The new generation of computers is programming itself | Sebastian Thrun and Chris Anderson
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 November 2017
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Summary
Educator and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun wants us to use AI to free humanity of repetitive work and unleash our creativity. In an inspiring, informative conversation with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Thrun discusses the progress of deep learning, why we shouldn't fear runaway AI and how society will be better off if dull, tedious work is done with the help of machines. "Only one percent of interesting things have been invented yet," Thrun says. "I believe all of us are insanely creative ... [AI] will empower us to turn creativity into action."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This interview features entrepreneur and engineer Sebastian Throon and TED curator Chris Anderson, recorded live at TED 2017. |
| 0:11.5 | Help us understand what machine learning is, because that seems to be the key driver of so much of the excitement and also the concern around artificial intelligence. |
| 0:22.2 | How does machine learning work? |
| 0:28.0 | So artificial intelligence and machine learning is about 60 years old and has not had a great day in its past until recently. |
| 0:33.1 | And the reason is that today we have reached a scale of computing and data sets |
| 0:39.4 | that was necessary to make machines smart. |
| 0:42.7 | So here's how it works. |
| 0:44.3 | If you program a computer today, say your phone, |
| 0:47.9 | then you hire software engineers that write a very, very long kitchen recipe. |
| 0:57.0 | Like if the water is too hot, turn out the temperature. |
| 1:02.9 | If it's to cold, turn up the temperature. The recipes are not just 10 lines long. There are millions of lines long. And modern cell phone has 12 million lines of code. A browser has |
| 1:09.8 | five million lines of code. And each |
| 1:12.7 | bug in this recipe can cause your computer to crash. That's why a software engineer makes so much |
| 1:18.5 | money. The new thing now is that computers can find their own rules. So instead of an expert |
| 1:25.7 | deciphering step by step, a rule for every contingency, |
| 1:30.3 | what you do now is you give the computer examples and have it infer its own rules. A really good |
| 1:35.4 | example is AlphaGo, which recently was won by Google. Normally in game playing, you would really |
| 1:41.8 | write on all the rules. But in AlphaGo's case, the system looked about a million games |
| 1:46.5 | and was able to infer its own rules |
| 1:48.7 | and then beat the world's residing Go champion. |
| 1:52.5 | That is exciting because it relieves the software engineer |
| 1:55.9 | of the need of being super smart |
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