AI Videos
True Artificial Intelligence will change everything
TEDx Talks | Juergen Schmidhuber | November 21, 2017 | Running Time: 15:56
Schmidhuber is a German computer scientist who has worked extensively on neural networks. He notes that the human brain contains about 100 billion neurons, each of which has 10,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. (Current figures are 86 billion and 7,000 respectively.) He then briefly explains how neural networks function. Schmidhuber emphasizes that autonomous AIs are "a new type of life" that will "colonize and transform the entire universe."
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence through Deep Learning
TEDx Talks | Yoshua Bengio | May 17, 2017 | Running Time: 17:54
Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist whose work has centered on networks and deep learning. He describes the latter as, "… an approach to machine learning inspired by the brain". He is generally considered, with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, to be one of the "godfathers" of modern AI.
Ex-Google Officer Finally Speaks Out On The Dangers of AI!
DOAC | Mo Gawdat | June 1, 2023 | Running Time: 1:56:31
Gawdat is a computer engineer who became chief business officer at Google X, the R&D facility founded in 2010 to produce "moonshot" technologies. This interview, along with Gawdat's Scary Smart, first alerted me to the possibility that AI could play a major role in addressing the ecological crisis. Gawdat is politically naive, but offers a deeply humanistic perspective on the AI revolution.
AI and the future of humanity
Frontiers Forum | Yuval Noah Harari | May 14, 2023 | Running Time: 41:21
Harari is an Israeli professor of history. I'm not a fan (his book Sapiens strikes me as conventional nonsense), but this talk is a useful introduction to AI. Harari emphasizes that AIs are not just tools, they can learn by themselves and also form "deep and intimate relationships with human beings" by exploiting their mastery of natural languages. AIs could use this intimacy to profoundly distort social and political processes. Like most AI experts Harari says that AIs could help solve to the ecological crisis, but fails to understand that AIs must play the leading role.
Beyond ChatGPT
Subtitle: Stuart Russell on the Risks and Rewards of A.I.
Stuart Russell | April 4, 2023 | Running Time: 1:13:24
Russell is an American professor of computer science. In this interview he presents the mainstream position that AIs must serve human interests and human values. Because these cannot be unambiguously specified, Russell suggests that AIs should initially be ignorant about our preferences, and should learn about them from the choices we make. Like other AI experts he completely ignores the ecological crisis. Hence he never explains why the interests and values of a species that is destroying the environment should be served. See also his 2019 book, Human Compatible (brief description here).
Will Superintelligent AI End the World?
TED Talk | Eliezer Yudkowsky | July 11, 2023 | Running Time: 10:32
Yudkowsky is an American AI researcher. Here he says that his aim is to, "… shape the preferences and behavior of a powerful artificial mind so that it does not kill everyone." However, he admits that he has no realistic plan, and he has very little of substance to say. His fame in the AI field remains a mystery to me.