How artificial intelligence is changing our society
Artificial intelligence is a bit like a human, who is inside something else
It’s not as smart as you — but it could be as smart as you in the future
I believe that we’ll become robots at some point too
Artificial Intelligence is changing our lives But what can it really do?
What will change, and what will remain science fiction?
To answer these questions, we embarked on a journey
to meet the scientists working on our future
Augsburg, in southern Germany:
Home to Kuka, the world's leading manufacturer of industrial robots
Rainer Bischoff is head of research here,
and is considered to be one of the world's leading experts in this field
He and his team are working on a new generation of robots
that learn independently — like children
The task: to recognize and sort building blocks
This robotic system taught itself how to grab -
in other words, there was no human programming the robot
So he tried by himself?
He tried by himself, like a child
When he first started grabbing he wasn’t successful except for in 1-2% of cases
But he observed himself And by observing himself,
the robot identified when an image matched a particular grasping motion,
and when it didn’t
He’s applied what he learned and now grabs these objects over 90% of the time
I didn’t program him and yet he’s still learning the task by himself
Seeing that really motivates you
But what if the robot sees a new object, such as pliers?
Here we have a nice example: every child would just say,
‘ok, grab and move these pliers over, no problem ’ But he's still failing
He’s failing because he doesn’t know what kind of inertial force this object has
to be able to grab it properly
But you can see how he’s already trying out different methods,
and in time he may get the hang of it
I should add that he isn’t trained after every attempt:
he collects around 1000 data, and then the neural net is re-trained
It’s possible that if we let him try 1000x, he would at least be able to grab reliably
Intelligent robots that learn by themselves
They can recognize parts, assemble them,
and they can independently adapt to their environment with the help of AI
But we’re only in the early development stages
I have a favorite example and that’s chess
These days, there are computers or AI that can beat chess champions
But we don't have a robot that can reach into a bookcase, take out a chess set,
open the box, take out the pieces one by one, set them up and start playing
A 6-year-old can do that — but no existing robot can
So for the moment, whenever I need physical intelligence, we’re still doomed to fail
And I think that will be the case for a few more years
Yet machines are getting better and more intelligent
This video was produced using special effects
but this robot has learned how to play table tennis
He was built by researchers in Tübingen
and shows how much is already possible in the real world
How long will it take before robots are better than us in some areas?
Robots already are better than us in many areas
Particularly those requiring non-variant repetition, a great deal of force,
or a high degree of precision
The tasks current robots are not as good at as we are, are those involving sensors
There’s no point denying that, and I think it will be another 10 or 20 years
before we have robots that can hold a candle to humans in some areas
We humans use all of our senses and can do more than smart robots
But the robots are beginning to learn
Artificial intelligence also plays an important role in a story that began
in January 1982, in Mount Washington, New Hampshire
Hugh Herr was 17-years old at the time
Together with his friend Jeff Batzer, Hugh went up a mountain
But they were caught off guard by a change in weather A blizzard raged for 3 days
The missing boys were only found after 4 days Alive, but both had severe frostbite
The doctors decided to amputate Hugh's legs just below the knee
32 years later, Hugh Herr has AI legs, which he developed himself
He spoke on turning disability into opportunity at the TED Conference 2014
Dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis lost a leg in 2013,
in the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon
Thanks to the smart prosthesis by Hugh Herr, she can dance again
Boston, home to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
We met with Hugh Herr to talk about artificial intelligence and the human body
He’s the pioneer in the field of intelligent prosthetics
A single person who is both developer, and user
There are dozens of prototypes in his lab
There’s a motor This is a synthetic subtalar joint for inversion/eversion
So we’ve iterated, and spent millions of dollars
to arrive at this optimal architecture
Hugh began developing prostheses after his lower limbs had been amputated
His replacement legs became increasingly complex
Now they are AI limbs, with countless sensors, motors and computers
I quickly realized that I had an opportunity
That from my knees down, there was a blank slate
And I could create anything in that space that I could conceive and imagine
So as a young man I started to imagine what that blank space may look like,
what may fill that space
Disability depends on perspective Hugh Herr has developed a novel answer:
With the special prostheses that he developed himself,
he can once again pursue his greatest passion: climbing
So there’s a computer in here?
There’s three, actually
Three?!
