(mechanical gears whirring)
(skull cracking)
Get the human.
(lasers zapping)
(Enlai screaming)
Thanks to Hollywood,
this is our image of artificial intelligence.
(suspenseful music)
(Enlai sighing)
Surrender, human.
(suspenseful music)
We imagine AI taking over the planet,
dominating mankind.
But what is the real picture?
What is artificial intelligence?
What?
(mechanical gears whirring)
(lights zapping)
(hydraulics whirring)
(haunting synth music)
Get the human.
And nothing but the truth.
Honey, would you life some coffee?
Yes, please.
(drill whirring)
(hard drive booting)
(Enlai jolting)
Is it my turn?
I'm still thinking.
(mechanical gears whirring)
(robot beeping)
(students bustling)
(curious orchestral music)
Alan Turing is considered
the father of computer science
and artificial intelligence.
In 1950, he wrote that
a computer would deserve to be considered intelligent
if it could convince a human being that it was human.
(playful orchestral music)
Before I try to understand artificial intelligence,
I first want to better appreciate natural intelligence,
so I'm here at the Singapore Zoo to get face to face
with some of nature's most intelligent creatures.
Orangutans are one of mankind's closest relatives.
I don't know about you,
but when I see some of my own human relatives,
I don't always see intelligence.
But when I look at these guys
and see the spark behind their eyes,
wow.
More intelligent animals should be able to learn more
and to solve more complex problems.
Right now, the orangutans are
enjoying their puzzle feeders.
Based on their intelligence,
they have to figure out how to get those nuts to enjoy it.
So it's like a test.
A test on their brains.
In the puzzle is like a maze,
so the orangutans have got to use a stick to push that nut
until he gets to the hole and then it drops down.
But the next layer of that opening
is either smaller or bigger, so the stick can't fit in.
So they got to find another stick or modify the stick.
So some of the orangutans are smart
by bringing two or three sticks of various sizes,
so they don't have to go around looking for it.
When we first installed the puzzle feeder,
some of them took only a few seconds.
They outsmarted you.
Outsmarted us sometimes, so now we are trying to
figure out how to outsmart them again
so they won't do it so fast.
They are pretty amazing, aren't they?
Aping the way living creatures see and learn
is the goal of a whole branch of AI: computer vision.
(mechanical clicking)
(robot whistling)
(playful orchestral music)
While a digital camera can take high quality images,
it doesn't really see or know what it's looking at.
To the machine, it's just a bunch of code and data.
Processing.
A group of zebra standing on top of a lush green forest.
But with computer vision,
machines learn how to recognize what they see,
and because this resembles how we see and learn,
you can kind of call it artificial intelligence.
(phone beeping)
A giraffe eating leaves from a tree.
Yes!
Correct.
(phone beeping)
A herd of elephants
standing next to a body of water.
Oh yes!
32-year-old man with black hair, looking neutral.
(Enlai chuckling)
32 years old, heh.
How accurate!
(groovy rock music)
This is Annabelle.
Hi!
She and the good folks at Neural Bay
have prepared a sexy demonstration for me
to show me how a computer can learn to
see and recognize things.
And today we'll be training a computer to hunt for...
Boobies!
(Enlai laughing)
As you know, to be specific, just a cleavage like this,
this line here.
Otherwise known as a longkang!
Why on earth are we doing this?
For fun, but basically raise up, you know,
very serious topics about data ethics,
data collection and privacy, and also implementation.
How did you teach the computer cleavage?
It's a very, very human-intensive task,
like what Yen is doing.
He's drawing boxes around the image,
just the part where the cleavage is meant to be detected.
Okay.
You've been staring at how many?
2,000.
2,000 sets of boobies.
So let me give an analogy
as to why we are actually drawing this labels, right?
So imagine a little girl,
and you want to teach a little girl
how to recognize a dog, right?
You hold a little girl's head and your brain is,
"Go, go.
