All You Need to Know About AI But Were Afraid to Ask

have you ever seen this

nice fellow before this robot now romeo

and pepper

i’ve been working with them for 10 years

and

romeo the big one is almost my fifth

child

i discovered robotics after my master’s

in ai at the end of the 80s and i never

let them since

first i’ve been working 20 years at cea

research institute where i developed

robots for nuclear application

and others for disabled handicapped

people

then 10 years at aldebarans of

bankrobotics with these fellows

and today i’m an expert in ai at

renault for intelligent car

compared to the ai i discovered when i

was young

the ai of today is incredibly more

powerful

you can find any information you want on

the web

uh ai can defeat you defeat any chess or

go master

uh was supposed to be the the most

intelligent guy

in the world and computer vision has

made a tremendous gap

ai computers can recognize your face as

we do but

it can also detect teeny tumor much

better than any expert radiologist

at aldebaran we were trying to make our

robot

ever clever more clever and more clever

for instance we taught now to climb a

ladder

and uh pepper has been trained to to

play you know cup and bold game

and um by training so we showed it a

good gesture once and then it train

again

and again and again and finally succeed

and when

you succeed to find a good gesture it

can redo it exactly

perfectly and win at every time i’m

always completely amazed

when i see robots doing uh

wonderful tricks and i’m not the only

one

when we conducted experiments with

pepper

with elderly people they were completely

amazed uh

to see the robots doing uh a target

by themselves and the favorite moment

was when the robot goes

to charging to the charging station the

fact that the robot decides by itself

well my battery are low i have to go

charging and does it was completely

amazing for them

another thing that is really amazing to

me are the magic tricks of my son

my oldest son simon is an amateur

magician and i’m

always delighted when the cartoon i

picked up in the deck reappeared

in my in my wallet or in my pocket or in

my ear

sometimes he explained me the trick and

it’s

always off very simple

very clever requiring some dexterity of

course

and i think ai is the same kind of magic

it looks magic

but it’s not when you know what is

behind the curtain

you are amazed but a little bit

disappointed

for instance if you

change the ladder of now it will redo

exactly the same gesture and of course

it will falls down and pathetically keep

on crawling on the ground

ridiculously and and the day paper

succeeded

in in this cup and ball game we brought

it in the in the ceo’s office to show

the performance

and of course it failed actually we

we did return a paper in our lab

and with a special slope on the ground

and when we were in the ceo’s office you

know on the thick carpet

the vertical angle of the robot was not

exactly the same so the perfect gesture

there was not the perfect gesture here

and it failed of course

all these little troubles can be fixed

but what i want you to to see that the

intelligence of your machine is very

narrow

as soon as you change a little bit uh

the situation

things can go completely wrong do you

know this story

of the tesla autonomous car that went

directly

through a truck knocked over in the

middle of the highway

the vision system of tesla is one of the

best in the world

it has been trained by watching millions

of

driving hours millions of hours of

driving video

each image of it was annotated

you know by showing on this picture you

have pedestrian

a car a cycle this is a tree

this is a building this is a road

you have to show millions of bicycles to

the system for it to recognize another

bicycle and this tedious work

made by human beings is necessary to

make machine

intelligent and thanks to this

supervised learning

you are your your computer your vision

system is able to recognize 99.9

of the object you will ever cross on the

road but not 100

during the training phase it never have

seen

such a track in the middle of the road

so it was unable to recognize

this object as an obstacle you probably

thought it was a

the sky or or a billboard above the road

but not

an obstacle that should be avoided and

then it went through

today we consider that autonomous

driving will avoid

plenty of accidents that human beings

have

but it will also generate crashes that

even the worst driver

could never have ai is perfect in its

domain but as soon

as it outside of it it’s fair

it’s it’s a drama and and and the the

the worst is that

ai does not have the consciousness of

being outside of its domain

so what is going to happen now

will researchers solve all these little

problems

or will ai reach a kind of limit

in 1997

when uh deep blue defeated the the chess

world master kasparov

people say yes you know but chess it’s

simple

it will never happen with go that is

really complicated

and 20 years later it happened alphago

defeated lisa doll thanks to the huge

progress of

ai and the moore’s law you know that

makes the

the computing power twice more powerful

every two years

now we can implement solution that would

even

dare to hope in in the 80s because of

the required

computing power but today you can run

neural deep neural network on a laptop

your smartphone can defeat you at any

game you play

so it’s really difficult to guess what

will be the limitation of ai

the victory of alphago made me think

that

saying that something it is impossible

to ai

it’s impossible today researchers are

working on

unsupervised learning it means that you

don’t have to explain for each input

what is supposed to be the expected

output

in the domain of out of domain detection

we are progressing too it means that the

ai

will be able to say wow but this object

i’ve never seen before so i don’t take a

decision

yes that’s that’s the first step to our

consciousness it’s nice to know that i

don’t know

but the common sense is missing

you as a driver when you see an object

that you don’t know the name of in front

of you you know what to do you know if

you should break or turn around or or

or or or keep on but ai does not have

this implicit understanding of unknown

situations

when you think about the way you learn

to to to to make

computers learning you know how it’s

simple to learn but oh it’s complained

complex to explain

and watching children learning is a good

way to try to understand

