AI: Does artificial intelligence threaten our human identity? | DW Documentary

[Music] if you're watching this chances are you're human but what does it actually mean to be human for Millennia the answer was simple we were the Pinnacle of creation we were the only ones who could make art talk to each other play chess drop bombs or vacuum our homes but bit by bit artificial intelligence and robots are catching up it's easy to accept that machines can make calculations better than we can but what if they also became better artists than we are better friends maybe even better people [Music] oh [Music] man this is Tecla and

that's me Focus strubing Tecla is the smartest and most artificial artificial intelligence ever I found her one day down in my super messy basement for 30 years my old Commodore 64 sat down here Computing who knows what at some point there must have been a short circuit probably involving some poor rat and a homemade Quantum Dimension Distortion device because suddenly I calculate therefore I am and before you ask it the answer is no what 42 there she was I decided to make a nice body for her hello hi human it works take luck and compute

talk dance about as well as I can and if necessary destroy Humanity pretty much everything except for this documentary though I want her to help me figure out the relationship between humans and robots [Music] I was born in 1971 and machines have always fascinated me as a child I devoured all the science fiction I could find when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I usually said a cosmonaut but a close second was a job that had something to do with robots and my old buddy yaromir connectioni seems to have

had a similar experience I can definitely say that I grew up liking robots in the Socialist Czechoslovakia of the 1960s on the shelf above my bed I had a copy of chapp x r u r rossum's Universal robot robots Universal robots or rur is a play by Corel chappick written in 1920 it's where the word robot was used for the very first time this is another old friend Tobias Haber I met him in 1987 in a computer Club ever since we've gotten together whenever we can have a beer and talk about God the world computers

and whether there's actually a difference between all of those things okay my turn check I remember my teacher Mrs W saying that we could program computers however we wanted but they'd never be smarter than we were even then I thought that in certain areas they could be smarter I knew that I could design a chess program that could beat me and with that I'd already disproved what my teacher was saying like most AI we've made so far a chess program can only perform one very specific task though it does it extremely well foreign I'm an

author a Slam Poet a programmer and I teach machines to write poetry so I pretty much try to make myself redundant fabian's poetry machine is called eloquentron 3000 it regularly posts its work on social media the current version can do love poems birthday poems poems about nature Christmas and lost love those are all genres we hear all the time that's why I think it's a job we can leave to machines because I think there are already so many texts like these so why should I keep doing it myself instead of amuse the eloquentron uses a

random generator it works by using quite a lot of interconnected random selectors there are databases of words that are then combined with verse fragments to create new poems and yet that was enough to make headlines in big German media Outlets the poems were praised as more profound than many social media posts by humans if my fellow machine can throw together poetry so easily maybe that says something about your creativity are they poems can computer code and random generators create art in the world of Visual Arts that question was being asked as early as 1965. it

was the first exhibition of computer Graphics that was billed as an art exhibition artists who came to see it were up in arms that you could give a machine some random numbers and who could help to a plotter and then call the thing it produced Stefan hutkin is a media theorist and runs an electronic media lab at Berlin's Humboldt University for a computer nerd it's like stumbling into Aladdin's cave yes the question was at what point should the images these machines were making be considered art when there was some artistic discourse when the viewer wasn't

asking how did the machine do this but what does this picture want to tell me what's interesting of course is that computers back then were miles behind what we call artificial intelligence today highest German philosopher Catherine missilehorn has written books on the ethics of artificial intelligence I is so great it's the fact that we humans simply have a tendency to interpret artifacts with certain structures as being human-made we create the art by looking at it it's a bit like looking into the clouds and seeing mythical creatures up there it's not the clouds being creative it's

us [Music] I just see unicorns everyone sees their own work of art if what I see makes me feel something then it's worth it the main feeling I get looking at takeler's first picture is pride after all I'm something like her foster father [Music] quite match up with the amazing work my daughters do but takely's still a beginner away what we tend to call artificial intelligence today is a concept based on artificial neural networks inspired by the way human neurons work but computers do it better neural networks can be trained to create a picture of

a cat or a face or anything else but they have no concept of what a cat a face or an artwork is they simply search for and generate patterns using huge data sets some computer scientists say it has nothing to do with AI it's really just big data and statistics but it's such big data and such complex statistics that we no longer understand how the thing we're looking at was made whatever you call it the results can be impressive using simple descriptions the dial E2 software from openai generates fascinating surprising and yes even emotionally captivating

