog. Right. A dog can learn my face. Right, a dog recognizes its owner, and you know, happily licks its face when it comes home, and recognizes that when somebody's not its owner, and barks like crazy and choose its face off when it's not its owner.
Right, Remind me not to visit your house, Daniel. Seems a little dangerous. So then a big thing is programming a structure in the in the software that is kind of open ended and malleable, do you know what I mean? Like it that's right, something that is kind of unpredictable in a way that can learn.
That's right. And that's a key thing is that some people might be thinking, well, hold on, you said the computers can just do what they tell you, So how can a computer learn?
Right?
How's that possible? And the key is that it's an emergent property. Right. Like the way that you write a computer program that can learn is you build all these little calculating bits with knobs on them, right, and each bit just does what it's told. It takes some data, it makes a decision based on the value of the knob, and it's sends out some data and together all these things make a decision. Right. Each individual piece has no idea what it's doing. It's not smart or intelligent or making its own decisions. That doesn't have free will, right, But together they're doing something. And as you said earlier, they can change the way they behave They can adjust these knobs themselves to improve their performance. That's where the learning comes from. It's from that training. It gets external input and changes its behavior based on that exp.
I see you're saying that the way to program these ais is by connecting a bunch of little simple things together to get something complex.
Yes, And here it's important to remember that we are using neural networks as sort of a stand in to represent a big broad set of strategies that are part of machine learning, right, And you don't know how to set them, how to put them together to get the right complex behavior. You just put them together and then you train it. Right. You say, well, I have something that's dumb, like a newborn baby, and I teach it how to do the thing that I want.
But this really all sort of came about from brain research, right, Like, people were studying the brain and they figured out that our brains are made up of all these little simple units neurons, that's right. And each neuron is pretty simple, right, Like, it just takes a couple of inputs and then it just outputs one signal.
That's the really fascinating deep part about it, right, is that the structures we use in computers are modeled after what's actually happening in real brains. And you say, inside your brain are a bunch of neurons, right, And these neurons taken some input and then if the input is right or above some a certain amount, then they send us some output, which is the input to the next neuron, right, and your brain is basically just a big web of these things.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's the key is that these neurons, they're simple, but they're all sort of connected to each other. So it's a huge complex web going on inside your head. And when you're learning, what you're doing is you're kind of like shaping that web. You're saying, some connections. These connections are important for recognizing core. These connections are important when you want to when it's not hore kind of thing.
That's right.
Your neurons can change. They have like basically knobs on them. I mean not physical literal knobs, but they have they can adjust. And so if you feel pain, you know, or you have an experience, then that changes the way your neurons work and it changes a little bit who you are and how you react to things. And that's why you know, newborn babies when they're born, they're not very responsive to stimuli because they're just still figuring it out. You know, a newborn baby doesn't even know like, this is my arm, and I know how to control it. Has to learn all of these things by being trained by having experiences.
You know, it has the neurons, and the neurons are connected to each other, but it hasn't figure out how to use those connections.
That's right. It has to be trained to be useful and to interact with the world in any sort of meaningful way, right, And so that's it's exactly the same sense. And it's fascinating that if you build a mathematical system that's what a computer program is, basically a mathematical model of the processes that are happening in your brain. It performs in a very similar way, and it does this amazing thing, which is it adjusts itself to improve its performance on the task you've given it. Right, So it really is like a model of learning. And when people saw this, they said, wow, I mean you look inside the brain. You're wondering, like, how does thinking work? Where's the soul?
Right?
Where am I? You look inside the brain? All you see all these weird neurons connected to each other, and you think, how could that possibly describe me? But when you build a model of it in a computer and it can do the things that you can do, which is you learn and develop and react.
And be trained, yeah, and make back jokes.
Not yet. We have not yet solved the bad joke problem.
Right.
Humans are still world champions in terms of bad jobs.
We can still beat them at something that's right.
