so fake oh visionaries me so the sheriff knocks and. intelligence may be just around the corner raising fears that we could one day end up being the pads of our super smart robots. what can we do to avoid it while i ask problems hall london inventor hacker and technology feature east. bob haldeman welcome to the show it's great to have you in our program so. i'll just start off with something that you've said many times that robots are coming for our jobs so will this happen in my lifetime should i be afraid at some you know so if perfecting thing would be sitting where i'm sitting right now and doing my

job better than i'm doing oh you might not get so lucky but you know a lot of jobs that robots are going to really take i mean that's pretty clear but it's also been happening for your whole lifetime already so it's not really new it's just the robots are getting better at doing things that they weren't able to do before we've been experiencing up for a century. so the core of the question is is there going to be a time in the near future i'm saying 10 maybe 20 years we're. everything that we do pretty much will be done better by the robots and we will be jobless. no i don't think we're anywhere close to that because there's you know different kinds of things the humans are good for different kinds of things that robots are good for and right now. you know for our lives we've been a good at making robots do you know sort of very clear clearly structured

logical progression like you can have a robot do the same thing over and over and over again what they weren't good at is doing things where you know the logical progression was super complicated or difficult to define and so now that we have machine learning we're able to have them do those kinds of things but there are so many other things the robots aren't going to do they're still not creative at all yet they're still not good at talking about creative taking care of humans talk about creating a lot of theater wrists and scientists that i spoke through like yourself are saying that robots won't ever be able to interface humans created jobs because they work requires unpredictable thinking inventing for mindsets one of the i.a.e.a. be able to eventually produce creative stuff as well artificial intelligence can already write poetry it's. sure and so what what i think is important understand is

that you know it would be a poor idea to say that they'll never be able to do anything in particular right we don't know what they'll eventually be able to do but what we can see is that there's things that they could do now it's easy to extrapolate that they could do these kinds of things faster and better and cheaper but what is irresponsible i think is to make these logical leaps that we're most certainly going to get these miraculous breakthroughs and we need miraculous breakthroughs for robots to actually be creative and for them to do things i mean a lot of the things that like writing poetry that you think of as creative they're not inherently creative writing poetry is a craft and a robot can learn and do a craft and that's what we see them doing but the creativity you know figuring out how to do something new the 1st time when you have a system that runs on data and random numbers then you know that's giving you a different thing that sometimes might seem creative might seem like it's just as

good but it's a different process and so i don't think that it's reasonable to say that they're the same or that this one is better or going to replace humans and i think to get there we need a real breakthroughs we need to invent something that might take a 1000 years ok so ok let's say that instead of creative we say craft and then that also means that it's not only mcdonald's jobs being taken over by robots that we are talking about artificial testers could be couldn't be doing the job of a lawyer or an accountant of a diagnosis doctor and what they are will have to care hate. us for a life is this conflict inevitable. well i mean. you know maybe they compete in the same way that you know. buggy whip drivers had to find something else to do because we have cars now right but in the sense that you

know robots are taking over the job of a lawyer it's probably because what the lawyer is doing is repetitive and monotonous and boring and low value and we're actually going to be better off having a machine do it because the machine is doing a better job of it and maybe it's true that we have too many lawyers it's entirely possible humans haven't always had this many lawyers no offense to the lawyers but you know if you if you've got a kid getting into college right now it might be good to advise them not to become a lawyer most of the lawyers we have probably are going to get to finish out their career because it takes a while to deploy these technologies but i don't i think the progression has to be looked at on longer time horizons and if you look on you know a horizon of more than a decade going back or going forward you can see that you know we you know these jobs were obsoleted by machines a long time ago a lot of them and we've replaced them with new jobs and that's. and that's what we

