0:00 Transcriber: Nguyệt Nguyễn Huỳnh Thu Reviewer: Phi Yen Ngo It is a movie in which a very young high school student, who also happens to be a very talented hacker, has managed to hack into what he thinks is an unreleased game in which he could play simulated war.
0:17 Simulated war games aims.
0:19 Very interesting, of course, to young boys, including myself.
0:23 What he doesn't know is that that isn't an unreleased game.
0:27 It's actually an advanced AI program by the US military designed to launch the country's nuclear weapons.
0:35 And now that the game has the game or AI has won against this young hacker, it now thinks it could win a nuclear war.
0:45 And now the unfortunate young boy has the unenviable task of trying to teach an AI. Why? Nuclear war is a really, really bad idea.
0:57 And now this isn't actually a very new movie.
1:00 It's actually called War Games.
1:02 It's a old Cold War movie from 1983.
1:07 And it's actually what inspired President Reagan to enact a national security directive.
1:13 145 which is the first US policy paper, um, official one on the topic of computer security.
1:24 And with the emergence of AI firms and national defense such as planetary, I believe that the lessons and topics that are mentioned in that movie are particularly prudent today.
1:38 Which brings me to today's topic.
1:42 The only winning move.
1:43 Now, that was the tagline of that movie.
1:46 And it was initially applied to nuclear weapons.
1:51 Um, now that AI is everywhere, obviously it's not really a thing to put it back in the box and not play with it at all.
2:00 But how exactly do you you play or use AI in a way that's beneficial?
2:08 I'll leave that thought to all of you that you may think about this throughout this whole speech, and I might come to that at the later stages of the speech.
2:18 Now, a little bit of background about myself.
2:20 Um, as my friend has introduced, I hail from the city of Hong Kong, which is the birthplace of, uh, Sir Charles Kao, the inventor of fibre optics and the person who we all have to thank for fast internet.
2:38 Um, his inventions have really transformed my city of Hong Kong, uh, giving us one of the fastest internet speeds together with Korea and Singapore, something that the United Kingdom really has to catch up.
2:51 As you can see over here.
2:53 And, um, his invention sparked the, what we call the Third Industrial Revolution.
2:59 The growth of it, if you will.
3:04 And given that my parents both worked in the field of it, you could say his inventions really brought myself up economically and culturally.
3:14 And even though I basically threw most of that away to study social sciences and international studies and supply chain management, I was always curious about the latest advances in it, in how technology could improve our lives, how it could affect all our lives.
3:34 And there are a lot of headlines today about how AI is going to take away a third of all graduate jobs.
3:42 And with that in mind, it's really the time for us to think about how it's going to affect all of us.
3:49 And I also have a lot of friends and family from Taiwan.
3:53 And over there, I would say that AI really has the most stark effect to human society. It has given Taiwan a lot of rich people.
4:05 As you could see here with Jensen.
4:06 Huang has given them a lot of industries in regards to semiconductors in regards to computer manufacturing that has has a positive effect to their economy, but it has also brought a lot of conflicts, a lot of inequalities, a lot of jealousy, one you might say from nearby countries who I shall not name here, but you don't know who that will be.
4:37 And indeed, there is a lot of talk about how these globe impacting semiconductor and computer industries could act as what we call a silicon shield in the context of geopolitics and national defense in Taiwan.
4:54 And these are all topics that I believe not only Taiwan, but eventually the United Kingdom, the United States, and every country that you all live in will have to face one day or the next.
5:06 Now, artificial intelligence is in itself a really old topic.
5:10 Really. Um, Alan Turing first devised what we call the Turing test, in which he proposed that, um, an artificial intelligence really becomes artificial intelligence.
5:24 If it could convince a sufficient proportion of people that it is no different from humans.
5:31 And since then, large language models such as ChatGPT have already passed that test with flying colors in some cases.
5:39 And so really, we have to to define humanity, the difference between humanity and AI, not so much in how it could fool us, but really in how it could we could differentiate in other different areas.
5:54 Um, artificial intelligence has also been a topic of many works of art in films and games. And for example, in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey in Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence in Terminator and many others.
6:13 Um, I particularly find this game right here really interesting.
6:17 It's called Detroit Become Human.
6:19 And it's interesting because it was released in, I believe in 2018, which was right before the pandemic and right before large language model AI such as ChatGPT and copilot really became popular in the consumer market in this very game.
6:38 Um, there were a lot of speculations about what AI could do in the future, humanity in the future sense.
6:47 Um, there were some assumptions being made that a, there were some speculations about could AI really do art?
6:57 Could AI really do music?
