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Creating AI Could Be the Biggest & Last Event in Human History | Stephen Hawking | Google Zeitgeist

Today I would like to speak about the origin and destiny of intelligence in our universe. I shall take this to include the human race, even though much of its behaviour throughout history has been pretty stupid and not calculated to aid the survival of the species. We all know that, over time, things tend to get messy. The second law of thermodynamics says that a total amount of disorder or entropy always increases over time. However, there is a loophole allowing a small system to decrease its disorder as long as it increases the disorder of its surroundings by an even greater amount. Our initially barren universe has evolved remarkably complex entities doing just this as well as reproducing. We call these entities life. Information is at the heart of life. DNA passes the blueprints of life between generations. Evermore complex life forms input information from sensors such as eyes and ears, process the information in brains or other systems to figure out how to act and connect in the world by outputting information to muscles for example. At some point during our 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, something beautiful happened. This information processing got so intelligent that life forms became conscious Our universe has now awoken, becoming aware of itself. I’ve given you a brief history of intelligence. What’s next? Some think that humanity today is the pinnacle of evolution, and that this is as good as it gets. I disagree. There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of our universe and what can be more special than that there is no boundary. And there should be no boundary to human endeavour. I think there is no qualitative difference between the brain of an earthworm and a computer. I also believe that evolution implies there can be no qualitative difference between the brain of an earthworm and that of a human. It therefore follows that computers can, in principle emulate human intelligence or even better it. Up to now, computers have obeyed Moore’s law which says that computers double their speed and memory capacity every two years. Human intelligence may also increase because of genetic engineering but not so fast. The result is that computers are likely to overtake humans in intelligence at some point in the next 100 years. When that happens, we will need to ensure that our computers have goals aligned with ours. It’s tempting to dismiss a notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction, but this would be a mistake and potentially our worst mistake ever. Artificial intelligence research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks, such as self-driving cars a computer winning at Jeopardy, and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race. A race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation. Such achievements will probably pale against what our coming decades will bring. The potential benefits are huge. Everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence. We cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is amplified by the tools AI may provide but the eradication of war, disease and poverty would be high on anyone’s list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, for example world militaries are considering starting an arms race in autonomous weapon systems that can choose and eliminate their own targets, while the UN is debating a treaty banning such weapons. Autonomous weapons proponents usually forget to ask the most important question. What is the likely end point of an arms race, and is that desirable for the human race? Do we really want cheap AI weapons to become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow sold to criminals and terrorists on the black market? Given concerns about long-term controllability of evermore advanced AI systems, should we arm them and turnover our defence to them? In 2010, computerised trading systems created a stock market flash crash. What would a computer-triggered crash look like in the defence arena? The best time to stop the autonomous weapons arms race is now. In the medium term, AI may automate our jobs to bring both great prosperity and equality. Looking further ahead there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved. There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is possible, although it may play out differently than in the movies. As Irving Good realised in 1965 machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a singularity. One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders and potentially subduing us with weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all. In short, the advent of super intelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity so we should plan ahead. If a superior alien civilisation send us a text message saying We’ll arrive in a few decades, would we just reply, Okay, Call us when you get here. We’ll leave the lights on? Probably not, but this is more or less what has happened with AI. Little serious research has been devoted to these issues outside of a few small non-profit institutes. Fortunately, this is now changing. Technology pioneers Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak have echoed my concerns, and a healthy culture of risk assessment and awareness of societal implications is begin to take root in the AI community. Many of the world’s leading AI researchers recently signed an open letter calling for the goal of AI to be redefined from simply creating raw undirected intelligence to creating intelligence directed at benefiting humanity. The Future of Life Institute where I serve on the scientific advisory board, has just launched a global research programme aimed at keeping AI beneficial. When we invented fire, we messed up repeatedly then invented a fire extinguisher. With more powerful technology such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and strong artificial intelligence, we should instead plan ahead and aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get. I am an optimist and don’t believe in boundaries neither for what we can do in our personal lives, nor for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. This means that the brief history of intelligence that I have told you about is not the end of the story but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins. Thank you for listening.

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