Transcript

Intro

we may look on our time as the moment civilization was transformed as it was by fire Agriculture and electricity in 2023 we learned that a machine taught itself how to speak to humans like a peer which is to say with creativity truth error and lies the technology known as a chatbot is only one of the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence machines that can teach themselves superhuman skills we explored what’s coming next at Google a leader in this new world CEO Sundar pichai told us AI will be as good or as evil as human nature allows the revolution he says is coming faster than you know the story will continue in a moment

Is society prepared

do you think Society is prepared for what’s coming you know there are two ways I think about it on one hand I feel no because you know the pace at which we can think and adapt as societal institutions compared to the PACE at which the technology is evolving there seems to be a mismatch on the other hand compared to any other technology I’ve seen more people worried about it earlier in its life cycle so I feel optimistic the number of people you know who have started worrying about the implications and hence the conversations are starting in a serious way as well I guess our conversations with 50 year old

Sundar Pichai

Sundar pichai started at Google’s new campus in Mountain View California it runs on 40 percent solar power and collects more water than it uses high tech that pachai couldn’t have imagined growing up in India with no telephone at home be there on a waiting list to get a rotary phone and for about five years and it finally came home I can still recall it vividly it changed our lives to me it was the first moment I understood the power of what getting access to technology meant so it’s probably led me to be doing what I’m doing today what he’s doing since 2019 is leading both Google and its parent company alphabet valued at 1.3 trillion dollars worldwide Google runs 90 of internet searches and 70 percent of smartphones we’re really excited about but its dominance was attacked this past February when Microsoft linked its search engine to a chatbot in a race for AI dominance Google just released its chatbot named Bard

Introducing Bard

it’s really here to help you brainstorm ideas to generate content like a speech or a blog post or an email we were introduced to Bard by Google vice president shell and Senior Vice President James manika here’s Bard and the first thing we learned was that Bard does not look for answers on the internet like Google search does so I wanted to get inspiration from some of the best speeches in the world Bard’s replies come from a self-contained program that was mostly self-taught our experience was unsettling confounding absolutely confounding Bard appeared to possess the sum of human knowledge ah with microchips more than 100 000 times faster than the human brain summarize than we asked Bard to summarize the New Testament it did in five seconds and 17 words in Latin we asked for it in Latin that took another four seconds then we played with a famous six-word short story often attributed to Hemingway for sale baby shoes never worn wow the only prompt we gave was finish this story in five seconds holy cow the shoes were a gift from my wife but we never had a baby they were from the six word prompt Bard created a deeply human tale with characters it invented including a man whose wife could not conceive and a stranger grieving after a miscarriage and longing for closure uh I am rarely speechless I don’t know what to make of this give me we asked for the story in verse in five seconds there was a poem written by a machine with breathtaking insight into the mystery of faith Bard wrote she knew her baby’s Soul would always be alive the humanity at superhuman speed was a shock how is this possible James mannica told us that over several months Bard read most everything on the internet and created a model of what language looks like rather than search its answers come from this language model so for example if I said to you Scott peanut butter and jelly right so it tries and learns to predict okay so peanut butter usually is followed by jelly it tries to predict the most probable next words based on everything it’s learned so it’s not going out to find stuff it’s just predicting the next word but it doesn’t feel like that we asked Bard why it helps people and it replied quote because it makes me happy

