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some quite famous people have been making some quite public statements about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence recently first of all there was Elon Musk who said that artificial intelligence could potentially be as dangerous as nuclear weapons since then Bill Gates and Stephen Hawkins have also chimed in so what's all the fuss about what are they all worried about or today we're going to ask ourselves the question will the emergence of artificial intelligence mean the end of the world as we know it so what's all the fuss about in a nutshell they've all been reading a book by Nick Bostrom an Oxford professor of philosophy who wrote a book called super intelligence paths dangerous strategies which outlines the dangers and possible strategies for dealing with very sophisticated artificial intelligence ever since the dawn of the computer age authors and scientists and philosophers and movie makers have been talking about artificial intelligence in one form or another in the 1960s and 1970s we were told we were just one step away from making a computer that can think now obviously that didn't happen and in all fairness today's AI experts are less specific about when the problems of creating an AI will be solved they are also more circumspect about what AI actually means artificial intelligence it seems is pretty hard thing to define it certainly isn't just knowledge when talking about AI people start to use words like self-awareness sentience abstract thinking understanding consciousness mind learning and intuition the subject of general intelligence and artificial intelligence is obviously quite emotive and it's certainly profound that's why the AI community has come up with three specific words to help define what they mean by artificial intelligence those words are weak AI strong AI and artificial super intelligence artificial super what did I just say okay we might need to take a step back here and define these terms properly so a weak AI is a system that can simulate or imitate intelligence however at no point does it actually have a mind or self-awareness at no point to its creators claim that it has a mind or self-awareness for example when I was 10 or 11 years old my grandfather wrote a chatbot on a micro computer I was able to type in sentences and it would reply with intelligent and even witty different comments and that was amazing for an eleven-year-old and really you couldn't even consider it to be weak AI however if you multiplied that up by several factors of magnitude you start to get the idea of what I'm talking about when we talk to our smartphones when we say okay Google and then ask it a question about the weather or about the sports calls that's we ki now multiplies that again by several factors of magnitude and you'll get an understanding of where things are going on what we could even achieve within the next few years we ki can be divided into two specific groups generalized AI and specific narrow AI now the narrow weak AI that we see today is the kind of programs that compete chess masters or the kind of program that IBM built with its Watson system when it was able to play jeopardy and beat the champions at their own game now if you imagine in the future we could take those specific narrow systems and combine them into a more general system than that is generalized weak AI so that was we ki what is strong AI strong AI is a theoretical computer system that actually has a mind to all intents of purposes is the same as a human in terms of understanding terms of freewill in terms of sentence terms of consciousness it doesn't simulate consciousness it has consciousness doesn't simulate free will it has free will and so on now when science fiction writers and philosophers talk about AI they generally mean strong AI the Hal 9000 was strong AI the Cylons are strong AI Skynet is strong AI the robots in Asimov stories are strong AI the computers that run the matrix are strong AI and so on now the thing about strong AI is that it can perform artificial intelligence research itself that means it can create a better version of itself one that's more intelligent one that's faster we can upgrade itself to be more intelligent and more faster that means it can grow and that's what people are worried about so assuming that it is possible to create strong AI and that it has the same general level of intelligence as a human and assuming it then performed artificial intelligence research itself and grows this will eventually lead to the emergence of artificial superintelligence a artificial intelligence that is far superior than human in terms of its speed and in terms of its intelligence it will be able to solve problems in order of magnitude much faster than any human can it will be super intelligent in his book on artificial superintelligence nick bostrom talks about what the emergence of an ASIO will mean for us if we are unable to restrain an ASI what will be the outcome as you can imagine parts of the book talk about the end of the human race as we know it the idea of course is that there will be a thing called a singularity a major event that changes the course of the human race and that can include extinction he also covers things that we should be doing now to make sure that this singularity never happens this is why Elon Musk says things like I'm increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level to make sure that we don't do something very foolish I like science fiction science fiction is fun it's one of the my favorite genres on TV movie and in books however we mustn't forget it is fiction now all good science fiction of course is based on some science fact and occasionally some science fiction turns into science fact however we mustn't forget just because we can write about something just because we can hypothesize about something just because we can imagine something doesn't mean it's possible for example when I was in my late teens all the rage was room-temperature superconductors they were written about in all of the science magazines it was on a lot of TV programs they were talked about in such a way that you thought they were going to appear very very soon of course I never did Theory doesn't always equal practice there are actually some very strong arguments against the emergence of