want to do is who want to free up humans to do with their uniquely good and we've just gotten in the last 5 or 10 years because the machine learning we got to a point where we can really free up a lot of humans that we didn't have a way of freeing up before that. they cannot harm thing better to do than yeah part of our brains up humans apart from freeing up humans maybe the extra wealth created by the artificial intelligence and machines will be used to just you know pay people money like universal basic income so that they can just file enjoy live and not be forced to work you know it's possible it turns out i mean i don't think that . i mean in life experience in a way not working turns out to be a pretty poor choice for a lot of humans you know doesn't make them happy they don't get a lot of fulfillment out of that and so it's not that we want to put humans out of work when i say magine freeing up humans i certainly hope they don't all go to the beach what i'm hoping is that they'll work on the things that the robots can't do

yet we're choosing to have humans do these things you describe diagnostics and reading legal documents and these kinds of things when what we really would probably rather have them do is teach kids or become nurses and take care of people who can't take care of themselves you know those are things that we're we're choosing these are not problems with the technology the problems with humans choosing what to do with the technology and right now i feel like you know we're choosing a lot of the wrong things and so if you get that opportunity because a robot is doing the work for you you get some free time you get your attention back you get that freedom well let's spend some of it washing netflix but then let's spend some of it taking care of other humans and that's what the potential here really is then there is this other thing right with technology yes it has already enabled our economy to grow like crazy for the past couple of decades yet the winners are fewer and fewer and most of the people aren't really getting any

richer i mean the gap is growing as we speak and while the knowledge will supposedly improve life the rich will keep getting richer and the poor will keep becoming poorer. well the poor keep getting richer too. you know i think that there is some misunderstandings about how this works right like when you calculate like say the poverty level you know the poverty level in the united states is about 31 times higher than the median poverty level for the world that means a poor person in the us has 31 times the wealth of a poor person on average in the in the world you know that's pretty significant every day hundreds of thousands of people are coming out of extreme poverty that's extraordinary progress now we're not done we have a lot of work to do but humanity as a whole is on a rampage doing better and better and better all the time now those gaps for

individuals when you feel them it can be hard when you feel them you know i mean even i mean i'm doing pretty well but i work with people who are a lot richer than oliver be right and what you have to understand is that you know those those gaps are about how you feel you're actually still doing better than you were in your ancestors were and i think that you know there may be measures we could do to reduce those gaps and especially in vironment where you have. an economy where people aren't getting a fair chance to participate there's really a lot of work there for humans to do to change the way their societies work to change the way civilisations work so that everybody gets a fair chance to contribute a fair chance to benefit and that you know that sort of equally distributed but those aren't technology problems those are actually problems with human decision

making right those are problems with policy making those are problems with how we choose to set up and structure business and economies and those things and so we have to go figure out how to improve on them. the wealth. in the united states is made i know less about other countries so in the united states we're no more you know we do have a lot of people who are super wealthy because of technology or working in the tech industry i should say and if you look at what they're doing with their wealth you know most of them if you you know once you have more money than you know what to do with a lot of it gets reinvested in companies that all to try and grow a lot of it becomes philanthropic wealth you know i spent some time working on projects for bill gates and those are philanthropic in nature right we're taking the money that bill earned and trying to use it to solve global health problems so

i think those kinds of things those sound worse than they really are a lot of times and maybe it's not reasonable that someone should be able to get so wealthy but i wouldn't say that's the problem of technology or the tech industry or the problem that comes from how we've set up incentives in our economy ok publicly that i took a break right now and when we're back we'll continue talking to a populous hallman an inventor a hacker technology discussing how innovations can change our lives stay with us.

