Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB-O0V9djEs
the jurgen experience this google engineer that has come out and said that he believes that the google ai sentient because it says that it is sad it says it's lonely it starts communicating and you know google is they're it seems like they're in a dilemma in that situation first of all if it is sentient does it get rights right like does it get days off i had this conversation with my friend duncan trussell last night and he was saying imagine if you you know if you have to give it rights like is it does it get treated like a human being like what is it well i'll give you make it even a step harder what if you copy it right now you've got two of them well that was what i said to ray kurzweil ray kurzweil was talking at one point in time about downloading consciousness into computers and then he believes that inevitably will happen and my thought was like was going to stop someone from downloading themselves a thousand times right with some donald trump type character just wants a million trumps out there just out there doing speeches like what what would stop that yeah exactly so so let's let's start with what this actually is today which is i think you know which is very interesting not well understood but very interesting so what what google and there's this other company open ai that are doing these kind of text the text bots that have the you know the the been in the news what they do it's it's a program it's an it's an ai program it's basically it uses a form of math called linear algebra it's a very well-known form of math but it uses a very complex version of it and then basically what they do is they've got complex math running on big computers and then what they do is they have what they call training data and so what they do is they basically slurp in a huge data set from somewhere in the world and then they basically train the math against against the data to try to kind of get it up to speed on how to interact and do things the training data that they're using for
these systems is all text on the internet right so and all text on the internet increasingly is a record of all of human communication right all the text on the internet all the text on the internet so how does it capture all this stuff well so google google's core business is to be the cro is to do that is to be the crawler you know famously their mission organizer will information they actually pull in all the text in the internet already to make their search engine work and then that's that's and then the ai just scans that and the ai basically uses that as a training set right um and so and basically just just basically chews through and processes it it's a very complex process but like chews through and processes it and then the ai kind of gets a converged kind of view of like okay this is human language this is what these people are talking about you know and then it has all the statistical you know once when a human being says x somebody else says y or z or this would be a good thing to say or bad thing to say for example you can get emotion you can you can detect emotional loading from text now so you can kind of determine what the computer can kind of say this text reflects somebody who's happy because they're saying oh you know i'm having a great day versus this text is like i'm super mad you know therefore it's upset and so you could have the computer could get trained on okay if i say this thing it's likely to make humans happy if i just say this thing is likely to make humans sad but here's the thing it it it's all it's all human generated text it's all the conversations that that we've all had and and so basically you load that into the computer and then the computer is able to kind of simulate right somebody else having that conversation um but but what happens is basically the computer is playing back what people say right right it's not it's not nobody no no engineer the the guy who went through this and did the the whistleblower thing but he even said he didn't look at the code he's not he's not in there like working on the code everybody who works in the code will tell you it's not alive it's not conscious it's not having original ideas what it's doing is it's playing back to you things that it
thinks that you want to hear based on all the things that everybody has already said to each other that it can get online and in fact there's all these ways you can kind of trick it into basic like for example you can have it he has this example where he like has it where basically he said you know i want you to prove that you're alive and then the computer did all this stuff through it's live you can do the reverse you can say i want you to prove that you're not alive and the computer will happily prove that it's not alive and it'll give you all these arguments as to why it's not actually alive and of course it's because it the computer has no view on whether it's alive or not but it seems like in in with with this is all very weird and for sure we're in the fog of life if it's not life it's in this weird fog of like what makes a person a person like what makes an intelligent thinking human being that knows how to communicate able to respond and answer questions well it does it through cultural context does it through understanding language and having been around enough people that have communicated in a certain way that it emulates that right yeah so this is the real question so this is where i was headed the the real question is what does it mean for a person to think right like that's the real question and so and so let's talk about there's something called the turing test right which is a little bit more famous now because the movie the term made by alan turing so the turing test basically in its simplified form the turing test is basically you're sitting in a computer terminal you're typing in questions and then the answers are showing up in the screen there's a 50 chance you're talking to a person sitting in another room who's typing their responses back there's a 50 chance you're talking to a machine you don't know right you're the subject and you can ask the entity on the other end of the connection any number of questions right he will he or she or it will give you any number of answers at the end you have to make the judgment as to whether you're talking to a person or talking to a machine the the theory of the turing test is when a computer can convince
