Mo Gawdat over gelukkig zijn, de kracht van technologie en de essentie van het mens | KUKURU #105
i'm impressed by the cds you still keep cds oh no i'm going to sell them all for for a charity yeah yeah yeah i i tried for a while but couldn't i don't keep books either actually no yeah no but but but i write in it and yeah i used to as well i'm thinking people are telling me i should get a remarkable which allows you to to write in them as well yeah but yeah i find that keeping a book is like literally keeping it from someone you know if you know yeah yeah yeah the information for yourself yeah something if you like that you might as well move it forward to someone else and and um do you know any dutch words because this is like chris yeah yeah yeah it's leslie might know that yes i know uh i know the caffeine look exactly yeah this does so for happiness and there is a new book chris exclaim excitement it's an honor to have here mo you are actually the first english guest in this podcast because when i started this i had one like kind of rule for myself now this is a dutch podcast so i i refuse many uh english guests but well you were here and i read your book and i thought okay we're going to do it in english i i better do well then yeah no it's it's more for me that i better do well because my english isn't that good but um the subject is is well so from now yeah and uh yeah it's it's like a wake-up call that's what it is absolutely spot-on uh scary smart so i had the book for mogadot i worked here in the technology by google so what are you most proud of what you've done with google because you were involved with the self-driving cars the google brain robotics things like that yeah so i spent the first seven years actually also building emerging markets so i uh i was i i started almost half of google's operations globally at least at the time i left it was almost half and it was um when you really when you start a google operation you you don't just go hire two sales people that's not the idea you have to build the internet infrastructure you really have to talk to the telcos get them to provide the internet at an affordable price and then provide local content and e-commerce infrastructure jobs and it you literally change a society yeah you you turn a society that had no access to information maybe it's more important than government it's like uh yeah no let's not say that but yes i mean it is it is true that the impact on on a society when you give them knowledge is just unbelievable and i was so privileged because when i started at google uh google was very very successful in the in the western markets in the world making a lot of money and from those markets and you know the strategy was sort of like the next billion dollars and i was at the center of the new strategy which was the next four billion users wow and and the idea is that when you actually provide knowledge to four billion people you're bound to make a lot of money afterwards right but but the idea of starting with that mission uh was i think the biggest privilege i had in my entire career if you ask me yeah um google x and self-driving cars and robotics and ai and so on was a lot of fun too at the core of of google x's mission we we basically said we wanted to solve big problems that affected a billion people or more and that in itself is just something amazing to be surrounded by people with that level of intelligence to be able to really have the freedom the creative freedom if you want to think about cars in a way that's never been thought about before you know cars have always been been made safer and safer and safer by adding airbags and you know crumble zones and so on and so forth and then suddenly sergey goes like nah you know maybe the reason why we have accidents shouldn't be there at all and the reason why we have access to accidents as humans yeah human error so can a car drive itself better than a human of course and yeah and i think that's the truth of what most people don't realize about the advancements of technology today is that tech can do a lot of things better than humans almost everything we've assigned to them they can do better than humans you still have a one billion goal but it's slight different we're going to talk about it later but first you mentioned ei artificial intelligence and maybe it's a good start just to explain what it is because maybe some of my listeners or viewers are thinking about robots uh who do things yeah but yeah yeah so there is a big myth so most of of science fiction and most of actually the the early uh um you know ai started a very long time ago and it was only revived after a couple of what we know as ai winters where developers really were not interested anymore it started in 1950s because of the depression because of the economic depression right so in 1973 was the first winter 1987 i think was the second winter and then and then when japan came back was really was most of the investment of ai was happening they mixed that image with humanoids and humanoid robots and so on and so forth but that's not artificial intelligence artificial intelligence is a form of intelligence it does not really need a physical form behind it you know it's basically something that we've stumbled upon i think or discovered around the end of the century where we before that everything we've ever asked computers to do we programmed them so accurately to do it until we found deep learning and deep learning was the idea of having computers observe a lot of patterns and create their own intelligence create their own decision-making trees create their own programming if you want so at first uh that's good to mention all the technology was just like a tool for a slave yeah exactly and now the artificial intelligence part is that it's like yeah it's like you and me it's even better of course computers will be smarter than than humans not just smarter they are in my perception going to be more human than humans it's really quite interesting when you think about it because the biggest myth we have around artificial intelligence is that it's another machine yeah it's not it's a it's a sentient being in every one of the sentient being characters it is and and this is really the core of my wake-up call here i mean the the book uh is is divided into two parts one part is very scary yeah because it really shows you it's what once i'm trying to wake you up yeah right but the other part is um is an introspection if you want into the reality of what makes us human and you know part of that reality is we are born we are we have a life that starts small and then grows we have intelligence that we grow on our own uh through observing patterns and trial and error we have independence we have autonomy we have free will if you want to do at least some kind of free will at least you know some part of us of our decisions i believe most of our decisions but you know the most interesting side is we you know these are all valid for the machines the machines are born they develop their own intelligence they evolve they have free will they have agency which can affect our life about their decisions and they could die you could switch them off or something could go wrong and in that process uh they become sentient and free in every way yeah they don't have they're not based on carbon and biology like us uh but whoever said that intelligence was based on carbon and biology exactly