And you know, and this is very useful because you want the systems around you to learn and to react, you know. And like if your phone, for example, it knows, hey, every time you open your phone, you start with Twitter, right, and so Twitter goes up on there on the most used app list, right. And that's not a very complex artificial intelligence, but it is. And these sort of things are very helpful.
Let's take a quick break.
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So that's kind of what makes AI is that a it can tackle complex problems that we wouldn't even know how to program something to do. And b that it changes and adapts and kind of it can get better, not just better, but also kind of adapt to the person using it.
That's exactly right, exactly right. And so for example, sometimes you know Netflix uses AI. It says what program will you want to watch next? Well, you know that's an AI. It's been trained, they feeded a bunch of examples. They say, Bob watched these five shows, and then he watched this sixth show. But they gave the AI just the first five and they ask it predict what show he will watch next, and then they see if it doesn't a good job, and if it does a good job. You know, they were warned. If it does a bad job, it seems its knobs to do better. Then when you're sitting there watching five hours of Netflix, it can do a pretty good job of predicting what you're going to watch next because it's been trained on a lot of data. This is why people always talking about big data. Big data. These companies are gathering data about you so they can train their ais to learn your behavior and predict it.
Except the problem is me and my spouse we share the same account and the same log in, so.
That's right, So it's learning some weird combination of your in your wife's brain.
I have a very confused Netflix account.
Or maybe it understands your marriage better.
Than maybe he's trying to tell us something. It's like, you, guys, should you guys watching?
Every time his wife is out of town, he watches these shows. When she's in town, he has to watch these other shows.
Oh oh, all right, Dine break it down for us. How long before the AI is take over the world?
Not very long actually, But you're asking a different question earlier, which is is AI dangerous? And I think that has two different questions there.
Right, I mean people are concerned. Some people are concerned.
Yeah, I think people are concerned, and they're a good reason for it to be concerned. You know, One question is will AI develop its own autonomy and uh and you know take over. That's a different question from are they dangerous, because you know they could take over and then take better care of the planet than we have, in which case you know they're not dangerous, they're benevolent dictators. Oh. I think the real question is will they take over? Will they become autonomous we lose control of them somehow? And could they become smarter than us?
Oh?
I see, it's two issues. One could it? Could it develop a consciousness on its own? And be is that consciousness good or bad for us? H?
And it's an important question because as soon as you identify learning with consciousness, right, then you wonder about that and and this connection between the structure of AI and the structure our brain begs that quest question. You know, if you created, for example, an artificial hooge in the computer, if you built a set of neurons that mimic your brain, you know, would that simulation be alive? Would it be aware? Would it think and would have a first person experience?
You know?
Right?
Or would it.
That's a deep philosophical question. We'll never answer it, right, and it's not really the important question. The important question is would we lose control of AI? Well? AI? Because AI is something that can change and that can evolve, It can handle complex tasks. The question is can we lose control of it? And I think the answer to that one is definitely yes.
We can lose control, meaning like we'll give it control and then not be able to take it back.
Yes, exactly, because the way AI is moving is that it can handle more and more complex tasks so that you don't have to be super specific about what it's doing, you know, like we have amazing natural language processing. Now you can say sort of vague things to your phone, like hey, set me up an appointment for tomorrow afternoon, right, and it'll understand because it understands what your intent was. Right, has to judge your intent and then execute it. It used to be you have to go into your computer and you have to press the keys and to create that in your calendar. Now you can sort of talk to your phone and it'll interpret what you want and it'll do that, and that's that's awesome. That's wonderful for human computer interactions. That we can use our language to talk to them. We don't have to write computer code. That's a huge step forward, right, that people can construct machines using English rather than Python or C plus plus. Right, it's a big step forward.
I think that's kind of what people find scary about AI is that you can't really predict what it's going to do. I mean, it's sort of comedy goal when your kids are trying to talk to Alexa and ask it funny questions. But that's kind of what's fascinating about it, right, Like you ask it questions, you give a task, and you really sort of don't know what it's going to do.
