Some people who have wild imaginations
say that what we're building right now is dangerous.
It's very captivating to the imagination
but it's not very based in the science.
At Vicarious our mission is to build the first human-level artificial intelligence
and use it to help humanity thrive.
Artificial intelligence will be bigger than the internet
or any previous invention that's revolutionized the way the human race works.
If 40 years from today Vicarious hasn't created human level artificial intelligence
I would be very surprised.
I would also owe one of my friends a drink.
My name is Scott Phoenix and I'm co-founder at Vicarious.
Well folks, what else can I do to make your day more comfortable?
When I was ten years old I saw The Jetsons
and I was blown away by Rosie the Robot.
You've done it all Rosie! What makes you so terrific anyway?
I'm programmed to be user friendly.
I imagined a world where there were a billion or a hundred billion Rosie the Robots everywhere
helping us to accomplish our greatest visions for what society could be.
Now here we are in 2016 and we have Roombas vacuuming our carpet
but where's Rosie?
If you can have a computer with the same
inventiveness and the same abilities that a human has
you can ask that computer to invent all the things that humans invent.
All the problems that have stymied the human race for decades
like curing cancer or inventing fusion power, making space travel cheap,
are things that intelligent systems could help us solve in hours or days.
For example, artificial intelligence can read
every article that's ever been written about cancer,
come up with really novel ideas, really interesting experiments that haven't been done yet
and then execute them, in parallel, without sleeping
with 800,000 robotic arms in a giant warehouse.
And you'll get breakthrough results way faster.
Then the question that follows it is, well, am I a hundred years too early to do that?
Am I five hundred years too early to do that?
Or is now around the right time?
At Vicarious when we had our first breakthrough around CAPTCHA,
we chose not to publish it because we didn't want to break the internet.
CAPTCHA is the squiggly set of letters that websites will ask you to type in
to prove that you're a real person using the service and not just a computer program.
We demonstrated that our AI vision system that we were developing
could actually solve any of those CAPTCHAs that humans could solve,
and so, effectively, our AI could prove that it was human
at least to these narrow set of tests.
No one had beaten CAPTCHA in the same way and no one has done it since.
But we're not here to make systems that read text. We're here to build AI.
We're trying to understand the computational principles that make intelligence happen
and put them into a computer.
So when you're first born,
you're experiencing this confusing cacophony of light intensities being shown to your eyes,
and touch being experienced on your skin,
and gradually over time your brain begins to make sense of these things
and form higher-level concepts and then begin to recognize and predict the world around you.
That matches the process we followed at Vicarious for developing our algorithm.
So, right now we're in the ABB Robot Lab in Silicon Valley.
ABB is one of Vicarious' large commercial investors.
They're a company that were discussing different applications of our AI technology.
How we can make robots vastly smarter and more useful than they are today.
Almost every article, it seems like, they write about Vicarious
they put a picture of the Terminator machine next to the article.
That gets a little old.
Because it just, it seems so radically out of alignment with what the company's values are
and what we're building and the state of the science today.
Every invention since the creation of fire has had the ability to do things that are in service
and also potentially hurt us if we don't use it properly.
Being motivated by wanting to create value for society causes us to think really critically
about what are the right applications for the technology that we're building.
And what are the ways that we could use it to help humans most?
I think that artificial intelligence is going to be, and already is,
a lot like all these other technologies,
where the first version is a Roomba.
Then your car gets a little smarter about staying between the lines,
and then on the highway it can kind of drive itself.
And then eventually it's able to take you back to your door stop.
These changes are not going to happen overnight.
There's going to be a gradual adoption of them in different industries
and in different kinds of products,
as they have with every technology before this.
People will understand the value of this technology
and be comfortable with it helping them in different ways.
When I pass people on the subway, I think about
how can the work that we're trying to do here be of service to them in their life?
And in their friend's lives and in their children's lives and in their parent's lives?
There's always this thread,
feeling a deep personal connection to our shared destiny as a species,
and what can each of us bring to alter the trajectory of that destiny
towards a place that would be better for everyone?
If we could build the first-human level AI
It would be the last invention any one would need to create.