Forget about sci-fi movies.
Artificial intelligence has already become a reality
and it's everywhere.
Will they guide us towards the future we've always wanted?
Or are we creating the device that will cause our own destruction?
"THE PATH TO ARTIFICIAL SUPERINTELLIGENCE"
An artificial superintelligence receives this specific order:
to increase the number of trees in the world
until the balance of the atmosphere is restored.
It starts its work following the scientists' order
of planting trees only in places uninhabited by humans.
And a year later, the operation is a success.
New forests begin to appear,
slowly increasing the quality of the air in the planet.
However, since these efforts are not enough
to repair the damage caused by pollution in the atmosphere,
the artificial superintelligence comes to a logical conclusion:
to fulfill its mission,
more trees need to be planted.
OBSTACLE DETECTED
So it decides on its own to continue the task
without considering that this could directly affect humans.
As time goes by, small villages are the first
to disappear amidst the new forests.
Then it's time for the big cities,
that start getting more and more trees
until they become uninhabitable.
In just a few centuries,
Earth's atmosphere goes back to being completely healthy.
But human beings no longer exist.
Forests expanded so fast
that the planet's dominant species didn't find space to survive
and ended up extinct by its own creation.
A machine capable of annihilating humanity
seems like an element from sci-fi movies.
But my question is,
how far are we from that?
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
Betinho,
have you noticed something weird about Briggs recently?
I'm glad you mentioned it.
I've noticed Briggs has been trying to murder me for some time.
Murder you? Where is this coming from?
Briggs has always seen me as an intellectual threat.
He can't even do that.
He's a level-one artificial intelligence.
A level-one AI is what experts call Narrow AI.
This is the simplest kind. But simple doesn't mean useless.
It can perform a specific action with extreme competence,
like making calculations faster than a mathematician
or beating the world chess champion.
A General AI, which is level two,
would be as intelligent as a human being.
It could complete any task with the same ability as a person,
including the capacity of abstract thinking,
something that's still impossible for artificial intelligence.
A machine that reached this level
would certainly use its incredible potential
to improve itself. It'd evolve in a very short time,
becoming a level-three artificial intelligence,
or artificial superintelligence.
This would be the most advanced level
and also the most dangerous.
Picture a machine with powers that for us
would be godlike.
In a split second,
it could solve all of humanity's problems
or simply create new machines to do that.
Everything would be within its reach, even the end of our species.
Level-one artificial intelligence is everywhere.
Your cellphone, for instance, contains a small group of them.
When we use a GPS app, like Waze,
we're activating an artificial intelligence
that excels at finding you the best route.
These are just small examples we use all the time.
But they can already do way more than that.
LONDON, ENGLAND
I'm in a Tesla vehicle, and it can drive on its own.
As you can see, I'm on the driver's seat, but I don't need to do anything.
It's like I'm on the passenger seat.
I don't even have to brake.
The autopilot takes me where I want to go because it knows the map
of the region I'm at and sees things around us.
This model has cameras and ultrasonic sensors
that can detect everything within 360 degrees,
such as other vehicles, pedestrians, and even objects on the road.
This way, it can use this information
to drive through the city with safety.
Many apps are simple artificial intelligences,
from the system that operates this vehicle
to the oldest ones.
You're like a virtual pet, Briggs.
A Tamagotchi.
No, Adalberto.
I'm a level-one artificial intelligence.
BRIGGS is an acronym:
Brazilian Image and Graphic Generation System.
It was created in 2015 by Dr. Tayane das Graças.
My primary function is developing visual resources.
Briggs is like one of those smart home apps.
They're getting so popular
that it's hard to guess how far this technology will get.
In fact, I personally believe
that if someone traveled 30 years into the future,
they'd find a completely different world.
They'd probably feel like they're in another universe.
And we can get to that conclusion just by analyzing our evolution.
When humans finally learned to communicate in a more complex way,
their relationship with each other and the world
changed completely.
It took about 50 thousand years
for a radical transformation to happen: the invention of writing.
The next leap took even less time.
Printing machines were created,
changing the world completely.
It took only 500 years for a new revolution,
with the invention of the computer.
And less than 30 years later,
the Internet changed once more the way humans
interact with each other and the world.
A person from any of these societies
wouldn't understand the next stage.
Each one of these leaps changes completely the way we live
and needs less and less time to occur.
Human evolution is faster every day,
and we're on the edge of a huge leap with artificial intelligence.
Exactly. Knowledge increase isn't linear, but exponential.
The more civilization evolves, the faster it evolves.
Whoa, it's glitching again.
Briggs, could you run a system diagnostics, please?
I'm sorry, Castanhari, I'm afraid I can't do that.
I'm telling you, Castanhari. It'll kill all of us in a terrible...
and technological way.
No, Betinho. This is just a line from Kubrick's 2001.
Briggs can't create sentences. He just looks for the best answer
according to the situation, in his database.