This is dog one, dog two, dog three.
So you point out another dog, totally different to the girl.
The girl is gonna guess, right?
She'll say, "I think it's a dog."
And that's where it's a guess with maybe 80% certainty
that that is a dog.
So that's what we call a confidence score.
So how do we increase this confidence score?
You show a girl hundred thousand images of dogs, right?
And eventually when she sees a dog, she's going to go like,
"Oh yeah, that is definitely for sure a dog."
For this experiment,
they've trained a computer to judge
when cleavage is socially acceptable.
I retrained this as acceptable,
and all the way down here as unacceptable,
and whatever's in the middle, we let the computer decide.
We have a few clothing items right there
and you can dress Vivian Vicky.
So if she were to be fairly conservative.
Okay, yeah, acceptable, acceptable.
I agree.
Okay, oh.
Oh.
(Annabelle chuckling)
Wow.
Put it down.
Still okay.
Just keep going.
We're getting a gray area right here.
Ah, there we go!
Oh!
I wouldn't want my kids in the future to kind of like
see somebody walking around looking like that.
Oh, now it's acceptable.
Okay, yes.
Yes, it works, it works.
Yes!
Yay!
Well, I guess it's time to test it on a human being.
That's you?
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Because I don't believe my acting is like a mannequin.
(Annabelle laughing)
First button.
Ha ha.
Ta da!
Acceptable or unacceptable?
Unacceptable.
Oh finally, thank goodness.
(Annabelle laughing)
Yep!
I was getting a bit worried.
I thought I'm going to have to take off my shirt.
If you walk out of your house like that,
I'm pretty sure a lot of people will find this unacceptable.
Why?
What's wrong?
From now on, I will be walking out of my house like this.
Hide your kids!
(both laughing)
The computer scientists
at the National University of Singapore
claim that their robot can recognize common objects
that you place in front of it.
(bowl dinging)
So I brought some random things to put it to the test.
(duckie squeaking)
Alexa, ask Jerry to pick up the rubber duck.
Okay, looking for the rubber duck.
Hold on.
(duckie squeaking)
Well, the magic here is that
even though Jerry has never seen
any of this particular object,
he has seen thousands of images of all sorts of
different kinds of objects,
just like humans as babies.
After we see enough example of them, we start to understand
what animals are like and what toys are like.
Okay, looking for the red truck, hold on.
By looking at thousands and thousands of images,
it will be able to extract some kind of
distinguishing characteristics that identifies the image.
So how has Jerry absorbed all this information?
It used to be that professionals, engineers,
that would handcraft these features,
points, edges or corners.
And it turns out humans are
not nearly as good as the machines
to automatically discover these features.
That's the latest advances in machine learning
and deep learning technologies.
Advances in machine learning and vision
have given computers human-like perception.
They can spot a face in the crowd.
Hello?
I know you.
They can see and anticipate oncoming traffic.
It can even spot diseases.
(bubbles popping)
(bright orchestral music)
At the National University of Singapore,
researchers have trained a computer to
differentiate cancerous cells from healthy cells.
It turns out that many diseases that we have
all have a signature in the way DNA is packed.
And inside this cancer cell nucleae,
the packing of the DNA is very different.
Based on his discovery,
Professor Shivashankar's team is using machine learning
to analyze DNA packing
in thousands of cancerous and healthy cells.
With enough data and training, AI could enable pathologists
to diagnose cancer in its early stages
when it's easier to treat, but harder to detect.
If you want to do early detection,
you need some AI-based approaches,
because it's very hard to detect visually, manually.
Just like finding a needle in a haystack.
But for early stages, it's a very subjective decision
because I've met with a number of pathologists.
They have told me that, "My brain is a machine.
It has already learned."
But that depends on the experience of the pathologist.
But we need to eliminate the subjectivity.
The researchers say their technique
is being refined and validated
and could be used in clinics in two to three years.