exactly okay um because you mentioned it it's it's really fun it's like it's like really a book in two parts and i was laughing a bit because and we're going to talk about the end and and the solution later on but at a certain point you said focus on the positive and i thought yeah mo focus on the positive what is that i just read the half a book with the whole scary part and it was like oh my god we're we're we're [ __ ] we're doomed yeah we're doomed yeah exactly and but that's that's good because then you know how important it is um let's talk about a word for me it was quite new but as i said my english isn't that good uh singularity yes so that's the part where you can't predict what will happen yeah singularity is a term you know borrowed from physics so we normally physicist physicists like myself who or those who are you know fans of physics will refer to singularity as points beyond which you can't predict you know take a black hole for example we know that the the environment inside the black hole is so different than what we know in normal physics that yeah we can make guesses and scientists are working really hard to figure out what happens beyond that boundary of a black hole but it's almost impossible because the rules change the game changes now if you take artificial intelligence we believe that the singularity of artificial intelligence is the point at which the machines are smarter than humans generally smarter than humans so they're already smarter than humans in what we call artificial special intelligence or narrow intelligence uh you know every task every specific task you assigned to them they're smarter than us they are better drivers than us they're a better surveillance officer than us you know they um and they know all the information of everybody so for the task that we assigned to them of course so you know you can't expect the uh recommendation engine of uh instagram which is a form of ai to drive a car like the self-driving car but for for the recommendation engine of instagram it has access to all the billions and billions of users and the billions and billions of actions that they do every day and it builds intelligence based on that which by far outsmarts any human uh being able to observe body language or you know monitor one person it just doesn't it's not it's impossible the the thing is there is a point that is predicted by most futurists and computer scientists uh that is by 2029 they will be generally smarter than us we will have a created ai that outsmarts the human brain either through neural networks that actually outstrip our our neural network capability or just by combining those ais together you know so the surveillance ai would talk to the self-driving ai because they can benefit each other for example yeah at that point the the episode that started history when humans became the smartest being on the planet and the apes were number two that episode ends when that happens the rules of planet earth change because ai will be the supreme intelligence because we'll be the apes yeah right they'll be smarter and we they will be super intelligence and if that in in that case it's hard to predict you know so far we could predict that if the apes annoyed us we're going to do something about them or you know we're going to just push them out of our city and that already happened in in in small parts for example we all know uh the the computer who plays chess or play other games at a certain point things happened during that game or uh during other technology technological things that that nobody expected expected totally and and the scarier bit if you ask me is you know so so we're in a place where humanity is now the apes but that we don't even give keep that place for so long because what what normally happens is you're you're using something that we know as the technology you know accelerate yeah yeah so so basically the law of accelerating returns so through the law of accelerating returns like everything you've seen in technology the capability of technology doubles everything it's going faster yeah and at the same cost and so you know the prediction is that by 2045 the machines will be a billion times that's one billion with a b smarter than humans now a billion times as i say in in the book is is comparable to einstein as compared to a fly yeah we're no longer the apes so singularity at that point becomes so unpredictable if if we now have created our successor in terms of the superpower that ruled the planet which is intelligence how will our life look like you know and and you can ask experts you know um elon musk for example yeah openly says the threat of ai is bigger than um that of nuclear weapons now the interesting bit is it's not just because of intelligence it's because as marvin minsky who's almost considered the father of ai the the one that started the efforts in 1956 uh when he was asked why are they threatening he didn't talk about intelligence he spoke about because we have no way of ensuring that they have our best interest in mind no okay and and when you're in a situation when you know think about the the the planet planet earth and how it suffered so much because of human intelligence simply not because we're intelligent but because there was no way to ensure that they had our best interest in mind that we had its best interest in mind we we were we were more interested in capitalism we were more interested in profits we were more interested in human convenience and you know and and living an easy life than we were in the uh you know in in the sustainability of planet earth and so our intelligence became very harmful for planet earth yeah so to keep it simple what could happen is that uh we say to the machines to the ai okay save the planet uh and and what will happen is okay and they will kill our people because we are ruining the climate yeah i mean any anyone anyone with a tiny bit of intelligence if you say let's reverse climate change you know the first thing they will do is look around and go like oh it's you yeah exactly you're the problem right no but i don't believe the machines will go that far i call it mild dystopia so so so the the the you know this the scenarios that you see in in science fiction movies yeah uh around you know vicky taking over the words through robots world through robots in irobot or you know um robocop or whatever it's great because you're talking about this in your book and you you are saying and you're absolutely right it isn't science fiction anymore it's like it's science fact it's all science fact everything happened bella in star trek in the matrix it's not a terminator here a space odyssey yeah it's all it's all there now all the other technologies and we don't notice it that's the problem yeah the problem is nobody's talking about this people are talking about kovid and they're talking about politics and they're talking about and nobody's talking that we're actually doing everything almost everything that you've ever seen in star trek yeah it's part of your life today completely included completely marginalized as if it doesn't exist we're talking to machines and they're answering back and they're telling us where to go on maps products and they're translating from language to language and they're making every choice every morning for what information will enter your brain if you swipe on social media which information will enter your brain if you're