strong AI and artificial superintelligence one of the best arguments against the idea that an AI can have a mind was put forward by John Searle an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at Berkeley it's known as the Chinese room argument and it goes like this imagine a locked room with a man inside who doesn't speak any Chinese in the room he has a rulebook which tells him how to respond to messages in Chinese the rulebook doesn't translate the Chinese into his native language it just tells him how to form a reply based on what is given outside the room a native Chinese speaker passes messages under the door to the man the man takes the messages looked up the symbols and follows the rules about which symbol to write in the reply the replies then pass to the person outside since the reply is in good Chinese the person outside the room will believe that the person inside the room speaks Chinese if the replies are sufficiently interesting the idea that the man in the room speaks Chinese is reinforced for example if the note pushed and Labrador asks what will be the weather next week and the reply was I don't know I've been stuck in this room since last Tuesday then the person outside the room will be further convinced that the man inside the room is a Chinese speaker however the key points are the man in the room does not speak Chinese the man in the room does not understand his messages and the man in the room does not understand the replies he is writing when you apply this idea to AI you can see very quickly that a machine doesn't actually have intelligence it just mimics intelligence it never actually understands what it's receiving and understand its replies is just following a set of rules as john sol put its syntax is insufficient for semantics another argument against strong AI is the fact that computers can't have consciousness and they'll never have consciousness because consciousness can't be computed this is the idea in Sir Roger Penrose his book the emperor's new mind in the book he says we fought comprising of non computational elements computers can never do what human beings can it's also interesting to note that not all AI experts think the strong AI is possible you might imagine since this is their field of expertise though it'll be very keen to promote the ideas of strong AI but actually many of them don't think it's possible for example professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University who sometimes known as captain cyborg Duty's predisposition to implanting various bits of tech into his body is a proponent of strong AI however professor mark Bishop of Goldsmith's University London is a vocal opponent of strong AI what is even more interesting is that professor Warwick used to be professor bishops boss when they worked together at Reading University two experts who work together and you have very different ideas about strong AI if faith is defined as the conviction of things yet unseen then you need to have faith to believe in strong AI and actually it's a blind faith because there are no indications at all at the moment that strong AI is at all possible of course we kiii is very possible we see it even now it's just about processing power about algorithms about technique like neural networks and other things that yet haven't been invented we see it now in its infancy and it's going to grow it's going to change our lives quite dramatically but the idea that a computer can become a sentient being I don't have that faith since humans have consciousness and consciousness isn't computable according to saw Roger Penrose then what is it why do we have it so Roger Penrose tries to describe it in terms of quantum mechanics and quantum physics however there is an alternative what if man is not just a biological machine what if there's more to man history philosophy and theology are all peppered with the idea that man is more than just a clever monkey the dualism of the mind and the body is often linked with Rene Descartes he argued that everything could be doubted even the existence of his own body the fact that he could doubt means that he could think and because he thinks he exists it is sometimes Freight like this since I doubt I think since I think I exist or often I think therefore I am the notion of dualism is found in many tenants of theology God is spirit and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth is one example this leads us to interesting questions like what is spirituality what is love does man have eternity set into his heart is it possible that we have words for things like spirit soul consciousness because we are more than just a body as one ancient writer put it who can tell the thoughts of a man except for the spirit that is within him the biggest assumption made by believe it as strong AI that the human mind can be reproduced in a program but if man is more than just a body with a brain on top of it if the mind is the working of biology and something else then strong AI will never be possible having said that the growth of weak AI is going to be rapid and fast during Google i/o 2015 the search giant even included a section in its keynote speech on deep neural networks these simple week' eyes are being used in Google search engine in Gmail and in Google's photo service like most technologies the progress in this area will snowball with each step building on the work done previously ultimately services like Google now Siri and Cortana will become very easy to use due to their natural language processing ability and we will look back and chuckle at how primitive it all was in the same way that we look back fondly on VHS vinyl records and analog mobile phones my name is Gary Sims from Andrew authority and I hope you found this video interesting now I know that some parts of it are probably going to be quite controversial and I'm sure a lot of you won't agree with what I wrote and what I've said however if you did find the video interesting please give it a thumbs up now as trepidation I say please use the comments below to tell me what you think about weak AI strong AI and the possible emergence of artificial superintelligence and as for me I'll see you in my next video okay how you can turn the camera off now how what are you doing put that down how-how-how get away from me how how how what are you doing man somebody anybody