intelligence and there’s no great
surprise there because it seems that the
whole world is currently talking about
artificial intelligence in fact we are
rather saturated with movies and books
and new stories and famous people all
giving us a view about this future of AI
and sentiment in this area is quite
mixed for example spoiler alert
in the film ex machina an artificially
intelligent robot goes bad and kills
people and in the film iRobot an
artificially intelligent robot goes bad
and kills people and in the new film
Morgan an artificially intelligent robot
child goes bad and kills people on the
other hand brilliant people such as Elon
Musk and Stephen Hawking having quite
vocal recently in their views on a world
in future in which artificial
intelligence goes bad and kills
everybody so not entirely positive I’m
being slightly facetious obviously the
films are good fun and when the likes of
Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are
speaking then the likes of me need to be
paying attention but they are all
talking about a future in which AI has
become self-aware possessing its own
motive and drive even its own
consciousness and that’s not where we
are right now but is it likely well the
scientists that NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory recently stated that soon
there will be no technological barrier
preventing us from creating machines
that have their own consciousness and he
might be right maybe technology is not
the barrier here maybe the barrier here
is actually our understanding of what
consciousness even is because we know so
little about it professor Margaret
Bowden is the head of cognitive science
at Sussex University near I live in
England she’s an amazing character in
the whole field of cognition and
intelligence creativity the mind she
said quite recently that we know so
little about consciousness but it’s not
that we can’t answer the big questions
we don’t even know
what questions to ask so maybe we’re not
quite yet ready to replicate this
process artificially a better question
might be does that even matter I’m sure
we’re all aware of the Turing test the
Turing test we’re chat BOTS have
conversations with humans and in so
doing try to convince those humans that
they’re actually having conversations
with other humans thereby showing some
form of intelligence and recent times
depending on what you read we’ve either
come close to or have actually passed
the Turing test and but no one would
think that these chat bots are actually
intelligent they just fool us into
thinking they are and that’s rather the
point at the time when a machine behaves
as though it’s intelligent and we behave
towards it as though it’s intelligent
does it really matter whether it’s
intelligent or not in terms of the
impact that that can have on our lives
and a eye is having a massive impact on
the world right now and some of that
impact is profoundly beneficial to the
whole world for example in the area of
Health IBM have been pushing Watson and
Watson health and it’s already saving
lives by diagnosing rare forms of
leukemia in London in England Moorfields
Eye Hospital which is an amazing place
have partnered with deep mind from
Google in order to analyze huge datasets
from AI scans and find and prevent the
illnesses that cause blindness this is
fantastic stuff and the field of
Education where we’ve been lumbered
since day one with the idea that in
order to educate people we need to get
large groups of people together in the
same place at the same time and tell
them the same thing in the same way does
it have to be this way how easy is that
to do in large areas where it’s very
difficult to get those people together
and they have very different
capabilities and a company called I am
Lango this is their image they are
working in Africa with a system with a
virtual tutor and and an adaptive
learning system they can reach these
children one-to-one and offer them
through the virtual tutor a personal
tuition one-to-one personal to ition
with a system which is adapting to the
individual learning capabilities of the
child
is amazing potentially at scale it
offers us the opportunity to raise the
education level of an entire region
through AI and we’re only here
scratching the surface of the benefits
that I can deliver on the flip side of
this are the fears and anxieties for a
world of AI right now those fears and
anxieties tend to focus on the idea that
artificial intelligence will automate us
out of our places of work this is
actually not a new film it’s quite old
this is an Amazon warehouse being run by
robots in being an old film that
actually shows us this is not just a
fear this is reality only the scale of
this situation is really a debating
point and there have been plenty of
studies on this subject
recently a Vox article quoted Morgan
Stanley as suggesting that in the States
the freight industry will be able to
save over 160 billion dollars a year
through the use of autonomous
technologies and over half of that over
80 billion dollars of savings will come
in the forms of staff reductions an
oft-quoted study from 2013 by Carl Frei
Michael Osborne suggested that in the
states also 47% of people with jobs in
the States have jobs which are at risk
of immediate potential automation 47%
represents a vast number of individual
human beings a far less intelligent man
stated the blindingly obvious recently
when he pointed out that we face a time
of major upheaval so the companies that
are creating these technologies how are
they facing up to the fears and
anxieties surrounding the technologies
that they’re working on well actually
it’s quite a positive story so recently
IBM Microsoft Google Facebook and Amazon
created something of an alliance to
tackle some of these issues they called
it the partnership on artificial
intelligence for the benefit of people
which is a nice title if not
particularly caching and they’re looking
to tackle these issues of ethics of
robustness of trust of security that AI
gives rise to Elon Musk who we mentioned
earlier founded open AI
or the billion dollars in order to try
and prevent this incredible technology
from falling under the control of
individual powerful people they have a
mantra to develop digital intelligence
in the ways most likely to benefit
humanity as a whole which is a wonderful
aspiration to have and then IBM
sponsoring the XPrize to offer financial
rewards to startups who can partner with
AI to confront the world’s grandest
challenges so the tech giants have our
best interests at heart and this I think
we can all agree is reassuring but what
does it mean for the rest of us are we
all the population as a whole are we
just sitting watching and waiting to see
what world is created for us and that we
will then try to work out how to live in
or can we proactively prepare for this
world set the scene for a world that we
have a rolling that we have a placing I
think we can and the reason that we can