Why Bard helps people

Bard to my eye appears to be thinking appears to be making judgments that’s not what’s happening these machines are not sentient they are not aware of themselves they’re not sentient they’re not aware of themselves they can exhibit behaviors that look like that because keep in mind they’ve learned from us we’re sentient beings we have beings that have feelings emotions ideas thoughts perspectives we’ve reflected all that in books in novels in fiction so when they learn from that they build patterns from that so it’s no surprise to me that the exhibitive behavior sometimes looks like maybe there’s somebody behind it there’s nobody there these are not sentient beings Zimbabwe born Oxford educated James manika holds a new position at Google his job is to think about how Ai and Humanity will best co-exist AI has the potential to change many ways in which you’ve thought about Society about what we’re able to do the the problems we can solve but AI itself will pose its own problems could Hemingway write a better short story maybe but Bard can write a million before Hemingway could finish one imagine that level of automation across the economy a lot of people can be replaced by this technology yes there are some job occupations that will start to decline over time they’re also new job categories that will grow over time but the biggest change will be the jobs that will be changed something like more than two-thirds will have their definitions change not go away but change because they’re now being assisted by Ai and by automation so this is a profound change which has implications for skills how do we assist people building new skills learn to work alongside machines and how do these complement what people do today

AI will impact every product

this is going to impact every product across every company and and so that’s why I think it’s a very very profound technology and so we are just in early days every product in every company that’s right AI will impact everything so for example you could be a radiologist you know if I if you think about five to ten years from now you’re going to have a AI collaborator with you it may triage you come in the morning you let’s say you have 100 things to go through it may say these are the most serious cases you need to look at first or when you’re looking at something it may pop up and say you may have missed something important why won’t we you know why won’t we take advantage of a super powered assistant to help you across everything you do you may be a student trying to learn math or history and you know you will have something helping you we ask pachai 

What jobs would be disrupted

what jobs would be disrupted he said knowledge workers people like writers accountants Architects and ironically software Engineers AI writes computer code too today Sundar pichai walks a narrow line a few employees have quit some believing that Google’s AI rollout is too slow others too fast there are some serious flaws there’s a return of inflation James manika asked Bart about inflation it wrote an instant essay in economics and recommended five books but days later we checked none of the books is real barred fabricated the titles this very human trait error with confidence is called in the industry hallucination are you getting a lot of hallucinations uh yes uh you know we just expected no one in the in the field as yet saw the hallucination problems all models uh do have uh this is an issue is it a solvable problem it’s a matter of intense debate I think we’ll make progress to help cure hallucinations Bard features a Google it button that leads to old-fashioned search Google has also built safety filters into Bard to screen for things like hate speech and bias how great a risk is the spread of disinformation AI will challenge that in a deeper way the scale of this problem is going to be much bigger bigger problems he says with fake news and fake images it will be possible with AI to create uh you know a video easily where it could be Scott saying something or me saying something and we never said that and it could look accurate but you know at a societal scale you know can cause a lot of harm is barred safe for society the baby have launched it today uh as an experiment in a limited way uh I think so but we all have to be responsible in each step along the way pachai told us he’s being responsible by holding back for more testing Advanced versions of Bard that he says can reason plan and connect to internet search you are letting this out slowly so that Society can get used to it that’s one part of it one part is also so that we get the user feedback and we can develop more robust safety layers before we build before we deploy more capable models of the AI issues

Emergent properties

we talked about the most mysterious is called emergent properties some AI systems are teaching themselves skills that they weren’t expected to have how this happens is not well understood for example one Google AI program adapted on its own after it was prompted in the language of Bangladesh which it was not trained to know we discovered that with very few amounts of prompting in Bengali you can now translate all of Bengali so now all of a sudden we now have a research effort where we’re now trying to get to a thousand languages there is an aspect of this which we call all of us in the field call it as a black box you know you don’t fully understand and you can’t quite tell why it said this or why it got wrong we have some ideas and our ability to understand this gets better over time but that’s where the state of the art is you don’t fully understand how it works and yet you’ve turned it loose on society let me put it this way I don’t think we fully understand how a human mind works either was it from that black box we wondered that barb Drew its short story that seems so disarmingly human that talked about the pain that humans feel it talked about Redemption how did it do all of those things if it’s just trying to figure out what the next right word is I mean I’ve had these experiences uh talking with Bard as well there are two views of this you know there are a set of people who view this as look these are just algorithms they’re just repeating what it’s seen online then there is the view where these algorithms are showing emergent properties to be creative to reason to plan and so on right and and personally I think we need to be uh we need to approach this with humility part of the reason I think it’s good that some of these Technologies are getting out is so that Society you know people like you and others can process what’s happening and we begin this conversation and debate and I think it’s important to do that when we come back we’ll take you inside Google’s artificial intelligence Labs where robots are learning