a person that it's a person then it will have achieved artificial intelligence right then it will be as smart as a person but but that begs the question of like okay like how easy are we to trick right right like and in fact and so actually it turns out what's happened this is actually true what's happened is actually there have been chat bots that have been fooling people in the turing test now for several years the easiest way to do it is with a sex chatbot because they're the most gullible specifically specifically to men of course that's why women are like way less women probably fall for it a lot less but men like you get a man on there with a sex chat bot like the man will convince himself he's talking to a real woman like pretty easily even when he's not right um and so just think of this as a slightly more you know you could think about this as a somewhat more advanced version of that which is look if if this thing if it's an algorithm that's been optimized to trick people basically to convince people that it's real it's going to it's going to pass the turing test even though it's not actually conscious meaning it has no awareness it has no desire it has no regret it has no fear you know it has none of the hallmarks that we would associate with being a living being like much less a conscious being and so so this is this is the twist and this is where i think this guy google got got got kind of strung up a little bit as or held up um is it the the computers are going to be able to trick people into thinking they're conscious like way before they actually become conscious and then there's just the other side of it which is like we have no idea we don't know how human consciousness works like we have no idea how the brain works we have no idea how to like we have no idea how to do any of this any any of the stuff on people the the most advanced form of medical science that understands consciousness is actually anesthesiology because they know how to turn it off [Laughter] right they know how to click you know power off and then power back on which
is also very important but like they have no idea what's happening inside the black box and we have no idea nobody has any idea so so this is a parallel line of technological development that's not actually recreating the human brain it's doing something different it's basically training computers and how to understand process and then reflect back the real world it's very valuable work because it's going to make computers a lot more useful for example self-driving cars this is the same kind of work that makes a self-driving car work yeah so this is this is very valuable work it will create these programs that will be able to trick people very effectively right and so so there for example here's what i would be worried about which is basically like what percentage of people that we follow on twitter are even real people right yeah elon is trying to get to the bottom of that right now he's trying to get the bottom of that you know specifically on that issue from the business but just also think more generally which is like okay if you have a computer that's really good at writing tweets if you have a computer that's really good at writing angry political tweets or writing whatever absurdist you know humor or whatever it is like and by the way maybe the computer is going to be better at doing that than a lot of people are you know you could you can imagine a future internet in which most of the interesting content is actually getting created by machines you know there's this new system dolly um you know that's getting a lot of visibility now which is this thing where you can type in any phrase and it'll create you computer generated art right oh i've seen that yeah they've done some with me it's really weird yeah yeah you know chase lepard he's got a few of them that he put up on his instagram how does that work yeah yeah so it's a very similar thing so basically what they do with the the google has one of these and and open ai has one of these what they do is they pull in all of the images on the internet right so if you you think about if you go to google images or whatever just do a search you know on any topic it'll give you thousands of thousand images of you
whatever and then basically they pull in all the images um yeah that's me exactly how bizarre yeah so that's so that's ai generated art so that's ai generated art that's a different program that's just basically doing yeah sort of psychedelic art the the the dolly ones are basically they'll they're sort of composites um where they will give you basically a it's almost like an artist that will give you many different drafts yeah that's another one of me yeah so uh he the first one he go back to that please yeah you just had it up it's what does it say it said uh what joe rogan facing the dmt realm insanely detailed intricate hyper hyper masculinist miss dark elegant ornate luxury elite horror creepy ominous haunting moody dramatic volumetric light ak render 8k post hyper details so they say that and then they enter all this stuff in and this is what comes out and this is what comes out now holy yes okay so first of all yes it's incredible like that's amazing it's an original work of art that is exactly this back that didn't make my nose look like that it doesn't really look like that right not today it's it's a little off i would say if that was an artist like i think you got the nose wrong and you made my job well it's referencing these other artists if you see at the end it's actually referencing is probably pulling in portraits right of other people from those artists and using it to do a composite thing right but the fact that it can make art no but see what it's doing right so it's very impressive i mean the output's very impressive and the fact that it can do this impressive but it's being told exactly what to do yes it didn't have the idea that it was going to do that it was told it was it's it's following instructions right right so it's not sitting it's not sitting there like a real artist dreaming up new artistic concepts right but here's the question because you were you were saying this before that it can trick people into thinking it's real how do we know what's what is alive but this is the question what is a human consciousness interacting with another human consciousness i mean it is
