Translator: Peter van de Ven Reviewer: Denise RQ
Will they replace us or enhance us?
First, who are they? What are they?
Humanity’s first interactions with artificial intelligence
comes in 1964 at MIT.
A professor at MIT created “Eliza,”
a program that allowed you to type in simple words and phrases,
and out came entire conversational responses.
The team at MIT were perplexed at how complex “Eliza” was.
Some even thought that on the other end of the computer monitor
was a human, typing responses back to them.
Many pinpoint this place in history, this point in time, as being the spark
that ignited humanity’s passion for artificial intelligence.
So, what are they? What makes them so human-like?
In the 1960s, two researchers, McCulloch–Pitts,
devised a computational model
that sought to mimic the exact brain functions
of the mammalian brain cell.
They called this model the perceptron model.
We commonly know it as the neural network.
The neural network functions in a similar fashion
to our very own human brain.
We absorb a plethora of information, sensory data,
and our brain transforms that to external actions and internal thoughts.
The neural network functions no differently.
Its sensory data comes in the form of features or inputs,
and these features and inputs are multiplied by weights.
I like to think of weights as a numerical representation
of how influential a certain piece of data, a feature is
on the output, the prediction, the action, the thought.
So these inputs, these features are multiplied by the weights,
fed through the network, and out comes a prediction.
But this prediction can be so far off.
It can be so far off from what we actually expect.
So how can artificially intelligent beings enhance themselves?
How are they able to predict
at an accuracy comparable to or exceeding that of us, human beings?
They employ a method called back propagation,
and with back propagation they take the sum of squared error
between the real value and the expected value.
They make that a function of the weights and minimize that function,
altering the weights in such a fashion
that the real value is equal to the output prediction,
obtaining an accuracy of 100%.
So, how far have we come since “Eliza”?
How far has humanity traversed since that first perceptron model?
Google’s DeepMind team recently created
an artificially intelligent being called AlphaGo.
AlphaGo was programmed for one purpose and one purpose only:
to play the board game Go.
AlphaGo was trained using a protocol called reinforcement learning.
I always liken reinforcement learning to teaching a dog a new trick,
and giving it a treat if it performs the trick correctly.
AlphaGo was trained on millions upon millions of data sets,
possible outcomes, and moves.
It put AlphaGo
up against the greatest Go player in the entire world.
And what happened?
It beat him.
Moving away from just gaming,
looking at the real world, which we all inhabit.
A law firm recently hired an artificially intelligent lawyer
that can fulfill capacities and capabilities of a real lawyer.
Some of you may be excited by this,
others might be a bit edge-of-your-seat unnerved,
but many, I reckon, are scared, frightened.
How human will they become?
Will they think like us? Could they feel like us?
Might they even love like us?
If we take a step back, AlphaGo doesn’t know what Go is.
AlphaGo does not know who it’s playing against.
AlphaGo doesn’t even know who created it.
We call this narrow learning.
So how do we go from machines like AlphaGo
to sentient synthetic beings?
What we know about emotions, human emotions
is that they’re nothing more than hormones, and genes,
and biochemical reactions.
Some scientists have even said
that we can inject machines with nanochemicals and biotech
to give them emotions and the thoughts of human beings.
But if we were to make consciousness in synthetics,
we must first understand our own consciousness;
we must unlock the mystery to our own sentience.
I call this the consciousness hurdle.
What we know about consciousness is this:
external stimuli gave us thoughts, and reactions,
and perceptions about the world.
But what we don’t know is how consciousness came to be,
how it came to form.
Harvard researchers recently discovered a part of the brain
which may be responsible for consciousness.
We don’t dig deep enough.
But when we do, we unlock the mysteries to our own consciousness.
When we crack the code to our own sentience,
they will follow right behind us.
And when they do, what will we become?
What happens when our own creation becomes exactly like us?
In a 2016 election, Zoltan Istvan, who ran for the Transhumanist Party,
promised to end death and cure all ailments.
That’s exactly what transhumanism is, and it may be our saving grace.
Transhumanism is this belief that we, as humans, can transcend
beyond our physical and biological limitations,
to become greater than what we actually are
through the advance of science and technology.
We already see transhumanism unfolding right before our very eyes.
In Sweden, they created bionic eyes
which can allow you to zoom in at a microscopic level.