They’re each the size of your thumbnail So very small microprocessors
And there’s a muscle-tendon-like motor-system
So the computer runs algorithms and receives sensory information
The device is measuring position, speed, accelerations, temperature and what not
All that information goes into the computer The computer runs its algorithms
and then decides on the action of the muscle-tendon-like motor-system
This all happens very fast So as I am walking, going up and down hills and steps,
it’s constantly responding to my biomechanical needs
It is so good that even nowadays you do mountain climbing — you go climbing
Absolutely, and I run You cannot with a straight face say that I am disabled
I trail run, I play tennis, I mountain climb, whatever I want to do physically
Now if you remove the technology from my body, I'm severely disabled, I'm crippled
But with the technology, in this sophisticated human-machine interaction,
I am freed from the shackles of disability
Are intelligent prostheses only the beginning?
Will technology increasingly merge with the human body?
Intelligent humanoids have already been depicted in films such as ‘Ex Machina’
You shouldn’t trust Nathan You shouldn’t trust anything he says
We’re closing the loop between the synthetic robotic limb
and the human brain, the human nervous system And what that means is,
the person can think, send descending commands down through the nerves,
we measure these commands, and they control synthetic motors on the bionic limb
And then we’re also closing the loop so that sensors in the bionic limb
will put information into the nervous system
So the person can feel the bionic limb moving:
its position, its sensations - as if it were part of the body
This is almost philosophical, because you have the body, and the machine
And you, sort of, start merging them together
Yeah, we’re gaining evidence that when a human being can feel a synthetic body part,
when they can touch it and it feels like normal touch,
when they move it and it feels like normal joint movement —
that the synthetic object becomes part of their body, of their identity, their self
What’s cool about having significant parts of your body be designable and synthetic,
is you can upgrade
So given that I’m an MIT professor, I’m upgraded every week, software and hardware
That’s interesting I grow older: no upgrade And you can get new
Right The synthetic part of my body is improving in time
My biological body is degenerating, which is very peculiar
For Hugh Herr artificial intelligence is a blessing
By the time our interview was over, a snowstorm was raging in Boston
An interesting coincidence — as this was also how Hugh’s transition began
Thanks to AI, body and machine are slowly merging
Artificial intelligence also increasingly determines our communication
It’s there, behind every search, hidden from view
In social networks, intelligent algorithms control what we see,
and thus influence what we read, and what we don't
But there’s a problem: Fake News
Capturing and re-selling our attention and our digital data has become ‘big business ’
Information technology firms are among the most valuable companies in the world
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have changed the media worldwide
But exactly what role do their intelligent algorithms play in the spread of fake news?
In 2018, a team of scientists from Boston analyzed the spread of fake news
The study was led by Professor Sinan Aral
It was the largest worldwide study that had ever been conducted
on the spread of fake news on social networks
While information is abundant, attention is scarce
So there’s way more information than we can process
And so these platforms help us by curating this information, and, as you said,
prioritizing what comes 1st in our newsfeed, what comes 2nd, what comes 3rd
And they have a machine, an algorithm based on machine learning
that is deciding what gets shown 1st, 2nd, 3rd; or in fact, what gets shown at all
Some things are not shown Not every piece of information is shown to everyone
But which criteria do Facebook and Twitter use to program their algorithms?
The incentives for writing those algorithms are based on the platforms' incentives,
the companies that they work for
Those companies are based on an economic model of engagement
The more people are engaged, the more opportunities you have to show ads,
and so you have more inventory for advertisements
But the second important reason is that the more people are engaged,
the more you learn about who they are, and what they like, and the more sophisticated
the targeting is in terms of advertising
Engagement is key for economic successes of social media industrial complex
And daily Internet usage is increasing worldwide: In 2018 in Germany,
the overall average was over 3h/day, for younger people it was just under 6h/day
Things that are exciting, novel, surprising, that are potentially shocking
are more likely to be engaging, clicked on, read, viewed, shared liked And therefore,
elements of the models that determine the newsfeed favor engagement
The following case from Japan shows what fake news in social networks can lead to
Videos of women who allegedly became ill from cervical cancer vaccine were posted
At the same time, unverified ‘scientific’ studies were circulated on social networks
Both videos and studies were picked up by television,
In Japan, the vaccination rate against cervical cancer fell from 70% to under 1%
How could it be that false information could turn an industrialized country
against a globally recognized vaccination?
