Artificial intelligence reports from this season | 60 Minutes Full Episodes

When Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize last year, he celebrated by playing poker with a world champion of chess. Hassabis loves a game, which is how he became a pioneer of artificial intelligence. The 48-year-old British scientist is co-founder and CEO of Google's AI powerhouse called DeepMind.

We met two years ago when chatbots announced a new age. Now, Hassabis and others are chasing what's called artificial general intelligence, a silicon intellect as versatile as a human, but with superhuman speed and knowledge. After his Nobel and a knighthood from King Charles, we hurried back to London to see what's next from a genius who may hold the cards of our future.

"What's always guided me and and and the passion I've always had is understanding the world around us," he said. "I've always been um, since I was a kid, fascinated by the biggest questions, you know, the the the meaning of of life, the the the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality itself. I've loved reading about all the great scientists who've worked on these problems and the philosophers, and I wanted to uh see if we could advance human knowledge, and for me my expression of doing that was to build what I think is the ultimate tool for for advancing human knowledge, which is which is AI."

We sat down in this room two years ago, and I wonder if AI is moving faster today than you imagined.

"It's moving incredibly fast," he replied. "Uh, I think we are on some kind of exponential curve of improvement. Of course, the success of the field in the last few years has attracted even more attention, more resources, more talent. So, um, that's adding to the to this exponential progress, exponential curve, in other words, straight up."

"Yep. Straight up and increasing speed of progress," I said.

"Start," he said. "Yeah, we saw the progress."

"Hello, Scott," he greeted. "It's nice to see you again."

We saw progress in an artificial companion that can see and hear and chat about anything. Early chatbots learned only the internet. An app called Astra also takes in the world.

"Do we call her she?" I asked.

"Um, it's a good question," he responded. "I'm not sure we I'm not sure we all know the answer yet."

Bibbo Shu is product manager for Project Astra, an app in a new generation of chatbots that interpret the world with their own eyes. We challenged Astra with virtual paintings we chose and showed to Astra for the first time.

"This is July Hi by Thomas Hart Benton from 1942," I said.

"How about this one?" I asked.

"That is the Virgin of Charity by El Greco," Astra responded.

"That painting is Automat by Edward Hopper," I stated.

"The person in the painting, what emotion is she exhibiting?" I asked.

"The subject in the painting appears pensive and contemplative," Astra said. "Her expression suggesting a sense of solitude."

"Can you create a story around this picture?" I asked.

"It's a chilly evening in the city, a Tuesday perhaps," Astra began. "The woman, perhaps named Eleanor, sits alone in the diner. She is feeling melancholy due to the uncertainty of her future and the weight of unfulfilled dreams. The scene freezes in time. Only the flow of ideas moving onward."

"That line, 'only the flow of ideas moving onward'," I said. "I wish I'd written that."

"And did we hear a limit to Astra's patience?" I asked.

"What was that fictional conversation about?" I asked.

"Ah, in the story I imagined, Eleanor and her friend talked about their shared dreams and the challenges of pursuing them," Astra explained.

"Something about the way you said 'ah' made me wonder if you were getting bored," I said.

"I apologize if my tone came across that way," Astra responded. "My aim is always to engage thoughtfully."

"And she said, 'Well, I'm sorry if you don't like my tone'," I recounted.

"Wow," I exclaimed. "What's happening there?"

"Well, that's interesting," Hassabis said. "That's again a challenge with these systems as they act in the moment with the context that's around them and that may have never been tested before."

He's often surprised because AI programs are sent out on the internet to learn for themselves. They can return later with unexpected skills.

"So we have theories about what kinds of uh capabilities these systems will have," Hassabis explained. "That's obviously what we try to build into the architectures. But at the end of the day, how it learns, what it picks up from the data is part of the training of these systems. We don't program that in. It learns like a human being would learn. So, um, so new capabilities or properties can emerge from that training situation."

"You understand how that would worry people," I said.

"Of course," Hassabis agreed. "It's the duality of these types of systems that they're able to uh do incredible things, go beyond the things that we're able to uh uh design ourselves or understand ourselves. But of course, the challenge is is making sure um that the the knowledge databases they create um we understand what's in them."

Now, DeepMind is training its AI model called Gemini to not just reveal the world, but to act in it, like booking tickets and shopping online. It's a step toward AGI, artificial general intelligence with the versatility of a human mind.

"On track for AGI in the next 5 to 10 years, I think," Hassabis stated.

"And in 2030, you will have what?" I asked.

"Well, we'll have a system that um really understand everything around you in very uh nuanced and deep ways um and kind of embedded in your everyday life," he answered.

"Embedded like Astra in eyeglasses," I said.

"What can you tell me about this building I'm looking at?" I asked.

"This is the Coal Drops, a shopping and dining district," Astra replied. "She sees what I see." There's a speaker in the earpiece only I can hear.

"What was it originally before it became shops?" I asked.

"The Coal Drops Yard was originally a set of Victorian coal warehouses used to receive and distribute coal across London," Astra answered.

"Was coal ever a problem for the environment in London?" I asked.

"Yes, coal was a significant source of air pollution in London, particularly during the industrial revolution," Astra responded.

"It occurred to us that the only thing we contributed to this relationship were legs, which will also soon be engineered," Hassabis said. "I also think another big area will be robotics. I think it will have a breakthrough moment in the next couple of years where we'll have demonstrations of maybe humanoid robots or other types of robots that can start really doing useful things."

"For example, hey, robot," I said.

Researchers Alex Lee and Julia Vazani showed us a robot that understands what it sees.

"That's a tricky one," Hassabis commented. "And reasons its way through vague instructions."

"Put the blocks whose color is the combination of yellow and blue into the matching color ball," I instructed.

"The combination of yellow and blue is green, and it figured that out," Hassabis explained. "It's reasoning."

"Y definitely. Yes," I agreed.

The toys of Demis Hassabis' childhood weren't blocks, but chess pieces. At 12, he was the number two champion in the world for his age. This passion led to computer chess, video games, and finally thinking machines. He was born to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mother. Cambridge, MIT, Harvard. He's a computer scientist with a PhD in neuroscience. Because he reasoned he had to understand the human brain first.

"Are you working on a system today that would be self-aware?" I asked.

"I don't think any of today's systems to me feel self-aware or you know conscious in any way," he answered. "Um, obviously everyone needs to make their own decisions by interacting with these chatbots. Um, I think theoretically it's possible, but is self-awareness a goal of yours?"

"Not explicitly, but it may happen implicitly," he said. "These systems might acquire some feeling of self-awareness. That is possible. I think it's important for these systems to understand you um, self and other, and that's probably the beginning of something like self-awareness."

But he says if a machine becomes self-aware, we may not recognize it.

"I think there's two reasons we regard each other as conscious," he explained. "One is that you're exhibiting the behavior of a conscious being very similar to my behavior. But the second thing is you're running on the same substrate. We're made of the same carbon matter with our squishy brains. Now, obviously with machines, they're running on silicon. So, even if they exhibit the same behaviors and even if they they say the same things, it doesn't necessarily mean uh that this sensation of consciousness that we have um is the same thing they will have."

"Has an AI engine ever asked a question that was unanticipated?" I asked.

