The Next 10 Years of AI Will Change Everything | Alexander Wissner-Gross | TEDxBoston

Ladies and gentlemen, Alex Whistner Gross.

Um, I have to ask, are you an AI?

>> What's the difference really at this point?

>> And how would you know?

>> Yeah.

So, yeah, I just

because people may think this is what they call a non-denial denial.

>> Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you for the non-denial denial.

Um, the question is not what the world will look like in 250 years.

The question is what foundations we choose to build today

so that 250 years from now people look back on our generation this moment

as one that expanded human possibility.

Talk to me about that quote.

What does that mean?

What what should we be doing right now?

What should we not be doing based on on you know hopefully building a

positive foundation for the future?

>> I I am I I think it's fair to say an accelerationist.

I think there are many things

that we should be doing not just for quarter of a millennium from now

but also for 25 years from now.

I think one of the most obvious travesties is

that right now on earth approximately 150,000 plus people die every day

and I think there's far more

that our civilization could be doing about

that.

I don't think people have to die.

I think accelerating super intelligence is one of a very few number of things

that we can do to put a positive end to

that.

And I think in part when we speak of 250 years in the future,

I think keeping substantially everyone who's alive today around

so that they can see America's 500th anniversary,

one of the best things we could possibly do.

So what do you believe historians in 2276 will say was the defining turning

point of the 21st century?

It's a tricky question in part

because we've only seen about a quarter of the 21st century unfold.

So I would say of the first approximately 25 years of this century probably

the single most important event was the publication of GPT2 by OpenAI. according to

their paper large language models are few shot learners

and this was the paper

and the moment when I think at at the very latest humanity realized how

to build super intelligence

and many would quibble with

that many would say we don't have AGI yet we don't have super intelligence

yet I think that's fundamentally wrong I think

as of no later than the GPT2 moment in summer of 2020 humanity

as a whole first in pieces

and then more of humanity over time figured out how to build much more

intelligence much more quickly.

And it turned out the answer was elegantly simple.

The answer was you just take general knowledge and you compress it.

That's all it took.

We could have sent

that knowledge of just take lots of information about general human knowledge,

compress it.

I think we probably could have sent that information,

that knowledge back in time by a few decades

and just gotten the whole show on the road decades sooner

and we could have had general purpose robotics sooner.

We could have had large language models

and chat bots sooner

if only more of humanity realized

that information which was

so startlingly simple.

We could have explained it to a mathematician

or a physicist from a century ago

and accelerated everything.

So, I don't know how many other advances are

so simple to explain yet

so transformative,

but I would say that's the highlight of the first quarter of a century.

I would hope that there going to be many comparable highlights for the next

threequarters of the century,

but my bet is we're going to get a lot of major surprises in

the next just 10 years.

Forget about the next 75 years or the next 250 years.

I think thanks to AI and super intelligence,

we're going to see a whole lot more doors open up to ontological shock

over the next 10 years.

>> So, it's not the Pentium chip, it's the data, stupid.

>> Ah, yeah.

I I've argued in the past

that the key to unlocking grand challenges in AI is actually more of a

data set problem than a compute problem.

that creating focused data sets

and benchmarks around those data sets is fundamentally a societal accelerant.

And if you look at arguably most of the grand challenges

that AI has unlocked over the past 50 years,

automated speech recognition, statistical machine translation, chess, Jeopardy, and yes,

>> go and general purpose conversational abilities.

I would argue that those were fundamentally data set constrained, not compute constrained,

not algorithm constrained, data set constrained.

And so the argument would go creating data sets

and benchmarks and communities around them is one of the single most powerful unlocks

to solving all of the ground challenges we still have left.

>> So when Minsky

and McCarthy went to Dartmouth

and kind of coined the term AI,

you know, cybernetics had been around before. were they aware how the role of

data >> I think

so Marvin was my first research adviser at MIT I think there's unfortunately an

alternative timeline where there was less focus early on in the development of the

field of AI on algorithms

and more of a focus on benchmarks arguably

so Marvin isn't around to defend himself anymore

but there's a narrative

that Marvin did fundamentally a disservice to the acceleration of AI by publishing a

now famous paper that showed

that a very simple function an exor function could not be reproduced by a

shallow neural network.

And there are some myself arguably included who would say

that one counter example may be set back AI by 20 years

or more.

>> That's the AI winter

that people >> that

that was one of the earliest AI winters.

We've had a few at this point. some count two,

some count three or four.

And so there's a an an alternative history

as it were where instead of just sort of throwing neural networks early on

under the bus by saying well they they can't model exor we would have

had benchmarks early on

that provided denser rewards

and denser signals to the entire field.

And even the the big shock the big onlogical shock of GPT2

which is just how well can your model predict the next word

or next token in general natural language.

That's such a simple objective.

