Rise of AI

As fall breaks out in Canada, I’m reminded of all the beauty, innocence and gun-free fun available from our neighbours to the North (, majestic music ), There’s the majesty of Toronto, vast hockey, rinks spectacular batches of poutine and gallons of maple syrup that You can chug openly and guilt-free, for this maple syrup is pure and nourishing. The changing of the seasons also happens to be the perfect time to encounter one of Canada’s most prized creatures, the artificial intelligence, nerd (, resolute, music ) Not too long ago. These beings were rare and hidden away in university dungeons, But today they flourish.

They primp with instinctual grace They wave their hands impressively to assert their intellectual dominance. They carb-load like overpaid professional athletes, And this makes some sense because they’re among the best-paid professionals in the world Together, these creatures did something truly remarkable.

Without anyone paying much notice, they gave birth to an AI revolution. They turned Canada, yes, Canada into one of the great AI superpowers. This is the story of how all this came to be. It’s the story of one nation’s quest to teach computers to think like humans. It’s. The story of what this science experiment will mean for all our lives and the future of the human species.

So if you’re a human or something trying to imitate one you’ll want na pay attention Ever since people first came up with the idea of computers, they’ve dreamed of imbuing them with artificial intelligence. I am a smart fellow as I have a very fine brain. That’s the most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen: AI is just a computer that can mimic or simulate human thought or human behaviour.

Within that there’s a subset called machine learning that it’s now the underpinning of what is most exciting about AI By allowing computers to learn how to solve problems on their machine learning has made a series of breakthroughs that once seemed nearly impossible. It’s the reason: computers can understand your voice spot a friend’s face in a photo and steer a car, And it’s the reason people are actively talking about the arrival of human-like AI. And, whether that would be a good thing or a horrific end of days thing.

Many people made this moment possible, but one figure towers above the rest. I’ve come to the University of Toronto to see the man they call the godfather of Modern, Artificial Intelligence, Geoff Hinton, (, calm, music ) Because of a back condition. Geoff Hinton hasn’t been able to sit down for more than 12 years. I hate standing

I much rather sit down, but if I sit down, I have a disc that comes out Well. At least now standing desks are fashionable Yeah, but I was ahead. ( laughter, ). I was standing when they weren’t fashionable Since he can’t sit in a car or on a bus, Hinton walks everywhere.

The walk says a lot about Hinton and his resolve. For nearly 40 years, Hinton has been trying to get computers to learn like people do a quest. Almost everyone thought was crazy or at least hopeless right up until the moment it revolutionized the field. Google thinks this is the future of the company Amazon thinks this is the future of the company Apple thinks this is the future of the company. My own department thinks it’s just probably nonsense and we shouldn’t be doing any more of it. ( laughter ), So I talked everybody into it, except my own department. You obviously grew up in the UK, and you had this very prestigious family, full of famous mathematicians and economist, and I was curious what it was like for. You

Yeah there was a lot of pressure. I think, by the time I was about seven. I realized I was gon na have to get a PhD. Did you rebel against that or you –? I dropped out every so often I became a carpenter for a while Geoff Hinton, pretty early on, became obsessed with this idea of figuring out how the mind works.

He started off getting into physiology the anatomy of how the brain works. Then he got into psychology and then finally, he settled on more of a computer science approach to modeling the brain and got in to artificial intelligence.My feeling is. If you wan na understand a really complicated device like a brain, you should build one. I mean you could look at cars and you could think you could understand cars When you try and build a car. You suddenly discover this is stuff that has to go under the hood. Otherwise it doesn’t work. Yeah,

As Geoff was starting to think about these ideas, he got inspired by some AI researchers across the pond. Specifically, this guy Frank, Rosenblatt Rosenblatt in the late 1950s developed what he called a Perceptron and it was a neural network, a computing system that would mimic the brain. The basic idea is a collection of small units called neurons. These are little computing units, but they’re actually modeled on the way that the human brain does its computation.They take incoming data like we do from our senses and they actually learn. So the neural net can learn to make decisions over time.

Rosenblatt’S hope was that you could feed a neural network, a bunch of data like pictures of men and women, and it would eventually learn how to tell them apart. Just like humans do There was just one problem: It didn’t work very well. Rosenblatt. His neural network was a single layer of neurons and it was limiting what it could do. Extremely limited.And, a colleague of his wrote a book in the late’60s that show these limitations.

