[00:01:08] February 10th, 2017. And this is episode three inspiration. In this third episode, I hope to inspire you to want to be involved in the space of machine learning and artificial intelligence, or at least to keep a very close eye on it. [00:01:23] A. I. I think is the most important thing happening in the world right now, period. And I hope that by the end of this podcast episode, you'll see where I'm coming from. This is completely a philosophical episode. It's a lot of fun and a lot of fluff. So lest you lose credibility in me as a teacher of machine learning, just know that this is the last of its kind. [00:01:45] We're going to get into some gory details, of course, starting in the next episode, but this one's just for fun. And like I said, this is all philosophical. There are four sort of philosophical conversations that are happening around the space of AI right now. And I'm going to talk about those four. Let's start with the most accessible, which is automation of the economy. [00:02:03] As I pointed out in the last episode, the definition of artificial intelligence being able to simulate any intellectual task. You can imagine the types of jobs that are going to be displaced once AI comes in full swing. In the dawn of AI, we were, we already kind of expected maybe very menial digital data entry type jobs, tax preparation kind of jobs to go away. [00:02:25] That's not, you know, we didn't really think of that as AI coming in and taking our jobs. We thought of that as the digitization and automation of jobs of simple jobs, but more and more. Very high skilled intellectual jobs are being replaced as well. AI is hitting the medical industry with a vengeance. [00:02:42] Medical diagnosis is a huge space where AI is hitting. In radiology, looking at x rays and coming up with a prognosis. Well, AI can do that very effectively by way of something called convolutional neural network. Surgery is now being revolutionized by AI. Very high precision surgery robots are coming into the hospitals. [00:03:01] And right now they're kind of an aid for surgeons. But we don't know how long that will last before they're a replacement. At least theoretically. Of course, cars need surgery. That we're seeing right now already on the streets, autonomous vehicles, Google self driving car is in many cities already, and it's in the news and people are discussing the implications. [00:03:20] They're discussing the economic implications. They're discussing the philosophical and safety implications. But right away, you can imagine that taxi drivers. And freight truck drivers are going to be impacted by this immediately. In fact, programmers, designers, and logo creators programming web website programming. [00:03:38] For example, there's a website called the grid. io, which is, has the goal of generating a website by way of artificial intelligence. If you give it some specifications, web design Wix has a module that you can have it design your page around your content. By way of artificial intelligence. And there's already a logo generator, an AI logo generator out there. [00:03:59] I can't remember the name of it, but as you can see, even creativity is not exempt from AI. And in fact, talking about creativity, music and art is already being generated by AI and people are having trouble distinguishing between a human generated piece of music or art and a machine learning generated piece. [00:04:17] So there are two natural responses to this economic takeover by AI. One is fear. Are the robots going to take my job? There's a web app on BBC. com that I'll point out in the show notes where you can look up your job and determine whether it's safe from the AI takeover. It's a lot of fun. I think, uh, nursing ranks up there as something that's safe for now. [00:04:35] I think it's because it involves a lot of highly unpredictable body motions where a robot on the road, a self driving car, follows a very predictable set of rules. Well, a nurse running around and carrying clipboards and IVs and, you know, Rushing to and fro and answering doctor's orders and all these things isn't something you can very reliably predict with robotics and artificial intelligence But one general response of the fear to the AI economic takeover is that if you look at all the prior economic revolutions in human history we've seen We've been okay. [00:05:06] There was the agricultural revolution, which switched us from hunter gatherers to farmers and people adapted for the better. There was the industrial revolution that automated a lot of grunt work, physical labor, and the result of it was a stronger economy where people could focus on things. That are less menial. [00:05:26] And then there's the information age of the, you know, the invention of the internet and everybody got on board with the internet and new jobs are created even as others were displaced. So for example, previously you'd call a travel agents to book your flight to a destination. Well, Google flights can get you your flight and find the best price. [00:05:44] No problem. Those guys are out of a job, but new jobs were created in the information age, such as web developers and mobile app developers that didn't exist before that. And our economy is stronger than it was before. So every hump, every economic revolution does have a small impact in its time, a potentially negative consequence on people who have the jobs that are being displaced. [00:06:07] But as new jobs are created, people are able to adapt and our economy comes out better. On the flip side, there's an entirely different take to this economic takeover, which isn't fear, but excitement. People in this camp point to exactly what we're trying to achieve with economic automation, replacement of jobs so that we can live more comfortable lives in the same way that the industrial revolution replaced very hard menial labor. [00:06:33] Well, think about the more comfortable and safe lives that we're going to be living with autonomous vehicles driving us around and delivering freight. The money saved by all this automation has to go somewhere and it's not going to go into the pockets of these robot CEOs who are conducting meetings and pointing at graphs that are going up into the sky and shaking hands with other robots and laughing and then having beers after work. [00:06:54] No, it's going to go to us. The robots are built to serve us. So the optimists say that it's not going to destroy