Sophia is not AGI (Ben Goertzel) | AI Podcast Clips with Lex Fridman

You are the chief scientist of Hanson Robotics. You're still involved with Hanson Robotics, doing a lot of really interesting stuff there. This is for people who don't know the company that created Sophia the robot. Can you tell me who Sophia is?

I'd rather start by telling you who David Hansen is, because David is the brilliant mind behind the Sophia robot. And he remains, so far, he remains more interesting than his creation, although she may be improving faster than he is. Actually.

That'S a good point.

I Met David maybe 2007 or something, at some futurist conference we were both speaking at. And I could see we had a great deal in common. I mean, we were both kind of crazy, but we also. We both had a passion for AGI and the singularity. And we were both huge fans of the work of Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer. And I wanted to create benevolent AGI that would create massively better life for all humans and all sentient beings, including animals, plants, and superhuman beings. And David, he wanted exactly the same thing, but he had a different idea of how to do it. He wanted to get computational compassion. He wanted to get machines that would love people and empathize with people. And he thought the way to do that was to make a machine that could look people eye to eye, face to face, look at people, and make people love the machine, and the machine loves the people back. So I thought that was very different way of looking at it because I'm very math oriented. And I'm just thinking like, what is the abstract cognitive algorithm that will let the system internalize the complex patterns of human values, blah, blah, blah. Whereas he's like, look you in the face, in the eye and love you, right? So we hit it off quite well and we talk to each other off and on. Then I moved to Hong Kong in 2011, so I've been living all over the place. I've been in Australia and New Zealand in my academic career, then in Las Vegas for a while, was in New York in the late 90s, starting my entrepreneurial career. Was in DC for nine years doing a bunch of US government consulting stuff, then moved to Hong Kong in 2011. Mostly because I met a Chinese girl who I fell in love with and we got married. She's actually not from Hong Kong, she's from mainland China. But we converged together in Hong Kong. Still married, now have a two year old baby.

So went to Hong Kong to see about a girl, I guess.

Yeah, pretty much, yeah. And on the other hand, I started doing some cool research there with Gino Yu at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I got involved with a project called Idea Using Machine Learning for Stock and Futures Prediction, which was quite interesting. And I also got to know something about the consumer electronics and hardware manufacturer ecosystem in Shenzhen across the border, which is like the only place in the world that makes sense to make complex consumer electronics at large scale and low cost. It's astounding the hardware ecosystem that you have in South China. People here cannot imagine what it's like. David was starting to explore that also. I invited him to Hong Kong to give a talk at Hong Kong Polyu. And I introduced him in Hong Kong to some investors who were interested in his robots. And he didn't have Sophia. Then he had a robot of Philip K. Dick, our favorite science fiction writer. He had a robot Einstein, he had some little toy robots that looked like his son Zeno. So through the investors I connected him to, he managed to get some funding to basically port Hanson Robotics to Hong Kong. When he first moved to Hong Kong, I was working on AGI research and also on this machine learning trading project. So I didn't get that tightly involved with Hanson Robotics. But as I hung out with David more and more, as we were both there in the same place, I started to get, I started to think about what you could do to make his robots smarter than they were. And so we started working together and for a few years I was chief scientist and head of software at Hanson Robotics. Then when I got deeply into the blockchain side of things, I stepped back from that and co founded SingularityNET. David Hanson was also one of the co founders of SingularityNET. So part of our goal there had been to make the blockchain based like Cloud Mind platform for Sophia and the.

Other Sophia would be just one of the robots in this. In Singularity Net.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exact, exactly Sophia. Many copies of the Sophia robot would be among the user interfaces to the globally distributed Singularity Net Cloud Mind. And I mean David and I talked about that for quite a while before co founding SingularityNET.

By the way, in his vision and your vision was Sophia tightly coupled to a particular AI system or was the idea that you can plug, you could just keep plugging in different AI systems within the pen.

