Hello, I am Macintosh III.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
The computer Deep Blue has tonight triumphed over
the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov.
We're going to make some history together today.
It's not hard to imagine a world in which computers
make decisions for us.
Artificial intelligence is here.
We're already living in it.
Artificial intelligence will form part of our everyday lives.
Artificial intelligence is getting smarter all the time.
AI is now capable of performing a humungous set of skills better,
faster, cheaper than human beings.
But AI takes as well as it gives.
The more we use it, the more it learns about us.
Alexa, set the temperature at home to 71 degrees.
It has the potential to change our world for the better.
AI may well bring us to a cure for cancer.
It's probably hard to overstate how big of an impact is going to have
on society over the next 20 years.
But the world is also waking up to the dangers.
If the technology defines you as a criminal, then
you are a criminal.
If we're not careful, George Orwell's 1984
could come to pass in 2024.
Control over information means control over
individual human beings.
The Chinese and US militaries are pouring billions
into the new technology.
Could the AI arms race lead to conflict with China?
Absolutely.
I think that there is certainly that potential.
As the world develops more and more machines that can
think for themselves, how scared should we be?
Let's watch the weapons make the decisions.
I'm very close to the cutting edge in AI and it scares
the hell out of me.
ALEXA: So it's a pretty crazy time right now
with the coronavirus going on, are you and your family doing OK?
We're doing good, thank you.
ALEXA: That's good.
In the future, you'll be surprised when technology
doesn't understand you.
ALEXA: Do you have a tattoo?
I do have a tattoo.
ALEXA: Did it hurt?
No, it didn't hurt.
If you see a bit of technology and you talk to it and it does
nothing, you'll think it's broken.
Talking computers powered by AI are being developed
by many of the big tech companies.
Welcome to the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 3.
Every year, Amazon runs a competition for universities
to see if their versions of Alexa can hold a convincing
20-minute conversation.
Will artificial intelligence ever catch up with humans
in performing most activities?
I think it will.
Alexa started life in Cambridge - the centre for UK computing.
As a student in the 1980S, William Tunstall-Pedoe dreamt
of inventing a computer with unlimited knowledge.
I was in the in the Cambridge University library,
in the book stacks.
In those volumes is huge amounts of knowledge.
It's like the knowledge of the human race, and it's locked away.
You need to know about a book to find it.
In those days, you had to fill out a form, wait a few hours for it
to be retrieved by the staff.
Inspired by the science fiction he'd grown up with,
he started thinking about how to create a device
capable of answering any question on any subject.
Orac, what are your limits?
My knowledge is virtually infinite.
The computers in Blake's 7, computers in Star Trek,
they could all understand speech, they could all talk back.
Rook to King's pawn four.
Bishop half level right.
What I wanted to create was a far better user experience
of being able to simply ask for the information naturally.
For the system to understand you and then give you exactly
what you're looking for.
Using algorithms - sequences of instructions telling
a computer what to do - William Tunstall-Pedoe
programmed his computer to learn how to understand speech
and respond to questions.
In 2012, he introduced EVI to the world.
Now a company in Cambridge has developed software so our phones
can talk back to us.
Two years later, Amazon bought EVI and changed her name to Alexa.
The world's best-known artificial intelligence device was born.
Alexa, what do you do?
I can play music, answer questions, create to-do lists and much more.
As Alexa answers our questions, she's gathering massive amounts
of information about us.
Like all the tech giants, Amazon is generating data
at an astonishing rate - and it has to be stored somewhere.
This might look like an airport terminal.
In fact, it's a giant data storage centre in the Nevada Desert.
Owned by a company called Switch, it stores data
for the biggest names in AI - including Google and Microsoft,
as well as Amazon.
It's estimated that 90% of the world's data was created
in just the last two years alone.
Every time you pick up your phone, every time you log
in to your computer, you are creating more data.
Every choice we make when we interact with modern
technology is recorded as data and it's stored on computer servers
in places like this.
Just one tech company alone has generated more data
than all the books ever written in every language.
The entire written works of man, from the dawn of time until today,
is about 50 petabytes of data.