We'll see you after this commercial break.
Another way AI is becoming human is through language.
How can I help you today?
But can AI give machines a sense of humor?
These jokes are written by a computer.
(comedian chuckling)
Stupid computer.
(mechanical gears whirring)
(hard drive booting)
(mechanical gears whirring)
(men chatting)
(Enlai giggling)
Another important aspect of intelligence
is our grasp of language.
An ape may be able to learn a few hundred words,
but the average human knows over 20,000 words.
Apparently.
There's a huge gulf between zookeeper and zoo exhibit.
(playful childish music)
From birth till age five,
children learn languages at a rapid pace,
and they don't need formal lessons.
Human babies are like language-learning machines.
Hello, I'm Terry the Tiger.
Are you Ollie the Ostrich?
Whoa, you're a heavy boy.
It's pointless to just
sit the child down and teach a new language.
It's not done that way.
It's more like emotion.
So if you're washing your hands with your little girl,
you say,
(Patricia speaking foreign language)
This is green, it's real paint.
There is this language acquisition device
that's in there,
and it's just able to listen to the sounds,
deciphers it, makes sense of it,
and makes use of it when it comes.
So I would say language is often caught, not taught.
(parents clapping)
♪ Baby shark do do do do do ♪
♪ Mommy shark do do do do do ♪
♪ Daddy shark do do do do do ♪
While learning languages
comes naturally to most children,
it's a much harder task for a machine.
Goodbye, everybody!
Bye!
(mechanical whirring)
(robot whistling)
Professor Francis Bond is a linguist who has, for decades,
tried to teach computers to understand language.
Well, a lot of understanding language
is common sense
and we have a lot of trouble getting computers to do that.
Out of the many possible meanings,
they'll invariably choose not quite the right one.
Okay, do you have any examples of that?
So here's an example of a sentence.
You saw this, you read this.
"I saw a kid with a cat."
And normally you build an image in your mind.
But the computer says,
"Ah, I can combine these words in many different ways."
So here we have "I saw a kid with a cat."
(Enlai laughing)
It's like animal cruelty.
Oh, and child abuse let's not forget that.
So here, "I saw a kid with a cat"
is a possible interpretation.
Using the cat as a telescope.
To overcome computers' lack of common sense,
scientists program them to follow rules
in line with how we interpret language.
To get a computer to do it,
we have to build the framework that exists in your brain.
But as you can see, just for a two-word sentence,
we're already covering the screen.
Yeah I know right?
In a 10-word sentence, you might have 10,000 features.
Natural language processing
is one of AI's hardest challenges,
but companies like Microsoft have made breakthroughs.
Microsoft say their AI can transcribe speech
better than a human can.
For the first time in history,
we exceeded human's performance.
Many people have worked on speech recognition
on the so-called switchboarder task.
Secretary of war.
We have two people
having conversation naturally,
and we need to transcribe that conversation
as accurately as possible.
If you look at the speech recognition on the switchboard,
the error rate has been above 10%
for almost like 25 years.
We're able to really make that error come down
from over 10% all the way to 5%.
That is the same level of you and me
to transcribe a natural conversation on the same task.
Transcribing speech at human levels.
How did that happen?
It's through the deep learning.
We're able to really learn from this huge amount of data,
running many experiments,
using the most advanced computing infrastructure.
Those three things really form the core
of speech breakthrough.
This prototype uses AI
to identify who's speaking
and transcribes what they're saying in real time.
You don't need to be worried about, you know,
taking notes anymore.
The poor person who has to write down the minutes,
oh well, you don't have to do that anymore.
How convenient.
Accurate transcription is key to accurate translation.
Our remote teammate in China
can see and hear a translation of this meeting.
On the sentence about center spaces
for the first time, Microsoft translation achieved
the same level or better performance
in comparison to professional people.
This provided us with a framework for us
to approach human level of performance for translation.
