Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREMIUM: "A.I. for Humans" with Prof. Joel Pearson
Transcript
- 0:00Get out humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, here's a dangerous idea
- 0:07for you.
- 0:08What if amid all the hoo-ha about artificial intelligence and the coming revolution and
- 0:13whether or not we have to be worried about artificial systems taking over the world and
- 0:18launching nukes at us all or turning us all into paper clips, what if the real concern
- 0:23about artificial intelligence is right under our nose or rather inside your head.
- 0:30The question of how we and our societies and our workplaces and our schools and our
- 0:35governments and our homes will adapt to artificial intelligence over the next year or three or
- 0:40five or ten is one that sometimes gets ignored or overlooked in all of our hyperactive
- 0:47babble about the promise of artificial intelligence.
- 0:49Big, big changes are coming and they're going to take place mostly for most people on
- 0:55the ground in the real world of your life when you walk in the front door of your home,
- 1:00when you sign up for a university class, when you try to get a new job or when you get
- 1:05laid off as a result of AI systems being incorporated into the company that you work at.
- 1:11Professor Joel Pearson is just the person to plan for such an eventuality, he thinks that
- 1:16governments and institutions all over the world should be treating this like the coming
- 1:20of a pandemic or any other major natural disaster which is foreseeable because it is foreseeable,
- 1:27it's coming and we don't want to deal with it the same way that we dealt with, for example,
- 1:31social media use among juvenile children where eight years after the fact we realized that
- 1:37it really wasn't a good idea and we have to figure out how to manage it.
- 1:41As a result, Joel wants to collect together a bunch of brainy wants to sort of wrestle through
- 1:47some of these ideas and I thought it would be interesting to preview some of the things that such
- 1:51wants would consider in Joel's ideal universe. Joel runs the Future Minds lab, he's a psychologist
- 1:57and a neuroscientist, the Future Minds lab is part of the University of New South Wales and he
- 2:01also has a consultancy called MindX which works with big companies like Sachi and Google and Pixar
- 2:09and Samsung to help tailor products to how people's brains actually work so he spends a lot of time
- 2:15at the interface between the human and the artificial. We talk about the state of artificial
- 2:20intelligence as it has progressed in 2024 what we can expect in 2025 and how you should arm
- 2:26yourself for the changes that are coming. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, the one I only
- 2:31Professor Joel Pearson. If you think back to the beginning of 2024, we currently further ahead or
- 2:40further behind than you would have expected us to be on artificial intelligence. Yeah, it's a
- 2:45funny blend of both. So in some areas it's moving ahead really quickly. I think the robotics is
- 2:49shooting ahead in interesting ways but most people aren't really aware of it yet and then some of the
- 2:55other stuff open AI I think it's you know that chat gpt's are creeping forward bit by bit. I think
- 3:01that's slower than a lot of people were hoping. I thought that you know be chat gpt 5 6 7 by now.
- 3:08So in some areas slower and it's kind of frustrating. How do they measure? Is there any
- 3:13objective measurement by which a 4 becomes a 5 becomes a 6? That's just their name.
- 3:18That's just their based on their learning and so they're working on the next iteration and
- 3:23probably the iteration after that. If they do a major training thing. If you think of like an
- 3:28earthquake scale. You know that a 4 is like 10x water 3 years or something because it's a
- 3:34logarithmic scale. They add letters and numbers and decimal points and things so they could be
- 3:42up to gpt 9 if they wanted to name it. They can do whatever they want. But I think the numbers
- 3:47are meant to signify the major training sets where they've had this thing training in the
- 3:51background on the however many billions dollars worth of computers and they finish that training
- 3:56and then they do the reinforcement things and they do the testing and it takes an extra 7 8 9 to a
- 4:02year many months to a year for them that goes public for the 50 checks. When you say that robotics
- 4:08is further ahead than you would have expected but maybe chat gpt is not. Is that because the performance
- 4:13of the large language models at the moment is more similar to what they were 12 months ago than
- 4:17you might have expected them to be. Yeah I think they're it's more similar but I think they're
- 4:23being more careful than they were originally. I think they're trying to slow down a little bit
- 4:27so I think where they're training at the moment is you know a fair bit in front of what's publicly
- 4:32available. Right so they're trying to be a bit more careful than lots of other startups are just
- 4:36trying to rush into things as quickly as possible. Careful by what measurement.
