Despite impressive advances in artificial intelligence (AI), none of the systems currently in use display anything remotely equivalent to human-level intelligence. That's not necessarily a bad thing - this talk argues that the future of AI is Collaborative Intelligence where the best of AI works with the best of human intelligence

1. There’s no such thing as
Artificial Intelligence
Jon Whittle
Director CSIRO’sData61
@Jon_Whittle_
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2. I propose to consider the
question, ‘Can machines
think?’
Alan Turing, 1950
In his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Turing began with asking
this question. It was this paper that defined the “Imitation Game” (later the Turing
Test) that was Turing’s attempt to provide a test for machine intelligence.
In most respects, we are still trying to answer this question today – and, in this talk, I
will give my own thoughts on the matter
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3. $315Bn value to the
Australian economy
First, let’s review some trends in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
There’s no doubt that AI is disrupting just about every industry.
• In Australia’s AI Roadmap (2019), prepared by CSIRO’s Data61, it is estimated that
digital technologies, including AI, could be worth $315Bn to the Australian
economy by 2030. This is based on an earlier report by Alpha-Beta.
https://data61.csiro.au/en/Our-Research/Our-Work/AI-Roadmap
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4. 54% global consumers
interact with AI daily
According to this infographic, 54% of global consumers interact with AI on a daily
basis (think common examples such as Google Maps, Siri, Alexa etc)
https://www.raconteur.net/infographics/a-day-in-the-life-of-ai/
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5. 3.8% of all scientific
publications
According to CSIRO’s Our Future World report, AI represented 3.8% of all
publications in 2019 versus 0.8% in 2000.
That’s almost 4% of all research publications – not just in
computer science, but across all fields of enquiry.
That’s astonishing
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/data/our-future-world
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6. And, in recent years, we’ve seen AI advancing in one of the areas which it was
previously thought was the realm of only human intelligence – creativity.
This high profile example is the use of the DALL-E image generation system from
OpenAI, used to generate the world’s first magazine cover
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7. Another recent example is an AI-generated podcast – between Joe Rogan and Steve
Jobs!
https://podcast.ai/
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8. Earlier this year, the media went crazy over claims by a Google engineer that the
LaMDA system (a large language model system that allows a human to interact with a
machine using natural language) had achieved sentience. Despite denials by Google
and AI experts from around the world, the story continued to propagate.
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9. There’s no such thing as
Artificial Intelligence
…the future is bright for
humans
In this talk, I will argue that Artificial Intelligence does not (yet) exist. While systems
like DALL-E and LaMDA might be very impressive – and give us the impression that
they are intelligent, they are really nothing more than large-scale statistical
algorithms crunching vast amounts of data. They cannot reflect on or explain what
they are doing; nor can they adapt themselves to even slightly different tasks.
While this might be disappointing at first, progress in AI is still amazing – and cool.
But the real cool thing – and the thing I am most excited about for the future – is how
we can combine the best of AI with the best of human intelligence (what we at CSIRO
call Collaborative Intelligence)
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10. What is AI anyway?
Let’s step back by giving a working definition of what AI is.
Before doing so, an anecdote: I was once giving a talk to a group of prospective
University students and parents. When I asked the audience “What is AI?”, one kid in
the front row put his hand up and said “That’s the intelligence that my parents have!”
The best definition of AI I have ever heard!
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11. a teenager answering a question in a lecture hall full
of people in the style of a Simpsons cartoon
And for fun – here is the output from the AI art system, DALLE-E, when you put in the
prompt in the slide!
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12. AI is really nothing more than a collection of technologies – or algorithms – designed
to do specific tasks. So:
• Search engines use AI all the time to help interpret a query and return relevant
results
• Computer vision systems are used everywhere to detect objects in images or video
streams
• Language processing systems are used everyday in technologies like chatbots
• Planning systems have been used for decades to (e.g.) help Mars Rovers plan their
way to find interesting rocks on the Mars surface
• Learning systems are pattern-recognition algorithms that can find patterns in vast
amounts of data
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13. There are only 2 types of AI really…
a cup of coffee from a side view with a swirl of milk
forming the letters AI
In fact, there are really only 2 forms of AI you need to remember:
(1) Rules-driven AI – where the human designer gives the machine a set of rules that
define a domain. There may be many rules and they be
inconsistent/contradictory, so the AI comes in when searching through a vast
database of rules to find the right set of rules for a given situation. This is
sometimes referred to as “good old-fashioned AI” as it was the cornerstone of
early AI efforts. While still used today, more popular is…
(2) Data-driven AI – this is often called machine learning, where a machine is trained
to recognize features in a large dataset. Once trained, it can be applied to a new,
previously unseen dataset and by identifying patterns, it can “learn” features in
the new data
Imagine applying both these approaches to the task of predicting what coffee I will
order next.
