(Toby Walsh) I wanna talk about artificial intelligence: it's --
I'm a professor of artificial intelligence
and its a great time, 2015, to be working in AI.
We're making real palpable progress
and there's loads of money being thrown at us.
Google just spent five hundred million dollars --
pounds buying an AI startup called Deep Mind a couple of weeks ago,
today they announced that they were going to spend a billion dollars
setting up an AI lab in Silicon Valley.
IBM is betting about a third of the company
on their cognitive AI computing effort.
So it's really interesting time to be working in AI.
But the first thing I wanted to help inform you about
is what is the state of art, what progress have we made in AI
because Hollywood paints all these pictures,
these mostly dystopian pictures of AI.
Whenever the next science fiction movie comes out, I put my head in my hands
and think Oh my God, what do people think that we're doing?
So, I wanted to start by just giving you a feel for what actually is really capable.
So a couple of years ago, IBM Watson won the game show Jeopardy 1,
the million dollar prize in the game show, Jeopardy P, the reigning human champions.
Now, you might think, well that's just a party trick, isn't it?
It's a -- pour enough of Wikipedia and the internet into a computer,
and it can answer general knowledge questions.
Well, you guys are being a bit unfair to IBM Watson,
there are the cryptic questions they are answering.
But just to give you a real feel for what is technically possible today,
something that was announced just two days ago:
some colleagues of mine at NII in Japan passed the University Entrance Exam
with an AI program.
Now, I thought long and hard about putting up a page of maths.
I thought, well, I'm going to get --
half of the audience is going to leave immediately if I put up a page of math
But I wanted you to see, just to feel
the depth of questions that they are answering.
So this is from the maths paper, you know, a non trivial, sort of,
if you come from the UK, A-level-like math question
that they were able to answer
Here is a physics question about Newtonian dynamics
that they were able to answer.
Now they got 511 points, out of a maximum of 950.
That's more than the average score of Japanese students
sitting the entrance exam.
They would have got into most Japanese universities with a score of 511.
That's what's possible today.
Their ambition in 10 years' time is to get into Tokyo, University of Tokyo,
which is one of the best universities in the world.
So, this is why I put up a picture of Terminator,
because whenever I talk to the media about what we do in AI,
they put up a picture of Terminator, right?
So I don't want you to worry about Terminator,
Terminator is at least 50 to 100 years away.
and there are lots of reasons why we don't have to worry about it,
about Terminator.
I'm not going to go and spend too much time
on why you don't have to worry about Terminator.
But there is actually things that you should worry about,
much nearer than Terminator.
Many people have said, Stephen Hawkins has said
that, you know, AI is going to spell the end of the human race.
Elon Musk chimed in afterwards, said "It's our biggest existential threat."
Bill Gates followed on by saying, "Elon Musk was right."
Lots of people have said that's a -- AI is a real existential threat to us.
I don't want you to worry about the existential threat that AI
or Terminator is going to bring.
There's actually a very common confusion,
which is that it's not the AI that's going to be the existential threat,
it's autonomy, it's autonomous systems.
What's in the (check) --
it isn't it going to wake up any time in the morning and say:
"You know what? I'm tired of playing Jeopardy,
"I want to play Who Wants to Be a Millionaire!
"Or wait a second, I'm tired of playing game shows,
I want to take over the universe."
It's just not in its code, there is no way,
it's not given any freedom to think about anything other
than maximizing its Jeopardy score.
And it has no desires, no other desires than,
other to improve its maximum scores.
So I don't want you to worry about Terminator,
but I do want you to worry about jobs.
Because lots of people, lots of very serious people,
have been saying hat AI is going to end jobs,
and that is a very great consequence for anyone working in education,
because, certainly, the jobs that are going to exist in the future
are going to be different than the jobs that exist today.
Now, who has an odd birthday?
Well, I haven't told you what an odd birthday is yet,
so someone has an odd birthday, like me.
OK. Who was born on an odd-number day of the month?
I was born on the 11th of April, right?
Come on, it's half the room, I know it's half the room.
(Laughter)
OK.Well, you want to have an odd birthday, by the way,
because that means, in 20 years' time, you will be a person with a job.
As opposed to the even people, who won't have jobs.
That's certainty -- if you believe lots of serious people,
you might have missed this news on Friday the 13th,
I thought this was a rather depressing news story
....... (check) comparison otherwise ...... (check)
but the chief economist, Bank of England,
went on the record saying 50% of jobs were under threat in the UK.
And he's not the first serious person who should know what he's talking about
who said similar things.
There was a very influential Merrill Lynch report that came out a month or to ago
saying very similar things about the impact of AI,
robotics, automation on jobs.
under threat