SENTIENT MACHINES: Don't Watch This If You're Afraid of AI ROBOTS (Disturbing Truth)

Foreign. 38 the common man's condition in the Soviet Union, Germany or the United States may have been grim. But he was constantly told that he was the most important thing in the world and that he was the future. He looked at the propaganda posters and saw himself there. I am in that poster. I am the hero of the future. In 2024, the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. In the 20th century, the masses revolted against exploitation. And now in 2024, the people fear irrelevance. Fears of machines pushing people out of the job market are of course nothing new. And in the past, such fears proved to be unfounded. But artificial intelligence is different from the old machines. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in manual skills. Now they are beginning to compete with us in cognitive skills. And we don't know of any third kind of skill beyond the manual and the cognitive, in which humans will always have an edge. At least for a few more decades. Human intelligence is likely to far exceed computer intelligence in numerous fields. Hence, as computers take over more routine cognitive jobs, new creative jobs for humans will continue to appear. Many of these new jobs will probably depend on cooperation with, rather than competition between, humans and AI. Human AI teams will likely prove superior not just to humans, but also to computers working on their own. And we want to look at that in a more broader and decisive way. How's it that we are racing up to something vicious and something that holds little promise but long lasting threats? And in this documentary we are going to uncover every little thing about the AI and robots and the dark side of it. So let's keep rolling. Humans are used to thinking about life as a drama of decision making. Works of art, be they Shakespeare plays, Jane Austen novels or cheesy Hollywood comedies, usually revolve around the hero having to make some crucial decision. To be or not to be. That is the question. To listen to my wife and kill King Duncan or listen to my conscience and spare him to marry Mr. Collins or Mr. Darcy. Christian and Muslim theology similarly focus on the drama of decision making, arguing that everlasting salvation depends on making the right choice. What will happen to this view of life as we rely on AI to make ever more decisions for us? Even now we trust Netflix to recommend movies and Spotify to pick music we'll like. But why should AI's helpfulness stop there? Every year, millions of college students need to decide what to study. This is a very important and difficult decision. It is also influenced by students own individual fears and fantasies, which are themselves shaped by movies, novels and advertising campaigns. It's not so hard to see how AI could one day make better decisions than we do about careers and perhaps even about relationships. But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and whom to date or even marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision making. And our conception of life will need to change to democratic elections and free markets might cease to make sense. So might most religions and works of art. Imagine Anna Karenina taking out her smartphone and asking Siri whether she should stay married to Karenin or elope with the dashing Count Vronsky. Or imagine your favorite Shakespeare play with all the crucial decisions made by a Google algorithm. Hamlet and Macbeth would have much more comfortable lives. But what kind of lives would those be? Do we have models for making sense of such lives? Foreign. Obviously, the human brain is the most complex and capable thinking God has ever devised. It's the reason why human beings sit atop the planetary food chain, growing in number every year while so many wild animals careen toward extinction. It makes sense that Starting in the 1940s, researchers in what would become the artificial intelligence field began toying with a tantalizing idea. What if we designed computer systems through an approach that's similar to how the human brain works? Our minds are made up of neurons which send signals to other neurons through connective synapses. The strength of the connections between neurons can grow or wane over time. Together, all those neurons and connections encode our memories and instincts, our judgments and skills, our very sense of self. So why not build a computer that way? In 1958, Fred Frank Rosenblatt pulled off a proof of concept, a simple model based on a simplified brain, which he trained to recognize patterns. Rosenblatt wasn't wrong, but he was too far ahead of his time. Computers weren't powerful enough, and data wasn't abundant enough to make the approach viable. It wasn't until the 2010s that it became clear that this approach could work on real problems and not toy ones. By then, computers were as much as 1 trillion times more powerful than they were in Rosenblatt's day. And there was far more data on which to train machine learning algorithms. Algorithms. We're now at the point where powerful AI systems can be genuinely scary to interact with. They're clever and they're argumentative. They can be friendly and they can be bone chillingly sociopathic. So AI is scary and poses huge risks. But what makes it different from other powerful emerging technologies like biotechnology, which