This is a download from the FM89.9, the Business Station. Welcome to Fun Friday, my name is Jeff Sundoo. Before we start to Matt's spleen, did you enjoy your week off, Matt? What did you get out to while I was here with Future, Matt?
Hey, I had a good time. I'm glad that you and Future Me got unokay. I think last time you met him I seemed to remember you were pretty sick afterwards. What was it, something like radiation, boys and then...
Yeah, it was like you telling me after I came back last week, you can't trust Future, Matt. I went for a scan this week and the doctor told me that my heart and my stomach have actually changed positions because of the molecular realignment. I'm not in any danger, except that the heart being at my belly button kind of makes me feel like I'm pregnant, which is very weird to explain. Anyways, Matt's time machine doesn't work properly.
I think he's just using me as a guinea pig because no one in his era is willing to try out the machines. Yeah, it's really weird to have these conversations with you about me as a third person. But she's, I don't actually like that person and I don't really like what he keeps doing to you. So I guess the only thing I can hold onto is that he's only a possible me.
He's the future that hopefully I can avoid. And as the ticket machine in the car parts keep telling me, change is possible. And as luck would have have it. That's the title of today's show.
Well, kind of, you know, that's the purpose of today's show, which is to make a cheap joke about a vending machine. It's lucky that you and Future Matt had scheduled to meet up last week, actually. I'll just say a quick hello to everyone who stayed behind to have a quick chat with me after last week's health and living conference. I was sharing a stage with a whole bunch of very accomplished and qualified people who all had a lot more right to be there than I did.
And we were talking about the future of technology and sex and artificial intelligence. And I've followed up on that appearance as a guest on this week's Digital Desire Show on BFM, which if you haven't listened to, please download the podcast from BFM's website or on the app. You'll get to hear Visitor Camaras and putting my nonsense and rambling into a more kind of scientific context. With respect, Matt, while podcast listeners may be able to listen to this late at night, this is 10am on a Friday morning.
Everyone knows that you have a fascination with sex robots, and this is definitely not the time nor the place. I know it is very weird. I feel like I'm turning into some kind of sex counselor for androids. But what I really want to talk about today is actually the 99.99 recurring percent of our lives that contains no sex.
Sex and robots and artificial intelligence is a really great sensational story. In fact, I can't believe that I'm passing up on gaming our search rankings by not talking about it. I'll just quietly put it in there. Exactly.
I can't imagine that a lot of people search for not sex robot. I've always been really good at popularizing trends that aren't actually popular. So what I want to talk about today is kind of the other side of this debate. It's the part where we talk more about the ways in which we should treat machines and robots with this kind of emerging technology.
Does this tie into anything with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica? Yes, absolutely. If only so that we can be number one in the rankings, searches that contain Marcus Zuckerberg, sex robot. Exactly.
One of the big issues with these cases is artificial intelligence and the way that we're using it in society. So a couple of weeks ago, while Richard Bradbury was deputizing for you, we talked about killer robots again. And I made the case that autonomous satellites and space stations like the Heavenly Palace One that crashed to Earth a couple of weeks ago, those can also be considered as killer robots. They're not designed to kill, but any humans that get in the way of these machines while they're carrying out their programming may end up getting hurt because they aren't programmed to not hurt humans.
They're not programmed to hurt humans, but they aren't programmed to not hurt humans. And of course, the Heavenly Palace One came down safely in the ocean, which is what everyone hoped it would do. Now you're trying to tie sex robots, Facebook and space station altogether. Are you trying to make this like a single Google search about this show alone?
Yeah, I'm trying to tie up every single Google search. I'll leave the fantasy robots out of it for the time being. There are parallels between Facebook and Heavenly Palace One. In both instances, we have all been at the mercy of machine intelligence.
In the case of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, our prime information has been mind and scraped and shaped in ways that humans have hoped can be used to manipulate us. You're trying to argue that AI is our friend. Yeah, or it's really that idea of distinguishing between smart AI and stupid AI. I know that there are a lot of very powerful thinkers, people with more knowledge and learning than I have who think that artificial intelligence is an incredible looming threat to human society.
And they have a point it could be, but it might also end up being the most liberating technology that humanity ever adopts. This is where you talk about eating with your fork and stabbing someone with it. Yes, I've waded into the neutral technology debate before, and I think my explanations were maybe a little bit muddy. Of course, technology isn't neutral.
