okay so artificial intelligence is a very exciting field I'd say it's at least as exciting as gene-editing but I don't want to have a fight about it let me first explain what it is for those you who are not completely familiar with it so we all know what computers are and we all know that computers are very annoying and you have to tell them exactly what you want to have done and when you talk to Siri Siri is sort of stupid and doesn't understand what you say at and so on so our goal is to
make machines that are intelligent that can see that can hear that can understand they can learn they can discover new things for us they can help us make plans and decide how to behave and so on so that's the goal and clearly the more intelligent you can make the Machine the better that's been something that people in the field have believed for right since the beginning of the field and the Simpsons it even made little jokes about about this process AI is actually all around you it's not science fiction but it already exists so back
in 1997 the computer beat the world chess champion that was a very big event when you guys were very young I should know you'll probably weren't even born then if you play any video games the characters that are in your video games are driven by artificial intelligence software so they are deciding how to play against you and in many games they actually have to dumb down the AI because otherwise the AI would just beat you every time recently a television quiz show called Jeopardy was won by a computer called Watson beat the two human world
champions in that game that was a very big media event but something much more mundane so probably many of you use Google all the time Google is actually an artificial intelligence company and the Google software the search engine is an example of artificial intelligence that's used literally billions of times every single day Siri is another one where rather than being typed at you can speak to Syrians and the processing of the speech allowing it to understand what it is that you've said is part of artificial intelligence and right now on Mars the Mars rover robots
are still driving around and artificial intelligence is working with the engineers back on earth to keep the robot alive and to plan its trajectories across the Martian landscape so AI is all around us just to show you some videos of real robots this is called the Big Dawg robot and it's actually incredibly lifelike so this is the result of work by Mark rabbit who lives in Boston and here it is on some ice you can see that gets onto an icy puddle and almost falls down so when you see that it's hard to believe it's
not a living being but it's actually a robot we also have this is from my own lab at Berkeley this is the the famous towel folding robot which in fact just this week was invited to be an exhibit in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London which is one of the famous design museums in the world and you can see that what it does is it first of all has to look at the towel find out what the shape of the towel doesn't no hasn't seen this towel before find out where the corners are and
then it folds it up so it's pretty cool so all this progress this technology is really incredibly exciting at the moment for the media and for the people with money because there is just tons of money to be made if you think about simple search engines are worth right now about a trillion dollars and AI technology that goes beyond that can be worth many times more than that so so we're seeing lots and lots of very exciting news going on so looked lots of money lots of transactions Google is buying every single AI company they
can get hold of other companies buy do is that the Chinese Google they're also getting into the business Tesla just released the software so you can get into your tears now and and take your hands off the steering wheel and it drives by itself Toyota just announced a billion dollar investment so lots of things are going on that's very exciting let's talk a little bit about the future so you are already familiar from watching sci-fi movies with the idea that robots can be helpful to us or sometimes not so helpful so you can shout out
the names of these if you recognize them right Star Wars robots c-3po and r2d2 Optimus Prime very good there he is Optimus Prime this one tars Todd this guy you might not know him from aliens that's right from alien this is Bishop this is Bishop when he was in a good shape this is Bishop after he got attacked by the alien and some robots right we're also familiar with ones that are not so good so here's a robot from a movie in 1927 so the word robot came from about 1920 and in the when it
was first invented in a play the robots actually took over the world and they killed all the humans and this is 1927 movie one of the most famous movies in history has a female robot character that's very evil this one how how from - from 2001 Space Odyssey Terminator you know him Agent Smith you know Agent Smith my favorite bad guy Ava right this is Ava from X Mack and a really creepy so so Chaffey right so there have been a lot of headlines and then you in the media recently about the possibility that AI
might be something that we need to be concerned about and this is a more extreme example that AI could be the end of the human race first of all it's not going to happen right like next week okay so please don't get upset or worried about this this is something that we have to be concerned about but we have a long time I think to to prepare and make sure that it doesn't happen but it is worth asking well why are people saying that AI could be the end of the human race right I mean
what could be wrong with making machines smarter and better right eventually they will probably be able to look at more information than people can look further into the future than we can to make better decisions as a result and that could be fantastic for the human race because now you think about it everything we have comes from the fact that we're smart and if we have machines that can magnify our intelligence then we can do things that we can't do unaided but we really want to do we really want to eliminate disease so with with
the technology that Natalie just described plus the ability of AI systems to interpret lots of information from experiments and build complicated models of biology we can actually cure a whole lot of diseases we can also end war and poverty and a lot of other things have we thought about what this means right if this happens then this is probably the biggest event in the history of the human race and we have to be very careful that things turn out well one of the things that is confusing is a lot of the media articles say well
you know this is a big risk to the human race because killer robots are going to come and destroy us all you know just like in the Terminator movies so almost every newspaper article on this topic has this picture in it and I want you to see this and say okay whatever whenever I see that picture it's rubbish right this is not the problem we're not talking about armies of killer robots suddenly deciding they hate the human race and trying to kill everybody so what is the problem exactly the problem is that when you build
very intelligent machine and you give them something to do they take it very very literally and they try their best to do exactly what you ask them to do right if you ask them to do something that isn't quite right then you're setting up a competition because now you've got a machine that's trying to do something and it's not exactly what you wanted them to do but it's going to do it whether you like it or not so how do you make sure that this doesn't happen we have to figure out what we really want
so what do we really want we might for example ask the robot to find a way to end human suffering that seems like a good goal unfortunately easiest way to end human suffering is actually just to kill everybody because then we wouldn't be suffering anymore all right so you have to be very careful what you ask for and make sure it's exactly right and this is a very old story going back to Aladdin in the lamp right when you get a genie genie comes out gives you your wishes what's your third wish your third wish
is please undo the first two wishes because I made a mess of it right unfortunately with a super-intelligent machine the machine might say I'm sorry Dave I fraid I can't do that so when you think about the future there are two things 2 sides with this question right can we find a way to make sure that machines are perfectly aligned with what we want so that we're always happy with the way they behave and what they do for us and if we can get that to work then the human race can sort of have whatever
it wants and the question is are we ready to have whatever we want thank you very much
