MSP79 [] What Does It Mean To Be Human?

This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. This is Tech Talk made possible by TM1. It's one Friday, my name is Jasandu and you're listening to Tech Talk. We're back to Destruction this week but in a very different way.

Over the past few weeks we've had and looked at some of the many ways that technology is disrupting our world and our lives. Today MSP asked what does it mean to be human? So I think we all know that we're actually human. Hey Jeff, I know, it sounds like a stupid thing to say, right.

Of course, but we only think we know that we're human. And yeah, I know. And that's not quite the same thing. And it's certainly not the same as what we might become in the near future.

So some of this will be a bit of a retread of some of the ground we covered last year when we looked at AI and the future of robots and automation. But also today we're going to place it into that context of disruption to link it to what we've been covering over the past few weeks. And also looking at some of the ways that these disruptive forces might be moving us or even forcing us towards becoming a new species entirely. It could be really changed that much.

Well, of course, I mean, for thousands of years the answer has been obvious. No, but those lines are blurring. They're blurring really fast. So take that story we covered on Geeks a couple of weeks ago, the one about Amazon's new packing robot.

So those machines may soon replace human workers at a lot of Amazon's distribution centers. And of course, that takes the company a step closer towards eradicating one of its biggest costs and inefficiencies in the supply chain. And of course, that's us. But as we covered at the time, there's a twist to this story.

Yeah, robots aren't very good at picking up odd shit items that we buy at a robot hands. Yeah, exactly. So the machines have to be fed by human workers. So the tables have turned the humans are now there to serve the robots.

And these are machines that are implacable. They're capable of just working and working and working. And that's a really daunting and inhuman task for a human worker. And that's the brave new world that I think we're going to find ourselves working in as support staff to machines.

Which implies that in the future, our roles will be to do the things that machines can't? Well, yeah, I mean, that's pretty much always been the role of kind of humans and machines. We build machines to do the things we can't or don't want to do. And they extend our capabilities and talents to achieve more with the same or preferably less human effort.

I mean, that's the purpose of having these machines. But we're seeing a change. As the machines themselves become more capable and intelligent, they are starting to surpass us in many things. So the nature of that relationship changes.

So we become the minion workers. Yeah, I think I used the example of a book I read earlier this year called Battle Star Suburbia by Chris McRudan. So that's about humans living in a world that's run and ruled by sentient robots. And the only role that people have is as cleaners, because although the robots can fly into space, for some reason, they aren't very good at waterproofing.

So humans have to do the cleaning tasks. And that's really what we're looking at today. That world of tomorrow where everything is kind of turned upside down and blurred, where robots and neural networks and quantum computers are your bosses, your colleagues, your friends. They might even be your clients and your customers.

And this is where we start heading into the scary stuff? Well, maybe. I mean, it's that thing we have choices. So this isn't do or die.

Are you sure? OK, I was trying to be a bit re-durring. I think it probably is do or die. Certainly we're looking at the rise of new forms of intelligence, perhaps even blends of humans and machines.

And we're at the edge of what could even be seen as an evolutionary leap in our species. So I think our entire world will need to be redesigned around this evolution. All right. So nothing to worry about that then.

Well, a couple of months ago, we did a show about data babies. So the humans who will be tracked from birth until death. Their data trail starts before conception because their parents plot fertility data into an app. They use apps to record the scans, the birth plans, the doctors, the institutions they're going to use.

And of course, all of these things give an idea of what the wealth of the family is. And those same parents will log into YouTube, they'll watch hours and hours of parenting, how to guides and their loyalty cards, their online sales will record kind of every baby product and every supplement, every panic purchase they make. So yeah, in a sense, we are voluntarily creating these kind of pre-consumers. Which day will continue once as the baby is born?

Well, yeah, those same parents will record the birth on a smartphone. Those images will be cached and mined. Those baby photos will be archived. I think we covered or touched on before Google now has an AI that can predict what we look like when we age.

Snapchat recently introduced one of those filters that can be like a baby or, you know, like a different gender. Yeah, exactly. And of course, you know, parents remotely view their kids growing up on baby monitors that live stream those images to a cloud server. And that footage may then be turned into anonymised data, which third-party companies then study.

Until the point where they start, they are all online existence. Yeah, of course. You know, at some point, those kids will want to become the stars of their own independent feeds rather than making guest appearances on their parents' profiles. I guess they're parents.