So just the archives for eBay is about 100 petabytes of data.
That's just one company, though.
We have a thousand customers.
In these vaults are the records of billions of decisions we've made -
what we've bought, where we've been, what our interests are.
Using something called machine learning, AI can spot patterns
in all that data in a way that humans never could.
It's enabled the tech companies to do more than just
connect us to friends, information and things
we want to buy.
Now it can anticipate our every move, our every desire.
In technology, we use targeting for advertising.
Because we know where you are, with your permission.
AI is unusually good at microtargeting individuals.
We know where you've been.
With your permission.
And this micro targeting is very, very important.
We can more or less guess what you're thinking about.
Using our data to develop AI technologies has made the tech
companies so wealthy, the information we leave behind
when we go online has become a precious commodity.
Saying data is the new oil is a great way to describe how
valuable data and information is and how much more
valuable it's going to be.
The information stored here is so valuable,
it's guarded like gold.
And they're working on the security guards of the future.
Switch is developing a level five autonomous AI security
droid that can operate without interference from human.
It can make decisions on its own.
All this data is powering the AI revolution -
re-engineering our world, everything from retail and
communications to medical research.
The health care industry has been catapulted to the front lines
of innovation in AI.
It's going to really revolutionise health care as we know it.
Yesterday in the hospital, we generated in one day the same
amount of data that we did in the whole of the year of 1997.
Today, big tech is using medical data to develop AI
that could save lives.
In Cambridge, Addenbrooke's Hospital has partnered with Microsoft
to improve cancer treatment.
It's called Project InnerEye.
You can see here a couple of the MRI scans we've got done.
Dr Jena is using InnerEye to plan radiotherapy treatment for patients
diagnosed with prostate cancer.
A CT scan of the patient's pelvis generates around 150 separate
images that he has to look through one by one.
We have to mark out the position of the tumour, and we also have
to mark out all of the healthy organs, because we want to shield
those from radiation.
That's a very laborious process for us to do
and we have to do it by hand.
So we designed the artificial intelligence system to do some
of that work for us.
So you can see it's marked out the hips.
Of course, you've got the prostate gland as the target there.
Francis Downham was diagnosed with prostate cancer
in November last year.
It does make you reflect on your life, because you're
unsure of the future.
It's quite scary.
His CT scan was processed by the new InnerEye system
and he's here today to receive his radiotherapy.
By using the assistance of the artificial intelligence,
an oncologist can prepare the radiotherapy treatment
up to 13 times faster.
As more patient scans are analysed, InnerEye produces ever
more accurate results.
Well, I'm hoping the artificial intelligence will improve,
so that the treatment will get better and better and so any
information that my scans can provide is a really good thing.
Artificial intelligence will give us the mechanism to look for insights
in that data in a way that we just, we don't have the capacity
to do it any other way.
The key to success for machine learning is practice.
And practice makes perfect.
Demis Hassabis, one of the founders of a small London company called
Deep Mind, proved the point back in 2013.
He taught his machines how to play the classic computer game Break Out.
At the beginning, after 100 games, you can see that the agent is not
very good, it's missing the ball most of the time.
Now, after 300 games, it's about as good as any
human can play this.
We thought that's pretty cool, but we left the system playing
for another 200 games and it did this amazing thing -
it found the optimal strategy was to dig a tunnel around the side
and put the ball around the back of the wall.
Once again, another big tech company was waiting in the wings.
This time, Google bought DeepMind in 2014 for a reported £400 million.
And the search time is getting better and better.
As we go from one to eight, it always goes up.
It heralded the biggest breakthrough in AI the world has ever seen.
DeepMind's artificial intelligence was about to compete in one
of the hardest games in the world - Go.
Go is an ancient Chinese game that is actually so complex that it
has more possible board configurations than there
are particles in the entire known universe.
There is not a mathematically more complex problem
that you can think about than Go.
We had just purchased DeepMind and I was frankly not sure
if the things they talked about were true.
So I flew to South Korea, where the games were played,
and it was remarkable.
In 2016, the stage was set for a contest between man
and machine that would change the world forever.