our economy. It's going to make life a lot more bearable. Livable for us and new jobs will be created that we can participate in, but we don't know what those might be yet. If you look at the result of any prior economic revolution, we lived more like Kings after each revolution than ever before. [00:07:19] And that's hopefully what's exactly about to come. We're going to live even more kingly lives than we already live. And if you think about the way we live now in the information age with our couches and our TVs and our video games, and we can all just go out and eat. I mean, a person's net worth being negative. [00:07:34] In a bygone era meant that they lived on the streets. A person's net worth being negative today is all too common due to student loans, and that's just because we live in this age where so much economic leniency is provided to us. And one way which the optimists think that this might pan out is something that's already being currently discussed in multiple governments, such as in Scandinavia called Universal Basic Income, UBI, where the government basically just gives us. [00:08:01] Uh, minimum wage. So how about that? So look, look into that UBI. So there you have it. Economic automation. The world is about to change under our feet by way of artificial intelligence. And I don't think that there's anybody who disagrees with that. This next section holds maybe a little bit less consensus than economic revolution. [00:08:18] And this next section is about the singularity. And this part is really fun. This is where I put on my tinfoil hat and we start to go down that philosophical rabbit hole into the void. So let me define the singularity. The singularity was a term coined by Werner Vinge and championed in recent times by a guy named Ray Kurzweil. [00:08:36] You're going to hear his name a lot. So just get familiar with that name, Ray Kurzweil. I'll come back to him in a bit. What is the singularity? In mathematics, the singularity is It's kind of like you call the singularity, maybe the point of no return. If you've got an exponential graph coming from the left and it's going to the right and getting bigger and bigger and going up and up and up and it goes up into the sky and into infinity, the point at which it just clearly kind of made a break for it up into the sky is called the singularity. [00:09:02] That's an exponential function. Now if you zoom into the graph and you try to figure out where that point is, point is that it made a break for it, you're not going to be able to find it because it doesn't look like any point is substantially greater than the next by comparison to the prior difference of points. [00:09:15] But if you kind of zoom back out and you, let's say you take a toy car and you're trying to push it along the graph from left to right, there will come a point where kind of the front bumper of the car seems to hit a wall. And that's the point that we call the singularity. So some say that human technology follows along this type of graph. [00:09:30] If you look at our economic revolutions from the prior section, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the information age, each revolution was closer to the previous one than that one was to its predecessor and higher up on the graph. And right now we're coming upon what's called the intelligence explosion where all mental work is potentially automatable. [00:09:51] By artificial intelligence. Now you might be thinking, well, that doesn't sound like it's going to infinity. That just sounds like a next big hump on the graph. But here's where things change. Artificial intelligence is tailored towards specific applications, medical diagnoses, autonomous vehicles, and stuff like this. [00:10:08] The notion of artificial general intelligence, where you have a. Intelligent agent, which can perform all of these tasks. Generally, any, any mental task generally across the board, that's called artificial general intelligence or strong AI. If you give it the task of sort of automating our economy and making our lives, cushy, fantastic. [00:10:28] If you give it the task of making a version of itself that is even better at performing that job, and then that's new child robot has the one goal of improving our lives. And the other goal of making another version of itself. That's even better than it. You know, this is sort of evolution, robot evolution. [00:10:49] What's called seed AI seed artificial intelligence. And since it doesn't take 25 years for a robot to grow old and Come to knowledge about the world and it's going to be way faster at mental processing and it's going to inherit the knowledge of its prior generations. You're going to get a spiral sort of out of control of technological progress and that is a shoot up into. [00:11:13] The sky, and that, my friends, is the singularity. Some think that this is the next phase of evolution. Humans effectively stopped evolution when they invented such effective medical science. Well, the exponential graph maybe doesn't start and stop with technology. What if it goes all the way back into evolution, starting at the Cambrian Explosion, and must necessarily continue all the way past humanity, and therefore it is almost impossible to stop. [00:11:37] Our inevitable duty to create artificial intelligence so that evolution can continue. This is all a lot of fun. This is craziness, right? I promise. I'm going to talk about real technical details of machine learning in a future podcast. I just, I want to get you inspired first. There's some really, really fun philosophy happening around why you should care about artificial intelligence. [00:11:57] Believe it or not, you can take your side after you've heard the arguments. All right. For the next section. Are you ready for this? Consciousness. This one is near and dear to my heart. I love philosophy and I love the philosophy of consciousness. An interesting thing is that consciousness might be the last bastion of unsolved scientific riddles. [00:12:16] We found the alphabet of life in the genome. We explored outer space and discovered the black hole and all these Physical and mathematical phenomena that were previously magic everything was magic or religious So for example at one point sickness illness a cold was what is now considered simply bacteria Was an infestation of evil spirits back in the day. [00:12:38] It was magic and it was a religion Well, if you think about it consciousness