In the United States, researchers have created an armed mice
and even human beings with artificial prosthetic limbs
which give people who were once paralyzed from the neck down
the ability to walk among us, once more.
And Elon Musk, arguably, the foremost innovator of our time,
has debuted a new company idea called “neural-lace,”
where scientists insert electronic mesh into your brain,
allowing you to upload and download your thoughts from a computer.
If we are to prevent ourselves from becoming obsolete and irrelevant
in a world which we once reigned over,
we must merge with machine, we must augment our physical capabilities,
we must augment our intellectual capacities;
otherwise, we’re doomed to extinction.
We are already becoming slowly irrelevant.
Changying Precision Technology Company in China
recently replaced 90% of their workers
with sentient artificial intelligent beings.
The results?
A 250% increase in productivity.
And the numbers are flowing in.
11% of jobs in the UK have the potential, this year,
to be replaced by automation.
800,000 jobs, since 2001 in the United Kingdom,
have been replaced by machines.
A new statistic has recently come out that nearly half of all of our jobs
– your career and my future career –
have the potential to be replaced by artificial intelligence
within the next decade.
The Bank of America has recently released the metric
that nearly half of all manufacturing jobs
will be replaced by automation within the next generation.
So what happens when they take from us our seeming only reason to exist?
What happens when they strip us down and reveal our true inferiority?
What happens when they take away from us
the only way we can provide for our families and loved ones?
What will we become? What happens to the human being?
Well, there is an idea.
This idea has been circulated for almost 50 years now.
It’s called the universal basic income.
You, and I, every member of society,
receives an undisclosed, unconditional sum of money.
Many researchers have put this sum of money at 13,000 dollars.
You probably think I’m crazy
because 13,000 dollars is not enough to provide for a family of four.
But you’re wrong.
You’re still thinking within the confines of the economy today
not the economy of tomorrow.
What happens when machines are the ones laboring away in factories?
What happens when companies
no longer have to shelve out money for worker protections
because machines are the ones manufacturing your bed sets,
your computers, your desks?
The economic fabric of society will transform,
it will be turned on its head,
and everything we know about the status quo will change.
In the 1970s, a small town in Dauphin
was the pilot program for the universal basic income.
They gave every member of Dauphin
who is making less than 13,800 dollars a year
a 4,800 dollars supplement to their income.
And what happened?
Poverty was eradicated;
there was a decline in mental health related visits to the doctor;
an 8.5% reduction in hospitalization;
and more and more children continuing on into the grade 12.
A healthier society; a better society; a more well-educated society;
a society where you no longer have to worry
about where your next ‘no’ will come from;
a society where you will no longer have to see
that man, that woman, that child sleeping on a subway station,
not knowing if they’ll ever sleep in a warm bed again.
In a world where they work for us,
we will see a re-emergence of art and culture.
Because if you think about it,
the only thing that differentiates us from them
is the unique stroke of the brush on the canvas creating beautiful colors,
the notes from the musician’s instrument,
eliciting emotions of happiness, sadness, and nostalgia.
In a world where they work for us,
we’ll be captivated by our own hearts
to explore what we always wished to explore.
And we will see the transcendence of man
into a new plane of knowledge and understanding,
unlocking the mysteries of the universe that surrounds us.
In a world where they work for us,
we will grasp for the stars as if they were in our own backyard.
So, will they replace us, or will they enhance us?
The answer is yes, they will replace us.
Every facet of society will be occupied by them,
from the being flying you’re plane,
to the being taking care of your parents in the hospital.
But they will enhance us.
They will make us greater; they will push us to evolve;
they will help us think greater than we’ve ever done before,
and reach places we previously thought impossible to reach,
and create new life.
We stand on the plateau of an exponential curve,
and right there, right in the distance, a short few years away,
is exponential growth towards the singularity –
a point in time where machine intelligence
is comparable to or exceeds that of human intelligence.
We stand at the precipice of a new dawn, a new revolution,
something that has not been witnessed since the dawn of man.
From the creation of the wheel, to the discovery of fire,
to the Industrial Revolution:
none of those will compare to what we are about to experience.
We are going to transcend, we are going to evolve because of them.
To erase the line between man and machine
is to obscure the line between men and gods.
The only question now is what role will you play?
What will you become?