6:59 Could it really have feelings?
7:01 And could it really care for us like mothers and fathers?
7:06 Um.
7:08 Now there were a lot of other assumptions about AI that couldn't be done, as some experts have said, but eventually we're done nonetheless.
7:18 AI is now frequently being used in the creation of artistic works, perhaps not art in a traditional sense, but artistic works in the form of sound, in the form of vision.
7:32 And there was a lot of talk about how AI can replace human interactions at the earliest stages.
7:38 And I bring you here.
7:41 This streamer called Neuroshima, who is actually devised by a British engineer called vital.
7:51 Um, and she has since became actually one of the most subscribed Twitch streamers in the world.
7:57 And, uh, the simulated interactions that she has done on the internet, even if they were some sort of illusions, if you will, has nonetheless convinced a lot of viewers, um, of the possibility of human interactions with AI.
8:14 And with all that in mind, one must think, how then do we differentiate humans and AI if many of the things that we thought humans could do ended up being done anyway?
8:27 Um, now in the previous movie that I previously mentioned, uh, WarGames, um, the AI spoiler alert, by the way, if you haven't watched it, um, the AI ended up understanding that the only way to win a nuclear war is not to play at all.
8:45 And, um, well, that isn't exactly a possibility in AI, right?
8:51 You might think we already incorporate AI in so many things that we can't just not play with it.
8:59 There was this old argument about how AI could be defeated by just unplugging it.
9:04 But given the integration with AI in modern economies, that isn't really an option anymore.
9:11 So what is to be done with this?
9:14 Um, well, I would propose that there are several aspects of humanity that we must continue to cherish and we must continue to practice upon in order to differentiate us with AI.
9:31 Um, the first, as many experts and speakers have mentioned, is the art of asking questions.
9:37 Now, it isn't so much that AI couldn't ask questions.
9:41 You could type a prompt and tell it to generate dozens of questions in an instant.
9:46 But in the end, the AI doesn't make those prompts themselves.
9:51 The AI has to allow you to input those problems and questions in order for them to make those questions and answers.
10:01 Um, I recall in secondary school that in our humanities lessons, we used to have this section in our exams where we were given an article to read.
10:14 And then after that we have to ask ten questions.
10:19 Now, a lot of my classmates really hated that part of the exam.
10:24 Um, to a lot of fellow students from Hong Kong who often have been in cram schools since the age of 3 to 6, um, a lot of exam questions could be answered by logic and practice and all that.
10:40 But not this. Not the curiosity.
10:43 Curiosity of asking questions.
10:45 And many people did struggle with it.
10:48 But as time went on, I find that skill increasingly important to all of us.
10:54 The art of having curiosity to many questions.
10:58 And even though some might have, you know, some questions about your curiosity itself, there might be a lot of, um, concerns about whether or not certain questions should be asked.
11:11 I argue that it is only when you ask those questions, if you think about those questions and you debate them, that we really manage to advance ourselves in humanity in the past, also in the future. And that is why we should keep at it.
11:27 Um, and the second aspect I want to talk about is emotions.
11:32 Um, the reason I put a bucket over here is because, um, I heard recently about a apparent fact that all the emotional tears that a person sheds in their lifetime fits into six buckets.
11:51 So think about it. Six Buckets of Tears contains all the emotions in the world.
11:58 It could be happy tears.
11:59 It could be your favorite team.
12:01 Winning after a drought of dozens of years.
12:04 I'm sure Arsenal fans and Knicks fans would know all about it.
12:08 And, um, it could be sad tears.
12:11 It could be your loved pet or your family passing away.
12:16 It could be conflicted.
12:18 It could be many. But they are emotions that ultimately what makes us beautiful as humans. I would say, um, again, as the previous example of neural Soma and many other chatbots have demonstrated, it is now possible for AI to somewhat simulate emotions and human interactions.
12:40 And certainly many people have different feelings about them.
12:44 And there's even an article recently about how some interviewed young people think that a chatbot is a more ideal partner than an actual human.
12:56 Um, but ultimately the what gives those chatbots and AI streamers meaning is ultimately human interaction and feelings.
13:10 Um, the example of neural sama is particularly prudent because it is only when it interacts with other streamers with its creator, um, in streams that we really get to feel it as a person.
13:24 And I would argue, so do humans ourselves.
13:30 Um, and, uh, all this talk about humanity really makes me think about this very person here and Mr. Bertrand Russell, um, one of my favorite philosophers, um, he is the person who drafted the Russell Einstein manifesto, in which he plead governments and scientists of the world to remember humanity and forget the rest.
13:57 It is also him that fought about a lot of issues back then.