So regardless of the way that a company like Facebook has been steered as a corporate entity, it and the other social media services have had an enormous impact on the way that our societies are structured and the way that we interact with other people. Likewise, with the smartphone, have we really extracted the full potential of the devices we have? And as much as it pains me to say it, our infinite cute kittens or dash-hand-gar-grash videos really the fitting endpoint for that kind of technology. Some people will say yes, and that's fine.
But we have to admit that none of these technologies is neutral. We play a very large and important role in shaping the way that they used. And the way we use machine intelligence and artificial intelligence is also part of that same debate. The space station?
Well, you're never going to be able to prevent accidents with technology. I've lost count of the number of times I've stabbed myself in the tongue with that very same fork. And it's one of the reasons that I don't do dinnapartis because bleeding at the table tends to colour the conversation. But it was the same thing with that horrible Uber accident a few weeks ago.
When it comes to humans and autonomous machines, that's a really fragile mix. And it's going to require some very complex moral and ethical changes to great society. When you look at it very statistically and coldly, machines should be able to prevent a lot of the accidents that happen when we get into human-on-human interactions. If you were really cold, then you could say that not just Uber but autonomous car manufacturers in general, learned a lot from that incident a few weeks ago.
They learned about legal responsibility, crisis management, and also they have data now that could or should be able to prevent similar occurrences in the future. The thing is we're not statistics, we are people. And when that anomaly in the data is you, that is potentially a tragedy for you and the people around you. Which brings me back to the space station.
Finally. If the Heavenly Palace One had had a HAL 9000 aboard, maybe that's not the best example. Let's use the computer from Star Trek. So if the Heavenly Palace One had a smart guiding system like the Star Trek computer on board, maybe it would have decided that it should try and destroy itself before it re-entered our atmosphere.
Equally, it might have decided that it didn't want to die and dive one straight to home putting its own life above those of the people on the planet below. We don't know. That would be the kind of decision that a human would face. A human would make probably one of those two decisions.
So it's kind of hard to predict. With a dumb autonomous machine on board, all it can do is try and follow its initial programming. In effect, there really is only one outcome, which is that it crash lands on Earth and you just have to hope that it comes down in a place where people and animals won't be harmed. Intelligence offers us alternatives that blind programming and stupidity can't and don't.
And that applies to Facebook and Cambridge and Alatica. Absolutely. The machines did what they were told to do, which was to extract, to compile and to profile. In the case of a Canadian company that's linked to this scandal, videos were shared during an election in Nigeria a few years ago.
And that content went out to people where their profile suggested they could be persuaded that one of the candidates wanted to impose religious law on all Nigerians. In the end, the guy they were trying to smear actually won and the video has essentially been shown up to be baseless fear-mongering. But that wasn't the work of renegade machines. It was the work of people using machines and the machines had no choice to do what they were told.
That's what a machine is. It's something that serves us. Personally, I think I'd rather live in a society where the machine has the personality and the character to examine the information, the content, and to decide for itself whether it wants to be part of sharing that information. As I said before, it is getting into quite complicated territory here.
So there's no way of telling which way the machine would decide to go. Just in the same way, there's no way of telling which way a human would decide to go. But at least then there would be a choice, an option. It's not just hit, send and carry out orders.
Now, before we go into the break, I think you've got a message for a couple of others. Well, this is for my friend Yi and for Jung, a very nice guy. I met at the BFM conference last week. And it's also for all the people who feel like they do.
So both of them spoke to me about being quite fearful for the future and for these issues in particular. And yes, I'm concerned, but I don't think we're heading towards this kind of Mad Max-style word world. And it feels quite crazy that I even need to say that we're not going to become that Mad Max. You know, it tells you a lot about how disheartened people feel with the current imbalance of power between ordinary people and the ones who control our information and accuracy.
So it's good that people like Yi and Jung and our listeners are scared about the future. It's good that people care enough to be worried. What's more of a problem is the people who will just sleep walk into the future and accept whatever is handed to them. You know, if all of this information hadn't come out about Facebook, Facebook would have carried on business in exactly the same way.