- 4:41Like like doing the red team the beat like trying to get people humans to test it to try and
- 4:49all kinds of things whether it be to make deep fakes whether it be to make you know biological
- 4:54weapons or like instruct me how to do this to not instruct teenagers to self harm or
- 5:01takes your own lives so all every kind of possible imposing danger rails on the intelligence.
- 5:06Basically yeah it's interesting isn't it I mean how is is that a race that one can keep up with
- 5:13or is it a game of whack-a-mole. I think it's they're trying to keep up with it but it's yeah it's
- 5:17more whack-a-mole. It's like hacking there's always going to be people ahead of the curve they're
- 5:21going to figure out how to break the machine or twist this or get under the hood of the thing
- 5:27yeah and make it work in different ways. And I've heard some murmuring slightly from AI
- 5:32skeptics that we're sort of beginning to see the edges of how useful
- 5:38like these training models can be in the sense that they've essentially read the entire internet
- 5:44now and they're bumping up against a natural ceiling where the exponential growth of the past
- 5:49a couple of years. Yeah so there's this talk and it's hard to know whether that's some of that
- 5:55might be true but for my understanding it's there's no real evidence for that so people are saying
- 5:59oh we're reaching a plateau now and everything's going to slow down but I don't see there's any
- 6:05real so there's different yeah there's the data sources and there's real data so there's two
- 6:09things that are happening people they're changing the way the models are learning so the the
- 6:16the new version of chat GPT which thinks if you use this one so you ask it to do something and
- 6:23I want to just give you the answer straight away so it thinks and it checks its own answer
- 6:26and iterates through it a few times right so they've added on reinforcement learning with human
- 6:31interaction so that is not just the brute force black box training that is getting humans to then
- 6:38shape it a bit more to try and get more logical reasoning in there so it can rethink
- 6:43in longer and deeper way by humans you mean the user yeah users right so you're saying that I
- 6:48would have an experience where I would ask chat GPT question and it would then ask me to
- 6:54contribute to its answer so they'll do a thing where yeah so they do it the general public I think
- 6:58as well I'll say here's two different answers which one you've seen that yeah that's like help
- 7:03getting us to help tune their model a bit yeah but they also have internal teams of doing that
- 7:08in more sophisticated ways right interesting so there's that kind of learning on top of the other
- 7:12kind of learning then there's synthetic datasets they're creating so they have other teams
- 7:16creating synthetic datasets defer the train on what's a synthetic dataset so it's rather than pulling
- 7:21you know all the videos from internet or all the copyrighted material which is all the legal
- 7:26all the the lawsuits going on at the moment it's creating a dataset using using different
- 7:32AI's to create datasets than any other AI's to train on that and dataset being just a bunch of
- 7:37material written stuff videos photos it could be anything and does the new AI it sounds incestuous
- 7:44that sounds like yeah it sounds like how disease where you're hitting the account back to the
- 7:47back to the back to the meat and it kind of it is because if yeah how do you know it really works
- 7:52really so yeah and an AI can just generate a whole bunch of a different AI that's independent
- 7:58that's the other one yeah and then you tell the other one read that learn from that yeah that's
- 8:03interesting and that buys you something where is the newness being injected into that closed system
- 8:10I think there's a lot of I'm not 100% sure I think because the the training sets I guess from
- 8:17one set will be different there's noise injected into that yeah I'm not sure where yeah the
- 8:26newness comes from then you have obviously you know robots that are now walking not only amongst
- 8:32officers and factories they're walking out in the wild you can see the Tesla robot now trying to
- 8:37walk up hills and fall over down grassy slopes and things and so that's learning so you think of
- 8:42that's all happening in the background and there's what say 15 of these humanoid robotic companies
- 8:47working on these things and all those senses of pulling in data you already go to some places I
- 8:51was at a restaurant in Singapore and like a robot robot they're just whizzing around everywhere they
- 8:56take the take your order yeah yeah yeah yeah deliver things to you well they have that clean
- 9:00I've seen that in in Santa Monica yeah well you walk down the street and there's little robots
