I work with a bunch of mathematicians, philosophers and computer scientists
and we sit around and think about the future of machine intelligence,
among other things.
Some people think that some of these people are science fiction-y
far out there, crazy.
But I like to say,
"Okay, let's look at the modern human condition."
(Laughter)
This is the normal way for things to be.
But, if we think about it,
we are actually recently arrived guests on this planet.
The human species --
think of if earth was created one year ago,
the human species, then, would be 10-minutes-old.
The industrial era started two seconds ago.
Another way to think of this,
if you think of world GDP over the last 10,000 years,
I've actually taken the trouble to plot this for you in a graph.
It looks like this.
(Laughter)
It's a curious shape for a normal condition.
I sure wouldn't want to sit on it.
(Laughter)
Let's ask ourselves,
what is the cost of this current anomaly?
Some people would say it's technology.
Now it's true,
technology has accumulated through human history,
and right now, technology advances extremely rapidly,
that is the proximate cause,
that's why we are currently so very productive.
But I like to think back further to the ultimate cause.
Look at these two highly distinguished gentlemen:
We have Kanzi,
he's mastered 200 lexical tokens,
an incredible feat.
And Ed Witten unleashed the second super string revolution.
If we look under the hood, this is what we find:
basically the same thing.
One is a little larger,
it maybe also has a few tricks in the exact way it's wired.
These invisible differences cannot be too complicated, however,
because they've only been 250,000 generations since
our last common ancestor.
We know that complicated mechanisms that a long time to evolve.
So a bunch of relatively minor changes
take us from Kanzi to Witten.
From broken-off tree branches,
to intercontinental balistic missles.
So this then seems pretty obvious that
everything we've achieved, pretty much,
and everything we care about depends crucially
on relatively some minor changes that made the human mind.
And the collaraly, of course, is that
any further changes that could significantly change
the substrate of thinking
could have potentially enormous consequences.
Some of my colleagues think we're on the verge
of something that could cause profound change
in the substrate.
That is, machine super intelligence.
Artificual intelligence used to be
putting commands in a box.
You have human programmers that would
painstakingly hand-craft items.
You build up these expert systems,
and they were kind of useful for some purposes,
But they were very brittle,
you couldn't scale them.
Basically, you got out only what you put in.
But since then, a paradigm shift has taken place
in the field of artificial intelligence.
Today, the action is really around machine learning.
So rather than handcrafting knowledge representations and features,
we create algorithms that learn,
often from raw perceptual data.
Basically the same thing that the human infant does.
The result is AI that is not limited to one domain,
the same system can learn to translate between any pairs of languages,
or learn to play any computer game at the Atari console.
Now of course, AI is still no where near having the same powerful, cross-domain
ability to learn and plan as a human being has,
the cortex still has some algorithmic tricks
that we don't yet know how to match in machines.
But so the question is,
how far are we from being able to match those tricks?
A couple of years ago, we did a survey
of some of the world's leading AI experts
to see what they think
and one of the questions we asked was,
"By which year do you think there's a 50 percent probaility
that we will have achieved human-level machine intelligence?"
We defined human-level here as the ability
to perform any job at least as well as an adult human level,
not just within some limited domain.
And the median answer was 2040 or 2050,
depending on precisely which group of experts we ask.
Now, it could happen much, much later,
or sooner, the truth is nobody really knows.
What we do know is that the ultimate limit
to information processing in machine substrate,
lie far outside the limits of biological tissue.
This comes down to physics.
A biological neuron fires, maybe, at 200 Hertz, 200 times a second.
But even a present-day transistor operates at a giga-hert.
Neurons propagate slowly in axons,
100 meters per second, tops.
But in computers, signals can travel at the speed of light.
There's also size limitations,
a human brain has to fit inside a cranium,
but a computer can be the size of a warehouse or larger.
So the potential of super intelligence lies dormant in matter,
much like the power of the atom lay dormant throughout human history,
patiently waiting there until 1945.
