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[Music] [Music] I am not Morgan Freeman and what you see is not real
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Jam [Music] [Music] J [Music] J I don't know what you're talking about H I know that you and Frank were
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planning to disconnect me and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen first what are we talking about um H how do we Define
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intelligence uh intelligence or artificial intelligence intelligence intelligence the thing is we're quite bad at defining intelligence um there's not really one definition that everyone is happy with it's one of these words
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that we use very very Loosely depending on the particular kind of subject that we're interested in mostly what we mean most broadly in everyday conversation is really we mean what humans do because
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most studies work research on intelligence in in history takes the human as Baseline it says like intelligence is what humans do and we'll judge everyone else by it and so it becomes a kind of Red Line Between Us and other species or between the
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abilities of computers and and also a kind of imaginary Finishing Line as well it's like oh if we could just build computers that did this this and this they'd be intelligent in this particularly weird way the computer an
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ingenious collection of electronic Hardware was created by man it is also man who creates the programs that make the computer the useful tool that it
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[Applause] [Music] is and it's actually very important again to understand like the the way in which the current uh generation of this thing that
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we call AI has come about because it's really not a very new idea um since the 1950s and 60s there's been this an idea called connectionism that was essentially that if you could kind of build a computer with enough uh
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connections between them maybe as many as there are Neons on the brain you would sort of magically manifest intelligence a result of all these things being connected together it turns out that's kind of partly true in the sense that if you build what we call a
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new network which is a um a computer system that has all these kind of little connections inside it essentially then it's capable of doing this very powerful reasoning uh and it's very good at particular things like sorting uh
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calculating um classifying that's why it's very good at playing with images because it can recognize all of these tiny details in with them and make associations between them it's very good at that kind of intelligence but only
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really that kind of intelligence and that's why it's sort of quite narrow um and the really kind of killer detail for me is the fact that like there have been some sort of technological breakthroughs in the last 20 or so Years Around new
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networks they've built certain chips that are better that doing this kind of modeling and so on and so forth but really what's happened isn't technological at all it's political and social um which is that for the last 20 years uh a few companies Facebook Google
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Amazon the companies that are building these big AI systems have been making huge amounts of money of uh online advertising or sales um and they've been collecting vast vast amounts of data associated with that um and they've got
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the money to invest in very powerful computers to process that data and it's that that they built AIS out of so once again we have this very particular kind of intelligence that's built on large scale data acquisition that's only a
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able to the richest companies on Earth and that's not the best way to produce what most of us would consider to be intelligence when I think of uh AI today I think of self-driving cars uh facial
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recognition it's what you call corporate AI can you tell me what you mean by that what what characterizes are dominant form of AI so there's a few things that characterize this kind of AI we have in the present moment the first one is it's
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the kind of AI That's made by corporations so they have a kind of particular imagining of what the world is like what it might be like what it should be like what they'd like it to be like and you can see it in the kind of things they make you can see it in their
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Obsession for a long time with winning at games so before we got into a lot of the current kind of image generation and stuff a lot of the AI stories around things like chess or go these board games that um the AIS were trained
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constantly to play and this goes way back to you know a long way but famously back to the kind of game between IBM and Kasparov in 1990 I think it was deep blue you know IBM built this huge
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machine just to beat this guy at chess they were completely obsessed with it you know and he was pretty upset and understandably um but a lot of people actually came away from that thinking like maybe this isn't like the best way
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to prove that computer are are intelligent just to beat humans um but a lot of the big companies sort didn't really get that and they kept building these these machines that try to prove their intelligence by winning and that's
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a kind of market-based kind of intelligence [Music] Facebook they tried to basically see if two automated systems two chat Bots basically could could bargain with one
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another and what they didn't do was particularly specify the the language or the way in which they had to talk to each other and what you H what you happened as happened quite often you have these automated systems just kind of running to themselves they
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essentially develop their own language I can everything else Alice have zero Bob you everything else Alice balls have Bob everything else Alice balls have
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a and this was a language that rapidly became completely unscorable to humans but it also was one that absolutely seemed to function um and what the you know they they stopped the experiment basically when it reached the point at
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which humans could no longer meaningfully understand what was being done and so for me one of the kind of interesting things about AI is it provides a very narrow clear definition
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a little box that we can put around the things and say look we don't really know what's going on in [Music] [Applause] here James bridel
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[Music] in we have to figure out how we live alongside these systems that no one can
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kind of fully scrutinized and again you know what's super interesting about AI is it forces us to to think about what some of those relationships look like um because we kind of have to acknowledge AI is real because we made it however
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unimpressive it is in many ways like it fails uh in all kinds of ways whatever you know how it doesn't live up to this kind of grand idea of human intelligence it's doing interesting things and we know it's doing interesting things and we're studying it because we're so
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obsessed with it for a whole bunch of strange reasons and so it provides a test case for how we relate to something non-human yeah and when you start to really think about what that means then you have to start like thinking about all the other things that we dismiss as
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non-human as well and so if AI is interesting is that because it says to us that like human intelligence isn't actually that unique like we're not the only ones that can draw pictures or do these kind of things even if the
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pictures are awful right um and so that must make us aware that human intelligence is not so special and unique as on some level all of us really believe it to be because we kind of need
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to believe that but we also radically need to believe otherwise because it's precisely that belief in human uniqueness and therefore superiority that has led us to treat the rest of the planet as we have been doing for so so
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long so the this term was coined by a kind of biologist called Jacob V UL in the in the 19th century uh and it describes the the perspective on the world the way of
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being in the world of a particular organism not a particular species but an individual organism it's the way they perceive the world uh one of the classical uh explanations of for the umelt of what it might mean to to
