The Royal Institution
What is Artificial Intelligence? with Mike Wooldridge
Hear more from the 2023 CHRISTMAS LECTURER, Mike Wooldridge, as he explains what Artificial Intelligence is.
This year’s CHRISTMAS LECTURES are on the theme ‘The Truth About AI’ – find out more at https://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures
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so my name is Mike waldridge I am a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Oxford and director of AI at the Allan touring Institute uh in London I’m an AI researcher I’ve been an AI researcher for more than 30 years uh and the reason that I’m here today is I’m this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lecturer which will be on artificial intelligence um the question what is artificial intelligence is just a phenomenally difficult one nobody owns artificial intelligence it’s a very broad Church lots of people have very different ideas about what it is and what it should be for some people artificial intelligence is the Hollywood dream what they’re after is the idea of building machines which are as fully capable or perhaps even better uh more capable than than human beings machines that could do everything that a human being could do uh and that’s sometimes called General artificial intelligence um for other people and I’m more in that other Camp artificial intelligence is about building tools building uh uh computers that can do very specific tasks better than human beings can so for example uh machines that can uh diagnose abnormalities on a heart scan or spot tumors on an X-ray those kinds of things um and uh the bulk of work in artificial intelligence is around those kinds of problems um but I say it’s a broad Church nobody owns it I certainly don’t own it you know everybody listening to this will have their own views but I have to say the center of gravity in AI is around extending the capability of machines to get machines to do things which currently only human beings can do I hate the word revolution uh to describe these things but I think what we’ve seen is genuine breakthroughs in the sense of a step change in capability of AI in the last few years and it happened around about 2020 prior to chat GPT chat GPT is the one that everybody noticed but around about 2020 there were AI systems released which were markedly better than the systems that went before them uh and that really got the attention of AI researchers and we realized okay this is a different game now where we’re in a different League here in terms of the capability and so genuinely I think somewhere around about 2020 we moved into a new era things have definitely changed uh and everybody in my community is busy exploring what these new techn Oles can do what these new AI systems can do uh trying to understand them which in itself is no no trivial thing they are phenomenally complicated things to try to understand why why they do what they can do and how they do what they can do but yeah I think we are this is one of those moments like the emergence of the worldwide web that is going to be a watershed moment in scientific history we are at the point now where general purpose AI techn Technologies are reaching a mass market and that’s a new thing we haven’t been there before and it’s happening very very quickly so when the worldwide web first appeared it took sort of five or six years for it to really reach a mass audience before people people on the clap Omnibus were were using it and we’ve seen much more rapid take up of these general purpose AI tools just in the just in the last year and so things are changing much more quickly than than we’ve been used to in technology over uh over the last few decades we’ve seen lots of technological changes the the arrival of smartphones around about 210 and then going back to the worldwide web uh before that and then before that the desktop computer and so on but they all took a you know years to unfold and we’re seeing this unfold in the period of of months if not weeks so it’s just going to be embedded in absolutely everything and to some extent it already is but we’re going to see a lot more roll out of that technology into your word processor and your web browser and So within a year I predict pretty confidently predict at this point you know you’ll be able to just select a paragraph in in your word document and there’ll be an option to summarize it or to turn it into beautiful English or to turn it into English that would be understandable for a 10-year-old audience or for a a professional business audience and so on and people won’t even realize that that’s AI but absolutely it is AI this generation is going to think of ways of using this that we can’t even begin to imagine they’re going to think up very clever and genius and for us old fogies weird ways of using this technology they’re going to create new businesses and services again that we can’t even guess at right now um they’re going to find applications for it in their work life it’s going to make them more productive it’s going to take away a lot of the drudgery I think of for an awful lot of jobs and free them up to do the things that require human intelligence and human Insight uh uh and emotional insight and so on it’s going to free them up in their in their jobs to do that they’re going to find use ways of using it in Leisure it’s going to appear in computer games and endless different applications so it’s going to enrich their world in an enormous number of ways but for every uh potential beneficial use of this technology there are there are ways in which it can be abused and misused and it’s just so important that people understand what those are and go into using the technology with their eyes open and I think one of the most important ones was the issue of data and the being the unwitting provider of data about yourself so everywhere where people deal with content with understanding content processing it you people whose jobs are to take do documents and to summarize them colate them into a single document you know just in London there are probably hundreds of thousands of people whose jobs more or less involve doing just that um uh people whose job is to summarize or extract their key points from text people who create uh routine copy uh pieces of text people who create routine pieces of artwork all of those in the very near future are going to be affected by this technology if your job largely involves following a script and the only thing that you’re really required to do is to understand what another human being is saying but otherwise you’re just following a script then those kinds of jobs seems to me are very vulnerable and uh in the UK one area of immediate concern is around call centers and there are hundreds of thousands of people in the UK employed in call centers um and there is potential it hasn’t happened yet but there is potential for AI technology to automate a lot of those processes it is absolutely changing science all the experimental Sciences are busy looking to see what they can do with AI Technologies and uh if you’re an experimental science you produce data and