Preparing for a future with Artificial Intelligence | Robin Winsor | TEDxYYC

The sea squirt is a fascinating little creature, it is quite pretty there, it lives most of its life in the water, filtering seawater through its tubes and obtaining its food, it is not always so sedentary, although in its juvenile stage It is a free-swimming organism. exploring the world around him having a good time but that youthful exuberance can't continue forever after a while he finds that a rock sets and anchors and that's where he will be for the rest of his life but what to do with the food until he gets the cute blue buns, well, he eats his brain, think about it if you're not going to move anymore, you don't need a bigger, smaller brain, nature shows us from a giant sequoia to a tiny little mosquito if you don't you're going to move You don't have a brain, if you're going to move then you have some ability to think, so that tells us interesting things about the world of humans, robots and

artificial

intelligence

.

In the field of

artificial

intelligence

, advancements are happening all the time. In fact, advances are constantly coming to us faster and faster, the pace of our world is changing and if you think you can keep up with the pace today, what about tomorrow within artificial intelligence? A couple of years ago something amazing happened in the field of gaming which is a subpart of artificial intelligence, a program called alphago was written by a group called deep mind and alphago received all the accumulated knowledge about gold go. It is computationally much more difficult than chess and requires a lot of training and playing against experts. he finally faced the world champion and people thought that there was no way artificial intelligence could face a human.

This is one of the things that only we can do and lo and behold, artificial intelligence defeated the human, but something much more fundamental happened. The next year and it didn't get as much attention, but it was a little more important, a new program was written called Alphaphage Zero and they didn't give it the benefit of human knowledge, they just showed it black stones white stones this is how you play game and they set it up playing against the previous year's champion program on a flash computer at computer speed, he became the champion, he would beat alphago a hundred games to none and in doing so he developed plays that after thousands of years of playing the game The humans They had never considered that it was like playing with an alien, but Alphago Zero is not going anywhere, it is not leaving home, but with the arrival of autonomous trucks and cars with unmanned aerial vehicles and drones, robots that were previously fixed. to the factory are like young sea squirts that go out and explore their environment, and as they do, we see the artificial intelligence that makes this possible become more mobile, become more intelligent, and begin to resemble something we would soon recognize as a brain.

We are going to have to reevaluate our entire relationship with technology, there are two major waves that have affected us, the first has already begun and that is the era in which we have specialists in professional artificial intelligence programs called narrow AI and robotics, together they go to make us question a lot about who we are and how we order our society, the second wave will be even more fundamental in a couple of decades or so, but certainly within the lifetime of most of us here today we will see one of artificial general intelligence. That has the capacity of all of us combined and it will be like sharing the planet with a new form of life.

These are slightly scary or maybe very scary changes, but how we handle them and how we handle that second wave really depends on the first. So let's look back at history and see how good we humans are at handling major changes. You can see where this is going up to the year 1400. Books were a very rare commodity, they were usually produced by monks in scriptorium, the monk would spend his entire life on it. He produced only a couple of volumes beautiful works of art but expensive, rare and literacy, of course, was correspondingly low. That all changes in 1440, when Gutenberg invents the printing press and suddenly we can print all kinds of things, we can print pamphlets, political treatises and yes, Bibles, but do the monks rise up and try to destroy the printing press?

No, first of all, at first they were quite peaceful people, but this is not a sudden and direct existential change, it is gradual and today we still see people. try to control what comes out of the printers, but the printers themselves are left alone. Fast forward a few hundred more years, to 1700, and weaving, taking cloth, making cloth and selling it was literally a cottage industry, the whole family would get together and participate in gathering wool, spinning it, producing textiles and that's how you put food in the table, but with mechanization comes the spinning jenny, the jacquard loom and suddenly the domestic weaver cannot compete and without a social safety net, suddenly they have no way to put food on the table one of the lessons of history It's that people tolerate an astonishing amount of things, but if you deny them a way to feed their children, you will have sown the seeds of revolution, and sure enough, in the early 19th century the British had more troops in England fighting the breakers. of machines or Luddites, as they became known, that on the continent fighting against Napoleon, so today we find ourselves at a fork in the road, new technology brings great promise, but also great disruption, how do we handle that. it's up to us we can choose what we can't do is choose not to have technology once it's invented it stays invented you can't put the genie back in the bottle so in this new world of technology who wouldn't want one same? -driving cars are safer, everyone learns from the mistakes they make instead of each one of us and they learn one at a time who would not want more efficient deliveries and all the things that entail, consider well the job that it is about a car driver truck disappear one of the most common jobs in North America today that provides a decent income without a higher education also consider the taxi driver job consider not only those people but also the restaurant and motel along the way they house and feed to those Those drivers are disappearing and will disappear very, very soon.

Now some politicians will tell you that they are going to bring back declining industries, like coal mining, and you know, with policy changes maybe they will, but if they do. Industries will not bring workers back, so the modern coal mine will use robots, not humans. In the tar sands of northern Alberta, giant trucks are now self-driving and more efficient, smaller in footprint and more economical. unviable and could actually get a pipeline to BC. There are all kinds of good things that could happen from this, but who wouldn't want this? Ask an unemployed truck driver, then at this point a speaker will usually tell you yes, yes, this is it. very disruptive, but just like textile workers who eventually became factory workers or graphic designers who became web designers, new jobs will appear and all those old jobs you didn't really want will go to the machines, but this time It's different because machines are reaching human-level capabilities.

