George Zarkadakis

In just over a decade, they did it.

Mr. President, distinguished ambassadors, ladies and gentlemen, it is truly a humbling and profound experience to be asked to speak here this morning.

On June 26, 2000, in the East Room of the White House, I had my chance to talk about what this meant and to give a big shout out to those 2,400 scientists who made it possible.

And I think all of us, one level or another, we're also thinking about this in terms of its implications for who we are, maybe even theologically.

We are doing something pretty profound here that's never been done by any species on this planet or maybe in the universe.

We're reading our own instruction book and we're part of that and we're watching it emerge day by day and putting all that information up on the internet as fast as we get it.

During that same time, hardware gets way cheaper, computers proliferate.

So what if we didn't try to model the human mind first?

What if we didn't try to encode human knowledge first?

What if we let the computer learn on its own?

What you do.

And the computer very obligingly makes a model of the mathematical patterns that it sees in the data.

These massive datasets were suddenly feasible to store and process in computer memory, which had sort of been prohibitively expensive before.

It's the beginning of a future of medicine.

It's the end of ignorance.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

There's a deep desire for the human condition not to be a deterministic output of our chemical or genetic or cultural forces, but for there to be something that allows for free will and surprise and creativity that belongs to us.

And we forget that when we get grandiose about artificial intelligence and we get grandiose about our imaginings.

And I'm just imagining a world in which, you know, you have more intelligent machines operating on humans.

Are the decisions those machines are making in those moments, which, you know, for humans, for example, you might make informed by instinct.