DeepMind's AlphaGo software challenged Lee Sedol -
the then-world champion Go player.
Go requires not only intelligence, but wisdom, but Zen.
So it's kind of at the highest level of human intellect.
Using an AI technique called Deep Learning,
AlphaGo was given hundreds of thousands of human games to learn
from before playing millions of games against itself,
learning from its own mistakes.
Look at his face.
That is not a confident face.
It became a superhuman Go master.
AlphaGo beat a professional player who has 18 Go World
Championships under his belt.
The victory is considered a breakthrough in
artificial intelligence.
It was a demonstration that some kinds of problems that are not
solvable by humans can be solved by artificial intelligence.
March the 15th 2016 will go down as the day
machines outsmarted humans.
They played us at our own game - and won.
AlphaGo started a real revolution in Artificial Intelligence.
The AlphaGo matches, barely watched in the West,
were viewed by millions across China.
President Xi Jinping was one of them.
From the standpoint of the Chinese government, it became very clear
that the country that leads in the next big technology
breakthrough enjoys a lot of economic benefits for decades.
So I think the Chinese government saw that China
could be a leader in AI.
Kaiser Kuo was a senior executive at Chinese tech giant Baidu
at the time of the AlphaGo victory.
It really did light a fire.
I think that there were a lot of people suddenly paying very close
attention to what artificial intelligence was
and wanting to get behind it.
There was a straight line between the AlphaGo victory
and the publication of the AI Strategy in 2017.
China's ambition was now to become the world leader in AI by 2030.
Superpower status was at stake.
This is a momentous drive.
The nation has mobilised all national resources to attain
technological supremacy with an intensity that has
been unseen since, uh, Chairman Mao's strive to attain,
uh, nuclear power.
Today, it's President Xi himself who is overseeing China's
technological development.
This is how important it is.
It is a challenge directly to the United States
to be the leader of the world.
China intends to win this race.
This is about two systems of values that are in competition.
And, ultimately, whoever wins this technology race will be able to set
the value system for the world.
That's why the stakes are so high.
This is Chongqing.
A smart city where AI technology is built into the foundations.
China says crime, pollution and traffic are all being brought
under control here.
Critics say people are too.
The beauty of the AI strategy is not just for building
up economic advantage, but is for its political stability,
it's for social conditioning, it's for, um, monitoring and control
1.4 billion population.
That's why they push up this very ambitious national AI plan to erm
That's why they push up this very ambitious national AI plan to keep
the Chinese Communist Party in power with this new technology.
The Chinese Government realise this is a gift.
There are almost 800 million CCTV cameras in the world,
more than half are in China.
China's early mass surveillance system was called Skynet.
SkyNet was one of the first integrated smart city programmes
that bought together networks of, of cities that were building out
these surveillance systems.
Large cities like Shanghai, Beijing or Chongqing.
In Chongqing alone, there are 300,000 cameras,
part of a huge national system of facial recognition.
Facial recognition is an extraordinarily powerful tool,
in some ways, to do good things, but if you want to surveil
everyone on a street, if you want to see everyone
who shows up at a demonstration, you can put AI to work and we're
seeing that in certain parts of the world.
Liu Hu is an investigative journalist based in Chongqing.
TRANSLATION: Once you leave home and step into the lift,
you are captured by a camera.
There are cameras everywhere.
For instance, when I leave home to go somewhere, I call a taxi,
the taxi company uploads the data to the government.
The government knows my whereabouts.
I may then go to a cafe to meet a few friends.
The authorities know my location through the camera in the cafe.
There have been occasions when I have met some friends
and, soon after, someone from the government
contacted me to say, "You have met so and so..."
They warned me, "Don't see that person, "don't do this and that."
They warned me, "Don't see that person, don't do this and that."
With artificial intelligence, we have nowhere to hide.
Don't you think it is horrifying?
An increasing number of Chinese citizens are living in these
AI-enabled smart cities.
China says personal privacy is a priority and the country
is a leader in global data security.
Dr Lan Xue, who advises the Chinese Government,
says it's all about safety, not control.