"Not so far that I've experienced," he replied. "And I think that's getting at the idea of what's still missing from these systems. They still can't really yet go beyond um asking a new novel question or a new novel conjecture or coming up with a new hypothesis that um has not been thought of before. They don't have curiosity."

"No, they don't have curiosity," I said. "And they're probably lacking a little bit in what we would call imagination and intuition."

"But they will have greater imagination," he said. "And soon, I think actually in the next maybe 5 to 10 years, I think we'll have systems that are capable of not only solving an important problem or conjecture in science but coming up with it in the first place."

Solving an important problem won Hassabis a Nobel Prize last year. He and colleague John Jumper created an AI model that deciphered the structure of proteins. Proteins are the basic building blocks of life.

"So everything in biology, everything in your body depends on proteins," he explained. "You know, your neurons firing, your muscle fibers twitching, it's all mediated by proteins. But 3D protein structures like this are so complex, less than 1% were known. Mapping each one used to take years. DeepMind's AI model did 200 million in one year."

Now, Hassabis has AI blazing through solutions to drug development.

"So, on average, it takes, you know, 10 years and billions of dollars to design just one drug," he said. "We could maybe reduce that down from years to maybe months or maybe even weeks, which sounds incredible today, but that's also what people used to think about protein structures. It would revolutionize human health. And I think one day maybe we can cure all disease with the help of AI."

"The end of disease," I said.

"I think that's in within reach, maybe within the next decade or so," he responded. "I don't see why not."

Demis Hassabis told us AI could lead to what he calls radical abundance, the elimination of scarcity. But he also worries about risk.

"There's two worries that I worry about," he said. "One is that bad actors, human uh pe you know, users of these systems repurpose these systems for harmful ends. Then the second thing is the AI systems themselves as they become more autonomous and more powerful. Can we make sure that we can keep control of the systems that they're aligned with our values? That they're doing what we want, that benefits society um, and they stay on guard rails."

Guard rails are safety limits built into the system.

"And I wonder if the race for AI dominance is a race to the bottom for safety," I said.

"So that's one of my big worries actually is that of course all of this energy and racing and resources is great for progress, but it might incentivize certain actors in in that to cut corners, and one of the corners that can be shortcut would be safety and responsibility," he responded. "Um, so the question is is how can we uh coordinate more, you know, as leading players, but also nation states, even. I think this is an international thing. AI is going to affect every country, everybody in the world. Um, so I think it's really important that the world uh and the international community has a say in this."

"Can you teach an AI agent morality?" I asked.

"I think you can," he answered. "They learn by demonstration. They learn by teaching. Um, and I think that's one of the things we have to do with these systems is to give them uh a value system and a and a guidance and some guard rails around that, much in the way that you would teach a child."

Google DeepMind is in a race with dozens of others striving for artificial general intelligence so human that you can't tell the difference, which made us think about Demis Hassabis signing the Nobel book of laureates. When does a machine sign for the first time, and after that, will humans ever sign it again?

"I think in the next steps is going to be these amazing tools that enhance our almost every uh endeavor we do as humans," he said. "And then beyond that uh, when AGI arrives, you know, I think it's going to change uh pretty much everything about the way we do things. And and it's almost, you know, I think we need new great philosophers to come about hopefully in the next 5 10 years to understand the implications of this."

We're about to show you a technological innovation that could one day change the way every child in every school in America is taught. It's an online tutor powered by artificial intelligence, designed to help teachers be more efficient and students learn more effectively. It's called KIGO. KIGO means "with me" in Spanish, and Khan is its creator. Sal Khan, the well-known founder of Khan Academy, whose lectures and educational software have been used for years by tens of millions of students and teachers in the US and around the world. KIGO was built with the help of OpenAI, the creator of Chat GPT. Its potential is staggering, but it's still very much a work in progress. It's being piloted in 266 school districts in the US in grades 3 through 12. We went to Hobart High School in Indiana to see how it works.

"Good morning," a teacher greeted. "Just a normal day in chem, right?"

At 8 in the morning, Melissa Higginson knows it's not always easy to get 30 high schoolers excited about chemistry.

"Are you ready? Are you ready? All right, that's what I want to hear," she said.

But these days, she has help.

"This is acetic acid," she explained. "The pipet's not going to fill all the way."

That lesson Higginson has displayed behind her and is explaining to her ninth and tenth graders was created with the assistance of KIGO. She told the AI tutor she wanted a 4-day course in which her students would investigate the physical and chemical properties of matter.

"This next section is your research section," she instructed.

It took KIGO minutes to come up with a detailed lesson plan that would have taken Higginson a week to create.

"You pull that computer back out; you're going to go back to KIGO research, and the students have KIGO on their laptops too, ready to help them with their questions," she explained. "We have a couple of questions that we need to ask KIGO. So, for example, I asked it what are three examples of acids, and if I wanted to know more. So, it gave you three examples of acids like hydrochloric acid, citric…"

"Can you give me more examples?" a student asked.

"…And if I wanted to know even more, I could ask it like what specifically some of the acids do. So it it's giving you acids and then it's asking you a question. Can you think of any other household items that might contain acids? Yeah. So like it wants to help you understand like what it's telling you and not just like give you the information," Higginson explained.

This school used to be finding creative ways to help kids learn, is something Sal Khan has been doing since 2005. He'd gotten degrees in math, computer science, and engineering from MIT, and an MBA from Harvard, and was working as a hedge fund analyst to build themselves when he started recording math tutorial videos in his closet for his young cousins.

"So, if I were to multiply this equation," he said in one of his videos.

Not long after, with the help of donors, including Bill Gates, he quit his career in finance and started the nonprofit Khan Academy.

"From the beginning of Khan Academy, the true north was how do you give more students at least approximations of the type of personalization they would get if they had a personal tutor?" Khan explained. "A wealthy family can afford a tutor for their child; if every kid could have a private tutor, that would level the playing field."

"Yeah, that's the dream," I agreed.

Co-founders of OpenAI, Greg Brockman and Sam Altman, were fans of Khan Academy and hoped to evaluate their AI using Khan's database of test questions and content.

"KIGO should do," Khan said.

So they gave Sal Khan early access to an advanced AI technology that today underpins Chat GPT.

"What did you immediately think?" I asked.

"It was pretty obvious this technology was going to transform society," Khan answered. "So it it was pretty heady stuff. Uh, but on the education side it was like, wow, people are going to be able to use this for doing deep fakes and fraud and cheat. Uh, but if used well, with the right guardrails, etc., could also be used to support students, to give them more feedback, to support teachers for all this lesson planning and progress report writing that they spend hours a week doing, item level analysis."

Educators and engineers at Khan Academy used OpenAI's technology to build KIGO.

"We're going to be using KIGO for this," a teacher said.

And for the last year and a half, the teachers and kids at Hobart High School and others have been testing it out.

"I'll ask it a question," a student said.

We sat down with two students from that morning chemistry class, Austin and Abigail, as well as Leen and Maddie who use KIGO in business class and Lou and Lily who use it in English and for SAT preparation.

"I heard people at Khan Academy came and and asked students to break it," I said.

"Yes, that was the fun part," Abigail responded. "That was some students would try and trick it into just giving you the answer."

"The superintendent I talked to said that some students were bullying KIGO for the answer," I said.

