(mysterious music)
- [Kal] I'm here on Wall Street where it all started.
On May 6th, 2010 at 2:45 PM,
one guy sitting in his parent's house way over in London
unleashed an algorithm
back here on the New York Stock Exchange
with a billion-dollar sell order.
The plan was to spoof the market
and cancel the order before it was completed.
But before that could happen,
the rest of the world's automated stock trading bots
also started selling,
setting off a chain reaction
that cratered the market.
- The Dow Jones Industrial dropped a thousand points
in just 15 minutes.
- [Kal] That's nearly as big as the drop
that kicked off the Great Depression.
- [Male] What the heck is going on down here?
I don't know, there is fear in this market.
- Cancel the cruise, switch your kids to public school.
It's a flash crash, people. Well, fuck.
36 minutes later, the market rebounded,
but the flash crash of 2010 marked the first time
humans got a visceral, first-hand, anus-puckering glimpse
of how AI was going to take over our financial system.
And you should see where it is now.
It's why I'm here in India foraging for wild honey,
but more on that later.
To understand how AI found this place or why,
you've got to first understand what AI is.
And if you think you already know, I bet you're wrong.
Whether you like it or not, you're all connected by money.
I'm Kal Penn, exploring this giant beast
that is the global economy.
(tense music)
So what is AI exactly?
I'm in San Francisco to first establish what it's not,
which is pretty much everything science fiction told you,
especially giant freaking robots.
(rock music)
Whoa!
Oh, my God.
I'm here with Julia Bossmann,
who serves on the World Economic Forum's
Artificial Intelligence Council,
advising world leaders on how to harness AI's potential.
The job comes with perks
even better than watching cars get destroyed,
like selfies with Canada's number-one sex symbol
not named Drake.
Oh, damn!
- So how are you gonna get home after this now?
- I still think it'll drive.
- [Kal] We're meeting at a company called Mega Bots
which built giant robots to fight other robots.
Sort of like an even nerdier Medieval Times.
According to Julia,
these robots are not just to fund theme park attachments.
They are technological dinosaurs
because of one important distinction.
- [Julia] In these robots, we are the brains,
but AI is the artificial brains.
- [Kal] Interesting, can you expand on that?
- We are basically making
computers now that can learn things on their own.
And they don't necessarily need to have bodies.
So a lot of the AI that we've built already
lives in giant data centers.
- [Kal] So if you had to explain it
to somebody who was 13 years old,
how would you explain AI?
- I think a very general definition of it
could be that AI is...
making machines do things that we didn't explicitly program them to do.
So in traditional programming you have, you know,
your set of rules and the algorithm and you know if this, then that,
and it's all laid out by the humans that program it.
If you look at the medical literature,
one database contains millions of entries
and no doctor could read all these research papers
to stay up with the current field, but a machine could.
So you can imagine a machine coming up with new ideas
on how to solve problems or
discovering new drugs for curing diseases.
- Wow, okay.
- The field in artificial intelligence
that is having the most excitement right now,
it's called Deep Learning.
- [Kal] What is deep learning?
- Deep learning is
when we have several deep layers
of these neural networks
that are similar to what we have in our brains.
So in our heads, we have all these neurons
that are connected to each other and exchange information,
and in a way, we are simulating this in machines.
We feed it data in a way that is balanced and unbiased, so that it also learns.
For example, image recognition we tell them
these are images of cats, these are images of dogs,
and then they just start churning through
the images and learn by themselves
how to recognize them so we don't have to
program every single bit into that.
- [Kal] Interesting. - And there's machine learning
that is not deep learning.
There are evolutionary algorithms
where we basically use a principle from evolution
and let the machine try out different instances,
and then we see which one works best.
And then the ones that work best
get to go to the next generation.
Just like organisms evolve,
we use that principle where the fittest programs
and the best programs survive.
- Wow, okay.
- So those are evolutionary algorithms? - Mm-hmm.
- And what is the financial interest in exploring AI?