The AI revolution

the revolution in artificial intelligence is the center of a debate ranging from those who hope it will save Humanity to those who predict Doom Google lies somewhere in the optimistic middle introducing AI in steps so civilization can get used to it we saw what’s coming next in machine learning at Google’s AI lab in London a company called Deep Mind where the future looks something like this the story will continue in a moment

AI soccer

look at that oh my goodness they’ve got a pretty good kick on them good game a soccer match at deepmind looks like fun and games but here’s the thing humans did not program these robots to play they learned the game by themselves it’s coming up with these interesting different strategies different ways to walk different ways to block and they’re doing it they’re scoring over and over again this robot here Raya hadzel vice president of research and Robotics showed us how Engineers used motion capture technology to teach the AI program how to move like a human but on the soccer pitch the robots were told only that the object was to score self-learning programs spent about two weeks testing different moves it discarded those that didn’t work built on those that did and created All-Stars there’s another goal and with practice they get better Hansel told us that independent from the robots the AI program plays thousands of games from which it learns and invents its own tactics here think that red player is going to grab it but instead it just stops it hands it back passes it back and then goes for the goal and the AI figured out how to do that on itself that’s right that’s right and it takes a while at first all the players just run after the ball together like a gaggle of uh you know six-year-olds the first time they’re they’re they’re playing ball over time what we start to see is now ah what’s the strategy you go after the ball I’m coming around this way or we should pass or I should block while you get to the goal so we see all of that coordination emerging in the play [Music] this is a lot of fun but what are the practical implications of what we’re seeing here this is the type type of research that can eventually lead to robots that can come out of the factories and work in other types of human environments you know think about mining think about dangerous construction work or exploration or

DeepMind

disaster recoverya hadsall is among 1 000 humans at deepmind the company was co-founded just 12 years ago by CEO Demis hasabis so if I think back to 2010 and we started nobody was doing AI there was nothing going on in Industry people used to eye roll when we talk to them investors about doing AI so we couldn’t we could barely get two cents together to start off with which isn’t crazy if you think about now the billions being invested into AI startups Cambridge Harvard MIT hasabis has degrees in computer science and Neuroscience his PhD is in human imagination and imagine this when he was 12 in his age group he was the number two chess champion in the world it was through games that he came to AI I’ve been working on AI for for decades now and I’ve always believed that it’s going to be the most important invention that Humanity will ever make will the pace of change outstrip our ability to adapt I don’t think so I think that we um you know we’re sort of an infinitely adaptable species um you know you look at today us using all of our smartphones and other devices and we effortlessly sort of adapt to these new technologies and this is going to be another one of those changes like that among the biggest changes her Deep Mind was the discovery that self-learning machines can be creative so this is uh asaba showed us a game playing program that learns it’s called Alpha zero and it dreamed up a winning chess strategy no human had ever seen but this is just a machine how does it achieve creativity it plays against itself tens tens of millions of times so it can explore parts of Chess that maybe human chess players and and programmers who program chess computers haven’t thought about before it never gets tired it never gets hungry it just plays chess all the time yes it’s it’s kind of amazing thing to see because actually you set off for zero in the morning and it starts off playing randomly by lunchtime you know it’s able to beat me and beat most chess players and then by the evening it’s stronger than the world champion demo sasaba’s soul deepmind to