We could have hypothetically sent

that back in time to the late 1950s to Marvin at all

and said you know what forget all of your other award-winning tenure providing PhD

winning algorithmic research.

Forget all of your religious warfare regarding whose algorithm is more neuro inpired

or whose is more mathematically elegant.

Just focus on this one objective.

Do a better job of predicting the next word in general text

which was already being electronically stored by the 50s

and the 60s.

Just focus on that

and measure progress in your ability to predict the next word over general text

over time.

Let that be your northstar.

And I think we could have been where we're going at least 20 to

30 years earlier.

Um, you know, I'm thinking of a sine wave, you know, these AI springs,

AI winters.

Are we, you know, now it's going like,

are we due for an AI another AI winter

or we've passed a moment where AI winter won't won't be happening?

>> I think we're overdue for an AI winter,

but I don't think it's going to take the form of historic AI winters.

Historically, you saw perhaps most infamously well after the the Marvin mini winter from

Exor not being able to be modeled with an ultra shallow neural network.

You saw the winter of the 80s

and 90s from Japan's fifth generation computing initiative

and expert systems turning out not to be such a great approach to general

intelligence.

I don't think we're going to see anything quite like that.

If I had to pinpoint finger to the wind,

the likeliest possible source for a brief AI winter

or something that gets called an AI winter,

it's probably all of the capex that's being allocated to tile the earth with

compute with data centers right now.

And if the leading frontier labs, for whatever reason,

can't provide enough revenue to justify that capital expenditure over the next two years,

I could foresee a mini winter, but I don't think it'll last long.

And I don't think it would even be comparable to arguably the telecom winter

in the early 2000s

when the US and other western countries

but mostly US overbuilt telecom capacity

and then it took a number of years.

>> That's right.

And that those were the the years of Enron

as well trading fiber optic uh capacity.

I don't think we're going to see anything like

that because I think we're we're

so deep into scaling at this point

and so deep into recursive self-improvement.

Unless there's some, at least to me,

unforeseeable ceiling on our ability to continue recursively self-improving,

I think we get to wherever we're going before we see another window.

Now, it is possible that at the end of the recursive self-improvement rainbow,

we discover the perfect AI algorithm, the perfect ML model,

and then we hit a ceiling,

and then there's a bit of a hangover

while we figure out what to do with ourselves,

and maybe the recursive self-improvement shock wave propagates down in the stack to improving

better hardware,

and then maybe better solutions at the infra level than CMOS.

But is that a shock to the system in the same sense

that the 80s or the the 60s winters were?

I think definitely not.

>> So I want to go a few um I'm going to pick a

few years and ask you what you think is going to happen.

So next 200 years 2020 uh 2226 will humanity uh still be earth ccentric.

What are the chances we discover evidence of ETSs extraterrestrials?

If you don't know what I'm talking about,

what constraints on civilization today are likely to disappear completely?

What is the most profound discovery humanity could make in the next two centuries?

In which order would you like me to answer questions?

Yeah.

And and if one of those is too hard, feel free to pass.

>> Yeah.

I think the odds are very high.

So maybe one of my perhaps mildly maybe it doesn't constitute a contrarian perspective

at this point but at minimum mildly contrarian perspectives is I think the odds

are very high that sometime in the next 5 to 10 years we'll have

a definitive answer to the question of is humanity alone in the universe >>

that's because AI is going to be able to analyze data >> I think

AI is the ultimate forcing function

so one way I think about it is >> according to my timelines

which may by some standards s constitute very aggressive AI timelines.

I think sometime in the next 5 to 10 years,

humanity will possess the technological capability of building self-replicating vonoyman probes

that we can send out in all directions at relativistic speeds.

And if we wanted to,

I think we'll have the capability to quite literally turn the rest of our

galaxy to paper clips

if we wanted to.

We'll have advanced nanotechnology.

We'll have the ability to send out replicating relativistic speed self-replicating probes.

And that's a point at

which if there is any other non-human intelligence in our galaxy,

if I were that NHI,

I'd be pretty concerned

and I would view humanity's sudden leap in capabilities thanks to artificial super intelligence

as potentially an existential threat.

So I think that's one reason.

There are a number of other reasons why if we're not alone,

at least in the galaxy,

galaxy is what about 50,000 lighty years or so in diameter.

Uh, I would be rather concerned right now

if I had any awareness of Earth

and its nent super intelligence

that poses an existential potentially threat to any other intelligent life in our galaxy

that's capable of detecting us.

So punchline, if there is non-human intelligence out there

and it's able to detect us

and it's aware of us,

it had better make a cameo appearance sometime in the next 5 to 10

years if for no other reason than self-preservation.