David's view was always that Sophia would be a platform, much like say the Pepper robot is a platform from SoftBank, should be a platform with a set of nicely designed APIs that anyone can use to experiment with their different AI algorithms on that platform. And SingularityNET of course fits right into that, right because SingularityNET, it's an API marketplace so anyone can put their AI on there. OpenCog is a little bit different. I mean, David likes it, but I'd say it's my thing, it's not his. David has a little more passion for biologically based approaches to AI than I do, which makes sense. I mean, he's really into human physiology and biology. He's a character sculptor. Right. So yeah, he's interested in, but he also worked a lot with rule based and logic based AI systems too. So yeah, he's interested in not just Sophia, but all the Henson robots as a powerful social and emotional robotics platform. And what I saw in Sophia was a way to get AI algorithms out there in front of a whole lot of different people in an emotionally compelling way. And part of my thought was really kind of abstract, connected to AGI ethics. And many people are concerned AGI is going to enslave everybody or turn everybody into computronium to make extra hard drives for their cognitive engine or whatever. Emotionally, I'm not driven to that sort of paranoia. I'm really just an optimist by nature. But intellectually I have to assign a non zero probability to those sorts of nasty outcomes. Because if you're making something 10 times as smart as you, how can you know what it's going to do? There's an irreducible uncertainty there, just as my dog can't predict what I'm going to do tomorrow. So it seemed to me that based on our current state of knowledge, the best way to bias the AGIs we create toward benevolence would be to infuse them with love and compassion the way that we do our own children. So you want to interact with AIs in the context of doing compassionate, loving and beneficial things. And in that way, as your children will learn by doing compassionate, beneficial, loving things alongside you. And that way the AI will learn in practice what it means to be compassionate, beneficial and loving. It will get a sort of ingrained intuitive sense of this, which it can then abstract in its own way as it gets more and more intelligent. Now, David saw this the same way. That's why he came up with the name Sophia, which means wisdom. So it seemed to me making these like beautiful, loving robots to be rolled out for beneficial applications would be the perfect way to roll out early stage AGI systems so they can learn from people and not just learn factual knowledge, but learn human, human values and ethics from people while being their, you know, their home service robots, their education assistants, their nursing robots. So that, that was the grand vision. Now if you've ever worked with robots, the reality is, is quite different. Right. Like the first principle is the robot is always broken. I mean, I worked with robots in the 90s a bunch when you had to solder them together yourself. And I'd put neural nets doing reinforcement learning on like overturned salad bowl type robots. In the 90s when I was a professor, things of course advanced a lot.

But the principle still holds.

Yeah, principle that the robot's always broken still holds, yeah. So faced with the reality of making Sophia do stuff, many of my robo AGI aspirations were temporarily cast aside. And I mean, there's just a practical problem of making this robot interact in a meaningful way because you put nice computer vision on there, but there's always glare or you have a dialogue system. But at the time I was there, no speech to text algorithm could deal with Hong Kongese people's English accents. So the speech to text was always bad. So the robot always sounded stupid because it wasn't getting the right text. Right. So I started to view that really as what in software engineering you call a walking skeleton, which is maybe the wrong metaphor to use for Sophia or maybe the right one. But I mean, where the walking skeleton is in software development is if you're building a complex system, how do you get started? Well, one way is to first build part one, well, then build part two, well, then build part three, well, and so on another way is you make like a simple version of the whole system and put something in the place of every part the whole system will need so that you have a whole system that does something, and then you work on improving each part in the context of that whole integrated system. So that's what we did on a software level in Sofia. We made like a walking skeleton software system where so there's something that sees, there's something that hears, there's something that moves, there's something that remembers, there's something that learns. You put a simple version of each thing in there and you connect them all together so that the system will do its thing. So there's a lot of AI in there. There's not any AGI in there. I mean, there's computer vision to recognize people's faces, recognize when someone comes in the room and leaves, try to recognize whether two people are together or not. I mean, the dialogue system, it's a mix of hand coded rules with deep neural nets that come up with their own responses. And there's some attempt to have a narrative structure and sort of try to pull the conversation into something with a beginning, middle and end. And this sort of story arc, I.

Mean like if you look at the Loebner prize and the systems that beat the Turing test, currently, they're heavily rule based because like you had said, narrative structure to create compelling conversations, you currently neural networks cannot do that. Well, even with Google Mina, when you actually look at full scale conversations, it's.

Just, yeah, this is the thing. So we've been, I've actually been running an experiment the last couple weeks taking Sophia's chatbot and then Facebook's Transformer chatbot, which they opened the model. We've had them chatting to each other for a number of weeks on the server. Just.

That's funny.