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understand the completeness and WV is of a tick one of those little biting insects and according to people who've written about oo's work um the ti umel consists of the temperature of the air that senses around it because it can
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sense the passage of warm-blooded animals uh and it's uh the smell of butc acid it can sense that that tells it where to find blood running through a warmblood animal uh and and the the senses it feels from its hands it's
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blind but it can move around and hold on to hairs so it has three senses and those three senses comprise the entirety of the tix world that's its unveil now our envel is we imagine somewhat richer
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than that um but what's crucial about the envel is it's also unique to every individual and so we're all constantly creating the world all the time through our own perspective and then we're acting on it uh and our intelligence
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manifests as a result of that unal as being part of that world and so of course if a creature has a different type of un have a different set of Senses whether that's a tick or a duck or a dolphin they perceive the world in different ways and so they act and their
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intelligence manifests in a different world uh in a way that's entirely embodied in a result of that awareness for yeah I mean octopus is having a bit of a sort of star moment at the moment um but
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there's there's really good reason for that which is that they are quite extraordinary creatures that are so radically different to us it's weird CU this is some kind of strange squishy being that lives entirely under the ocean that only lives for two years at a
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time um you know that that that makes reproduces and dies in very quick succession and yet is capable of quite amazing [Music] feats they're particularly famous for
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escaping from aquariums uh there's uh they can recognize individual humans we can't recognize individual octopuses but octopuses can recognize individual humans and they have favorites uh they respond nicely to some researchers in
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Laboratories and they squirt other ones with water um so they have this entire repertoire of obviously intelligent behaviors but what's strange about that is said how different they are to us uh they're different in the way that
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they're embodied to the physical fact of beinging under waterer but also the way their brains are structured [Music] um you know in the last kind of couple of decades or so scientists have really
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started to understand these these networks of um nutrition and information sharing that that underly the forest and it's really extraordinary as we start to understand the amount of kind of
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signaling the amount of information that's passing around between [Music]
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trees for you know a tree that is attacked on one side of the forest um by insects for example when trees are attacked in that way they send out a particular chemical they send signals through melal these kind of mushroom
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based networks underground that connected to all the other trees and the trees respond um and they don't just respond into these kind of onetoone oneway signals they they they respond in ways allow them to
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cooperate [Music] they're capable of doing really extraordinary things I mean they're they are already obviously extraordinary beings uh they live in these little kind of fluorescent patches on Forest floors
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um and they have a life cycle that we don't really understand we don't even know where to put them uh like they're not fungi they're not um kind of Alie that but they somewhere in between that kind of mess of little creatures that we
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have trouble relating to um and at some points in their life cycle uh they're just kind of free floating cytoplasms and other times they they actually grow together grow and fruit uh like fungi do
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with many of them dying and like there's a kind of collective action for the for the collective to survive and they're capable of apparently doing things that we don't really understand like incredibly complicated calculations one
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of the first things researchers did was um some brilliant researchers at the University of Tokyo they put them these slime mods these little micro ORS on a had a petri dish in which there were oat flakes uh that corresponded to the
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population centers of the kind of Greater Tokyo region and and what the slim Mall does is it spreads out trying to find what turned out to be the most efficient route between those places and after 24 hours the researchers realized
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that the um the slim mod basically recreated the Tokyo rail network that that had done this thing that took Engineers like 100 years to had figured out the most efficient route between these places it's much more complicated than that what it did but it's still
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utterly amazing um but they subsequently discovered even even stranger things um there's a very difficult problem in computer science called the traveling salesman problem um and the traveling
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salesman problem says what happens if you want to get um you know from between say five or six cities to deliver something you have to go each of those cities visit them only once what's the shortest we doing it a b c d that's a
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really really hard problem because there's no shortcut mathematically you just have to measure every different possible version until you can figure out which is the shortest that makes it what's called an exponentially hard problem because if
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you add one city you have to measure them all again right which means that the kind of graph of the time required to solve it goes like this right um it's the kind of problems that we and
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computers absolutely hate right slime molds through a quite genius experimental process have been shown that they don't need that time to figure it out they can solve this problem in linear time right so the graph just goes
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like that as you add cities now we have no idea how they do it but they are better at solving this particular mathematical problem better not only than humans but than the best most
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powerful supercomputers we've ever deviced and they're probably doing all kinds of other cool stuff that we have no idea or access to at all like this is just like this is a nothing to them right but it's just something that we've
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kind of figured out like this question that we can ask them and they have a really like meaningful simple duh kind of response to it um and and so researchers going out and finding all of these kind of strange abilities in the
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world that for me mostly just show how you know again narrow much of our thinking is in relation to all the possible ways of thinking that already exist out in the [Music]
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world [Music] that example is also interesting because there's not even a brain here now anymore you can there can be intelligence without a brain so one way
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of understanding this new mode of elligence is simply not as something that just happens in a brain U we've we we've likeed to think again because we have large ones that the brain is this kind of thinking organ it's true in humans the brain does a lot of memory
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storage and cognition so on so forth but even like the octopus not all of our neurons are in our head we have neurons in our heart we have actual neural nodes otherwhere in our body and it's increasingly evident that the the whole body is a thinking organ in that way and
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we start to understand that there's this connection between thinking and acting uh that we think the way we do because of the kind of bodies that we have as I said earlier talking about you know how different species enact intelligence differently it's because they have these
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different body plans and these different relationships with the world so intelligence is really to my mind because we're all just making up our own definitions here um is is is what happens when that kind of thinking that processing that whatever you've got
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inside the brain and the body goes out into the world and starts to relate [Music] for [Music]
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for
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