Humans rule Earth without competition. But we are about to create something that may change that: our last invention, the most powerful tool, weapon, or maybe even entity: Artificial Super intelligence. This sounds like science fiction, so let’s start at the beginning.
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00:00Humans rule Earth without competition, but we're about to create something that may change that.
00:06Our last invention, the most powerful tool, weapon, or maybe even entity, artificial superintelligence.
00:14This sounds like science fiction, so let's start at the beginning.
00:19Intelligence is the ability to learn, reason, acquire knowledge and skills, and use them to solve problems.
00:26Intelligence is power, and we're the species that exploited it the most.
00:31So much so that humanity broke the game of nature and took control.
00:37But the journey there wasn't straightforward.
00:39For most animals, intelligence costs too much energy to be worth it.
00:43Still, if we track intelligence in the tree of species over time, we can see lots of diverse forms of intelligence emerge.
00:51The earliest brains were in flatworms 500 million years ago.
00:55Just a tiny cluster of neurons to handle basic body functions.
00:59It took hundreds of millions of years for species to diversify and become more complex.
01:04Life conquered new environments, gained new senses, and had to contend with fierce competition over resources.
01:11But in nature, all that matters is survival, and brains are expensive.
01:16So for almost all animals, a narrow intelligence fit for a narrow range of tasks was enough.
01:21In some environments, animals like birds, octopuses, and mammals evolved more complex neural structures.
01:28For them, it paid off to have more energy-consuming skills like advanced navigation and communication.
01:34Until 7 million years ago, the hominins emerged.
01:38We don't know why, but their brains grew faster than their relatives.
01:42Something was different about their intelligence.
01:45Very slowly, it turned from narrow to general.
01:48From a screwdriver to a multi-tool.
01:51Able to think about diverse problems.
01:542 million years ago, Homo erectus saw the world differently from anyone before.
01:59As something to be understood and transformed.
02:02They controlled fire, invented tools, and created the first culture.
02:08We probably emerged from them around 250,000 years ago with an even larger and more complex brain.
02:15It enabled us to work together in large groups and to communicate complex thoughts.
02:20We used our intelligence to improve our lives, to ask how things worked and why things are the way they are.
02:26With each discovery, we asked more questions and pushed forward.
02:30Preserving what we learned, outpacing what evolution could do with genes.
02:35Knowledge builds on knowledge.
02:37Progress was slow at first, and then sped up exponentially.
02:41Agriculture, writing, medicine, astronomy, or philosophy exploded into the world.
02:46200 years ago, science took off and made us even better at learning about the world and speeding up progress.
02:5335 years ago, the internet age began.
02:56Today, we live in a world made to suit our needs, created by us, for us.
03:01This is incredibly new.
03:03We forget how hard it was to get here, how enormous the steps on the intelligence ladder were, and how long it took to climb them.
03:11But once we did, we became the most powerful animal in the world in a heartbeat.
03:17But we may be in the process of changing this.
03:20We're building machines that could be better at the very thing that gave us the power to conquer the planet.
03:26Humanity's final invention.
03:30Artificial intelligence.
03:33Artificial intelligence, or AI, is software that performs mental tasks with a computer.
03:38Code that uses silicon instead of neurons to solve problems.
03:42In the beginning, AI was very simple.
03:45Lines of code on paper, mere proofs of concept to demonstrate how machines could perform mental tasks.
03:51Only in the 1960s did we start seeing the first examples of what we would recognize as AI.
03:57A chatbot in 1964, a program to sort through molecules in 1965.
04:03Slow, specialized systems requiring experts to use them.
04:08Their intelligence was extremely narrow, built for a single task inside a controlled environment.
04:13The equivalent of flatworms 500 million years ago doing the minimum amount of mental work.
04:19Progress in AI research paused several times when researchers lost hope in the technology.
04:25But just like changing environments create new niches for life, the world around AI changed.
04:31Between 1950 and 2000, computers got a billion times faster while programming became easier and widespread.
04:39In 1972, AI could navigate a room.
04:42In 1989, it could read handwritten numbers.
