looking for public accessible social
media platform data found the Instagram
profile of my son
despite the program fetch the data and
injected it into a database somewhere
located abroad just a few days later my
son resentfully said to me houston we
have a problem I see all my Instagram
data on another website I didn’t upload
any data to this website nor did I
subscribe to their services how is that
possible what’s going on here together
we double-checked and we figured out
that he changed something in the
security settings of his Instagram app
making his profile publicly accessible
for everybody I didn’t like that at all
because you could easily reverse
engineer a typical day in the life of my
son now the whole story triggered a very
intense and deep discussion about the
internet ecosystem technical details on
how messages are transmitted the history
of the Internet why do we have an
Internet at all data privacy and search
engines and how they influence our daily
decisions I really like this discussion
and I learned two things first my son
knows all the apps from
our universe and in case there are any
parallel universes he knows all the apps
from there as well he has quite a good
overview of all the functionalities and
he uses all these apps as responsibly as
he can second he has rather limited
knowledge on the forces governing the
internet ecosystem he is not really
aware how this ecosystem influences the
decisions he makes and the way he sees
and understands our world
of course that worries me a lot
now I can safely say that my son was not
well enough educated in those aspects
now you might say Oh Marcel come on
chill out I mean it’s important to know
how to use all these apps and
technologies in a ficient way but it
isn’t as important to know how they are
engineered and by the way Marcel isn’t
it your job your challenge to teach your
kids on all those aspects I say yes you
are right but that’s just one part of
the story and the other part goes as
follows the government our educational
system and we as a society are in charge
as well to educate future generations on
the ongoing digital revolution and I
want to support this statement by
talking about artificial intelligence
whoo artificial intelligence I’m sure
everybody here heard about it in one or
the other way lately
you might have rats that Google has a
built a system based on artificial
intelligence which beats a top player at
the game of goal now that’s really
impressive because the game of go has a
much higher complexity compared to the
game of chess systems based on
artificial intelligence are at least as
good as humans at brain cancer detection
self-driving cars cell flying drones
face detection
voice recognition algorithmic trading
news book and music recommendations
robots chat BOTS and and and artificial
intelligence is here and now and you
carry it in your pocket now one type of
system or one type of technology making
possible all this break truth is called
deep learning or deep neural network
these systems are based on layers each
layers is composed of small
computational units called neurons
neurons within one layer are connected
to neurons within the next preceding
layer now assume you have a bunch of
images which are unlabeled and the image
show different animals and you want the
system to classify those images how does
this work well the system reads the
image and passes the data to the first
layer neurons in the first layer
responds to very simple patterns and
shapes like edges the activated neurons
then pass the data to the next layer the
second one neurons in the second layer
respond to more complex patterns like
arms or legs or years
again the activated neurons pass the
data to the next layer and this goes on
and on and on till the last layer the
last layer knows about the complex
concept of how an animal looks like like
a fish cat or dog finally the output of
the system is a bunch of numbers telling
you how confident the system is at
detecting a cat or an elephant or any
other animal now the whole thing works
somehow similar to what is going on in
our brains when we humans classify
images different regions in our brain
respond to different patterns on
different complexities deep learning
systems are of course not limited to
process images you could input let’s say
text from an email and the system tells
you what this is BAM or not or you could
input voice records and the output of
the system might be transcriptions or
you could input data related to the US
presidential election and the output
might be well let’s talk about something
these systems are even capable kind of
dreaming so they show signs of
creativity take the image on top the
famous image and input it to the system
but you don’t ask the system to classify
the image but you ask the system to
amplify patterns
it recognizes on the image patterns that
it has seen and learned before and you
can end up with something like the image
on the bottom this is Ammar very high
accurate in classifying and show signs
of creativity now more and more system
coming up learning by direct
interactions with humans Microsoft did a
very interesting experiment lately they
release the chat bot on Twitter and the
bot was supposed to engage Millennials
with artificial intelligence shortly
after they released about they had to
shut down the machine what happens the
boat turned racist and started to
insulting other people now what is the
lesson learned here what we see here is
that machines can be biased but this
should not come as a surprise because
machines learn from data and we humans
we generate those data but we humans are
biased
that’s how something like discrimination
can find a path into those machines now
here it’s obvious that something went
completely wrong but take a more subtle
case like an assistant for churches in
risk assessment on cream
there are well-documented cases were
non-white persons were discriminated by
such machines now that means that we
have to think about somehow how we
incorporate societal values in those
machines but who is going to do that I
mean who will decide what values will go
in is it the government or IT cracks or
researchers or you and me the point is
that at the moment almost nobody is able
to participate in that discussion and
the reason why is well we are not
educated but think about that I mean we
teach our kids on the importance to know
that we had graffiti in forms of cave
painting ten thousand years ago but we
don’t educate our kids on the drivers of
the ongoing digital revolution a digital
revolution which is about to change
society now and a revolution which has
the potential to change humanity in the
future Nick Bostrom a recognized expert
in the field of artificial intelligence
hypothesized on the question what
happens when a machine reaches human
level of intelligence and he says that
such a machine will go piont
any human cognitive capabilities very
quickly now what does this mean for us
there are several scenarios of course
one scenario is this one we do nothing
and hang around all day along
and the machines will do our work not my
preferred scenario because work is too
much fun right another scenario probably
more realistic is that such a machine
would even not recognize anymore that
humans are intelligent what would that
mean for us what would that mean for a
relationship between humans and machines
of course nobody knows you know I’m
really a big fan of all these
technologies and in particular of deep
learning and I think that these machines
can help us solving complex and
important problems in our world I think
we can use these machines for the good
but to release the potential in the
right direction that we really can
benefit from it we have to think about
some really hard questions questions
such as who is responsible for machine
generated decisions should intelligent
machines have their own rights and where
and how do we want to engage artificial
intelligence and what societal values
should go in do we need regulation I
hope you come along with me now that
these questions are by far too important
to be discussed just among experts this
discussion has to be brought to the
public domain and one key element to do
so is education education on all the
fundamental topics touching our digital
lives education starting at primary
school so the healthy relationship
between humans and machines is triggered
by education
by the way my son and me we wrote to the
website owner and told him to delete all
the data he fetched from my son’s
Instagram profile and you know what at
that time my son knew that the website
owner has to do that there was no option
to not to do it so the key was education
thank you
[Applause] [Music]