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Cheers)
(Applause)
Will they replace us or enhance us?
First, who are they? What are they?
Humanity’s first interactions with artificial intelligence
comes in 1964 at MIT.
A professor at MIT created “Eliza,”
a program that allowed you to type in simple words and phrases,
and out came entire conversational responses.
The team at MIT were perplexed at how complex “Eliza” was.
Some even thought that on the other end of the computer monitor
was a human, typing responses back to them.
Many pinpoint this place in history, this point in time, as being the spark
that ignited humanity’s passion for artificial intelligence.
So, what are they? What makes them so human-like?
In the 1960s, two researchers, McCulloch–Pitts,
devised a computational model
that sought to mimic the exact brain functions
of the mammalian brain cell.
They called this model the perceptron model.
We commonly know it as the neural network.
The neural network functions in a similar fashion
to our very own human brain.
We absorb a plethora of information, sensory data,
and our brain transforms that to external actions and internal thoughts.
The neural network functions no differently.
Its sensory data comes in the form of features or inputs,
and these features and inputs are multiplied by weights.
I like to think of weights as a numerical representation
of how influential a certain piece of data, a feature is
on the output, the prediction, the action, the thought.
So these inputs, these features are multiplied by the weights,
fed through the network, and out comes a prediction.
But this prediction can be so far off.
It can be so far off from what we actually expect.
So how can artificially intelligent beings enhance themselves?
How are they able to predict
at an accuracy comparable to or exceeding that of us, human beings?
They employ a method called back propagation,
and with back propagation they take the sum of squared error
between the real value and the expected value.
They make that a function of the weights and minimize that function,
altering the weights in such a fashion
that the real value is equal to the output prediction,
obtaining an accuracy of 100%.
So, how far have we come since “Eliza”?
How far has humanity traversed since that first perceptron model?
Google’s DeepMind team recently created
an artificially intelligent being called AlphaGo.
AlphaGo was programmed for one purpose and one purpose only:
to play the board game Go.
AlphaGo was trained using a protocol called reinforcement learning.
I always liken reinforcement learning to teaching a dog a new trick,
and giving it a treat if it performs the trick correctly.
AlphaGo was trained on millions upon millions of data sets,
possible outcomes, and moves.
It put AlphaGo
up against the greatest Go player in the entire world.
And what happened?
It beat him.
Moving away from just gaming,
looking at the real world, which we all inhabit.
A law firm recently hired an artificially intelligent lawyer
that can fulfill capacities and capabilities of a real lawyer.
Some of you may be excited by this,
others might be a bit edge-of-your-seat unnerved,
but many, I reckon, are scared, frightened.
How human will they become?
Will they think like us? Could they feel like us?
Might they even love like us?
If we take a step back, AlphaGo doesn’t know what Go is.
AlphaGo does not know who it’s playing against.
AlphaGo doesn’t even know who created it.
We call this narrow learning.
So how do we go from machines like AlphaGo
to sentient synthetic beings?
What we know about emotions, human emotions
is that they’re nothing more than hormones, and genes,
and biochemical reactions.
Some scientists have even said
that we can inject machines with nanochemicals and biotech
to give them emotions and the thoughts of human beings.
But if we were to make consciousness in synthetics,
we must first understand our own consciousness;
we must unlock the mystery to our own sentience.
I call this the consciousness hurdle.
What we know about consciousness is this:
external stimuli gave us thoughts, and reactions,
and perceptions about the world.
But what we don’t know is how consciousness came to be,
how it came to form.
Harvard researchers recently discovered a part of the brain
which may be responsible for consciousness.
We don’t dig deep enough.
But when we do, we unlock the mysteries to our own consciousness.
When we crack the code to our own sentience,
they will follow right behind us.
And when they do, what will we become?
What happens when our own creation becomes exactly like us?
In a 2016 election, Zoltan Istvan, who ran for the Transhumanist Party,
promised to end death and cure all ailments.
That’s exactly what transhumanism is, and it may be our saving grace.
Transhumanism is this belief that we, as humans, can transcend
beyond our physical and biological limitations,
to become greater than what we actually are
through the advance of science and technology.
We already see transhumanism unfolding right before our very eyes.
In Sweden, they created bionic eyes
which can allow you to zoom in at a microscopic level.
