Transcriber: Nikolaos Mavridis Reviewer: Micaela Umedez
Imagine a world
where robots are part of your everyday life,
and not only as helpers, but also as companions and friends.
And where the minds of such robots are not just building the big,
technological centers of the world like Silicon Valley,
but they are built even in a small oasis city
in the middle of the Arabian Desert,
such as Al Ain.
Furthermore,
imagine a world
in which we can all participate in wider intelligent entities,
that are made up of potentially thousands of humans and machines,
even with ten seconds of our time every day,
and whose capabilities might far surpass the current limits
of both human as well as artificial intelligence.
And finally,
imagine a world
where we can harness
the collective mind and intellect of the citizens of our nations
in order to be able to bring forth
effective participatory governance for the smart green cities of the future.
These three have been my dreams and goals in the last ten years.
And they have partially produced some fruit:
such as Ibn Sina, the world's first Arabic speaking android robot.
In the words of the BBC, as recorded in my lab:
(Video) But unlike his older counterpart, this Ibn Sina is altogether
more high tech.
As well as being fluent in English and Arabic,
he can hold a conversation with humans. He looks for information about us
on the Internet, and uses that to chat with us.
He'll also remember it for the next time you meet.
Robot voice: Saeed - Happy.
Narrator: But this lab isn't in Japan, China, or the United States;
it is in Al Ain, just an hour's drive from the UAE capital Abu Dhabi.
(Applause)
Nikolaos Mavridis: I would like to ask you
to embark with me upon a journey,
that will have three parts: first, I will start with
a very short history of intelligence on the planet Earth, to arrive
to the moment where we actually have robots interacting with humans.
Then, I will talk about individual intelligence,
and how this scales up to collective intelligence.
And in the end, I will go to the most crucial question, I think,
for today: how can we harness the collective mind of our citizens
in order to bring forth effective participatory governance?
Let us start!
In the beginning, the Earth
was full of lifeless matter.
And then,
the first organisms appeared,
And later,
the first animals
that could actually perceive the world through their sensors,
their eyes and their ears, and then
mediated through their natural intelligence,
they could act upon the world
through their muscles.
Later,
humans appeared,
and with them,
the first man-made objects,
such as tools,
and much later,
a very special kind of man-made objects:
machines, that could run along on their own.
And it wasn't until very recently,
that we started getting the first intelligent machines,
such as computers.
But ask yourselves:
how much has our life changed,
since the introduction of intelligent machines?
Just think:
in the last week,
how much time have you spent
in direct interaction, one-to-one with another person?
Versus how much time have you spent
in electronic mediated interaction,
through your cell phone, or through your messaging system?
Versus, more importantly, how much time have you spent,
interacting with a machine, and not a human?
With a website, with a computer game, with an ATM,
and in the future, with robots?
The average American is spending
two hours of his day online,
and a big part of this time has to do
with interaction with machines, not with humans.
So we are spending more and more time with them,
and slowly,
we are starting to relate to them.
And then,
came robots.
And robots are very different from other intelligent machines;
they don't need to have somebody at a keyboard
in order to feed them
with information from the world,
as you need for a computer;
they have their own sensors,
they can perceive the world through their cameras and their vision systems,
through their sonars, through their auditory sensors and so on.
And most importantly they can also directly act upon the world;
they have their own muscles
which are their motors, in this case.
And the connection between the sensors and the motors
happens through their artificial intelligence.
For example,
when it comes to chess,
the Deep Blue computer of IBM
was able to win over Kasparov,
the World Champion of chess.
But still, in many, many other things,
human intelligence is far superior to machine intelligence;
take for example, the motor abilities of a 5 year-old girl,
if you get the best biped humanoid robot,
like Asimo that you saw,
it is much worse when it comes to what it can do.
Take also the abilities of young children
to be able to continuously learn
in an exploratory manner.
Again, the best machine learning program
out there cannot even think about doing something like that.
There are unsurmountable limits, though, to what a single intelligent entity,
either it being human or being machine, can do on its own.
And this is why, participating in groups
is not only very, very pleasant as an activity,
but it can enable us to do things that we cannot even think of alone.
But the intermediate stage
between the single individual and the group
is the pair.
In this case, a pair of a robot and a human
And most of the work that I have done so far in my lab
actually has to do with exactly this setting.
And let me share with you three interesting examples of that:
first, the robot Ripley, which has the form of a helping hand.