This translation app actually
somewhat eradicates all language barriers, right?
(hip hop electronica music)
I'm in Chongqing's Hongyadong
to try out Microsoft's translator.
My Mandarin is infamously bad,
so if it can help me, it can help anybody.
Right?
Can I try it?
(AI translator speaking Mandarin)
(vendor speaking Mandarin)
Okay.
It's quite nice.
Which one is spicy?
(AI translator speaking Mandarin)
(vendor speaking Mandarin)
Mala?
Yeah.
Let's try it.
(vendor speaking Mandarin)
Oh, it's good.
How much is it?
(AI translator speaking Mandarin)
(vendor speaking Mandarin)
It's doing-
9,481 pounds?
I'm sorry auntie, but that's too expensive for me.
I want one bag.
(AI translator speaking Mandarin)
(vendor speaking Mandarin)
Okay, xie xie.
I managed to get some shopping done with the app.
Was it perfect?
No, not really.
I think it only works with very simple statements,
but it's better than nothing, right?
(vendor hollering)
I wonder what he said.
Could you say that again?
I haven't got my app out yet.
Are you ignoring me now?
People nowadays.
(phone ringing)
Hello, how can I help you?
Hi, I'm calling to book a women's haircut
for a client.
I'm looking for something on May 3rd.
Natural language processing
has enabled computers to talk like us, debate with us-
Allow me to respond to
some of my opponent's most recent claims.
And even compose poetry.
AI wrote this book of poems.
"I have failed to love my own life.
Yet I touched the spirit in your eyes."
Not bad, right?
But there's a part of language that AI struggles with:
humor and sarcasm.
(playful blues music)
The science of humor is very underdeveloped.
Why is one person funny and someone else not funny?
We still really don't know.
Maybe I can challenge the computer to try and
write some jokes for me.
Yes, we can, we'll give you what we've got.
And if you can make them funny, anyone can make them funny.
(upbeat jazz music)
In a few moments, I'm going to be going up on stage
just before Kuma,
everyone's expecting Kuma.
(Enlai groaning)
I'm really nervous.
I have them written here, all our computer-generated jokes.
Wish me luck!
Hello, hello, hello ladies and gentlemen!
Welcome, welcome, welcome!
(audience cheering)
Don't worry, I'm not Kuma.
(audience chuckling)
I think you can tell the difference.
(audience chuckling)
I wear more makeup than Kuma.
(audience chuckling)
Okay, this is the first joke, guys.
"What do you get when you cross a frog with a road?"
(audience chattering)
"A main toad!"
(audience jeering)
Nay?
I would throw this card away,
but there are two jokes on one card, so I cannot.
So the next one, one second.
"When is a job not a job?"
(audience laughing)
[Woman In Audience] When it's a (bleep) job?
"When it's a (bleep) job?"
You sure that's not a job?
(audience laughing)
"When it is a nose job."
(audience groaning)
I like that answer, though.
(audience cheering)
Ladies and gentlemen, Kuma!
Thanks Enlai.
(Kuma chuckling)
Stupid computer cannot fight human being, la, not ever.
(audience laughing)
But what did you think of the jokes that I did just now?
It was really, really bad.
It's not even about knock-knock jokes,
or, you know, why did the chicken cross the road?
It was so bad.
It was so bad, it was like, "Whoa."
I actually thought it was gonna be like that
because you know, it needs a human to relate to people.
You know, people want to relate with the humor.
They want to relate with things about life, you know?
And a computer can't see that.
You were funnier before you even started telling jokes
from the, you know?
Okay, so slowly as it learns things like
wordplay and puns,
which you also do.
Yes, yes, of course, of course.
Do you think it will-?
Never.
Confirm, never?
Never, ever, ever, ever.
Never.
Okay, but then what if the computer just writes the script
and you still perform it.
No.
If you, if Kuma-
I'd rather bleed to death.