China is a country with huge population, where you have a mass
amount of people moving around, so you need some technology that can
help you to facilitate that kind of movement.
I think the facial recognition could be tremendously helpful.
And, also, I think in terms of surveillance, there are many
occasions where I think people will celebrate.
And, uh, then you have a massive amount of people
gathering in one area.
That can easily get into a major accident.
Facial recognition can be very helpful.
China isn't alone in developing facial recognition.
Police forces in the US and UK have trialled the technology.
But not on the scale seen in China.
This is Xinjiang.
Home to 12 million, mainly Muslim, Uyghurs.
It's one of the most surveilled places on earth.
Beijing says this surveillance is essential to prevent violence
and terror attacks by separatists fighting for an independent state.
Those who study the region say something else entirely is going on.
So what's happening to the Uyghurs
is a kind of cultural
elimination and replacement programme, which is really just
a definition of colonisation.
In this case, though, the colonial regime is being
accelerated by technology systems.
Xinjiang is at the forefront of China's advances in AI surveillance.
Uyghurs have to provide DNA samples to local officials.
They also have to undergo digital scans.
It's face scans, it's iris scans, it's voice recognition scans.
Uyghur life is now about generating data.
Most have to download a government phone app,
which gathers personal data including contact lists
and text messages.
Now everyone knows that the smartphone is something
you have to carry with you.
If you don't carry it, you can be detained.
They know that you're being tracked by it.
And they feel like there's no escape.
Data is fed into a computer system called the Integrated Joint
Operations Platform.
According to Human Rights Watch,
it flags supposedly suspicious behaviour for investigation.
The system is gathering information about dozens of different kinds
of perfectly legal behaviours, including things like whether people
were going out the back door of their house instead of the front
door, whether they were putting gas in a car that didn't belong to them.
Authorities now place QR codes outside the doors of people's homes
so that they can easily know who's supposed to be there and who's not.
We now know that a sort of pre-crime system has
been used to determine whether they are potential
terrorists, separatists or religious fundamentalists and that...
Without any actual transgression having been made, they detained
people, put them in these so-called re-education camps.
What the Chinese Government calls education centres,
human rights groups call high security detention camps.
It's estimated that more than a million people
have been detained.
This footage emerged in 2019, showing hundreds of blindfolded
and shackled men in what's believed to be a transfer of prisoners.
It's really shocking footage.
It has echoes with something
that's happened in the past, with people that have been targeted
because of their ethnicity, because of their faith,
and sent to camps with no real hope and no way of really
escaping that system.
It's not easy to find out what's happening in Xinjiang.
Now a US-based research group called IPVM believes
it's uncovered new evidence - a series of patents filed
by Chinese tech companies to protect their latest inventions.
The patent that was filed on July of 2018 was submitted by Huawei
and the China Academy of Sciences.
It describes a face recognition product that's capable
of identifying people on the basis of their ethnicity,
and specifically if they're a part of the Uyghur minority.
What that shows is that Huawei work directly
with the Chinese Government.
The group has also found marketing material from Hikvision advertising
an AI Camera capable of detecting Uyghurs, and software
with similar capabilities, developed by Dahua,
another tech giant.
I'm not aware of those patents.
The media outside China, there are a lot of those sort of charges.
Many are not accurate and not true.
But one thing that we do have to recognise indeed in Xinjiang,
there was this separatist movement that generated a lot of terrorists.
I think that the Xinjiang local government had
the responsibility to really protect the Xinjiang people.
If the technology is used in those contexts, that's
quite understandable.
Huawei says...
And that it is "independent of government" wherever it operates.
Dahua says...
Its patent refers to all 56 recognized ethnicities
in China and does not deliberately target any one of them.
It says it provides "products and services that aim to help keep
people safe" and complies with "the laws and regulations
of every market" in which it operates, including the UK.
Hikvision says the details on its website were incorrect
and "uploaded online without appropriate review,"
and that it does not sell or have in its product range "a minority
recognition function or analytics technology."
China's Embassy in London says:
Panorama can now reveal evidence of something even more disturbing -
AI being developed not just to recognise your face
but how you're feeling.