Hamburg — where we meet Riko Muranaka
The doctor had tried to counteract the anti-vaccine hysteria,
and inform the public online But then she was targeted
I was personally attacked in the Twitter or social media
when I started writing about the safety of the vaccines
They tried to threaten me by sending those blackmail messages to my family or me
Riko continued undeterred She analyzed the vaccination opponents’ facts,
checked the scientific validity of their experiments, and published her results
Afterwards, I was just stormed by the criticism
One day I just decided to shut my Twitter account for a while
But when I got the John Maddox Prize, it became a Twitter trend in Japan
But even that didn’t change public opinion in Japan
Despite the most respected scientists sharing Riko’s view,
she eventually lost the battle to fake news
They accused me because my writing is wrong,
and my writing is giving wrong impact to the society, and I am hiding the truth
But it’s the contrary: I'm telling the truth, people feel I'm hiding the truth
It’s really interesting, isn’t it?
The WHO sees the anti-vaccine movement as a global health threat
In Japan, around 3000 women will probably die every year from cervical cancer,
because they chose not to get vaccinated Fake news can be fatal
The false information is moving through human society digitally like lightning,
while the truth is like molasses, dripping very slowly from person, to person
The spread of false information, shown in orange, and correct information, in blue
Sinan Aral has studied these patterns on Twitter more closely than anyone
False news travelled further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth
in every category of information that we studied
Sometimes by an order of magnitude difference
And this was particularly true of false political news
Which was the most viral category of any type of news that we studied
Fake news!
We are fighting the fake news
As you say: fake news
Fake news has changed the political climate - worldwide
Social networks with intelligent algorithms are increasing division in society
They vie for our attention, feeding us exactly the information we like
What counts are click rates, quotas and length of stay -
and not whether content is true or trustworthy
This personalized communication is dividing our society
Social networks assign each user a profile, based on what they click, read and watch
Those belonging to the red group here are mainly supplied
with information that matches the red profile
Thus a filter bubble is gradually formed
Everyone lives within their own network
Our opinion is echoed by like-minded people
Contradictory information and opinions hardly enter our bubbles
Media should be a mirror of society
But AI algorithms distort the opinions we form based off our media consumption
Yet media are too important to be left to people out to make money
How will artificial intelligence change conflicts?
What about intelligent autonomous weapons?
The military is already testing prototypes, like here in California:
two fighter jets launch a swarm of intelligent drones
The autonomous flying objects then identify their own targets
Should machines be allowed to take life-or-death decisions?
We travelled to meet one of the top ethicists on autonomous weapons in the US
He warns of uncontrollable development and is committed to a worldwide ban
on autonomous weapons
We visited Yale professor Wendell Gelding in his house north of New York
Sometimes people do not fully understand what lethal autonomous weapon systems are
They tend to think of drones that might have facial recognition software,
and would pick up a terrorist at a distance,
or perhaps a few robotic soldiers on the battlefield
What is sometimes not fully appreciated: lethal autonomy is not a weapon system
It is feature sets that can be added to any weapons system
And that includes atomic weapons or high powered munitions
And the feature sets would be the ability to pick a target and destroy that target
with little or no active human intervention
Intelligent image recognition, automatic target recognition -
these AI techniques are already available
And global armament race has begun
That machines do not make life and death decisions about humans,
humans make life and death decisions about humans
And when we open this door to machines making those decisions,
we undermine the basic principle of a responsible human agent
Lethal autonomous weapons and self-driving cars are just the tip of the iceberg,
with something much larger below the surface
And that larger thing is autonomy in general, autonomous systems in general
Autonomous systems threaten to undermine the foundational principle of agency
And that agent can be a human or a corporation
But that there is an agent who is responsible,
and potentially culpable or liable for any actions that are taken
I cannot imagine of anything more stupid than humanity going down a route
where we have diluted the principle of responsibility
Where we dilute it in such a way that nobody can be held responsible anymore
if something truly dire takes place
In the past, we have been too slow to recognize we were going down a wrong path
We need a worldwide ban on autonomous, intelligent weapons!
Artificial intelligence will revolutionize industry
In Germany, the term Industry 4 0 has become a buzzword
Cars, robotic tools and entire production plants
are being linked via sensors and equipped with AI
But how will German companies fare in worldwide competition?
Dr Michael Bolle heads the Bosch Research Center, in Renningen, Baden-Wurttemberg
Artificial intelligence is one of the main focus points here
When it comes to industrial AI, the AI that plays a role in products,
then I think that the technology companies that have decades of experience
in the physical world, in real-life objects,
and the corresponding experience in development and production,
have a competitive advantage when adding in machine learning and AI
They have an advantage over companies that come purely from the virtual world
So I’m confident And this is the reason why we're investing so much in this area
And why we're rolling out and applying this expertise across the group
Germany has faith in its decades-long technical expertise together with AI
One player who is fighting to get ahead is China
Changing of the guard at the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing
Soldiers, flags, Mao
This was the old image of the country; but modern-day China has awakened
Digitalization and AI promise a brave new world
An entire nation seems intoxicated by its own progress
Where does this palpable euphoria about the future stem from?