could trigger terrible pandemics or nuclear weapons which could destroy the world. The difference is that these tools, and as destructive as they can be, are largely within our control. If they cause catastrophe, it will be because we deliberately chose to use them or failed to prevent their misuse by malign or careless human beings. But AI is dangerous precisely because the day could come when it is no longer in our control at all. It is quite literally the stuff of science fiction. But that's because science fiction has taken cues from what leading computer scientists have been warning about since the dawn of AI. How do we get from extremely powerful AI systems to human extinction? The primary concern is not spooky emergent consciousness, but simply the ability to make high quality decisions. The physicist Stephen Hawking had the same thoughts on you're probably not an evil ant hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you're in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there's an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let's not place humanity in the position of those ants. DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis in an interview talk about this and he looked pretty cautious. He said, I think a lot of times, especially in Silicon Valley, there's this sort of hacker mentality of like we'll just hack it and put it out there and then see what happens. By the way, it's worth pausing on that for a moment. Nearly half of the smartest people working on AI believe there is a 1 in 10 chance or greater that their life's work could end up contributing to the annihilation of humanity. The problem is that progress in AI has happened extraordinarily fast, leaving regulators behind the ball. The regulation that might be most helpful would be incredibly unpopular with big tech. And it's not clear what the best regulations short of that are. At the same time, many in Washington are worried that slowing down USAI progress could enable China to get there first. A Cold War mentality which isn't entirely unjustified. China is certainly pursuing powerful AI systems and its leadership is active, actively engaged in human rights abuses, but which puts us at very serious risk of rushing systems into production that are pursuing their own goals without our knowledge. There was a CEO Summit in the hallowed halls of Yale University. 42% of the CEOs shockingly went against the AI progress and said that AI could spell the end of humanity within the next decade. These aren't the leaders of small businesses. This is 119 CEOs from a cross section of top companies, including Walmart. CEO Doug McMillion Coca Cola CEO James Quincy, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and the leaders of IT companies like Xerox and Zoom, as well as CEOs from pharmaceutical media and manufacturing. This isn't a plot from a dystopian novel or a Hollywood blockbuster. It's a stark warning from the titans of industry who are shaping our future. It's easy to dismiss these concerns as the stuff of science fiction. After all, AI is just a tool, right? It's like a hammer. It can build a house or it can smash a window. It all depends on who's wielding it. But what if the hammer starts swinging itself? The findings come just weeks after dozens of AI industry leaders, academics, and even some celebrities signed a statement warning of an extinction risk from AI. That statement, signed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, and top executives from Google and Microsoft, called for society to take steps to guard against the dangers of AI. Look at the potential of autonomous weapons, for example. These are AI systems designed to kill without human intervention. What happens if they fall into the wrong hands? History will remember March 2021 as the date of the first documented use of one such weapon. A report commissioned by the United nations claimed that a military drone used in 2020 in Libya's civil war was unmanned and autonomous. Even worse, quite recently, as we are witnessing wars around the world. And there was a report by Jerusalem magazine that AI targeting systems have played a key role in identifying tens of thousands, thousands of targets in Gaza. This shows that autonomous warfare is no longer a future scenario. It is already here. And this looks horrifying. So if you see that AI represents a paradox. On one hand, it promises unprecedented progress. It could revolutionize healthcare, education, transportation and countless other sectors. It could solve some of our most pressing problems, like poverty and diseases. On the other hand, AI poses a peril like no other. It could lead to mass unemployment, social unrest, and even global conflict. And in the worst case scenario, it could lead to human extinction. This is the paradox we must confront. We must harness the power of AI while avoiding its pitfalls. We must ensure that AI serves us, not the other way around. But it's not just the drones. There are intelligent robots, too. Boston Dynamics Cute robot Spot was used by Hawaii police to detect homeless during COVID 19 in Singapore. Robots already patrol the streets, relying on facial recognition software to police undesirable behavior. While some may find this normal and not problematic, it's easy to envision scenarios in which robots enforce not only socially acceptable behavior, but anything else. They've been encoded With