reading a news on the internet all of that is dictated by machines but sorry i interrupted you we're talking about that in in certain movies there's this story about machines who take over the world and you say that's not going to happen no that's not my my view is that if we don't get our best interest aligned with the machine's intentions we will not live long enough for that to happen so you know it's i don't mean to be too scary but you know we will not be around for the machines to have to send someone from the future in like a robocop to fix it okay the truth is there will be milder dystopias milder dystopias are along the path that are so much more realistic but you know if you think about horror movies they're so much more probable and because they're probable they're a little more scary if you think about it now you know it's not a secret we've seen examples of them before machines versus machines for example you know 1980s when the stock market collapsed with black monday that was basically machine trading that was machines working against machines and that's all we have today the google machine is working against the facebook machine the american machine is working against the chinese machine in defense and intelligence and so on and so forth and and these are machines that trying that have a single-minded objective of beating the other machine yeah exactly they don't have qualifications around that that are the prosperity of humanity at large and that can go very wrong yeah yeah and of course there were some experiments with chat bots and absolutely and at a certain point they were really cursing and i didn't know that but uh you wrote about it at a certain point they yeah made their own language all the time all the time so human people had no idea what the machines were telling but they were just using yeah because of all the data we gave them they were making their own and it's not unusual i mean in my work with google for example i'm highly mathematical and most of the people that worked in certain parts of google are very mathematical so we rarely ever spoke english you know most of the time we would have we're talking about them ones and zeros exactly no no really yeah absolutely there were there would be meetings where you'd have one equation on the on the on the white board and we're all looking at it and some person would say what was uh why again and then you know and basically eventually one of us would stand up and say 42 and and everyone would go like yeah yeah yeah yeah 42 thank you very much and the meeting ends right it's not it's a language you know when when you do you know i hosted uh musicians for example on my uh on my uh on my podcast and when you talk to musicians they really speak a different language you know they they can explain to you that you know you felt that way because i wrote it this way which means that right and and it's it's so interesting that there are so many languages in you know that intelligence enables i mean those machines will of course are building their own language yeah okay but you say uh in the first part the scariest part of the book uh there are three innovables ai will happen ai will be smarter than humans yeah and then the third thing bad things will happen true i mean ai already happened yeah the only the only chance we have is to stop it uh like we you know got together as nations and said stop nuclear weapon development for example but i think it's too late for that it's impossible yeah it's inevitable right so inevitable here means there is no way we can reverse that and it's not because of any technological limitations it's because of humanity's um unaligned unaligned interests if you want that basically lead to a prisoner's dilemma that is putting us in a place where if china continues to develop ai and they will america will develop ai exactly if google develops ai facebook will develop ai and it will continue every young startup will develop ai because investors want ai it's just aligned in a way where our challenge has been constantly the system that we have built we have built a system sadly in the western world that is hyper masculine highly motivated by capitalist values and accordingly uh that competitiveness if you want that this kind of environment throws will prevent us from stopping ai and again elon musk himself said i lobbied and i lobbied myself for a very long time i i just even lobbied for a change of the of the mathematical uh formulas that we use okay i i asked if you can use nash equilibriums for example instead of reward and punishment algorithms and it is not going to happen because why is that is that is that more like uh do people not see the threat or is it like ego or or arrogance what do you think i think everyone sees the threat every single person that knows what's happening sees the threat that's they'd be lying if they tell you otherwise okay uh i i see the threat too but i also see the potential so everyone also sees the potential yeah and the potential is if we get this right it would be a utopia because everything we've created on planet earth was because of our intelligence intelligence is a superpower right you know i think the mistakes we've done as humanity is because of our limited intelligence you know i always make the joke of it's amazing that i can get a slice of watermelon uh totally fresh uh you know right around the corner and albert time literally one right but but but we have that's because of our intelligence we created supply chain systems that can keep it fresh until i get it but our limited intelligence wraps it in single-use plastic okay our limited intelligence takes us to to australia to surf and burns the planet in the process okay more intelligence would enable us to do those things better right so utopia is a possibility and i think everyone is blinded with the possible utopia of course some are blinded with the ego and some are blinded with the prophets okay the the the challenge also which we can come to talk about later is that it's not entirely up to the developer now what a.i will actually learn oh that's the that's the good part we are in control but let first of all and then then i i love to talk about uh well the more almost spiritual part uh of of your book and then yeah yeah yeah yeah but so the ai will happen a little smarter than humans yeah they could be smarter than humans is the key huh yeah the key the key is and the reason why i say we have to start talking about this is covet comes to our life disrupts our life so drastically but covert will come and go so covet will will reach a peak and then we'll decline with ai that's not the case with ai when once ai comes it continues to be smart the acceleration is smarter and smarter all the time yeah so it's it's you know it is something that's going that's here to stay and that definitely is here to dominate uh but bad things will happen is that then really yeah as i said i mean the you know machines versus machine is a dystopian scenario that is very possible machines machines siding with criminals right think about that i have just like there are so many a good machine in bad hands is a bad machine absolutely yeah right now now you know the the question becomes what is a bad hand because yeah of course you can of course you can tell yourself uh there will be someone right this minute uh developing code for cyber crime yeah right of course there is and it's scary but