- 9:05scooter by and I think it's going on they're like that's like Uber eats kind of delivery thing
- 9:09the future yeah I was like yeah yeah Australia bizarre okay so anyway the point is that all like
- 9:14just like all those sensors to have many cameras on a Tesla are learning all the time recording all
- 9:18the time or so that's a massive brand new set of data robotics have brand new it's creating tons
- 9:25of tons of data all the time so you have all that fresh data coming in so the more robots doing
- 9:31things the more fresh data sets hmm so I yes I know I there must still be a huge amount of visual
- 9:38data that the systems don't yet have and haven't ingested because I've heard you know conversations
- 9:45between AI people about you might ask it to you might give it a photo and say can you change the
- 9:51person in this photo into a dragon and have like a cat flying by and the AI will do a really good
- 9:58job but there'll be some common sense things that it doesn't know like that a flying cat I don't know
- 10:03can't be inside a closet yeah or something like that so the laws of physics don't yeah in other
- 10:11words but maybe if but the idea is if we just train them if we just now that they've learned all
- 10:15the words we just have to train them on all the photos and all the videos you've ever been taken
- 10:20and then they'll gain an intuition about how the natural world works and why cats can't be flying
- 10:26inside cupboards yeah and I think at the moment all the video models are trained separately to the
- 10:30word models and the other or the the large language models and so yeah if you combine those you
- 10:35might get something interesting my understanding looking at all the output of all the video platforms
- 10:41is that they don't learn the rules of physics very well from training just on videos and some like
- 10:46the gravity won't be quite right you know horses running will kind of float a little bit like gravity
- 10:50is not quite working sort of bounce legs will make it just weird there's a bit strange gravity physics
- 10:56things that get a bit wonky interesting but I'm sure they'll get they'll get they'll get proved
- 11:02yeah so I mean where I'm at with this is really the big picture so let's think five 10 years I do
- 11:09think that everything that uses electricity will be influenced in by aliens some way so everything
- 11:16in your house your car you obviously already tech and then if you think about that for a second that
- 11:21will filter down to change basically every aspect of society and our lives so it's going to change
- 11:28obviously education jobs and there's you know every consultancy firms trying to figure out how many
- 11:34jobs going to be lost from AI it's pretty hard to figure out accurately estimates to range from
- 11:4020% up to 60% in 10 years and so if you think about that just by itself right you think of take
- 11:49any country and you take away 60% of the jobs even over a five-year period 60 even over a decade
- 11:56that's pretty disruptive in itself then well I mean we've seen what happens when you when like
- 12:02coal mining becomes not a thing in Appalachia and you know everybody gets addicted to oxy
- 12:09content and votes for an ultram but not where I was going Josh but I mean guys like the kind
- 12:15social disruptions that happen when they're large scale yeah it's not a simple thing and it has
- 12:20yeah but I in their education and so I you know I work at a university and the university is still
- 12:26spend the last two years arguing over whether students should be allowed to use chat GPT for their
- 12:30essays right and my thing is not only you know sure we'll have AI's teaching and there already
- 12:35is Khan Academy and these interesting products and services already but it's more like what is
- 12:40even the role or purpose of a school or university in 10 years if you all have our personal AI built
- 12:46into our wearables our clothes has our history it's all sealed off with privacy we don't have to
- 12:52worry about that it has it's tapped into my physiology there's also changes it knows when I'm stressed
- 12:57it knows all my habits it can pick me up on you know cognitive biases it can help me make
- 13:01decisions it has access to all the information in the world and let's say it has more compute than I do
- 13:07more intelligence um what is the role of me going to school my kids going to school what do
- 13:13we need to learn at university do we still even need those two things mmm and I think the answers
- 13:18straight out no or yes some probably somewhere in between but the point is we don't we don't
- 13:24have an answer for that right so just pause on the academic question and the and the sort of
- 13:28governance question and just dig a little deeper in this world that you're articulating about
