Translator: Alessio Politi Reviewer: Michele Gianella
For those of you who don't particularly like movies,
or just lived on Mars over the last 38 years,
you have just seen
the final monologue of a 1982 film by American director Ridley Scott -
I was also born in 1982 by the way.
This movie somehow managed
to transcend time, space and generational divides,
becoming a pillar of world pop culture:
Blade Runner.
Blade Runner came to stay for decades,
not just because of the stellar director and even greater actors -
we just saw Rutger Hauer -
but because every time we watch it, we feel a little bit uncomfortable.
We distinctly feel a kind of discomfort, but we can't help ourselves,
because it comes from a question that resonates in each of us.
A question that can challenge
everything we know, or we think we know, about existence.
And the question is:
"Do androids dream of electric sheep?"
I know, for many of you this question is totally meaningless.
But "Do Andoid Dream of Electric Sheep?"
is the title of a novel by American author Philip K. Dick,
the Blade Runner myth took inspiration from.
Dick first walked in the footsteps of authors like Isaac Asimov,
taking sci-fi literature and bringing it to new horizons:
postmodern, post-humani and post-humanistic horizons.
Essentially, Dick created the cyberpunk movement:
a dystopian universe
where the great technological evolutions
redefined social dynamics and hierarchies.
In this universe, technology essentially questioned
the role of man at the center of the world,
our humanism.
Humanism is precisely that perspective where Man replaced God,
refusing it
becoming the center of everything, thanks to his logic abilities,
his intellect
and his ability to sympathyze with everything around him.
In his book, and in Blade Runner movie, the director and the author are asking us:
what's so special about Man, to put him at the center of everything?
Dick describes us a dark and sunless future,
where it always rains as the only remedy
against unsustainable air pollution,
where men and and androids live together,
where Asia had the hegemony on politic and culture.
In that world,
Artificial Intelligence replaced electricity
as a staple of a new economic and social revolution.
And mankind makes, thanks to technology,
a further shift in his all-encompassing role.
After replacing God, man turned into God
and created a generation of artificial beings -
the androids, precisely -
which he built and created in his own image and likeness,
in order to overcome Man's limitations.
Androids were prettier, smarter and stronger than men;
but Man still needed to preserve his centre in the world.
So he created androids with a very, very short life,
with the following explanation:
“A flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”
However, some androids rebelled and decided to merge with men,
trying to meet their creator,
and ask him to live a little longer.
It's therefore necessary to ponder
what's the difference between Men and androids.
The author's question became even more evident.
What make us different?
What legitimates us to put ourselves at the centre of the world anyway,
especially now that logic, intellect and physical strength
belong to androids?
The answer is the Voight-Kampff test:
a completely fictitious test,
used to determine whether an examined subject
is able to feel empathy with his or her surroundings.
Empathy, then, really started setting us apart.
It was a kind of upgrade of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum:
"I think, therefore I am";
which is replaced by: "I feel, therefore I am".
I feel, therefore I am human, and worthy living.
And it's no coincidence that the main character's name, Rick Deckart,
is a literal transposition of Réné Descartes.
The incredible thing, within the film and the book,
is that eventually,
considering that androids manage to empathize -
as you saw, Roy saved Rick -
we ultimately find ourselves empathizing with androids.
We almost wish that, as we replaced God,
they took our place as their God.
Why did I tell you this story, and why now?
Because although we are still a few years away,
before this kind of future actually takes place,
the trajectory we seem to be heading towards
seems quite marked.
Let's consider a fundamental law of ICT: Moore's Law.
Moore's law says that every two years
the computational power of machines doubles.
In such a endemically technology-based society,
if the computational power of machines doubles every two years,
the distance between us and our future
halves every two years.
Fact is, Artificial Intelligence is already replacing electricity,
and soon we will have to shift
from programming for profit to a creation for value.
Let's take a step back: when we think of Artificial Intelligence,
we probably imagine a computer that plays chess
and beats the world chess champion.
That computer was IBM's Deep Blue;
that chess world champion was Garry Kasparov.
And the year was 1997,
which in technological eras was like prehistory.
Let's see what happens,
or what has happened over these last few years.
In 2016,
an Artificial Intelligence algorithm defeated the world champion of Go,
a game considered the epitome of human intellect:
a trillion trillion trillions more combination than chess,
so a trillion trillion trillion times a harder game than chess.
This algorithm played against itself for a couple of hours,
than goes against the world champion
and beated him, with patterns that we absolutely can't grasp.
In 2016, we conquered the equality between man and machine.
The machine was able to recognize objects
as well as humans.
In 2017, voice recognition:
machines begun to understand voice just as well as we do.
That was in 2017, three years ago.
