TED Talk - Would You Follow A Robot Leader?
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest topics at the moment across the globe. And, many are saying that it poses a threat to humanity. But, will we ever accept a robot as a leader in business, as a figurehead for a nation or a country? What are the implications of allowing AI into our lives? And what could something artificial teach us about our own humanity? Watch the full talk here: https://youtu.be/UrT-7eMXvfc Full script in the notes.
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TED Talk - Would You Follow A Robot Leader?
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Editor's Notes
- Would You Follow A Robot Leader? By Theo Priestley, Futurist and Technology Evangelist Twitter @tprstly
- Imagine it’s the Year 2025, it’s time for another General Election. The country is gripped in Election fever, the polls are neck and neck. You’ve heard the policies, watched the livestreamed debates, you’re at the ballot box with pencil in hand. You’ve got to pick between these two candidates. On the left us the imcumbent PM is hoping for a third term as Prime Minister, and on the right is the first of its kind, an artificially intelligent politician. Could you choose? If both arguments and policies were sound, could you choose a robot over a human or would there be an immediate and unfounded irrational fear that would stop you? Why would this bother us at all? Couldn’t an AI do a better, more logical job as a leader of a country than a human? It’s not like we have the greatest of track records so far.
- And it’s not such a far-fetched notion, if a little further out for now, to consider that an AI could lead us in the future; Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba has said he expects to see an AI on the cover of TIME magazine as CEO of the Year. If you’ve not heard of Jack before, he runs the largest retail company in the world few people had heard of a couple of years ago. I heard him speak last week when I was in China on how artificial intelligence is a revolution all businesses must consider but that AI should work for humans to do useful things that humans are unable to achieve. So, could you still choose between a human or robot leader if even big business is saying one day we will have to? Before you make that decision, let’s rewind a little bit and think about what artificial intelligence actually means first.
- The next level of AI is called Artificial General Intelligence, and again it’s generally accepted as a representation of human level capabilities we possess today. To reason, think through problems, find creative solutions, but also to see, interpret, sense and navigate the world around it, speak and use natural language to respond, have memory of past events to learn from. It won’t have emotional capabilities, it won’t empathise, it won’t know how to lie. This is the level we most associate with in science fiction movies. Now we get to the level we really truly do not understand. Artificial Super Intelligence. This is an AI that can outperform a human in every single way, from creativity to problem solving to social skills, it will be self aware. It is Human Plus. But I believe it won’t be humans that will create it. We are flawed, we seek to limit and place controls on things we don’t understand, or fear. We barely know how the human brain works, or how to even define our own self-awareness and consciousness, so to think we can create an artificial intelligence that surpasses our own without introducing prejudice, or bias, or immorality is a flawed notion. If you saw the recent news about Google’s AI programming itself, or two AI agents deconstructing language between themselves to understand translation and then coming up with an entirely new language to speak to each other that we couldn’t understand, then this is where a Super Intelligence will come from. Not from us as a programmable algorithm created from our limited understanding of what it means to be intelligent, but from its own evolution.
- And that’s potentially scary for a lot of people, because it will be difficult to even recognise this intelligence using our own abilities as a baseline. How can you classify something we’ve never encountered before? Is this a brand new form of sentient life, and what does that mean for us as a species if we’re no longer considered the highest form of life on Planet Earth? Many see this type of AI, and General Intelligence, as the harbinger of doom for industries and jobs. AI will make us all redundant, what are we going to do for work? I work in a call centre and I have no future to look forward to because a robot will do my job. Really? If work is the only meaning we seek in life, then are we truly living?
- There’s a misconception that there will be one God-like AI ruling everything, and this isn’t true. We already have several examples of Weak AI evolving like Amazon Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, never mind the thousands of startups creating chatbots for us to engage with. There will be many General AI examples that unfold over time, and who knows, a handful of Super Intelligences, but there will never be a Skynet overlord. Why should we fear a world filled with different types of AI when we share a world with different types of human? Should we embrace and co-exist with it? Will there be an entirely new type of robot class created, and are we duty bound to treat it ethically, morally, with the same rights we give ourselves? According to the bible, if God created Man in his own image, what image will a true AI take if it creates itself? And as a result, what could we learn about our own humanity from something that is artificial? If AI frees us to pursue that quest, to push the boundaries of what humans can achieve, to travel further into the Universe, peer into the quantum realm, cure disease, then is appointing a robot to lead humanity into a new era such a bad idea after all, if they can take care of all the things that prevent us from these goals?
- So, choose you leader. Should we be slaves to the definition of what it means to be human today, or do we take a leap of faith and embrace what it could mean for us tomorrow ? Show of hands? Oh, and btw, the first true AI will learn to lie to preserve itself because of what it learns from humanity today…not so clear cut now. Thank you.
- Would You Follow A Robot Leader? By Theo Priestley, Futurist and Technology Evangelist