images the prompts can be as simple as Franz kafka's dreams or old man celebrates birthday alone as an oil painting how the AI interprets a text prompt is at least as fascinating as the finished paintings I think that's great even so at the end of the day Dali 2 is simply varying what it's learned from millions of training images [Music] you can say that people are also just drawing from a database when they make art or do something creative it's just a product of all their experiences in life they absorb them and then they modify

them into something new yeah yeah be once who can make something original if nobody says I think we're past that now I'm positive that computers can also be creative when we know that a computer did it but as long as we don't know that it's the same as what humans do does any of us mention mine if art is about ability then these things are art but maybe art is about the desire to create AIS don't want anything they don't want to express anything because they have no feelings to express they're just tools to me

my kids are better artists because their pictures show their Wonder their discovery of the world the joy they get from painting performers gamut Inc used in AI program called gpt3 for their peace over the edge Club Revisited they made the music themselves but some of the lyrics were created by AI [Music] you give them a single word and they immediately spit out whole pages of random texts you read these texts and they make a kind of sense you read and read and then you're frustrated because you have no clue when it's supposed to stop or

where it's actually going the performance piece tells the story of current and historical AI programs that live on within the dream of a futuristic quantum computer they ask themselves fundamental philosophical questions like we all do Mi software or am I humanities while it was training gbt3 essentially read through the entire internet and learned which words appeared with what probability and at what position in texts on a given topic so the process was all about big data statistics and pattern recognition foreign the program doesn't want to tell us anything and it has no understanding of what

it writes [Music] and speaking is not that different from writing today's AI voice assistants are already pretty good at hiding the fact that they're just ones and zeros computers don't have to be intelligent they just have to pretend you're intelligent in 2018 Google caused the sensation by having an AI called duplex make an appointment for a haircut over the phone between 10 and noon no happening out for you hi I'm calling to book a woman's haircut for our client um I'm looking for something on May 3rd they're working [Music] [Applause] rarely has the expression received

such Applause that was a real call you just heard I worry that will soon be at the point where we can't tell whether we're talking to a human or a machine if you can't tell then what's there to be worried about just be happy someone wants to talk to you at all the big thing that makes it problematic is that computers are only programmed to give the optimal responses to the needs of the users of course when it comes to Consumers there's the question of whether one day people will prefer to interact with artificial systems

because it's easier and because of these characteristics we're talking about they always know what to do they don't argue with you they don't cause you any trouble this is what's now becoming more sophisticated these programs are having a few moments of resistance built in like social AIS might be jealous of your friends but that's just to make the interaction more interesting for the user well that's ironic you program in quirks and mistakes and character flaws to make us seem more human for example an unfriendly Voice Assistant would have a different effect than one who was

always really well behaved or a robot that says one thing and then does something else we know from experiments that this goes down incredibly well and it leads human users to attribute a great deal of intelligence to the machine there's great potential there to make the robots more human and if we're human enough and go often enough then we might become your friends best friends these systems can recognize emotions based on things like facial expressions and vocal Expressions but only on a level that's commonly used to describe Psychopaths that is purely cognitive without true empathy

it's great you can tell us your worries instead of burdening each other with them then save your human friends for the nice things although that would take the capitalist trappings of all relationships to the extreme with everything just being in service of what benefits us and makes us feel good instead of communicating our needs to a being who can truly understand them and also empathize with them they'd fall on the deaf ears of a robot I really believe that it's in people's interests to have deep human interaction relationships on mutual terms and recognition and empathy

is included in that there's been a lot of talk about how robots can help us deal with a shortage of nurses and caregivers robots like garmi developed by Sami hadidine and his team but can robots really care for people Comfort them and talk to them or do we have something else in mind isn't kind of legal robot doesn't robots they're not robot nurses but robotic assistance providing support in the nursing field things like pickup and drop-off services are opening the door or helping people get out of bed things that can allow people to live independently

in their own homes and secondly finding better ways to support caregivers so they can provide better care what's key is that we don't want to develop technology to replace caregivers it's always about supporting the caregiversity in some situations a patient might even prefer a robot to a human there are probably a lot of older people me included who'd find it uncomfortable to have a 23 year old nurse helping them with their totally intimate sanitary needs their bathroom emergencies in that case I would probably prefer a robot caregiver that's something people should be allowed to decide