is still the domain of magic and religion But surely our brains are the physical substrate of the mind and our brains follow biochemical laws, physical laws of the universe. Therefore, can't our brains be considered to be machines? [00:12:57] And if that's the case, are our minds the result of a machine, the by product of the workings of a machine that brings into question the notion of free will. Do we have free will or simply are we reactionary to an environment? If the human mind is the byproduct of a machine and we're creating a computer brain, which itself is a machine, will the computer brain create as a byproduct, a computer mind? [00:13:23] This is a very deep, deep rabbit hole of debate in the space of cognitive science. Cognitive science incorporates philosophy, neuroscience. And artificial intelligence, all these people, these philosophers coming together and debating whether or not in fact a machine artificial intelligence can be conscious. [00:13:44] Let's talk about the words intelligence and consciousness. When I say that a machine is artificially intelligent, it is intelligent. If it can. is effective at performing its mental task at hand. In fact, maybe a calculator is intelligent by that definition. I think a lot of people when they say, yes, well, it won't have intelligence like humans have intelligence. [00:14:02] Then you can say, well, okay, so human intelligence is superior to machine intelligence at present, but you can compare them. They're not apples and oranges. Intelligence is intelligence. What you're thinking about when you have a debate in mind is consciousness. Is the computer experiencing the phenomena that it's simulating or that it's seeing in the world in the case of a self driving car, or it's computing an algorithm? [00:14:27] Is it experiencing these things? An experience is called qualia in the world of philosophy of consciousness. Is it experiencing the things if you're religious, then I'm sure you already have your own conclusions about consciousness where consciousness basically equates the soul. This is called dualism. [00:14:43] The soul is separate from the brain. The physical substrate is separate from the byproduct in a substantial way. They're in different dimensions. That's called dualism, and one of the biggest proponents of the philosophy of dualism was René Descartes. While we've moved past dualism, you won't really find very many philosophers and cognitive scientists who believe in dualism. [00:15:02] Now they believe in, most likely, monism, which says that the brain works Is the mind in some important way. And so how does the brain create a mind? A very prominent subfield of consciousness philosophy is called functionalism that is accepted today. And I'm going to boil it down to this, and I may get in trouble for this, but if it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck, Then internally, it is experienced as being a duck. [00:15:25] So if a human expresses intelligent action that appears to stem from consciousness and a robot expresses similar intelligent action, then question mark. This segue is effectively right into Alan Turing's test for consciousness, which is called the Turing test. If you're talking to a robot and you're talking to a human, they're both intelligent. [00:15:45] Curtains and you can't see which one's which and you can't tell the difference then I think we've done it That's called the Turing test. So this is so fun the the discussion of can robots be conscious Can artificial intelligence be conscious and it warrants a whole podcast series of its own I'm going to point out some good resources at the end of this episode and I highly recommend digging in there real fun And finally the last big philosophical throwdown in the space of ai evil killer robots. [00:16:15] So the big scare will AI inevitably rise against us. One of the most prominent books in this space is called Super Intelligence by Nick Bostrom. And an example of his thoughts goes like this, it's called the paperclip maximization algorithm. If you start utilizing AI at a paperclip corporation to maximize the production of paperclips, and you don't specify not to destroy the earth in the process, what might happen is that the AI might find a way to achieve achieve. [00:16:47] Consuming all the resources of the planet in order to maximize paperclip production. The general idea goes that be careful what you wish for because you may not be able to specify all the constraints. Big figures like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates got on board with this at one time and it became really big in the press. [00:17:05] Me personally, I don't think that there's warrant for such a scare, but I'm going to leave it to you to come to your own conclusions by diving into the resources. So here are the resources. The book, The Singularity is Near. by Ray Kurzweil describes from A to Z, the whole process of the singularity. And this is kind of a must read for anybody in AI. [00:17:22] It's very fun. It's very fluffy. Um, it's, you know, not rigorously scientific, but it's very, you should read it in the space of consciousness and whether a machine can become conscious. Ray Kurzweil also. wrote a book called how to create a mind. That's also a very good book. My favorite resource on consciousness is a video series by a company called the great courses. [00:17:44] And the series is called philosophy of mind, brain consciousness, and thinking machines. And this goes over all of that. All of the philosophy of consciousness from the beginning until now, including Renee Descartes and dualism and including artificial intelligence. It's really, really good. I strongly recommend it. [00:18:01] And then there's another book that I'm currently reading by Daniel Dennett, who was a prominent modern philosopher in consciousness called consciousness explained. And when it comes to the fear stuff, there's a book, of course, I mentioned called super intelligence by Nick Bostrom. And all of these resources I'll put on my show notes on O C D E V E L. [00:18:20] OCDevel. com forward slash podcasts forward slash machine learning with a hyphen forward slash three. In the next episode, we're finally going to get into technical details. I'm going to describe machine learning from a high level overview and how it's broken down into the subfields of supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. [00:18:40] Hope to see you then.