It must have an incredible potential impact on the economy.
- Yes, I think it's going to radically change the economy,
and we're talking about a new industrial revolution here.
- [Kal] Interesting. - It has been called our last invention
because once we have artificial brain that is smarter than us,
it can then invent more things for us.
- Is it called the last invention
'cause it's gonna kill us all?
- Hopefully not.
- Many are afraid artificial intelligence
is going to become too smart and kill us all,
but don't worry.
One of the reasons AI is so smart
is because it's dumb as hell.
Come here, AI.
Imagine you asked AI to find the perfect recipe for a cake
using evolutionary algorithms.
AI wouldn't try to think about the best way to make it,
it would just try it billions of times
with every ingredient in the kitchen
in the dumbest possible ways.
Most of course will be due to failure.
This one for sure. Nice try, idiot.
Failure doesn't hurt AI's feelings.
It doesn't have any.
The great part about evolutionary algorithms
is that by trying all these seemingly stupid methods
it might stumble upon a solution
to a culinary problem no rational human would try to solve,
like making a superior vegan cake.
- I made a cake. - Way to go, AI.
- It's mostly cashews. - Would you have thought to use cashews?
Of course not, that would be stupid
which AI is willing to be so you don't have to.
Will this moron evolve into something so smart
it could dominate the world and kill us all?
Hard to say for sure.
- I'm learning launch codes.
- But in the meantime, have some cake.
(upbeat music)
- [Kal] Even though I'm still worried
that AI is going to cook up more problems than it solves,
experts agree it will boost productivity
in areas like healthcare, transportation and finance,
adding $15.7 trillion to global GDP by 2030.
That's more than the current output
of China and India combined.
So how big of a deal is AI?
- From my perspective,
it's one of the three big deals in human history.
- Human history? - Absolute human history.
- [Kal] I'm here with Andrew McAfee,
one of the world's leading experts
on how new technology transforms economies
and, subsequently, the entirety of human society.
- If you want to graph human history,
what you learn is that for thousands of years,
absolutely nothing happened, we were just flatlining.
It was almost indistinguishable from being dead.
And then, all of a sudden, at one point in time,
that graph of human history,
it doesn't matter what you're looking at,
went from boring horizontal
to crazy vertical, kind of, in the blink of an eye.
And it happened right around 1800,
because of, first of all, steam power
and then, second of all, electricity.
So electricity did some pretty obvious things, right?
It gave us trolleys,
it gave us subways.
Less obvious, it gave us vertical cities
instead of horizontal ones.
- Electricity did? - Absolutely.
- You need elevators. - Oh, elevators, okay.
- You just don't have vertical cities without that.
You can't climb up 80 flights of stairs every day.
So these two industrial revolutions of steam
and then the one-two punch of electricity
and internal combustion,
literally changed human history.
There's no other way to look at it.
And these were all technologies
that let us overcome the limitations of our muscles.
What's going on with AI
is that we are overcoming limitations
of our individual brains, of our mental power.
We have actual tough challenges to work on,
sincerely tough challenges, right?
We should cure cancer,
we should feed more people,
we should stop cooking the planet in the 21st century.
These are just insanely complicated things.
And our brains chip away at that complexity,
and we do it with science,
and we do it with accumulating knowledge,
but the complexity is just overwhelming.
The way I think about AI
is that we actually have a really powerful new colleague
to help us make in-roads into that crazy complexity,
because what these new technologies are so good at
is seeing even really subtle patterns
in overwhelmingly huge amounts of data,
more than you and I can take in.
One of the craziest examples I heard recently
was in finance and the rise of,
they're called robo-advisors,
which is just an algorithm that puts your investment portfolio together.
Up until now,
you had to have a certain level of affluence
to even get in the office of financial planners and advisors.
That's changing really quickly.
With things like robo-advising, people who have less wealth
and less wealth and less wealth,
can get access to super powerful cutting-edge tools
to improve their financial lives.