Well, I mean, that's essentially what it is, because you're looking at it as a world where everyone is acting. So, you know, their online education tools rather will monitor their intellectual development. It will also gauge their susceptibility to suggestion and how suitable they are for different forms of advertising. Location apps will provide help to identify your kids' friends and their social habits.

AI assistants will record snippets of their conversation. So technology will be this ubiquitous and seamless thing. It will be this invisible part of all of our digital lives. And of course, digital lives with data trails that leads, we don't know where.

If you're making the case that we're being primed for the machines, what about the reverse? Are the machines ready for us? Well, we know that AI can do incredible things. It can accurately process and translate natural language.

It anticipates our behaviour, it answers our email and our phone calls, and it boosts our productivity in thousands of tiny ways. It can look for those really complex patterns in data that humans struggle to find, and it's benefiting thousands of industries, including, you know, market research, medicine, finance, education, engineering, the arts, even radio. But as we've said over and over for all of its ability, AI is essentially dumb. And unlike kids, because we often compare smart AI to kids, it will never outgrow that set of programming limitations.

So it's a five-year-old forever? Well, yeah, imagine a future of talking about dinosaurs at the dinner table every night, you know, forever. And those dumb machines don't serve us very well. We really need to have machines that are intelligent enough to make genuine choices, machines that can adapt to be able to think beyond the confines of their programming, and a machine that, you know, wouldn't carry out the commands of a company like Cambridge Analytica.

Isn't it what people like Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking were afraid of? I guess. I mean, I don't think we're at that point yet, but we are on the way to a generation of machines that isn't going to think like us. So whose logic and reasoning processes will be unknowable to us.

But I'm not sure that that means that they would be an existential threat to us, much as I don't like to have any opinions that disagree with Stephen Hawking, because that just assumes your wrong. I don't think AI is going to be an existential threat. But isn't that fear a natural thing? It is, but we don't have to fear things that think or speak in a different way to us, although people generally fear me.

Earlier in the year, we used the example of a TED talk called How Language Shapes, the Way We Think by Professor Boroditsky, and she gave an example about bridges. So in Spanish bridges, a masculine word, so bridges have masculine linguistic characteristics, like strong and long. In German, it's a feminine word. So they're described with feminine characteristics, like beautiful and elegant.

And just to check, I did want to see if there was any hard data to suggest that Spanish bridges are stronger and, you know, German bridges are more beautiful. Can't find any hard data on that. So, you know, even within our own species, there are huge differences in the way we think and communicate. But you can't dismiss it that easily.

Well, that's why we have to have choices, you know, to build that society or to shift in a new direction. I don't think we should change direction if we're really scared, or rather that all we're really scared of is that lack of shared language. As we develop ever more complex AI, our ability to control or observe them shifts further away. So Facebook and Google have both had to shut down chatbot systems.

And they didn't do anything wrong. They just basically evolved the language they were meant to be communicating in. They weren't malfunctioning. They were just finding more efficient ways to use that language.

And that's what we do with language, but we do it, of course, at a much slower pace over generations and generations. Of course, if you're watching a language evolve in real time, if you're watching your own language diverge and develop foreign and unintelligible patterns, of course, watching those machines is going to be an unsettling experience. You think it's more about shifting our perspective and our way of thinking? Well, I think we're overstating the threat of AI because we frame the argument in a human context.

And that's a context that will probably be irrelevant to the machine. I'm not entirely sure that AI will even consider us in any way that we can understand. It's a bit like a puppy. He adores his owner, but he has no way to comprehend that his owner loves him back.

For him, it's just a one-way relationship. And it could end up being that way with artificial intelligence. In truth, I think we have probably most to fear from the careless or unthinking actions of artificial intelligence. But then that's precisely the threat that humans pose to every other species on the planet already.

I know there has to be a butt, but we will get to that after the break. When MSP returns and met, this starts us out of the last shreds of humanity. We're still clinging on to the VIRF-A, BFM 89.9. You're listening to Tech Talk made possible by TM-1.

Bloggers for Malaysia, BFM 89.9. You're listening to Tech Talk made possible by TM-1. And we're back. It is Tech Talk.

My name is Jasando together with CulturePops.net. I'm a Titch and we're back on SkyNet Radio. I mean, sorry, I mean, MSP. Today we're turning us into machines and we're waiting for the biggest butt of them all.

I take it. That's a very unsightly jab at me. On the subject of SkyNet, have you seen the trailer for the new term, Nick? No, I've not.

No. You have to watch it seriously. It looks awesome. Linda Hamilton's back and she is still looking badass.