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live. lists lists lists lists. list. playing. and very well might continue watching on since last. taxes are not going to do it you have to go right to the root of things it's assets and that's the balance sheet balance sheets is what they should talk about and that's where we can be clever because taxation is the dumb one of trying to get the wealth back from the from the wealthy.

over the course of your. program the over. the it was only worth. it we're back with pablo's hall london inventor hacker and technology futurist published welcome back so compared to tech advances of the past this time around it is you know super fast this isn't a steam engine or the automobile that that happened in like one or 2 generations to

life lifespans right while our society even be able to adapt to the change just ask quickly as it happens because right now it's twice if not more for it's faster than we are developing in terms of generations. you know. i think we're. it's easier to adopt over a generation so if you just look at the way your kids handle technology. they're pretty good at it they internalize it really fast they get something new and in today's it's normal to them. you know so in some sense i think a lot of these technologies in one generation it's enough for people to accommodate them. what do you think do you think we right now are ready to be dealing with a computer that surpasses human mind well we've had computers that surpass the human mind for our whole lives like

a calculator has always been better at math than you and me. that's what we're talking about yeah but not here is area better if you are memorizing the phone number little things that you know not every human you know can be quick and calculating right if you're like a mathematician or or you're in that filled like you're good at it in that situation yeah but but then here we're talking about all encompassing human mind right we're not just talking about one or 2 or 3 fields that are technical. well i don't think i don't i think it's not true that we're close to creating computers that perform the all encompassing human mind if we really don't know how brains work but one thing we do know is that they don't work the way computers do and so you know trying to extrapolate that computer is get faster every year on an exponential curve and at this point they'll be smarter than humans it's kind of

like saying cars get faster every year and at this point you'll be able to drive to australia it's just not how they work that's not how brains work and so even though the computers do get better and they can do more and more and more stuff not on a course that replaces brains in my mind i don't see that happening and i think it's kind of disingenuous to frame it that way it's making people terrified and there's no reason for that these are just you know better and better tools that we can use our brains to put to use however we want now stephen hawking sad that artificial intelligence is very good at accomplishing its goals and if its goals aren't aligned with our assumption that we're in trouble how do we make sure that artificial intelligence we create sticks to human values and if we try to humanize it one that limit its cognitive superpowers. i mean i think it's like every other tool you have to do you have to. you have to express your values and

how it gets used right and so when artificial intelligence is doing the wrong thing it's because we didn't tell it what we cared about and what we wanted it to do you know these are. still tools you know a hammer the same hammer can use to smash someone's head is the same hammer i can use to build them a home but that's a human choosing what to do with that that's me expressing my values with a tool and that's what we need to do with artificial intelligence as well and i think those warnings you know. don't appreciate them so much because i think it's getting people more scared than they need to be but. but fundamentally the true the truth is we need to express to these tools when we build them what we want them to care about yes there is there are 2 camps one camp is as a camp that talks like you and then there is out there camp because you're always saying you are saying that being afraid of artists out of jail intelligence is like

being afraid of the steam engine back a days or a tractor or something. and it's true that generally people are suspicious of technology but hey there are with i a. voices i would say smart man like ill in moscow or stephen hawking oriel bill gates and they're saying that you know we need pretty alert and there's a reason to be afraid of new technologies alas we start to somehow you know lead them into the right path. those are all really smart guys have a massive amount of respect for all of them none of them work in artificial intelligence you might want to take note of that all of them read super intelligence which is a terrifying dystopian book about how computers are going to get smarter than humans and make us all obsolete i don't believe that we have some agency in this we can choose how to use these tools to build a better future instead of

a worse one and that's just one version of the story right there's just one story about how the whole world could go terribly wrong in the future. ok so let's talk about you and your vision and your inventions you invent solutions to global issues and you come up with some amazingly ambitious projects like hurricane suppression by cooling off the surface of the ocean or you know have the ring a giant to helen balloon 14 miles about the earth which will pump out chemicals into the stratosphere and help hold back global warming but considering that ideas like this are way too expensive are they basically not more than just a big shift imaging nation i mean an exercise in dairy. actually. yes so both of those inventions are things that i worked on at the intellectual ventures lab and what we tried to do was those are called geo engineering