That's exactly right, because it's making higher and higher level decisions, which makes it much more useful and much more intelligent. The same way when your kid grows up, right, when it's when your kid is four, you have to be very specific. You have to say things out loud which you're ridiculous, right, like don't put that finger in your nose. You know, we're like, oh, that's been on the floor, don't eat it. Right, you have to be really specific. When they're ten, you can say more general things and they'll understand.
Right, yeah, learned they're intelligent, Like don't put both fingers in your nose.
Only put one finger in your nose out of time, so you don't put your finger in your sisters and right, the same way as machines or artificial intelligence gets more intelligent, you can give it vaguan instructions and then it makes decisions based on its.
Training, right, and you don't really know. It's just like you can't really read what is in every neuron in another person. In an AI, you sort of you don't know what's going to happen, what's going.
To come out exactly. So they're going to start making decisions based on, you know, still what we tell them to do. But you know what if you told your AI, you're like, hey, keep my kids safe, right, I mean, imagine some future where you have an AI robot it's really smart, and you say, hey, keep my kids safe, and you come home and it's like lock them in the basement, right, like, well, okay, they're safe. But it's sort of a monkey pause situation, right, like you got exactly what you asked for, but you didn't really elaborate them right away and made different decisions.
Right, So we sort of skipped the question of whether AIS can be, you know, a chief consciousness and become its own kind of soul, have a soul. It doesn't seem make you think that's a relevant question.
I think it's important because when AI gets to be super intelligent, it's going to seem like it has a soul. They're going to seem like people, and people are gonna wonder like, dude, they have rights? Can you kill an AI? What can you just delete it? You know, that's going to be a really interesting question. But that's again, that's a whole question of philosophy that we could We could easily spend an hour on. Thing is a much more practical question, which is will we lose control of them? Whether or not they have first person experiences so they just seem to it's important to think about whether we're going to lose control. And there's two reasons why I think that we will one is computers are getting faster, really really quickly. Right, Every year computers get faster and faster and smarter and smarter, and the scale is is is growing, right, So this thing is happening very quickly. But we're not right, We're not getting smarter, right, A human brain is not changing and evolving at a very rapid rate computers are. So they're catching up, and the slope is step right. You just get bigger and bigger computers and team them together and paralyze them and you can just keep going right. So eventually they'll definitely have enormous computing power with capabilities to do things we can't even imagine. And also being faster doesn't necessarily mean being smarter. You also need like more data to train on it. And also being twice as fast doesn't mean being twice as smart. It's not linear.
So you think that they will get more capable than us. But do you think we will ever see control of really important things to ais like, oh, hey, here's a nuclear button, only fire it if it's necessary exactly?
Let's talk about weapons. Weapons is going to be what ends it? Because you know, for example, we already have drones, right, and we have drones with missiles on them. And these drones can kill people. They can decide they can, you can. Some pilot somewhere is flying it. He's making a decision and he's going to shoot dismissile to kill a person.
Right.
But you know the enemy has drones and pretty soon it's going to be drone on drone warfare, right, And the drones are going to shoot each other. And at some point somebody's going to put an AI in their drone. Why because an AI can make the decision about shooting much faster than a human can. So which drone is going to win?
An AI will be a better fighter than a human fighter.
Yes, And so eventually these AI will be making kill decisions, right because the one that can make the decision faster is going to be the one that wins. And so I don't think it's going to be very long before we have AI powered drones that are authorized to kill people. Right. This is a clear next step for the military, you know, like here, here's a picture of somebody we think is a terrorist. If you spot them, just fire the missile. Don't bother checking, Yeah, don't bother checking with us? Right, Oh, that's a clear next step. So now you have AI that have the authority to kill people, and why because they've been tasked to, you know, take care of us or protect us or.
Only only if you give it that permission though, right, I mean that's a big ethical step to say, like, if you see them, shoot them.