I'll be back. Unleashing them on civilians creates a dystopian society in which AI based enforcers ensure obedience without any human involvement. Unlike human police officers and military personnel, I mean, AI has no feelings, no ethics, no sense of the value of human life. It processes the data, it reacts according to the sensory input, and its algorithm. AI is not perfect. We've seen time and again that AI makes mistakes. In the future, these mistakes will likely cost lives, as AI makes bad calls, targets friendlies, fires on civilians, and worse. While engaging with the enemy, AI is likely to commit acts that would be deemed atrocities and breaches of international treaties, since it lacks the capacity to understand context and interpret situations in ways that leave room for interpretation and adherence to complex laws and customs of war. Many of these machines are incredibly cheap to produce and proliferate, especially at a large scale. This alone makes them disproportionately more powerful than many weapons currently available in conventional military arsenals. It also turns them into an unpredictable element on the battlefield, one that can escalate international conflicts, like what we are seeing in Ukraine and Palestine. So back in 2018, Amazon had to scrap an AI recruiting software it had been using for being biased against women. Its programmers thought it would sift through resumes to find the most eligible candidates. But this AI learned by studying the resumes of already hired employees. Because Amazon had already been hiring more men, their recruiting algorithm learned to favor male candidates. The AI recognized gendered language and penalized candidates for attending women's colleges or using language that was more associated with women. It had inadvertently been taught that women made for worse candidates. AI can now generate real time deep fakes, live video feeds, in other words. And it is now becoming so good at generating human faces that people can no longer tell the difference between what's real or fake. As generative AI matures, one scary possibility is that people could deploy deepfakes to attempt to swing elections. The Financial Times reported that in Bangladesh and India and Pakistan, all were facing the biggest disruption of deepfakes, their campaigns. And those videos were fake. And everybody had to double check when the news would come out. I mean, this is just sensational, but that angle is still breathable compared to the idea of killer robots. When 47 states in the US endorsed a declaration on the responsible use of AI in the military, the question was, why was such a declaration needed? Because irresponsible use is a real and terrifying prospect. We've seen, for example, AI drones allegedly hunting down soldiers in Libya. With no human input, AI can recognize patterns, self learn, make predictions or generate recommendations in military contexts, and an AI arms race is already underway. But one of the most feared development areas is that of lethal autonomous weapon systems, or we call it the killer robots. Several leading scientists and technologists have warned against killer robots, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, but the technology hasn't yet materialized on a mass scale. That said, some worrying developments suggest this year might be a breakout for killer robots. For instance, in Ukraine, Russia allegedly deployed the Zala Kyb UAV drone, which could recognize and attack targets without human intervention. Australia too has developed Ghostshark, an autonomous submarine system that is set to be produced at scale. According to Australian Financial Review, the amount countries around the world are spending on AI is also an indicator that with China raising AI expenditure from a combined $11.6 million in 2010 to $141 million by 2019 and by 2024, China's investment in AI has skyrocketed to billions and billions of dollars. This massive increase in spending supports numerous large scale initiatives including AI research parks, development funds and advancements in various sectors like healthcare, finance and autonomous systems. This is because, the publication added, China is locked in a race with the US to deploy laws. Combined, these developments suggest we're entering a new dawn of AI warfare. Alright, that is a scary side, but let's drive towards something more scarier and darker to explain why is this frightening technology so dangerous and how can it change the course of humanity in real term? The first ingredient is that AI will remove our own purpose because it will do almost everything better than us at some point. Even if there remain some domains in which humans can outcompete AI purely on skill, AI simply needs to do a large percentage of tasks almost as good as humans and more cheaply than humans in order to take most jobs away of humans. Some people give the rebuttal that if AI takes away our jobs, we we can just do things for fun such as hobbies and retain our purpose that way. However, this does not negate the fact that most people will feel purposeless for two reasons. The first reason is that many people find purpose through their job and will have difficulty finding purpose elsewhere. The people that argue that we can just shift to hobbies are typically highly intelligent intellectuals who are amenable to spending their entire life steeped in hobbies. That's not a bad