- 13:33you know wearables and so on because I think AI has become such a buzzword that you know
- 13:38a a home electronics company will just say that it's got an AI and the light bulb and the light bulb
- 13:44just means that my bananas AI and they're just means that the light comes on when you walk in the room
- 13:50or something yeah you've all know a harrari you know tries to define it by saying it's AI if it can
- 13:57make in decisions about what it is that you want without having to ask you about what you want
- 14:04especially if it's making those calculations on the basis of your of your state of your physiological
- 14:10status you were just saying yeah so you know a coffee machine that turns itself on at seven in the
- 14:14morning and makes you a cup of coffee is not an AI no a coffee machine that notices that you had
- 14:20a bad night's sleep and therefore you select the extra strong blend of coffee and bruise it at
- 14:26precisely the moment that you're going to want to drink it it's AI yeah it adds extra things to it
- 14:31adds extra whatever your sense of the guana and the garana nicotine the area all the good
- 14:35the nootropics to your car it changes the lighting it changes puts certain music on it does this
- 14:40it have what your schedule for the days is adjusted it changes your exercise routine and whatever
- 14:45hundred other settings and how does that bump up against my desire to feel like I am the agent
- 14:51of my life and not being bossed around by devices yeah I don't think we know the answer that
- 14:57that research hasn't been done and it will probably get done by engineering firms rather than
- 15:02scientists because everything's moving so quickly I think that the agency in the because it's
- 15:06very important that we feel like we have the freedom of free will even if we don't I don't think we
- 15:11do it but that's for another day we've had long conversations on the radio about free will
- 15:17taking calls from listeners yeah most of them are universally believe that we do have free will
- 15:22and we have to be disabuse of the naive notion but we do we know from mental health work that it
- 15:28it's very important that we feel like we do independent of whether we do or not yeah and just
- 15:32that we we feel like our tech is is servant is a servant of ours right yes not the other way around
- 15:37yeah um but I mean the counter argument to that is that we just push out choices and freedoms to
- 15:43other things that we want to do and then so we will quickly get into sort of universal basic
- 15:47income territory there so you know there is is they are going to bring on the next renaissance
- 15:50so we're going to have this sitting around you know playing guitars or doing poetry painting
- 15:55right that kind of we get to just play around doing our hobbies and enjoy life
- 16:02kind of like what people think of retirement should be even a retirement doesn't often
- 16:06doesn't work that way it's actually quite bad for you and bad for your health
- 16:09well yeah wouldn't that whole thing be bad for your health I mean when you see I don't think
- 16:14universal basic when you see spoiled spoiled rich kids or people who spend all their time playing video
- 16:20games and drinking slurpees like you see the way most people spend leisure time and it's not
- 16:28it's fulfilling no it's not and yeah it's a return to bad for your health most people who go and
- 16:34holiday I think they want it they want it they're going to be feel great if they do nothing
- 16:38after a week they can't stand it I mean not everyone but most people I'm like that yeah and often
- 16:42we get that wrong it's one of that we think all we want to do is have you know no job do nothing
- 16:47and as soon as we're there we fall apart and mental health problems arise and physical health
- 16:55anyway so going back to and to agency I think the idea would be we can push agency to other parts
- 16:59of our life and we would use or I guess the AI is to take care of things we don't want to do yeah
- 17:04and this will become an engineering problem basically and a customer experience user interface problem
- 17:10one out of how much can you hide what the AI is doing so that the person is unaware of the way
- 17:16in which they're being manipulated by the AI perhaps so we still feel like we're in control so if
- 17:21I've got a in your analogy there where you've got wearables and the AI is one step ahead of you
- 17:26because it understands your physiology let's say I'm cranky yeah I'm wearing a watch that is
- 17:30measuring my physiology maybe my glasses are as well and maybe the maybe my living room is as
- 17:36well there's some integrated system right that's monitoring me my bed probably knows that I had a
- 17:42bad sleep and what there are ways for artificial intelligence in five or 10 years to restructure my day