I meet Hong Yang She is Chinese and has worked for a German company for years
I ask her what is different in China
Culturally speaking we are different In the traditional thinking
we are more open to the latest technology and open to the world
Probably you can see from how much we using the smartphone:
like just now, we buy the coffee, and pay the taxi bill with the smartphone
Sometimes my German colleagues are astonished to say that:
you don’t even have to bring cash with you
And I said, yeah, that’s normal life
I always forget my wallet when I’m in Germany, because here in China,
I pay for everything with my smartphone If you go to the market
and there’s an 80-year-old woman selling produce, you might think:
“I guess I’ll pay with cash ” But you can’t anymore
You’ll be buying an apple, and she’ll take out a QR code, scan it,
and then you pay for it with your smartphone
It’s unbelievable There’s nothing like that in Germany It’s crazy
For example, if I have dinner with my friends,
and we all first have to hand out our phones, and we put phones on the table
And then, if somebody is picking up the phone —
by calls, or text message or WeChat, he has to pay for the bill That’s the punishment
So we can feel the advantages of the technology, but when you get used to it,
You start to reflect: what kind of impact to my life, what’s good, and what’s bad
And then in terms of the bad part, I mean everyone will start to think about
‘How I can get rid of the bad part’, but still trying to keep the good part
Young China is catching up, and the whole nation is hungry for progress
What’s so special about China?
The speed Just think about where China was 40 years ago
Now, things are going full-throttle
China has even surpassed the US when it comes to filing AI patents
One example is the mobile transportation service DIDI
Active in 400 Chinese cities, the platform organizes some 30 million trips a day
Each Didi vehicle is equipped with a data logger, which registers whether the car is
stationary or moving, or whether there’s a traffic jam
The data is also used to improve information on traffic flow in big cities
We call this Real-Time Traffic Information, or RTTI
The Didi data go directly into the RTTI, which gives you a much more reliable view
of whether roads are congested or not than in German cities
Connecting everything with everything else, and generating added value from that —
the Chinese are really, really good at that
China is a much younger nation, there’s energy and enthusiasm about what's to come
There are a lot of investments There are great education institutions here,
Tsinghua University in Beijing and Tongji University in Shanghai are top level
There are really many capable people The talent pool here is huge
So I think there’s a good chance that China will be leading
It’s predicted that in 2030, 37% of all scientists will be Chinese
By comparison, 1 4% will be from Germany
And while Germany is currently facing a lack of science teachers at schools,
a young generation of innovators is growing up in China
They have top-level education, fresh ideas, and they’re hungry for success
For example the DJI company from Shenzen It was founded in 2006 by a young engineer
Today, it’s the world's largest manufacturer of civilian drones
Chief Development Officer Martin Brandenburg shows us the latest the model
The new drone uses intelligent image recognition
and can independently pursue its target
Equipped with dozens of sensors and smart positioning, it can detect obstacles,
such as trees or bushes
The tree saved my live!
The tree was the limit, because the drone says no
In this case, the drone said ‘I can't fly through it safely, so I'd better stop ’
As I understand it, it’s very common here in China to combine things:
facial recognition, navigating, flying
Yes, and in this case only visuals were used
You don’t have a Bluetooth transmitter or anything else on you
The pilot simply says:
‘I want to follow Ranga’ on the display, confirms and then the drone follows you
Innovation ‘Made in China’ Chinese television proudly reports such successes
China no longer copies — modern-day China invents
DJI is truly the first global brand with a completely new product range from China
Before, China was primarily known as the world’s factory
That's changing now, and perception is also changing
Our company alone employs almost 3000 engineers Really smart people:
They’re all enthusiastic; they're motivated and want to create something new
And that’s the spirit that prevails in this country That’s going to persist
A hunger for innovation is what defines modern China
And China's economy is booming Cities such as Shenzen, Chengdu or Guanchu
have the same economic output as entire European countries
The country is investing in its young people Take the example of Robomaster
Here, a team is preparing for the upcoming season
Each team has to program and optimize a gaming robot
The final is a nationwide event
Troy Qin supervises the competition and shows us the parkour
This one is this year’s- the new- the latest one And also we have a-
It doesn’t shoot right now?