We're generating training data of what Sophia says in a wide variety of conversations. But we can see compared to Sophia's current chatbot, the Facebook deep neural chatbot comes up with a wider variety of fluent sounding sentences. On the other hand, it rambles like mad. The Sophia chatbot, it's a little more repetitive in the sentence structures it uses. On the other hand, it's able to keep a conversation arc over a much longer period. Now you can probably surmount that using Reformer and using various other deep neural architectures to improve the way these Transformer models are trained. But in the end, neither one of them really understands what's going on. And I mean that's the challenge I had with Sophia is if I were doing a robotics project aimed at AGI, I would want to make like a robo toddler that was just learning about what it was seeing because then the language is grounded in the experience of the robot. But what Sophia needs to do to be Sophia is talk about sports or the weather or robotics or the conference she's talking at. Like she needs to be fluent talking about any damn thing in the world and she doesn't have grounding for all those things. So, so there's this just like, I mean, Google Mina and Facebook's chat, but I don't have grounding for what they're talking about either. So in a way the need to speak fluently about things where there's no non linguistic grounding pushes what you can do for Sophia in the short term a bit away from Asia.

I mean, pushes you towards IBM Watson situation where you basically have to heuristic and hard code stuff and rule based stuff. I have to ask you about this. Okay, so because you know, in part, Sophia is like an, is an art creation because it's beautiful, it's. She's beautiful because she inspires through our human nature of anthropomorphized things. We immediately see an intelligent being there.

Because David is a great sculptor.

Is this great sculptor. That's right. So, in fact, if Sophia just had nothing inside her head, said nothing, if she just sat there, we already prescribe some intelligence to.

There's a long selfie line in front of her after every talk.

That's right. So it captivated the imagination of the. Of many people. I was going to say the world, but yeah, I mean, a lot of.

People and billions of people, which is amazing.

It's amazing. Right now, of course, many people have prescribed much greater, prescribe, essentially, AGI type of capabilities to Sophia when they see her. And of course, friendly French folk like Yann Lecun immediately see that the people from the AI community and get really frustrated because.

Understandable.

So what? And then they criticize people like you who sit back and don't say anything about, like, basically, allow the imagination of the world, Allow the world to continue being captivated. So what. What's your. What's your sense of that kind of annoyance that the AI community has?

I think there's several parts to my reaction there. First of all, if I weren't involved with Hanson Rabach and didn't know David Hansen personally, I probably would have been very annoyed initially at Sophia as well. I mean, I can understand the reaction. I would have been like, wait, all these stupid people out there think this is an AGI, but it's not an AGI, but they're tricking people that this very cool robot is an AGI. And now those of us, you know, trying to raise funding to build AGI, you know, people will think it's already there and already works. Right? So I. Yeah. On the other hand, I think even if I weren't directly involved with it, once I dug a little deeper into David and the robot and the intentions behind it, I think I would have stopped being pissed off. Whereas folks like Yann Lecun have remained pissed off after their initial that's his thing.

That's his thing.

I think that in particular struck me as somewhat ironic because Yann Lecun is working for Facebook, which is using machine learning to program the brains of the people in the world toward vapid consumerism and political extremism. So if your ethics allows you to use machine learning in such a blatantly destructive way, why would your ethics not allow you to use machine learning to make a lovable theatrical robot that draws some foolish people into its theatrical Illusion. If, if the pushback had come from Yoshua Bengio, I would have felt much more humbled by it because he's not using AI for blatant evil. Right. On the other hand, he also is a super nice guy and doesn't bother to go out there trashing other people's work for no good reason. Right.

So Shaw's fired, but I get you. I mean, that's.

I mean, if you're going to ask, I'm going to answer no, for sure.

I think we'll go back and forth. I'll talk to Jan again.

I would add on this, though. I mean, David Hansen is an artist and he often speaks off the cuff. And I have not agreed with everything that David has said or done regarding Sophia. And David also was not agree with everything David has said about.

That's an important point.

I mean, David is an artistic wild man. And that's, that's. That's part of his charm. That's part of his genius. So certainly there have been conversations within Hanson Robotics and between me and David where I was like, let's be more open about how this thing is working. And I did have some influence in nudging Hanson Robotics to be more open about how Sophia was working. And, and David wasn't especially opposed to this, and he was actually quite right about it. What he said was, you can tell people exactly how it's working and they won't care. They want to be drawn into the illusion. And he was 100% correct. I'll tell you what. This wasn't Sophia. This was Philip K. Dick. But we did some interactions between humans and Philip K. Dick robot in Austin, Texas, a few years back. And in this case, the Philip K. Dick was just teleoperated by another human in the other room. So during the conversations, we didn't tell people the robot was teleoperated. We just said, here, have a conversation with Phil Dick. We're going to film you. Right? And they had a great conversation with Philip K. Dick, teleoperated by my friend Stephane Bugaille. After the conversation, we brought the people in the back room to see Stefan, who was controlling the Philip K. Dick robot. But they didn't believe it. These people were like, well, yeah, but I know I was talking to Phil. Like, maybe Stefan was typing, but the spirit of Phil was animating his mind while he was typing. So, like, even though they knew it was a human in the loop, even seeing the guy there, they still believe that was Phil. They were talking to a small part.

