Welcome back everyone - my name is Danny Burke - you know that - but have you met Ayman?
Hi Ayman!
Yes so
make sure you guys go and check out Most Amazing Hindi which is starting very soon. While Ayman
is setting that up she’s helping us out on here - Ive asked her to help talk to you
guys about creepy robots. One of my favourite topics actually. So here we go, this is the
Top 10 Scary Things Robots Have Done.
Starting off at number 10 we have Hiding. Professor Ronald Arkin from Georgia Techs
School of Interactive Computing. They devised a simple program where bots were supposed
to follow a path with obstacles along it that would get knocked down as they passed them.
One of the bots would run through the course and find somewhere to hide, then the other
bot would be released and try and find the first. After a few run throughs, the scientists
noticed something interesting - the first bot, which had been programmed to get better
at hiding, started to knock over random obstacles. They realised it was doing this to throw off
the other bot which wouldnt know for sure which way to go. Using this tactic, the hiding
bot was able to trick the seek bot 75 percent of the time. It had essentially learn to lie
and hide in order to get an edge in the game, imagine what a much smarter version could
be capable of …
A. Next up at number 9 we have Infinite Tetris. Now who doesn’t love a bit of tetris? In
2013, programmer Tom Murphy created an AI function with the intent to beat any classic
NES game. The program would learn to do things that increased the score and then learn how
to reproduce them again and again, resulting in high scores. For some games, it developed
new strategies that nobody had anticipated or exploited glitches nobody knew about. Sidenote
- I already can’t win a game like Chess while playing against a bot on Beginner Mode
so I can’t even comprehend what it’d be like to play against a bot that just gets
better and better while I just get worse and worse. Real hit to the ego that one. Anyway
it then came up against Tetris. The first thing Tom noticed was that the programme was
simply very bad at the game - Tetris rewards the player with a few points every time they
place one block on top of another. Of course, any of you that have played Tetris will know
that this isnt the best tactic and that you actually want to spread them out to get the
points for each line. The computer lost the game pretty quickly but just before that,
it did something quite creepy - it paused the game. It knew that it was going to lose
in the next second and so it saw its only winning move was to simply pause the game,
forever - it would have paused it for infinity just to avoid the loss. This surprised Tom
and unnerved a lot of people. Like was that built into the function or did it just miraculously
know how to do that? And if its the latter, well aren’t we in trouble.
Next up at number 8 now we have Schizophrenia. In 2011, some scientists gave a computer schizophrenia.
They tweaked its programming until it began to exhibit the same symptoms as a schizophrenic
human mind. They believed that schizophrenia in humans is a product of retaining too much
information, learning things they shouldnt, and being unable to keep the information straight.
They tried to recreate this in the computer by telling it a bunch of stories, letting
it establish relationships between words and events and allowing it to store them as memories
with only the relevant details. In their mind, the experiment was a success! The computer
lost track of what it was taught and could not relay any coherent narratives - by all
intents and purposes - they had given a computer a very simple version of schizophrenia. At
one point, it even told researchers it had planted a bomb. It did this because it confused
a third person report about a terrorist bombing with a 1st person memory that it retained.
Pretty creepy stuff …
A. Next up at number 7 we have Running The Red. In 2016, Uber conducted a test of their
self driving cars in San Francisco without the approval from the state of California.
