“Success in creating effective A.I.,” said the late Stephen Hawking, “could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know.” Elon Musk called A.I. “a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization.” Are we creating the instruments of our own destruction or exciting tools for our future survival? Once we teach a machine to learn on its own – as the programmers behind AlphaGo have done, to wondrous results – where do we draw moral and computational lines? Leading specialists in A.I., neuroscience, and philosophy will tackle the very questions that may define the future of humanity.
TOPICS ON TIMELINE:
00:06: Opening film on the history and future of artificial intelligence.
06:05: Participant intros.
07:34: What is machine learning?
09:30: What are neural networks and how do they learn?
12:00: Teaching computers to create internal models of the world?
13:50: What do the next 10 years in AI look like?
14:35: Artificial narrow intelligence and mental models.
16:01: How is AI changing the world of art and creativity?
19:35: Can computers be creative?
23:20: AI writes a screenplay for a movie, how did it turn out?
25:30: What is artificial general intelligence?
27:00: How far away are we from developing artificial general intelligence equivalent to human intelligence?
28:30: Will advanced AI turn into Terminators and take over the world?
31:10: What’s so special about human intelligence?
31:11: What is human consciousness and will machine ever experience consciousness?
41:34: Separating intelligence from consciousness.
44:34: Defining morality in AI agents.
46:45: Will machines ever have emotions?
50:05: Should we be looking at other forms of non-human intelligence to model in our machines?
52:25: How do you align the drives of AI with human values?
53:10: Will artificial general superintelligence be good or bad for humankind?
56:15: Creating new ethics of AI.
58:40: When will we ever have super-AGI?
MODERATOR
Tim Urban – Writer: Tim Urban is the Writer, Illustrator, and Co-Founder of Wait But Why, a long-form, stick-figure-illustrated website with over 600,000 subscribers and a monthly average of one million visitors. He has produced dozens of viral articles on a wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence to social anxiety to humans becoming a multi-planetary species. His articles have been republished on sites like Quartz, The Washington Post, Business Insider, and Gizmodo. Counted among Wait But Why’s readers is Elon Musk, who once asked Urban to write about his companies, resulting in a 4-part blog series totaling 95,000 words and read by over 4.5M people. Urban’s 2016 TED main stage talk was the most-watched of its year and the first TED video to ever reach 10 million views in its first year.
PARTICIPANTS
Yann LeCun – Computer Scientist: Yann LeCun is VP & Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and Silver Professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences & the Center for Data Science. He was the founding Director of Facebook AI Research and of the NYU Center for Data Science. He received an Engineering Diploma from ESIEE (Paris) and a Ph.D. from Sorbonne Université. After a postdoc in Toronto he joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1988, and AT&T Labs in 1996 as Head of Image Processing Research. He joined NYU as a professor in 2003 and Facebook in 2013. His interests include AI machine learning, computer perception, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the recipient of the 2018 ACM Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) for “conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.”
Susan Schneider – Philosopher, Cognitive Scientist: Susan Schneider is the 2019 Distinguished Scholar at the Library of Congress and the Director of the AI, Mind and Society (AIMS) Group at the University of Connecticut. She writes about the fundamental nature of the self and mind, especially from the vantage point of issues in philosophy of mind, AI, astrobiology, metaphysics, and cognitive science. Discussions of her work have appeared in venues like The New York Times, Wired, Science, Big Think, Nautilus, Smithsonian, Discover, and PBS.
Max Tegmark – Physicist, AI researcher, Author: Max Tegmark is a Professor doing physics and AI research at MIT. President of the Future of Life Institute, Tegmark advocates for the positive use of technology. He is the author of over 200 publications, as well as the New York Times bestsellers Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. His work with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.”
Peter Ulric Tse – Neuroscientist: Peter Ulric Tse is interested in understanding, first, how matter can become conscious, and second, how conscious and unconscious mental events can be causal in a universe where so many believe a solely physical account of causation should be sufficient. He and his students carry out fMRI, EEG and psychophysics experiments in an effort to answer these philosophical questions scientifically. Details can be found in his book The Neural Basis of Free Will. He also leads a multi-university NSF consortium investigating the neural basis of volitional attention. He was raised in NYC by a German mother and Chinese father. He went to Dartmouth, where he majored in math and physics, and then to graduate school at Harvard, where he studied what visual illusions can teach us about conscious/unconscious brain processing. He has been a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth since 2001. Tse lives with his family on farmland in New Hampshire.