You can give it commands in language,
it helps you with things that you want to do on a table
and it can learn the meaning of words through examples.
Let us see it in action!
(Video) Man: Where is the red one?
Robot voice: At the top.
Man: Look at the center!
Robot voice: OK.
Man: Where is the red one?
NM: So up there you can see what the camera sees,
and this is the model of the world that it makes.
(Video) Man: What color are the objects?
Robot voice: One is red, and the other is green.
NM: It cannot see the red object anymore, but it still remembers it.
Man: Imagine a blue object on the left.
NM: Now we are telling it that there is an object on the left,
so it's imagining an object
and it waits to see it when it looks on the left.
(Video) Man: Where is the blue one?
Robot voice: Most probably at the left.
Man: How big is the blue one?
Robot voice: I have no idea.
Man: Look at the left!
NM: And now he will see what he was imagining before
and verify that indeed what I was telling him was true,
that there is a blue object, and it will know how big it is.
Man: How big is the blue one?
Robot voice: Small.
NM: And the robot can also remember.
Man: How big was the blue one when your head started moving?
Robot voice: I had no idea.
Man: Where was the red one when the green one appeared?
Robot voice: Most probably at the top, but maybe not.
Man: Thank you!
Robot voice: You're welcome.
(Applause)
NM: So you see how, slowly, these machines are learning
how to bring part of the world within their own mental realm, their head.
And then they're learning how to connect
all of these things with language and help us,
and even remember in some cases, and imagine.
The second example that I want to share with you
is from the Facebots robots.
And here my purpose was to build a robot that can interact with you
not only once, but it can keep your interest
so you can speak again with him
after one day, after one week, many times within a month
or three months.
And for that reason it's trying to create
shared memories with you,
so it remembers the things that you did together,
and shared friends,
so it can spread gossip about the friends
and have an interesting discussion.
At the same time it can meet with people physically or through Facebook
and also it can get information from Facebook that is relevant to them.
Let us see that too!
(Video) Robot voice: Are you Layli Tutunzin?
Woman: Yes!
Layli Tutunzin, are you doing well today? Woman: Yes!
Robot voice: Well, let me tell you some updated news
from the world of technology.
NM: Here it is giving customised news.
Robot voice: That's great!
NM: It has recognised the face of the person.
Robot voice: Layli, do you know that our friend, Panos Tulli,
has posted a new photo in the photo album?
Woman: No.
Robot voice: I am sending you an inbox message about this.
NM: Talking about common friends.
RV: One of our common friends, Panos Tulli, is online.
Would you like to send a message to our friend?
NM: It can connect people, one of which is online, the other physically there,
even get people to know one another.
RV: I remember when we talked this morning and I had asked you
"Are you doing well today?"
And you were doing well
and we talked a little about Chandan Data.
Layli, it was nice speaking to you! Goodbye for now.
(Applause)
And then, the third example
after Sarah the Facebot
is Ibn Sina, which you very briefly saw in the beginning.
And here the purpose was to create a shopping mall robot,
or a museum robot, or even an Interactive theatre actor.
And this robot actually spoke with thousands of people as you shall see.
A lot of degrees of freedom in the face, it can have facial expressions.
(Video) Man: Salam Aleikum! Marhaba.
NM: A simple dialogue system in Arabic.
It even does the greeting
of the Khaliji greeting. Haha!
Robot: Hazin: sadness.
NM: And it can take facial expressions corresponding to emotions.
Sadness.
Robot: Elpostir: disbelief.
NM: Disbelief.
Robot: Motahamas: Excited.
NM: And excitement!
(Laughter)
As you can imagine this got a lot of publicity,
so just a small sample follows:
This is Agence France Press.
(Video: Speaking in French)
Dubai TV.
Thirty countries around the world.
Netherlands.
And then the robot also went to shopping malls and exhibitions
and spoke with around 3000 people.
And it also flew on Emirates Airlines to Saudi Arabia,
invited by the Minister of Education of Saudi.
And here he is very happy.
And in the end the letter that he wrote
to Sheikh Nahayan bin Mubarak of the Emirates.
(Applause)
So all of these three examples that I showed to you
were examples of interaction between pairs:
a human and a robot,
speaking with one another.
The next stage is group interaction,
and in this case we have a group of two robots and two humans
from the NASA Robonaut Project.
And after that, what we reach is what one could call
in Layman's terms "superorganisms"
that could have thousands of humans and machines,
connected tightly to one another, and sharing their eyes and hands,
and brains, if you want.