and things like the square kilometer array telescope uh all of those like CERN produce vast vast vast quantities of data and AI now gives you another tool to be able to analyze that data to spot patterns in it uh to to maybe form hypotheses about what’s going on in the data now I have to tell you there are scientists out there who think this is more or less the end of civilization you know the idea that it’s no longer human beings that are forming the hypothesis but that a machine is forming a hypothesis or maybe even the machine uh isn’t even doing that it’s just telling you that if you eat uh if you eat these red toad STS then you’ll die but it can’t tell you why or form a theory about why you would die and for some people don’t think that that kind of Extreme inductivism as it sometimes called is is even science but uh everybody is frantically looking to see what they can do with this so it really is changing science across the board so suppose you are an astronomer and what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to figure out how many spiral versus bar galaxies there are out there so what do you do you can take pictures of the sky uh and expose them for a long time and you’ll get pictures of lots and lots of galaxies and 20 years ago you would go through those pictures and you would count the number of spiral versus bar galaxies so with how does AI help you with that well with AI what you can do is you simply rather than writing a program to identify a spiral or a bar Galaxy what you do is you simply show the program and you say that’s a spiral galaxy that’s a bar Galaxy that’s a bar Galaxy off you go and the program figures out how to do that identification on its own and that’s what the technology of neural networks and the like the machine learning Technologies that’s what they’re extremely good at and that’s just one example one very simple example of how the Technologies might be used in modern science but you can think of exactly the same kinds of scenarios everywhere you look in science in biology and chemistry and so on I’m absolutely fired up and interested in this subject and one of the reasons is because stuff that seemed like it was just unimaginably distant at the start of my career we now have you know we have tools that you can just converse with in ordinary language they didn’t exist even a decade ago nothing like the tools that we have now existed even a decade ago and stuff that was just pure speculation and philos philosophy 10 years ago now we can just we actually can try out uh and and and it’s transforming AI into a kind of new science uh in we’re Reinventing uh AI as a field to be able to explore what large language models can do what they can’t do you know do do they really understand people do they really understand at all and these used to be philosophical questions and now they’re practical ones we can actually roll up our sleeves and try things out and that’s just enormously enormously exciting
#Artificial #Intelligence #Mike #Wooldridge
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Amazing
Not true
The future is here
Interesting.
AI or artificial intelligence is same as AI or artificial insanity. If it's invented by humans, then it's very fallible.
I can't confirm who through the extra dough at my manager but I hope it doesn't escalate into a verbal assault or a fight since they seem to have such a beautiful friendship, maybe I'm being a bit over-critical, sensitive
why is he talking to quick? caffeine? i had to quit the video
Hmmm, imagine what terrorist will do with AI
It is just so sad, that me and my friend are so interested in this topic, to choose this as our careers. And yet others of our age are completely in a different and outdated world. Best video ever, Thank You so much for the information given.
Humanity created a.i. and primarily tasked it to support the business world before curing any diseases or hunger. Humans don't deserve a.i.
We’re focused on artificial intelligence(AI) when we need more attention on fixing natural intelligence. AI requires input and we don’t need garbage in garbage out!
When IBM super computer Watson defeated a human chess grandmaster back in 2000 I knew the future would be amazing beyond our current imagination.
Ai is that present and future. AI will change everything for better or worse, it's our call.
I didn't feel there was a need for AI until I read the comments. There does seem to be an untapped demand for writing English, or any language and to convey meaningful thoughts. Computers also communicate more effectively with each other.
Upto 400 Billion in England- enough said, computer and there science is a way of thinking this is a process not a theory
The MillenIum bug is the stArt -there was billions spent and nothing happens its based on FEAR
Bit too evangelical for me.
the tech behind Aliagents is super interesting, tokenized AI systems with real functionality
Well- I guess that you are not an A.I
Still too many typical human paradigms and you know- algorithms
AI's ability to process and analyze data at unprecedented speeds holds transformative potential, but it is crucial to address ethical concerns and ensure that its advancements benefit all aspects of society
Incredible work! Your effort really shows.
His delivery and enthusiasm is very contagious! <3
AI is a disgraceful invention that needs destroying
Your prediction came true. Apple devices will summarize my paragraph.
We can change the world by changing our way of thinking. A. Einstein.
Using Ai to augment our Ni, Neutral Intelligence.
An Oxford don hates the term 'revolution'. Dear oh dear. It is a term to describe, rapid, radical, change!
This is beautiful lecture.
Still confused if this is the same Wooldridge that wrote the textbook I used in my undergraduate years
I learned one thing from the military, that if you think where the police are and it's far away and perfect, and in case I have to know if someone is at home just think if he's at home and many other things you learn from the military if you need information they say everything with their minds, thank you artificial intelligence
I learned one thing from the military, that if you think where the police are and it's far away and perfect, and in case I have to know if someone is at home just think if he's at home and many other things you learn from the military if you need information they say everything with their minds, thank you artificial intelligence
Is this clip natural or even this is artificial…. slowly we could loose our trust of what's natural and artificial…. difficult times coming but cant be avoided….. preserve your natural essence.
World is such a brutal place … every where we complain that natural essence in life is missing every thing is artificial and now it's time for human intelligence to be turned into artificial….just thought .but I do beleive life is complete circle it goes back where it started we call it getting back to roots ….till then let's embrace being artificial trying our best to preserve and cherish natural essence before it becomes distinct till the point that it returns back to us after ages of wait.
Finally a clear video on Ai