- 17:51or provide me with suggestions sure be less than that yeah it'll be a couple of years I think for
- 17:56that right but I think yeah I mean think of it as like your personal assistant that's with you 24
- 18:01seven that you will be able to trust in other words the way the hackable you want to worry about
- 18:07privacy issues and when you say you'll be able to trust it and it won't be hackable and we
- 18:12want to worry about privacy issues one thing that looms large for me is here is that there are a
- 18:20couple of economic models for technology one is think of a video game for example or a smartphone
- 18:26one is you just pay a lot of money upfront and you buy the thing and then you own it and it's
- 18:30private another is a company gives it to for free and you become the product and advertisers pay
- 18:36the company for access to your attention this might be the difference between apples selling point
- 18:43and you know the Google ecosystem where Google will sell everything about you and make things cheaper
- 18:47and Apple reassures you that what happens on an iPhone stays on my phone or a video game that
- 18:52tries to coerce your children into getting to it's free but it tries to coerce your children to
- 18:57getting to have a higher levels where they can buy in game benefits and things like that so it
- 19:02keeps them on a treadmill and shows them ads rather than something you buy outright.
- 19:07Is there a risk that we end up with a two tiered AI world where I can afford you and I can afford
- 19:12the expensive one that's private but the the ordinary one that people use is using their physiology
- 19:20in their state of mind to prey upon them and suggest to them that the correct solution might be this
- 19:26new new or tropic that has you know just become available and and deliver it to you for just 2499
- 19:31with a month the three months trial just by yeah I mean we're already there right there are free
- 19:40versions and there are paid versions already now the leading open AI has said that they're not
- 19:47going to do advertising or ads there was something I think they you know in one of the hundred
- 19:53interviews that Sam Altman's recently done I think he said that well the door is now open
- 19:57to potential advertising so there's there's as that whole business model of theirs and the structure
- 20:01of their company changes from this original not for profit to this for profit they're moving rapidly
- 20:06towards they will probably introduce advertising of some sort in some way I'm sure a low tier
- 20:13and the other thing that is going to reshape is like it basically looks like the US and China
- 20:18are leading the way in AI fairly substantially now and then Australia and Europe
- 20:25UK a little bit with some of Google's work there but it's really going to be the US and China
- 20:31and so there may be this sort of divide between the people or nations that use products from one
- 20:36area or use products from the other area whether China opens those up to everyone or not
- 20:41is still a bit unclear so there'll be that kind of what they call a silicon curtain sort of idea
- 20:49that the world will be sort of split up based on which AI products from which companies that's
- 20:54interesting that's part of the global arms race for lack of a better word to try and you know
- 21:00country supporting companies and companies racing as fast as they can to dominate the AI space
- 21:07and just to put a flag also in the in the near future here which is that there's this sort of
- 21:13holy grail which people call AGI or unofficial general intelligence which we don't yet have
- 21:19what do you understand that to be because the people who think that we'll get there so and think
- 21:23it'll be as revolutionary as anything so there's all I mean there's different definitions of that
- 21:29and there's not I don't think it's that interesting to argue about all those definitions but
- 21:32the idea that that an AI system can do everything a human could do and more or above that capacity
- 21:40so it's the idea so at the moment you can have you know even our phones can do things we can't do
- 21:45so it's not like being able to do math that we can't do or something like that it's being able to
- 21:49do things generally from controller car through to do something in the kitchen through to do videos
- 21:55through understand the world or it so we can move through all these different spaces and do
- 21:59different things then you get something towards this general this generalizability or super generalizability
- 22:05all these different phrases people use for that right so and to come up with innovative solutions
- 22:10to things the way that a human that can be part of it I don't know if that's generally included I
- 22:15think it's more the fact that it once you can generalize across all the different things that a