Nice. It's not that much of a digression. One of the undercurrents of the trailer seems to be characters who are both human and machine. So we've moved away from those skin-covered androids of all the Arnold Schwarzenegger character.

And that's the sort of actual future we're looking at. Hopefully without the machines trying to make humanity extinct with a bit of love. We'll get to the physical transformation part of that comment in a minute. First, let's get back to that.

But how do we stop machines from turning onto us? Well, really simple. Treat them well. Don't just treat them as family, treat them as though they're human.

Or if that's an insult to them, because why would they want to be anything as inferior or puny as us humans, then just treat them as equals. And that will require discussion about the rights that these machines will or won't have. In the US, the transhumanist party has been running on a platform that would revise the US constitution to encompass machine rights, as well as human rights. But that party is still very much an outlier.

But there are still plenty of politicians who don't know the difference between a robot, an android, or iOS. And we're not getting very far with these discussions. Google's ATAC? Well, yeah, Google tried to put together an ethics advisory board on AI earlier this year.

It was called the ATEAC. Yeah, I'll let it in. Yeah. And it quickly fell apart over arguments about how qualified some of the panel of experts were to sit on the panel.

And that problem raises some really interesting points. Who should get to talk about the future of AI and the determination of machines? Should it be technologists, business leaders, politicians, interest groups? Or should it exclude any vested interests and focus exclusively on what?

The public wants. And of course, how long before the machines demand their own representation on these boards? I could demand their own representation. Well, I know it seems a little bit weird and esoteric, but it is actually grounded in precedent.

So in the US company personhood, the idea of the corporation as an individual is already legally enshrined. So if we want to have machine intelligence that is self-aware and self-determining, we have to decide what freedoms those machines will enjoy. The simple things that we take for granted like the right to own property to start and run your own company or to vote. How do we protect ourselves?

Because surely, assuming the machines are always right is a very dangerous path to take. Yeah, I mean, we have to be brutally honest. AI may be smart in the future, but it won't always be right. You know, sentient creatures are capable of both good and bad actions, either with or without intent.

Now, humans have long established laws and codes of behavior to deal with these. It determines the correct course of action to take when people make mistakes or commit crimes. Those systems may need to be reworked for a world that contains people and these intelligent machines. So you have to wonder, do you switch the machine off?

Do you kill a sentient and self-aware creature? If not, how do you imprison a virtual intelligence? And how would you even quantify what constitutes a punishment? Could we just, you know, not bother?

And that is a perfectly valid point. You know, a lot of people do ask me, why does any of this matter? They're just machines, they don't need rights. And if society decides that, you know, then it's fine.

But if machines don't have rights, they shouldn't be self-aware. That concept applies to the AI power in your phone, your home or your company. If it's sentient and it has no rights, then it's a slave. And one thing that history, and of course, going through, has shown us, is that societies that keep slaves are frequently attacked by dragons.

But of course, we're not just talking about machines here. Which is where we come back to that Terminator trailer? Yes, because it's all about hybrids. People that are part machine and machines that are part human.

Or do we even stop making that distinction? Because, you know, we've been blurring the line between human and machine for decades. Artificial limbs and organs are commonplace. You've got lots of them.

Bionic limb systems like re-walk are allowing stroke victims and paraplegics to walk again. We can implant computers and nerve endings to switch off pain signals. I've got that one. And alleviate common conditions like arthritis.

And of course, brain and cancer are already in the works for people with dementia, enabling them to store and access memories that their brains will no longer run. And we can use those same technologies to enhance healthy humans. And that's the big issue. You know, if we build implants for damaged brains, then someone is going to take those devices and use them to enhance healthy brains.

Somebody else will connect those implants to the cloud. And if you connect that implant to the cloud, then why not connect it to Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant? Suddenly you don't just have a chip in your brain. You have an AI.

Fast forward a couple of product cycles and that chip is no longer Siri or Alexa. It's a machine with its own thoughts and its own identity. And it's that scary prospect of a second personality actually sharing your brain. But can machines make those evolutionary steps to become more human-like?

I'm not sure how we get there. But I can't imagine that we won't. Now you brought up a story about Minecraft and artificial intelligence learning to make diamonds. Yeah.

This is going to use neural networks that actually reverse engineer decision-making processes. This is another new form of neural network. So even though I don't know how we're going to get there, we're getting all of these different forms of machine learning. And I just assume that we will get to that point where the machines are more human-like.

