Chapter 1: What is the relationship between AI and human existence?
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It's alive!
It's alive! It's alive! Most of us, when we hear the term AI, we think about Hollywood.
Why do you cry?
You mean people?
Yeah.
I don't know. We just cry. We think about the Terminator. We think about Ex Machina.
Would you program her to flirt with me? If I did, would that be cheating? Wouldn't it?
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Chapter 2: How do our perceptions of AI reflect our fears and hopes?
AI has become an invisible architecture upon which modern life is being built. It's wrapped up in our jobs, our government, our wars, our art. Sometimes without us even realizing it.
Right now, we're inside a computer program. Is it really so hard to believe? You've been living in a dream world, Neo.
There's something powerful about the story The Matrix and countless other sci-fi books and movies tell. The AI becomes sentient, surpasses human intelligence, and lays claim to our world. Sure, it's a terrifying thing to imagine. And yet, we're fascinated by these stories. Exploring that feeling, the tension between our love of AI and our fear of it, is what this episode is really about.
In a sense, decoding the humans behind the machines. As an animal, we're a very weak creature. The only thing that we have is our social structure and our collective and individual minds. And those minds compel us to extend our capabilities. And that is, I think, in many ways why, you know, people sort of imagined gods being just like them, only more powerful. This is George Tsarkadakis.
I have a PhD in AI and I'm actively working in the field over many years. He also wrote a book all about the history of artificial intelligence from ancient times to present day called In Our Own Image, Will AI Save Us or Destroy Us? At the heart of this history are a few key questions. Why do we want to create artificial intelligence? What would it mean for a machine to become intelligent?
And how would that change our lives? Most of the questions I don't think we'll be able to answer at this particular point in history. But I don't think we can resist the temptation of asking them and trying to answer them. Coming up, we begin at the very beginning, the Big Bang of the human mind.
This is Caron DeMars from San Antonio, Texas. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR.
What is a human?
What is a human?
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Chapter 3: What are the fundamental questions driving AI development?
For George and millions of others around the world, it was proof that humans can imagine and then create the capacity to transcend ourselves, and that stories provide the roadmap. I interviewed a lot of people to see what made them become scientists or engineers. And it was always some kind of, you know, book, kind of comic, something, right, that excited them, that triggered their imagination.
It could be, you know, the outer space of planets and asteroids and whatnot, but it could also be the inner space, the human body. So those stories are very powerful. And I try to sort of explore those stories, where they come from, What are they telling us about this desire to become, in a way, like gods?
So, you know, big bang of the universe, whatever it was before, something happened, it changed. Boom. We have something different now. Protons and, I don't know, dogs, cats, you and me, whatever. Our species has been around probably for maybe 300, 400,000 years.
And yet, for most of that time, we're doing, you know, chiseling some stones, hunting some animals, you know, living very simply in caves, you know. Not a lot was happening. And then around 14,000, 16,000 years ago, boom. the big bang of the human mind.
Something amazing happens and our ancestors, across the world by the way, right, start creating art, start to narrate, tell stories about how they experienced the world. When love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep. Through these stories, we project our hopes, fears, and dreams onto the canvas of the invisible unknown.
All the earth is a grave, and nothing escapes it.
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Chapter 4: How has AI influenced various aspects of modern life?
And that meant also that we were able to transfer information and knowledge to the next generation. The divine gift does not come from... a higher power from our own minds. And that's what kicked off this amazing journey of our species to where we are today. What seems to have happened is some kind of genetic mutation that furnished us, our species in particular, with the ability of
Language and stories. We know they're part of what makes us human. But what else?
This body, what is it?
How did it begin? People somehow think maybe we knew about DNA for the last several centuries. We didn't. It really wasn't that clear what was the hereditary material that passes from parent to child and that carries all those genetic factors. This is Francis Collins. Maybe you've heard of him. But in case not, I asked ChatGPT to write up a bio. Here's what it gave me.
Francis Collins is a renowned physician geneticist. He earned his MD and PhD at Yale University and is best known for his leadership of the Human Genome Project, a landmark international research effort to decode the entire human genetic blueprint. The people at the University of North Carolina will be upset to hear that ChatGPT said I got my MD from Yale, but that's okay.
Oh, so there's an error in there. There is an error. Were there any other mistakes? It was a bit of an omission. I don't think there was any mention of the 12 years I spent as the director of the National Institutes of Health under three presidents, but that's okay.
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Chapter 5: What ethical considerations arise from AI's integration into society?
We asked ChatGPT to comment on its error. I apologize for any errors in the biography of Francis Collins. As a language model, I am trained on a large dataset of text. I may make mistakes or omissions. I recommend fact-checking any information that I provide. Don't worry. We will.
So much of the driving force behind Collins' work is trying to understand what makes humans human, like at the most basic molecular level, but also beyond that. Growing up in the 1950s, he was amazed by the recent discovery of the structure of DNA. There were covers of Life magazine saying, discovering the secret of life. Was it actually discovering the secret of life?
It's maybe a little over the top because I actually think there's more to life than just molecules. But certainly if you want to talk the biological basis of life, yeah, this was discovering that. It's kind of, you know, the book of life that's inside each cell. It's incredibly inspiring to think about this. And it is the same kind of molecule that all living things on this planet use.