So if if you believe

that super intelligence capabilities are on

as steep a ramp

as I do and we're going to get molecular nanotechnology,

self-replicating robots, relativistic interstellar probes,

then you should also believe that unless we are completely alone in this galaxy,

we're going to have some visitors sometime soon.

>> Right?

So that's 200 years, 150 years from now, 2176.

How might our definition of consciousness change?

What aspects of human nature are likely to remain unchanged despite uh technological transformation?

>> Well, I think the nature of human consciousness

and I'm not even sure the question is well posed

as stated is likely to get resolved in the next 10 years.

So, if if you're hearing me say next 10 years a lot,

it's not just a verbal tick.

I really do think many of the grand challenges in math, science,

and engineering are likely to get solved with enormous help from super intelligence in

the next 10 years,

including the nature of consciousness.

I'm not even sure using

that word as an avatar

or as a verbal device makes an enormous amount of sense right now.

But I I do think I'm higher confidence

that sometime in the next 10 years there will be at least among some

scientific elite inclusive of the AI scientific elite some consensus

as to what consciousness is

if it is a reified thing

that that makes sense to speak of.

We'll have a sense of what

that is and then 10 years out I'm very bullish

that we're going to have variety of forms of human cognitive enhancement.

I think full bandwidth full dive virtual reality I think high bandwidth brain computer

interfaces I think wholeb brain emulation

and human mind uploading all par for the course in the next 10 years

so when you ask about what consciousness looks like 100 plus years from now

I would envision and expect

and I don't think maybe again some might construe this

as over optimism I don't think it's over optimism I think it's a realistic

reasonable expectation at this point

that 100 150 years from Now we will be 100 plus years into an

era of human civilization

when perhaps most of the intelligence in our solar system is ultimately derived from

human brain uploads and not biological human meat bodies in nature.

>> So I asked you about 100 years from now 200 you you keep

on referring to the next 10 years.

Let me ask a question.

>> I'm rounding down to 10 years for every question.

>> No no no yeah no all good.

So specifically 10 years from now,

what does a successful human AI civilization look like?

What is that symbiotic relationship look like?

What is how do you define success?

And uh and what what are some chess moves

that we need to be able to get to

that kind of success?

>> I think there are

so many levels to what a successful endgame on a 10-year time scale looks

like.

I wrote a book with Peter Diamandis called Solve Everything is available publicly solveverthing.org.

Encourage folks to read it if it's of interest.

I think there are many different dimensions to that 10-year endgame.

I think there's a technical endgame where math for example right now those following

the really popcorn popping drama in the the set of Eddish problems

which are a set of call them uh hard at least the the ones

that are as of yet unsolved medium to hard unsolved problems in math

that were enumerated by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdish these are starting to get

bulk solved now >> what's your Erdish number >> I need to recalculate it

changes is every day

because I meet more mathematicians.

So the Erdish number is the the number of degrees of separation via co-authorship

from >> 60 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon

but different.

>> It's probably two at this point.

Probably two.

Yeah.

Now now it's changed probably since the fist bump.

So math gets math gets solved for some definition of solve.

My definition of math being solved is that for any given problem in math,

we can be confident

that if we just pour more compute into AI

that we can be very confident

that we're going to get a solution to the math problem

that exists.

And we're starting to see a variety of previously unsolved problems in math just

get bulk solved by AI.

So right now it's at maybe a dozen, a couple dozen.

>> How does that help the everyday person?

How does that change, you know, the the billions of populations?

>> It's true.

What what what has math ever done for me?

>> Yeah.

>> Uh so math, I think,

is I like to say the canary that owns the coal mine.

Math is the herald of physics and chemistry and biology and material science.

These are all going >> close encounters to the third kind.

It's how we communicate >> and and formal first contact with non-human intelligence.

These are all I think downstream of at least chronologically

if not causally downstream of AI bulk solving math.

I think these are all likely to get solved in the next 10 years

through the same underlying advances

that are allowing AI to solve math.

Now what does AI bulk solving physics, chemistry, biology?

Well, how about cures for the top 5,000 diseases?

Through AI, creating virtual twins,

digital twins of individual cells and then tissues and organs and whole organisms,

we'll be able to speedrun the future of medicine.

I think over the next 10 years, we'll be able to speedrun,

you like to talk of Star Trek, I know.

How about a future where 10 years from now, not 250 years from now,

we have substantially all of the physically possible inventions

and discoveries that Star Trek conceives of.

If they're physically possible,

I think odds are very good

that >> the replicator warp drive the >> replicator

if they're allowed by the the laws of physics of the universe

that we turn out to live in.

I think we're going to see at least a theoretical understanding of them

and probably unless they require exorbitant amounts of energy

or other resources.

I think we're likely to see early implementations of any physically possible Star Trek

technology in the next 10 years.

>> Thank you, Alex, for sharing the stage

and thank you for the work

that you do.

Alex Wister gross a verb.