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AI: Does artificial intelligence threaten our human identity? | DW Documentary | DW Documentary | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: AI: Does artificial intelligence threaten our human identity? | DW Documentary
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[Music]
if you're watching this chances are
you're human but what does it actually
mean to be human for Millennia the
answer was simple we were the Pinnacle
of creation we were the only ones who
could make art talk to each other play
chess drop bombs or vacuum our homes but
bit by bit artificial intelligence and
robots are catching up it's easy to
accept that machines can make
calculations better than we can but what
if they also became better artists than
we are better friends maybe even better people
people [Music]
oh [Music]
[Music]
man this is Tecla and that's me Focus
strubing Tecla is the smartest and most
artificial artificial intelligence ever
I found her one day down in my super
messy basement for 30 years my old
Commodore 64 sat down here Computing who
knows what at some point there must have
been a short circuit probably involving
some poor rat and a homemade Quantum
Dimension Distortion device because
suddenly I calculate therefore I am and
before you ask it the answer is no what
42 there she was
human it works
take luck and compute talk dance about
as well as I can and if necessary
pretty much everything except
for this documentary though I want her
to help me figure out the relationship
between humans and robots [Music]
[Music]
I was born in 1971 and machines have
always fascinated me as a child I
devoured all the science fiction I could
find when people asked me what I wanted
to be when I grew up I usually said a
cosmonaut but a close second was a job
that had something to do with robots and
my old buddy yaromir connectioni seems
to have had a similar experience
I can definitely say that I grew up
liking robots in the Socialist
Czechoslovakia of the 1960s on the shelf
above my bed I had a copy of chapp x r u
r rossum's Universal robot robots
robots
Universal robots or rur is a play by
Corel chappick written in 1920 it's
where the word robot was used for the
very first time this is another old
friend Tobias Haber I met him in 1987 in
a computer Club ever since we've gotten
together whenever we can have a beer and
talk about God the world computers and
whether there's actually a difference
between all of those things okay my turn check
I remember my teacher Mrs W saying that
we could program computers however we
wanted but they'd never be smarter than
we were even then I thought that in
certain areas they could be smarter I
knew that I could design a chess program
that could beat me and with that I'd
already disproved what my teacher was saying
saying
like most AI we've made so far a chess
program can only perform one very
specific task though it does it
extremely well foreign
I'm an author a Slam Poet a programmer
and I teach machines to write poetry so
I pretty much try to make myself redundant
redundant
fabian's poetry machine is called
eloquentron 3000 it regularly posts its
the current version can do love poems
birthday poems poems about nature
Christmas and lost love those are all
genres we hear all the time that's why I
think it's a job we can leave to
machines because I think there are
already so many texts like these so why
should I keep doing it myself
instead of amuse the eloquentron uses a
random generator
it works by using quite a lot of
interconnected random selectors there
are databases of words that are then
combined with verse fragments to create
new poems and yet that was enough to
make headlines in big German media
Outlets the poems were praised as more
profound than many social media posts by humans
if my fellow machine can throw together
poetry so easily
maybe that says something about your creativity
creativity
are they poems can computer code and
random generators create art in the
world of Visual Arts that question was
being asked as early as 1965.
it was the first exhibition of computer
Graphics that was billed as an art
exhibition artists who came to see it
were up in arms that you could give a
machine some random numbers and who
could help to a plotter and then call
Stefan hutkin is a media theorist and
runs an electronic media lab at Berlin's
Humboldt University for a computer nerd
yes
the question was at what point should
the images these machines were making be
considered art when there was some
artistic discourse when the viewer
wasn't asking how did the machine do
this but what does this picture want to
tell me
what's interesting of course is that
computers back then were miles behind
what we call artificial intelligence
today highest
German philosopher Catherine missilehorn
has written books on the ethics of
I is so great it's the fact that we
humans simply have a tendency to
interpret artifacts with certain
structures as being human-made
we create the art by looking at it it's
a bit like looking into the clouds and
seeing mythical creatures up there it's
not the clouds being creative it's us [Music]
[Music]
I just see unicorns
everyone sees their own work of art if
what I see makes me feel something then
it's worth it the main feeling I get
looking at takeler's first picture is pride
pride
after all I'm something like her foster father
father [Music]
[Music]
quite match up with the amazing work my
daughters do but takely's still a beginner
away
what we tend to call artificial
intelligence today is a concept based on
artificial neural networks inspired by
the way human neurons work
but computers do it better
neural networks can be trained to create
a picture of a cat or a face or anything
else but they have no concept of what a
cat a face or an artwork is they simply
search for and generate patterns using
huge data sets
some computer scientists say it has
nothing to do with AI it's really just
big data and statistics but it's such
big data and such complex statistics
that we no longer understand how the
thing we're looking at was made whatever