(Kuma laughing)
(Enlai laughing)
So AI won't be a comedian soon,
but it could be a doctor or a scientist.
She'll become as good as Einsteins or Newtons of science.
(piano tinkling)
Actually, it's surprising to me it's composed by
artificial intelligence.
AI could even turn me into an artist.
So I can hang this up in a gallery?
You can try.
(mechanical gears whirring)
(hard drive booting)
(mechanical gears whirring)
(robot beeping)
As an actor, I'm constantly confronted by new technology
in theater and the arts.
Let's play with our horns.
That's interactivity, isn't it?
Everything is so vivid, and we all get doubled.
They're really so close to you.
It's like:
Like this.
This experimental performance is run by Steve Dixon,
the president of LaSalle College of the Arts.
Because you're Enlai!
Help, there's other people!
When he isn't acting like a maniac.
Steve wrote the book on digital performance.
Artists always will look towards technology
to see if it can really increase the spectacle and so on.
Artificial intelligence is being used
in lots of interesting ways in theater now.
I think one early example,
and I can show you on video here,
an artificially intelligent performer
in the form of a large head called Jeremiah.
So it has an emotional intelligence engine,
but it is entirely AI.
It isn't being operated by someone offstage.
We will see more synth thespians.
So either projected synthetic performers
or robotic, android type of performers.
But I don't think the actor is ever going to be replaced.
I think that that human being
will still remain center stage.
So your job is secure in that.
Phew, thank goodness!
Then again, I could be a robot.
(Steve chuckling)
My job may be safe for now,
but other artists may be in for a shock.
You will be the third doctor!
(playful orchestral music)
In England, at Cambridge Consultants,
researchers have trained a computer to create art.
They call it Vincent.
Since it's called Vincent,
I want to try and do a Vincent Van Gogh painting.
Go for it.
I'm going to try drawing, anyway.
So you'll see what it's doing here is it's trying to
interpret your sketches, the lines you add on,
and as you're drawing.
So we trained on 8,000 images
from Renaissance art right through to 20th century.
So it's got people like Jackson Pollack and Rothko in there
but all of their opinions and their styles and influences
will be being used together
to try and interpret the lines you make
and create some art.
Oh, okay.
Well, I'm going to try and do something by Rothko,
which is basically just sort of like.
It's ultra abstract, isn't it?
Like that.
This looks like kueh lapis.
Very good.
Tim was quite dismissive of my art.
I think Vincent was more forgiving.
I thought my drawings were quite good, weren't they?
And I would certainly say that
the more professional or the more talented you are,
I think the better results that you can achieve.
Okay.
So with this experiment that you have here,
do you think this is going to change the future of art?
I think that you could say that this machine
has some level of creativity,
but it understands only a very small world.
This machine only knows those 8,000 images.
So its inspiration is quite limited, you could say.
It might change the future of my art, maybe,
but for somebody who's actually a good artist, I think not.
Simple forms of this kind of AI
let us make our selfies resemble artistic masterpieces.
But I wonder what the art establishment thinks of
AI emulating the masters.
Actually artists draw from
diverse cultural sources.
The curator says Singapore's National Gallery
houses a style of paintings
that combines Eastern and Western influences.
This is a very good example of what we call
the Nan Yung style.
This is a painting by Lee Man Fong
and it's titled "Balinese Life."
And here we see an example of his use of
Chinese ink painting brush techniques,
but bringing in kind of the Western atmospheric perspective
to give a sense of distance to the painting.
If you look at this face,
it looks like it's from a Chinese painting.
Exactly, yeah.
Right?
Yes.
But then the way these ladies are reclined.
Exactly.
It's taken from the Western pictorial traditions,
the reclining nude.
So I have used a combination of styles,
something very primitive, which is orangutans-
Wow.
Uh huh.
Something very contemporary, which is a selfie of myself,
And a style of painting
which you could kind of describe as cubism,
using artificial intelligence technology
to come up with this.
