What is it that gives us power over the world?
It's the fact that we're the most intelligent.
What happens when we're not the most intelligent?
How would we maintain power over these entities,
that are much more intelligent therefore much more powerful than us?
Most observers and experts would say,
we're on this path towards superhuman intelligence,
and we're not prepared for success.
So we're investing hundreds of billions of dollars into a technology,
that if eventually it succeeds could be civilisation ending,
could be a huge catastrophe.
There are many misuses that are already occurring.
For example autonomous weapons guided by AI software,
can actually go out find potential targets decide who to kill and kill them.
Because it doesn't require any human supervision,
one person can launch an attack with millions of weapons.
They can be selective so you can wipe out just the males between 12 - 70,
or people of a particular ethnic group.
They don't leave a huge radioactive smoking crater,
and they're cheap and easy to proliferate.
It's hard to see any dimension on which they're not,
more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
Major countries the U.S. the UK, Russia,
are currently blocking progress on a treaty.
Turkish arms manufacturer who's selling them,
quadcopters that can autonomously find, track and kill human beings.
They are for sale and Turkey is promising to use them against the Kurds.
So that's one misuse: surveillance, control,
authoritarian governments, are already starting to use AI to,
keep track of there citizens in the way the Stasi used to do in East Germany.
Except that Stasi required almost 20% of the adult population to do this job.
The AI is gonna do it for you so you'll have your own personal Stasi agent,
keeping an eye on you 24 hours a day.
You can also use it for control,
because if you know exactly what people are doing 24/7 you can give them a score.
sort of like we use credit scores except it will be much more pervasive.
I guess I should mention social media.
On social media content selection, newsfeed selection, these are all made by algorithms.
They're learning algorithms and they're designed to optimise one thing:
Revenue generation for the platform.
They want you to click on things,
and you might think okay the best way to get you to click on things,
is to send you stuff that you like and that's probably what I think,
they thought the algorithms were gonna do.
What those methods did instead was actually to modify people,
so that they would be more predictable and therefore better sources of revenue.
The result is that the algorithms have modified people,
to have much more extreme political views,
or tastes in violence or taste in pornography.
So I think for many observers this is a catastrophe,
that it's basically unraveling our democracies,
it may be unraveling our social relationships.
This is actually an example of the general problem,
with how we think about AI.
If you make systems that are either intelligent,
or deployed on a global scale or both,
and they are tasked to pursue an objective,
that is not correctly specified, very hard to undo.
This is the case now even with these simple learning algorithms.
If we have AI systems that are more intelligent in a general sense than human beings.
It's going to be impossible to interfere,
with their pursuit of the objective that we've given them.
Super intelligent AI climate control system says okay:
Want to reduce carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels.
The system figures out that the cause of all this carbon dioxide is people,
So get rid of the people solve the problem.
Second wish, if you have a second wish, I didn't mean that what I meant was,
get the carbon dioxide under control without killing anybody.
Okay fine then we'll just run a multi-decade, social media,
social engineering campaign to convince people not to have any children.
And then in 75 years or so we'll have got rid of all the people,
and then we can fix the climate problem.
maybe you don't get a third wish after that.
So let's not design AI systems that way,
let's not put fixed objectives into the Machine.
This is advice not just for AI but many other disciplines,
that form a big part of our civilisation.
In economics corporations try to maximise profit,
we know that maximising profit while ignoring externalities is a really bad thing.
In fact look at the climate crisis,
it's the result of a super intelligent machine, the fossil fuel industry,
outwitting the human race in pursuit of a badly specified objective.
Namely profit while ignoring the costs to the climate,
they executed a 50-year plan to keep pumping out oil, carbon dioxide.
While subverting the government's so that we couldn't interfere with this process.
So this notion of putting in a fixed objective is a form of,
design or engineering that actually doesn't work.
So what do we do instead?
We design machines so that their only purpose in life,
is to be of benefit to human beings.
Meaning to act in such a way that human objectives,
Not machine objectives but human objectives are satisfied.
Once we have methods that are provably safe and provably beneficial we have to have,
strict regulation to prevent poorly designed a AI systems running out of control.
There's still another problem which is well what about the bad actors,
who read all the technical papers they develop their own AI,
but they don't want to put the safety part in.
I think that's a real problem I don't have a solution for it,
but I can tell you that it's gonna make the current malware cybercrime crisis,
look like child's play so we need to get our act together on that.
The other issue we need to worry about is the fact that we're sort of lazy.
We might find that it's just too tempting to have the AI system,
just go look after everything for us.
If you've seen the movie WALL-E the human race is on this cruise ship,
that just goes on forever and they're passengers.
The machines look after everything and the humans become obese,
and completely stupid they don't learn anything there's no point,
why would you go to school for 15 years and learn something,
when the AI system already does it better.
So you could get this situation where we have infantilised, enfeebled species.
that is essentially completely dependent on its machines.
It's happening in some ways already machines are taking over,
some functions like navigating in cities.
I think it's a slow insidious process we need a cultural response to it.
it's not a technological problem it's up to our culture,
to re-emphasise the value of knowledge, of learning, of capability.
To recognise dependency when when we see it and make it socially undesirable.
There are many different actors in this play.
Within the AI community,
there's a defensive kind of denialism creeping in.
People don't want to admit that what they're doing,
the direction they're driving the human race is actually a cliff.
So we have a big task ahead of us to convince everyone,
that they have to take this seriously,
but also to provide a replacement.
If we're saying don't design AI systems that way do it this way,
but that way, the old way, we have 70 years of technology that we've built up.
But the new way most of the technology doesn't exist yet,
so we have our work cut out for us.
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