The Extension of Human Intelligence

[Music]

[Applause]

hey siri

the weather today sunny with a high of

okay can you tell me a joke

sure why did the students eat their

homework

because their teacher said it was a

piece of cake

let me try asking something more

abstract hey siri

what’s the meaning of life

all evidence shows it’s chocolate

just now i had a little conversation

with siri and i’m sure many of you have

spoken to some sort of digital assistant

whether it be siri alexa bixby you name

it

it’s so convenient that sometimes we

feel that they’re even smarter than a

real person

until we give them some creative

questions the technology behind siri and

her relatives

is artificial intelligence or a.i

today from spotify which uses ai to

give us better music recommendations to

verizon

which uses ai to improve internet

services

to instagram using ai to tackle online

bullying

artificial intelligence is all around us

in fact ai is now called the fourth

industrial revolution

following steam electricity and the

internet

but for too many people artificial

intelligence seems scary

but don’t worry today i’ll talk about my

research on ai

its core mechanism and also address what

ai holds

for the future the concept of artificial

intelligence was first seen through

depictions of robots

in films such as metropolis in the 1920s

in 1956 the term artificial intelligence

was officially coined

at the dartmouth summer research

conference by a group of scientists from

dartmouth

harvard and ibm this was a monumental

moment to nail the flag to the mast

the field of ai was launched by the bold

vision

that computers could be made to perform

intelligent tasks

but when we talk about ai we often think

of those cool robots

but actually a.i and robotics are

separate fields of study

robotics deals with machines that

interact with the physical world via

sensors

on the other hand ai tackles learning

and logical

logical perception in short while ai

acts as the brain robots act as the body

but the evolution in both areas

continues

and the line between a i and robotics is

blurring

because when combined you can get an

artificially intelligent robot

and in 2018 spacex actually flew an

artificially intelligent robot named

simon

to the international space station to

better understand how ai works

let’s look at a simple example of how

this how the computer learns

this is a short python program called

the capital cities of the world

it works when you type a country’s name

into the search box and it’ll pull up

the country’s capital

now if a response wasn’t previously

reported then it will prompt you to put

in the right answer

now some of you may be saying oh i’ve

known country capital since i was in

elementary

i don’t need ai to do that for me

however this is only the simplest

learning process here’s another example

the price of a diamond can be determined

based on seven different features

for us humans considering two or three

features can be easy

but adding on more features may hurt our

brains

for a i considering five or even ten

more features to compute

is only a matter of milliseconds from

here you can see that ai can compute at

an incredibly complex

level to understand how ai works under

the hood

we can break ai down into two main

subsets

narrow ai and machine learning narrow ai

is good at executing predetermined

actions siri

is a great application of narrow ai upon

receiving your request

siri records the sound waves from your

voice and translates them into a code

she then breaks down the code to

identify particular patterns

and keywords and when you hear her

response

it’s not a person behind the scenes but

rather just a search result

from her tremendous database and when

siri doesn’t have an answer

she simply shows you a web search that

matches your keywords

and finally she converts the results to

an audible response

but for more complicated questions we

don’t have answers and there’s no

database to search

therefore there are no predetermined

actions so we as humans learn through

experience

by trial and error and make educated

guesses via neurons

in our brain guess what a.i learns the

same way

scientists are replicating this process

using artificial neural networks

and this is the core of ai called

machine learning

and this is super cool right who

wouldn’t want to make a good educated

guess when there’s no way of telling

what’s right i certainly do

so here at school i co-founded a

forecasting club

forecasting is the versatile skill of

predicting a future event analytically

we started with fun events such as the

us open and we’ll continue with the

upcoming elections

we’re using a basic software from

microsoft and just playing around with

the data

but i have to admit with so many moving

parts it’s difficult considering all the

factors

so moving forward we’ll invite local

university professors

and ai experts to help and teach us

along the way

now here’s how machine learning actually

works there are four major components

the first is the mail carrier who

collects data for ai to learn

then we have the construction worker who

builds the model

now not fashion model but a set of

functions that calculates the outputs

this is the simulation of the human

brain that’s why these models are also

called

neural networks then the police officer

the loss function comes in to monitor

the performance

calculate the errors and redistribute

them back into the model to be

recalculated

and finally the manager who makes the

calculation process

faster via a fancy jargon called the

optimizer

and this process repeats for several

rounds until the errors

are minimized curious on how to better

use ai

this past summer i participated in the

national center of atmospheric research

artificial intelligence summer school

working with scientists from stanford

university and

noaa i learned that essentially machine

learning is fitting

inputs and outputs into an algorithm

otherwise known as

curve fitting and now let’s look at an

example

from the summer school of rain

prediction to see how this whole machine

learning process plays out

we used temperature pressure and

moisture data as inputs

to predict the chance of rain we used

past rain events to train ai and obtain

a curve

we then use the curve and sets of

functions to calculate the output

and in the meantime we used physical

functions such as mass and energy

because the calculations still need to

follow physical laws such as mass

conservation

and this process repeats for several

rounds until the curve

is fit and as you can see this machine

learning process requires ai

experts in the field today to

collaborate with other disciplines such

as

environmental science medical science

engineering financial business

etc to create models that advance each

field

and teamwork is key for future

development

while the benefits of ai are tremendous

new technology can cause concerns

like every other innovation in human

history the risks

exist consider the invention of cars and

airplanes

we all understand the risks of traveling

by these means of transportation

but they have allowed traveling to

become so much easier

and even impacted areas outside of basic

transportation

such as logistics and emergency rescues

for the

reasons ai technology is built on the

foundations of

improving efficiency and scientists are

like the wright brothers

being brave and cautious to improve this

technology

another concern is human employment it

may be intuitive to think that the

growing development of ai

will eventually take over many existing

jobs

however the world economic forum states

that automation will generate 60 million

more new jobs than existing jobs

and i.t companies gartner and the

mckinsey global institute

echoed that thought now if you watch a

lot of science fiction movies like me

you might be thinking what if the robots

from the matrix and the terminator team

up with ai to dominate

humanity well oxford university released

a study claiming that a.i will

outperform humans and many activities in

the next 10 years

such as translating languages by

boosting efficiency

ai will allow us to see a decrease in

manual labor

and an increase in new jobs by

developing new products

and services our relationship with ai

should not be like

that seen in the terminator but rather

like that we

see in star wars with r2d2

in fact mit professor eric brynjolfsson

says that we can use the power of ai

to work on the elimination of global

poverty disease reduction

and the provision of better education he

tells us

not to ask what will happen but rather

what will we choose to do with this

technology thank you