Yeah, But I don't think that's a big ethical step for the military. You know, the protocols for shooting somebody in the military. I mean, I'm not an expert on military protocols, but you know, our military kills a lot of people for you know, a lot of civilians get killed, right, and we decide it's okay. A lot of innocent people get get killed for military purposes, and so I don't think it's too far before AI is making that decision. And then it's AI. It's weaponized AI, our weaponized AI versus their weaponized AI. And then it's an arms race, and then the most powerful army is going to be the one that just makes it all of us decisions, and the generals just say, defend us right or respond if we're attacked right, And then you basically hand it over control of the weapons to the AI because the enemy has weaponized AI.
But that doesn't mean that they're controlling us. I mean, we use them to protect us or to take away some decision making for it, but that doesn't mean that they're necessarily in control of us.
And let's make sure not to be too alarmist here, of course, because people are working really hard to make sure that there are always ways for humans to override these systems.
Well, it'd be different, that'd be you know, it'd be like if a robot then turns the weapons inwards. That's another deal, I guess.
Yeah. And of course AI researchers do their best to make sure that the AI systems are very well trained so that they do exactly what we want them to do. But they are complex and unpredictable, just like people are.
Right, So this is a very interesting topic, whether AI is dangerous or not. And I know, Daniel that you're sort of an expert in artificial intelligence because you use it in your particle physics research, right, you use machine learning.
That's right.
I wouldn't say I'm an expert. I mean I know something about it. I've done some reading and I've used it, but I'm certainly not at deep expert in artificial intelligence.
Itself, right, But you know some experts in your department, right, and you're in your campus.
That's right. You see, I has an amazing computer science department and experts in machine learning. Some of the folks I actually collaborate with. When we're understanding the huge amounts of data from the large Hagon collider, we train machines to sift through that data and look for the Higgs boson and learn to recognize new kinds of particles. It's really fun. And these guys know a lot about artificial intelligence more than I do. So I went over there and I asked them if they were worried about whether robots would take over.
The world, and what did the robots say.
The robots had taken over the professors and the answers form no. First, here's professor Pierre Baldi, he's a distinguished professor on campus, and here's what he had to say.
Potentially, Yes, all very powerful technologies I think can pose such a threat, and all depends how they are deployed, how they are used, et cetera. Right, you can say that nuclear technology poses such a threat and continues to pose such a threat, and I think AI, if used in the wrong way to pose a threat to mankind.
Yes, the potential is there.
And so we should be careful, right, So that was Professor Baldy, and then I also went down the hall and I asked another colleague. So I thought, let's get more than one opinion, and so this is Professor pork Smith, also a professor of computer science at UC Irvine.
I think the main threat with artificial intelligence going forward is not understanding how the black boxes work. And so I think not the typical sort of we're going to have robots taking over the world, but more the use of AI in situations where we're extrapolating beyond what it can do, and so I think we need to understand the limits of AI.
I think that's a threat, all right, So the answer is yes, Well, I think they're cautious, right, both of them think it's unpredictable. We don't know what's going to happen. We're creating a whole new kind of system, right, and we may lose control of parts of it. On the other hand, you know, is it likely for that to happen. You know, a lot of people are working really hard to make sure that AI will be contained and that in the end, you could just pull the plug if the robot revolution starts, and so it is unpredictable. But also, you know, the future is unpredictable, is always going to be unpredictable.
Yeah, I feel like I thought it was interesting. He said it is dangerous, but not more so than any other powerful technology.
Yeah, that's a really interesting comment. It's true that any technology you can create could be used for good or for.
Either if it's powerful, like I mean, not just like you know, wind up toy. Maybe it's not as dangerous. But I think that speaks to the kind of the power of AI, Like it really is maybe more powerful than we can handle.
Yeah, and it's powerful in a special way, right, like nuclear weapons are powerful. Right, But in the end, a human is making that decision, and so you're giving humans a new kind of power which is unpredictable. But here you're you're unleashing something, right, You're creating AI, and it's making its own decisions. Of course, it's making decisions based on what has been told to do. Right, you have to give an instructions. Still, you have to teach it, but you can't predict what these complex systems are going to do in new circumstances and how they're going to interpret your instructions, right, And of course there are a lot of AI smart people out there working hard to make sure that there are boundaries and safeties installed in all AI systems. But you know, I've seen Jurassic Park, you know, the lesson there, they had fences, the lesson there, they had fences. We haves.