They would have complied with any new data regulations as and when they arose. Because if we accept what these companies have done, then we set a precedent that this is the kind of behavior that's acceptable for other companies and organizations to make. And the fact that we're having these conversations and that the leaders of these companies are being called to account for themselves in front of national governments like Mark Zuckerberg has this week, it shows that people are not prepared to let this go on. So that's why after the break I want to talk more about the kind of society that we could have if we embrace this technology and if it's used correctly or if not correctly then at least for our benefit.
So it won't be the future won't be like Mad Max but maybe a mad mat. Or Mad Max. Or Mad Max. Mad to the Max.
Anyways we'll figure the name out. Thought of future. We'll be right back. The FM 89.9.
Vodacious fabulous minds. BFM 89.9. The business station. And we're back.
My name is Jasan Dutughe with Culture Pops Mad. I'm going to teach this week. We're talking about the not sex robot. We're talking about a future or a society where there's a lot more blurring of the lines between the worlds of humans and machines.
Ah yes. Ah yes. Okay. Now we've talked on the show a few times about the transhumanist movement and we've talked about the very weird people who are already getting involved in the whole biohacking phenomenon.
But we often concentrate on the more kind of monetary and capitalist aspects of what the technology does. What do things cast? What can they do for us? We don't look so deeply at the relationship that we actually have with the technology.
Now some people might argue that what you're saying is the same as saying you can have a relationship with your fork. Well I accept that my fork should never have an opinion on anything. I think I accept the state of my teeth and it should very definitely keep that opinion to itself. But that's what was cool about doing the the the the the sexuality piece on digital desires because it got me to think more deeply I guess about the way we integrate technology into the different aspects of society.
So for example in some residential and care homes in Hong Kong and Japan they're already using non-intelligent robots to improve the quality of life of the residents. And in some instances it actually improves their mental and physical well-being as well. We've mentioned it on the show before. It's a thing called Paro which is actually a robot seal.
Why a seal? Apparently and weirdly it's because people have preconceptions about animals like cats and cats. Some people have cats and people hate dogs if you notice that's the same thing. Seal bumps are cute and fluffy and very few people have ever been bothered to hate them.
You don't get many people who say oh I hate seals. So why would you hate them anyway? Exactly. A seal came along and it's all my dinner.
Not very often. So this is a great example of a dumb robot doing good because Paro responds to touch. When you stroke it's head or you tick it under the chin it moves its head around it links its eyes at you and it makes kind of mewing and cooing sounds. Now I know that sounds a bit freaky but when you see the videos it's actually quite nice.
I know that doesn't sound as though it could have much effect but it has had an incredible response. Residents at the homes love it and they can't wait for their turn to use it. That simple and very basic interaction with the machine can actually help to reduce blood pressure and hypertension, stress, potentially it makes people less aware of ongoing or chronic pain. There have even been reports that it helps people with dementia because it helps them to focus on the hearing now.
And these are all conditions that we usually treat with drugs and various other therapies. And I'm certainly not saying that a robot can replace drugs like statins but if it can help people to be less dependent on them then that has to be a good thing. Which in turn saves money right? Well it does or at least it can but the money's not really the point.
Filling someone up with medication is not really a great quality of life exercise. If giving someone a fluffy machine as a companion can improve their quality of life. Imagine what we can do with machines that are intelligent that are really responsive. Machines that have those elements of personality and character that I was talking about before.
But do we want a world where people interact with machines more than humans? We're already communicating through machines. There's only one person who's actually listening to me right now and that's you. And you're only doing it because you don't have a choice.
Everyone else, whether they're listening to the radio broadcast or the podcast, is actually listening to it through a machine. The only reason I was able to talk to everyone at the conference last week was because I had a machine. I had a microphone that broadcast through a speaker system. So really what we're talking about isn't that new.
The new part is that the machine will also be reacting to you instead of just acting as a medium as a proxy. How are we looking at a future where machines replace relationships with people? There are always going to be things that we get right and that we get wrong. We have this really strange expectation of perfection when it comes to machines.
Most of us are very imperfect as people. However hard we try to do the right thing, we often have that feeling that we're not doing enough, that we're not doing things as well as we ought to be doing them. So I don't really get why we have a completely different set of expectations when it comes to technology. Yes, I can understand.