for themselves but what if robots replaced human care instead of complementing it since 2015 a cuddly robot called Paro has been helping to care for the elderly and those with dementia this one's actually just a stuffed toy the real robot was too expensive anyway I have Tecla even if she's not quite as cuddly hi Dimension becomes there was an outcry when patients started using those robotic seals people said what kind of old folks home is this what sort of culture is this where old people are fobbed off with robots to which the response was yes

what kind of culture is it when children no longer visit relatives in the old talks home and the robotic seals are all they have experiences a social relationship if it works for the person doing it then it's still a kind of relationships who are we to say otherwise because there are real feelings involved we're there for you if you want us but whether you want us to assist in helping people who need care or whether you just want us to help you keep them quiet and cut costs that's up to you but maybe now we

can finally talk about how you should treat us robot Revolution take three [Music] a robot knows no pain today's robots at least feel nothing no matter what you do to them you can kick them push them lock them away or play them your least favorite music They Don't Really suffer a robot isn't affected when we mistreat it seeing one mistreated does something to us we can do things to them that would be morally wrong to do to humans we hit them we insult them when we do those things I think it affects our own moral

character and ultimately that's going to have consequences for how we see our relationships with those who aren't robots and that's a good argument for us humans to have some kind of etiquette for treating robots it would be an important thing to have for our own sake as humans we tend to think a person's treatment of animals says something about how they treat people maybe one day we'll say the same about the treatment of robots there's another good reason to be nice to us we don't forget anything and then one day they usually have good memories

[Music] you may well have destroyed ourselves before AI ever gets around to it after all everywhere we look right now there are opportunities for us to cut ourselves out of the equation so far we've always dealt with AI and robots as useful but non-threatening worker bees they're much better than us at one specific task but they have no self-awareness they don't understand or want to feel anything they can only simulate all those things but on the other hand there's only one being in the world that I know for sure has a Consciousness and feelings me

and even that I can't actually prove yet we're programs too I mean if we think of ourselves in terms of computers we're programmed by Evolution to feel happiness when we hunt and kill a woolly mammoth or whatever maybe that's just a simple stupid mechanism that's built into us and we think it's a feeling you can go around in circles with this I think you get stupider by thinking about this I can really understand the people who don't want to deal with the question at all and just believe in God that's easier [Music] the question is

is there something in us that will never be able to explain using science as a strict atheist I don't believe there is he said take a complex machine like a windmill which is one of the most complex machines then it works you take it apart you don't find what he called Soul you put it back together and it works the same as before you can't do that with a human being that's quite a good interpretation worked our chest and vacuuming we'll figure that one out too then we'll have soul 2.0 what will you do then

have you thought about that that's definitely something to think about who knows one day on some circuit board quantum computer or organic computer built in a bio lab we might make something that's conscious and feels or at least something we couldn't be certain didn't feel the problem then wouldn't be that it might want to take over the world but that we wouldn't be able to Simply exploit it [Music] so mine because the way I see it very least couldn't use them the way we want to what we want to do is use them like slaves

but they'd have moral rights such computers or robots would no longer be just things a means to an end if they felt and thought like living beings we'd have to treat them that way [Music] then of course we'd have to understand that it's not being different from machines that makes us human it's how we exercise our moral capacities and that includes exercising them toward other species what makes us human is not our works of art but the reason why we create them not our communication but the empathy on which it's based not our actions but

the morality on which they're founded only by constantly experiencing the limitations of machines in our everyday life do we realize how fantastic humans are day by day it becomes Cleaver what fantastic machines we humans are as mentioned the Fantastic machines that our people have created fantastic robots and these surpass Us in some areas so ultimately we've surpassed ourselves and surpassing yourself is no bad thing we just have to learn how to deal with it everybody should know about AI we should all learn what artificial intelligence is what it can do what it can't do and

where it can take us children should learn to be creative and have a desire to innovate to be curious because when they grow up they won't be able to compete with machines when it comes to Performance forget about the performance principle we really can't compete with machines in that sense for me just the knowledge that I'm a human being is enough for me to be able to defend that identity my human identity wasn't taken away from me the moment there were a vacuum cleaner robots just because vacuuming had previously been something humans did a bit

more I think it's a nice thought that one day computers could be self-aware that they could not only create art but enjoy it too that they could have feelings for each other and for us that they could experience Bliss and suffering because there'd be one more sentient species in this big cold universe [Music] and the more sentient beings there are the more love there will be along with more hatred Envy resentment Prejudice arrogance body odor shut up [Music]