(1) Rules-based: I would give the machine a set of rules defining my coffee-drinking
behaviour (e.g., I like to have a black coffee in the morning, but a cappuccino at
the weekend with friends, etc.) The machine then searches through these rules to
predict my coffee choice for the current situation
(2) Data-driven: this time, I get an AI to follow me around for a couple months. Every
time I order a coffee, it makes a note. When it has enough notes, it can find
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14. patterns in that data and predict what I will order next
[ASIDE: this image is generated automatically by DALL-E)
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15. A brief history of AI’s ups and downs
Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/history-of-the-first-
ai-winter-6f8c2186f80b
Here’s a brief history of AI. The take away here is that AI is not a new technology – it’s
been around since at least 1950. But it has really made progress since “deep
learning” was invented in 2012 – deep learning is a form of machine learning with
advances in the underlying algorithms that allow ML to scale to incredibly large
datasets. This is what has enabled systems like DALL-E and LaMDA.
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16. 2021
DALL-E
Adding to history, we see that it’s only in the last year or so that we’ve seen systems
like DALL-E (and many others) that can arguably be creative. These AI art/music/text
generating systems are set to disrupt the creative industries.
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17. Creativity – the last bastion of human intelligence?
Going back in history again, whilst it’s only in the last year or so that creative AI has
captured the public’s imagination, there have been efforts towards creative AI from
the very beginning – this is an example of art generated by an AI system called the
Painting Fool. It’s over twenty years old – and it uses rule-based (or good old-
fashioned) AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2KWQ47LBXQ
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18. a modern day musician looking across an uncanny
valley in the style of an impressionist painter
Recently, we asked Uncanny Valley to use AI to generate
a jingle for a new podcast that we are bringing out in
early 2023. It shows that AI can generate music as well
as art – watch out for our “Everyday AI” podcast in
January!
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19. a bald headed man with glasses with his back
towards us playing a grand piano next to a robot
And if you want to see a human musician interacting with an AI musician in real time,
watch this clip of Mark D’inverno improvising in real-time with an AI music generator!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrM_Ls3PnfA
Watch from 21:20
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20. So are humans
becoming redundant?
So, what does this all mean?
Does the fact that AI can now be ‘creative’ mean that we humans are finally
redundant? Are we moments away from AI taking over our jobs and our lives?
Of course not.
All the examples I have given of AI are not really intelligent. They are just data-
crunching algorithms. They don’t know what they do or why they do it. To pretend
otherwise would be folly.
Having said that, they are pretty impressive! But the really impressive thing is when
we start combining the best of AI with the best of human intelligence….
We’ll see some examples from CSIRO where this is happening right now….
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21. DARPA
Subterranean
Challenge
This is CSIRO Data61’s world leading robotics team. In 2021, we came a very close
second in a global DARPA challenge to use robots to explore underground
environments. Use cases include mine collapses/metro fires etc – robots can be
deployed to avoid putting first responders in danger.
It’s actually a great example of collaborative intelligence.
There’s lots of great AI on/in our robots – they have to map out an underground
environment they’ve never seen before, fully autonomously; they have to drop
communicate nodes to talk to each other and optimise where these nodes go (no cell
service underground!); and they have to use computer vision to detect objects (e.g.,
stranded members of the public).
But IMO the coolest bit is the interaction with humans. In the competition, there
were six robots and one human supervisor. The robots did the bulk of the work fully
automatically (mapping, vision, etc.) But the human got involved to set high level
strategy. Both aspects are needed – and the magic comes when the human works
with the robots as a team.
Lots more info here:
https://research.csiro.au/robotics/our-work/darpa-subt-challenge-2018/
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22. Crown of thorns starfish tracking
Another example is work CSIRO did with Google to use computer vision deployed on
underwater gliders to automatically detect Crown of Thorns starfish (COTS) that are
poisoning the Great Barrier Reef.
Again, it’s a great example of humans and AI working together. Traditionally, human
divers have been used to trawl the reef and find starfish. This can now be automated
by AI. But that doesn’t put the divers out of work – it just means their scarce
resources can be better used to control the starfish.
Watch this cool video on the project here:
https://blog.google/intl/en-au/company-news/outreach-initiatives/protecting-our-
reef-with-csiro/
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23. Hairy plants
Finally, a much smaller example – a very small team. But cool nonetheless.
This project is using AI to detect the hairiness of leaves – which turns out to be
important to cotton breeders. The AI is replacing manual work by humans who
traditionally have to walk fields and feel for hairiness. AI can do this job.
But again, the real magic is collaboration between humans and AI – by freeing up
human time, this can better be used on higher-level abstract thinking such as
breeding strategies.
Watch the video here: https://vimeo.com/680241120
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24. What do these examples have
in common?
All of these examples from CSIRO deploy some really cool AI….
…. But they are also great examples of where AI is working in collaboration with
humans
There are still a lot of open questions about how best to combine human and
machine intelligence – indeed, we have a whole R&D program devoted to this at
CSIRO, our Collaborative Intelligence Future Science Platform.
More on this here:
https://research.csiro.au/cintel/
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25. There’s no such thing as
Artificial Intelligence
…the future is bright for
humans
Current AI systems really aren’t intelligent.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that they can do really amazing things – but by combining with the
amazing things we humans can do, there are potentials to really change the world for
the better
[Note: I haven’t talked about AI ethics at all in this talk – that’s a different
presentation. There are some serious potential ethical issues with AI – we are
exploring and providing solutions to this as part of our Responsible AI strategy pillar
at CSIRO’s Data61]
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26. a future world in which the best of artificial intelligence works in
collaboration with humans to make the world a better place to live
I leave you with a final DALL-E generated image….
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