Right, well I think it's interesting.
The composition, you know,
having your self portrait at the center
draws our attention to it.
And as you mentioned, it's also a kind of cubistic
or a bit of surrealistic elements.
So I can hang this up in a gallery?
You can try.
(Seng Fu laughing)
You may not succeed.
Okay, how can I improve myself?
When you make digital art, of course,
it's not just using an application,
because that's just kind of a very formulaic way of working.
I think for important art or art that's kind of creative,
we have to push out of these boundaries.
Will artificial intelligence aid artists in the future?
Or will they replace artists?
Somewhere in between,
whereby technology or augmented intelligence
is used to collaborate with artists to make art.
Cool.
All they need is a platform.
And all this needs is a space.
I'm going to put it right here, okay?
Right here.
Yeah, let it stay there, it looks great.
Okay?
Okay.
Enjoy, guys, enjoy.
AI is going beyond visual art.
This piece of music was created
with the help of an AI composer called AIVA.
(dramatic orchestral music)
Wow, what a stirring soundtrack.
You know, it's very emotional.
There are highs and there are lows.
Strangely, it's all written by AI.
AIVA is an artificial intelligence
that has been taught music composition
by reading essentially 30,000 scores
of the great composers of history.
So, you know, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven.
What AIVA looks in those scores is for patterns
in the melody, in the rhythm and the harmony.
And based on those patterns,
it will be able to create a model of
what music is supposed to sound like.
(uplifting classical music)
On the screen because the representation of
how AIVA understands music.
This looks like a colorblindness test.
(Denis chuckling)
Aell, AIVA definitely isn't colorblind
when it comes to musical style.
Each one of these points
is a particular piece in our database
labeled here by, you know, the composer.
I'd like AIVA to compose a piece called "Becoming Human."
I would like something that can tug at the heartstrings.
Okay.
Something emotional.
You got it.
Yeah, I need one tear by the first 15 seconds.
That's, um-
We'll try that.
We'll ask AIVA to do her best,
but you know, that'll be subjective.
AIVA composes original music
in less than three days.
AIVA's registered with a French composer society
and has a built-in plagiarism checker.
She's written music for the City of Dubai,
global corporations, and now, me.
(dramatic piano music)
AIVA's latest composition, "Becoming Human," is presented
before a panel of music students and their teachers.
Kind of soothing,
but also quite dramatic at the same time.
Seems to me as if I would have heard it before.
And there were a lot of quotes
from music that we had heard before.
It's like, strange, a bit.
A little bit strange.
I like this piece, and it's actually surprising to me
it's composed by artificial intelligence.
A bit of pain,
but also at the same time, some hope.
The ending sort of leaves you wanting more of it.
And I think that's a good sign of
a well-crafted piece of music.
It did tug on my heartstrings a bit, I guess,
because it was kind of like melodramatic,
but this piece of music, "Becoming Human,"
may not be an appropriate soundtrack for this show.
It's probably better for like "Titanic II."
AI isn't just mastering the arts.
It's taking on science and medicine.
Welcome to Babylon.
How can I help you today?
I've got a really bad headache.
Do you get any warning signs
before your main symptoms start?
Babylon Healthsave have taught their AI chat bot
to think like a doctor.
Have you felt dizzy, unsteady, lightheaded,
or like the room is spinning, recently?
No.
The most likely cause of your symptoms
is a migraine.
For more information on possible causes and treatments,
I've sent you a full report in your Alexa app.
The text-based Babylon chat bot
is already serving the National Health Service
and 32,000 people in central London.
Once Babylon diagnosis an illness,
it helps you get medical treatment
or a doctor's appointment.
The beauty of the app is
if you click on book an appointment,
we can see when the next video consultation is available.
Behind Babylon as a team of
scientists, engineers, and medical specialists
who train the AI with medical knowledge
from textbooks and research papers.
Their chief scientist says their AI
can match human doctors at certain tasks.