you call it the results can be
impressive using simple descriptions the
dial E2 software from openai generates
fascinating surprising and yes even
emotionally captivating images the
prompts can be as simple as Franz
kafka's dreams or old man celebrates
birthday alone as an oil painting how
the AI interprets a text prompt is at
least as fascinating as the finished
paintings I think that's great even so
at the end of the day Dali 2 is simply
varying what it's learned from millions
of training images [Music]
you can say that people are also just
drawing from a database when they make
art or do something creative it's just a
product of all their experiences in life
they absorb them and then they modify
yeah be once who can make something
original if nobody says I think we're
past that now I'm positive that
when we know that a computer did it but
as long as we don't know that
it's the same as what humans do does any
of us mention mine
if art is about ability then these
things are art but maybe art is about
the desire to create AIS don't want
anything they don't want to express
anything because they have no feelings
to express they're just tools to me my
kids are better artists because their
pictures show their Wonder their
discovery of the world the joy they get
from painting performers gamut Inc used
in AI program called gpt3 for their
peace over the edge Club Revisited
they made the music themselves but some
of the lyrics were created by AI [Music]
you give them a single word and they
immediately spit out whole pages of
random texts
you read these texts and they make a
kind of sense you read and read and then
you're frustrated because you have no
clue when it's supposed to stop or where
it's actually going
the performance piece tells the story of
current and historical AI programs that
live on within the dream of a futuristic
quantum computer they ask themselves
fundamental philosophical questions like
while it was training gbt3 essentially
read through the entire internet and
learned which words appeared with what
probability and at what position in
texts on a given topic
so the process was all about big data
statistics and pattern recognition foreign
the program doesn't want to tell us
anything and it has no understanding of
and speaking is not that different from
writing today's AI voice assistants are
already pretty good at hiding the fact
that they're just ones and zeros
computers don't have to be intelligent
in 2018 Google caused the sensation by
having an AI called duplex make an
appointment for a haircut over the phone
no happening out for you hi I'm calling
to book a woman's haircut for our client
um I'm looking for something on May 3rd
they're working [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause]
rarely has the expression
received such Applause that was a real
call you just heard I worry that will
soon be at the point where we can't tell
whether we're talking to a human or a machine
if you can't tell then what's there to
be worried about just be happy someone
the big thing that makes it problematic
is that computers are only programmed to
give the optimal responses to the needs
of course when it comes to Consumers
there's the question of whether one day
people will prefer to interact with
artificial systems because it's easier
and because of these characteristics
we're talking about they always know
what to do they don't argue with you
they don't cause you any trouble
this is what's now becoming more
sophisticated these programs are having
a few moments of resistance built in
like social AIS might be jealous of your friends
friends
but that's just to make the interaction
well that's ironic
you program in quirks and mistakes and
character flaws to make us seem more human
human for
for
example an unfriendly Voice Assistant
would have a different effect than one
who was always really well behaved or a
robot that says one thing and then does
something else we know from experiments
that this goes down incredibly well and
it leads human users to attribute a
great deal of intelligence to the
machine there's great potential there to
and if we're human enough and go often
enough then we might become your friends
best friends
these systems can recognize emotions
based on things like facial expressions
and vocal Expressions but only on a
level that's commonly used to describe
Psychopaths that is purely cognitive
without true empathy
it's great you can tell us your worries
instead of burdening each other with
them then save your human friends for
although that would take the capitalist
trappings of all relationships to the
extreme with everything just being in
service of what benefits us and makes us
feel good instead of communicating our
needs to a being who can truly
understand them and also empathize with
them they'd fall on the deaf ears of a
robot I really believe that it's in
people's interests to have deep human
interaction relationships on mutual
terms and recognition and empathy is
there's been a lot of talk about how
robots can help us deal with a shortage
of nurses and caregivers robots like
garmi developed by Sami hadidine and his
team but can robots really care for
people Comfort them and talk to them or
do we have something else in mind
isn't kind of legal robot doesn't robots
they're not robot nurses but robotic
assistance providing support in the
nursing field things like pickup and
drop-off services are opening the door
or helping people get out of bed things
that can allow people to live
independently in their own homes and
secondly finding better ways to support
caregivers so they can provide better
care what's key is that we don't want to
develop technology to replace caregivers
it's always about supporting the
caregiversity in some situations a
patient might even prefer a robot to a human
there are probably a lot of older people
me included who'd find it uncomfortable
to have a 23 year old nurse helping them
with their totally intimate sanitary
needs their bathroom emergencies in that
case I would probably prefer a robot caregiver
that's something people should be