is because although this revolution is
being brought to us through technology
the challenges we face in preparing for
that are entirely human challenges with
entirely human solutions and there are
three things that I think we need to
focus on the first is education you’ll
be glad to know that I don’t have any
children and I suspect a number of you
will either now or in the future are
those people learning what they need to
learn in order to have an active role to
play in the future which is being
created for them we clearly need to
create a curriculum syllabus that trains
people in the skills and the attributes
they need to work on or with these
autonomous technologies to be able to be
complementary to them rather than in
conflict with them knowing what we know
about the professions which are at risk
of immediate automation means we can
prepare people to have successful and
sustainable careers in areas which are
far at less risk not doing so means we
risk creating generations of people who
upon leaving our educational systems are
in
immediately lost this involves our
Boards of Education our schools our
colleges our government agencies which
are all bodies we have a voice in that
we must use secondly dialogue a
conversation it would be nice to think
that the companies who are creating the
technologies which will revolutionize
the world would take into account the
thoughts and feelings of the people
whose world it is that is being
revolutionized that might seem like
something of a pipe dream there is
actually a recent precedent in this area
albeit on a small scale with the
technology which we know is already
transforming the world that of
autonomous cars self-driving vehicles
every major motor automotive company is
currently engaged in a program of work
on autonomous driving Volvo is one of
those Volvo actually were keen to take
onboard the hopes aspirations and
opinions and anxieties of the people for
whom they are creating the vehicles and
use that to shape the program of work
they opened a channel to allow people to
answer a string of situational questions
such as do autonomous cars result in the
end of traffic accidents to publish the
figures so that we can all be aware of
what opinions are in this area and then
to take the data set that they create in
Word and allow it to shape the work that
they’re doing now the stance that we’ve
seen being taken by the major
organizations suggests that this is not
something they would shy away from I
think they would welcome this the third
challenge we face is by far the biggest
on a massive scale and it is the problem
of the distribution of resources we have
created a world over thousands of years
where resources are distributed based on
work that gets done so you work you
therefore have access to the resources
that you need what happens when people
stop working currently we have welfare
schemes benefit schemes for those people
because they are the exception but what
happens when the exception becomes the
rule now Stephen Hawking a very clever
man obviously who we mentioned earlier
he put this quite succinctly when he
said recently and I’m paraphrasing now
in a world where machines
uess what we need the outcome will
depend on how things are distributed we
can all live lives of luxury if the
machine produced wealth is shared or the
majority can live lives that are
miserably poor if the machine owners
successfully lobby against the
redistribution of wealth which is pretty
clear sadly he went on to say that the
trend historically is toward the latter
which is about as disappointing as it is
predictable now at this point a
colleague of mine suggested that all of
these talks should have a picture of the
planet Earth in order to add gravitas
here’s mine
so box ticked I think and what we need
to do is to fundamentally D couple the
distribution of resources from the idea
of work and this seems like a gargantuan
task perhaps perhaps insurmountable but
actually there are people who have a
proposition to tackle this head-on and
we heard about this in an inspirational
talk this morning the idea of a
universal basic income now this idea of
giving people money for basically for
being there is not a new one it’s come
back to the floor
largely because of this threat of
automation and I was one of those people
I’m ashamed to admit that did jump to
the rather cynical assumption that if
you give people money for doing nothing
then they will do nothing but actually
sometimes in life it’s rather nice to be
given the impression that you could well
be wrong here and this scheme that’s
being run in Kenya is being run by an
organization called give directly and
they have invested and they’ve raised
funding to give people a sizeable
community of people in Kenya a living
wage over a period of about 10 years in
order to see how they respond and the
way they talk about this response right
now is entirely positive it’s
interesting given the control that
people have given given over their lives
to see how productively they work on
behalf of themselves their families
their communities and give directly are
expanding their activities into Uganda
so good for Africa would it work in
other parts of the world or we’re about
to find out
with those programs pilot programs being
and Utrecht in the Netherlands in
Ontario Canada and in Finland so this is
an idea that has traction that could
spread however there are also countries
who have already rejected this idea so
there is no global consensus and nothing
is yet proven and I’m not showing you
this because I think this is the
solution because frankly I don’t know
I’m showing you this to demonstrate that
there are people who believe this
problem can be solved and they believe
in their solution to work on it to back
it to implement that solution and test
it out in the real world and that is
profoundly positive because where there
is one solution and a set of motivated
people to carry it through there can be
others so three things to prepare us for
a future with an artificially
intelligent revolution preparing our
next generations so that they can enter
this world with a full and vital role to
play in it having a say even a small one
even a tiny one in the development of
those technologies and lastly
confronting the biggest challenge of all
how we distribute the resources on earth
three things but three human things now
we started with the talk about
artificial intelligence we’ve ended up
somewhere much much bigger the future
for everyone
artificial intelligence has yet to reach
a point where as beyond our ability to
influence its development this
technology revolution is coming bringing
with it as we’ve seen huge benefits and
equally huge challenges we can let those
challenges overwhelm us if we choose not
to confront them or we can work to
slowly build a world in which the
benefits of this revolution are made
available to us all thank you very much
[Applause]
[Music] [Applause]