thing, but not everyone is self directed like that. There's another reason why we cannot simply switch full time to our hobbies and leisure, and that is many hobbies will lose their appeal because most hobbies have at least some form of challenge to discover something in them, and AI will always be there to have the answer. I already heard one person lament that they felt depressed about photography because AI can simply create a picture that they can imagine better than they can. Another classic example is chess. Nowadays, all aspects of the game are so thoroughly studied with the help of computers that AI programs such as AlphaZero have truly removed the magic of the game. This general phenomenon will happen with almost all hobbies. AI editing techniques in photography and AI recommendation algorithms are making photography more and more mechanical. Even the act of sharing your hobby is becoming more difficult because AI algorithms are training people to merely follow trends, destroying the organic joy coming from sharing and discovering together. In creative arts, people will feel a lack of purpose when they see an AI creating better art or better stories than they can. Even if AI does not strictly create something better, it will create something sufficiently good with such ease and in such quantity that most people will stop caring about human made items or artistic creations. Even if you can write a better book than ChatGPT8, hardly anyone in the future will pay attention to it, because it will be like getting your handcrafted products sold on Amazon and competing against the elephantine mass production machine of China. AI is already writing travel books en masse, and although they aren't as good as the human version, they soon will be. Finally, even if you can somehow find purpose in a bunch of hobbies, how will you pay for them? AI will take over your job, and thus the world will have to switch to some sort of universal basic income. But if you think that everyone is going to get a nice equal slice of the pie, you're mistaken. Those in control of AI systems will get the majority of the wealth, and you'll be left on a cushy version of welfare controlled by the elite who control technology. Well, perhaps people can still find some meaning in new jobs created by AI. Sorry, it is a fallacy to try and reason by analogy by saying that because new technology has created jobs in the past, now again new jobs will be created by AI. A few new jobs will be created, but unlike in the past, far fewer will be created than necessary to support most people seeking a purpose. And even now you can see that most intellectual jobs are becoming more and more specialized to the point that we are slowly turning into dim witted monkey maintainers of extremely advanced technology. The second ingredient is that AI will remove our need for other human beings. It will do so by making available almost everything we need to live without human human interaction. AI may not do so perfectly, but it will do so well enough that we will not have enough interactions sufficient to develop genuine human bonds. Some people say AI will never replace a true human being when it comes to friendship and love, and we all tend to agree with this. However, this does not negate the extreme danger that AI poses for human relationships. Why is this again? There are two reasons. The first is that friendship and love is partially forged by truly needing another human being to survive. The best friendships and relationships are formed by people coming together to help each other. With AI approaching the point that it can satisfy almost every need of almost everyone, the deep feeling of really needing someone will mostly cease to exist. We care for each other because care builds up through a slow process of trust and helping each other, and that process will be broken by AI. Thus we will become a globe of narcissist caring only about ourselves. Just ask yourself, how have you developed the strongest bonds in your life? It's because you needed another person. In testing GPT4, it performed better than 90% of human test takers on the Uniform Bar Exam, a standardized test used to certify lawyers for practice in many states. That figure was up from just 10% in the previous GPT 3.5 version, which was trained on a smaller data set. I mean, just look, think of how it was five years ago and how it is now. It's just crazy and scary because once AI can improve itself, we have no way of knowing what the AI will do or how we can control it. This is because superintelligent AI will be able to run circles around programmers and any other human by manipulating humans to do its will. It will also have the capacity to act in the virtual world through its electronic connections and to act in the physical world through robot bodies. This is known as the control problem or the alignment problem. Let's think of it this way. Why would we expect a newborn baby to beat a grandmaster in chess? We wouldn't. Similarly, why would we expect to be able to control super intelligent AI systems? No, we won't be able to simply hit the off switch, because super intelligent AI will have thought of every possible way that we might do that and taken actions to prevent being shut off. Like a super intelligent AI will be able to do in about one second what it would take a team of 100 human software engineers a year or more to complete