When we compare the average accuracy
in terms of a diagnosis
of the AI against a set of human doctors,
we're very close.
But then when we consider triaging ability,
that's the ability to tell the patient
where to go to seek advice,
stay at home, pharmacy, G.P., emergency department,
our AI is already safer than a human doctor.
Could it one day surpass the human doctor?
Our aim is not to surpass or to replace human doctors.
Our aim is always
to augment the intelligence of human doctors
with artificial intelligence.
Since the AI is able to be kept up to date
with the latest medical knowledge,
and because we're able to see, you know,
hundreds of thousands of patients potentially per day,
and so because of the application of machine learning,
we expect that over time,
we should start to get close to
the level of intelligence of human doctor.
If an AI doctor is on the horizon,
how about a scientist?
Computer science pioneer Alan Turing
theorized about AI at the University of Manchester.
His successors at the university's biotechnology institute
have created a robot scientist called Eve.
She's designed to automate
simple forms of scientific research,
not just the experiments you see physically happening here,
but also the thinking and reasoning involved in science.
She forms her own hypotheses,
she thinks of experiments to test the hypotheses
and continues the cycle of scientific research.
Scientist Eve discovered that
an antibacterial chemical in toothpaste
also kills the organism that causes malaria.
Eve doesn't do anything
which human scientists couldn't potentially do,
but human scientists didn't discover it, you know,
it was her discovery.
How does Eve's intelligence
match up with human intelligence?
Because we regard human scientists as, you know,
being very smart, very knowledgeable.
Humans are not very good at reasoning about science,
whereas it actually plays to the strengths of
computers and AI systems.
At the moment, Eve can only do very simple forms of science,
but I think over time with better software and hardware,
she'll become as good as average scientists
and eventually over time
as good as Einsteins or Newtons at science.
That's my prediction.
Really?
(urgent electronica music)
AI as smart as Einstein?
If AI outsmarts us, machines could take over our world.
(lasers zapping)
We could totally lose control over them.
The next generation of AI could come from
unlocking secrets in our brains
and solving childhood mysteries.
I can see a lot of promise for
artificial intelligence that learn like infants.
I just hope we can avoid a nightmare future.
Help me!
(mechanical gears whirring)
(robot beeping)
Dear Professor Tegmark,
I read your book, "Life 3.0," and had a bad dream.
I dreamt I was kept in a zoo that was run by robots and AI.
Help me!
(electronics beeping)
(Enlai gasping)
Oh food, food, feeding time!
Feed me!
Do you think this could really happen?
Yours sincerely, Enlai.
Thanks for your message, Enlai.
I think this could totally happen,
because the reason that we humans
have more power on this planet than the lions in the zoo
is not because we're stronger, but because we're smarter.
So if we build machines which are smarter than us,
which I think we eventually will,
then we could totally lose control over them.
But it doesn't have to be a bad thing.
We were all in the presence of smarter entities already,
mommy and daddy, when we were little,
and it worked out well, you know,
because their goals were aligned with ours.
If AI grows up to rule the world,
I hope it learns from the best in humanity.
We have a lot to offer.
Just look how cute we are.
(mechanical whirring)
(robot whistling)
Nature inspires science.
Just as bird swings inspired airplane wings,
brains inspire artificial intelligence.
MIT, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
is home to the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.
They draw on psychology and neuroscience
to build intelligent machines.
I want to understand the brain,
and if intelligent machines comes as a consequence of that,
good, but I would be happy either way.
The center's director is
a neuroscientist slash computer scientist,
Dr. Tomaso A. Poggio.
The founder of computer science,
you can argue it was Alan Turing.
He wanted to build a brain.
He ended up building a computer.
A good way to understand, to build an intelligent machine
is to understand first
the only example of intelligence we have,
which is the human brain.
Professor, talking about AI and machine learning today,
how much of it is inspired by
modeling the way our brains and minds work?