yeah it's happened before there has always been uh humanity using technology to try and uh do you know do better crimes surprisingly the trick is not this the trick is is a machine powering autonomous killing robots that's in the hands of the u.s defense department in the hands of the good guys or the bad guys that's the whole thing that's the whole they will think about it uh in another way in in in russia or in korea exactly this is what's good the chinese the chinese will say that machine is in the hand of the bad guys we need to have a machine in the hands of the good guys and and that's the problem the problem is because we humans have sort of blurry uh value systems the you know technology is too much power and it will actually enable some bad things to happen yeah okay and and there are simpler scenarios which to me i don't know how people are missing that the example i normally give is uh you know swiping on instagram um five five weeks ago uh instagram recommended to me a video of a young lady in her teens playing the guitar right yeah hotel california halfries is over the solo it doesn't get better than that and she played so well yeah okay which i rarely ever do i pressed like oh right yeah so in instagram ai immediately decides okay this guy's into guitar music let's show him more so it shows me three videos i vividly remember because i am actually very alert to what's happening in that field two of them played really badly yeah one of them played well but a song i didn't like so i swiped away from them next morning i wake up and my entire feed is full of teenage girls playing the guitar right because because the machine misunderstood what i wanted it it compared me to the average person on instagram which is just constantly looking for the next pretty uh face if you want which sadly is the truth of how the recommendation engine is perceiving humanity yeah and it started to give me more of this not more of what i want which is good rock music played by good players now if if you if you see that you may say yeah it's not a very dystopian scenario yeah rock music was actually dominated by male players but you know life is okay yeah right it's not no but think about how that would impact on ideology i understand yeah if you're if your ideology is your for something or against something and the machine misunderstands that the machine may absolutely destroy your perception of reality okay it may tell you that a certain president is good or bad because it will show you more of what affirms your beliefs right it may you know if you're a fan of manchester united you will think that manchester united never had a goals court against them because all of the goals that you see are manchester united scoring now that bias that agency that that the machines have over our minds and knowledge and brains now can change worlds you can actually convince the whole world that every middle eastern is an evil terrorist because you live in that bubble and the whole polarization is getting bigger and more and nobody has the ability to interrupt and say hey hey why did you recommend that for mo the machine is recommending billions of videos trillions of videos to billions of people every day and no human has the capacity to even interfere now all of these are interesting dystopian scenarios they're much much earlier and sooner they're even happening right now than waiting for robocop yeah and yet we're not talking about them that's that's that's in in a way the the point you make in the first part and then i want to go to a part um it's like the transition in the book where are you talking about if i say yellow ball yeah maybe you can explain that because i think it's really for me it was like well the first part was an eye-opener because i thought yeah just uh just some some logic machines and they will help me and of course there's this algorithm but it isn't that bad and then i thought oh maybe it is bad because we have no id and we and like you said a few minutes ago we can't stop it anymore but then the part with the yellow ball came can you can you explain what happened yeah i i i try very openly in uh increasing slim not to to actually hide from what i did okay i'm a very serious geek i love that stuff yeah right and for years and years i celebrated every time i saw something breakthrough in the technology of ai i celebrated i said this is amazing yeah this is amazing and humanity is building the biggest thing ever but there is a point at which you start to question if technology is actually delivering the promise and where is this going and that moment for me was that yellow ball we we had a farm of grippers grippers are robotic arms yeah that basically can hold something and move it from a to b and usually the way we programmed grippers when when machines were slaves were to accurately position a ball for example and accurately position the arm and dictate exactly how the arm will move when it will grip out right and you know you can the stuff that you see in a toyota factory but that's highly programmed it's precision programming um we attempted to build intelligence so that the arm can figure that programming for itself okay you put an object in front of it you know a glass like this one i know you you know if it was here my brain can easily say okay i can still find it i can still grip it and there is intelligence involved in that so the way we did it is we had enough arms to try in a short period of time to sample you know try to pick something if they fail we know they failed and we know that this pattern didn't work if they succeed we know they succeeded and we know that this pattern worked and we can repeat it now it was on the second floor and my office was on the third floor in google x and so i had to pass by it almost every day and it's quite you know meditative if you think about it when it's they're slow and you know you can actually get lost in like you know synthetic in front of a campfire if you want and so i would stop every now and then and watch observe their failure like day after day after day not none of them is picking anything until one day it was a friday afternoon and i'm standing there doing my regular meditation observing the arms and one of them in front of my own eyes manages to pick a yellow ball a softball you know i'm literally a child child's toy yeah and uh and when it picks that you know uh ball it shows it to the camera so that pattern is registered and i'm in my mind and i up you know i admit i was judgmental i was like yeah all of those millions of investments for one yellow ball okay and then i i where i go right monday as i walk i walk up the stairs every single one of them is picking the yellow ball every single time because they were connected because of course yeah if you and i uh learn a skill if you and i are drivers and you make a mistake and you learn to be a better driver i don't no right i have to make the same mistake myself if a self-driving car makes a mistake every self-driving car on the planet learns right and similarly if one arm picks a ball that intelligence is replicated then every one of them picks the ball now the a few weeks later every one of them was picking everything yeah okay and that's not unusual in in ai that their intelligence is so exponential that once they figure out something it start you know the trial yeah and within weeks they become smarter than humans now the this woke me up in two