04:45But it remained a fancy tool, no match for humans.
04:49Until in 1997, an AI shocked the world by beating the world champion in chess.
04:54Proving that we could build machines that could surpass us.
04:57But we calmed ourselves because a chess bot is quite stupid.
05:01Not a flatworm, but maybe a bee, only able to perform a specialized narrow task.
05:07But within this narrow task, it's so good that no human will ever again beat AI at chess.
05:13As computers continued to improve, AI became a powerful tool for more and more tasks.
05:19In 2004, it drove a robot on Mars.
05:22In 2011, it began recommending YouTube videos to you.
05:26But this was only possible because humans broke down problems into easy-to-digest chunks that computers could solve quickly.
05:33Until we told AIs to teach themselves.
05:38Rise of the self-learning machines.
05:41This is not a technical video, so we're massively oversimplifying here.
05:46In a nutshell, the sheer power of supercomputers was combined with the almost endless data collected in the information age to make a new generation of AI.
05:55AI experts began drastically improving forms of AI software called neural networks.
06:00Enormously huge networks of artificial neurons that start out being bad at their tasks.
06:06They then used machine learning, which is an umbrella term for many different training techniques and environments, that allows algorithms to write their own code and improve themselves.
06:15The scary thing is that we don't exactly know how they do it, and what happens inside them.
06:21Just that it works, and that what comes out the other end is a new type of AI.
06:26A capable black box of code.
06:29These new AIs could master complex skills extremely quickly, with much less human help.
06:35They were still narrow intelligences, but a huge step up.
06:39In 2014, Facebook AI could identify faces with 97% accuracy.
06:44In 2016, an AI beat the best humans in the incredibly complex game of Go.
06:50In 2018, a self-learning AI learned chess in 4 hours just by playing against itself, and then defeated the best specialized chess bot.
07:01Since then, machine learning has been applied to reading, image processing, solving tests, and much more.
07:07Many of these AIs are already better than humans for whatever narrow task they were trained, but they still remained a simple tool.
07:14AI still didn't seem that big of a deal for most people.
07:18And then came the chatbot ChatGPT.
07:21The work that went into it is massive.
07:23It trained on nearly everything written on the internet to learn how to handle language, which it now does better than most people.
07:30It can summarize, translate, and help with some maths problems.
07:34It's incredibly more broad than any other system just a few years ago.
07:38Not crushing any single benchmark, but all of them at once.
07:42Many large tech companies are spending billions to build powerful competitors.
07:47AI is already transforming customer service, banking, healthcare, marketing, copywriting, creative spaces, and more.
07:55AI-generated content has already taken hold of social media, YouTube, and news websites.
08:01Elections are expected to be inundated by propaganda and misinformation.
08:06No one is sure how much good or harm can come from adopting AI everywhere.
08:11Change is scary. There will be winners and losers.
08:14One of the biggest questions governments and corporations have now is how to manage the transition to an AI-boosted economy.
08:21All these potential gains or risks are just the result of today's AI.
08:26ChatGPT's intelligence is a major step up, but it remains narrow.
08:31While it can write a great essay in seconds, it doesn't understand what it's writing.
08:36But what if the AIs stopped being narrow?
08:40General AI
08:42What makes humans different from current AI is our general intelligence.
08:47Humans can technically absorb any piece of knowledge and start working on any problem.
08:52We're great at many very different skills and tasks, from playing chess to writing or solving science puzzles.
08:57Not equally, of course.
08:59Some of us are experts in some fields and beginners in others, but we can technically do all of them.
09:05In the past, AI was narrow and able to become good at one skill, but was rather bad in all the others.
09:11Simply by building faster computers and pouring more money into AI training, we'll get us new, more powerful generations of AI.
09:20But what if the next step for AI is to become a general intelligence like us, an AGI?
09:27If the AI improvement process continues as it has been, it's not unlikely that AGI could be better in most or even all skills that humans can do.
09:37We don't know how to build AGI, how it will work, or what it will be able to do.