Do you really believe that your job, whatever it may be, can't be done by a super-efficient computer or a full-fledged robot or a combination of the two and if your job can? So why can't new jobs be done by them too? So we are faced with a situation where we have to compete with machines for a while, but will this happen quickly or did we have time to think about it? and get used to the idea, well I have already mentioned the pace of change if we look back in history again in the four years of the first world war between 1914 and 1918 an entire empire arose an entire social order the class system came below The world changed radically in just a few years at a time in history when we thought the pace of change had been glacial.

And now? This dawned on me a few years ago when I attended a geophysical conference and watched a number of the presenters talking about newly discovered planets, all the presenters were introduced as XO biologists and I thought, what the heck is an exobiologist? He's the scientist who studies the possibilities of life around a newly discovered planet, but those EXO biologists had become EXO biologists in just a couple of years after the mission launched, less time than it takes to get a degree in biology, so things are changing so quickly, how can we keep up? If it's faster than art, we can get an education faster than we can pass a regulation or legislation.

Are we doing it well? Let's take a look at the legal system and see if perhaps that might mean a bit more nimble change and, surprisingly, this brings us to the curious case of the glue sniffing in Glasgow in the early 1980s, in the UK there was a glue sniffing epidemic across the UK and this was a real problem because obviously it is terribly harmful but there was no law against it, glue was not illegal, the plastic bags that children used were not illegal and then believe it. or not, some enterprising corner store merchants came up with the idea that some poor children couldn't participate because they couldn't afford a whole bottle of glue, so they started measuring out a few pieces of glue into plastic bags and make glue sniffing kits and sell them to children the moral compass hmm I don't know anyway the police said enough, they said no, no, we can't because it's not illegal, the system in most of Canada in England is common law, so there are statutes, things that Parliament says are illegal. and things that are known to be illegal based on precedent, so to fix this in England or most of Canada you would have to pass new laws that mean committees and sending things and sending them back and sending them after the Queen has signed and so And eventually, while all the children are harmed, a law is passed in Scotland;

However, their system is based not only on common law but also on civil law, and in civil law it is not the priests who deal with matters, it is the principle, and in Scottish law it is illegal to harm children, so they quickly arrested these guys and put them in jail for three years and the High Court judge said on appeal that it would be bad if the law couldn't handle crimes that arise in modern times, so that maybe that hope that the legal system will become a little more flexible in Canada because of the way the Quebec system is also incorporating French civil law, so let's move on to another why Scotsman because I'm fond of my Scotsman Adam In 1776, Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and established the foundations of capitalism.

With that, he talked mainly about the division and pricing of labor, but if all work is done by machines, where does that leave capitalism? It takes away the very basis for us moving forward with robot factories that produce the goods we need. of the raw materials that are outside and then if those factories and robots are owned by a few oligarchs, there will be some super rich people and the rest of us waiting for patronage from those, a world of massive inequality, another approach could be that. We affirm that ownership of all those resources belongs to the people who live on the earth and we have implemented something called universal basic income.

Now the ubi universal basic income is generally seen as supporting the poor, but remember we are all going to be giving our jobs to robots, so who gets the ubi? That would be all of us, so we really need to have a conversation about SU. I'm with you, everyone has enough to live without having a job to go to some of us will not be up to the challenge, but some of us will explore, discover what truly makes us ourselves and in doing so, explore nature of human nature. What defines us? Is it just our job?

I hope not I hope it's something else but with that we have to hurry because time is running out that only takes us to the end of that first wave of change the second wave of change is artificial general intelligence we know the difference between a chimpanzee and a human , we know the difference between the IQ of the proverbial village idiot, not so much an Einstein of one hundred and sixty to one hundred and sixty-five, but can we understand the IQ of a new being who has an IQ of 5000 because he does There is no mistake , the AI ​​train won't stop at the human station, it will head straight to a destination we can't even understand, so what are we going to do about it?

Well, there are certainly challenges, there are many promises that we wouldn't make. You want to have a friend with an IQ of 5000, take care of yourself, but you wouldn't want to have someonewho doesn't like you. We faced existential crises in the past. We thought the plagues of the middle ages would kill. for all of us and it was the end of the world but it was not more recently when the first hydrogen bombs exploded, not the atomic bombs but the hydrogen bomb. Many scientists thought that the chain reaction would not stop with the bomb because there is a lot of hydrogen in the atmosphere and they would remove the entire atmosphere from the earth leaving the planet lifeless why the hell would you do it right?

The American argument was good timing if we don't do it, the Russians will be better off dead than red fire, luckily. we survived recently, concerned citizens sued to try to stop CERN from starting up the Large Hadron Collider for fear that we would create a mini black hole and then we would all be sucked into it if we were sucked into the black hole we wouldn't know at this point because from the outside we would have been gone but we would see me anyway, that's another thing we've survived, that's good, so why should we fear a new super intelligent being?

Well, most likely he has no hostility towards us, but this new artificial general intelligence may emerge from a controlled research laboratory, but it may suddenly appear in the software equivalent of a nuclear chain reaction. If we were to leave a project to find the millions of bits of pi or perhaps a factory that is trying to maximize paperclip production, we would simply be on the road. I'm sure the people who built this fine theater had nothing against ants. and Moles who lived here before but still poured the concrete, so if this is the case, all we can do, like a parent raising a child, is try to create the initial conditions that will be most favorable to having this new super intelligence favorable to us.

These are going to be tremendously turbulent times, so buckle up because as we move forward we have to get this first stage right, we have to figure out how to handle the changes in our economy, in our legal system and in our ability to define ourselves . who we work for so that AGI, artificial general intelligence, emerges from a kind society instead of a bad one and that adjacent possible is absolutely magical and could be the golden age for humanity, so let's try to get it right, thank you.