data it is the understanding of the use of language inflection tone the vernacular that's used in whatever region you're communicating with this person in to make it seem as authentic and normal as possible and you're doing this back and forth like a game of volleyball right this is what language is and a conversation is if a computer's doing that well it doesn't have a memory well but it does have memory well it doesn't have emotions is that what we are i don't know because if that's what we are then we're all that's all we are right because the only difference is emotion and maybe biological needs like the need for food the need for sleep the need for you know the for touch and love and all the weird stuff that makes people people the emotional stuff but if you extract that the the normal interactions that people have on a day-to-day basis it's it's pretty similar yeah yeah well so so here would be the way to think about it is like what's the difference between an animal and a person right like why do we grant people rights that we don't grant animals rights and of course and of course that's a hot topic of debate because there are a lot of people who think animals should have more rights but but fundamentally we do we do have this idea we have this idea of what makes a human distinct from a horse or a dog right is is is self-awareness right as a sense of self a sense of self being conscious right you know i i descartes i think therefore i am right right and so at least we have this concept with this philosophical concept of consciousness being something that involves self-awareness like the computers the computer is like i told you the computer is quite capable of telling you it has self-awareness yeah it's also quite capable of telling you it doesn't it doesn't care right it has no opinion on whether it has consciousness or not and that's why i'm confident that these things are not conscious they're not alive but these things are they just it's just it's a program it's a program it's a program yeah but at what point in time does the program figure out how to write better programs right at what point in time does the
program fit figure out how to manifest a physical object that can take all of its knowledge and all the information that's acquired through the use of the of the internet which is the basically the origin theme in ex machina right the super scientist guy he's using his web browser his his search engine to scoop up all people's thoughts and ideas and he puts them into his robots which is basically what basically what what these companies are doing hopefully hopefully with a different result um well let me bring there's another top word hopefully there's another there's another topic the friend of a friend of mine peter peter thielenaer's argue sergers is like it's like basically he's like look us you know civilization is declining you can tell because all the science fiction movies are negative right like it's it's all dystopia everybody's got hope for the future everybody's negative and my answer is just like the negative stories are just more interesting right nobody nobody makes the movie with like the happy ai right like it's just not there's no drama in it right so anyway that's why i say hope hopefully it won't be hollywood's dystopian vision but here's another question though the nature of consciousness right which is another idea that the card had that i think therefore i am guy had is he had this idea of mind-body dualism which is also what ray kurzweil has with this idea that you'll be able to upload the mind which is like okay there's the mind which is like basically all of this you know some level of software equivalent coding something something happening and how we do all the stuff you just described then there's the body and there's some separation between mind and body where maybe the body is sort of can be arbitrarily modified or is disposable or could be replaced or replaced by a computer it's just not necessary once you upload your brain and of course and this is a relevant question for for the a for ai because of course the ai dolly has no body you know gpt3 has no body right well do we really believe in mind-body do we really believe mind and body are separate like do we really
believe that and what the science tells us is no they're not separate in fact they're very connected right and a huge part of what it is to be human is the intersection point of of of of brain and mind and then brain to rest the body for example all the medical research now that's going into the influence of gut bacteria on behavior right and then the sort of in the role of viruses and how they change behavior and like and so basically like i think the most evolved version of this the most sort of advanced version of this is like whatever it means to be human it's some combination of mind and body is some combination of logic and emotion it's some combination of mind and brain it leads to us being the crazy creative inventive destructive innovative caring hating people we are right the sort of mess yeah the mess that is humanity right like that that's that's amazing like that that you know the the four billion years of evolution that it took to get us to the point where we're at today is like amazing and i'm just saying like we don't know we don't have the slightest idea how to build that