"I think that was the elementary school kids," Austin said.

"Oh yeah," Abigail agreed. "Okay. Blame it on the elementary school kids."

"It's very helpful for those students who um maybe don't feel comfortable asking questions within class," Leen commented.

"Does it have a personality?" I asked.

"It's very much there for you," Maddie answered. "Like it's very positive. It'll it's very reassuring. It's getting me thinking, and it's not just giving me an answer."

"Do you ever just want to be like, 'Can you just give me the answer?'" I asked.

"That was the hardest part for I know like me and a lot of other students like, 'Why isn't it giving me answers?'" Lou replied. "At the end of the day, that's where your better answer is going to be. It's not going to be whatever the AI gives you. It's going to be whatever you create. So, your hypothesis going into the last test is…"

Teachers at Hobart High don't just use KIGO to help plan lessons and save dozens of hours a week. They also monitor their students' understanding of subjects in ways they never could before.

"You can track how a student is actually using KIGO," Higginson explained. "Yeah. I'm going to click usage, and then if I wanted to pick a specific student, I could come down here and really dive into what that student's been looking at KIGO. And this is real time because you saw Abigail this morning looking at acids and bases. So, wait a minute. These are the footprints of Abigail's work. These are the footprints of Abigail's work. At 8 a.m. she was asking about acids and chemical reactions. So even though you may not be hovering over the student at any given moment, you're somewhere else in the classroom, you can later check, oh, this is what Abigail was looking. I understand her thought process on on why she got these."

"Absolutely," I agreed. "So it gives me a lot of insight as a teacher in terms of who I need to spend that one-on-one time with. Maybe KIGO throws in a mastery challenge."

Sal Khan says they won't sell the data they collect through KIGO or give it to other tech companies. They do use it, however, to improve KIGO's memory and personalization.

"It'll guide them to sort of what to do first," Khan said.

Sarah Robertson, a former English teacher who's now a KIGO product manager, showed us a new feature they've developed to help kids write better and think more critically.

"I found this essay that I wrote to test it," Robertson said. "I gave KIGO a paper I wrote in sixth grade about my mom, Gloria Vanderbilt. So, go ahead and click next. Start revising."

After just 90 seconds, KIGO delivered a very detailed evaluation of my essay.

"Okay," Robertson said. "It liked some of what I wrote. The use of a quote to start the essay is effective and sets the tone for the rest of the biography, but suggested I should revise several paragraphs and my topic sentence. So, I'm going to rewrite my sixth grade paper."

"Go for it," I encouraged.

After a few minutes of tweaking, I asked it what it thinks.

"Um, what do you think?" I asked.

"It says, 'Connecting childhood events to her later life will make your essay more cohesive and insightful'," Robertson reported. "I mean, yeah, it's good advice."

"I can tell you, as a former seventh grade English teacher, when I assigned an essay, I would limit myself to 10 minutes per essay," Robertson explained. "I had 100 students. So, it would take me 17 hours to give feedback on every single student's first draft. The burden that we place on teachers to give that specific, timely, actionable feedback is just so great that it's not possible."

So, I've now plugged in to see if KIGO could catch me cheating. I asked Chat GPT to write a paragraph about my mom and pasted it into my essay. I now see that there's a critical flag. KIGO immediately sent an alert to Sarah Robertson.

"It says that you pasted 66 words while revising from an unknown source," Robertson reported. "So, if I click on that now, it's going to load your essay and it's going to show me exactly what you just did."

"I'm so busted," I said.

"You're busted," Robertson agreed.

"Do you want to work with a three-digit or four-digit number?" I asked, changing the subject.

KIGO is free for all teachers in the US, but school districts have to pay up $15 per student per year to cover computation costs, and it's still being improved.

"Any other ideas that can show the…" I began, but was interrupted.

We got a hint of how KIGO might evolve when Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, stopped by Sal Khan's office to show us their new vision technology that'll…

Be available to chat GPT paid subscribers soon. We're preparing a demo for 60 minutes to show people what chat GPD can do with voice mode with vision. It can actually see what someone is doing through live video and interact with them in real time. Brockman was talking with it on his phone.

Got it. How about an anatomy lesson? You're going to quiz him and ask him to draw whatever body part you want to you want to quiz him on and have him label it. How does that sound?

That sounds like a fantastic plan. When Brockman pointed his phone's camera at the blackboard, the AI started to quiz me. Let's start with the heart. Anderson, can you draw and label where the heart is in the body? It understood what I was doing, even though my drawing was pretty crude. The location is spot-on. The brain is right there in the head. As for the shape, it's a good start. The brain is more of Don't patronize me. It also seemed to pick up on my anxiety.

Anderson, how about the liver? Give it a shot and show us where you think it's located in the body. Okay, this is a little tough. Uh, this is how we learn. Absolutely. No pressure, Anderson. I put the liver on the wrong side of the body. Jack GPT corrected me politely. Anderson's placement is close, but it's primarily on the right side, just below the diaphragm.

So, can you critique this diagram? Overall, Anderson's diagram is a solid effort, especially for an impromptu drawing. The AI caught my mistake, but it's not foolproof. The formula is simple: 1/2* the base times the height. Watch what happened when Khan asked it to calculate the area of a triangle and intentionally misidentified the height. Is this the height over here? This four. Is that right? The AI said he was right. Yes, that's correct. It didn't catch the error. However, this technology improves quickly, and it is fun to interact with. I really really Greg Brockman asked it to write a song about the formula for the area of a triangle, to make it rhyme and sing it using a British accent.

Absolutely. Let's give it a try. To find a triangle's space, here's what you do. Multiply the base by the height. It's true. Then take that product and divide by two. Now you've got the area's formula to pursue.

How was that? That was really fantastic. That's I It's incredible. It is. It feels like we're in a science fiction book.

Really? I mean, it just feels like to actually see it, you I mean, I'm sort of speechless. The first time you see this stuff, it really does just feel like this magic and almost incomprehensible. And then after a week, then you start to realize like how you can use it. That's been one of the really important things about working with Soland and his team has been to really figure out what's the right way to sort of bring this to parents and to teachers and to classrooms and to do that in a way so that the students really learn and aren't just, you know, asking for the answers and that the parents can have oversight and the teachers can be involved in that process. You can ask a follow-up question.

Salon hopes this new vision technology can be incorporated into Kmigo and available to students and teachers in 2 to 3 years, but he wants it to undergo more robust testing and meet strict guidelines for privacy and data security. I can imagine a lot of teachers watching this and thinking, okay, well, this is just going to replace me. Why would I want this in my classroom? It's like a Trojan horse. I'm pretty confident that teaching, any job that is has a very human-centric element of it, is as long as it adapts reasonably well in this AI world, they're going to be some of the safest jobs out there.

You think there will always be a need for teachers in a classroom talking with the student, looking the student in the eye?

Oh yeah. I mean that's what I'll always want for my own children and frankly for anyone's children. And the hope here is that we can use artificial intelligence and other technologies to amplify what a teacher can do so they can spend more time good job standing next to a student, figuring them out, having a person-to-person connection.

Two tens. Two tens. You got it. Good work.

