We are living in a society today -
not in some vague, distant future -
where artificial intelligence is impacting our lives now.
And you outline one of the main problems
when it comes to AI, which is this
idea of ethics versus morality.
And I just want to understand a bit more
about what you mean by it.
What is it, and what is the problem there?
Our lives are pretty early on shaped by moral
and ethical choices, whether we know it or not.
- Right.
- But the computer that we create will just be
a computer that mirrors our own rationality.
And if we're not careful, it can
start to take decisions that sound rational to it,
and to the people who programmed it,
but will be anti-human.
And that's why, for me,
as we move in this century towards
autonomous general intelligences,
autonomous machines that can decide
"Are they gonna kill somebody on the battlefield?"
These machines have to be given codes
and safety standards and ultimately
ethical codes which mirror ours.
But how do you program ethics?
It just sounds mental when I say it out loud.
How do you - ?
With an artificial general intelligence -
in other words, a thinking machine that
can emulate ours - it has to have, as it were,
an embedded series of values that can
deal with any eventuality.
Though engineers are actually quite good at
programming ethics into machines.
- Yeah.
- They're already dealing with safety standards
for things like autonomous killing vehicles that
can patrol borders in South Korea
or Israel, for example. This is real.
What they're not good at - because why should they be,
they're just engineers - they're not good at importing
whole human value systems that have taken
religions and philosophers thousands of years
to develop.
- Right.
- Into machines.
Engineers are good at yes/no decisions.
They're brilliant, actually, at designing
"Shall I do this? Or that?"
That's all a computer program is.
"Shall we go this way? Or that way?"
What they're not so good at is thinking
about the 360-degree humanity of the people
they're building these machines for.
- Not to mention, like, what is ethical and moral
in, let's say, China is different to what is
ethical and moral in Ethiopia to the
United Kingdom to the United States. How do we -
So who regulates?
Who regulates is the government of the day.
I mean, that's who's regulating.
There are international standards for AI
made by IEEE, which is an electrical
engineering standards board. But they've only just
been written two years ago, and it's not
exactly clear that everyone who's
producing AI is following them.
Above all, people who are working on AI
are in the military sphere. That's why I argue:
The businesses who've been mostly very good
at saying, "Look, we need ethics."
Some really good ones say, "We have an ethics board."
I'm telling them: "You're gonna need moral
philosophers. You're gonna need people
who are adept at understanding
global worldwide problems for human beings.
Because as soon as you unleash this machine you're
building into the world, it has to know
more or less what its values are."
- We have to assign morality to artificial intelligence.
Now how do you do it?
You need to build in to university departments,
almost like aggressive cross-disciplinary working.
So that the engineer doesn't go: "Right, look,
I know that you're developing an ethical
standard for an autonomous sentry that
can kill anything at 2,000 meters."
- Right.
- "And I'm gonna come to the conference next year
where we'll discuss what controls
we put over this thing, because it's really interesting.
But by the way, do you want to see
the one I built in the lab? It's here."
That's what engineers do.
Militaries around the world, nations like China
and the U.S., are, in some senses, in an AI battle.
It's an arms race.
- They are in an AI arms race, and they have actually,
at the moment, different objectives.
- Oh, right.
- I think the USA has a clearly military objective
in its AI. It is spending the most
per year on AI, but it has a big private
sector that is trying to develop AI privately.
And it's very, very acutely aware that the U.S.
federal government must not be allowed
anywhere near what they are doing. In China -
- Yeah.
- Well, China has said it needs to be
the AI leader by 2032.
You know that very specifically because -
- Yes, because they have a policy. They're gonna do it.
And the way they're gonna do it
is the opposite of America:
The state requires the private sector to hand
over its intellectual property and
to interoperate.
Killer robots - tell me about that.
- Look, there are already autonomous
sentry vehicles. So they patrol borders
or fence lines.
But they're not AI?
Well, they have an artificial intelligence
built into them - a limited one.
And South Korea and Israel and the United States
has vehicles like this, though the obvious
problem with them is - we call it
"who's in the loop."
You can have a human being in the loop.
- OK.
- And the human being in the loop says,
"Right, look, I can see, little rover
vehicle, that you're about to go
and kill somebody. I'd just like to check
whether or not it's our local -
our local cleaner coming up the road
who's forgotten to tell us."
So let's not do it until I take
a human decision. That's "human in the loop."
So a human being decides:
"Yes, kill; no, don't kill."
- Yeah.
- OK.
- Like just as a drone pilot does -
- Right.
Say in Afghanistan or Iraq - that's what the
U.S. and the UK military do, they look and then -
but the drone is autonomous.
- Right.
- It's flying, but they take decisions.
Increasingly, however, humans tend to put themselves
"on the loop." It's like this:
I've got 10 of these vehicles. 2 of them
have seen a suspicious person.
And they're gonna kill that person
unless I stop them. So I'll just have a look
and check that it's all right.
But if the person who's approaching
the fence line is the enemy,
then go ahead and kill them.
If I do nothing,
something bad happens.
"On the loop" is where I think it's going.
And the argument for it is, in wars,
in conflicts, a lot of bad things happen.
- Yeah.
Often due to human frailty, human error or evil.
We have the Geneva Convention.
You can program the Geneva Convention into
a killing machine, and the people who
support it say, "It will always
obey the Geneva Convention."
- Which is a good thing?
- It would be good thing. Of course, nobody
wants to kill anybody. But the final form
of autonomous machines,
of artificial intelligence,
will eventually be "human out of the loop."
Some of these automated processes, machines
and intelligences will have that status
in our lives. And so it makes it ultra
imperative that at the design stage,
the engineers take ethics seriously.
But, even more importantly, that we as
a human society understand what's being built.
Can AI be useful to the developing world?
- Look: AI, digital technologies, networks,
automation - that's the future.
Developing nations already are sending
their scientists, their engineers, their
computer programmers, their linguists
to developed world universities to learn
this stuff.
I am totally optimistic that we can
cure diseases, solve behavioral problems,
emotional problems, solve structural problems
of living in a city through intelligent machines.