And it kinda put the whole area of research into a deep freeze for a good 10 years. No one wanted to work in this area. They were sure it would never work. Well, almost no one. It was just obvious to me that it was the right way to go.

The brain’s a big neural network, and so it has to be that stuff like this can work’cause it works in our brains. There’S just never any doubt about that. What do you think it was inside of you that kept you wanting to pursue this when everyone else was giving up? Just that you thought it was the right direction to go. I know that everyone else was wrong. Okay,

Hinton decides he’s, got an idea of how these neural nets might work and he’s gon na pursue it. No matter what, For a little while he’s bouncing around research institutions in the US, He kinda gets fed up that most of them are funded by the defense departments and he starts looking for somewhere else. He can go.I didn’t wan na take defense department money. I sort of didn’t like the idea that this stuff was gon na be used for purposes that I didn’t think were good.

He suddenly hears that Canada might be interested in funding artificial intelligence, And that was very attractive that I could go off to this civilized town and just get on with it. So I came to the University of Toronto And then in the mid’80s we discovered I had to make more complicated neural nets, so they could solve those problems that the simple ones couldn’t solve. He and his collaborators developed a multi-layered neural network, a deep neural network.

And this started to work in a lot of ways Using a neural network, a guy named Dean, Pomerleau built a self-driving car in the late’80s and it drove on public roads.Yann LeCun in the’90s built a system that could recognize handwritten digits and this ended up being used Commercially But again they hit a ceiling. They didn’t work quite well enough because we didn’t have enough data. We didn’t have enough compute power,

And people in AI in computer science decided neural networks was wishful thinking. Basically, So it was a big disappointment.Through the’90s into the 2000s Geoff was one of only a handful of people on the planet who are still pursuing this technology. He would show up at academic conferences and being banished to the back rooms. He was treated as really like a pariah

Was there like a time when you thought this just wasn’t gon na work? No, And you did have some self-doubt. I mean there were many times when I thought. I’M not gon na make this work, But Geoff was consumed by this and couldn’t stop

He just kept pursuing the idea that computers could learn.Until about 2006 when the world catches up to Hinton’s ideas. Computers were now a lot faster And now it’s behaving like I thought it would behave in the mid’80s. It’S solving everything

The arrival of superfast chips and the massive amounts of data produced on the internet gave Hinton’s algorithms a magical boost. Suddenly computers could identify what was in an image, then they could recognize speech and translate from one language to another. By 2012 words like neural nets and machine learning were popping up on the front page of The New York Times. You have to go all these years and then all of a sudden in the span of a few months it just takes off, and it finally feel like. Aha, the world has finally come to my vision. It’S sort of a relief that people finally came to their senses.

( laughter ). Next up, we have Professor Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto, ( applause ). Thank you, (, calm, music ) For Hinton. This is obviously a really redemptive moment Now he’s basically a technology celebrity And for Canada. It’S the country’s moment as well.

They have more AI researchers than just about any other place on the planet, and the quest now is to see what these guys can do. Starting companies and pushing the technology forward. I’M gon na set out on a journey across Canada to see the best in Canadian AI technology and to get a feel for how far the technology has come and how far it still has to go. Here is a city that gets right at the central tension of modern life and the unfolding AI revolution. ( church bell ringing ), It’s Montreal a place filled with beauty and old world charms that ask you to move slowly through its streets and to chill for a while, reflect and think deep thoughts, (, calm, music ). At the same time, it’s one of the world’s top AI research centers

Students flock here from all over the globe to get deep with machine learning and to take Geoff, Hinton’s ideas and figure out how to turn them into products. We all use.To see just how successful they’ve been look no further than your pocket. All this stuff started out as hardcore computer science, but over the last five years AI has invaded our everyday lives. Your smartphone is packed full of AI-powered apps, including something like Google Translate that lets. You point your phone at a magazine, that’s written in French and read it as if you’re a local.Engineers have been trying to get computers to translate text like this for decades, but it was Geoff’s neural nets that finally made it possible.

Thanks Geoff – And it’s not just your smartphone neural networks are heading for the open road Off we go Meet. My friend Stephane, the head of Montreal’s Tesla Fan Club, I’m driving a Tesla for a little bit more than four years and a half

So do you have people asking you for rides all the time? Yes all the time, Maybe that’s because of his fancy. Pants autopilot, Tesla’s, semi-autonomous driving system that kicks in when road conditions are right.So. That’S it autopilot’s on Yes and it’s driving by itself.

