How to Build a Human Page #5

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They both sound like something

that a person could have written.

That's right. We are really heading

towards a kind of tipping point,

or a point at which things

are going to accelerate

beyond anything we've seen before.

This is just really historic.

It's not just about muscle power

any more. It's about brainpower.

Machines are moving into cognitive

capability and that of course

is the thing that really

sets people apart.

That's the reason that

most people today still have jobs,

whereas horses have been

put out of work.

It's because we have

this ability to think, to learn,

to figure out how to do new things

and to solve problems,

but increasingly the machines

are pushing into that area

and that's going to have huge

implications for the future.

Are any jobs safe?

Right now it's really hard to

build robots that can approach

human ability in dexterity

and mobility,

so a lot of skilled

trade type jobs,

electricians and plumbers

and that type of things,

are probably going to be

relatively safe,

but that's thinking over

the next 10, 20, maybe 30 years.

Once you go beyond that, really,

nothing is off the table.

But the biggest danger

may not be losing our jobs.

Professor Stephen Hawking

recently warned that the creation of

powerful AI will be either

the best or the worst thing

ever to happen to humanity.

Hawking was recently joined by

Tesla founder Elon Musk and other

leading figures in an open letter

highlighting the potential

dangers of unchecked AI.

One of the most vocal

was Professor Nick Bostrom.

Developments in the last few years

in machinery have just been

more rapid than people expected

with these deep learning

algorithms and so forth.

How far away are we from achieving

human level artificial intelligence?

The median opinion - by which year

do you think there's a 50% chance?

There's 2040 or 2050...

Within our lifetime? Yeah.

Within the lifetime of

a lot of people alive today.

The concern there is you are

building this very, very powerful

intelligence and you want

to be really sure then

that this goal that it has

is the same as your goal,

that it incorporates human values

in it,

because if it's not a goal

that you're happy with,

then you might see the world

transform into something that

maximises the Al's goal but leaves

no room for you and your values.

This idea of autonomous and

dangerous Als is a recurring theme

in the world of science fiction.

Are you ever going to let me out?

Yes.

Nick thinks that super intelligent

machines could one day

inhabit the real world and use

their power to negative effect

if we don't put

the right safeguards in place.

Als could take their instructions to

logical but unanticipated extremes.

Ava, I said stop!

The concern is not

that these Als would resent us

or resent being exploited by us

or that they would hate us

or something,

but that they would be

indifferent to us,

so if you think, maybe

you have some big department store

and it wants to build

a new parking place.

Maybe there was an ant colony there

before, right? So it got paved over.

It's not because we hate the ants,

it's just because

they didn't factor into our goal.

I see. And we didn't care.

Similarly, if you had a machine that

wants to optimise the universe

to maximise the realisation

of some goal,

in realising this goal, we wouldn't

be kind of stamped out...

Collateral damage...in the same way

that... Yeah, collateral damage.

The way in which Als can be diverted

from what their architects intended

played out earlier this year when

Microsoft introduced Tay to Twitter.

The AI persona was designed

to act like an American teenager

to attract a younger audience.

The chatbot worked by absorbing

and mimicking the language of

other Twitter users, but

Tay was hijacked by Internet trolls,

who gave it a very different

set of values.

The original intention was corrupted

and Tay was unable to work out

which views were acceptable

and which weren't.

Within a clay, Tay became

a Hitler-loving, racist sex pest.

This shows what can happen to AI

if it falls into the wrong hands

but could a future Tay be far worse?

Once you have a kind of

super-intelligent genie

that's out of the bottle,

it might not be possible to

put it back in again.

You don't want to have a

super-intelligent adversary that is

working at cross purposes with you,

that might then resist

your attempts to shut it down.

It's much better to get it right

on the first attempt, not to

build a super-intelligent evil genie

in the first place, right?

You want to have, if you're going to

have a super-intelligent genie,

you want it to be... You want it to

be on your side. Yeah, exactly.

In Cornwall, our genie is about

to be let out of its bottle,

and I want to know

whose side it's on.

The robot's upstairs here.

Bear in mind this is

not your final skin,

so let's have a look inside.

Let's just let her peep out.

Oh, my goodness.

That's so weird!

See...

It's quite warm.

Just feel it, though. It's weird.

What do you think of the eyes?

Oh. my God!

SHE LAUGHS:

It's so strange.

Because she's not quite right,

but she...

You know, I can recognise...

...that the nose is...

Well, I mean, yeah. It's my nose.

Try asking her something.

OK. What have you been up to today?

We've been busy filming

season two of Humans since April.

And it's been very exciting.

Not bad!

So we can have a kind of guess of

the sort of things people might say,

saying...

I can't resist cheese on toast.

What did you have for breakfast?

I had a toasted cheese sandwich.

Is that because

you can't resist cheese on toast?

I like the taste of cheese.

THEY LAUGH:

Is that true?

Do you really like cheese on toast?

I love cheese, yeah. Ah!

So, you know,

there's a little personality trait

we might have got right. Maybe not

as much as she likes cheese. Right.

It's the facial expressions.

They're not quite in sync

with what she's saying.

Basically, there's

a slight software bug... Raining.

But don't worry too much...

GEMMA LAUGHS:

She's confused! Very strange input.

A few facial tics going on.

Yeah, she has, but, you know,

this is really the first time

we've tried this,

so it's very, very new,

and what you'll find is things

will progress very, very quickly.

Facial tics aside,

the build is going well.

Every day the robot is

making progress in terms of

how it looks, sounds and thinks,

so we've come up with an idea

to put it to the test.

Hey, Gemma. Hi.

Robot Gemma, do not fail.

We're building an artificially

intelligent robot that

looks like me, talks like

me and thinks like me.

And today, I'm going to meet her

in her finished form.

Last time I saw her,

she needed quite a bit of work.

So I'm hoping that today we'll have

more of a finished product.

Yeah, I don't know,

I'm quite nervous.

Oh, no.

Really strange.

It is spooky, isn't it?

SHE GASPS:

It's really quite uncanny.

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