- 22:19human can do rather than have narrow different AIs one for driving a car one for doing writing one
- 22:24for doing film one for doing this photos one for doing something else once one think one can do
- 22:30all of those things then it's generalizable right and I mean I sometimes think in try to put myself in
- 22:37the mindset of the future looking back on the moment that we're currently sitting in in the same
- 22:42way that we might look back on like I've said before for example that when 9-11 happened which
- 22:50is within the living memory of people of our generation it's hard to remember that not only
- 22:56were there no iPhones and YouTube and you know let alone Facebook and Tiktok and Twitter there were
- 23:04no iPods remember the original white iPod the big wheel that you scrolled your thumb around that would
- 23:12like wait a brick like the same way as a brick and kept three songs on it that was released just
- 23:19after 9-11 and then you sort of think back and you go wow so that was a world where and obviously
- 23:25when we were teenagers you know you made a plan with your friends to meet at the movie theater and
- 23:32you would go there at that time and there was no way that you could contact them once you went
- 23:37to the house you just stood there and if they didn't show up you just stood there looking at people
- 23:43passing by and gazing at the clouds until eventually you just wandered off because you got
- 23:48blah blah waiting for them right there was no way to even send a text message to them and that
- 23:52seems like such ridiculously ancient history to a Tiktok generation now and so I tried to sort of
- 23:58use that as a way of noticing the pace of technological change that we're living through and think all
- 24:05if you extrapolate out from that into the future and assume that we've got like exponential rates
- 24:09of change then there will soon come a time when we look back on this moment that we're sitting
- 24:15here together and we'll go I can't believe that was a world in which we didn't what exactly like
- 24:22what's the answer that what is the most what will be the most striking thing about the technological
- 24:30world we live in now when we look back on it in five or 10 years my guess is that our everyday
- 24:36lives will feel like we're surrounded by creatures that are artificial I don't mean physiological creatures
- 24:42but I mean yeah that we will be in constant conversation with creatures that with entities that
- 24:50fields that seem to be sentient to us and seem to be as intelligent as we are and that those that
- 24:56will just always be interacting in a series of conversations with those things or with a thing
- 25:01yeah that is our personal systems that is our travel arranger that is how lawyer that is how
- 25:07our accountant will basically all have a failings of really smart useful creatures yeah so everything
- 25:16like 24 years from now I think it will be like that we'll have artificial humans we'll have
- 25:22artificial intimacy we're I mean we're already having the next big revolution taking over from
- 25:26TikTok is obviously artificial intimacy we can swing back to that in a second but yeah I think
- 25:31you're right we'll have we'll have all kinds of deep relationships with things that we'll call
- 25:35now called artificial but by then I don't think we'll care whether they are or not I don't think
- 25:43universal basic income utopia thing is going to work the way people keep talking about it that
- 25:48we're just going to have them to do I don't think I think humans are too competitive to greedy to
- 25:52human nature doesn't work with universal basic income right people want to outdo the other
- 25:57and we've seen that every time we have a new you know I can do my email on the phone fantastic it
- 26:01doesn't mean that extra time it buys I go off and write poetry I mean I just work hard I
- 26:07write peat with my neighbor or whatever although just in defensive universal basic income I don't
- 26:10think you need to be one of the polyanna idea lot of who believes that universal basic income is
- 26:15going to lead to all of us just doing hobbies all the time to nonetheless defend on the economic
- 26:20grounds a universal basic income to smooth out the social disruption of a huge you know the
- 26:27redundancy of massive sectors of the workforce you could just use it the same way that we use the
- 26:32idea of social security or yeah for all or something we're like you know let's just make sure that
- 26:38everybody has thirty thousand dollars a year and then they can keep working so that kind of thing
- 26:42could work but yeah I think we just have to be careful with the psychological side of that because
- 26:45a lot of the talk tends to evolve to hear the rest of this conversation go to uncomfortable
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