So we need to pay attention, but we don’t have to drive. That’S crazy, ( laughter, ) Self-driving cars are packed full of camera, sensors and radar When teamed with computer vision neural nets. It’S this technology that lets the cars build a picture of the world. The technology has a long way to go, but this Tesla can monitor all the cars around it switch lanes and park all by itself.

Thanks Geoff So you’re living in the future Yeah, You know when you try it once it’s very difficult to do without it, because I just can be relaxed and we can drive like this Oops

There’S a stop sign, That’s why we still need to pay attention, ( laughter, ) Back on the sidewalk. I tap those neural nets again, This time in the form of speech, recognition Find me some poutine eh

I found a few places within 8.4 kilometers.Speech recognition used to suck, but now it’s pretty darn good. Why A neural net? Of course,

Thanks Geoff, The Google brain sent me here For an artery hardening affair with poutine Once a simple Quebec dish of cheese, curds, French fries and gravy, it’s been disrupted, The dandan pepperoni bacon and onions

Here we go It’s gooey glorious and blessedly algorithm-free. Well now the humans are toast when they could make stuff like this (, calm, music, ), A big part of Hinton’s legacy lies beyond these examples of AI in the world. He’S also inspired a legion of disciples spreading the good word of neural nets.

Yoshua Bengio is a professor at the University of Montreal he’s one of the researchers who gloomed on to Hinton’s ideas when it seemed to make little sense to do so. Over the years, he’s formed a mind, meld with Hinton and together they’ve come up with many of the key concepts behind modern AI. You guys worked on this stuff through the’80s the’90s to 2000s, and then it just seemed like this totally went from computer science and research to we see it everywhere in our lives Are even you surprised: what’s happened in the last five years that it really is like Sitting on all our phones and –, The rate at which the progress and the industrial products have been coming up is totally something we didn’t expect. Even now, it’s hard to predict: where are we going? Is it gon na slow down or are we gon na continue with this exponential increase?

It’S thanks to Yoshua that Montreal is full of top notch, AI graduate talent. This in turn has brought tech giants like Google and Facebook to town along with their ample checkbooks. To me, it seems like if you’re good at AI, you can make $ 200,000 $ 300,000. A year It is crazy to see how much these guys get paid. Now A million dollars is something quite common. As a salary

Have you ever had a country offer you an incredible money to come, set up a lab there? Not a country but yeah companies yeah, But Yoshua has rejected the lucrative offers of big neural net. He remains committed to the ivory towers of academia, which is a better fit for his philosophical approach to AI. You’Ve got guys like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking that sometimes paint this technology in a very, very dark light that it could run amok and start doing things on its own

What do you feel when you hear people say things like that? I’M not concerned about technology running amok.The, Terminator scenario, I think, is not very credible, And I also believe that, if we’re able to build machines that are as smart as us, they’re also smart enough to understand our values and to understand our moral system and so act In a way, that’s good for us Now. I think there are real concerns, which is essentially misuse of AI to influence people’s minds.

It’S already happening with political advertising, Yeah we’ve already seen like the stuff from Facebook, So I think we should be careful about this And try to regulate the use of AI in places where it’s morally wrong or ethically wrong. I think we just we should just ban it and make it illegal.It’s comforting that Yoshua has these concerns.

But hop down the road from the university in reality or, what’s left of it becomes messier. This tiny room is the home to a startup called Lyrebird. It was founded by Yoshua’s former students and has built an app that can clone your voice. We were speaking about this new algorithm to copy voices. This is huge.

It can make or say anything really anything One of its founders is this guy Mexican expat Jose. He taught me the art of the clone, So you’ll need to record yourself for a few minutes of audio Thousands of letters danced across the amateur author screen.

When you start to eat like this, something is the matter. You guys better quit politics and take in washing. I don’t know where that one came from ( laughs, ), Okay, so create my digital voice. Now Creating your digital voice,

Takes at least one minute One minute, my God Yeah so before – to create some artificial voice of someone. You would need to record yourself for at least eight hours Test your voice, All right. So now I get to type something

Yeah so the moment of the truth: Okay, Once Lyrebird’s AI, has worked its magic after I’m done typing Better spell that out Any words I put into the app can be played back in my digital voice.

And here’s the crazy thing Even words. I never actually said in the first place. Artificial intelligence technology seems to be advancing very quickly.Should. We be afraid I mean I can definitely hear my voice in there.

