Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Nicoletta Pedrana
Good evening, thank you for coming.
I have to admit, I am a bit afraid:
after the empathetic dolphin,
18 minutes of philosophy aren’t a piece of cake.
Resist the impulse to leave, I promise that it will be interesting.
Before coming here,
I was discussing about the talk with a friend and I told her the title.
“Artificial intelligence and intelligent design”.
And she said to me, where is empathy in there?
Two days later, we were still arguing about the relevance of empathy.
I promise that in 18 minutes we should make it;
but if I’m good enough,
empathy will be one of the last words that I will say in this talk,
because it will be the answer to the question:
if machines are intelligent, what does it mean to be human?
A bit trivial, deceptively simple question.
Actually, the interesting thing about this question,
that is also in the event's description,
is that it’s biased,
it’s assuming that machines are indeed intelligent,
and if so, they are as intelligent as human beings.
Actually, the “if” in this question has an essential role:
we have to ask ourselves if machines are really intelligent,
and if yes, what kind of intelligence do they have.
I will start this talk
by telling you what AI is;
understanding what promises and perils this technology brings about,
what should we take or avoid.
And understand how these risks and opportunities
impact human beings today.
When we talk about artificial intelligence
people have very different opinions, we have a really broad range.
On one side, those who say:
"Oh no, AI is great, it will allow us to overcome biological limitations,
we will be able to live forever, be immortal,
do something called “mind uploading”:
transferring all the information we have in our brains
upload them onto a machine,
that will be so powerful that it will become an avatar:
us, without our bodies.
We will be really powerful, extremely intelligent, eternal.'
On the other side of the spectrum are the ones who say
"Say no to artificial intelligence:
machines will always be more powerful, finely crafted,
and will be able to define the rules of their design
and will then become so powerful, so finely crafted
that human beings will become redundant,
they will exterminate, imprison and enslave us’.
So, the singularity, the “transhumanism”, and the science fiction.
Nothing to do with research, nothing to do with science.
If you happen to hear someone talk about one of these two things,
it's a nice book, a nice discussion at the pub on a Friday night,
but nothing to do with the reality in front of us.
Artificial intelligence –
this is an academic definition,
but it’s the only academic thing in this talk, so bear with me --
is "A resource of autonomous agents able to interact and learn
and that can be used to perform tasks
that would otherwise need human intelligence
to be successfully performed".
We wrote this in a paper
that we published last year in "Science robotics".
Two things are important in this definition:
first, what type of intelligence machines do have.
Machines aren’t intelligent:
they don’t have ideas, intuitions, empathy, awareness, conscience,
no intuitions like the ones we have
when we do even the simplest things.
Machines just behave as if they were intelligent.
Regulating the temperature here based on outside temperature,
to how the people inside the theatre react;
if I did it, you would think,
"She's intelligent,
she knew we were cold and turned up the thermostat."
Machines do the same thing, achieves the same goal,
but it's not intelligent.
It just behaves in a way we would deem intelligent
if a human did the same.
The other important aspect
is that AI allows us to have autonomous agents,
that are capable to interact and learn while interacting with the environment.
In the history of humanity we had automatic machines:
the clock we carry on our wrist. or some types of car.
But they never were autonomous:
and it’s this autonomy, not the one of human beings,
that carries problems, risks, but also opportunities of AI.
I'll also talk about the risks,
but what I really want to talk about positive things, opportunities.
The first risk has to do with profiling:
you've heard about it today from the speakers before me.
It’s what allows Google
to give us information similar to the one we are looking for
when we open the page.
I'm from Naples,
if I look for a restaurant in London
the first thing I see are pizzerias.
Don't show me a sushi restaurant,
I could have a breakdown.
Google knows it, and acts accordingly.
Profiling is a good thing,
as long as it doesn’t become an engine for discrimination,
when it perpetuates prejudices
that are already in society and artificial intelligence facilitates.
Another example linked to Google:
some years ago a case became famous, where Google’s algorithm
would show ads for management positions
more often to men than to women.
This is a case of discrimination, this is a risk we have to avoid,
because in a society
where artificial intelligence is more and more distributed,
we can’t afford to facilitate and distribute and multiply
these types of discriminations.
The second problem has to do with the nature of this technology.
Very often, AI is defined as a black box:
we have the inputs, we design the technology,
but we can’t predict the outputs.
We could do so just by having the same calculation ability, but it’s hard.
And why is that important?
It’s important because we trust AI,
we delegate to AI very important tasks:
cancer diagnosis,
deciding who we should hire from our next interview,
where to have dinner on a Friday night.
But in reality, we trust these machines that we don’t understand
and which behavior we can’t predict –
this is also an important aspect,
a lot of research focuses on this topic.
And the other aspect is about the use of AI
and the effects on human beings.
We heard about the fourth revolution earlier.
A fourth industrial revolution, a sentence often repeated,
and it’s used to indicate that we've become a digital society.
Actually, the fourth industrial revolution
isn’t really about finding our friends on Facebook
or that we buy books on Amazon,
it’s more about our fridge doing groceries on Amazon by itself,
based on what our tastes are,
inferred by our comments on Facebook.
It's this correlation.
AI facilitates this correlation,
AI is an invisible facilitator that mediates between the interactions,
our interactions with the environment;
and in mediating them, it is actually guiding us.
To what extent is this guidance at odds
with our self-determination, with our ability to choose?
My job is partially
making sure that we use AI in support of our determination,
not at the expenses of it.
I already told you:
these are risks, but also opportunities.
The great advantage of AI
is that it allows us to delegate critical tasks to machines
that are tedious, boring, sometimes dangerous,
and free up our time.