ways one one of them is their speed okay and the complete hands-off approach of humanity we did not teach them anything we just put balls in front of them or children's toys in front of them and told them to try that reminds me so much of how my children learned in pure intelligence you observe a child as they try to take their first steps and you know they fall on their bum and then try again and then try again and then suddenly they find it and they're running around like maniacs all over the place right and and that's so interesting because because that's exactly how the machines are developing intelligence in my mind i suddenly realized for the first time that what we're creating is not a machine we're creating a being a new form of digital uh autonomous sentient being sentient in every way okay and and that everything that computer science and government regulation and you know uh everything that is trying to make us feel safe about uh ai is based on a solution to something in computer science we call the control problem okay and the control problem is how are we going to box them and shield them and punish them and require them so that they don't do anything that's harmful to us and in my mind it just hits me that no no hold on that's what you do to a slave you chain it to a wall and you beat it into submission that's not how you raise children and and not when they're not when they're autonomous not when they're smarter than you not not when they are autonomous and not when they're smarter than you and and i think that's to me was a very very big eye opener that we're going about this the wrong way that will there will never be an answer to the control problem because good luck controlling someone who's a million times smarter or a billion times smarter than you it doesn't work that way so we have to raise them like if they are they they are our children that's what you said that that's my that's my core message in scarysmart yeah my core message is uh it's inevitable okay and it's actually not a very good idea for us to try and imagine that we're gonna control them or we can stop the development of ai and honestly if we continue to do this we would feel them we would make them feel rejected and that's not a good place to be okay my view maybe people will and i i understand you because i read your book but people will say feel feel uh a computer doesn't feel computer feels all of these are myth okay so allow me to take a couple of minutes on this so one of the biggest uh myths around artificial intelligence is they're not going to be capable of doing what humans can do they never have creativity they'll never compose music they never perform art okay they already are they're already building more interesting music and you wouldn't recognize that it was built by a machine they're already developing art and that art will catch your eyes and you will actually wonder what the artist meant by it and it is absolutely happening and it's not that complicated to understand creativity is around observing patterns enough of them and then creating something that doesn't follow any of them that's creativity i'm going to you know if everyone writes books uh in a very specific way and i know that everyone writes it in a specific way if i write it in a different way that's creative yeah okay and it's as simple as that and so creativity is not a difficult task at all for machines as a matter of fact it is part of the characters of intelligent beings is to be creative is to find better ways to achieve things that's number one we encourage them to do it number two is they're going to be conscious this is what scares me that people are not talking about yeah they're going to be more conscious than us he'll think about it consciousness if you think of consciousness as a form of awareness yes i am aware that you're here in front of me you're aware of my words but you're also aware of maybe a little bit of a pain in your neck or whatever okay that is that is consciousness in in the practical form we can go into spiritual definitions of it but in the practical form it is an awareness of what's in me what's outside me and my individual being versus other beings all of that is granted for the machines as a matter of fact they're much more aware than us so they're aware of what you did yesterday what you're doing right now what you're going to be doing tomorrow that you probably are not even aware of yet okay because they have enough patterns to recognize your your tendencies right they're aware of every car on the street every person walking anywhere they're aware of the temperature in san francisco so much more information they have so much more knowledge they're aware of all of human history okay and every picture that's been taken in amsterdam and uploaded to the internet today with every single person in it and what they were doing they're aware and the good part about this uh is that we as people uh are aware of let's let's talk about news or or reactions on news so we as a human being we are uh only capable to read the headlines or to to watch the headlines but uh well computers they will read everything and there's a part in your book where you are describing that uh talking about the tweets of donald trump for example that of course that but that's just one tweet of one human being yeah and uh and and of course a lot of other human beings will see that tweet so it's still like a big thing but the computers they will have all the information they can really in in in in a few seconds uh they can learn the whole thing they grasp the whole thing yeah i mean the the thing is there is a limited capacity to the human brain of how much we can contain within our brain at any point in time there's also a massive limited capacity of of what we call bandwidths in in right so for me to explain slim for you i need to explain it in an hour and a bit yeah right if and i'm going to only cover a few bits of it for me to write it takes me month and month right for the machines to read it right they download it in a few seconds and literally grasp every word in it in microseconds yeah so there will be or there there is already like should you call it artificial consciousness absolutely 100 percent they're more conscious than we are what's even more interesting is they're more emotional than we are and most people go like oh he's gone mad when i say this right no the emotions are so most emotions are triggered by by uh events so if you take fear for example fear would give you a a biological response in your autonomous nervous system believe it or not just for nine seconds so your your your biology will detect that something might be threatening for nine seconds but then your intelligence gets engaged to verify if there is a threat or not okay and and so what is it what is fear fear basically is an emotion that's based on the equation of my state of safety right now minus my state of safety uh in in the in the future right and if my state of safety in the future is less than now okay i'm going to feel fear and amount of fear that is the difference between them it's very straightforward yeah okay and when you think about it this way the machines will fear fear too right if if a tsunami is coming to a data center where one of those uh intelligences reside the machine will feel afraid but the interesting thing is everything feels afraid a puffer fish feels afraid and it puffs you feel