Deep neural networks have been
real big advance in the last six years or so,
suddenly making machine learning able to attain
practical use, you know,
in terms of gadgets like Alexa or autonomous driving.
And I think this is really the beginning of a golden age
for artificial intelligence applications.
Recent success stories.
What is inside of this?
Two algorithms: deep learning and reinforcement learning.
And both of them come from neuroscience as an inspiration.
Deep learning comes from a model from neurons
in the visual cortex of monkeys.
That's the basic architecture today of deep networks.
And the other one is reinforcement learning.
It's this a trade off between exploration and verification
that you can use or a mouse uses to solve a maze
and go towards a food.
And so I think if somebody asked me
what is the next breakthrough-
Yes, what is the next breakthrough?
(Enlai chuckling)
Exactly.
I would say, "I don't know."
(both chuckling)
But I think it's a good bet to think that
it will come also from neuroscience.
Neuroscience isn't their only bet.
The center partners
the Harvard Lab for Developmental Studies,
uncovering how children and infants learn
could spark next-generation AI.
I can see a lot of promise
for artificial intelligence
from attempts to build machines that learn like infants
because such a machine I think would stand the best chance
of developing something like our common sense.
And they'll be most useful if they can understand us
and share our general picture of the world.
So how does the development of intelligence
in children and infants
inform the development of artificial intelligence?
There's lots of domains in which children
develop intuitive sense, right?
There's the domain of what we like to call
common sense or naive physics,
how to objects behave,
what kind of actions do you need to
perform on a set of objects
to build a tower that won't fall over
or a bridge between two supports?
So there's a whole domain of knowledge there.
It's really over the last decade that I feel that
enough information has been amassed
that we really are in a position to
develop computer models of human infant learning,
which could serve as a basis for
developing smarter, more flexible machines.
How confident are you
that we may be able to create a truly intelligent machine?
I think it's the greatest problem,
besides making a machine, a computer
that is as intelligent as we are,
to be a long time.
(gentle childish music)
How smart AI can get is anyone's guess.
There are many books and theories about AI's future impact.
Here's best-selling author and futurist Max Tegmark.
All the recent progress in AI
makes me wonder how far it's going to go.
And I think about this question in terms of
this abstract landscape of tasks,
where the elevation of each task
represents how hard it is for AI to do at human level
and the water level represents where AI is today.
So that beach over there, for instance, represents driving.
AI is improving, the water level is rising,
and it's a really bad idea to try to make a career now
out of being a driver.
The tall tree out there might represent investing,
which will take longer to get outperformed by AI.
And then the distance I imagined tall mountains
like art, cinematography, science.
The really big question that keeps me awake at night is
"Will the water eventually flood all land?"
Because if we do, then by definition,
AI can do all jobs, even the job of AI design,
better than us,
rapidly leaving human intelligence far, far behind.
Either it's going to be
the best thing ever to happen to humanity or the worst.
I want to work hard to make sure it's the former.
(spectators chattering)
Well, there you go.
Va-va-va-voom.
(Enlai chuckling)
It's like animal cruelty.
This journey I've had studying AI
has been a real eye-opener.
Whoa, you're a heavy boy.
AI being able to make art,
(Enlai laughing)
AI being able to make music,
AI being able to understand many languages,
(AI translator speaking Mandarin)
and I think Turing would be quite thrilled
by how far AI has come.
Right?
But I don't think I will see robots
that are smarter than me.
Bingo!
Not in my lifetime.
Stupid computer cannot fight human being, la.
As long as we use these tools to help us
and not take over us.
(performers singing)
I think I'm good with that.
(robot dog speaking foreign language)
What's the most pressing when it comes to the use of AI
is our ethical use of AI.
What's right, what's wrong.
That's the question I seek to answer
in my next AI adventure.
(gavel clanking)
Order in the court!
Court is in session!
(uplifting synth music)