It doesn’t shoot right now
As we can see, there is the panel right here
The reference system is for sensing the bullet When you strike it, it flashes
That means you hit the panel and it decreases the health
If one robot loses all of its points it will shut down
It may look like a game, but it’s actually a program to support young engineers
It was launched by DJI and now several other companies are also involved
The next generation of engineers needs to be good at designing and programming —
and that’s exactly what they are learning here in a playful context
The background is serious engineering or more a game?
It’s serious engineering Because you need to be able to build a whole and new robot
Putting them together is just the first step
Then you need to do the coding, and do some artificial recognitions
It’s quite a massive work and it’s not that simple for students
How many universities are ?
There’s 32 universities in the final tournament
But for this year we have 170 universities from all over the world
that have registered for the competition
And how many are Chinese?
About 140
And how good are they?
We shall see
OK - maybe can get hands on the robots and experience how it works
OK - we have two robots, so we’ll try and have a look at it
Troy needs just a few key combinations to control the robot
here W for forward and S for backward
I'm an old guy you know
And now you see me
And now you fire at me? No, I fire at you?
You can fire me But we are teammates, right? We don’t fire at teammates!
The final is a major event 20,000 people are in the audience
Another 30 million watch the contest online
Engineers and programmers are China's new pop stars
They really care about this game
If a team from their school wins the glory from the game, that means a lot to them
The students invested thousands of hours into developing their robots
The winner of the 2018 competition was from Southern China University of Technology
All of China celebrated their success
There are also excellent initiatives in Germany:
One example is the so-called Ideen-Expo in Hannover
Around 300,000 students come here in a single week, Europe's largest classroom
Young people are introduced to new tech, learn how to program,
and design new circuits — and they seem to love it
But in contrast to China, German media hardly take note
Germany talks too little about its successes
We, too, can keep up with the global AI race - if we want to -
but we really have to step on the gas!
Children are now growing up with smartphones, internet and intelligent toys
But what does that do to children? We met scientist Stefania Druga to discuss
Following research in Boston, she is currently working in Berlin
The generation after the internet generation is the AI generation
They are growing up surrounded by AI
like Alexa, for example:
This device was not designed for children
This device was designed for households, so families make purchases via this device
I think that it’s very important to recognize when we talk about kids,
and about regulating smart toys or devices that record data about our kids,
to understand who made this device and what was the ultimate goal of this device
Just imagine you that in some years You might also have children
Would you install Alexa in your home?
It depends on what Alexa, the platform, would look like then; where I would live
Right now?
Right now? No!
Alexa, how many seconds are there in a year?
A calendar year has 31,536,000 seconds and a leap year has 31,622,400 seconds
That's not what I wanted to know
Unlike Alexa, the small robot COSMO was developed for children
Trust and intelligence are related, because if I think that a device is smart,
I tend to trust it more
So the younger children were not sure how smart the devices were
The older children thought they were smart because they have a lot of data
So basically the children who are 3 and a half, 4-6,
were more skeptical initially of these devices
But as soon as kids would go to school they were more trusting
just because they saw how much information these devices have
Curiosity, creativity, imagination:
Children are open-minded, and enjoy trying things out
Some devices react as if they were artificial living beings
After the children learned how to program it and train it,
both the young and the old children became more skeptical and trusted the device less
They understood it knows how to answer this type of question, not this type
Do you trust machines? Are they smart? What can you do that they can't?
Stefania calls for increased understanding of artificial intelligence
The goal of my research is to bring this AI literacy both to kids and parents,
they're there in the home, parents are also part of the conversation, asking questions
I think it is important for families to understand how AI works,
in order to make good use of this technology
Some things promote our own creativity, others seem to be superfluous
And: there is another important difference between humans and machines:
A friend can sleep over at your house and tell you stories She talks to you
If you play with a robot, it can only do certain things
Cosmo can only play with dice
Alexa can only answer questions or sing a song And that ball can only roll
Julia can do all those things
You just have to get a lot of single things from one robot, or get other robots
First this one, then that other, then the next
And with a person you don't have to get a new one
You always have them there and they can do everything
Marie and Julia hit the nail on the head:
The robot cannot replace a best friend, no matter how smart it is
A machine cannot substitute a human being
Here our journey through the world of artificial intelligence draws to a close
There will be major changes! But: It is not the machines, but we humans who cause them
We have not only the freedom, but also the responsibility to shape our own future