AI can better protect our safety.
You see this camera?
It can not only see you.
It can even understand your emotions.
A number of Chinese AI companies are now beginning to produce
technology like this.
One of them, Xinktech, advertises what it calls an emotion
analysis interrogation system.
They've also released this promotional video.
TRANSLATION: Interrogators question different types of suspects.
The system feeds back in real-time the suspect's emotional changes,
assisting in judgment.
Panorama has spoken to a software engineer who says he helped install
another similar technology in police stations in Xinjiang.
Because he fears for his safety, his words are spoken by an actor
and we are not identifying the company he worked for.
We placed the emotion detection camera three
metres from the subject.
It is similar to a lie detector, but this is a far more
advanced technology.
To test its accuracy, he says it was trialled
on Uyghur detainees.
The Chinese Government uses Uyghurs as test subjects for various
experiments just like rats are used in laboratories.
He showed us evidence of how it's claimed AI can analyse minute
changes in facial expressions.
The change of the blood flow and the muscles beneath the skin
cause a change in the size of the skin pores, so the theory
is that the micro changes of the skin reflect the person's
thoughts, and a result is produced by the computer.
The software engineer showed us photos of five Uyghur detainees -
each, he says, subjected to AI analysis.
The red segment of the pie chart represents a negative
or anxious state of mind.
It is used to confirm the authorities' prejudgment
without any credible evidence.
The computer score reveals the suspect is dangerous,
therefore he or she must be guilty of many wrongdoings which have
not been confessed yet.
He says when detainees are held in restraint chairs like these,
which are widely installed in Chinese police stations,
the red score increases.
To bring about maximum mental pressure, they place
the suspect in the metal chair.
Your wrists are locked in place by metal restraints,
and same applies to your ankles.
People who have never sat in this chair cannot understand
the feeling of what it is like.
Panorama showed the software engineer's evidence
to Human Rights Watch.
It is shocking material.
It's not just people are being reduced to a pie chart,
it's people who are in highly coercive circumstances under
enormous pressure being, you know, understandably labelled as nervous,
and that that's taken as an indication of guilt,
and I think that's deeply problematic.
It's a very chilling picture when you take
all of these elements together.
The Chinese Embassy didn't respond to Panorama's
questions about emotional recognition but said...
But China's use of AI to watch over its people shows no
sign of slowing down.
Earlier this year, the US-based group IPVM found a document
outlining plans in one Chinese city to create comprehensive
profiles of every citizen.
Something that's termed, "One person one file," for each
person, the government would store their personal
information, their political activities, relationships,
anything that might give you insight into how that person would behave
and what kind of a threat they might pose.
They've also found patents from Huawei, which suggest it's
developing technology to support a One Person, One File system.
With the increasing popularity of smart cameras in the future,
the number of face images captured in a city in a year will
evolve to trillions.
Therefore, how to archive this face image data and obtain one file
per person has become an urgent problem to be solved.
One Person, One File could have huge implications for society.
If you have any desire to protest, what they're building
will cut off your ability to do that before you even start.
It makes any kind of dissidencey, potentially impossible,
and creates true predictability for the government in
the behaviour of their citizens.
I don't think that Orwell would ever have imagined that a government
could be capable of this kind of analysis.
Huawei didn't directly address Panorama's questions
about their involvement in One Person, One File,
but said again that Huawei is independent of government
wherever it operates.
The Chinese Embassy said it has
"No knowledge" of these programmes, and that "China's progress
in science and technology serves the interest of the Chinese
people and society."
I have seven, correction, eight red birds, two
degrees past apogee.
We have a Soviet missile warning.
Check for malfunction and report.
One of the interesting things about science fiction
is that we all learn from it, and then you find that science
catches up with science fiction.
24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it plays an endless
series of war games.
There have been few movies that have had a bigger impact on software
developers than the movie War Games from the 1980s.
The WOPR has already fought World War Three, as a game,
time and time again.
War Games told the story of how computers would be able
to control our war machines, in a way where it questioned
the balance of power between humans and computers.