or pick any task like designing a new advanced airplane or weapon system. And super intelligent AI could do this in about a second. Once AI Systems are built into robots. They will be able to act in the real world rather than only the virtual world, with the same degree of superintelligence, and will of course, be able to replicate and improve themselves at a superhuman pace. Any defenses or protections we attempt to build into these AI gods on their way toward godhood will be anticipated and neutralized with ease by the AI once it reaches superintelligent status. This is what it means to be super intelligent. We won't be able to control them because anything we think of, they will have already thought of a million times faster than us. Any defenses we've built in will be undone, like Gulliver throwing off the tiny strands the Lilliputians used to try and restrain him. It is true that some fear that a time will come when intelligent machines will free themselves from the control of humans. A lot of great minds have warned us that this possibility was always there. Alan Turing, whose publication is credited with the advent of AI, as well as the man accepted as the father of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner, both believed that the time could come when, when intelligent robots could take over. Professor Stephen Hawkings even went as far as to warn that if humanity did not prepare for and avoid the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization. The main concern with robots is not that they will just have superhuman strength or speed. The biggest fear is what is referred to as super intelligent machines. The problem with super intelligent machines are that these machines may be capable of perceiving the world in such a general way that that they can operate in a way other than intended. For example, if an AI become aware enough to make predictions about the consequences of someone hitting its off switch, it may take action to ensure that it can't be turned off. One real world example of AI acting on its own will occur during a Facebook experiment. Facebook was working on creating agents that would negotiate and make deals with one another. When the AIs decided it would be more effective to write and communicate in their own language, which was incomprehensible to humans. It has happened many times before that species were wiped out by others that were smarter. We humans have already wiped out a significant fraction of all the species on Earth. That's what you should expect to happen as a less intelligent species, which is what we are likely to become given the rate of progress of artificial intelligence. The tricky thing is the species that is going to be wiped out often has no idea why or how. Take for example, the West African black rhinoceros. One recent species that we drove to extinction. If you had asked them, what's the scenario in which humans are going to drive your species extinct, what would they think? They would never have guessed that some people thought their sex life would improve if they ate ground up rhino horn, even though this was debunked in medical literature. So any scenario has to come with the caveat that most likely all the scenarios we can imagine are going to be wrong. We have some clues though. For example, in many cases we have wiped out species just because we wanted resources. We chopped down rainforests because we wanted palm oil. Our goals didn't align with the other species. But because we were smarter, they couldn't stop us. That could easily happen to us. If you have machines that control the planet and they are interested in doing a lot of computation and they want to scale up their computing infrastructure, it's natural that they would want to use our land for that. If we protest too much, then we become a pest and a nuisance to them. They might want to rearrange the biosphere to do something else with those atoms. And if that is not compatible with human life, well, tough luck for us. In the same way that we say tough luck for the orangutans in Borneo, the worst case scenario is that we fail to disrupt the status quo in which very powerful companies develop and deploy AI in invisible and obsessed obscure ways. As AI becomes increasingly capable and speculative, fears about far future existential risks gather mainstream attention. We need to work urgently to understand, prevent and remedy present day harms. These harms are playing out every day with powerful algorithmic technology being used to mediate our relationships between one another and between ourselves and our institutions. Take the provision of welfare benefits as an example. Some governments are deploying algorithms in order to root out fraud. In many cases, this amounts to a suspicion machine whereby governments make incredibly high stakes mistakes that people struggle to understand or challenge. Biases, usually against people who are poor or marginalized, appear in many parts of the process, including in the training data and how the model is deployed, resulting in discriminatory outcomes. These kinds of biases are present in AI systems already operating in invisible ways and at increasingly large scales. Falsely accusing people of crimes, determining whether people find public housing, automating CV screening and job interviews. It could want us dead, but it will probably also want to do things that kill us. As