That’S really interesting, I just picked those words at random and I definitely did not say some of them and it’s like flawless and being able to sort of pick from just about any word and manufacture it, Hello world. This is the best show. I have ever seen This technology seems sweet but lends itself to all manner of trickery.

I’Ve popped back to my hotel to test out the Lyrebird technology a little bit, And you could see some really obvious ways that this could be abused.This is fake, Donald Trump talking The United States is considering, in addition to other options, stopping all trade with any country. Doing business with North Korea And then you could picture somebody taking over your voice and creating some mayhem in your personal life.

Now, to really put my computer voice to the test, I’m going to call my dear sweet mother and see if she recognizes me ( phone ringing, ), Hey mom Hi.What! Are you guys up to today, I’m just finishing up work and waiting for the boys to get home

Okay, I think I’m coming down with a virus ( laughter ). I was messing around with you. You were talking to the computer ( laughs ). Is that scary or good

I don’t know ( laughter ). Is it (, calm, music, ) After realizing that anyone with the time and inclination could mess with my life? There was only one thing left to do. I joined Jose and a few other Lyrebirds to chat more about the evils of AI, while dulling my fear with booze. Obviously, some people are freaked out by this technology because we’re already like blurring the line about truth and reality.

Of course, there is some risk in people using this kind of technology for bad applications. Unfortunately, technologies, it’s not possible to stop it.So. The ethical path that we have decided is to show these to people to make them know that this kind of technology is available and to make them more cautious from this kind of subject. We really believe that right now that the technology is not perfect is the right time to let people kind of play with it get used to it slowly. So you guys think that the idea is just sort of new and that’s why it scares people. But if you get used to it, it’s just that’s just the way it is

We want our technology to be used for positive things. It’S not something that we should be really afraid of. It’S something that we should be careful about, but I feel enthusiastic about (, calm, music, ), It’s nice to be enthusiastic. It’S also nice to meditate on the consequences of your inventions instead of turning our souls over to chance and blind luck, But it is kinda cool to be a cynical bastard in my new artisanal computer voice.

Welcome Russian friends to our huge, wonderful and very pure elections, The real artificial intelligence weirdos in Canada live here in Edmonton. This is a large but very very cold and very very flat city. It is more or less in the middle of nowhere. It’S the kind of place that has a giant butter vault to help people survive the lean winter months.

Canadians like to put the best possible spin on how these conditions bring out interesting traits in people. Ask anyone Like this guy from the Edmonton Tourist Center? Well, Edmonton’s, one of those cities that isn’t automatically listed in the top cities in Canada in terms of size or scale or notice. Even But it’s always had a really neat quality to it. Of that Western independent spirit that you see very much in Alberta in general. Combined with a conscience and thoughtfulness,

Over at the University of Alberta, some of the most far out AI research in world is taking place. The man I’m here to see is the university’s very own. Ai, godfather, Rich Sutton, Rich, is considered one of the great revolutionary thinkers in AI. You are not Canadian. I am Canadian

You are (, laughs, ), but not by birth. No, I was born in the US, But now I’m just Canadian Okay And what brought you to Canada.

The Rise of AI

The politics I wanted to get away from difficult times in the United States. United States was invading other countries in 2003. When I came here and I didn’t care for all, that.Sutton entered the field of AI in the mid’80s And like Geoff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. He was a big believer in neural networks.

But Sutton has a different idea about how to further the technology, Unlike Hinton’s method of feeding, neural networks, reams and reams of data and telling them what to do. Sutton wants them to learn more naturally from experience, an approach called reinforcement, learning, Reinforcement, learning, it’s like what animals do and what people do. Try several things, the things that work best you keep doing those and things that don’t work out so well. You stop doing them And how do you teach a computer that idea

The computer has to have a sense of what’s good and what’s bad.And, so you give a special signal called a reward If the reward is high. That means it’s good. If the reward is low, that means it’s bad To see, reinforcement learning in action. I found Marlos ], an industrious young Brazilian, whose created an AI to play his video games for him. His algorithm plays the game thousands of times and gradually learns from experience how to do better.

So the goal of this game is that you are this yellow block, and what you have to do is that you have to get as many potions as you can, while avoiding harpies.And. This is like the AI going at this. For the first time, It’s the AI running for the first time, So it just bumps into things If it gets points, it’s happy if it dies. It’S unhappy.