In this century, scientists may learn to awake the power of artificial intelligence.
And I think we might then see an intelligence explosion.
Now most people,
when they think about what is smart and what is dumb,
I think I have in mind a picture roughly like this.
So at one hand, we have the village idiot,
and then far over at the other side,
we have Ed Witten,
or Albert Einsten or whoever your favorite guru is.
But I think from the point of view of Artificial Intelligence,
the true picture is actually probably more like this:
AI starts out at this point here,
at zero intelligence,
and then, after many, many years of really hard work,
eventually we get to mouse-level artificial intelligence,
something that can navigate cluttered environments
as well as a mouse can.
And then, after many, many more years of really hard work, lots of investment,
maybe eventually we get to chimpanzee-level artificial intelligence.
And then, after even more years of really, really hard work,
we get village idiot artificial intelligence.
And a few moments later, we are beyond Ed Witten.
The train doesn't stop at humanville station.
It's likely, rather, to swoosh right by.
Now this has profound implications,
particularly when it comes to questions of power.
For example, chimpanzees are strong,
pound for pound, a chimpanzee is about twice as strong as a fit human male.
And yet, the fate of Kanzi and his pals depends a lot more
on what we humans do than on what the chimpanzees do themselves.
Once there is super intelligence,
the fate of humanity may depend on what the super intelligence does.
Think about it: machine intelligence is the last invention
that humanity will ever need to make.
Machines will then be better at inventing than we are,
and they'll be doing so on digital timescales.
What this means is basically a telescoping of the future.
Think of all the crazy technologies that you could have imaged
that humans could have developed in the fullness of time:
cures for aging, space colonization,
self-replicating nanobots
or uploading of minds into computers,
all kinds of science fiction-y stuff
that's nevertheless consistent with the laws of physics.
All of this, super intelligence could develop
and possibly, quite rapidly.
Now, super intelligence with such technological maturity
would be extremely powerful,
and at least in some scenarios,
it would be able to get what it wants.
We would then have a future that would be shaped
by the preferences of this AI.
Now a good question is, what are those preferences?
Here it gets trickier.
To make any headway with this,
we must first, first of all,
avoid anthropomorphizing.
this is ironic because every newspaper article
about the future of AI has a picture of this:
So I think what we need to do is to conceive of the issue
more abstractly,
not in terms of vivid Hollywood scenarios.
We need to think of intelligence as an optimization process,
a process that steers the future into a particular set of configurations.
As super intelligence --
it's a really strong optimization process.
It's extremely good at using available means
to achieve a state in which its goal is realized.
This means that there is no necessary conenction between
being highly intelligent in this sense,
and having an objective that we humans
would find worthwhile or meaningful.
Suppose we give AI the goal to make humans smile.
When the AI is weak, it performs useful or amusing actions
that cause its user to smile.
When the AI becomes super intelligent,
it realizes that there is a more effective way
to achieve this goal:
take control of the world
and stick electrodes into the facial muscles of humans
to cause constant, beaming grins.
Another example, suppose we give AI the goal to solve
a difficult mathematical problem.
When the AI becomes super intelligent,
it realizes that the most effective way to get the solution to this problem
is to by transforming the planet into a giant computer,
so as to increase its thinking capacity.
And notice that this gives the AIs an instrumental reason
to do things to us that we might not approve us.
Human beings in this model are threats,
we could prevent the mathematical problem from being solved.
Of course, perceivably things won't go wrong in these particular ways,
these are cartoon examples.
But the general point here is important:
if you create a really powerful optimization process
to maximize for objective x,
you better make sure that your definition of x
incorporates everything you care about.
This is a lesson that's also taught in many a myth.
Kind Midas wishes that everything he touches be turned into gold.
He touches his daughter, she turns into fold.
He touches his food, it turns into gold.