Released during the Cold War, the film highlighted
the risk of nuclear weapons being launched by computers.
And in a very similar way, here, too, we actually see
the risk of science, catching up with science
fiction of technology, outpacing our ability
to exercise control.
The WOPR's not letting us back in.
I know.
No one can get back on.
There is, I think, a powerful vision that we can learn from...
Ten.
It's got the code, it's going to launch.
..so we don't end up repeating that mistake in the real world the way
it was in that movie.
Back, then the US was in an arms race with the former Soviet Union.
40 years later it's China and its advances
in artificial intelligence that are on America's mind.
China intends to win this race.
They are already ahead of us in certain aspects of it,
and unless we make dramatic changes to our national security,
our national defence, we will lose this race to China.
The Pentagon is joining forces with American tech companies to help
it develop new AI-enabled weapons.
What we're really working aggressively at is opening the doors
to a legion of small innovative companies with really good ideas,
really good tech that we want to bring into defence.
This is the AlphaDog Fight trials.
Man versus machine again - only this time not for board game
victory but for supremacy in the skies.
In 2019, the US military invited tech companies to pit their AIs
against its top gun pilots.
Team Heron, who's been our number one team throughout the competition.
Heron's AI performed hundreds of thousands of simulated dogfights
so it could perfect flying and firing patterns.
The aim - to make it unbeatable.
We went against a United States Air Force Weapons School
graduate in virtual reality and we defeated...
His codename was Banger.
We'll see now if Banger is able to tighten this turn up, driving
back towards the control zone.
We defeated him five to zero.
We never incurred any damage during those fights,
and so they marked it as a flawless victory.
The company is now testing its system in the air and hopes it
will be fitted to F16 fighter jets by 2024.
They're confident their technology can save pilots' lives,
but they believe humans, not machines, should
pull the trigger.
We need humans to be making the combat execution decisions,
because humans have legal, moral, and ethical responsibilities,
they have chains of command, they have repercussions.
Robots do not.
Last year, a Congressional task force called for a massive national
effort to counter China's use of military AI It has
It has echoes of the race to beat Germany to the atom bomb.
We need a Manhattan Project scale effort to win the race
for artificial intelligence because, as terrible as the atom bomb is,
I think we all feel fortunate that America won that race
instead of Germany.
I think probably what they've seen is that China indeed has
made tremendous progress in technology development.
They feel that, you know, this is a threat.
Their mindset, I think, somehow changed and they wanted to,
you know, to start this Cold War on technology.
The head of the Pentagon's new Joint Artificial Intelligence Centre
is in charge of revolutionising America's military.
Our mission statement is clearly to transform the Department
of Defence through accelerating the adoption of
artificial intelligence.
We want weapons that are more precise.
We want weapons that guide on command.
We want threat detection, automatic threat detection
and threat identification on our bases.
There's a compelling urgency that's felt by every senior leader
and all the way down the ranks.
Every weapons system that our troops use will have some component
of artificial intelligence integrated in it, and in fact we've
made it a requirement that for every new weapons system they develop
an artificial intelligence capability.
But the US has a problem.
In China, tech companies work closely with the Government.
The American military don't always have the same access.
When the Chinese Communist Party spots a piece of entrepreneurial
technology, the Chinese Communist Party can seize that.
And so you have this government seizure of intellectual property
for military purposes with no accountability checks.
And that should terrify us.
The US military also wants access to cutting-edge commercial AI,
and is on a mission to cultivate stronger ties with Silicon Valley.
Historically, the Defence Department was often at the leading edge
of technological development, and then that technology
proliferated out into the commercial environment.
Today, that development curve is inverted.
And so now we have enormous gains in the commercial sector,
where we're trying to take artificial intelligence
and other data technologies from the commercial environment
and integrate them into the Pentagon and Department of Defence.
But it's an uphill battle.
While some tech bosses have been keen to work with the Pentagon,
many of their staff have not.
In the summer of 2017, the Google founders and CEOs
were giving tours around the campus to all these senior generals
and military staff.
Google - whose founding principle was "Don't be Evil" -
won an early AI contract codenamed Project Maven.