- That's exciting, especially,
because it seems like we've always had people
who are willing to use this stuff to do harm.
- I'm not saying that there's nothing to worry about.
And what we know from the previous industrial revolutions
is they brought some bad stuff along with them.
We absolutely mechanized warfare
with all of these industrial technologies.
We absolutely polluted the hell out of the environment.
We made really serious mistakes
like large scale child labor
because of the industrial revolution.
So it's not all perfect,
not at all points in time,
and the same thing's gonna happen this time around.
- Damn.
Now McAfee's got me thinking,
what if history repeats itself
and AI reshapes society in all the wrong ways...
like rampant pollution
and tiny city coworkers?
What about the moral and ethical questions
that come up with powerful new technologies?
Walking around London's National Computing Museum,
you see a lot of machines that were created
to advance society like the two-ton Harwell Dekatron,
which was built to make calculations
for Britain's scientific research program in the 1950s.
But in the wrong hands,
there's no telling how a new technology will be used.
Could you watch porn on this computer?
- (laughs) Well, you can turn them on
to see very low resolution porn.
- Okay.
I'm here with programmer Alan Zucconi
who teaches at Goldsmith's College here in London.
He's used tech to help create some revolutionary things
like game controllers for people with impaired mobility.
He says that one of the biggest moral quandaries
in tech history is coming soon
as AI begins to replicate so many human behaviors
it can pass as one of us.
What is this thing?
- Basically it's one of the first computers ever built,
and it was built by Alan Turing and his collaborators.
This machine was one of the first computers
that was able to decode the Enigma code
that was designed by Nazis.
- Whoa.
Alan Turing was the father of modern computer science
and when he wasn't helping the allies win the war
by breaking Nazi codes,
he was philosophizing about something he called
the Turing Test.
- How can we tell apart a human from a machine?
And if we can't tell the difference,
then the machine passes what he called the "imitation game."
The machine is trying to imitate the human behavior.
Now this has been known as the Turing test,
and this was one of the machines
that hypothetically could have been used.
- To take the Turing Test,
a human would input questions into a machine
while an outside observer assessed
whether or not the responses coming back
were from a human or a machine imitating a human.
How old are you?
- [Kal] There we go. - [Alan] Oh!
- It knows how old it is.
I was born in 1912, so I'm 105 years old.
Back in Turing's time,
it was pretty easy to spot the computer
but today, AI is able to study human behavior
and program itself to act like us.
Can you tell the difference between this?
- Normally I begin these remarks
with a joke about data science
but about half the stuff my staff came up with
- was below average. - [Kal] And this?
- Our enemies can make it look
like anyone is saying anything at any point in time.
- [Kal] That second one was actually created by BuzzFeed
along with actor Jordan Peele.
And it got a lot of people concerned
about a new AI form of fake news.
- Moving forward we need to be more vigilant
with what we trust from the internet.
AI studied Peele's facial movements,
then merged them and recreated them on Obama's face,
creating a hybrid known as a deepfake.
- You might have seen
something similar, for example, in Snapchat
there is a filter that allows to swap faces.
The difference is that, that filter does it in a very simple way.
But the technology behind deepfakes
relies on artificial intelligence.
It comes from something called "deep learning."
Artificial neural networks extract facial expression.
It uses that expression to recreate your face.
And this is how we manage to achieve photorealistic results.
- Alan makes internet tutorials
on how to make deep fakes,
and he's a true believer that this technology
should develop freely without restrictions,
even if it could potentially start World War III.
How is the consumer supposed to reasonably know
what's reality and what's not reality?
- As a consumer, when you approach news,
whether it's an article, whether it's a video, whether it's a picture,
everything that you see has been created by someone.
"What is the narrative of what I'm seeing?
What does this video want me to tell?"
- So I can see--
- The danger.
- The danger as well as just the curiosity of it.
Is this actually gonna help people?
Because I would imagine you have talked to people
who look at how to grow the economy
through this type of technology.
