Transcription
It is totally absurd and embarrassing that the United States of America, the richest country on earth, is the only major country not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right. You know the function of insurance companies is not to provide healthcare; it is to make a lot of money, and they do make a lot of money. Drug companies make an enormous amount of money, and it, it saddens me very much, uh, that we have a system which everybody recognizes is broken. It is dysfunctional. It is enormously complicated. And by the way, not only are we the only major country not to guarantee healthcare to all people, we're spending twice as much per capita as other countries. So I think the answer to your question is healthcare is a human right. We guarantee healthcare to all people, young, old, rich or poor.
Can I add one thing to that? Um, it is true that healthcare companies can abuse AI to decide not to ensure people are going to get sick, which is what they'd like to do. Um, however, I think the benefits that we're going to get from our own healthcare are a bigger effect than that. I think we'll get huge benefits from AI reading medical scans, AI designing new drugs, AI being able to take all the data about a patient, their genome, all the tests that are done on them, all the tests that have been done on their relatives and use that information to make better diagnoses. Um, we've already seen that Microsoft had a system that could diagnose better than doctors, and quite a bit better, I think. Um, so it is true that any powerful technology like this will be abused by people trying to make more money, but overall the effect on healthcare, despite that, I think will be very positive.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Thank you. Back up to the balcony.
>> Uh, hi. My name is Zach. I'm an undergraduate senior and I'm studying human science. And I was just wondering, have you seen the movie Wall-E? Because I feel like, as you've been saying with AI and all the potential benefits, uh, why does it not make sense for us to invest all of our money, all of our time into developing really, really powerful super AIs so that they can just take care of all of our problems and in the future we don't have to like worry about things like working and jobs?
Okay, let me answer that. If we had a political system that was run for the benefit of the people, that's exactly what we should do. We should have very powerful AI that does everything for us. We should be very careful to design it so it cares more about us than it does about itself. I've been pushing this idea of maternal instincts. If you look around for how can we coexist with something smarter than us? Well, look around to see where does a less intelligent system thrive in the presence of a more intelligent system. There's only one place, and that's a baby and a mother. The mother cares more about the baby than she does about herself. Um, the baby thrives. We need AI with maternal instincts. We don't know how to engineer that, but we're still in charge and we should be able to engineer that. Um, that's part of the puzzle. We, if we can engineer that and we can have a political system which aims to um help all of the people all of the time, um, it would be great. But that's not the political system we've got in most places. We've got authoritarians. Um, we have um systems in which some people see most of the other people as mugs to be exploited. They're a market. We need to deceive them into buying our useless products which fail as quickly as possible so we can send them more, sell them more. Um, in that kind of system, it's very bad to develop AI and put people out of work. But there is the hope that we could get a system where it is used for the benefit of everybody. Um, a system like one big family. That's what it should be like. Um, so it's not just totally out of the question, but this is kind of, I feel like I'm sort of 16, 16 again and thinking about how politics ought to be. Um, it's very idealistic.
>> Well, I think you've raised a very important question and I think you're saying, hey, this is great. AI is going to come. You don't have to do this job. You don't have to do that job. Really, really good. Do you think that is what Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos have in mind? Do you think that's why they're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to say, "Hey, isn't this great? We can lower the work week. We can guarantee healthcare, high-quality healthcare to everybody. We can expand life expectancy. We can solve global warming. Man, let's go do it. That's what we want to do." Do you think that's what these guys have in mind?
>> Probably not.
>> Probably not. And what Dr. Hinton was saying is exactly the issue. Is AI, are AI and robotics inherently bad? Absolutely not. If they are used, for example, you are already seeing some of the large unions like the UAW negotiating with the car companies and saying, you know what, our productivity is going up. We want a 32-hour work week. Needless to say, the companies were not sympathetic. But if we can lower the work week, if we could do away with dangerous jobs, improve healthcare for all, it's a positive. But again, I get back to the point that I started. Understand the people who are pushing this transformative, transformative revolution are the richest people in the world. They are not staying up nights worrying about working people. In my view, they want even more wealth and they want even more power. So the struggle is not whether AI is good or bad. It's who controls it and who benefits from it. That is really the the fundamental issue in my view. All right. Thank you. Back down here to the floor.
Hi, my name is Nick. I'm a sophomore studying government from Florida. Uh, this is a question for Senator Sanders. Thank you for being here. Um, obviously we've heard a lot of talk about the AI bubble and with that the impending burst that's probably going to eventually happen with the AI bubble and indeed you've heard people like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, say he expects the government to bail out AI industries. You know, this is kind of a two-part question, but firstly, you know, should a, should a bubble burst occur, how do you see Congress uh responding to that? And secondly, are there similarities to the AI bubble that you're seeing with past bubbles like the dot-com bubble? Do you, does it, does it worry you that this bubble burst will be worse than those previous?