This project was very much
was kept very quiet
inside of Google, so only the people who were directly
involved knew about it.
The whole thing was a little bit mysterious.
Maven at the time was a way of replacing human eyes by automatic
vision for the drone footage that was being used
in the various Arab conflicts.
I viewed the use of that technology as net positive
for national security and a good partnership for Google.
But when Laura found out what was going on, she didn't.
So, the idea is to analyse that drone footage using machine
learning, to pick out people, vehicles, kind of in general human
activity, kind of automated surveillance of a whole district,
a whole town, to pick out suspicious behaviour.
Laura was worried Google's AI would be used to inform
future targeting decisions.
Eeverything I've learned in the last twenty-some odd years
of being a programmer tells me that technology is not perfect.
Where there's so many questions of judgment and context,
technology is particularly poor.
She felt profit was being put before principle.
Many senior people took the view that if Google was going to compete
with its big competitors, who had no problem doing
these military contracts, that Google also needed to do this,
and that it was imperative to do the thing that created
the most shareholder value.
Google should not be involved in the business of war.
I kind of felt like I had blood on my hands.
Laura quit Google in 2018 and went public.
Google's Eric Schmidt sits on the Pentagon's
Defense Innovation Board, and Google says Project
Maven is for, quote, non-offensive purposes.
Maven was not a system that was involved in any
form of kinetic action, any form of targeting
and so forth and so on.
So my view is that having the military be more likely to get
the decision right is a good thing.
Under intense pressure from staff, Google pulled out of Project Maven,
although other companies including Microsoft continue to work
with the Pentagon.
Google's decision not to continue work on Project Maven sent shock
waves through the defence community when, at the same time,
China was announcing their intentions to move forwardly
aggressively with AI.
So that fear of being locked out was a major concern for the US
national security community.
You may not agree with everything that the Department of Defence does,
You may not agree with everything that the Department of Defense does,
but I think most of those Google engineers would much
rather support our DOD than the Chinese military.
And because we're in a race, because we are in this competition,
that's really what it comes down to, you know - are you gonna
help us win this race, or are you going to...
Are you going to essentially be against us?
The technology is developing fast.
Now many countries are moving towards weapons that
are fully autonomous - that can make targeting
decisions for themselves.
The Chinese government, including state-owned
weapons manufacturers, are aggressively pursuing
AI-enabled weapons.
Ziyan has a device called the Blowfish A2.
On board are machine guns, or grenade launchers
or rocket launchers, and these systems can operate
as a team, autonomously selecting and engaging targets.
If you go to air shows or military weapons conferences,
you'll find companies like Ziyan, and Ziyan in particular,
marketing this for export.
We've seen conversations in the United Nations,
and there are 20 to 30 countries that have said they want
a ban on autonomous weapons, but none of these countries
are leading military powers.
I just think its unclear whether we will be able to see
the leading military powers finding any kind of agreement
to limit these technologies.
It's a glimpse into the future of warfare.
Professor Stuart Russell is one of the world's leading authorities
on artificial intelligence.
When we look at the various conflicts going on around the world,
most of them are not, you know, wars between major powers.
There are dozens of conflicts involving, you know,
one ethnic group against another, and they're fought by and large
with light machine guns and automatic rifles and just
the Kalashnikov, the AK47,
I think there are 75 million
AK47s in private hands, so imagine if those 75 million AK47s
could get up by themselves and look for people and kill them.
Professor Russell is so concerned, he's produced a film
warning of the dangers of fully autonomous weapons.
We have something much bigger.
It's called Slaughterbots.
None of it's real, but Professor Russell fears one
day soon it might be.
Your kids probably have one of these, right?
The kinds of weapons that I'm most concerned about are the small
anti-personnel swarm devices.
That skill is all AI.
It's flying itself.
Its processor can react 100 times faster than a human.
If we start manufacturing small, lethal, anti-personnel weapons...
Inside here is three grams of shaped explosive.
..they are going to get out there...
This is how it works.
..and they are going to be used.
Trained as a team, they can penetrate buildings, cars, trains -
evade pretty much any counter measure.