a baby does not need to to see millions

of teddy bear to recognize another teddy

bear

but in the other way around it’s

incredible

to see how difficult it is for them to

remember that 7 times 8

is 56 when a very cheap calculator can

do it

hey daddy if a very cheap calculator can

do it why should i remember that

hey i’m talking to these people ask your

mother

excuse me um yeah so it means that um

a a community of researchers

is working on what we call developmental

robotics

they want to implement the way that

children learn and without or there is

very few supervision

only by experiment by experience the

computer will discover the world

the effect of the is motioned with the

rest of his body

and this is this is a very very complex

task it’s it requires a lot of

mathematics to do that

but it will take very very long time for

this kind of intelligence

to become a threat for humanity

because at the end of the day that is

the question that the reason why you’re

listening to me

will i overcome humanity the idea of

singularity you know singularity will be

the moment where

computers will be more clever than human

beings

as we’ve seen we’re already there

computers can defeat you at

any games a computer can store

and use more information that all humans

can do all together

alan turing you know that is one of the

father of the ai

he said ai will really exist today

you will not be able to detect if you’re

talking to a machine or

to a human being when you discuss with

uh with some chat bots today you can

have long discussion

sometimes more interesting than a

discussion that you can have with a

football fan at the stadium

some people have tried to evaluate the

computing power

of a human brain they say it’s about 20

petaflops

as you know one petaflop is one million

of billion operations per second

others say it’s a thousand petaflops

anyway

today the most powerful computers are

hundred petaflops

you’re not so we’re not so far

and what do we have do we have computers

able to create by themselves

even more intelligent computers

no so okay futurologists say that

singularity will happen in 15 20 years

from now

but what will happen in the meantime

always more computing borrower

sure self-learning machine

self-replicating machine why not

but does it mean that this will lead to

the destruction of humanity

in a way it’s a very anthropomorphic way

to see the world

think that if you are more clever than

people you will overcome them

why couldn’t we couldn’t we imagine that

we can live

peacefully side by side with very

intelligent machines

like the electricity like the internet

ai

will be more and more important in our

lives

if we try to compete in its excellence

domain

we are lost it’s like trying to run

faster than a car on the highway

it’s silly but being a pedestrian

you can climb mountains you can dance or

you can play football

of course you cannot play anymore and

you cannot run on the highway anymore

and and do you regret it and that’s my

point

why shall we regret that ai can do

for us ai is invitable at chess

okay but did we stop playing chess no

but we can have ai as a sparring partner

to prepare

the next game against our friends

it will be difficult to turn ai off

so now we have to imagine the life that

go with it

a study in 2018 showed that

60 of the jobs created in the u.s

between 1980 and 2015

had names that did not exist before you

know

because of uh internet and computers of

course

but with ai it will be the same

it’s it’s it’s funny to see that every

week you can have

new application on your smartphone i

think there are about

two million applications available on

the apple store

none of them are not all of them are

made of ai but plenty are

and and it’s incredible to see how

imaginative people are to create these

new services for us

and ai is a wonderful support for them

for their creativity

by the way it’s interesting to see that

so many people

are able to develop ai-based

applications because

ai algorithms rely on very high level

mathematics

of course you know the principle of

neural networks so you have a

data coming from the previous layers

coming here and

and each value is multiplicated by the

white a weight all together they are sum

up and then transfer

to the next neural layers

that is pretty simple what is a little

bit tricky is to compute

the multiplicative weight for each

neuron and to have the expected

output and what is a little bit

complicated

is when you try to deal with images for

instance then you need

convolutive networks be more complicated

and if you want to to deal with video

you need

convolutive and recursive neural

networks

this is really complicated and ai

researchers are working hard

to make the ai more and more efficient

thousands of

very high level scientific papers are

published every

year what i want you to understand with

this

is that even if ai is based on learning

it does not develop by itself brilliant

human beings are

improving the performance of ai

and the learning part of it is just how

to apply this generic

architecture to specific use case like

for instance

translating greek instead of hungarian

or recognizing plants

instead of birds

this make possible for almost anyone to

develop

ai based applications the idea that

researchers find as soon as a researcher

finds this this new architecture they

publish it

and you can reuse it today amongst the

best researchers in ai

come from google and and facebook they

are not really public institutional

philanthropic associations

but they publish almost everything and

then good engineer can reuse that

for its own application

it’s um actually it’s a massive change

in the way an economy can grow

finally i would like to compare the

ai to a big wave you can

consider it as a terrifying tsunami

but because ai comes from california you

also can consider it

like surfer do it’s a way to have fun

and to go fast

you have different kind of of of server

you have the researchers you have the

developers and you have the users

and as users what is really important is

you

understand what can and cannot do ai

ai cannot be human er

ai is still hard time to deal with

complex human emotions

ai cannot improvise in this complex

situation and that’s where we have a

place

to deal with people to take care of

people in complex situation

in this situation if you behave like a

robot

sooner or later you will be replaced by

a robot

but if you behave like a human you will

always

have your place thank you