>> Sure. It does worry me, you know, getting back to a point that, you know, Dr. Hinton raised is in my view, I don't want to put words in his mouth, you have a fairly corrupt political system. So when Wall Street went under, they knew what they were doing. They knew that they were investing in fraudulent mortgages, etc. They went under, they caused a massive recession, and they went to the government and said, "Yeah, we made huge amounts of money. We were crooks. We were dishonest. Bail us out." Because if you don't bail us out, we're too big to fail. We'll take down the whole economy with us. If that was true then, I suspect it is a lot true right now. The gumption of people who are multi-billionaires who are making money hand over fist says, "Oh, by the way, if we fail, you who are one of the 60% of American people living paycheck to paycheck, we would appreciate your bailing us out." All right. So, that gets to another issue. The broader issue is how we create a government that represents ordinary people, not just dependent on the campaign contributions of billionaires. And that is the broader political issue. How do we create a fact, a with a small 'd', a democratic society where government works to protect the interests of all people, where AI and robotics are a positive, not a negative, for working people. That's the issue that we've got to address. Thank you.
>> All right. Thanks. Back up to the balcony.
>> Um, hi. I'm Anna. I'm a senior in the School of Foreign Service. I'm studying science, technology, and international affairs. Really quickly, I want to thank Dr. Hinton for your decades of tireless work, even through all the AI winters and everything. But now for the question. You all alluded um earlier to the debate between the um, you know, connectionists and the symbolists and um, kind of famously in the beginning, Microsoft dismissed the connectionists and some of your work. So I was wondering if you think right now in the scientific field, do you think there's a similar type of neglect or dismissal of any school of thought, for not policymakers, but anyone in the field? Um, thank you very much.
Okay, I'm not the guy to ask because the approach I pushed is currently winning. Um, the people to, I mean, it's quite possible there'll be a very different approach. Um, and the people to ask are young people who think what I'm doing is wrong. Um, but I'm going to stick with what's working.
>> Sorry, that's not a very good answer. But um, there may well be radically different approaches out there, but it's not old men who are going to push them.
>> All right, thanks. Back down here.
>> Hi, my name is Charlotte. I'm a junior in the college studying government and psychology and I'm from Connecticut. And uh, one concern about AI that we haven't yet discussed today is its ability to spread misinformation um, specifically like via voice replication, accurate videos, etc. And this information will absolutely worsen our already very deep and disturbing political divides. So, I was wondering what you would propose as policy to address this issue or what you foresee being put on the docket to deal with.
Okay. Um, I have something to say about that. Um, many people suggest we should get AI to recognize things like fake videos. That's never going to work. The, the first AI systems that generated really good images were called generative adversarial networks. And the problem is, if you have an AI that can recognize that a video is fake, then a generative AI can look inside that other AI and figure out how to generate things that it will think are real. And so you get this sort of arms race between a discriminative AI that says whether they're fake or not and a generative AI that's getting better and better at fooling the discriminative AI. And that's how you got very good images with generative adversarial networks. So there's no future, I believe, no long-term future in getting AI to recognize fakes produced by AI because you can always make better fakes. Then the way to do it is to have provenance. So a few hundred years ago in Britain, there were political pamphlets, and the government insisted that every pamphlet that was printed had the printer's name on it because if you had the printer's name, you could find out who paid the printer and you could find out the provenance of the pamphlet. And that's because the printing press was a limitation. For at least for political videos, there's a scheme suggested to me by Yan Talin, who's, I should mention Yan Talin, he's invented Skype, um, with some other people, sold it to Microsoft. He's a billionaire. He's used a lot of his money for AI safety. Many, many AI safety groups are funded by Yan Talin, and he's taken it very seriously. Um, he suggested you do the following: Every political video, you have a QR code at the beginning. The QR code takes you to a website. Websites are unique. Um, if on that, if that is the website of the political campaign, and on that website there's the identical video, you know it's for real. If not, you know it's not. And your browser can do all that work. Your browser can take the QR code, go to the website, check it's a website of that campaign, check if there's an identical video. So, it should be possible for your browser to tell you that this is a genuine video for that campaign, at least. Um, you have to go for provenance, not recognizing fakes. Um, I once gave this argument to people from the New York Times who thought that was great because, I mean, I believe news that comes from the New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian. People, I believe, will get two sources, at least two sources, and won't just make stuff up. Occasionally get stuff wrong, but it's all going to be done by provenance, I believe, in the long run. Well, somebody, I am told by my staff, that there was I was on television selling on on the internet selling some insurance policy, and it sounded and looked very much like me. So, it is a real, real issue. You just worry that, you know, two weeks before an election, an election, and they're very good at this stuff. You can have somebody uh sounding like somebody uh saying crazy stuff which can impact an election. So, it's a very big issue and I think it's got to be dealt with.
And I actually think we should use inoculation. That is, before an election, people should put out very convincing fake videos. Fake videos in favor of Trump, fake videos against Trump. Um, and at the end of the fake video, they should say, "That was a fake video." What they're trying to do is make you understand that fake videos will be out there. And it's like inoculation. They give you one that's labeled as fake so you can get used to dealing with it.