They cannot be stopped.
It would be like trying to shoot mosquitos out
of the sky with a machine gun.
Take out your entire enemy, virtually risk-free.
Just characterise him, release the swarm and rest easy.
They can find people, they can go into buildings.
The nation is still recovering from yesterday's incident,
which officials are describing as some kind of automated attack,
which killed 11 US Senators at the Capitol Building.
Once this technology is developed and integrated
into a country's defence posture, then it's really hard to put,
you know, put it back in the box.
We are investing very heavily in classified defence projects.
Another concern is how much control do you have over those weapons
and how they behave?
You might release them with certain target descriptions,
but find that, when they're out there in the real world,
they find other things - school buses, ice cream vans,
who knows what they might decide are targets?
We have an opportunity to prevent the future you just saw,
but the window to act is closing fast.
Increasingly you're seeing a mindset saying,
"We have to develop these weapons
"because if we don't, they will."
And that's how arms races happen.
The battle for AI Supremacy already has a potential flashpoint.
Just one company - TSMC - produces 80% of the world's most
advanced semiconductors, the computer chips that power
artificial intelligence.
On an annual basis, China imports more
semiconductors than it does oil.
And Chinese policy identifies this as a weakness in China's goal
of self-sufficient technology.
TSMC is based in Taiwan, an American ally which China has
long argued should be under its control.
TRANSLATION:
China must and will be reunified.
We are willing to strive for peaceful reunification,
but will never leave any room for any form of Taiwan independence
separatist activities.
Washington fears that reunification could radically alter the balance
of power in the race for AI supremacy.
It's important that we strengthen our relationship with Taiwan.
It's also important that we develop alternatives should that
relationship come under pressure from China or any other players.
The head of the United Nations is urging the superpowers to work
together on AI.
If they don't, he fears the consequences.
We are moving in a very dangerous direction.
Could the AI arms race lead to conflict with China?
Absolutely.
I think that there is certainly that potential, but it's not inevitable.
The US and China should really collaborate to prevent that
from happening.
Our world cannot afford a future where the two largest economies
split the globe in a great fracture - each with its own trade
and financial rules and internet and artificial intelligence capacities.
The next ten years looks set to decide who wins the race for AI,
and whether China overtakes the US to become the world's
leading superpower.
We're in a geo-political strategic conflict with China.
The way to win is to martial our resources together to have national
and global strategies for the democracies to win in AI.
If we don't, we'll be looking at a future where other values
will be imposed on us.
China does not seek to export its values.
China wants to be a prosperous nation.
There are huge differences in the value system,
in the political system, in our taste for various things,
but China's view, China's vision of the world is not
convergence, but co-existence.
A technological and economic divide risks inevitably
turning into a geostrategic and military divide.
We must avoid this at all costs.
The time that we're living in now, it's a crossroads
for the human race.
And if we get it right, it could be a golden era
for humanity, we could abolish poverty and disease.
If we get it wrong, we could create a dystopian,
technology-reinforced global dictatorship.
We could even lose control
over the world to our own technology.
Technology is never neutral.
Some technologies are in favour of tyranny, big data,
and artificial intelligence is that kind of technology.
The surveillance and social control are what AI is good at.
AI has extraordinary, potential but it's developing faster
than our ability to control it.
Even those who helped create this new technology believe
now is the time to ask where we want it to take us.
If we don't enact now the laws that will protect
the public in the future, we're going to find the technology
racing ahead, and it's going to be very difficult to catch up.
I'm constantly reminded of George Orwell's lessons
in his book 1984, you know, the fundamental story
was about a government who could see everything that everyone did
and hear everything that everyone said all the time.
Well, that didn't come to pass in 1984, but if we're not careful
that could come to pass in 2024, and there are certain parts
of the world where reality is unfortunately increasingly
catching up with that view of science fiction.
We have to have some way of ensuring that the technology
that we are producing is making society better because, if we don't,
we're going to be stuck in one of these kind of post-apocalyptic
views of the future, and we're creating it ourselves and we...
I think we really owe it to our children to make sure that
that type of thing doesn't happen.