Artificial intelligence - it will change everything.
But artificial intelligence is not a new concept.
In fact we've been writing about AI almost as long as
stories have been written and we've been beguiled by novels, movies
and TV series about it ever since. We've seen it developed from Turing's simple
predicting machine- to beating our best at chess and now deep learning programs
that promise to eradicate disease, predict crime, solve world poverty, drive
our cars, understand world economies and save our planet through climate change
predictions. We're already using digital assistants that talk to us, developing
robots that walk like us but what will happen when we develop systems that
think like us or beyond human capacity. We're stood at the edge of the fourth
Industrial Revolution and we need to shape our future carefully.
So what do we need to know about AI?
There is not going to be anyone on the planet in the next
50 years who is going to be affected for better or worse by artificial
intelligence in some way. There's not going to be anyone who isn't affected by
some of the big challenges that we face like climate change, biodiversity loss,
sustainability that artificial intelligence may help us to solve.
Although the word itself wasn't actually coined until 1956 at Dartmouth, at the
very famous conference on artificial intelligence and machine learning, in our
cultural imaginations in the West it goes right back to Homer.
What's so intriguing is that there's a massive prehistory in literature and film in our
cultural imagination which is arriving with this artificial intelligence
technology and shaping the way people are thinking about it beyond the reality
of what's actually happening.
What's made it possible is the speeding up of
computers the fact that number crunching is far faster now because of Moore's Law
which makes computers get twice as fast every couple of years.
One of the really exciting things that's happened in AI and the reason it's been so
revolutionary is that we have massive amounts of data for certain problems. So
we have the whole internet worth of text to learn about languages, we have again
the whole internet worth of images to learn about what images look like
and these fields have progressed very quickly but that's hitting a limit.
Many of the biggest challenges that we face in the coming century will
involve making sense of huge amounts of information and complex interconnected
systems, whether it's making sense of our genomes, phenomes, proteomes or all of
the complicated systems that make up the ecosystem around us. Human intelligence
can make in-roads into this but human intelligence in combination with artificial
intelligence allows a much more powerful ability to really understand these issues.
In machine learning you give the computer lots of data and then the
computer has an algorithm that finds patterns in data and also
includes the performance of the computer at some task. And that sort of key idea
learning from data is really what's revolutionised AI in the last decade or so.
We are using it in our mobile phones, we are using it with face recognition, we
are using it in medicine, in law and so on so it's already part of our daily
life there's nothing intrinsically magical about artificial intelligence.
It's just very clever algorithms that are being executed in very clever ways.
In some ways it's easier to imagine the potential downsides of AI than the
upsides. Now partly I think this is because we all know the Hollywood images
of the machine intelligence breaking down our door and coming in with a
machine gun, whereas the positive sides are being dreamt up by thousands of
people all over the world, imaginative young people who see a problem and think
about how they can solve it using AI, so it's really difficult to predict all of
the countless ways in which it's going to make our lives better whether that's for
example just recommending a new song you're going to like or curing us of cancer.
But there is great public concern about the impacts of automation and
robots on our jobs. Some pessimistic studies report that up to 40% of jobs
could be lost to AI.
With the first Industrial Revolution we
mechanised much of human labour, we replaced human muscle power.
What intelligent machines might do is also replace human brain power so it's
natural that we're asking ourselves- well what will we do where machines can do
everything better than we can?
And at that point we might want to start asking
is the paradigm of everybody working a nine-to-five job the one that we want to
stay in long term. I would ask the question are there things that we value in
society at the moment that we currently don't build into our models of
finance and economics?
I think for this to happen obviously there's got to be
massive redistribution of wealth otherwise the wealth earned by the
computers is going to go to the huge companies or to the individuals who own
them and have the skill. So I think we need massive socialist redistribution so
to set up very large numbers of publicly funded and respected, dignified jobs as
carers and other kinds of social work.
Still we have to think about what that
transition looks like. We have to make sure that nobody is left behind so we
have to think about the kind of skills we need and how to manage the disruption
of people losing jobs and seeking new ones.
History tells us that new jobs will
be created that we can't even imagine yet. Imagine talking to your grandparents
50 years ago and telling them that the software engineer is going to be the job
of the future.
AI is developing against a backdrop of a world that is becoming
increasingly digitised. While this brings great benefits there are concerns.