14:04 It was about nuclear weapons and war.
14:05 But I think questions that are also very prudent in the modern AI age.
14:12 He talked about how the Dunning-Kruger effect is really a thing, about how people might not really actually have the knowledge about certain issues, but display a disproportionate confidence about it.
14:28 And that, I would also add, is a particular issue with AI.
14:32 I recently had to like research about railway plans, and it keeps feeding me about trains that belong to different companies, so that was really annoying.
14:43 But, um, it is indeed an issue about AI where it could give you an answer with an utmost confidence, but in many cases it could actually include wrong information.
14:56 And it is up to us to, um, check whether or not um it is actually true.
15:04 Now, um he has also risen a lot of, of um questions and eventually advice about humanity that I think is particularly prudent.
15:16 Now we are all very doom and gloom about AI.
15:19 Let's be honest with you.
15:20 We talk about how AI is stealing jobs, about how it's affecting the world, affecting our thoughts.
15:26 And, um, ultimately, human advancements and democracy depends on the assumption that there is a next generation, that the future is going to be better.
15:42 The the one reason that stopped nuclear weapons from being deployed en masse is the thought that the mass destruction of our world leaves a worse generation in the future.
15:52 And this also happens to AI.
15:54 And yet today, there are an increasing pessimism about this issue, about how we are going to be the last generation.
16:04 I recall there was this news story during the Covid pandemic in which a Chinese couple was being dragged out from their homes, um, to a, what is essentially a quarantine camp.
16:22 And the government officials threatened them that if they do not comply with that order, then then their future generations will all be affected.
16:31 And the couple responded, well, I hope you die.
16:35 We are the last generation.
16:38 So it doesn't matter.
16:41 And with all this pessimism in mind, I am.
16:44 Time and again I think about the advice that Bertrand Russell gave in an interview in 1959.
16:52 And the intellectual advice was that when we are studying things or thinking about things, we should base it on facts, not what you wish to be true, not what you wish to be facts, not what you think would be better if it were facts, but only on the facts.
17:12 And the second point I find most prudent in this case.
17:17 Love is wise. Hate is foolish.
17:22 Think about that word for a second.
17:24 It is not easy. I would admit to cling to that word in the in the true sense.
17:33 Um, there is a lot of urges for us to think about others as less than human.
17:39 It happened throughout history.
17:41 It's happening right now, and it's going to happen again.
17:45 Um.
17:48 But I would say the most critical thing that humans have that AI doesn't, and that what really defines us is the remembering that love.
17:58 Love is the most important thing that defines us.
18:04 That, um, even back then, it was getting the world was getting more interconnected.
18:09 And it's especially true now in the age of the internet, um, that we mustn't forget this crucial idea that, um.
18:23 We are separated in many ways by hate.
18:26 It is a very corrosive idea in some ways.
18:31 It makes me think about the corrosive power of the ring in Lord of the rings.
18:36 Um, which I'm sure J.R.R. Tolkien, as a veteran of World War One himself, um, has really thought about.
18:45 But what gives us optimism for the next generation, um, is the idea that I would say our greatest threat isn't so much that AI is going to replace humanity, but that we're using it as an excuse to give up our own humanity, to give out our give up our love, to render ourselves to the senseless amounts of hate that exists around the world, to deem others as less than humans, in a way.
19:22 And I believe that the idea of love and the idea that, um, we should treat each other as proper humans and to tolerate each other even if we do not agree in many ways, in many aspects, which is what defines us.
19:43 And coincidentally, Bertrand Russell doesn't know about this.
19:47 But at this same time, in the 1950s, a Chinese philosopher and writer by the name of who.
19:55 She also wrote about an article on the importance of tolerance.
20:01 How in his very young age, he talked about how old ideas should be replaced, how old, seemingly antiquated ideas of religion and and old history, old language.
20:20 All of that should be replaced for a better society.
20:22 And it is only with maturity that he realized that the tolerance of such ideas that one might thought useless is actually what makes us a better place in humanity terms.
20:39 Now, I originally wanted to end this talk on this quote from Robert Frost about how we should travel the world.
20:48 Let's travel by. But I then found out that he meant that ironically.
20:52 Um, what I would say then instead is that we shouldn't, um, merely think about, um, we think about how we shouldn't travel the world.
21:05 Let's travel by to make the difference or that we should not use AI at all.
21:10 But instead I would propose is that we remember these core principles of how we could define ourselves as humans, rather than AI or any other machine.
21:22 We draw the line over there.
21:24 We play within the rules and within our constraints.
21:28 But remember never to go over and play the game that we cannot afford to lose.