For those who've suffered a traumatic spinal cord injury and are paralyzed, there's rarely encouraging news. Which is why what's happening in early clinical trials in a research lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, is so remarkable. A renowned French neuroscientist, Gregoire Cortine, and Swiss neurosurgeon Dr. Joseline Block have implanted a small stimulation device on the spine of paralyzed patients, helping them once again stand up and walk. What's even more surprising is their newest innovation, which uses an implant in the skull that enables patients to move their paralyzed legs or arms just by thinking about it.

When we visited their lab, Neuro Restore, in March, they were working with a 39-year-old woman whose spinal cord was severed 6 and 1/2 years ago. She'd been told she'd never walk again. Okay, you can roll to my side. Marta Castiano Dombi is the most severely paralyzed patient who's enrolled in this clinical trial at Neuro Restore to regain mobility in her legs. Try to go backward. She has no feeling below her waist and isn't able to keep her balance. Just sitting up on her own is a challenge. You catch me, huh? Sure. Good.

In 2018, Marta was a new mom working at a German tech company when she began training with her husband for an Iron Man competition. She was in the best shape of her life, but during the bike portion of the race, she suffered a devastating accident. You were found near a tree. Near a tree. Yes. and your back hit the tree. We're hypothesizing what happened, right? Cuz nobody saw me. So, I must have had a pretty tough collision because my spine basically broke like two dimensions. Her spinal cord injury was so severe doctors said there was no sign of nerve connections left to her lower body. She'd also broken eight ribs, punctured her lungs, and was bleeding internally. She needed emergency surgery, and doctors told her family she might not survive. You came out of the surgery. I understand you wrote a a message to your mom. So the surgery took about 7 to 8 hours and I was intubated. I could not talk. And my mom, you can imagine, was in tears. And I just wrote to her, I'm strong.

That strength has been tested. Marta spent 10 days in intensive care and four and a half months in a rehab hospital learning to adapt to her new life in a wheelchair. Traditionally, if someone gets a spinal cord injury, what are the treatment options for them? You have to do a little bit of physiotherapy, get into a wheelchair, and then you go back home and that's all. That's it. That's it. And that was for many years the only option.

Dr. Joseline Block and Gregoire Cortine have been at the forefront of researchers trying to expand those options since 2012. Their lab near Lake Geneva is a collaboration between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland's MIT, and the Lausanne University Hospital. That's where they've implanted eight paralyzed patients with a device that allows them to stimulate their spinal cords, enabling them to stand, take steps with a walker and lift weights. Some can even climb stairs. They use a button to activate the stimulation left. And now, thanks to Cortine and Block's latest technology, five other patients can move their paralyzed limbs using their own thoughts. It's called a digital bridge and it wirelessly connects a patient's brain to their spinal cord stimulator.

Normally there is a a direct communication between the brain and the spinal cord. For me to walk, my brain just automatically tells my legs to walk. But because of the spinal cord injury, the signal is interrupted. So we are aiming to bridge bypass the injury by having a direct digital connection between the brain and the region of the spinal cord that control leg movement. To do that Dr. Block implants a small titanium device originally developed by a French research institute in the patient's skull directly over their motor cortex, the area of the brain responsible for controlling movement. Mhm. You see you have the 64 electrodes and so each of these is what? It's electrode that are recording populations of neurons underneath and you can immediately see which one are the best correlated to certain movements like the hip is here and then the knee is here and then the ankle is here etc. Mhm. When a patient thinks about moving a limb, those electrodes record the brain's activity. Then a computer uses artificial intelligence to translate the recordings into instructions for the stimulation device implanted on the spinal cord. That device sends electrical pulses activating muscles in the legs or arms. All of it happens in about half a second.

Gan Oskum was the first person to get the digital bridge four years ago after he was paralyzed in a bike accident. We met him for a walk by Lake Geneva. So now the stimulation is on. Now it's on. Yes. Do you feel it at all in your body? I do feel a little uh tingling sensation from the stimulation with my brain. His headpiece powers the implant in his skull and on his walker is the computer. It's cumbersome and tiring physically and mentally, but he can walk up to 450 ft. It's incredible to me though that you can continue talking with me even though this machine is reading the signals from your brain. It's able to discriminate walking and talking uh at the same time. That's uh that's incredible for somebody who has not been able to control their movements to suddenly be able to control their movement. I mean that's Mhm. Yeah. There is this initial phase of surprise you know when they realize that it's they are giving the order and it's happening you know. Wow. That was me and you. They're like, "Did I do that?" Like, "Is it me or you actually stimulated?" No. Say, "No, you did it." They think you're pressing a button somewhere and doing it. They don't understand cuz I've been paralyzed for so many years.

Ready? Started increasing amplitude. Morta got the digital bridge implanted in September. She's worked with a team of engineers and physical therapists to figure out how much electrical stimulation is needed to move her legs. Nice. And up. So that's the stimulation. The electrical stimulation is making the leg move. Yeah. Marta is completely paralyzed. This is the magic cappy. But Marta's also had to teach herself to think about moving the exact same way every time. Right. So the AI can recognize her thoughts. She practiced at first with this avatar. Stop. You have to relearn or rethink how to walk. Exactly. So we were experimenting a little bit. What do I think about? Is it I think about the hip being contracted. Do I think about the knee lifting up? Do I think about the ankle?

To show us how she does that, they disconnected her skull implant from her spinal cord stimulator and connected it to this exoskeleton. You can control this with your thoughts right now. Yeah. If I want to do a right movement, right hip flexion, it does a right hip flexion. You're not pressing any buttons or anything. You're just thinking, "Sure." Can you look at me without looking at it and just do a right one? Yes. I think it works. It does work.

After training with the digital bridge for just two days, Dr. Joseline Block and Gregoire Cortine, or G as Marta calls him, put her to the test, eager to see if she could take some steps. Joseline and G come in. It's like, okay, show off. So, what can you do? They said show off. Yeah. Yeah. Were you ready to show off? I did not know if I'm able to show off. This was the thing, huh? Using a harness to support about half her body weight and physical therapists to help place her feet on the ground, Marta took her first steps. Despite having no sensation below her waist, she was able to move her paralyzed legs with her thoughts. Want to go backward?

What was that like? Uh, gaining some superpower. Um, a power that I did not have before. And now with these implants, you know, it's I'm an real iron woman. Mhm. Nice.

When we were there in March, Marta wasn't able to walk on her own yet, but she said she'd already regained something she'd lost. It's giving me my perspective back. Standing up again and looking people in the eye, that's different. a difference in how you think about yourself or in how others see you or how you interact in the world? Everything. Everything. You leave the hospital on your wheelchair and you notice the different looks right away. You notice Yeah. Scared looks also a lot of smiles that are a little bit too long. Those well-meaning smiles reminded Arno Rober, who's quadriplegic, how much his life had changed. A Swiss journalist, he'd spent decades traveling the world. But three years ago, he slipped on a patch of ice and was instantly paralyzed from the neck down. He regained some function in his right arm with physical therapy, but wanted to see if the digital bridge could help him with his left.

Opening and closing a hand is far more complex than walking. It is because of the possibility to access a different muscle individually. The hand is tricky with all these different little muscles and it's very subtle. But after surgery and training at Cortina Block's lab for eight months, he was able to use his left hand to help hold a glass and type. Even to be able to move my fingers, this is something that I couldn't do. And of course moving the the the arm like that. This is something that I couldn't do either.

