The Exchanges

Q the P and the T and the GPT as your, uh, Twitter bio says, the guardians called you, um, father of AI. Uh, it seems like the media tends to, um, you know, put these labels on researchers. You know, there's, there's a handful of fathers and godfathers of AI. Uh, how do you respond to that and how would you contextualize your role and where the technology is today?

A No single person can create an AI by himself or herself. You need an entire civilization to build an AI. You need not only the guys who are trying to invent algorithms, learning algorithms for artificial neural networks, that is what current AI is about. You also need people who, um, you know, build better computers. You need all the video gamers who are, um, Creating a market, uh, for, um, uh, acquiring more of these fast and faster computers, and you need, and providing an incentive to the computer makers to, um, speed up, uh, the computation per dollar by a factor of 10 every five years. You need all the farmers who are feeding the video gamers, and so on. So, it is impossible for a single person to create an AI. You need an entire civilization.

AI assessment note: “No single person can create an AI by himself or herself.”

Q the trenches working on AI researcher research for a long time, and we're definitely in a period of fast progress today. So there's been all these questions about how much better AI can get and whether it's going to hit a wall and where current techniques will lead. Uh, where do you, what do you think? Where do you land on that question about where AI can go from here?

A So, um, since the 19 seventies, I have been an optimist and I have been claiming That within my lifetime, uh, I want to build an AI that learns to become smarter than myself, such that I can retire, and we are obviously not there yet. And at the moment, the only AI, the only AI that is working well is the AI behind your screen, you know. Yes, behind the screen, there's an AI that can pass the Turing test. Um, what is that? It means if you type, uh, questions to it, it answers back, and, um, and And now the question is, can you distinguish whether the other guy is a human or a machine? And today, this Turing test is passed by many AIs. However, it just means that the Turing test is a bad way of measuring intelligence, because there is no AI in the physical world, outside of the screen, that can do all the things that a little boy can do, that can do the things that a A plumber can do. For decades I have used the plumber as an example. Or an electrician. Um, so all the, the, the things that humans can do with their hands, their physical hands, they don't work well. Only bits and zeros and ones behind the screen, that's the only thing that is working well. However, it's not going to stay like that forever, and, um, there is progress in the physical world, AI for the physical world, And I think the culmination point, the culmination point of that, which I've been talking about agai…

AI assessment note: “there is progress in the physical world, AI for the physical world”

Q Yeah, and so that sort of brings me to this question, which is, as the machines get closer to the human brain, does it change the way we're gonna think about what it means to be human?

A I, I think it will change what many people think about humans. I guess it won't change much what I think about humans, um, because it's more or less what I said, you know, many decades ago, but yes, uh, many people who, you know, who claim that AIs can't have emotions and stuff like that. They, they do that decades after the fact, and they are going to change their minds, I'm pretty sure, and often it's just a, a matter of direct experience, so maybe you have heard of these little sweet cute robot seals that you have in certain healthcare centers, and the people who are interacting with these furry Uh, artificial beings. They get really emotionally attached to them. They really like them, and they, they play around with them, although they are not smart at all. You know, they don't learn much, and, uh, and if even such a simple robot can invoke, um, feelings of, you know, almost love or something, then, um, you can imagine what will happen once you have really convincing, very sweet little robots that, um, are more like little animals, Except that they can do maybe a couple of things that these traditional biological little animals cannot do.

AI assessment note: “I, I think it will change what many people think about humans.”

Q Right. So where's your vision of where the little guy can end up?

A The little guy is, in the long run, the little guy is going to profit. So at the moment, the big companies, and everybody says, oh, the big companies, they are profiting like crazy. But is that true? Look at their cash flows. No, they go down like that. Look at their debt ratios. They have stopped to repurchasing their own shares because they don't have enough cash any longer. And so, uh, at the same time, What the little guy has to do is just wait a little bit, you know, because every five years computers getting 10 times cheaper, which means in, in 10 years you can buy the same thing for one percent of the price, and it's going to be just like with smartphones, you know, and I'm often, um, relating the story of the rich guy whom I knew in the eighties, and he, he had a Porsche, he was rich, he had a Porsche, but the most amazing thing was in the Porsche, there was a, A mobile phone. You know, he could pick up the receiver and talk via satellite to another guy with a Porsche like that. And today, 40 years later, everybody in developing countries has a smartphone that is immensely more powerful than what he had in his Porsche. So the little guy is paying almost nothing for whatever he had there, which was really expensive. And the same thing is going to be true with AI. And soon AI will not be in the cloud, you know. No, it will be local, on your local computer, a small little …

AI assessment note: “in the long run, the little guy is going to profit.”

Q now demanding on humans are going to be replaced by the machines. Then there will be trillions of different types of AIs and a rapidly changing complex AI ecology expanding in a way where humans cannot even follow. Um, so almost 10 years ago you said that. It actually seems more plausible now than obviously it did back then. How far away do you think we are from that future?

A Yeah, that's a good question. So actually, even, um, even earlier in 2014, because of these things that I said back then, and when I gave talks or whatever, um, uh, we formed a company, Nascence, which was really about physical AI in the world, in the real world, using wild models, and then exploiting the wild models to better, um, Interact with the world, and, and we had crazy contracts with really famous, um, um, uh, companies. Nevertheless, this, this was probably still too early, like some of the other things we have done now, so probably too ambitious for that time, but now we are getting closer and closer, um, and, um, and, and, and, you know, the, the main hindrance, the main obstacle Is very progress in the hardware, on the hardware side. So there is one type of progress on the hardware side, which is enormous, which has been enormous since 1941, which is every, every five years, computers getting 10 times cheaper, you know. So in 1941, um, the first general purpose program controlled computer, you know, by Zuse, um, he could do maybe one operation per second. And then, 30 years later, for the same price, one was able to do a million operations per second, and today we, we almost, not quite, have a 1,000,000,001, billion instructions per second. And, um, for the same price, for the same price. But, the robots of today, the robots of today, they are not a million times b…

AI assessment note: “now we are getting closer and closer, um, and, um, and, and, and, you know, the, the main hindrance”

Q much of intelligence is encoded in machines, And those machines can predict and take action based off of their conception of where things are heading. Do you believe then in the concept of free will right now and in the future, will there be a free will as so much of our reality is intermediated by these machines that have a pretty good idea of where things are heading? Hmm.

A So in 1997 I wrote this paper, a computer scientist's view of life, the universe, and everything, and basically this was about trying to explain, um, trying to find the simplest explanation of our universe. So the holy grail of physics would be find the shortest deterministic program that computes everything that we have ever Observed in this universe, including the seemingly random, um, quantum events, been up and down measurements and, and everything. And, um, and we don't know this, uh, shortest, uh, description of the history of the universe, but as scientists, we are trying to find better and better and more and more compact descriptions. And we have made a lot of progress as scientists, as physicists towards that goal. And then I, uh, realized in, you know, a couple of years before, That although we don't know the shortest algorithm that computes just this universe in which we are living, Um, we at least know the super-short algorithm which computes all possible computable universes, which is basically, uh, the, the program that systematically enumerates all possible programs, and then there's an optimal way of allocating, uh, runtime to them, and every possible computable universe is going to be computed, including ours, if it is computable, and, um, there is no physical evidence against the possibility that our universe is computable. So I'm not talking just about unive…

AI assessment note: “So in 1997 I wrote this paper, a computer scientist's view of life”