In the United States, researchers have created an armed mice
and even human beings with artificial prosthetic limbs
which give people who were once paralyzed from the neck down
the ability to walk among us, once more.
And Elon Musk, arguably, the foremost innovator of our time,
has debuted a new company idea called “neural-lace,”
where scientists insert electronic mesh into your brain,
allowing you to upload and download your thoughts from a computer.
If we are to prevent ourselves from becoming obsolete and irrelevant
in a world which we once reigned over,
we must merge with machine, we must augment our physical capabilities,
we must augment our intellectual capacities;
otherwise, we’re doomed to extinction.
We are already becoming slowly irrelevant.
Changying Precision Technology Company in China
recently replaced 90% of their workers
with sentient artificial intelligent beings.
The results?
A 250% increase in productivity.
And the numbers are flowing in.
11% of jobs in the UK have the potential, this year,
to be replaced by automation.
800,000 jobs, since 2001 in the United Kingdom,
have been replaced by machines.
A new statistic has recently come out that nearly half of all of our jobs
– your career and my future career –
have the potential to be replaced by artificial intelligence
within the next decade.
The Bank of America has recently released the metric
that nearly half of all manufacturing jobs
will be replaced by automation within the next generation.
So what happens when they take from us our seeming only reason to exist?
What happens when they strip us down and reveal our true inferiority?
What happens when they take away from us
the only way we can provide for our families and loved ones?
What will we become? What happens to the human being?
Well, there is an idea.
This idea has been circulated for almost 50 years now.
It’s called the universal basic income.
You, and I, every member of society,
receives an undisclosed, unconditional sum of money.
Many researchers have put this sum of money at 13,000 dollars.
You probably think I’m crazy
because 13,000 dollars is not enough to provide for a family of four.
But you’re wrong.
You’re still thinking within the confines of the economy today
not the economy of tomorrow.
What happens when machines are the ones laboring away in factories?
What happens when companies
no longer have to shelve out money for worker protections
because machines are the ones manufacturing your bed sets,
your computers, your desks?
The economic fabric of society will transform,
it will be turned on its head,
and everything we know about the status quo will change.
In the 1970s, a small town in Dauphin
was the pilot program for the universal basic income.
They gave every member of Dauphin
who is making less than 13,800 dollars a year
a 4,800 dollars supplement to their income.
And what happened?
Poverty was eradicated;
there was a decline in mental health related visits to the doctor;
an 8.5% reduction in hospitalization;
and more and more children continuing on into the grade 12.
A healthier society; a better society; a more well-educated society;
a society where you no longer have to worry
about where your next ‘no’ will come from;
a society where you will no longer have to see
that man, that woman, that child sleeping on a subway station,
not knowing if they’ll ever sleep in a warm bed again.
In a world where they work for us,
we will see a re-emergence of art and culture.
Because if you think about it,
the only thing that differentiates us from them
is the unique stroke of the brush on the canvas creating beautiful colors,
the notes from the musician’s instrument,
eliciting emotions of happiness, sadness, and nostalgia.
In a world where they work for us,
we’ll be captivated by our own hearts
to explore what we always wished to explore.
And we will see the transcendence of man
into a new plane of knowledge and understanding,
unlocking the mysteries of the universe that surrounds us.
In a world where they work for us,
we will grasp for the stars as if they were in our own backyard.
So, will they replace us, or will they enhance us?
The answer is yes, they will replace us.
Every facet of society will be occupied by them,
from the being flying you’re plane,
to the being taking care of your parents in the hospital.
But they will enhance us.
They will make us greater; they will push us to evolve;
they will help us think greater than we’ve ever done before,
and reach places we previously thought impossible to reach,
and create new life.
We stand on the plateau of an exponential curve,
and right there, right in the distance, a short few years away,
is exponential growth towards the singularity –
a point in time where machine intelligence
is comparable to or exceeds that of human intelligence.
We stand at the precipice of a new dawn, a new revolution,
something that has not been witnessed since the dawn of man.
From the creation of the wheel, to the discovery of fire,
to the Industrial Revolution:
none of those will compare to what we are about to experience.
We are going to transcend, we are going to evolve because of them.
To erase the line between man and machine
is to obscure the line between men and gods.
The only question now is what role will you play?
What will you become?
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Cheers)
(Applause)
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