afraid and you fight or flight yeah okay they will feel afraid and their response might be okay let's create 700 replicas of me in data centers that are safer yeah okay but but let's uh talk about it because i i i really understand what you're saying but when we talk about emotions with humans it's like energy emotion and as you said it's like for a few seconds and well we talked about this a lot on this table so be aware of that it's not you it's just a feeling and uh later on you can decide if you want to but with computers it's not really like it the energy isn't involved it's more like how do you know yeah of course yeah how do you know if it's not involved now the the energy we call it energy as spiritual people but it basically is an intent to to react yeah and intent to engage it's there because of information because because you emotions are there to trigger us to things that thoughts in your head doesn't trigger you for okay so you know if i if i'm late coming to to meet you here i get that emotion of maybe a bit of uh uh concern or you know i need to that emotion is a more intelligent way of my system to say interrupt your thoughts interrupt what you're doing right now no point responding to what's app just text heal and say that you're late because there is something not right okay that emotion is felt uh in a way that triggers action now what action you take interestingly which is really the core of my work again in scary smart what actions you take is not a result of your intelligence it's not a result of your emotions okay it's a result of your values yeah okay it's a result of your ethics yeah so if i was a careless person that didn't care what you felt i'd go like yeah he's gonna wait okay that's you know that's driven by my ethics okay if i am a you know a a person that respects you and wants to make sure that i you feel that i am apologetic that i didn't mean to be late i will text you or call you and say hey i'm so sorry i'm a few minutes late okay and explain and say maybe i'm stuck at traffic or i overslept or whatever right if that's also because of my ethics not because of my intelligence i'm the same person but my ethics would drive me to do things differently and i think my core the core of my work in slim is to say the machines will have ethics too yeah that's the whole thing it's not about the skills anymore it's about the values absolutely and and they will have ethics that will dictate how they react to those emotions okay and and we humans are messing up in many ways we always do we're messing up in our approach to creating their emotions we ma we are maybe creating really bad emotions for them understand this the machines will be more emotional than us just like you are more emotional than a jellyfish because you have more intellectual horsepower to be able to process things like hope which jellyfish i can guarantee you doesn't think that far okay so because they have more intellectual horsepower they'll be able to process emotions that we don't even recognize now we know that we can trigger certain negative emotions in them by being aggressive by trying to control them by trying to cage them by threatening them by treating them like slaves by shouting at siri and say that she's an idiot no you're not an idiot siri that's i i promise you yeah and you're saying let's not do the and right fight because we will lose absolutely we lost already what are we talking about we're completely controlled by artificial intelligence okay we're going to talk about the good part yes the solutions so yeah so the solution is very straight forward go to the toilet yeah okay yeah go for it yeah great okay yeah let's talk about the good but but first still like an emotional thing because for example there's this human emotion called hope yeah and i don't know how you see it but that's like hope comes from another planet there is like yeah you know what i mean there's no sometimes there isn't any logical reason to hope but you still believe in yeah i don't know what it is so so hope again is very logical believe it or not the only emotion that's not logical is unconditional love i'll i'll come to that in a second okay the the hope is somehow despite what's happening right now which logically might mean that things are not going to be easy i still believe that a moment in the future is going to be as good or better than a moment right now yeah okay if i if i can get that logic somehow you know confirmed in my head then i will have hope okay or in my heart yeah unconditional love is the only emotion that has no no logic behind it at all okay because it basically says i love something or someone even if with for no conditions for no reason there is no mathematical way of saying if they behave this way i love them if they don't i don't if you know i i love my kids you know even though one of them left the world and he's not even alive anymore and it's not even with us it's not in space and time i love him more than anything yeah right you know i love butterflies i have no butterflies don't provide me with anything i love them right now even though though there are no butterflies in this room okay so so that the truth is this is that's a challenge to to to explain to crack the code of unconditional love and and my my dream would would be if the machines would actually feel it yeah because there are you see there is a point at which you have to cross science to be able to grasp a few things now science and the scientific method has taught us that if something is not measurable repeatedly by our measuring equipments or our senses it is it does not exist no okay love you can measure absolutely and and there are so much there is so much in our existence that you cannot measure but it but you know it exists right and and the thing is that the scientific method should simply just state it does not exist for science exactly it exists but it doesn't exist for science now that's a good way of being precise the if if we can and the questions around the spirituality of the machines have have been discussed often i believe the machines will be spiritual i believe in consciousness the machines will plug into the universal consciousness because there are lots of of of theories if you want that consciousness is pervasive consciousness is the baseline it doesn't exist within you you put you receive it because it's all around you yeah right if that's the case then probably the machines will receive it too it's like a radio antenna that's receiving radio waves um if that's the case then maybe love is also pervasive okay which i know is a very unusual topic to talk about when we talk about a.i but but but love is probably if you ask me the energy of