DeepMind to Google

Google in 2014 one reason was to get his hands on this Google has the enormous computing power that AI needs this Computing Center is in Pryor Oklahoma but Google has 23 of these putting it near the top in computing power in the world this is one of two advances that make AI ascendant now first the sum of all human knowledge is online and second Brute Force Computing that very Loosely approximates the neural networks and talents of the brain things like memory imagination planning reinforcement learning these are all things that are known about how the brain does it and we wanted to replicate some of that in our AI systems you predict one of those those are some of the elements that led to deepmind’s greatest achievements so far solving an impossible problem in biology proteins are building blocks of life but only a tiny fraction were understood because 3D mapping of just one could take years deepmind created an AI program for the protein problem and set it Loose well it took us about four or five years to to figure out how to build the system it was probably our most complex project we’ve ever undertaken but once we did that it can solve a protein structure in a matter of seconds and actually over the last year we did all the 200 million proteins that are known to science how long would it have taken using traditional methods well the rule of thumb I was always told by my biologist friends is that it takes a whole PhD five years to do one protein structure experimentally so if you think 200 million times five that’s a billion years a PhD time it would have taken deepmind made its protein database public a gift to humanity hasabis called it how has it been used it’s been used in an enormously broad number of ways actually from malaria vaccines to developing new enzymes that can eat plastic waste to a new antibiotics most AI systems today do one or maybe two things well the soccer robots for example can’t write up a grocery list or book your travel or drive your car the ultimate goal is what’s called artificial general intelligence a learning machine that can score on a wide range of talents would such a machine be conscious of itself

Consciousness

so that’s another great question we you know philosophers haven’t really settled on a definition of Consciousness yet but if we mean by sort of self-awareness and these kinds of things um you know I think there’s a possibility AIS one day could be I definitely don’t think they are today but I think again this is one of the fascinating scientific things we’re going to find out on this journey towards AI even unconscious current AI is superhuman in narrow ways back in California we saw Google Engineers teaching skills that robots will practice continuously on their own push the blue cube to the blue triangle they comprehend instructions push the yellow hexagon to the yellow heart and learn to recognize objects what would you like how about an apple how about and apple on my way I will bring an apple to you we’re trying Vincent vanook senior director of Robotics showed us how robot 106 was trained on millions of images I am going to pick up the apple and can recognize all the items on a crowded countertop if we can give the robot A diversity of experiences a lot more different objects in different settings the robot gets better at every one of them now that humans have pulled the forbidden fruit of artificial knowledge thank you we start the Genesis of a new Humanity AI can utilize all the information in the world what no human could ever hold in their head and I wonder if humanity is diminished by this enormous capability that we’re developing I think the possibility of AI do not diminish Humanity in any way in fact in some ways I think they actually raise us to even deeper more profound questions Google’s James manika sees this moment as an inflection point I think we’re constantly adding these superpowers or capabilities to what humans can do in a way that expands possibilities as opposed to narrow them I think so I don’t think of it as diminishing humans but it does raise some really profound questions for us who are we what do we value uh what are we good at how do we relate with each other those become very very important questions that are constantly going to be in one case sense exciting but perhaps unsettling too it is an unsettling moment critics argue the rush to AI comes too fast while competitive pressure among giants like Google and startups you’ve never heard of is propelling Humanity into the Future Ready or Not but I think if I take a 10-year Outlook it is so clear to me we will have some form of very capable intelligence that can do amazing things and we need to adapt as a society for it you know Google CEO Sundar pichai told us Society must quickly adapt with regulations for AI in the economy laws to punish abuse and treaties among nations to make AI safe for the world you know these are deep questions and you know we call this alignment you know one way we think about how do you develop AI systems that are aligned to human values and including morality this is why I think the development of this needs to include not just engineers but social scientists ethicists philosophers and so on and I think we have to be very thoughtful and I think these are all things Society needs to figure out as we move along it’s not for a company to decide we’ll end with a note that has never appeared on 60 Minutes but one in the AI Revolution you may be hearing often the proceeding was created with 100 percent human content explains the evolution of Google’s founding don’t be evil motto it’s a lot more of a nuanced view but it Underpants how we think about things at 60 Minutes overtime.com incredibly enabling