(inspiring music)
In the 1960s,
computers seemed poised
to surpass human intelligence.
(beeping)
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
I'm sorry, Dave.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
What are you talking about, Hal?
This mission is too important
for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Then came decades of frustration and setbacks.
Machines, it turns out,
struggle with balance and common sense.
An early English Russian translation of
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"
comes out as, "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."
(dramatic music)
In 2010, all that changes.
A.I. is revolutionized by deep learning,
neural networks that discern complex patterns
in huge quantities of data
and react in real time.
Almost overnight,
we can talk to our phones
and be chauffeured by a self driven car.
If you look under the hood
as to what's powering a lot of these breakthroughs,
it's machine learning.
It's not the old fashioned kind of A.I.
that once upon a time beat us in chess
where the intelligence is programmed in by humans
and then the machine is just better at it
because it can do things faster.
Rather, the machine has actually learned itself,
little bit like a child,
from taking massive amounts of data
and therefore it becomes able to do things
that even the programmers can't do and don't understand.
It's the ultimate promise and peril,
machines teaching themselves.
(dramatic music)
In the popular imagination,
A.I. triggers the apocalypse.
In the scientific community,
thinking machines are often dismissed
as a distant dream.
MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark sees a third way.
The reason
that we have more power on this planet than tigers
is not 'cause we have sharper claws or stronger muscles.
It's because we're smarter than the tigers.
If we ever design machines that are smarter than us,
there's no guarantee that we're gonna remain in control.
I'm optimistic that we can find good solutions
to all of these challenges with A.I.
but it might take a long time,
it might take decades to get those answers we need.
Perhaps the most common use of A.I.
is the Google search algorithm.
In recent years,
the smart humans at Google
have gone on an A.I. shopping spree,
gobbling up a dozen companies.
Their apparent goal was summed up by one tech pioneer,
step one, solve intelligence.
Step two, use it to solve everything else.
The reason we're hearing so much more
about A.I. in the news these days
is simply because the field is making great progress.
A.I. has gotten very good
both at very low level cognitive processing
such as looking at pictures and figuring out
whether that's a cat or a dog
and also at the things
that we humans used to think was very high level
like playing chess,
checking if mathematical proof is correct.
Somehow it's in the middle there
that A.I. is struggling the most,
kind of putting it all together.
Thanks to deep learning,
facial recognition software
can tell identical twins apart.
But ask a computer
whether people on a surveillance camera are fighting
or being playful
and it has no clue.
Tegmark believes that machines,
just like their human counterparts,
are far more likely to be inept than evil.
If we ever succeed in building A.I.
that's even smarter than us,
then the main thing we need to worry about
isn't malice but competence.
Maybe you get a good laugh
out of the bugs that crash your laptop
and make you lose one hour of work
but it's less funny if the thing that crashes
is your self driving car or your self driving airplane.
(dramatic music)
Perfect machines
require perfect and precise instructions.
If you simply direct a self driving car
to get to the airport as fast as possible,
it will race there
without regard to speed limits or pedestrian safety.
But unlike humans,
computers learn collectively.
If one masters the secret of avoiding airport traffic,
every other one in a shared network
acquires the same skill.
Smart machines seem destined to infiltrate
nearly every aspect of our lives.
And if they live on the web or in the cloud,
there is no off switch.
I'm optimistic
that we can create an awesome future with technology
as long as we win this race
between the growing power of technology
and the growing wisdom with which we manage it.
And traditionally, the strategy we used
for staying ahead in this race
was learning by mistakes.
We invented fire,
screwed up a bunch of times,
invented the fire extinguisher.
But with more advanced technology,
we don't want to learn from mistakes.
It's a terrible strategy.
We want to be proactive, not reactive
and get things right the first time
'cause that might be the only time we'll have.
Scientists can be blinded
by their hunger for knowledge.