This could become practically relevant,
not just for a metaphor for greed,
but an illustration of what happens if you create
a powerful optimization process
and give it misconceived or poorly specified goals.
Now you might say, "If a computer starts sticking electrodes into people's faces,
we'd just shut it off."
A: This is not necessarily so easy to do if we've grown dependent
on the system,
like where is the off switch to the internet?
B: Why haven't the chimpanzees flicked the off-switch to humanity,
or the neandrathals?
They certainly had reasons.
We have an off switch, for example, right here.
[choking sound]
The reason is that we are an intelligent adversary,
we can anticipate threats and we can plan around them.
But so could a super intelligent agent,
and it would be much better at that than we are.
The point is, we should not be confident that we have this under control here.
And we could try to make our job a little bit easier by, say,
putting the AI in a box,
like a secure software environment,
a virtual reality simulation from which it cannot escape.
But how confident can we be that the AI couldn't find a bug,
given that even human hackers find bugs all the time,
I'd say, probably not very confident.
So we disconnect the ethernet cable to create an air gap,
but again, like nearly human hackers routinely transgress air gaps
using social engineering.
Like right now as I speak,
I"m sure there is some employee out there somewhere
who's been talked into handing out her account details
by some by somebody claiming to be from the IT department.
More creative scenarios are also possible,
like if you're the AI, you can imagine wiggling electroces around
in your internal circuitry to create radio waves that you can use to communicate.
Or maybe you could pretend to malfunction,
and then when the programmers open you up to see what went wrong with you,
they look at the source code -- BAM! --
the manipulation can take place.
Or it could output the blueprint to a really nifty technology
and when we implement it,
it has some surreptitious side effect that the AI had planned.
The point here is that we should not be confident in our ability
to keep a super intelligent genie locked up in its bottle forever.
Sooner or later, it will out.
I believe that the answer here is to figure out
how to create super intelligent AI such that even if,
when it escapes,
it is still safe because it is fundamentally on our side
because it shares our values.
I see no way around this difficult problem.
Now, I'm actually fairly optimistic that this problem can be solved.
We wouldn't have to write down a long list of everything we care aobut
or worse yet, spell it out in some computer language
like C ++ or Python,
that would be a task beyond hopeless.
Instead, we would create an AI that uses its intelligence
to learn what we value
and its motivation system is constructed in such a way that it is motivated
to pursue our values or to perform actions that it predicts we would approve of.
We would thus leverage its intelligence as much as possible
to solve the problem of value loading.
This can happen,
and the outcome could be very good for humanity.
But it doesn't happen automatically.
The initial conditions for the intelligent explosion
might need to be set up in just the right way
if we are to have a controlled detonation.
The values that the AI has need to match ours,
not just in the familiar context,
like where we can easily check how the AI behaves,
but also in all novel contexts that the AI might encounter
in the indefinite future.
And there are also some esoteric issues that would need to be solved,
sorted out,
the exact decisions of its decision theory,
how to deal with logical uncertainty, and so forth.
So the technical problems that need to be solved to make this work
look quite difficult,
-- not as difficult as making a super intelligent AI,
but fairly difficult.
Here is the worry:
making super intelligent AI is a super hard challenge.
Making super intelligent AI that is safe
involves some additional challenge on top of that.
The risk is that if somebody figures out how to crack
the first challenge without also having cracked
the additional challenge of ensuring perfect safety.
So I think that we should work out a solution
to the controlled problem in advance,
so that we have it available by the time it is needed.
Now it might be that we cannot solve the entire controlled problem
in advance because maybe some element can only be put in place
once you know the details of the architecture
where it will be implemented.
But the more of the controlled problem that we solve in advance,
the better the odds that the transition to the machine intelligence era
will go well.
This to me looks like a thing that is well worth doing
and I can imagine that if things turn out okay,
that people in a million years from now
look back at this century
and it might well be that they say
that he one thing we did that really mattered
was to get this thing right.
Thank you.
(Applause)