That's incredible. It's really incredible. I mean I don't want to pretend that I'm using this left arm on a daily base. There is a long long way to get it functional for every quadriplegic in the world. But it was certainly a success because um I see that I can do things that I wouldn't I was not able to do before. But something else has happened as well. After using the digital bridge over time, both Arno and Ge Yan have improved their ability to move their paralyzed limbs even when the system is turned off.

How is that possible? What happened? That was also our questions and we could not do much in a human being to understand it. Since it wasn't possible for them to see the changes in their patients' spinal cords at a microscopic level, they did studies in animals to understand what was happening. What we understood was completely unexpected that this training enabled the growth of new nerve connection. So new nerve start growing and they grow on one very specific type of neuron that is uniquely equipped to repair the central nervous system. So we also observed that the less the severity of the spinal cord lesion is the the better the regrowth happens. You know if it's a complete spinal cord injury it will be hard to regrow but indeed there is something happening.

How well the digital bridge works still needs to be studied in a lot more patients. They hope to launch clinical trials in the US in the next 2 to 3 years. The FDA has already designated it as a breakthrough device, which will prioritize the review process. And Cortine and Block have co-founded a company called Onward Medical to bring this technology out of the lab, making it faster, smaller, and widely available. It's not changing my everyday in ways people might think, "Oh, she's she's getting back her life she had before." So, as long as it makes me feel good that I can stand up and hug my husband or hug somebody that I love, that means a lot.

What's your goal? To go out in the park and just stand up and do some steps with my family. It's not a stroll in the park how it would look for most other people, but for me, it's just good enough to make me happy.

After 6 months of hard work, just before Marta was to return to her family, she did what doctors years ago told her she never would. Oh my god. She took a few steps. No harness to hold her, just her walker and her iron will in October.

Last year, a 14-year-old girl named Franchesca Mani was sitting in her high school history class when she heard a rumor that some boys had naked photos of female classmates. She soon learned her picture was among them. But the images were doctored, created with artificial intelligence using what's known as a Nudify website or app, which turns real photos of someone fully clothed into real-looking nudes. We found nearly 30 similar incidents in schools in the US over the last 20 months and plenty more around the world. We want to warn you some of what you'll hear and see is disturbing, but we think unveiling these Nudify websites is important. In part because they're not hidden on the dark web. They're openly advertised, easy to use, and as Franchesca Mani found out, there isn't much that's been done to stop them.

When you first heard the rumor, you didn't know that there were photos or a photo of you? No, we didn't know. I think that was like the most chaotic day I've ever witnessed. In a school, somebody gets an inkling of something and it just spreads. It's like rapid fire. It just goes through everyone. And so then when someone hears hears this, it's like, wait, like AI? Like no one thinks that could like happen to you.

Franchesca Mani knew nothing about Nudify websites when she discovered she and several of the girls at Westfield High School in New Jersey had been targeted. According to a lawsuit later filed by one of the other girls through her parents, a boy at the school uploaded photos from Instagram to a site called Clothoff. We're naming the site to raise awareness of its potential dangers. There are more than a hundred of these Nudify websites. A quick search is all it takes to find them. Cloth off is one of the most popular with more than three million visits last month according to Graphica, a company that analyzes social networks. It now offers to nudify males as well, but female nudes are far more popular. Have someone to undress? Cloth off's website asks. You can upload a photo or get a free demonstration in which an image of a woman appears with clothes on. Then a few seconds later, her clothes are gone. We're blurring it out, but the results look very real.

Franchesca Mani never saw what had been done to her photo, but according to that lawsuit, at least one girl's AI nude was shared on Snapchat and seen by several kids at school. What made it worse, Francesca says, is that she and the other girls found out they were the victims when they were called by name to the principal's office over the school's public address system. I feel like that was a major violation of our privacy while like the bad actors were um taken out of their classes privately. When I left the principal's office, I was walking through a hallway and I saw these group of boys laughing at these group of girls crying. And that's when I realized I should stop crying and be mad because this is unacceptable.

That afternoon, Westfield's principal sent this email to all high school parents, informing them some of our students had used artificial intelligence to create pornographic images from original photos. The principal also said the school was investigating and at this time we believe that any created images had been deleted and are not being circulated. Francesca's mom, Dota, who's also an educator, was not convinced.

Do you think they did enough? Well, I don't know. Anderson, you work in television. Is anything deleted in the digital world? You feel like even if somebody deletes something somewhere, who knows where these images may be? Who printed? Who screenshot it? Who downloaded? You can't really wipe it out.

Dro says she filed a police report, but no charges had been brought. She was shocked by the school's handling of the whole incident. The principal informed me that one boy receives um one day suspension and that was it. So I asked her if this is all are there going to be any other consequences and she said no that's for now this is all that is going to happen. The school district wouldn't confirm details about the photos the students involved or any disciplinary action. In a statement to 60 Minutes the school superintendent said the district revised its harassment, intimidation and bullying policy to incorporate AI, something the Mani said they spent months urging school officials to do.

You feel like the girls paid a bigger cost in the end than the boy or boys who are involved in this did because they just have to live with knowing that maybe an image is floating their image is floating around the internet and they just have to deal with what the boys did.

Kina Colai has been looking into Cloth off and other nudify sites for more than a year. She's a senior researcher who specializes in the misuse of AI at Bellingcat, an international investigative group. This site, as soon as you get there, it says you have to be 18 or over to use the website. You can't use others' photos without their permission. You can't use pictures of people who are under 18. Is there any way for them to actually check if you're under 18 or

Over 18? You'll see, as we click "um, accept," that there's no verification. And now we're ready here. And immediately you're getting very explicit photos. And then they have the "poses" feature, which is one of their new settings, which is the different sex poses, which is the premium feature. Wow. So wow. And that's that. This is the preview. We haven't.

Cloth off and other Nutify sites encourage customers to promote their services on social media, and users often show off their favorite before-and-after AI nudes. I've even seen on social media platforms people showing before-and-after photos of what are clearly like high school girls, and I've um, like, reverse image searched the original photo, and they're like high school girls' like swim meets. These are very clearly these are minors, and adult content is being made of them non-consentually, then also being posted on social media. I think a lot of parents would be surprised to learn that if you post a picture of your child on your Instagram account, your child could end up a naked photo of your child out there. Yeah.

And so you have a registration. Nutify a photo on Cloth Off is free the first time. After that, it costs from $2 to $40. The payment options often change, but there are always plenty to choose from. It's giving me everything from crypto to using a credit card, for a variety of different credit cards. We got PayPal here, Google Pay. I would imagine some of these companies are not thrilled that their services are being used by these websites.

Yeah. And in many of these cases, it it directly violates their policies. To trick online payment services, Kolina Coltai says Cloth Off and other Nutify sites redirect their customers' payments through phony websites like these, pretending to sell flowers and photography lessons. Say, for example, you want to pay through PayPal. So, we click this, and it'll take a second. So, it's now redirecting you. It's redirecting through a dummy, a dummy website. So that way, on PayPal's end, it looks like you may be purchasing anything from motorcycles or beekeeping lessons or rollerblade lessons. And so now we got to the PayPal screen, but we can see down here it says "cancel and return to inner nookdesigns.m motorcycles." So that's what PayPal is being told is the website that's asking for the the charge.