09:42Since narrow AIs today are capable of mastering one mental task quickly, AGI might be able to do the same with all mental tasks.
09:50So, even if it starts out stupid, an AGI might be able to become as smart and capable as a human.
09:57While this sounds like science fiction, most AI researchers think this will happen sometime this century, maybe already in a few years.
10:06Humanity is not ready for what will happen next, not socially, not economically, not morally.
10:13Earlier, we defined intelligence as the ability to learn, reason, acquire knowledge and skills and use them to solve problems, all things humans excel at.
10:23An AGI as intelligent as even an average human would already disrupt modern civilization because they're not bound by the same limitations as we are.
10:32Today's AIs like ChatGPT already think and solve the tasks they were made for at least 10 times faster than even very skilled humans.
10:41Maybe AGI will be slower, but it may also be faster, maybe much faster.
10:46And since AGIs are software, you could copy them endlessly as long as you have enough storage and run them in parallel.
10:55There are 8 million scientists in the world. Now imagine an AGI copied a million times and put to work.
11:02Imagine 1 million scientists working 24-7, thinking 10 times faster than humans, without being distracted, only focused on the task they've been given.
11:12What if, suddenly, AGI could do all intelligence-based jobs in the world, from interpreting law to coding to creating animated YouTube videos, better, faster and much cheaper than humans?
11:24Would whoever controls this AGI suddenly own the economy?
11:29And thinking bigger, human progress is our intelligence applied to problems, so what could a million AGIs achieve?
11:38Solve fundamental questions of science, like dark energy.
11:42Invent new technology that gives us limitless energy, fix climate change, cure aging and cancer.
11:49But then again, sadly, humans apply their intelligence not just for the benefit of all.
11:54What if the AGIs are tasked to guide drones or pull the triggers in war?
12:00Or to engineer a virus that only kills people with green eyes?
12:04Or to create the most profitable social media, so addictive that people starve in front of their screens?
12:10The creation of AGI could reasonably be as big of an event as taming fire or electricity, and give whoever invents it equally as much power.
12:20But now let's go one step further.
12:23What if the potential of AGI doesn't stop here?
12:27Intelligence explosion.
12:29Intelligence and knowledge build and accelerate each other, but humans are limited by biology and evolution.
12:36Once we evolved the right hardware, our software outpaced evolution by orders of magnitude, and within a heartbeat, we ruled this planet.
12:45But our software basically hasn't changed much since then, which is why we have obesity and destroy the climate for short-term gains.
12:53Since AGI is software on a computer, once it's smart enough to do AI research, the rate of AI progress should speed up a lot.
13:01And that results in better AI that's better at AI research without much human involvement.
13:07It may even be possible that AI could learn how to directly improve itself, in which case some experts fear this feedback loop could be incredibly fast.
13:16Maybe just months or years after the first self-improving AGI is switched on.
13:21Maybe it would actually take decades. We simply don't know. This is all speculative.
13:26But such an intelligence explosion might lead to a true superintelligent entity.
13:31We don't know what such a being would look like, what its motives or goals would be, what would go on in its inner world.
13:38We could be as laughably stupid to a superintelligence as squirrels are to us, unable to even comprehend its way of thinking.
13:48This hypothetical scenario keeps many people up at night.
13:52Humanity is the only example we have of an animal becoming smarter than all others.
13:57And we have not been kind to what we perceive as less intelligent beings.
14:02AGI might be the last invention of humanity.
14:06It's possible that it could become the most intelligent and therefore most powerful being on Earth.
14:12A god in a box that could exercise its power to bring unimaginable wealth and happiness to humans while securing our future.
14:19Or it could subvert civilization and bring about our end, with humanity unable to come up with a way to stop it.
14:27We'll look at some of these potential futures in more videos, but for now, let's wrap up.
14:33The only thing we know for sure is that today, right now, many of the largest and richest companies in the world are racing to create ever more powerful AIs.
14:43Whatever our future is, we are running towards it.
14:49Who knows how long we have until we must confront our AI future.
14:54Luckily, you still have plenty of time to prepare for it.
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