In 2018,
they had the same accuracy in answering questions;
in 2019, they could translate all thousands of Chinese dialects
into English just as well.
So it seems logical to me
that logic and intellect were matched, or even outdated in some cases.
What edge is left for men?
Art, of course: right Chiara?
Who is the most popular poet in the world, today?
The most popular poet in the world, with over 700 million readers,
is XiaoIce,
an artificial intelligence from Microsoft.
She not only writes, but also leads seven television programs
and sings songs.
Another beautiful project - always for you, Chiara -
is "The Next Rembrandt Project",
which in 2017 saw a Microsoft AI
studying in depth all Rembrandt's masterpieces.
Then it was connected to a 3D printer,
and alone - we left it free to express itself -
it created a new painting
that all Rembrandt experts in the world
would have attributed to the great Flemish painter.
Of course, today you know that 95% of what we deem valuable -
worth is assigned after a semantic operation:
a man-made recognition of a symbol and the manmade attribution of a meaning.
The truth - ah, by the way,
we never knew what happened to that very painting.
But it must be somewhere.
The truth is that Artificial Intelligence
is already, as we said, replacing electricity.
And much like in the sixties, and the seventies,
assembly lines have been automated,
our work, or part of our more impersonal jobs
will be automated.
That's what AI is demanded for.
So we find ourselves asking: what's our place in the world?
What is, what puts us at the center of the world?
Once again, our empathy
will determine our place, our kind of future:
utopian, distopic, maybe fairer?
The truth is, right now we have the chance
to correct mistakes through empathy,
to understand the creation for a value - which value should be created.
But how is our empathy doing, lately?
Let's do a little experiment:
let's start thinking we have an Artificial Intelligence algorithm.
And we say to it "We have a company. Hire the absolutely best professionals."
And we give it all world companies' data, in all economic history,
with all the data of all the professionals in the world, in economic history.
Since AI, and the quality of the output,
depends on the value and the quality of the data,
today that AI would select
a 40-year-old white man.
For in history, obviously,
we are subject to a lot of preconceptions, discrimination, pay gap.
So I ask you: how's right now our empathic state?
Today's sovranist consensus
is two percentage points below what it was in 1939.
Does it remind you of anything, 1939?
What's the path we are moving along?
We are a world that builds walls, that "helps them at their home",
that leaves them floating on the boats in the Mediterranean,
that puts the Italians first, the Americans first, the British first.
We are a very dystopian world, so the future can only be dystopian.
And the perverse thing
is that we have stopped creating, and empathically seeking a value,
but we try to confirm our bias, as if it was Juventus vs Inter:
a thing of pure cheers, of pure belief.
The "fake news" are exploding.
And this is not a tiny detail:
this corresponds to a surge in "hate crimes", in discrimination.
Is this the future we want?
Stephen Hawking told us
that we are at risk of destroying our human race, our humanity,
because of our greed and our stupidity.
So we're screwed, and sooner or later we'll be replaced by machines?
No, because there are also people around who think differently and act differently.
Someone said earlier: "To be, you have to do".
And I absolutely agree: Bias to action.
One example is Microsoft,
which is also why I joined Microsoft.
That's the humanistic view
of technology and Artificial Intelligence,
that are used to give more power - "to empower our people" -
to overcome limitations, to overcome discriminations.
I'll give you an example.
(Video)
I see two faces:
a forty year old man, with a beard, looking surprised;
twenty year old woman, looking happy.
The app can describe
the general age and gender of the people around me,
and what their emotions are, which is incredible.
He is a visually impaired colleague,
thanks to an artificial intelligence algorithm
he can "see":
he doesn't need someone to bring him to the meeting rooms,
he can read the menus,
he can sense an audience before him, looking at him and saying,
Where does he come from?
Or: "Ah, I've heard it, it actually sounds interesting -"
This is a "to empower people" use,
this is a "to make the wrong right" use,
as they say in America, to correct mistakes.
This is something worth exploring,
that makes us all better.
Another example is the Inner Eye Project,
an A.I. algorithm -
which was used on eye cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer -
that increases by 95 percent the ability - 99 percent, in some cases -
to correctly diagnose a tumor mass.
Obviously, I'm not suggesting that this thing -
that artificial intelligence should replace doctors tomorrow:
that's absolutely not the case.
But as far as Image Matching Recognition is concerned,
this is certainly more accurate.
So by freeing the doctor, with his cognitive abilities,
from at least a part of this weight,
today the doctor could take care of what's more important:
the patient management,
the management of the person in front of the doctor.
This is only one of the many virtuous existing examples.
But essentially, the question I'm asking you, is that it depends on us.
This I would like us to understand: it depends only on us.
So I ask you:
would it be good for us too to start dreaming of electric sheep?
Thank you.
(Applause)