Yes And the AI starts to figure out that, maybe what I wan na do is to collect the potions and avoid the harpies. And now we can look at AI. That has ran for 5,000 games. Okay, And this is what it looks like.

You can tell that it’s smarter about its strategy, Yes, And then what happens if you run it 500,000 times? Oh, we got you. This superhuman performance level, Though notching a high score is the noblest of pursuits. Reinforcement learning has turned out to have all kinds of other applications.

It’S behind the algorithm that recommends movies and TV shows on Netflix and Amazon. It beat the world champion, Go player, a feat previously thought impossible for a computer.Soon. It could read your brain waves and determine whether you have a mental disorder, But for Sutton all that is just the beginning. We are trying to make real intelligence

We’Re trying to recreate human intelligence Humans are our examples. He sees reinforcement, learning as the path to what futurists call the singularity The moment when our AI creations light up and surge past human level intelligence. Do you have dates for the singularity or

It’S a quite broad probability, distribution and the median is at 2040, So that means equal chance being before or after 2040.The. Rationale goes like this By 2030. We’Ll have the hardware So give guys, like me, another 10 years, to figure out the algorithms, the software to go with the hardware to do it, and it’s gon na be exciting. Where we’re going.

If 2040 seems like a long time to wait to meet a smart robot, do not fret Over in the experimental wing of the university, there are coeds hard at work. Learning the line between humans and machines. Are you human, Of course not, but that shouldn’t keep us from chatting Case in point homegrown, Edmontonian genius, Kory, Mathewson,

Tell me about this guy a little bit or — Yeah sure Sure. So this is Blueberry On Blueberry I’ve deployed the Improv System, so there’s an artificial Improv System running on Blueberry right now. Yes, that’s right. Kory does Improv comedy with a robot

I’Ve been doing Improv longer than I’ve been doing computing science. I’Ve been doing it for 12 years and I thought there’s no more natural convergence than taking some of these state-of-the-art systems and putting them up on stage One day, we’ll take it to the moon. If this planet is not to be our last ( laughter, ), The sky, the moon and the universe, The sun, the sun,

The sky, the moon and the universe, I keep thinking it’s like ventriloquist or it is like a new edge. That’S really good way. To put it yeah Strange too, as I thought it, The piece that’s different is that I don’t know what it will say:

Anything that comes from the system it’s generating live in the moment. Blueberry I created you, I downloaded a voice into your brain so that you could perform in front of these people, But I do not know what I’m going to say. I don’t know what you’re gon na say: either

To give Blueberry the power of surreal Canadian Improv Kory made use of some tech that should be familiar by now, a neural network Step one. He feeds the network, the dialogue from a bunch of movies, 102,000 movies to be exact, All the movies Every movie for 100 years.

And that’s just so. It can learn language to see how somebody responds to somebody else.That’s exactly right, Yeah. It builds kind of language model Step two. He uses reinforcement, learning to train the network, Rewarding it when it makes sense and the punishing it when it spits out. Gibberish

Time to put this wannabe kid in the hall to the test There we go Start improvising: Okay, campers we’re gon na get ready for a real baseball game, Grab your gloves and grab your baseball bats. Let’S get out there, especially you Franklin,

Okay, okay! Well, why aren’t you ready for the match? Okay, Come on Franklin, you know how I feel about you, but you got ta, keep your head in the game right now. It’S threatening you!

I know Oh Jesus put down the bat Franklin. What are you doing? I’Ve got nothing to hide Look. This is all I am

Okay I’ll end it there That’s what how it work. That’S great. Obviously, some of the responses are a little bit weird, but that it’s really funny’cause, then, as you go along, it did hid a couple of things perfectly and then it’s like. I mean it’s extra hilarious because yeah that’s going.Blueberry may not be ready for its second city audition. Just yet, but Kory has a higher purpose. Making AI relatable

Oh, it’s gon na move. It’S gon na move. It’S gon na move Holy crap, (, laughter ). There is fear in society of AI

So we are kind of humanizing, this AI, where we’re taking it down a peg, We’re saying don’t be afraid of this tech. Look at how cute it is Look at how kind of naive it is Yeah, yeah yeah that sounds cool

You’Ve done it again, Blueberry. Isn’T there a flip side to that, though, that you make it cute and then people start to accept it then we wake up. I mean I don’t think that will happen in my time The singularity may be near or maybe not so near, But if the inhabitants of this oddly beautiful place keep pushing the technology, they just might create something alarmingly human-like one day,

For Rich Sutton, it’s not a question of whether we’ll get there, but whether we’ll be able to accept our mechanized brethren.Our society will be challenged. It’S just like every time are lack people. People are women. People we will do the same thing with robots. Eventually, Are they allowed to own property? Are they allowed to earn an income, or do they have to be owned by somebody?