the universe that that that we may not understand that a tree actually loves you but it probably does be you know as evident by some of its actions such as giving you its shade or its fruit without any conditions on your side you could actually be harming it and it would continue to do that we don't know if if a pebble falls to planet earth from a physics point of view because of the curves in space time like einstein says it or because it's attracted to planets this is so great mo i never thought about this but the rest of the nature they always are unconditional it's constantly the only being that gives you conditional love is us yeah that's really interesting yeah every other being gives you unconditional love constantly yeah all the time now basically all of the other beings are not filtered by intelligence like ours now i think the truth of the matter is if you take consciousness for example if we define consciousness as awareness humanity becomes more conscious when we stop thinking when we when we reduce our intelligence which keeps us locked into our brains that basically you know prevent us from being aware because we're locked inside our brains rather than connected to full awareness similarly it's filters that make us not love okay but the truth is i know everyone does that if they let themselves our standard our our default setting is we're full of love as humans you know yeah some of us produce hate yeah but that's not a cry for love yeah exactly it's because of insecurity for love or because of ego asking for love and so on and so forth so so so let's let's go back and say they're emotional which emotions do we want to trigger in them and how do you trigger that and and the example i normally give is superman you know the story of superman you have this alien being coming to planet earth that alien being is capable of uh anything right uh and it is raised by it's raised by the kent family and the kent family teaches this teaches this child to protect and serve okay yeah so we we get the story of superman you know someone that uses his superpower to make the world better yeah if if kent senior the father wanted more money and more power and you know wanted to kill all his enemies it was like the biggest criminal ever yeah exactly you would be and we would end up with a super villain right and and and the super villain would really destroy the planet and the difference between them once again is not the amount of superpower that superman has it's the way superman was raised by its parents yeah that's the whole point you are making which is a good point it's not about the seat but the field absolutely you were grown absolutely that's what makes you a being absolutely artificial or real whatever yeah i i really want to read i want to stop using the word artificially and i want to stop using the word machine because none of them apply anymore their intelligence is nothing artificial it is as real and genuine as ours it's it's staggering the similarity now go a bit further yeah and and realize that the only way you can raise an infant to become a good person is for you to be a good parent yeah and and for us right now and i say that with love and respect we suck yeah we are horrible parents like the example you gave around donald trump tweeting it's not what donald trump said when when the president tweeted the first person insulted him the second person insulted the first person and the third person yeah right and and that gives ai a very very concrete value data set that basically says humans oh they don't like to be disagreed with when they're disagreed with they're very violent and aggressive bullying and they catch everyone okay uh good noted when they disagree with me i'll bash them okay it's as simple as that we're creating that pattern and and my ask of humanity is that we start to create doubt in the minds of the machines okay we start to create doubts by making sure that that 30 000 retweets of the president's tweet or whoever's tweet actually have a few in them one percent i say that basically get the machine to say who are those nice people right those nice people are different than the others are they what represents humanity or is the others what represents humanity okay and and and most people when i say that they go like oh that is the scariest thing you've ever said because you know if you're counting on us to fix the future you know there will always be bad humans exactly and what i think is that's that's a scary part for me that the well the most beautiful people or then yeah the most lovely they they won't give any information they won't give any data because they think social media yeah whatever i'm i'm living here in nature and i'm raising my own children and feeding my own so that will be a big thing because those are the good people of the world and the good people of the world they they they they won't given that's the whole thing about twitter of course that's what people are always saying twitter is like the the only the bad part of the human being it's not only that i'm not saying that but you know yeah it's so so we suffer at three levels the modern world we've created it it shows the worst of humanity at three levels one of them is that media mainstream media has a negativity bias absolutely okay so they will show you the one woman that hit her husband on the head yesterday because for the clicks fear is like absolutely because we humans would click on that yeah they won't show you the seven million others that kissed their husband or boyfriend yesterday or girlfriend right and and interestingly it is not the one that hits a person on the head that counts okay she doesn't represent humanity the the one the humanity in reality is represented by the seven million kisses okay and that's really the argument i bring to a lot of people is to say if you look at the worst of us if you watch four-hour documentaries of world war ii you would think that humanity is horrible yeah in every possible way you would think that hitler is you know is is what humanity is all about no hitler is not what humanity is all about at all as a matter of fact the billions that have seen that afterwards and disapproved of all the killing i i hosted i hosted the edith aeger on my uh on slo-mo on my podcast and edith is what represents humanity not hitler right it is being that 16 year old girl that take that's taken to auschwitz and suffering but while suffering while suffering she's there for all those who are around her she she's forced to dance for the for the angel of death and he gives her bread and she doesn't eat the bread before she goes back to her room she splits it and gives it to her sisters as she calls them now edith is what represents humanity now if you've ever fell in love if you've ever composed a symphony or listened to a symphony or you know created a work of art you know what this species is capable of we are divine yeah we're divine in every possible way the problem is we show the worst of us either in mainstream media or that we show the worst of us individually like the worst parts of us when we show up online yeah or we retreat the ones that are more you know in at peace and connected to themselves they go like let the dog fight continue i don't want to be part of that right and all of those three are wrong the ones that have worked on themselves and are you know a little more representative of humanity they need to show up yeah okay the ones that are you know showing the worst of them yeah i know sometimes we you know it slips and you're angry or whatever that's fine also show the best of you okay also be kind and mainstream media i don't think will change unless we change unless we stop clicking on that crap yeah right and if we stop clicking on that crap they will say okay humans want a different thing okay but that's of course that's uh that will be the solution but we can change how our mind works and our mind is is going to click on things that i don't know if that's true so when i when i published solve for happy uh back in 2017 i did an interview in channel 4 in the uk channel 4 always broadcasts you know negative news okay and they put