Yes. PayPal told us it banned Cloth off from its platforms a year ago and shuts down the accounts for these redirect sites when it finds them. The problem is Cloth off often just creates new ones. On this login screen here. And that's not the only deception it relies on. Its website lists a name, Groupo Digital, with an address in Buenos Aires, Argentina, implying that's where Cloth off is based. But when we sent our cameras, there was no Groupo Digital there. It turned out to be the office of a YouTube channel that covers politics. And when we knocked on the door, off. The employee who answered said she'd never heard of Cloth off. Cloth off also made up a fake CEO, according to Kina Colai, complete with what she says is an AI-generated headshot.

There is an really inherent shadiness that's happening. They're not being transparent about who owns it. Um, they're obviously trying to mask their payments, but you look at the sophistication of these really large sites. It's completely different than say some guy in a basement that set up a site that he's trying to do it on his own. When these sites launched and the way that they've been developing and going this past year, it is not someone's first rodeo. It's not the first time they set up a complex network. Cloth off claims on its website that processing of minors is impossible. We emailed what the site says is a press contact asking for any evidence of that and to respond to a number of other questions. We didn't hear back.

A lot of people might say, "Well, these images are fake." But we know victims will suffer uh, humiliation. They'll suffer um, you know, mental health distress and and reputational harm. In a school setting, it's really amplified because one of their peers has created this imagery. So, there's a loss of confidence, a loss of trust.

Yoda Surus is chief legal officer at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Her organization regularly works with tech companies to flag inappropriate content on their sites. In at least three cases, Snapchat was reportedly used to circulate these photos. In one instance, a parent told us that it took more than 8 months to get the accounts that uh had shared the images taken down. Their responsiveness to to victims, that is a recurring problem that we see across tech companies. So it's not as it's not as easy as a parent, no, sending a note through Snapchat, "hey, this is happening. My child has been exploited." It's it's entirely unclear why it is not a faster process.

We can actually notify tech companies as well and ask them to take that content down. And in return, do they much faster than when an individual calls? Yes. That isn't the way it should be, right? I mean, a a parent whose child has exploitative or child pornography images online should not have to rely on reaching out to a third party and having them call the tech company. The tech company should be assuming responsibility immediately to remove that content. Why are they not doing that? Because I do not think there are ramifications to them not doing so.

Social media companies are shielded from lawsuits involving photos someone posts online due to what Yoda Surus considers an outdated law under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law from 1996. So very different world back then. Online platforms have near complete immunity for any liability arising from content that a user puts on their system. The Section 230 protection is really what allows this very loose um ecosystem to exist in terms of Nutify apps and and websites that cause harm to children.

We asked Snapchat about that parent who told us the company didn't respond to her for 8 months. A Snapchat spokesperson told us they've been unable to locate her request and said in part, "We have efficient mechanisms for reporting this kind of content," and added, "We have a zero tolerance policy for such content and act quickly to address it once reported." AI nudes of minors are illegal under federal child pornography laws, according to the Department of Justice, if they depict what's defined as sexually explicit conduct, but Sirus is concerned some images created by Nutify sites may not meet that definition. There's this gap in the law around a Nutify app that desperately needs to be shut.

What are the gaps in the law? Currently, a nude image of a child that does not include sexually explicit conduct is not illegal. Um, and that is a serious gap that exists for real children and that exists certainly for images of nude children that are created by a Nutify app. Sent a clear message that what the boys had done.

In the years since Franchesca Mani found out she was targeted, she and her mom have urged schools to implement policies around AI and worked with members of Congress to try and pass a number of federal bills. The Take It Down Act does two things. The Take It Down Act, co-sponsored by Senators Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar, made it through the Senate this month and is now awaiting a vote in the House. It would create criminal penalties for sharing AI nudes and require social media companies to take photos down within 48 hours of getting a request. Schools don't really know how to address this. Police in many cases don't do much at this stage, and the sites are making, I presume, millions of dollars off this. So, can it be fixed? Absolutely. If we have the appropriate laws, we will have the uh criminal consequences first of all to deter offenders, and then they'll be held liable if they are still using these apps. We would have civil remedies for victims. Schools would have protocols. Investigators and law enforcement would have road maps on how to investigate, what charges to bring. But we're a long way from that. We just need the laws in place. All the rest will come from that.

The familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs. Machine learning will let cars, computers, and chatbots teach themselves, making us humans obsolete. Well, that's not very likely, and we're going to tell you why. There's a growing global army of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly. They're called "humans in the loop." People sorting, labeling, and sifting reams of data to train and improve AI for companies like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. It's grunt work that needs to be done accurately, fast, and to do it cheaply, it's often farmed out to places like Africa. The robots or the machines, you are teaching them how to think like human and to do things like human.

We met Naftali Wambalo in Nairobi, Kenya. One of the main hubs for this kind of work. It's a country desperate for jobs because of an unemployment rate as high as 67% among young people. So Naftali, father of two, college educated with a degree in mathematics, was elated to finally find work in an emerging field, artificial intelligence. You were labeling. I did labeling for videos and images. Naftali and digital workers like him spend eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching the AI algorithms to recognize them. You would label, let's say, furniture in a house, and you say, "This is a TV, this is a microwave." So you are teaching the AI to identify these items, right? And then there was one for faces of people, the color of the face. If it looks like this, this is white; it looks like this is black; this is Asian. You're teaching the AI to identify them, right? Automatically, humans tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI is getting smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that'll need labeling. You find these humans in the loop not only here in Kenya, but in other countries thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, in India, the Philippines, Venezuela, often countries with large, low-wage populations, well-educated but unemployed.

Honestly, it's like modern-day slavery because it's cheap labor. Whoa. What do you? It's cheap labor like modern-day slavery, says Narima Wako Ojiwa, a Kenyan civil rights activist. Because big American tech companies come here and advertise the jobs as a ticket to the future. But really, she says, it's exploitation. What we're seeing is an inequality. It sounds so good. An AI job. Is there any job security? The contracts that we see are very short-term. And I've seen people who have contracts that are monthly, some of them weekly, some of them days, uh, which is ridiculous. She calls the workspaces "AI sweatshops," with computers instead of sewing machines. I think that we're so concerned with creating opportunities, but we're not asking, "Are they good opportunities?" Because every year a million young people enter the job market. The government has been courting tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Intel to come here, promoting Kenya's reputation as the "silicon savannah," tech-savvy and digitally connected. The president has been really pushing forward opportunities in AI. President, yes, our president. Yes, the president does have to create at least 1 million jobs a year, the minimum. So, it's a very tight position to be in.

To lure the tech giants, RTO has been offering financial incentives on top of already lax labor laws. But the workers aren't hired directly by the big companies. They engage outsourcing firms, also mostly American, to hire for them. There's a go-between. Yes. They hire, they pay. M. I mean, they hire thousands of people, and they are protecting the Facebooks from having their names associated with this. Yes. We're talking about the richest companies on earth. Yes. But then they are paying people peanuts. AI jobs don't pay much. They don't pay well. They do not pay Africans well enough. And the workforce is so large and desperate that they couldn't pay whatever and have whatever working conditions and they will have someone who will pick up that job. So what's the average pay for these jobs? It's about uh, a dollar and a half, $2 an hour. $2 per hour, and that is gross before tax.

