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- In this century probably, we will be building
this hugely consequential thing
which is the first general intelligence
that will be smarter than humans.
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This involves an enormous responsibility.
This is like maybe the most important thing
that our species will ever have done on this planet.
Giving birth to this new level of intellect.
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I'm Nick Bostrom, I am a professor at Oxford University
where I run the Future of Humanity Institute.
With the unusual mandate of trying to think carefully
about the really big picture questions for humanity
and the future of earth originating intelligent life.
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AI has been a big focus of mine
really since my teenage years.
It always seemed that if you look around
and ask what accounts for why the world is the way it is?
Our human world, a lot of it is
because we humans have made it so.
We have invented all kinds of technologies.
And so all these things whether it's jet planes or art
or political systems have come into the world
through the birth canal of the human brain.
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That immediately made it plausible to me
that if you could change that channel
creating artificial brains,
then you would change the thing that is changing the world.
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I think we have this notion of what's smart
and what's dumb.
Whereas I think there is actually
a huge amount of space above us
between our level of intelligence and God's.
And once you go a little bit beyond human,
then you get this feedback loop,
where the brain's doing the AI research
will become AIs themselves.
Therefore I think there is a significant chance
that we'll have an intelligence explosion.
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So that within a short period of time,
we go from something that was only moderately
affecting the world, to something that completely
transforms the world.
All the things that we could imagine human intelligence
being useful for, which is pretty much everything.
Artificial intelligence could be useful for as well
if it just became more advanced.
Whether it's like diseases or pollution or poverty
we would have vastly better tools for dealing with
if you had superintelligence you could help develop
better clean energy technologies or medicines.
So it does look to me like all the plausible paths
to a really great future, involve the development
of machine superintelligence at some point.
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There are I think existential risks connected
with the transition to the machine intelligence era.
And the most obvious being the possibility
of underlying super intelligence
that then overrides the earth, human civilization,
with its own value structures.
Another big class of failures would be
if this technology were used for destructive purposes.
Then I think there is a third dimension that has received
less attention so far, which is how good the outcome is
for the AI stem cells.
If we're going to construct digital minds
that are maybe conscious
or have moral status of various degrees.
Then how can we ensure that they are treated well?
If you think about it, most of us would acknowledge
that various non-human animals have degrees of moral status.
Even something as simple as a humble lab mouse.
At that point it becomes an active question
of whether we have obligations to the AIs
not to just make sure we don't misuse AIs
against one another or protect ourselves from the AI,
but also make sure we do what we ought to do
with respect to the AIs.
And if we succeed at that and things go well,
then we can imagine living lives,
way beyond anything that is possible now.
This is why there has been so much interest in AI,
in recent years because it does look like it could be
this fourth ground on which the future depends.
So on the one hand it does look from this
kind of slightly abstract point of view
that we might develop, in the not too distant future
greater than human AI and it could change everything.
On the other hand, it seems kind of rather incredible
that this world that we've known for our whole lives,
that, that will be a plausible scenario
in which that changes radically in our lifetime.
And we become I don't know some sort of
semi-mortal uploaded creatures, with Jupiter sized minds.
Like is it I actually take that seriously,
like it seems to go against day to day lived experience.
So to keeping both of those in mind,
creates this kind of interesting tension,
between two different ways of thinking about the world.
I think rather than just eliminate one of them,
just keep them both there and struggle with that tension.
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