But what do I mean exactly by that?
Let me give you an example.
These are ten red balloons;
they are about I think five meters in diameter,
and they were placed in random locations around the United States in 2009
as part of a DARPA research program:
this was the network challenge, as they called it.
And the goal of the teams that were taking part in the competition
for these balloons which were University teams
was to find a way to find them.
And they could use whatever they want:
they could use humans, they could use satellites,
they could use machines.
So the team that was actually able to win
which came from the MIT Media Lab, where I did my PhD too,
used - what do you think?
Social networks.
So they used social networks in order to get to recruit thousands of people
who pretty much spent ten seconds of their time lending their eyes
and their brain to the system to look around
and check if they see a balloon.
And then, through the thousands of eyes that contributed to the system
they were able to find them in a very, very [short] time.
Of course you can extend this.
You can get people give part of their brain abilities
as services to the system.
They can be translating text,
they can be planning,
they can be doing operations.
And if you bring all of this together,
then you get something that is much more similar, if you want,
to this dance of the reincarnation of the Buddha that they have in China.
So enough with interactive robots and the human-robot cloud.
Now let me go to the third part of the talk,
and talk to you about the answer
to the following question:
how can we harness the collective mind of citizens
in order to be able to bring forth effective participatory governance?
Both in Ancient Athens as well as in Islam and many other cultures
one of the prime elements of politics
is "consultation" or "Shura"
as it's usually called.
The big issue though with Shura is that it works at the level of a village
but how can you extend this to the multi-million-people nations
that we have today?
This is a big problem,
but this is exactly the opportunity in terms of technology
for the first time in the history of humanity to try to do it.
And a prime example of this,
is what his Excellency
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid has done in Dubai,
in which through the UAE Brainstorm program,
he brought about ten thousand of his citizens to contribute
to the reformation of the education program of the Emirates
by sending messages through Twitter and through the Internet.
And there are many cases in which electronic consultation
can really help bring forth new ideas
and can really help people participate in what is happening.
There are cases though where it is important to, if you want,
get the physical element come in there.
That's why, as part of my involvement
in “Recreate Greece", which is a citizens movement in Greece,
I planned and organised hybrid electronic and physical workshops
for consultation, in which again we had many citizens of Greece
coming together and brainstorming
in order to plan for the Renaissance of Greece after the crisis.
And the important thing about the physical element
which you cannot find too easily in the electronic
is the fact that you can have
real friendships taking place in this meeting,
and also the citizens that get involved later start group action together.
So you actually get volunteer groups too that really do things and not just talk.
And there are many other technologies
that have become available right now
to be able to enhance governance,
that are based on this collective mind of the people, if you want.
There is liquid representation,
there is participatory budgeting,
there are online petitions,
and much more that you can easily find
if you see for example the World Forum of Democracy in Strasbourg.
Also, there are many new technologies
regarding being able to analyse public opinion.
In a project that we started in my lab recently, we actually fetched
150.000 tweets that were related to the ObamaCare website
and how people reacted to it.
And we were able to find out
who the main influencers were, what the spheres of influence were,
what the communication dynamics were,
how the sentiment of the people
was coming up and down over time,
and how this whole thing was related to what was happening out there
in terms of government announcements and the real project progress.
And you were even able to actually get predictions from what is happening,
through this analysis of public opinion.
Thus, in the green smart cities of the future,
it's not just the infrastructure that will be intelligent
and the buildings, and environmentally friendly.
One of the most important elements we think in that respect is to be able
to harness both the skills and the mind and the opinions of all of the citizens
in order to help governance,
and in order to help them make their dreams come true.
Thus, we have gone a long way.
I started by talking about lifeless matter and went all the way
to robots interacting with humans.
Then we talked about individual intelligence
and collective intelligence.
And finally, we asked about the collective mind of the citizens
and how it can help in the new cities of the future.
Let me thus just close with a vision of the future.
Imagine a world in which humans, robots,
and all other intelligent and natural entities
that will make up the complex biological and artificial ecosystem of tomorrow,
will co-exist in peace, harmony, and mutual benefit,
and in which through our participation in larger entities
we will able to reach a much more deep collective self-actualization.
And finally, imagine a world,
in which through the collective mind of the citizens,
we will be able not only to have effective participatory governance,
but most importantly, we will help preserve and enjoy
our most beautiful planet,
its biosphere,
and Mother Earth.
(Applause)