Naftali, Nathan, and Faca were hired by an American outsourcing company called Sama that employs over 3,000 workers here and hired for Meta and OpenAI. In documents we obtained, OpenAI agreed to pay Sama $12.50 an hour per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got. Though Sama says that's a fair wage for the region. If the big tech companies are going to keep doing this this business, they have to do it the right way. So it's not because you realize Kenya is a third-world country, you say this job, I would normally pay $30 in US, but because you are Kenya, $2 is enough for you. That idea has to end. Okay. $2 an hour in Kenya. Is that low, medium? Is it an okay salary? So for me, I was living paycheck to paycheck. I I have saved nothing because it's not enough. Is it an insult? It is. Of course, it is. Why did you take the job? I have a family to feed, and instead of staying home, let me just at least have something to do.

And not only did the jobs not pay well, they were draining. They say deadlines were unrealistic, punitive, with often just seconds to complete complicated labeling tasks. Did you see people who were fired just cuz they complained? Yes, we were working on eggshells. They were all hired per project, and say Sama kept pushing them to complete the work faster than the projects required. An allegation Sama denies. Let's say the contract for a certain job um was 6 months. Okay. What if you finished in 3 months? Does the worker get paid for those extra 3 months? No. KFC. What? Who used to get KFC and Coca-Cola. They they used to say, "Uh, thank you. They get you a bottle of soda and KFC chicken, two pieces, and that is it."

Worse yet, workers told us that some of the projects for Meta and OpenAI were grim and caused them harm. Naftali was assigned to train AI to recognize and weed out pornography, hate speech, and excessive violence, which meant sifting through the worst of the worst content online for hours on end. I looked at um, people being slaughtered, uh, people engaging in sexual activity with animals, people abusing children physically, sexually, people committing suicide. Basically, all day long. Yes. All day long. 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. The workers told us they were tricked into this work by ads like this that described these jobs as "call center agents to assist our clients' community and help resolve inquiries empathetically."

I was told I was going to do a translation job. Exactly. What was the job you were doing? I was basically reviewing content which are very graphic, very disturbing contents. I was watching dismembered bodies or drone attack victims or you name it. You know, whenever I talk about this, I still have, you know, flashbacks. Are any of you a different person than they were before you had this job? Yeah. I find it hard now to even have conversations with people. It's just that I find it easy to cry than to speak. Uh, you you continue isolating yourself from people. You don't want to socialize with others. It's you and it's you alone. Are you a different person? Yeah, I'm a different person. I used to enjoy my marriage, especially when it comes to bedroom fireworks. But after the job, I hate sex. You hated sex? After countlessly seeing those sexual activities, pornography on the on the job that I was doing, I hate sex.

Sama says mental health counseling was provided by "quote, fully licensed professionals," but the workers say it was woefully inadequate. We want psychiatrists. We want psychologists qualified who know exactly what we are going through and how they can help us to cope. Trauma experts. Yes. Do you think the big company Facebook, ChatGPT, do you think they know how this is affecting the workers? It's their job to know. It's their job to know actually because they are the ones providing the work. These three and nearly 200 other digital workers are suing Sama and Meta over unreasonable working conditions that caused psychiatric problems. It was proven by a psychiatrist that we are thoroughly sick. We have gone through a psychiatric evaluation just a few months ago, and it was proven that we are all sick. Thoroughly sick. They know that we're damaged, but they don't care. We're humans. Just because we're black or just because we're just vulnerable for now, that does that doesn't give them the right to just exploit us like this.

Sama, which has terminated those projects, would not agree to an on-camera interview. Meta and OpenAI told us they're committed to safe working conditions, including fair wages and access to mental health counseling. Another American AI training company facing criticism in Kenya is Scale AI, which operates a website called Remotasks. Did you all work for Remoes or work with them? A Fantis, Joan, Joy, Michael, and Duncan signed up online, creating an account, and clicked for work remotely, getting paid per task. Problem is, sometimes the company just didn't pay them. When it gets to the day before payday, they close the account and say that you violated a policy. They say you violated their policy, and they don't pay you for the work you've done. Would you say that that's almost common that you do work and you're not paid for it and you have no recourse? You have no way to even complain. There's no way. The company says any work that was done in line with our community guidelines was paid out. In March, as workers started complaining publicly, Remotasks abruptly shut down in Kenya altogether.

There are no labor laws here. Our labor law is about 20 years old. It doesn't touch on digital labor. I do think that our labor laws need to recognize it. But not just in Kenya alone because what happens is when we start to push back in terms of protections of workers. A lot of these companies, they shut down and they move to a neighboring country. It's easy to see how you're trapped. Kenya is trapped. They need jobs so desperately that there's a fear that if you complain, if your government complained, then these companies don't have to come here. Yeah. And that's what they throw at us all the time. And it's terrible to see just how many American companies are just just doing wrong here. Just doing wrong here. And it's something that they wouldn't do at home. So why do it here?

By now, we've all heard about Elon Musk's efforts to reshape the US government. But tonight, we'll introduce you to another tech billionaire, one who set his sights on radically changing the way the Pentagon buys and uses weapons. His name is Palmer Luckey, and he's the founder of Anduril, a California defense products company. Luckey says for too long the US military has relied on overpriced and outdated technology. He argues a Tesla has better AI than any US aircraft and a Roomba vacuum has better autonomy than most of the Pentagon's weapon systems. So Anduril is making a line of autonomous weapons that operate using artificial intelligence. No human required. Some international groups have called those types of weapons "killer robots." But Palmer Luckey says it is the future of warfare.

I've always said that we need to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store. Do we want to be the world's gun store? I think so. I think we have to. Says the guy who sells weapons. See, I I agree. It sounds self-fulfilling, but you have to remember I also got into this industry because I believe that.

Palmer Luckey isn't your typical defense industry executive. His daily uniform, flip-flops and Hawaiian shirt, is more suited for Margaritaville than the military. But the 32-year-old billionaire is the founder of Anduril, whose line of American-made autonomous weapons looks like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie and whose slick marketing videos wouldn't be out of place in one. There's the Roadrunner, a twin turbo jet-powered drone interceptor that can take off, identify, and strike. If it doesn't find a target, it can land and try again. Anduril also makes headsets, which allow soldiers to see 360° in combat. And there's this. It's an electromagnetic warfare system that can be programmed to jam enemy systems, knocking out drone swarms. It's not some futuristic fantasy. And systems are already being used by the US military and in the war in Ukraine.

We shouldn't be sending our people to stand in other countries, putting our men and women, our sons and daughters at risk for the sovereignty of other nations. So you'd rather have an American-made product in their hands than our soldiers over there? Absolutely. Every time. And I think that that's one of the reasons that autonomy is so powerful. Right now there's so many weapon systems that require manning. You know, if I can have one guy commanding and controlling a hundred aircraft. That's a lot easier than having to have a pilot in every single one. And it puts a lot fewer American lives at risk.

[Music] To be clear, autonomy does not mean remote controlled. Once an autonomous weapon is programmed and given a task, it can use artificial intelligence for surveillance or to identify, select, and engage targets. No operator needed.