And of course, we've long since broken many of the barriers that we think separate us from machines like creativity, the artwork Min-Max E that sold at Christie's New York last October for over $400,000. That was, yeah, exactly. That was painted by a generative adversarial network created by the Parisian Art Collective obvious. And even that's not a new idea.

Artists like the Tech of Angelus structure with Davis, they've been coding algorithms to computer-generate artwork for well over a decade, probably close to two. The music industry is moving towards automation. Song Music has an experimental music composition. AI, you can listen to the examples on YouTube.

They're terrible, but they're there. And of course, last year, the filmmaker Tony Kay, the director of American History Tech's, he announced his intention to cast an AI as the lead actor in forthcoming movie project called Second Born. None of this necessarily points to that evolutionary leap that you mentioned. Well, okay, you have to squint a bit.

I admit, if you zoom back out for a minute, you can see this post-human age on the horizon, a technology-fueled evolutionary jump, beings that share human and machine traits. And then you start to see the divergence between enhanced and basically off-the-shelf humans, add gene modification tech like CRISPR into the mix. And you can see why the legal framework governing AI becomes so important. Even without the machines and the implants and the intelligence, we're already capable of creating this post-human species.

You mean those gene-edited babies? Yeah, six months ago, there was the case of the Rogue-Chinese Bioresearcher, Hijang Kui, who claimed to have altered fetal DNA to create the world's first gene-edited babies. And we can't turn back this tide because DNA modding can cost you as little as $40. You can hack yourself by following YouTube videos.

I know that's not a phrase you ever want to hear, right? You can hack your DNA on YouTube. The age of the post-human is already here. Whether we're ready or not.

And that puts us in a tricky place. Will we be part of the same species, or will we see humanity split and diverge? Can a machine be a person? And of course, at what point does a person become a machine?

Or if we use that earlier example, if there's a sentient AI shaping your brain, are you one person or two? You know, the real question is, Matt, is any of these going to happen or are you just making it up? I know it sounds like a lot of it could be made up. But we've mentioned this example before.

So last fall, it was reported that a team of scientists at the University of Washington linked three people's brainwaves. And they played a game of Tetris using only their thoughts. Now, I know that's about retro-80s as my tech debt. But you know, Facebook is looking at ways to allow you to think your post.

And most of the other big tech companies are looking at some form of brain processing technology. And there was a story we covered on Geeks last week about brainwaves and hearing aids. Yeah, the one that uses machine intelligence to analyze the user's brainwaves. So it can determine which voice in the crowd the listener wants to focus on.

And that's perhaps an even more salient question for right now. In this age of free services and least software, we may have to ask, who actually owns those thoughts? Yeah. Right now, most countries lack even the basic legislation to deal with fake news on social media.

So how are we supposed to wrestle with the concept of, you know, freemium tier memories? So we're pretty much into the unknown. Well, this is going to be a strange and very different world. Wealth and resources may truly determine what kind of person you are.

And of course, the one with the most money gets to be the Terminator human. Well, Sarah Connor seems to manage your key. But that's only because friendly terminators keep coming back in time to help her. And that's what these smart systems will be.

They will be this very money-dependent helping hand. And I think it could change everything because who needs education when you can have all the world's knowledge and understanding put onto a chip in your head? We may find that implants teach babies to walk, to talk, and to eat. And all of these things could be an essential edge in a world where automation has replaced pretty much all the jobs except the CEOs.

So it follows that those who enhance will be more likely to progress and to succeed. So for the first time in our history, the hubs will be physically and mentally better than they have not. Now, this is the point where you see we have a choice. We do have choices.

But we also have a lot of questions to ask, decisions to make before we can actually make those big choices. So what are we going to need or want in this cybernetic age? How do you quantify a person or a legal individual who is distributed across dozens of cloud servers across the globe? I'll be honest, I don't have the answers.

And I don't think anyone has those answers yet because we haven't even started the conversations that might lead us to those answers. But we don't have to worry because this future is decades away. Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, it's at least 50 years or five or definitely longer than a month.

We simply don't know. What we do know is that these convergence technologies, the DNA modification, the robotics, the AI, these are already here. So they might be at a basic level, but they're already here. And that's why we should be planning for that future emergence or convergence now.

What have we learned from today, then, Matt? Well, if you only take one thing away from today, it's that Terminator Dark Fate looks really, really good. And even if it does become our future, at least we get to watch Linda Hamilton and Arnie experience it all first. You know, you've done it.

You've actually made me feel less of a human being in 20 minutes. So yeah, good job, man. We'll be right back with Geeksqualls. I'll please get to find the transcripts on Cajabop.com.

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