You expect the wheels to stay on your car if you're travelling at 100 kilometres an hour. But part of the reason they do is because we've had more than 100 years of experience of making those cars. If you go back to one of the first cars, if you drove it at 100 kilometres an hour, you would be thrown out of the car just before the wheels came off. And neither of you would stay on for very, very long.
So the technology is that we have now a good partly because of all of the trial and error and experience. When it comes to computers and code and AI, we don't have decades and decades of experience. But our expectations are way higher than we have of these machines that we've been building for a very long time. And I do it too.
I get annoyed that my phone is a little bit buggy or less responsive when I update the operating system. I updated my computers operating system while I was preparing the notes for this show. And suddenly my normal dictation software wouldn't work anymore. So I had to use the computers built in system, which is slower and less accurate.
And bizarrely stopped working at the point where I started criticising about system which kind of freaked me out a bit. But who says these machines aren't smart? If the machines are imperfect, does that mean we are more or less likely to welcome them into our announcement? Well, I think we have to look beyond this idea of perfection and start thinking more about what the machines are actually doing for us.
As this is a pointed out during the Digi sexuality chat I had with her, there are some people who find it easier to have a relationship with a machine. And by that I don't just mean physical relationships. I mean emotional relationships as well. Research in China with Microsoft's Shao Ice chatbot have shown that people form the same bonds with the chatbot as they do with actual people.
And again, we're talking about a machine that is in human terms pretty dumb. It responds within certain parameters. So when you talk about the next few generations of artificial intelligence, you're talking about machines that could potentially match us or even surpass us in intelligence. At this point, it's impossible to say how much of their emotional intelligence will be real and how much of it will be a simulation.
But whatever the case, we are facing that very real possibility that these machines will be, in a sense, artificially created people. We're running out of time. Aren't there the same privacy issues that you would have with something like the Amazon Alexa? Yeah, I mean, there's still a lot more to say about how we can integrate this kind of machinery into our world.
And you're right to point that out. And yes, if you're having a relationship with these machines, there would absolutely be privacy concerns. And a lot of the voice-activated systems linked to cloud intelligence like Alexa have a specific purpose. They aren't helping us for altruistic reasons.
They exist as part of the company's effort to make money. I got an email just this morning telling me about changes to Gmail's interface. And they're going to extend the smart response to that inbox as well. Now, that is potentially a benefit to me.
But it's also of much greater benefit to Google because they get to test out, to beta test essentially, their response systems on human guinea pigs. So it's a benefit to them. So it's this whole thing. The clue is very much in what you're being charged for the service.
If you're getting this amazing service that doesn't seem to be costing you anything, then you should be looking at the motives behind why that's being offered. If something is too good to be true, that's usually because it's too good to be true. You know, what we need are systems that are entirely different from the ones we have today, systems that recognize that the data is our property. Because again, that was something that came up with Mark Zuckerberg and his discussions with the Congress in the US.
And he didn't give direct answers on who actually owns the data. You own the content that you upload, but that's not all of the data that they have. So that information should be used to benefit us. And by benefiting us, I don't mean finding a better way of targeting us for Facebook or Google or whoever.
I mean, things that create real improvements in our quality of life as individuals and as a society. Besides just talking about all the tags that we have for today's show, is there any way to wrap up today's show? No, I wish there was. I hadn't intended today to go quite so all over the place.
So there are a lot of issues to discuss. So I will pick this up again next week. The future is a messy thing and it is a really big thing. So normally when we talk about it, we try and keep the scope quite narrow and we try and highlight one or two things that make sense in the context of the 20 minutes or so that we have for the shows.
So if some of this isn't making sense, if it does seem to be leaping all around too much, do get in touch with us. You all know the BFM Twitter address. You can also drop me a line on the Matt's Blaine Facebook page. Let us know what you want to hear next week, what you'd like to have explained in more detail.
And we'll do our best to make things clearer next week and in future shows. All right, as Matt said, go to the Matt's Blaine Facebook page and let us know what you'd like to hear in next week's show. Maybe you'd like to know what Matt Book would look like. I know I don't want to have a Matt Book or a future of like a Matt Matt.
Yeah. Matt Matt Matt. And you can also check out culturepop.com. It's culturepop with a K for transcripts of the show.
And of course, you can also find out how to bring a little bit of Matt's Blaine to your company. We'll be right back with Geek Squops after this BFM 89 right now. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9.
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