In the UK we all have gardens, in the summer we'd like to throw parties
but we never get to Saturday wanting to throw one,
because we spent all day mowing the lawn.
And some time ago I moved house,
I spent a weekend assembling Ikea furniture,
fights I can’t even describe,
there is no stable chair in my house.
When I found out that there were robots guided by AI
that could assemble Ikea furniture by themselves,
I had a moment of unspeakable emotion.
Just as driving in traffic areas,
being able to read or interact, instead of spending time driving,
and so on.
In a society where AI will be distributed "horizontally" -
it will be everywhere, in our pocket, in our phone, in our toaster,
in our thermostat, in the hospital, at school, in the office -
the task is making sure that more AI means more “human flourishing”,
that is, the capacity of developing and realizing
our existential projects, our human projects,
both on an individual and on a social level.
In 2015 the UN defined
what we call "Sustainable development goals"
17 challenges to be reached successfully within 2030,
and that will allow humankind
to live better, to do better, to be better.
And they span from research in the biomedical field
to healthcare,
environment protection, gender equality, diversity.
We have found out that artificial intelligence
can help facilitate the development of all these objectives.
There are AI applications
that allow farmers in India to understand when sow
to maximize the harvest based on climate conditions.
We have AI applications
that ease plastic collection from the oceans,
one of the environmental tragedies that are most felt nowadays.
We know that by 2050
there will be 131 million people with Alzheimer’s,
a disease we can’t cure, that’s hard to diagnose,
and we know that AI allows us to diagnose it six years earlier,
therefore limiting its impact because we can treat it earlier.
So what about all these risks and opportunities,
how do they affect us, and afflict us as human beings?
The answer I usually give is this one.
It’s a Leonardo da Vinci quote that says:
"I have been impressed by the urgency of doing.
Knowing isn’t enough, we need to act.
Having great intentions isn’t enough, we need to do".
And in front of the potentials of AI one really wants to say,
let’s take advantage of it,
let’s take this chance and change the world.
In a superficial reading,
it can be hotught of as one of those Silicon Valley mottos.
A few years ago, in San Francisco,
they would have said “fail often, fail fast”:
don’t worry if you fail, repeat the mistake,
the important is that you bounce back, try again and again.
Sooner or later, you will succeed.
In the process we had Cambridge Analytica,
we had all the scandals that we heard,
so it’s actually not really a good idea.
Leonardo isn’t telling us "fail often, fail fast".
Leonardo is a man of the Renaissance, a poetic man,
his actions follow his thoughts,
using the tool of today in order to change tomorrow.
Acting means designing and actually he’s telling us so,
he’s telling us, knowledge is not enough:
it’s necessary but it’s not sufficient.
Good intentions are useful, but not enough;
we need to do more, in addition.
So what good intentions,
what knowledge are needed today
in order to do what Leonardo would mean us to do,
designing the future?
And here there is a tiny bit more of philosophy.
AI is one of the technologies
maybe the most advanced technology of the digital,
and the digital one is a revolutionary technology,
because it allows us to do new things,
and in so doing, it also changes the reality around us,
It's a transformative technology.
With digital we do new things,
we could read a book while we drive.
But it changes the things we understand too.
Think of the concept of war,
that is one of the fields I work in.
In the history of humankind,
war meant violence, destruction, death.
Nowadays we talk about "cyber conflicts"
An expression of strength, of aggressiveness;
but are completely detached from the concept of violence.
We can fight a cyber war
without killing anybody, or destroying anything,
while still reaching the same goal.
A concept has changed:
the concept of war, tied as it was to strength exhibition and violence
shifted to a concept where violence is detached from strength.
This transformation of the environment,
of our interaction, of our comprehension
brought about by digital and AI
are a leverage, the element over which we need to push
in order to trigger the “action” suggested by Leonardo.
What’s the nature, or the value, of the human being
in the digital society,
in a society where machines behave as if they were intelligent?
And we can delegate to AI the computational power:
artificial intelligence can gather information,
process information, make correlations in a quicker, more accurate way
than any other intelligence we know.
Think of cancer diagnosis:
AI can recognize a cancer from a CT scan without ever getting tired,
without ever forgetting any of the CT scans it has seen,
without a moment of stress, of fear.
It’s super-efficient - but this is the delegation.
AI is a tool,
a tool we need to use to change the reality in which we live.
We need to use AI to design society:
our society, but also the ones we call “post-AI” societies,
those societies where AI
won’t be a transformative, revolutionary technology anymore,
but will be taken for granted, a bit like electric power today.
We need to use AI to make sure we can develop societies
that are tolerant, fair,
democratic, pluralist.
The order of the words isn’t accidental:
tolerance is a fundamental value in this context.
So if we look at intelligent design,
why is that important?
Because intelligent design, Leonardo-wise intelligent
the way the future should be designed
is what makes us human
and it’s what we do and AI doesn’t.
And we have this responsibility,
because it’s about giving shape
to the reality that will come after our children's one.
I will leave you with a quote from Winston Churchill,
who was a quite cynical man,
but he saw clearly in the future.
He once said:
"We shape our buildings and then, afterwards, our buildings shape us".
[She translates into Italian]
This is what architecture tells us.
This sentence is true for architecture,
even more so for the digital,
and even more so for AI.
We design AI,
and we need to know
that this technology has then a direct and very strong impact
on us as people, as society, as environment.
We need then to be sure to design AI
in a way that it allows us to take the shape we want,
a shape where empathy is still a fundamental value,
an aspect to be cherished, protected, and distributed.
I leave you with this. Thank you.
(Applause)