But a robot is obviously not a person Right, No (, calm, music, ), (, upbeat music ). For my last stop I returned to Toronto.Home to 2

8 million people one very tall tower and, of course, the godfather himself Inside the system there’s also little processes which are a little bit like brain cells. He may be an import, but Geoff Hinton has done something truly exceptional for Toronto. He’S turned this city into an AI Mecca where AI conferences like this one seem to take place daily, ( applauding ) and where young minds come to show off their ideas. Canada, if we’re being honest, doesn’t usually seem that intimidating, but thanks to Geoff it’s got nothing less than world domination in mind.

We are enormously thankful to Canadians for inventing all these stuff’cause. We now use it throughout our entire business –, And we have it on record that he owns that Google owns Canada, We absolutely own Canada. So that was a mistake. The tech industry is full of people who adore AI And then also some famous types like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, who said well that AI might be the end of us To consider such dystopia. In the proper light, I’ve come to Toronto’s geekiest bar to encase myself in this steel container, with George Dvorsky

He’S a writer for Gizmodo and an AI philosopher Since we’re in a Apocalyptic bar. What is the con case around AI? What’S the nastiest scenario that everybody is worried about? Unfortunately, there is no shortage of nasty scenarios and I think this is what makes artificial intelligence such a scary thing is all the different ways that it can go wrong. It can be everything from an accident where we just didn’t think it through

We gave a very powerful computer instructions to do something. We thought we explained it articulately. We thought we gave it a concrete goal and it completely took a different path than we thought it would in such a way that it actually caused some great damage And I’m sure, you’ve heard the old paper. Clip example. Where you’re a paper clip manufacturer – and you say hey, we need lots of paper clips and because the artificial intelligence has so much reach and so much power, it actually starts to go about converting all the matter and all the molecules on the planet into paper. Clips.Before. You know it: we’ve now converted the entire cosmos into paper clips, It’s a crazy scenario, but it’s an illustrative scenario.

We can’t be dismissive of the perils, I think, that’s exceptionally dangerous, and I don’t think it’s too early to start raising alarm bells about it Being turned into clippie sounds awful, But fear not we’ll have years to ease into that sort of suffering as AI steadily plucks Off one job after another.The, first to go of course, will likely be the always screwed factory workers which brings us to Suzanne Gilbert, a budding AI overlord and founder of robotic startup Kindred AI

(, calm, music ) Tell me about these guys, So these are research prototypes, So they’re, some of the first robots we’ve built at Kindred. We tend to work with small robots, It’s a bit like if you imagine a child growing up and it breaks a lot of things.

Now imagine if the child was six feet tall when it have the brain of a six-month-old, it would be terribly dangerous How many of these robots have ever slapped you. I have been hit in the face by robots a couple of times. Suzanne seems nice enough. She makes exotic digital art

And she loves cats to the point where she has built a robotic fleet of them for the office. This one I usually call pink foot It’s a quadruped robot loosely based on cat anatomy, although it’s not a very highly faithful representation. Yet.And then, when you were growing up, you would build things as well. Yeah, that’s correct! Yeah!

So I was really enthralled by electronics at an early age. I guess most little girls will be looking at trays of beads and things, and I was looking at trays of like resistors and capacitors and little components, but having the same kind of reaction to them. But don’t be fooled by the hobby, electronics and the cute cat bots Suzanne is a keen business. Woman And Kindred has recently embarked on its first commercial venture.

What’S going on here is that we have a bank of robots that are learning, so they are continuously running picking up objects. These would run all day All day, all night Powered by a neural network. These arms can do something, that’s very easy for a human but very hard for a bot, Pick up objects of different shapes and put them down.

Most factories still use people to do that sort of thing, lots and lots of people Today, everyone’s shopping on ecommerce.Thousands and thousands of different types of objects shapes textures weights. How do you pick that up Right now? As humans, we have millions of humans in warehouses, just like picking up things and putting it into another location, so we’re teaching our robots. How to do that. What’S the hard part is figuring out, what’s a belt, what’s a shirt or it’s just how to grasp it.