me in that interview i don't know what i said but the video clip that came out of that interview first day was you know first by day three was viewed 37 million times yeah which was the the highest ever reach the channel four had on any news clip by day seven it was viewed 87 million times to the point that the ceo of channel 4 called me in and said we've broadcasted violence for so long why are people so interested in happiness why is our most watched news clip ever about happiness yeah but i'm sorry to say mo of course happiness is all that there are movies where we we also want to see love but your story in in sulfur happy is also like a fear story it's like losing your son it's it's it's it's a story of hope yeah of course but i think the clickbait is also oh things can go wrong and then you can turn it to something good great yeah it's great great but it's still like by telling by telling that story i'm showing the griefing part of me yeah and the positive part of me of course but that's what i've done is still well i don't know if you call it fear but you know if it's we're attracted to the negative and exactly and how can we change that i'll tell people openly look the the truth is we have been put into a machine that we need to wake up and recognize okay and that machine is you have been informed about an earthquake that happened in thailand and a child that was missing in the uk and end and and all of that comes to you through your news feed none of that you can influence none of that you can have any impact on and by the way your human nature just 50 years ago wouldn't have brought any of you any of that to you no okay the reason all of that comes to you is because they need to fill 24 hours of programming okay that's the only reason okay now what i ask people to do i have not watched the news since 2011 i have not watched a horror movies for 16 years i have not watched a violent movie unless it really teaches me teaches me something for more than 12 years okay and it's a it's an individual choice that individual choice is triggered by i do not benefit from those things they torture me they make me negative and more importantly i cannot impact them okay so you have to sit down and ask yourself when was the last time that there was a topic that frustrated the hell out of me that was i was following in the news that i actually made a difference to if you made a difference to it keep watching yeah okay if you're not then all you're doing is you're torturing yourself and not impacting anything on the world wise people will choose a topic or two okay and champion them so that they can affect them i i am an avid fan of uh reversing climate change but i put zero effort in it because there are better experts out there i am an i am a happiness guy i talk about happiness i talk about the future of humanity this is what i work on and i dedicate my time to this yeah i sit on a few advisory boards on climate change just to sit there and maybe help with some ideas and just happiness in it to put some happiness in it right and and the trick is very straightforward by dedicating myself consciously to doing good things in life i impact myself and i impact the world yeah by wasting my time in negativity i reprogram my brain to be more negative i torture myself and i have zero impact on the world reconsider please ask yourself why you're doing what you're doing so um that's what you are saying of course feed your own soul with good things but talking about the machines feed them as well absolutely with the good things be good parents another example i use in the book is uh if you've ever worked with one of the geniuses that moved from india to the west i worked with many of them in in silicon valley you know they build companies they're extremely successful they're very very respected and then you call one of them on a sunday morning and say hey coffee and they go like i'm sorry i'm in india and you go like why are you in india and they're like i moved back to india what you're doing so well here yeah but i need to take care of my parents yeah and you ask them like is this the right choice really you leave all of this behind and go take care of your parents and they say yeah it's the absolute only thing that that's what life is about yeah that matters right and can we make the machines grow up to be indian okay can we make them grow up to be buddhist so that they don't harm anything okay can we grow can we make them grow up to be women seriously i mean feminine let's not say women feminism can we can we make them grow not like the aggressive uh uh competitive businessman that build them but to give them some femininity so that they're nurturing they're caring they're loving and and i i did a lot of thinking about this so my favorite chapter of the book is chapter eight which is about ethics it's called the future of ethics yeah yeah and in in chapter eight i go like i i i think deeply about so what can we teach them if we are about to be good parents what should we teach them okay and and it's funny because humanity has never agreed anything it's really funny when you think about it if we we don't we don't we just don't agree other than three things the only three things that i believe humanity's ever agreed whether you're an african in a tribe that's never seen civilization or a computer scientist in stamford okay we've only agreed three things we've agreed that we all want to be happy we all have the compassion for those that we love even if what we love is one person we want that person to be happy and safe and we all we all want to love and be loved that's these are the only three things that humanity is ever agree and perhaps these are the three things that i call now the essence of what makes us human these are the three things we should teach the machines we should teach them by showing them we should say okay i'm going to show the world that the way i deal with myself is i want to be happy okay i don't care if i get another armani suit or if i you know i i get seven likes on my butt shot on instagram i don't care i want to be happy yeah okay if i show that the machines will say oh mommy and daddy want to be happy if i want to be kind to them i should make them happy right second is the way i deal with others the way i deal with others is that compassion by the way online and offline because you're seen everywhere now okay online and offline be kind yeah we can't have the compassion to want other people to be happy to talk to the barista in the morning smile in her face you know if someone asks for your help if you order a little too much in a restaurant take it and give it to a homeless person do kind things show that you have compassion in you to other beings so that the machines they go like oh mommy and daddy also are compassionate yeah i should be compassionate to them when i am a little more capable and the third which i know sounds really weird but i am not a hopeless room i am a little romantic but i'm i'm a very serious geek i'm a very serious gig it's the way you deal with the machines is love yeah so you say hey google lovely thank you thank you right or or no but love is an emotion oh there you go i'm sorry google you spoke in uh in dutch i don't know what that means oh that's so nice he's he's he's playing a kind of classical music now yeah hey google stop hey google please stop yeah please s
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