inventions and there are ways to a 1000000 or 8 some of the facts of global warming so they're like band-aids for the environment both of them we explicitly worked on because they were a way to show that we could do cost effective geo engineering projects so the hurricane sink is just a giant tube made out a recycled truck tires that you stick in the ocean that's all there is to it but it causes the water to get pumped down and mixed up with the cold water below and that gets your cat 5 hurricanes down to care for 3 category 3 and so the cost of it is orders of magnitude less than the cost of the damage from hurricane right so these are these are technologies that we could do they're very simple they could buy a some time they're not solutions they don't solve the problems with global warming what they do is they buy a some time to transition off of carbon emitting fuels and to transition to better

technology for energy but that's all they're good for and what we do is try to show that they're possible and it's going to take humans 10 or 20 years to figure out if that's the best idea we have. so the internet mode of live the life that we actually leave in today's world is that we give up our privacy completely for the sake of using a free product like g. mail or instagram and founder and leader of the free software movement richard stallman told me once that we have to sacrifice our confort and convenience a little bit for the sake of our freedom and privacy but if i have to give up free internet products that inconvenience in itself is under freedom to me so will it ever be possible for us to enjoy progress with privacy without having to bring our daily concerts to the altar. yeah and that's exactly one of the challenges

right now is that we need to take control of these things ourselves and do them ourselves so it turns out you know. in the ninety's we had online services like a.o.l. which were america online in the u.s. we use this service for email and things as centralized service kind of like facebook. where they controlled who could publish who could. transact who you could talk to all those kinds of things and what happened is the internet which is a decentralized protocol t.c.p. ip is a decentralized protocol managed to become that more useful vastly more big quiz and it took over and put practically put a.o.l. out of business right and the reason is it's no one can control it we're all free to do what we want. all you got to do is connect to the internet and i can publish i can subscribe i can transact and you can do whatever you want i can't stop you

and that's the beauty of decentralized protocols now because facebook and google gave us a lot of free stuff we ran into a big walled garden so now we're in modelling the again where you know we gave up our privacy we gave up our freedom for all that all those free toys but the truth is there's not a lot of real technology behind most of these things right instagram isn't that hard to build we could build our own decentralized instagram that has no ads and where we control the knobs that decide what we get to see there's no reason we can't build that and choose to use it it's not expensive to do it's just that you know people are too busy hanging out on instagram and not busy building a replacement but the technologies we use are all very democratized right the same software the same tool kits the same servers all the stuff that i use for the projects i work on you know kids in elementary school in latin america and africa are getting access to more. and more and more you know

a lot of stuff and the things that stallman is referring to those are open source technologies they're made to be free and everybody gets access to them and that's what google built their stuff on that's what facebook built their stuff on open source technologies so we can go build alternatives anytime we want and i think that let me have the day off is there is right now sat for you then done for me who has no idea how to build that technology. so yeah that still remains somewhat a problem for someone like me who has no clue how to start doing your own ensure graham or facebook will actually there are there are there are dozens of alternatives right now that already were built they don't have the user base of instagram or facebook but you can go sign up for them and use them for free you don't need to know anything about coding other people built those for you they're not in the news they're not making billions of dollars they're not making anybody rich but they do the same thing with no ads for free and that's available people

could choose to use them people are choosing instagram and i think that's the thing you know we need to understand there's personal responsibility here it's not that instagram is being pushed on your facebook is being pushed on you you can choose something else there's plenty of alternatives there are just as good and they're free and they don't take your privacy but people are still choosing instagram i see your point was unfortunately that's all the time we have for today it was really interesting talk a little more time to sort of. feel so antagonistic today i mean it's good it makes up for a good interview so it was thanks a lot for for your thoughts and your insight and good luck with everything that you are doing and hopefully we'll talk some time said we're talking to bob let's call him an inventor hacker and here is discussing solutions that technology can operative global problems of today and what should be done. doesn't become

a problem and that's it for this edition of visionaries and i'll see you next time . my neighbor just sucks because he. has to jack see what i don't see to show. up at the border you know if you. let him out we've got to get it out.

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