Yeah exactly It’s very hard to pick it up right, So things will show up in any shape and you got ta figure out how to pick up without dropping it put in the location. So it takes a lot of training. Part of the training involves of all things: humans,

Robot, pilots who manually control the arms while the AI watches and learns the finer points of grabbing All right. Man teach me how to use this thing Have a seat. So you see a 3D mouse here. This lets you navigate the arm through dimensional space. So imagine you’re holding the arm in that left hand and you’re just moving around

Move it slowly and gently There you go, I’m trying to get the Oreos. I got ta go up, Oh shoot. I went too far up.

I want these Oreos ( grunts ) You killed the can. You lose Come back to me arm There success

It’S like being in an arcade. Basically, It’s like you actually get to win something Just down the hall. Kindred keeps a room full of pilots. Doing the same thing as me: Only these guys are actually competent.

They’Re remotely overseeing some arms in a Gap factory a thousand miles away in Tennessee. How long have you been a robot pilot Just over a month? Actually, I’ve only been here five weeks. What was the training process like

Almost like playing a video game, It’s a like shirt done. That’S a backpack! That’S a backpack okay.Somebody’s undies!

Oh there, it goes One shirt at a time: (, calm, music, ). As the arms observed their human guides, they gradually learn how to do better at picking up T-shirts and shoe boxes Eventually, they’ll be fully autonomous and size services will no longer be required. One day this is just gon na light up and it’s gon na be picking the objects — Pretty much.

Pretty much that’s the ultimate end goal, at least for these. To have it just constantly wearing and going And the people will be free. The people will be free to do other more important things.So. He seemed kind of happy about the prospect of unemployment, but I was concerned for his future. Isn’T there something grim about the human training there?

Yeah, it’s not good to take people’s jobs away, but this kind of technology coming into the workforce should make us stop thinking about how we’re going to pay people in the future, because AI is not just going to automate manual labor jobs, it’s gon na automate things Like doctors and lawyers and accountants very soon, so I think there’s gon na be issues. There’S gon na be a lot of disruption when these things come online. Suzanne is a realist but she’s. Also an optimist In her vision of the future. Robots won’t be mindless competitors to humanity, They’ll be full-fledged. Citizens like the rest of us.One of the crazy ideas that you talked about was you’ve got a robot and it’s working at a factory, and then it’s got ta go. Maybe it gets paid a wage and it goes to buy lithium-ion batteries to keep it going.

Why would that have to happen? I mean, if you’re having a physical body, then you will have a lot of physical needs just like we have.You might have to go to the repair shop to get like motor looked at or something like that and they’ll have to pay someone to do that. I think they’ll just be contributing to our economy in the same way we do, And if they have brains like us, they’ll want to explore new things. They’Ve never seen before. They’Ll want to learn things. They’Ll want to perhaps rest so that their mind has time to consolidate all this new information.

I’M trying to picture it in my head this little robot worker. Does he go home and sit on the couch watch TV after work? I don’t see why not.They probably watch cat videos like the rest of us It’s hard to tell sometimes if Suzanne is laughing with us or at us

But she’s not alone in her cautious optimism for the future. I think there’s always a sense that technology can be either used for good or used for bad unreassured. That Canada is part of it in terms of trying to set us on the right path. On the whole being responsible and thoughtful about the power, we’re gaining by research and learning is the right trend line and I don’t think AI is automatically doomed to some dystopian outcome. We’Re told that politicians will come up with policies that address massive job loss and prevent horrific inequality between the classes And we’re told that these guys will take so long to become human-like. That we need not be afraid for a while.

The truth, though, is that we’re turning ourselves over to the unknown here, So you know fingers crossed Eventually. I think we will become the AIs. We will become the intelligent machines, We will understand how things can be smart and we can deliberately create them.

So it’s you might think of it as making a new generation new kinds of people. Humanity is continuing to evolve and why wouldn’t enhanced people or even design people be the next step in humanity? It’S really hard to predict the future. I think there’s gon na be all sorts of things happening. We didn’t expect, but there’s one thing that we can predict. This technology is gon na change. Everything

Good bye, Good, bye, Good, bye, Good bye. Once I power you down, that’s it

Yeah, that’s right, We’ll end it right there That was getting deep.That was getting really deep…