The world is definitely going to end one day.
All of this will be gone and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
Everything is temporary and we’re all gonna die.
We made it through Y2K, the black plague, and the Cuban missile crisis and yet 22% of Americans still think the world will end in their lifetime.
10% thought it was going to end in 2012 when the Mayan calendar ended, but
you know, that turned out fine.
But there’s still tons of theories as to just how the world is going to end.
From aliens, to nuclear war, to all of this being a simulation that just gets shut down all of a sudden.
I’m gonna find out which one the truth is.
We’re going to talk to some experts, share a little history, and we’re going to find out what’s really going to do us in.
How long we have until it happens and if there’s anything we can do to slow it down.
Chapter 1:
The idea of artificial intelligence gaining superiority and taking over humanity has been in sci-fy forever
from The Matrix, to The Terminator, to Disney Channel original movie, 'Smart House'.
And real people are worried about it too, like some of the smartest people in the world.
I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.
So I went to talk to the leader of the human resistance against the robots.
Our last bastion of hope as a civilization.
People that are programming artificial intelligence and the engineers, they have biases, they’re human beings.
Is that a problem that you guys think about, like the people's biases slipping into the programming?
Quite a bit, yeah, and this is especially important when you start looking at biometric data and things like that.
So if you're trying to recognize specific individuals or people who might be a certain nationality or ethnicity, as potential targets—
of course you have all sorts of scope for racism being built into these systems.
And that’s particularly important as these systems are going to start being adopted by police departments.
Where we already have a lot of racism and racialized violence by police.
And now they can actually program all that racial bias into the robots and let the robots do it.
Robots are not moral agents.
If you send out robots, they’re not going to disobey orders, right? They’re going to fire on the population.
What is the kind of worst case scenario?
What’s more concerning is where this could become a geopolitical issue where countries could
get into arms races with each other, could accidentally start wars through these automated systems.
You look at the demilitarized zone in North Korea where there’s already some automation,
some automated sentry guns that are being deployed there.
You could very easily get into a situation where the machines are escalating and initiating conflict—
without any humans making the decision to go to war.
Chapter 2:
Was Peter right?
Are robots really just weapons of mass destruction that are also incredibly racist?
I went to the source to find out.
What are you planning?
Tell me what you’re planning!
The foundation of the consortion for research and robotics is really about bringing together different disciplinary areas
in order that we have a kind of ethical approach to how we’re using these tools.
If we don’t do it, then somebody else is going to do it.
And so it's up to us to make sure that the way we use robots is ethical and that it’s responsible around our humanity.
So, robots are just as likely to be taught to paint as they are to kill.
But it’s probably not these industrial robots that we have to worry about.
Chapter 3:
There’s this theory called 'Grey Goo,' which says that self-replicating nano-robots
basically, tiny little robots that can make copies of themselves—
will just keep replicating and replicating and replicating until they covered and ate the entire earth’s ecosystem.
Since the 80’s that theory has been disproven,
but I’m still really scared ot it.
So I went to talk to two experts in existential risk.
It wouldn’t have to be grey, it wouldn’t have to be gooey, it could be something like dust that’s blown through the wind like pollen.
It remains possible that a malicious individual of some sort could intentionally design these nano scale machines—
to grab a hold of whatever organic material is in their immediate environs and convert it into essentially a clone of itself
and the results would be obviously catastrophic—it would destroy the biosphere and with the biosphere, it would annihilate human beings.
An utterly lifeless planet, a graveyard for human civilization.
Covered in tiny robots?
Covered in mindlessly, reproducing, self-replicating nano-bots.
Actually what we’re worried about is something far, far more menacing.
The idea is that if you were to have a super intelligent A.I. whose values are even slightly misaligned with ours.
That could be catastrophic.
It’s a daunting, formidable, and somewhat frightening situation.
All of these guys have different outlooks on what an A.I. future will look like, but they
agree on one thing.
Humans can stop this.
We’re in charge of this technology.
Well, for now at least.
The A.I. industry will likely be pulling in $37 billion by 2025.
And the robotics industry makes billions more already.
And robots can be great. Remember Furby's?
Those were dope.
But if that’s not how the world ends, what is?
I thought back to something Peter told me earlier.
Chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, mass destruction weapons,
but if you have the ability to create a fleet, an army of robots that could be under the control of
one person or a small group of people—you could have similar kinds of effects.
The notion of a weapon of mass destruction, is that a small group of people,
or an individual with one device, or a small number of devices could do an enormous amount of destruction.
We already talked about nukes and disease outbreak, but what about a weapon that no one on earth could possibly understand?
Something completely beyond our comprehension.
Aliens.
Next time.