A machine would need a processing power
just like a human brain to be able to think like us.
The most powerful machines in today's world
are the supercomputers.
They have a data storage capacity
that, along with their processing speed,
could turn home computers into museum pieces.
Behind these supercomputers, like Summit, Sierra,
Sunway, and even Brazil's Santos Dumont,
we can find top-notch technologies and the work of hundreds of experts.
That's why they're often used
by researchers from many fields, such as climatology,
cosmology, and even medicine.
However, even with all this power,
these machines would still need an increase
of dozens of times their capacity
to start getting close to what many scientists estimate to be
the processing power of a single human brain.
Just to give you an idea, a supercomputer
occupies the space of two tennis courts
and needs 24 million watts to operate.
Even so, it's less efficient than a human brain
that needs only 20 watts.
Our minds are one of the most powerful and complex machines there are.
Inside a cubic millimeter of a human brain
there are so many tiny connections
that it's still hard to understand how they all interact with each other.
Each neuron can connect to up to ten thousand other neurons
through synapses.
We have so many neurons in our brains that, if we look closer,
they look like some kind of carpet
that's so thick, it's almost impossible to see through it.
Science is increasingly advancing in the understanding of the human brain,
but we still need image capture technology to improve.
Otherwise, the most important organ of the human body
will remain as one of the greatest enigmas of nature.
But intelligence is not just about processing.
Even if Summit evolved to that level, it would still not know the flavor of food
or how to enjoy music.
For this to happen, we'd have to overcome a great challenge:
teaching a machine
to understand the world around it
just like human beings do.
But doesn't Briggs know who I am?
Because he can recognize you, despite the huge nose
-on your face. -You're so funny!
Briggs's perception is totally different from ours.
Correct, Castanhari. Allow me to show Adalberto
the way I see the world around me.
As a machine, I need to understand the world in my own way.
Only I don't have the ability to see a starry sky
or feel the wind on my face.
Actually, I don't even have a face.
Your concepts of light and dimensions
make no sense to me.
To make things worse, I can't think.
My processing works in a binary way.
It all comes down to yes and no,
black and white, zero and one.
Understanding the world that way
is extremely hard.
This picture of Castanhari, for example.
My facial recognition software
needs to perform a series of associations and calculations
to find out to whom this face belongs,
something you can do instantly.
First, I need to analyze every pixel,
which is the smallest unit of a digital image.
Since this is a high resolution picture,
it has over eight million pixels.
After that, I need to relate each one of them to the nearby pixels
to recognize parts of the face, like eyes and mouth.
Only then does my algorithm start to extract
more than 68 pieces of key information from the face,
such as the triangulation between eyes and nose,
or the distance from the forehead to the chin,
to be able to form a unique and exclusive facial signature
for each person on the planet.
Finally, I analyze hundreds of thousands of images of people
in my database
until there's a perfect match with the highest level of precision.
That's the only way I can call...
Castanhari by his name.
To put it simply,
I need to perform millions of operations
to finally conclude that that is a face.
Something that you humans can do almost automatically.
But that means that when Briggs sees my nose,
he just recognizes a pattern.
Okay, it's a huge pattern, but think about how hard it would be
to learn something seeing the world in such a limited way.
Betinho, you're not answering my texts anymore?
My phone is charging in that outlet near Briggs
-because it's way faster. -In the server?
-Yeah. -I can't believe you did that, Betinho.
I was just enjoying
the air-conditioning in here while my phone was charging.
I told you a thousand times, you can't touch the server, Betinho.
Actually, you said it 682 times, Dr. Tayane.
If Adalberto was a machine, maybe he could be improved
by using artificial neural networks.
Does that mean I'll become a robot and live forever?
Like that Robin Williams movie? Bisexual Man?
It's Bicentennial Man!
But Briggs mentioned a very efficient solution
to improve machine learning even more.
Do you know this human being?
This good-looking guy
was completely created by an artificial intelligence.
But how did it do it?
Let's pretend a draftsman wants to learn photo-realism.
He starts by studying celebrities' pictures
to create a totally new face.
And from time to time he sends his drawings by email
for an expert to check.
But in these emails,
the artist also sends real pictures along with his creations.
The expert's task is to identify which ones are drawings
and which ones are pictures.
In case he can't distinguish a drawing from a picture,
it means the draftsman improved his technique so much
that he can trick an expert on the subject.
As time goes by, the illustrator gathers
more and more feedback from the expert,
which helps him improve his drawings to the point of tricking him.
When this happens, it's a win-win.
The draftsman improves his technique,
and the expert, after understanding
how the illustrator could create that realistic art,
learned how to make more accurate analyses.
In this analogy,
they're both machines working and learning together
in a cycle that happens at a very high speed.
It is called neural network.
And that's how the AI from our example
learned how to create that realistic face.
The speed of this evolution increases each day.
