- My name is Kristin Lennox,
and I'm a principal data scientist at Beyond Limits.
My job is to help humans and computers interact
with each other in industrial context.
Today, we're gonna be looking at some Hollywood depictions
of artificial intelligence.
And I'm gonna be giving my view on how similar that is
to what's going on in the real world today.
2001: A Space Odyssey, two astronauts on a mission
to Jupiter with a computer in their ship,
supposedly the most advanced
artificially intelligent computer
that's ever been created.
- [Mister Amor] Good afternoon, HAL, how's everything going?
- [HAL] Good afternoon, Mister Amor.
Everything is going extremely well.
- So HAL is described as working like a human brain
except a human brain that never makes mistakes.
Computers really don't work like that.
Fundamentally, computers don't think like we think
even when they're displaying what appears to be emotion.
- [HAL] I'm afraid, Dave.
- It's trying to make you more comfortable,
but it's not reflecting what's going on under the hood.
What artificial intelligence does is more task-specific.
So we teach a computer to do a task like drive a car.
But we don't have a computer that makes decisions
outside of that task.
There is one thing that HAL says...
- [HAL] The 9000 series has a perfect operational record.
- Excluding situations where there's a hardware failure,
this is actually correct.
Computers will do exactly what they've been asked to do.
So any decisions that HAL was making
that didn't make sense to the pilots...
- [HAL] It can only be attributable to human error.
- During the journey, the computer, HAL,
appears to be making mistakes.
This leads the astronauts to attempt to deactivate HAL.
- [HAL] I know that you and Frank were planning
to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something
I cannot allow to happen.
- It's actually very difficult
to design artificial intelligence
that can potentially be dangerous to humans
mostly because it's very difficult
to get machines to recognize when humans are in danger.
The film is definitely not an accurate depiction
of the state of AI in 2001.
But I'd say this is a solid C.
- I can't believe I'm having this conversation
with my computer.
- [Samantha] You're not.
You're having this conversation with me.
- Her, a world where there are artificially intelligent
operating systems.
So the the main character in the movie gets an OS
named Samantha, and they form a relationship.
I should tell you that I'm not in a place
to commit to anything right now.
- [Samantha] Did I say I wanted to commit to you?
I'm confused.
- Samantha is a very human character,
so not just mimicking human emotion
but actually experiencing it.
- [Samantha] I don't know.
When we were looking at those people
I fantasized that I was walking next to you
and that I had a body.
- Which makes for a very interesting movie
but is not the way that computers behave today.
We don't actually know how to make a computer
that wants things.
- [Samantha] I wanna learn everything about everything.
I wanna eat it all up.
I wanna discover myself.
- That's capable of growing beyond what we ask of it.
Eventually, the computers reached a point
where they were much more interested in each other
and much more interested in things that were not relating
to the humans who created them,
what's called artificial general intelligence,
which would be a true, sort of, conscious AI.
We don't have a reason to believe it's impossible,
but we don't know how to get there.
Can we even do it with the current digital architecture,
or would we have to switch to something
that's closer to what our brains are,
which is an analog biological architecture.
But that doesn't mean that we can't get there.
It just means that we really don't know
when we'd be able to.
It's a very interesting film.
It's not accurate.
And it's a lot of interesting ideas
about how things could potentially evolve in the future.
I'd say B-minus.
Ex Machina...
- Are you building an AI?
- I've already built one.
- [Kristin] A billionaire tech genius
who builds a humanoid AI robot
and recruits a human to test it.
- The real test is to show you that she's a robot
and then see if you still feel she has consciousness.
- So we don't have a clearcut definition
of what consciousness is.
The definition that resonates the most with me
is to say that consciousness
is the experience of being yourself.
We don't say that a thermometer knows
what the temperature is,
'cause there's no internal experience for a thermometer.
There is no reason to believe that our current computers
have any kind of internal experience.
Would we know it if we got it,
if we built a very persuasive AI that could interact
as if it had an internal life?
It's very unrealistic to say
that the first very human-like AI
is going to fit in a human-sized box.
Current super computers, which are not capable
of producing consciousness, fit in buildings
and are run by their own power plants.
There is some hand-waving in the movie
about mythical quasi-biological processing architecture
that they're going to use to be able to achieve this
but, again, it's not based on anything
that's real and achievable right now.
It's a very enjoyable movie.
It's a movie that sort of explores
what does it mean to be human?
much more than it explores what does it mean to be AI?
And I would say if you were counting on this movie
to teach you about AI,
you would not receive above a D-minus.
- Instead of creating an artificial intelligence
you duplicated an existing one.
- [Kristin] Transcendence, there's an AI researcher
who is dying.
In order to preserve him, they upload his brain
into a computer that he's built.
- [Will] I can't describe it.
It's like my mind has been set free.
- [Kristin] They hook him up to the Internet
and suddenly he has access
to all this information he never had.
He starts building things that humans can't even comprehend.
- [Will] We've made a breakthrough with the nanotechnology.
We can rebuild any material faster than before.
- This movie is full of lies.
We can't scan a person's brain.
If we could, we'd have to take your brain apart,
so don't try it on your own.
- And in a short time,
its analytical power will be greater
than the collective intelligence of every person born
in the history of the world.
- Even with the best technology,
you can't overcome physical limitations.
It only has so much storage space.
It only has so much processing space.
There's only so much power to run it.
You don't automatically get this
sort of runaway increase in capability.
I think that there is a point to be made
about taking the unknowable artificial entity
and hooking it up to the Internet
and letting it do whatever it wants.
- [Will] You need to get me online.
I need to access financial markets.
- But it's unrealistic even in its depiction
of the threat there.
The way the technology works is a solid F.
WarGames, it's basically about
an artificially intelligent computer
developed during the Cold War
to sort of simulate global thermal nuclear war
and try to figure out under what scenarios
would you maximize survival of Americans.
A youthful hacker accidentally accesses this computer
and asks it to play a game of global thermal nuclear war.
In trying to win this game, the computer decides
that the optimal strategy is to actually start
an immediate preemptive strike against the Soviet Union
and launch a bunch of missiles.
So the first takeaway is don't ever give the computer
the ability to launch your nuclear missiles.
That's a terrible idea.
This computer, which is very, very smart
in a very, very inhuman way,
is doing exactly what it was programmed to do.
And it finds a solution.
And it goes to execute on it,
and it doesn't understand
that it doesn't have all the context,
that really, the best way
to win a global thermal nuclear war
is to not ever start one in the first place.
It's showing a computer that's an antagonist
but not a malevolent one.
It just doesn't understand.
Oh, A-plus, A-plus, I love WarGames.
When people make movies about computers,
they're actually making movies about people.
And we like watching stories about people or entities
that are like us more than we would like watching
this is the life of your toaster.
I think as long as people view it as entertainment
and say that an artificial intelligence monster
is no more real than a vampire or a zombie,
then it's good clean fun.
It's actually a really exciting time
to be working in artificial intelligence,
not because we're building robots
that have feelings, but because we're seeing a lot
of really exciting things in healthcare, in energy.
The world of research in general
has been completely revolutionized.
There's so much more good to AI than bad,
and that's sort of the vision of AI
that I see moving forward.
(upbeat music)