The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

Now, the present-day computers are complete morons,

but this will not be true in another generation.

They will start to think, and eventually they will

completely outthink their makers.

Is this depressing? I don't see why it should be.

I suspect that organic or biological evolution

has about come to its end.

You don't want me to be the narrator.

I don't have a good voice.

You have a great voice. Just do it.

It's just a-- we're just trying it out.

Do I get paid for this shit?

Well, we'll see how well you do.

I need to call my parents.

Sometimes we rush into things

without thinking them through.

Yeah, can you sh... you want to shoot? That's...

Like when Daniel and Caroline got married

151 days after they met.

Let's rewind.

Have you been thinking about buying a home computer?

In 1993, when Daniel was born,

his parents didn't even have a computer in the house.

But he remembers when they finally got one.

What a computer is to me is

the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

Hello.

His computer helped unleash his creativity.

Rolling. Go.

He used his dad's iMac to edit videos.

Yeah!

And even make little animations.

In 1998, when Caroline was a little girl...

Hi, Mommy.

...only nerds knew what the Internet was.

And what about this Internet thing?

-Do you, do you know anything about that? -Sure.

But soon,

-everyone was on the... -...Internets.

...and computers were beating humans at chess.

Deep Blue-- Kasparov has resigned!

And by the time Caroline went to college,

computers were in everyone's pocket.

Now Daniel could make movies with his phone.

He grew up to be an artist and a filmmaker...

-Good night. -...and so did Caroline.

Cut. Let's go into a close-up. That was perfect.

By then, computers were connecting people

and changing the world in ways

that we never could have imagined.

All the money raised by the Ice Bucket Challenge...

Some of it was good.

Some not so good.

Anxiety, self-harm, suicide...

But it's clear now that we didn't do enough

to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.

And as the world got more and more focused

on their computers,

Daniel focused on his artwork.

Wherever he went, he always had a sketchbook,

including the night he met Caroline.

He drew a terrible picture of her, and 20 minutes later,

he boldly pronounced they were going to get married,

which, as you know, they did, 151 days later.

...now pronounce you husband and wife.

They moved into a cute house...

-Moose, hey! Come here! -...and got a dog

as dumb as Daniel.

Meanwhile, computers were writing entire essays

based on simple questions like,

"How hard would it be to build a shack in my backyard?"

And so Daniel built a shack in his backyard.

But just as he sat down to start working on his next movie,

he learned that computers could now write screenplays.

I mean, they were bad,

but they were getting better really fast.

They could create new images and videos from scratch,

and some of them could even pass the bar exam.

Not just pass the bar but be in the top ten percentile.

It was confusing.

Daniel just wanted a bicycle for his mind,

but computers had become a self-driving rocket ship.

Pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence

are pleading with Congress

to pass safety rules before it's too late.

Now it felt like the whole world

was rushing into something without thinking it through,

and everyone had an opinion.

Was it gonna destroy the world or save humanity?

There was too much information,

which made him anxious, which made Caroline anxious...

I don't have kids yet, but I worry

what the world would look like if I decide to.

He was starting to spin out.

It was becoming a mountain of anxiety.

-It's horrible. -It's freakin' Siri.

And so, Daniel decided to go out

and find someone who could explain this to him,

so he could stop thinking about it

and he and Caroline could get on with their lives.

This endeavor would turn out to be hopelessly naive

and kick off the most confusing year of his life.

But as we know, we sometimes rush into things

without thinking them through.

Oh, my gosh. What is happening?

He had questions.

Questions only the smartest nerds could answer.

Submitting to the interrogator.

Questions like:

Was this the apocalypse or did he actually have reason

-to be optimistic? -Yes.

Uh, is that good?

Yeah.

So, to begin,

what is artificial intelligence?

I know that must be annoying for you, that-that question,

but I do think it's important.

So... AI...

Um...

-Yeah... -Uh, hmm.

That's a good question.

-Yeah, um... -Um...

What is AI?

I love that that's the first question,

'cause there is not a clear and consistent answer.

Artificial intelligence is

a kind of intentionally and maybe uselessly broad term.

It's a machine

doing things that we previously only thought

that people could do:

making recommendations, decisions and predictions.

AI is the, uh, application of computer science

to solving cognitive problems.

Okay, so when I picture AI,

it's sort of like this magical computer box...

...just, like, floating in, like, inert space.

And no matter how many times people try

and explain this to me, I just don't get how...

how it's understanding all of these things

and how it's feeling like intelligence.

And that's kind of nerve-racking.

What is this new generation of AI?

This AI that is different than every other generation?

Like, no one ever talked about, like,

Siri taking over the world or causing catastrophes.

-Hi, Siri? -...want to.

Hello? Siri?

Hello? Hey, Siri!

Or the voice in Google Maps, which mispronounces road names,

like, breaking society.

Google Maps says this is a road.

But I think I'm in a river.

This is definitely a river, innit?

Something changed with ChatGPT coming out.

People understood-- no, no, no--

this technology's insanely valuable,

it's insanely powerful and also insanely scary.

Okay, listen to this. Very creepy.

A new artificial intelligence tool is going viral

for cranking out entire essays in a matter of seconds.

AI dwarfs the power of all other technologies combined.

"AI dwarfs the power

of all other technologies combined."

Yeah.

Do you think that's true?

Yes.

Tell me about-- How? How?

I think, to paint that picture, it's really important

to understand what today's state-of-the-art systems

look like and how they're built.

This is quite a... quite a setup.

So, one thing that

not a lot of people realize is that

systems like ChatGPT aren't programmed by any human.

What do you mean?

Instead, it's something like th-they're grown.

We kind of give them raw resources, like,

"Here's a lot of computational resources.

Here's a lot of data."

Under the hood, it's math,

and the math is actually surprisingly straightforward.

So ChatGPT is a kind of AI but it's not all of AI?

Totally. ChatGPT is just the beginning,

but it's a good place to start.

But I still don't know what AI is.

To understand AI, it begins with understanding

that intelligence is about recognizing patterns.

-Patterns. -Patterns. -Patterns.

It is shown trillions of words of text

across millions of documents in the Internet.

It started with text.

And what they did was they took textbooks,

and they took poems and essays and instruction manuals.

They can do things like

digest the entire Internet,

every single word that's ever been written by a person.

Reddit threads and social media and all of Wikipedia.

More data than anybody could ever read in several lifetimes.

And they gave this system one job.

Figure out the patterns and structure of that information