Years after leading the Manhattan Project,
Robert Oppenheimer admitted,
when you see something that is technically sweet,
you go ahead and do it.
You argue about what to do
only after your technical success.
That is how it was with the atomic bomb.
But great minds also recognize
the value of cooperation
and the benefits of sharing knowledge.
I think the only hope for our future safety
must lie in a collaboration
based on confidence and good faith
with the other peoples of the world.
Tegmark has taken on the mission
of ensuring that A.I. benefits mankind.
In 2014, he cofounded the Future of Life Institute
where top minds work to safeguard life
and develop optimistic visions for the future.
Tegmark and his colleagues know
the destiny of A.I. is wide open.
It could become like the internet,
a vast upside and relatively small risks
or like nuclear weapons,
enormous risks with minimal benefits.
When we glibly say let's put human values into the A.I.,
it sounds great
until you start asking yourself,
"Well, who's values exactly?
"ISIS values, Hitler's values, my values?"
And this is a very important conversation
I think needs to be had
not only by those of us who work on the technical stuff
but by everybody in society.
It's philosophy with a deadline, really.
Revolutions take unexpected turns.
The Apollo missions led to a new focus
on the Earth, ecology and globalization.
The A.I. revolution
could trigger greater appreciation and understanding
of the most complex machinery we know of,
the human mind.
A.I. could relieve us of drudgery and tedious tasks
or steal our jobs
and rob our lives of meaning.
It's a primal force like fire,
the same fire that keeps us warm and cooks our food
can scorch our skin and incinerate our homes.
I think it's obvious
that A.I. is going to keep automating
more and more of today's jobs
and this is something that both poses a lot of challenges
and also opens up great opportunities.
The challenge, of course, is that everybody loses their job
has to find some other source of income
and meaning in their lives.
But our children when they're five years old
they don't seem to have any problem
finding meaning and purpose in their lives
even though they don't have a job.
So I think it's a fascinating set of questions
for psychologists, sociologists,
and a spectrum of other thinkers to ask themselves,
"What kind of society do we want to make
"where we can all flourish with all this high technology
"and have it working for us rather than against us?"
And what will A.I. get out of the deal?
Will it experience joy or suffering?
Will it want to?
If I am driving down the road,
I have this subjective experience
of colors, sounds, vibrations, emotions
but does a self driving car have any subjective experience?
Does it feel like anything
to be this self driving car or not?
I bet that question has an answer
and there should be some equation which tells you
that this kind of information processing is conscious
and this kind is not.
I would love it if we can find it.
Not so long ago,
we shared the Earth with numerous other species of hominids.
Humans survived and thrived,
apparently because of our ability to adapt and to cooperate,
the same skills we'll need in the future.
President Kennedy,
who inspired mankind to reach the moon,
called himself an idealist without illusions.
It's an apt description of Max Tegmark,
who dreams of man and machine joining
in a grand alliance.
One of the most exciting things we've learned from science
is that the opportunity for the future of life
is so much more awesome than we thought.
We have billions and billions of years ahead of us,
not just on this planet
but potentially on maybe 10 to the power of 57 times
more volume out there in this amazing cosmos.
If we want to actually use
this fantastic cosmic endowment we have,
we're absolutely gonna need A.I..
Who wants to sit in a space ship for three million years
to get to Andromeda?
A much better way of doing it
is develop advanced nanotechnology with A.I.,
send some nanoprobes there,
have them set up some constructor stations,
and then if I want to send myself,
well, digitize the information,
send it there at the speed of light
in an intergalactic email
and have people built there.
That's a much more feasible way
than sending a bunch of meat bags
on this crazy journey.
Ultimately, if we want the life we have here to spread
to more than a puny fraction of this amazing cosmos,
we're gonna need A.I..
When we reach the stars,
we shouldn't be surprised if we encounter other life forms.
Perhaps not flesh and blood
but ancient alien A.I. of unimaginable intelligence.
(mysterious ambient music)