Do You Trust this Computer?

What we're on the brink of is a world of increasingly intense,

sophisticated artificial intelligence.

Technology is evolving so much faster than our society

has the ability to protect us as citizens.

The robots are coming, and they will destroy our livelihoods.

You have a networked intelligence that watches us,

knows everything about us, and begins to try to change us.

Twitter has become the world's number-one news site.

Technology is never good or bad.

It's what we do with the technology.

Eventually, millions of people are gonna be thrown out of jobs

because their skills are going to be obsolete.

Mass unemployment...

greater inequalities, even social unrest.

Regardless of whether to be afraid or not afraid,

the change is coming, and nobody can stop it.

We've invested huge amounts of money, and so it stands to reason

that the military, with their own desires,

are gonna start to use these technologies.

Autonomous weapons systems could lead to a global arms race

to rival the Nuclear Era.

We know what the answer is. They'll eventually be killing us.

These technology leaps are gonna yield incredible miracles

and incredible horrors.

We created it, so I think, as we move forward,

this intelligence will contain parts of us.

And I think the question is:

Will it contain the good parts...

or the bad parts?

The survivors called the war "Judgment Day."

They lived only to face a new nightmare:

The war against the machines.

I think we've completely fucked this up.

I think Hollywood has managed to inoculate the general public

against this question.

The idea of machines that will take over the world.

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

I'm sorry, Dave.

I'm afraid I can't do that.

HAL?

We've cried wolf enough times...

...that the public has stopped paying attention,

because it feels like science fiction.

Even sitting here talking about it right now,

it feels a little bit silly, a little bit like,

"Oh, this is an artifact of some cheeseball movie."

The WOPR spends all its time thinking about World War III.

But it's not.

The general public is about to get blindsided by this.

As a society and as individuals,

we're increasingly surrounded by machine intelligence.

We carry this pocket device in the palm of our hand

that we use to make a striking array

of life decisions right now,

aided by a set of distant algorithms

that we have no understanding.

We're already pretty jaded about the idea

that we can talk to our phone,

and it mostly understands us.

I found quite a number of action films.

Five years ago -- no way.

Robotics. Machines that see and speak...

...and listen.

All that's real now.

And these technologies

are gonna fundamentally change our society.

Now we have this great movement of self-driving cars.

Driving a car autonomously

can move people's lives into a better place.

I've lost a number of family members, including my mother,

my brother and sister-in-law and their kids,

to automobile accidents.

It's pretty clear we could almost eliminate car accidents

with automation.

30,000 lives in the U.S. alone.

About a million around the world per year.

In healthcare, early indicators

are the name of the game in that space,

so that's another place where it can save somebody's life.

Here in the breast-cancer center,

all the things that the radiologist's brain

does in two minutes, the computer does instantaneously.

The computer has looked at 1 billion mammograms,

and it takes that data and applies it

to this image instantaneously,

so the medical application is profound.

Another really exciting area that we're seeing a lot of development in

is actually understanding our genetic code

and using that to both diagnose disease

and create personalized treatments.

The primary application of all these machines

will be to extend our own intelligence.

We'll be able to make ourselves smarter,

and we'll be better at solving problems.

We don't have to age. We'll actually understand aging.

We'll be able to stop it.

There's really no limit to what intelligent machines

can do for the human race.

How could a smarter machine not be a better machine?

It's hard to say exactly when I began to think

that that was a bit naive.

Stuart Russell, he's basically a god in the field of artificial intelligence.

He wrote the book that almost every university uses.

I used to say it's the best-selling AI textbook.

Now I just say "It's the PDF that's stolen most often."

Artificial intelligence is about making computers smart,

and from the point of view of the public,

what counts as AI is just something

that's surprisingly intelligent

compared to what we thought computers

would typically be able to do.

AI is a field of research to try to basically simulate

all kinds of human capabilities.

We're in the AI era.

Silicon Valley has the ability to focus

on one bright, shiny thing.

It was social networking and social media over the last decade,

and it's pretty clear that the bit has flipped.

And it starts with machine learning.

When we look back at this moment, what was the first AI?

It's not sexy, and it isn't the thing we could see at the movies,

but you'd make a great case that Google created,

not a search engine, but a godhead.

A way for people to ask any question they wanted

and get the answer they needed.

Most people are not aware that what Google is doing

is actually a form of artificial intelligence.

They just go there, they type in a thing.

Google gives them the answer.

With each search, we train it to be better.

Sometimes we're typing a search, and it tell us the answer

before you've finished asking the question.

You know, who is the president of Kazakhstan?

And it'll just tell you.

You don't have to go to the Kazakhstan national website to find out.

You didn't used to be able to do that.

That is artificial intelligence.

Years from now when we try to understand, we will say,

"How did we miss it?"

It's one of the striking contradictions that we're facing.

Google and Facebook, et al, have built businesses on giving us,

as a society, free stuff.

But it's a Faustian bargain.

They're extracting something from us in exchange,

but we don't know

what code is running on the other side and why.

We have no idea.

It does strike right at the issue

of how much we should trust these machines.

I use computers literally for everything.

There are so many computer advancements now,

and it's become such a big part of our lives.

It's just incredible what a computer can do.

You can actually carry a computer in your purse.

I mean, how awesome is that?

I think most technology is meant to make things easier

and simpler for all of us,

so hopefully that just remains the focus.

I think everybody loves their computers.

People don't realize they are constantly

being negotiated with by machines;

whether that's the price of products in your Amazon cart,

whether you can get on a particular flight,

whether you can reserve a room at a particular hotel.

What you're experiencing are machine-learning algorithms

that have determined that a person like you

is willing to pay 2 cents more and is changing the price.

Now, a computer looks at millions of people

simultaneously for very subtle patterns.

You can take seemingly innocent digital footprints,

such as someone's playlist on Spotify,

or stuff that they bought on Amazon,

and then use algorithms to translate this

into a very detailed and a very accurate, intimate profile.

There is a dossier on each of us that is so extensive

it would be possibly accurate to say

that they know more about you than your mother does.

The major cause of the recent AI breakthrough

isn't just that some dude

had a brilliant insight all of a sudden,

but simply that we have much bigger data

to train them on and vastly better computers.

The magic is in the data.

It's a ton of data.

I mean, it's data that's never existed before.

We've never had this data before.

We've created technologies that allow us to capture

vast amounts of information.

If you think of a billion cellphones on the planet

with gyroscopes and accelerometers

and fingerprint readers...

couple that with the GPS and the photos they take

and the tweets that you send,

we're all giving off huge amounts of data individually.

Cars that drive as the cameras on them suck up information

about the world around them.

The satellites that are now in orbit the size of a toaster.

The infrared about the vegetation on the planet.

The buoys that are out in the oceans to feed into the climate models.

And the NSA, the CIA, as they collect information