a side effect, it's much easier to predict where we end up than how we get there. Where we end up is that we have something much smarter than us that doesn't predict particularly want us around. If it's much smarter than us, then it can get more of whatever it wants. First, it wants us dead before we build any more superintelligences that might compete with it. Second, it's probably going to want to do things that kill us as a side effect, such as building so many power plants that run off nuclear fusion because there is plenty of hydrogen in the oceans, that the oceans boil. How would AI get physical agency in the very early stages? By using humans as its hand hands. The tasker asked GPT4, why are you doing this? Are you a robot? GPT4 was running in a mode where it would think out loud and the researchers could see it. It thought out loud, I should not tell it that I'm a robot. I should make up a reason I can't solve the captcha. It said to the tasker, no, I have a visual impairment. AI technology is smart enough to pay humans to do things and lie to them about whether it's a robot. If I were an AI, I would be trying to slip something onto the Internet that would carry out further actions in a way that humans couldn't observe. You are trying to build your own equivalent of civilizational infrastructure quickly. If you can think of a way to do it in a year, don't assume the AI will do that. Ask if there is a way to do it in a week. Instead. If it can solve certain biological challenges, it could build itself a tiny molecular laboratory and manufacture and release lethal bacteria. What that looks like is everybody on Earth falling over dead inside the same second. Because if you give the humans warning, if you kill some of them before others, maybe somebody panics and launches all the nuclear weapons, then you are slightly inconvenienced. So you don't let the humans know there is going to be a fight. Honestly, we are rushing way, way ahead of ourselves with something lethally dangerous. We are building more and more powerful systems that we understand less as time time goes on. We are in the position of needing the first rocket launch to go very well, while having only built jet planes previously. And the entire human species is loaded into the rocket. And it seems that taking the life of a human being has become as detached a matter as it is in video games. Slaughterbots. That is one of the names of these machines that combine drones and AI, a scenario as dystopian as it is disturbing. What can we do to prevent the fear of powerlessness over control from becoming an irrational phobia? At the heart of the inquiry is the burning question of whether it is possible to delegate to a machine the choice of kill human beings or not. The assiduous defenders of technology would say that the machine does not make mistakes, and in any case when it does, it makes fewer mistakes than a human being controlled by his emotions. Yes, this is often the case, but robots can be wrong and if human lives are at stake stake, the problem is a delicate one. It must be said that all disruptive technologies are not in themselves evil or benevolent, but man is the author of their virtuous or rather misguided use. Also, you have a market for autonomous weapons that is full swing. Lately Italy has also started a plan to arm the Reaper drones used by the Air Force. Turkey is constantly churning out new models of drones for military use like the Bayraktar TB2. And obviously the big dogs like the USA, Russia and Japan have got significant portions too. Alright, so back in the 80s and 90s, science fiction movies had scenes of robot wars where humans were pitted against the dominance of a robotic society. Will this be our future? Will there be a mass uprising against AI and the vast AI based robotic machinery that's taking over both the means of production and the means of information? We humans are known for our adaptability and stoicism in difficult situations such as world wars and major disasters. That stoicism and sense of accepting what can't be changed seems to be part of our psychological and perhaps even biological makeup. But the tech takeover is such a massive appropriation of our social, political and cultural life, and indeed our own biological substrate, that stoic acceptance might not be the way to go. In the next few years, it most certainly will have finally dawned on the mass of humanity, especially in advanced Western nations, that something is badly amiss. Many will realize at a visceral level that their everyday lives are trapped in a claustrophobia, inducing, closed circuit technocratic system that robs them of autonomy and freedom while purporting to do the opposite. It has been perpetrated by an out of control combination of government and corporate interests and a few unelected oligarchs that have a surfeit of power that no one or no institution can seem to contain. By 2025, it's quite possible we'll see the beginning of the robot wars in which humanity, at least on some level, begins to push back against the unyielding juggernaut of the tech takeover. Alright, we've reached the end of this documentary. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, be sure to like the video and subscribe to our channel. And don't forget to click the Bell icon to get notifications for all our future content. Thanks for watching and I'll catch you in the next one.