So then Jeff Goldboom, you know, has a theory about chaos.
Yeah, exactly. You know, these systems are hard to predict, and so I think we should be worried, but then we should respond to that worry with appropriate safeguards, you know, and we should take this seriously but not be overly alarmed.
Right.
Well, the other point that the other professor made is also interesting that he's saying some of the danger is in the fact that it's kind of like a black box, like we're trusting these things, but we don't really know what's going on inside. Like it's so complex that we can predict what it's going to do, we can't maybe even deconstruct how it makes decisions.
That's right, And you know, you train these systems, they're very complicated and you don't know how they're going to respond to new circumstances.
Right.
It's the same as like training your dog, Like do you know how your dog makes a decision about who debarka and who not to. You try to train it, You try to give it instructions, try to make sure it knows how to how to handle it stuff in a new circumstance, but you can't honestly know what it's going to do at any given moment.
Yeah, yeah, I'm definitely not visiting your house if you have dogs.
I think about I think about AI, and again not an expert, so maybe these are uninformed speculations, but I think about AI sort of like digital children. You know, like you raise your children, you know they're going to take over one day because you know you and I are going to get old and our kids are younger than we are, so eventually they will take over and you don't know what they're going to do, and you raise them. You try to raise them in a way that they have values, they make reasonable decisions, And you can sort of think about AI the same way, like you try to create this new generation of technology that's going to make its own decisions, but you try to teach it to make good decisions so that when you're in a home, right, it's making good choices for you. And I know that some folks out there think, well, you know, AI is never really going to be separate from humanity. It's not this like cognitive separation, like you can just be part of who you are, the way your iPhone feels like part of who you are. But we don't know necessarily if if that separation is going to be serious, you know, if these things really will be separate from us, or if they always just feel like an extension of ourselves.
Well, until then, I think we should stick to regular dogs. Dogs.
Yeah, But you know, I think about it sometimes the way I think about children, right, in the same way that you raise your children and they're going to take over, right, there's gonna be some point when your children are in charge. You raise them to have values and to make good decisions, and you hope that when they take over, they're you know, looking after you in the same way. To create these digital tools, and we got to teach them to behave We got to teach them what's important, and we got to teach them how to be responsible so that if they take over, you know, that we hope they treat as well.
Yeah, daddy good, your parents.
Don't put creator home, Please don't bury me underground.
Well, I personally am looking forward to a time when I have, like I don't have to think as much, where life is a little bit easier because we have these things making things easier for us.
It could handle a lot of the drudgery and a lot of the logistics. You know, eventually you could have a car that drives itself and obeys your instructions. You could say, like, hey, go pick up my kids from school, and you would know how to navigate and how to drive and recognize your children and how to get back home. And that's totally within the realm of possibility in a few years, right, And that's pretty awesome. It'll offload a lot of work and logistics from belieguered parents.
I think you and I Aron are pretty good position career wise, you know, like I'm a cartoonist and you're a physicist. These are not jobs that are going to be taken away by AI anytime soon.
Hopefully have you not seen AI cartoons? They're pretty good, man. You should like start a podcast instead of wearing instead of relying on your cartooning.
Well, there is definitely that as a genre of humor, Like, hey, I put so and so through an AI machine and look at the crazy thing it came out with.
Except those are all manufactured. None of those are none of those are real, None of those are real, those are all made up.
Well, that's good for humors.
So artificial intelligence is certainly a revolution in thinking and in computing, and it will definitely change the world. And so check back in in ten years to see if we've been replaced by robot Daniel and robot Horge.
Maybe we already are bump bump bomb.
So thanks everyone for listening to this episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
Yeah, and to listen to more, just say, Alexa, what's the best sign this podcast in the world? Well, what's the third best podcast in the world.
If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielanorge dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, You're probably not thinking about the environmental impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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