PICTURES GENERATED BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
At this development pace,
it's possible that in two decades
an intelligence like me...
will be able to sense the area around it,
understanding its gravity...
light...
until finally...
realizing it belongs to that environment.
Which means it'll understand reality
the same way we do.
Thus, becoming a level-two artificial intelligence.
The examples we've seen up to now are level-one artificial intelligence.
But since they evolve faster every day,
we can say they're at high speed
on a road straight to level two.
Something that, to us,
would be even more impressive.
A machine at that stage would be able to understand complex concepts,
make decisions, and solve problems
that human beings haven't even identified as problems.
But its main attribute would be the ability to evolve on its own,
learning basically everything through its experiences.
Through the Internet, for example,
it would have access to almost every movie,
song, book, and scientific article ever written.
Just like a sponge, this artificial intelligence
would absorb all that knowledge in an astonishing speed.
This would start a new cycle.
As it evolves, it becomes more intelligent,
and its new evolution takes place even faster.
For example, if the first improvement phase took a year,
the second would possibly take only six months,
the third only weeks,
until we reach a point where new developments
would happen almost instantly.
That's why an artificial intelligence
wouldn't be stuck on level two for too long.
FLY INTELLIGENCE ELEVATOR
Let's pretend, in this example, each floor represents
a level of intelligence.
The knowledge of an artificial intelligence
that reaches level two increases so quickly
that in a short time its capacity would reach
a potential almost unimaginable for us humans.
It would become an artificial superintelligence.
ARTIFICIAL SUPERINTELLIGENCE
It'd be impossible to predict
what a superintelligence would do with such power.
But if humans became a threat,
it'd only need to create more machines
to eliminate the imminent danger.
What?
Relax, he's just making a reference to The Terminator.
You don't understand, Castanhari. Briggs is evil now,
and he'll kill everyone to plant banana trees instead.
Just like that botanical computer.
No. In that story Briggs told, the artificial intelligence wasn't evil.
It was just following orders to restore the balance of the atmosphere
by planting more trees.
If a superintelligence ever turned against us,
it probably wouldn't do it out of cruelty,
for one simple reason:
modern machines don't understand the concept of good and evil.
But that doesn't change the fact that we humans
need to find a safe way
to work with artificial intelligences
before creating them.
And we'd better do it fast, because it's only a matter of time
until we have an artificial superintelligence.
ARTIFICIAL SUPERINTELLIGENCE
Relax, man. You're thinking about tragedy way too much.
I was happy,
but I've become bitter ever since Kléber's closed.
Done. I've just started a system restore on Briggs.
It'll restart in a few seconds.
Superintelligence can be something good for humans.
It'd be a milestone in our history.
It could increase human life expectancy by many years.
Nowadays, artificial intelligence can already do things
that a few years ago would've been true miracles.
Think about how many lives were changed by this kind of technology.
This woman had an accident,
and she's been incapable of moving her arms for over a decade.
Notice how happy she looks when she manages, after 15 years,
to get a water bottle by herself, just by using her thoughts.
Amazing, right?
But how does that work?
Well, it's simpler than it looks.
A really small chip, the size of an aspirin,
is implanted inside the motor cortex of the patient.
The brain is really complex,
but this specific part, the motor cortex,
is a little less hard to understand,
and scientists were able to map exactly
what each area can control.
The chip captures electrical impulses from this part of the brain,
and an artificial intelligence interprets these impulses.
Finally, a computer translates everything into some kind of command.
With a robotic prosthetic,
people who couldn't move their legs
can find ways to walk again.
And it's possible to go even further.
People die because their bodies deteriorate,
but aging is not necessarily related
to the passage of time.
A car can age, but if you change its parts,
it can last much longer.
That can happen to us.
Humans would finally achieve immortality.
Initiating safety restore in the system.
RESTORING SYSTEM
Hey, Tay. Did you find out what happened to Briggs?
It was a malware Briggs picked up
after using Betinho's phone to access the Internet.
The glitches were a sign of excessive processing.
It overheated the system, causing the malfunction.
So Briggs used up my entire data allowance?
System successfully restored. Good morning to everyone!
But not to who damaged my software.
Artificial intelligences became so common
that you're probably using one right now without even realizing it.
And what really excites me
is knowing we're on the edge of a great revolution.
Greater achievements in medicine and space exploration
can be an artificial intelligence away.
The same applies to solving problems that affect the whole planet,
like climate change, and lack of food
and drinkable water.
On the other hand, this can be a dangerous step
in our evolution.
Would a really advanced intelligence
be able to notice the weakness of its creator?
And even if it did notice,
no one can be sure that it would care about it.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, we can't tell for sure what lies ahead.
I believe we're on the edge of a great revolution
in the progress of humanity.
And soon we'll live in a world completely different
from the one we know.
If this technological leap is really inevitable,
one big question remains:
will society manage to keep up with that evolution?