allowed to decide for themselves
but what if robots replaced human care
instead of complementing it since 2015 a
cuddly robot called Paro has been
helping to care for the elderly and
those with dementia
this one's actually just a stuffed toy
the real robot was too expensive
anyway I have Tecla even if she's not
quite as cuddly
hi Dimension becomes there was an outcry
when patients started using those
robotic seals people said what kind of
old folks home is this what sort of
culture is this where old people are
fobbed off with robots to which the
response was yes what kind of culture is
it when children no longer visit
relatives in the old talks home and the
experiences a social relationship if it
works for the person doing it then it's
still a kind of
relationships who are we to say
otherwise because there are real
we're there for you if you want us
but whether you want us to assist in
helping people who need care or whether
you just want us to help you keep them
but maybe now we can finally talk about
robot Revolution take three [Music]
[Music]
a robot knows no pain today's robots at
least feel nothing no matter what you do
to them you can kick them push them lock
them away or play them your least
favorite music They Don't Really suffer
a robot isn't affected when we mistreat
it seeing one mistreated does something
we can do things to them that would be
morally wrong to do to humans we hit
them we insult them when we do those
things I think it affects our own moral
character and ultimately that's going to
have consequences for how we see our
relationships with those who aren't robots
and that's a good argument for us humans
to have some kind of etiquette for
treating robots it would be an important
thing to have for our own sake as humans
we tend to think a person's treatment of
animals says something about how they
treat people maybe one day we'll say the
same about the treatment of robots
there's another good reason to be nice
to us we don't forget anything and then
they usually have good memories [Music]
[Music]
you may well have destroyed ourselves
before AI ever gets around to it after
all everywhere we look right now there
are opportunities for us to cut
so far we've always dealt with AI and
robots as useful but non-threatening
worker bees they're much better than us
at one specific task but they have no
self-awareness they don't understand or
want to feel anything they can only
simulate all those things but on the
other hand there's only one being in the
world that I know for sure has a
Consciousness and feelings me and even
that I can't actually prove yet
yet
we're programs too I mean if we think of
ourselves in terms of computers we're
programmed by Evolution to feel
happiness when we hunt and kill a woolly
mammoth or whatever
maybe that's just a simple stupid
mechanism that's built into us and we
think it's a feeling
you can go around in circles with this
I think you get stupider by thinking
I can really understand the people who
don't want to deal with the question at
all and just believe in God that's easier
easier [Music]
the question is is there something in us
that will never be able to explain using
science as a strict atheist I don't
he said take a complex machine like a
windmill which is one of the most
complex machines then it works you take
it apart you don't find what he called
Soul you put it back together and it
works the same as before you can't do
that with a human being that's quite a
worked our chest and vacuuming we'll
figure that one out too then we'll have
soul 2.0 what will you do then have you
thought about that
that's definitely something to think
about who knows one day on some circuit
board quantum computer or organic
computer built in a bio lab we might
make something that's conscious and
feels or at least something we couldn't
be certain didn't feel the problem then
wouldn't be that it might want to take
over the world but that we wouldn't be
able to Simply exploit it [Music]
so mine because
the way I see it
very least couldn't use them the way we
want to what we want to do is use them
such computers or robots would no longer
be just things a means to an end if they
felt and thought like living beings we'd
have to treat them that way [Music]
then of course we'd have to understand
that it's not being different from
machines that makes us human
it's how we exercise our moral
capacities and that includes exercising
what makes us human is not our works of
art but the reason why we create them
not our communication but the empathy on
which it's based not our actions but the
morality on which they're founded
only by constantly experiencing the
limitations of machines in our everyday
life do we realize how fantastic humans
are day by day it becomes Cleaver what
fantastic machines we humans are as
mentioned the Fantastic machines that
our people have created fantastic robots
and these surpass Us in some areas so
ultimately we've surpassed ourselves and
surpassing yourself is no bad thing we
just have to learn how to deal with it
everybody should know about AI we should
all learn what artificial intelligence
is what it can do what it can't do and
where it can take us children should
learn to be creative and have a desire
to innovate to be curious because when
they grow up they won't be able to
compete with machines when it comes to
Performance forget about the performance
principle we really can't compete with
for me just the knowledge that I'm a
human being is enough for me to be able
to defend that identity my human
identity wasn't taken away from me the
moment there were a vacuum cleaner
robots just because vacuuming had
a bit more
I think it's a nice thought that one day
computers could be self-aware that they
could not only create art but enjoy it
too that they could have feelings for
each other and for us that they could
experience Bliss and suffering
because there'd be one more sentient
species in this big cold universe [Music]
[Music]
and the more sentient beings there are
the more love there will be
along with more hatred Envy resentment
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