It's a scary idea to some people. It's a scary idea, but I mean, that's the world we live in. I'd say it's a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapon system that doesn't have any level of intelligence at all.

There's no moral high ground in making a landmine that can't tell the difference between a school bus full of children and Russian armor. It's not a question between smart weapons and no weapons. It's a question between smart weapons and dumb weapons. Lucky showed us how those so-called smart weapons can be synchronized on Andrew's AI platform. It's called Lattis. Lattis collects data from various sensors and sources, including satellites, drones, radar, and cameras, allowing, he says, the AI to analyze, move assets, and execute missions faster than a human.

If you were having to require the human operator to actually map every single action and say, "Hey, do this, if that, then this," it would take so long to manage it that you would be better off just remotely piloting it. If it's the AI on board all these weapons that makes it possible to make it so easy.

There are lots of people who go, "Oh, AI, I don't know. I don't trust it. It's going to go rogue." I would say that it is something to be aware of, but in the grand scheme of things, things to be afraid of, there's things that I'm much more terrified of, and I'm a lot more worried about evil people with mediocre advances in technology than AI deciding that it's going to wipe us all out.

Lucky says all Andrew's weapons have a kill switch that allows a human operator to intervene if needed. But the Secretary General of the United Nations has called lethal autonomous weapons "politically unacceptable and morally repugnant."

When people say to you, "Look, it's evil," how do you respond to that? I usually don't bother because if I am going to argue with them, I usually poke it. I'm like, "Okay, so do you think that NATO should be armed with squirt guns or slingshots? How about sternly worded letters? Would you like that? Would you like it if if NATO just they just have a bunch of guys sitting at typewriters, a thousand monkeys writing letters to Vladimir Putin begging him to not invade Ukraine?"

Our entire society exists because of a credible backstop of violence threatened by the United States and our allies all over the world. And thank goodness for it. It might sound flip, but part of Palmer Lucky's philosophy is that autonomous weapons ultimately promote peace by scaring adversaries away. My position has been that the United States needs to arm our allies and partners around the world so that they can be prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on, nobody wants to bite them.

In your mind, is it enough just to have all these things as deterrence or do they have to be deployed and used? They have to believe that you can use them.

By the end of this year, Andrew says it will have secured more than $6 billion in government contracts worldwide. When you first came into this space and you're a tech guy in a Hawaiian shirt and you're walking into the Pentagon, maybe in flip-flops, I don't know, were you welcomed with open arms?

There were a very small number of people who welcomed me with open arms, and everyone else thought that I was nuts. Nuts because there hasn't been a new company in the defense industry in a significant way since the end of the Cold War. For decades, five defense contractors called the primes have dominated the industry. Typically, the primes present an idea to the Pentagon. If the Pentagon buys it, the government pays for the company to develop it, even if it's late or goes over budget. Lucky started Andrew to flip that procurement structure on its head. The idea behind Andrew was to build not a defense contractor, but a defense product company.

What's the difference? Contractors in general are paid to do work whether or not it succeeds. A product company has a very different mentality. You're putting in your own money. You're putting in your own time. My vision was to build a company that would show up not with a PowerPoint describing how taxpayers are going to pay all my bills, but with a working product where all the risk has been baked out, that will work for enough things that you can save our country hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

It may not surprise you that Palmer Lucky's father was a car salesman. His mother took on the role of homeschooling him and his three sisters. Lucky says he was fascinated by electronics and spent a lot of time tinkering in his parents' garage in Long Beach, California. By age 19, his tinkering turned into Oculus, the virtual reality company. And at 21, Palmer Lucky fulfilled every young founder's dream when he sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion. The Wonder Kid graced the covers of magazines, but two years later, he was fired from Facebook.

Why did you get fired? Well, you know, everyone's got a different story, but it boils down to I gave $9,000 to a political group that was for Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton. To be a Trump supporter in 2016, you know, this was at the height of the election insanity and derangement in Silicon Valley. And so, I think that a lot of people thought back then that you could you could just fire a Trump supporter. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has denied that Lucky was fired for his political views.

What do you think now when you see those tech leaders Mark Zuckerberg lined up behind President Trump now at his inauguration? I am inclined to let every single one of them get away with it. Look, what do you mean get away with it? Coming around to a point of view that is more aligned with the American people broadly, I think is good for the country. I think it is not good for you to have techno corpo elites that are radically out of step with where the American people are.

In 2017, Lucky says he left Silicon Valley with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank and a chip on his shoulder. I was fired at the height of my career. You know, my gears were ground, and I really wanted to prove that I was somebody, that I was not a one-hit wonder, and that I still had it in me to do big things. He says he thought about starting companies to combat obesity or fix the prison system, but ultimately decided to break into the defense industry.

Have you run into any people who don't take you seriously because you were never in the military? I I don't think so. I think I owe that to the James Bond franchise. Everyone in the military has seen James Bond movies and they all like you, right? I'm the wacky gadget man. I'm the guy who types on the computer and pushes up my glasses and then gives them a strange thing to help them accomplish their mission.

And this is his laboratory, Andrew's 640,000 square foot headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. It's a mix of high-tech carpentry and robotic engineering. A sign on the floor pokes fun at the boss's shoe choice. But Lucky wanted to show us something off-campus. We hopped in his 1985 Humvee. The billionaire told us he also owns a decommissioned Blackhawk helicopter, a 48 crew submarine, and a Navy Speedboat.

In Dana Point, we took a ride 15 minutes off the coast to see the largest weapon in Andrew's arsenal, this submarine. It's called the Dive XL. It's about the size of a school bus and works autonomously. It's not remote controlled by this computer. It's doing it on the brain on the submarine itself. So if I told it to go off and perform some mission, it's months long. Like go to this target, listen for this particular signature. And if you see this signature, run. If you see this one, hide. If you see this one, follow it. It can do that all on its own without being detected, without communicating with it. Andrew says the Dive XL can travel 1,000 miles fully submerged. Australia has already invested $58 million in the subs to help defend its seas from China.

But Andrew's most anticipated weapon has been closely guarded until this month. Hidden inside this hangar, Andrew's unmanned fighter jet called Fury. There is no cockpit or stick or rudder because there's no pilot. The idea is that you're building a robotic fighter jet that is, you know, flying with manned fighters and is doing what you ask it to do, recommending things that be done, uh, taking risks that you don't want human pilots to take. Fury represents a big turning point for the company. And was viewed by some inside the defense industry as a tech bro startup until it beat out several of the prime defense contractors to make an unmanned fighter jet for the Air Force. Fury is scheduled to take its first test flight this summer. If selected by the Pentagon, it, like all Andrew products, will be produced in the US.

The war games say we're going to run out of munitions in 8 days in a fight with China. If we have to fight Iran and China and Russia all at the same time, we are screwed. If we go to war, right, your version of what Andrew's place is in a in a conflict. Yep. How do you view it? I think what we're going to be doing is first connecting a lot of these systems that otherwise would not have been talking to one another. We're going to be making large numbers of cruise missiles, large numbers of fighter jets, large numbers of surface and subsurface systems. I guess I would hope that Andrew is making most of the stuff that's being used on day 9, day 10, day 11, day 100. I think a lot of that is going to be coming out of our factories every after everything else is run dry.