Our infrastructure is becoming digital. Our weapon systems,
our scientific processes, artificial intelligence allows us to better make
use of these systems and to optimise them. However it means that new potential
vulnerabilities will open up that may result in accidental problems but also
present opportunities for hackers to manipulate or to attack systems.
These are systems that we build to empower us to do amazing things. Now what can go
wrong with these tools is that they might exacerbate inequality for example,
you could cause geopolitical disruptions for example if AI is being used in
warfare for lethal autonomous weapons and just generally changes to the way our
society works, changes that are too sudden for example the changes in
democracy. These things could cause unintended consequences.
We've already seen in recent elections what can be done if you have enough data and access
to people's minds through social media and AI is going to bring that to a
wholly new level. Or for example we'll be able to use AI to disable critical
systems like energy grids and food supply systems and so forth and at the
same time it's a flipside of the benefits of AI the more we come to rely
on it to run our transport systems or our health systems for example, the more
vulnerable we become when those systems are attacked.
So preparing for an age of intelligent machines
is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time?
If you think about the world right now we have changed the world in a greater way
than any species that has come before us both in positive ways and in negative
ways and a very large part of that has been our intelligence. That's what
allowed us to populate the entire planet, to change our environment, to build the
machines that we have and if we are introducing entities that
are able to match or even surpass our problem-solving and scientific
capabilities, that's going to change the world even more than we have.
It can't simply be enough for
the leading scientists as brilliant as they are to
be pushing ahead as quickly as possible. We need there to be ongoing
conversations and collaboration between the people who are thinking about the
ethical impacts of the technology, how it's going to be deployed in different
sectors, what portions the population are going to be affected in different ways,
how we can make sure that the benefits of the technology reach as many people
as possible.
Our intelligence is central to being human so what will happen when
we develop sentient AI that matches or surpasses human intelligence?
Human capacities are of course a product of our very specific evolutionary history
and of what you can fit inside one skull. The machines we're building I think will
be completely different, in a completely different history completely different
constraints, so they're going to force us to really expand our idea of what
intelligence is.
If we develop general artificial intelligence I think all bets
are off as to what it would mean to be human. It's an open question what we even
mean by general artificial intelligence. Broadly we use it to refer to
intelligence that is not just narrowly defined to do a particular task very
well but intelligence that is able to go into a new environment, make sense of it
figure out what problems need to be solved and set about solving them.
When we develop artificial intelligence systems, if we do, they're able to achieve
this, I think it's fair to say we'll be introducing a new type of intelligence
to the world and that that will change the world and our part in it in ways
impossible to predict.
This is an incredibly exciting time to be alive.
For millions of years we humans have lived with other kinds of intelligence with
birds all around us and animals and bacteria that all in their various ways
manage to solve the problems of life. But now we are creating a wholly new
form of intelligence and we don't know what that's going to be like, we don't
know what life in the age of intelligent machines is going to be like but I'm
really excited about the possibilities.
There may be areas of scientific
progress that are simply beyond us. Whether it's new forms of physics, our
deeper understanding of the universe or an understanding of our own biology and
health that goes beyond what we can do without these tools. The idea that
artificial intelligence can help us to understand ourselves and to understand
the universe at a much deeper level than we'd ever would be able to do without it
I think is about as far reaching a goal for artificial intelligence
as could be.
My special interest in space science and that's an arena where the
robots clearly have an advantage because space is a hostile environment for
people, it's very expensive to send people into space but I expect that we
will have much more sophisticated robots, large flotillas of tiny machines
exploring all the planets and the moons and also perhaps fabricators building
huge structures up in space which are intelligent enough to do their work without
human beings. So I see space as being an arena for robots and miniaturised probes
which can be far more effective than human beings.
This is perhaps the most
exciting time in the history of mankind. We're only a decade or so away from the
future where we will be able to converse across multiple languages, where doctors
will be able to diagnose better, where surgeons will be able to operate more
accurately, where drivers will be able to drive more safely. So I think in our
research and in our work we should really
embrace this technology and work together for the benefit of society.
Although machines are threatening one aspect of what it means to be human at
the same time they ought to help us appreciate the incredible machinery of
the human brain and body and just how much of the millions of years of
evolutionary history have gone into making us embodied creatures that can
function in the world and just how impressive that is.