- If you want to be thought of as knowledgeable
rather than gullible,
educated rather than oblivious,
insightful rather than obtuse,
please know that self-aware robots,
machines that take over the world
and systems that decide humans are the scourge of the earth
is a lot of hogwash.
Great science fiction that has nothing to do
with the world as it is.
Skynet from "Terminator," "Blade Runner," "I, Robot,"
Ultron, Dolores in "Westworld," Cortana in "Halo,"
Agent Smith in "The Matrix,"
even HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey,"
the list of cyborg villains is long
and it confuses the conversation
about what artificial intelligence is and what it can do.
The most important thing to know about AI is this,
there is general AI, which is the stuff of science fiction,
and there is narrow or functional AI,
which is the stuff of science fact.
The stuff we are actually building and putting to use.
I want you to fully understand this difference
so you'll be confident in conversations,
discerning while scrolling through your feeds
and creative in your problem-solving.
The theory of general artificial intelligence,
that machines will eventually learn enough
that one day they'll wake up and become conscious,
it gets a lot of attention because it's sensational.
The theory seems logical.
We can write code and build systems
that can see and hear and talk,
systems that can make lightening fast decisions,
system that can drive cars and win video games
and full of proteins, these things are amazing.
So doesn't it seem like likely
that when they can do all these things, eventually,
they will put two and two together
and start thinking for themselves.
It may seem so, but no.
Doesn't it seem likely that we can build machines
that can imitate people so well
that they will be indistinguishable from
autonomous sentient creatures,
who, by the way, are far smarter than we are?
It may seem so, but no.
Haven't we created enough compute power
that eventually all of these amazing systems
will reach out and connect together
across the internet and gain consciousness?
Again, no.
Humans are so much more complex than that.
The human brain is the most complex thing in the universe.
More than a hundred billion neurons
and a thousand trillion synapses
and we still we'll have trouble figuring out how it works,
much less figuring out what the mind is.
Okay, but what about neural networks?
Aren't they built like the human brain,
yet are much more powerful?
No, they're not.
Neural networks were designed after a concept
of how we think the brain might work.
The same way you might try to build an airplane
based on a bird flapping its wings.
It seems like that's how flight works, but it isn't.
It wasn't until we figured out aerodynamics
that we understood how the shape of the wing
is what makes flight possible.
Today we don't really know how the mind works,
so we can't actually recreate it as it is.
Scientists came up with a theory of neurons and synapses
and we built simple, clumsy artificial neural networks
based on that theory and you know what happened?
We ended up with creating a new kind of software,
a much more powerful kind of software
than we've ever had before
for solving certain types of problems.
But it doesn't work anywhere near as well as the human mind.
We simply don't have the technology we might need
to make a self-aware sentient machine.
And today data scientists know enough
to keep that from happening.
We do have a new tool that is capable in ways
that we're only just beginning to harness
and that is what we refer to when we talk about
specialized tasks or functional AI.
And now you can have a rational conversation about AI
without getting sidetracked into science fiction.
Be one of the people that embrace these new tools.
It will help your career and might even help you
make the world a better place.