Of me believes that they were right actually, because our understanding, well, we don't understand the universe.

There is a cosmic mindfield that we're all embedded in that yields many strange synchronicities in the world, which is a topic we don't have time to go into too much here.

Yeah, I mean there's, there's some nature, there's something to this where our imagination about Sophia and people like Yann Lecun being frustrated about it is all part of this beautiful dance of creating artificial intelligence that's almost essential. You see with Boston Dynamics, I'm a huge fan of as well, you know, the kind of. I mean, these robots are very far from intelligent.

I played with their last one actually.

With the spot menu.

Yeah, very cool. I mean it reacts quite in a fluid and flexible way.

But we immediately ascribe the kind of intelligence. We immediately ascribe AGI to them.

Yeah, yeah. If you kick it and it falls down and goes ow. You feel bad. Right? You can't help it. Yeah.

And I mean that's, that's, that's part of, that's going to be part of our journey in creating intelligent systems more and more and more and more. Like as Sophia starts out with a walking skeleton, as you add more and more intelligence, I mean, we're going to have to deal with this kind of idea.

Absolutely. And about Sophia, I would say, I mean, first of all, I have nothing against Yann Lecun.

No, no, this is fine. This is awesome.

He's a nice guy. If he, if he wants to play the media media banter game, I'm happy to play. He's a good researcher and a good human being and I'd happily work with the guy. But the other thing I was going to say is I have been explicit about how Sophia works and I've posted online and what H plus magazine, the online webzine. I mean, I posted a moderately detailed article explaining like there are three software systems we've used inside Sophia. There's a timeline editor, which is like a rule based authoring system where she's really just being an outlet for what a human scripted. There's a chatbot which has some rule based and some neural aspects. And then Sometimes we've used OpenCog behind Sophia where there's more learning and reasoning. And the funny thing is I can't always tell which system is operating here. Right. I mean, so whether she's really learning or thinking or just appears to be over half hour, I could tell. But over like three or four minutes of interaction.

So Even having three systems that's already sufficiently complex where you can't really tell right away.

Yeah. The thing is, even if you get up on stage and tell people how Sophia's working and then they talk to her, they still attribute more agency and consciousness to her than is really there. So I think there's a couple levels of ethical issue there. One issue is should you be transparent about how Sophia is working? And I think you should. And I think we have been. I mean, there's articles online that there's some TV special that goes through me explaining the three subsystems behind Sophia. So the way Sophia works is out there much more clearly than how Facebook's AI works or something. I mean, we've been fairly explicit about it. The other is, given that telling people how it works doesn't cause them to not attribute too much intelligence agency to it anyway, then should you keep fooling them when they want to be fooled? And I mean, you know, the whole media industry is based on fooling people the way they want to be fooled. And we are fooling people 100% toward a good end. I mean, we are playing on people's sense of empathy and compassion so that we can give them a good user experience with helpful robots and so that we can fill the AI's mind with, with love and compassion. So I've been talking a lot with Hanson Robotics lately about collaborations in the area of medical robotics, and we haven't quite pulled the trigger on a project in that domain yet, but we may well do so quite soon. So we've been talking a lot about robots can help with elder care, robots can help with kids. David's done a lot of things with autism therapy and robots robots before. In the COVID era, having a robot that can be a nursing assistant in various senses can be quite valuable. The robots don't spread infection and they can also deliver more attention than human nurses can give. Right? So if you have a robot that's helping a patient with COVID if that patient attributes more understanding and compassion and agency to that robot than it really has because it looks like a human, I mean, is that really bad? I mean, we can tell them it doesn't fully understand you and they don't care because they're lying there with a fever and they're sick. But they'll react better to that robot with its loving, warm facial expression than they would to a pepper robot or a metallic looking robot. So it's about how you use it, right? If you made a human looking door to door sales robot that used its human looking appearance to. To scam people out of their money, then you're using that connection in a bad way. But you could also use it in a good way. But then that's the same problem with every technology, right?

Beautifully put.

Sam.