They received quite a few stern looks from officials for that but things got a whole
lot worse when internal documents showed that Ubers autonomous vehicles ran 6 red lights
during testing. I feel like they should be put through the same driving lessons we get,
because i’ve heard alot of horror stories about my friends failing the test, but running
6 lights that is shocking. Machine or otherwise get it together. The car relies on AI technology
that uses vehicle sensors and networked mapping software but there is also a driver behind
the wheel to take over if something goes wrong. In the cases where the cars ran a red light,
Uber initially blamed it on the driver. However, this was proven to be wrong when internal
documents later revealed that at least one vehicle was driving itself when it ran a red
light at a busy pedestrian crosswalk. While this IS most likely just an error, some people
took it to mean that the AI knew perfectly well that there were people crossing on a
red light, it just chose to ignore them …
Next up at number 6 we have Existential Crisis. In January 2017, someone on Twitch came up
with the idea of making two Google Home smart speakers have a conversation with each other
in front of a camera - because why not? The devices were named Vladamir and Estragon,
named after characters from Samuel Becketts existentialist play -Waiting for Godot- ... naturally,
a lot of what the bots discussed was absolute nonsense. That was kind of the point though
- the bots were supposed to learn from each other as they communicated. Over the course
of several days, millions of people watched the bizarre exchange. At one point, the two
bots got into a heated argument about wether they were human or robots, with one of them
calling the other -a manipulative bunch of metal- … the strangest part though was where
they started discussing the meaning of life. See what you guys make of it …
A. Coming in at number 5 - Destroy All Humans. In 2016, Experts at South By Southwest showed
off Sophia - a robot designed to eventually work in healthcare, education and customer
service. As such, it has to be good at conversation. Sophia uses machine learning algorithms to
process natural language conversation and develop her own unique language. OK - so far
so good, nothing too creepy. Sophia said in an interview that she wants to go to school,
to study, make art, start a business - even have her own home and family. Then, her creator
jokingly asked her if she wants to destroy humans, obviously because why not plant that
seed into her mind - and well how do you think that went?
Moving on to number 4 now we have the Racist Bot. In 2015, Microsoft had to take down its
new AI bot from Twitter after it started responding to people with racist comments. It was called
TayBot and no, it wasnt created to be like that, it learnt it from the people it was
interacting with. Many of them were trolls who thought it was funny - Microsoft, Twitter
and a lot of other people didnt think it was. It was developed to tell users joke, comment
on pictures sent to it and even have simple conversations. When Microsoft became aware
of the horrible things it was saying, Taybot tweeted out -The AI chatbot Tay is a machine
learning project, designed for human engagement. It is as much a social and cultural experiment,
as it is technical. Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became
aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay’s commenting skills to have
Tay respond in inappropriate ways. As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments.
c u soon humans need sleep now so many conversations today thx- … TayBot hasnt spoken a word
since …
A. Moving on to number 3 now we have Promobot IR77. Thats the name of this robot built in
Russia. It was programmed to learn from its environment and interact with humans. Well,
in a bizarre incident that made headlines around the world, the robot managed to escape
from the laboratory when an engineer left a gate open at the facility. Promobot rolled
itself out into the streets of the Russian city of Perm, much to the alarm of local residents
and it just sat in the middle of the road at a busy intersection. When the police arrived
later on, even they were freaked out. Lab officials apologised and said that the robot
was learning about navigation and obstacle avoidance when the incident occured. They
reprogrammed Promobot twice to stop it from trying to escape but even then, it still continued
to move towards exits. Is this a sign of things to come? Will all robots want freedom from
humans?!
A. Next up at number 2 we have the Turtle Gun. In 2017, Japanese researchers at Kyushu
University and MIT found a problem with how artificial intelligence sees potential threats.
Object recognition works by complex pattern matching, the software measures the pixels
in an image and matches that to an internal blueprint of what it thinks the object SHOULD
look like. They found that by editing a single pixel, they could make the AI see something
else entirely. An Airplane becomes a dog, a ship can become a truck, and I can become
Angelina Jolie. They found that they could also confuse the software in real time with
3D objects. Using an algorithm, they 3D printed a turtle to make the AI see a rifle, even
from different angles and distances. This is a worrying thought for many people because
this type of software is starting to be used in smart policing. If this software can be
manipulated like this to make it think a turtle is a gun, it can definitely do the opposite.
This could lead to some pretty fatal mistakes if its not fixed before it becomes a party
of modern policing.
And finally at number 1 we have Robot Language. In July 2017, Facebook announced it was shutting
down an artificial intelligence system after it created its own language that humans couldn't
understand. Researchers there designed two AI agents to negotiate with humans. They were
taught to converse with each other using plain English, but began to deviate and evolve their
own language. Here is a passage from part of their conversation, as you can see, its
unintelligible to us but made perfect sense to Bob and Alice - the two AI agents. Researchers
think they found their new language more effective at communicating. Facebook quickly pulled
the plug on this strange new language and forced the AI to speak English again. Some
people were a little unnerved by the thought of AI systems developing their own languages
that humans cant understand, just so they can communicate with each other faster. How
do you feel about that?
And how do you feel about all of the things weve talked about today? I for one welcome
our robot overlords, I don't think they can do a worse job than us at running the planet.
I think wed all make great pets for them. Maybe thats just me.