Another reason to be pretty sure that we're all descended from some common ancestor, and that as this information molecule evolved over time, it took on different letters and different orders, but it was still that double helix with all of that potential. Potential. Part of what this discovery did was show us humans a way into understanding things about ourselves we hadn't yet discovered.
And Collins believed to further unlock the secrets of who we are, we needed to decode our genetic programming. The big question was, okay, this is a book. We are information organisms, and this is our information source. It's digital, but it's not actually carrying out the actions. How does that happen? How do you take this information and cause a cell to actually do something?
If we were going to get that intelligent about our own instruction book, maybe we could not just read it, but we could actually occasionally figure out how to do a find and replace when something was misspelled. It was clear to me, if we want to do this, we've got to have a better database to work with. We need the human genome. That became my dream.
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Chapter 6: How does the history of AI reflect human ambition and creativity?
If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know. You are listening to the heartbeat of the Sage Computers. Every instrument in this room is constantly monitoring, testing, pulse-taking, controlling.
This era, when humans were seeking mastery of the sky and the body, was in many ways dependent on another groundbreaking technology of the time. An additional brain that can work faster than ours, but does what we wish we could do. The computer. In the old days, the word computer usually meant a person, usually a woman actually, that sat down and did mathematical calculations by hand, okay?
And by rule, a ruler, right? And then that word computer, which described a human being, was transposed into the machine because the machine can do it better. So the mainframe computers would only fit in these massive rooms in the basement, which is fitting because these devalued laborers who did the actual programming work were down there.
My name is Stephanie Dick, and I'm an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She holds a PhD in the history of science with a specialization in the history of mathematics and computing. These machines produced massive amounts of heat and noise.
And working with them, you had to carry these boxes of punch cards back and forth as input and output and stick it into the machine. This is like a sweatshop. Everything was really slow, very different from the machinery that we're all used to today, which is almost as fast as light and conforms to our every demand.
You know, the most disturbing part of the history of AI for me comes from the fact that these men who were working in artificial intelligence looked at those massive, noisy, hot, mainframe computers and saw themselves in it. They looked at them and identified a deep affinity that there was something fundamentally shared between their minds and these machines.
Coming up, as we unlock the secrets of man and machine, we ask the question, will this knowledge bring us closer to perfection or destruction?
Hi, this is Christopher from Los Angeles, California. I love ThruLine because it is always informative and keeps me alive.
A machine is a device that can perform specific tasks more efficiently, or with greater precision, than humans can do alone. The basic idea behind the machine is to make work easier. Humans have been creating machines for thousands of years, starting with simple tools like the wheel, and advancing to complex machines, like computers and robots.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can we learn from the defeat of human champions by AI?
how processes can be broken down and what the elementary steps even of thought might be. So we also see in this moment a kind of devaluation of the classes of people and or machines who do this sort of repetitive mechanical broken down labor in service of efficiency and profit maximization and industrialization and early capitalism.
Babbage was really dismissive of working class people.
He thought they were annoying and filthy and they were always making noise and singing songs and said famously, I wish to God these calculations had been produced by steam, by which he meant the steam engine, which was driving factory automation at the time.
People have been playing around with what is called automata, essentially machines that would automatically do something simple for centuries. This is George Tsarkadakis again. So there was always this idea of replicating nature, replicating movement, because movement was related to life.
I think the Industrial Revolution was in many ways a culmination of all those ideas that people have been experimenting on and off for at least 2,000 years.
Our blows will destroy their whole modern industrial plant and organization.
Something happened to our collective psyche after the atom bomb. At zero minus 15 seconds, a warning tone sounds in the plane.
They hoped that would put an end to this war, put an end to a butchery that had been going on for many years.
Until then, everybody was excited about the new things and about new discoveries and about new technologies. And then we discovered something that can destroy us completely. It was terrifying.
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for human and AI collaboration?
With the Cold War driving interest in artificial intelligence, there was a lot of money up for the taking. And a conference of mathematicians and scientists from top-tier universities and labs seemed like a pretty good investment. There was exactly one running computer program that was operational and presented at the conference.
And it was the logic theory machine that had been developed by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon at the Rand Corporation. And it enshrined a particular vision of the human mind. Herbert Simon is famous for saying that human minds and modern digital computers are quote-unquote species of the same genus.
They are fundamentally the same, just a symbol processing machine that takes symbolic information as input, manipulates it according to a set of rules, and outputs decisions, solutions, judgments, and so on. Bodies don't matter. Society doesn't matter.
One proposed measure of machine intelligence was something called the Turing Test, named for its creator, British mathematician Alan Turing, who you might remember from the movie The Imitation Game.
Would you like to play? Play? It's a game, a test of sorts, for determining whether something is a machine or a human being.
was based on a parlor game for swapping gender that says a man and a woman leave the room and the party goers have to figure out who's the man and who's the woman by sending questions back and forth on paper. And the man's job is to try to pretend to be the woman and the woman's job is to be herself.
And he says, what if we took the same test and replaced the man by a computer and the woman by any person? And then the judge, of course, is meant to be able to figure out whether the machine is the human or the human is the human.
And what I have always found so shocking about the Turing test is that it reduces intelligence to telling a convincing lie, to putting on the performance of being something that you're not.
From the beginning, with this disembodied conception of intelligence, the question that Turing posed, what can the mind do without a body, and therefore what might the machine do since it doesn't have one, chess was one of the first answers given. Why did they pick chess?
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