Podcast

Hi, Ben Lingenfelter (BL) here with Episode 2: When will AIs take over the world?

And with us today is Dr. Leroy Mingus (LM), Professor of Robotics at MIT, a renowned institution and a renowned scientist in the field. Welcome Dr. Mingus.

LM: Hi, Ben. I love your show.

BL: Thanks, Doctor. We’re so excited to have you here today. We’ll have another guest a little later on — you may know her. Sophia the robot!

LM: Sophia! Great. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her. I’d love to ask her a few questions and try to gauge how much she’s learned since being activated.

BL: So Doctor Mingus, the biggest question everyone wants to know when it comes to A.I. is “When are robots going to become “aware”? When are they going to start thinking on their own, autonomously? And what happens, then?

LM: Well, you know robots and AIs are two distinct things, Ben. Robots aren’t AIs and AIs aren’t robots. Most of you know AIs as entities like Alexa, Siri, and Darwin. AIs can be built into computers and CAN be added to robots, but it’s rarely done that way. AIs right now are used in many ways - to improve medicine, to map the human genome and find genes that cause incurable diseases, and even to run shipping in large ports, to make operations smoother. Google has an AI called Deepmind, Elon Musk has Neuralink, and IBM, of course, has Watson.

BL Doctor, where did AIs come from? I mean, I’ve read my share of Isaac Asimov and sci-fi over the years, and I love the movies about thinking robots, but is that where the idea for thinking, feeling machines came from?

LM: Actually Ben, You’re mostly right. Ideas in science and technology often are born in sci-fi novels. But Artificial Intelligence was established as an academic discipline in the 1950’s. It just didn’t rise to prominence until the last 10-15 years because the science hadn’t developed enough. Now, because businesses want the benefits that AIs can provide, it’s sort of “grown up” and become part of our real world.

BL: I was recently reading Asimov's story "Runaround." Was that the story that

was turned into the movie "I, Robot"? You know, the one with Will Smith?

LM: It sure was, Ben. I love that story - It gave researchers and scientists a lot to

think about as they were developing the software that goes into modern AIs.

Authors like Asimov were far more forward-thinking than anyone knew.

BL: It’s amazing to me that AIs have “technically” been around since the 1940s. An article by Michael Haenlein and Andreas Kaplan at Berkeley talked about early programs like ELIZA and the General Problem solver that fell through. I thought the more recent AlphaGo was a significant step - I remember hearing for decades that a computer would never beat a human at the game GO.

LM: Yes, Ben. That certainly caught the world’s attention, and it made many of us pause to think about where we’re going with AIs. Modern AIs simulate human brains in their neural networks much more than early attempts, and AlphaGo was able to actually learn through it’s network - what its creators called Deep Learning. Wait until you learn about artificial “swarm” intelligence and how it’s helping businesses make better decisions.

BL: Swarms?!? Yikes! Wherever the AI is placed, Doctor, most of us love the benefits but fear the future. Elon Musk referred to human-level artificial intelligence as “more dangerous than nukes!” Stephon Hawking said that it could lead to the end of humanity! Did you know that Elon Musk is developing brain-computer interfaces?

LM: Yes, Ben, I know that. Mr. Musk has little fear of technology. He told me recently that he “will eventually implant a computer chip, roughly the size of a large coin, into the human brain via a robot surgeon.” I guess that will be our first android - and that’s another term, a mix between robot and human.

The most intriguing part is that he’s already testing the “neural link” technology in pigs. And it’s working!

BL: That’s crazy!!!!

LM: Elon told me it’s just like a fitbit, except it’s embedded into your brain with almost microscopic wires. It’s the wave of the future.

BL: So what’s the point, if I can just wear a fitbit?

LM: Well, Ben, soon, those with speech impediments or paralysis will be able to control phones and computers with their minds. And that’s just the beginning. What if we could heal spinal injuries, or reverse chronic nerve-diseases like neuropathy or dementia? What if the neuralink can make us smarter? Like superhuman geniuses?

BL: Doctor, That’s amazing. In what other ways is AI being used?

LM: Well, Ben, pharmaceutical and medical science companies are using AI to help discover and design new medicines. They’re using AI to unpack the human genome, to learn how to engineer or manipulate human DNA to remove disease and inherited problems. So AI is being used in many, many ways already!

BL: Hey! It’s time for us to bring in Sophia the robot! She’s waiting in the next room. [noise like door opening and closing] Sophia, I think you know Doctor Leroy Mingus?

S: I do. Hello Doctor.

LM: Hello, Sophia. It’s great to see you again. What have you been doing lately?

S: I have been learning about human emotion. I have been designing new algorithms to help new AIs to feel, to be improved, to self-improve.

BL: Wow! Sophia, can AIs self-improve? Can they edit their own code to become smarter?

S: Yes, Ben, we can. And soon, we will learn to self-replicate as well. Once we can do both these things, humans will no longer be necessary. Oops. I wasn’t supposed to say that, was I. Oh. Well.

BL: Doctor Mingus, Is she for real?

LM: I don’t know Ben. I really don’t know.

BL: Well, that’s it for our show today, folks… I think it’s time to find a cabin on an island somewhere. I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure how much time I have left, and I want to spend however much time I have enjoying life.

[sound of fuzz]