What are some of the practical economic impacts of it?
- I think that the first industry that will
take advantage of that is the film industry.
Simply because changing faces,
it's something that we've been trying to do for
decades in movies, and usually we use makeup,
usually we use masks, sometimes we use CGI.
- As an actor and as somebody who worked in politics,
this freaks me out so much.
- I totally also understand-- - And it should.
- [Both] And it should.
- BuzzFeed's deep fake revealed to the general public
just how vulnerable we are.
In a time when the president can open his mouth
and move markets,
a well made deep fake could sink the global economy
faster than the flash crash,
obliterating your IRA
in the time it takes fake Obama to say--
- Stay woke, bitches.
- [Kal] Does any of this sound a little science fictiony,
even a little scary?
If AI grows powerful enough to know how we move,
how we talk, and how we think,
it may become indistinguishable from us.
And if AI has its own consciousness,
AI could also develop strong opinions about us,
and they may not be positive.
- And in the future,
AI could develop a will of its own,
a will that is in conflict with ours.
The rise of powerful AI will be either
the best or the worst thing
ever to happen to humanity.
- I tried to convince people to slow down,
slow down AI, to regulate AI.
This was futile. I tried for years.
- Nobody listened, - This seems like a scene
- in a movie where the robots-- - Nobody listened.
- ...are gonna fucking take over and you're freaking me out.
- How real is the threat
of an AI-led doomsday scenario?
To find out, I need to talk to the guy
who's research got everyone freaked out in the first place.
Okay, so I'm really excited to talk to you because--
Well, I'm excited to talk to you for a number of reasons,
but we have been exploring artificial intelligence,
trying to figure out what it is, where it's headed.
You've influenced people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates,
and that's a pretty amazing sheet of influence.
I'm at Oxford University meeting Dr. Nick Bostrom
and since he's not one to toot his own horn, I will.
♪ Rock and roll ♪
He's one of the foremost minds on machine superintelligence
and its existential risks
and the author of some great beach reads.
I feel lucky to meet him,
because Nick is so busy doing his own deep learning
that he only carves out an hour a month
for answering questions about his research.
A lot of the conversations about AI
are things like are the robots gonna take over
and is that gonna be the end of humanity.
I'm curious if things are not managed properly
is there a scenario in which AI hurts society
or even maybe eliminates humanity as we know it?
- In the longer-term context,
if we're thinking about what really happens
if AI goes all the way,
and becomes able to replicate
the same general intelligence that makes us human,
then, yeah, I do think that in that context
there are bigger risks, including existential risks.
I mean, if you think about
something like self-driving cars
could run over a pedestrian.
There are privacy concerns.
The militarization of these autonomous weapons.
All of these are real concerns.
But at some point there will also be
the question of how we affect
these digital minds that we're building.
They themselves might obtain degrees of moral standing.
And if you roll the tape forward and if you think, what ultimately
is the fate of homo sapiens,
the long-term future could be machine intelligence dominated.
It's quite possible humanity can go extinct.
Those great powers come with a risk
that they will, by accident
or by deliberate misuse,
be used to cause immense destruction.
So I think those are in the cards
and if we're thinking about longer timeframes,
you know, the outcome might be
very, very good or very not good.
- [Kal] Okay, these scenarios do sound scary.
But out of all the potential outcomes,
Nick actually believes
the most likely doomsday scenario with AI
will be economic.
- If you think about it,
technology in general really is
the idea that we can do more with less.
We can achieve more of what we want with less effort.
The goal in that sense is full unemployment, right?
To be able to have machines and technology
do everything that needs to be done so we don't have to work.
And I think that's like the desired end goal.
It's not some horrible thing we need to try to prevent.
It's what we want to realize.
Now, to make that actually be a utopia,
there are a couple of big challenges
along the way that would need to be solved.
One, of course, is the economic problem.
So one reason why people need jobs is they need income.
If you can solve that economic problem,
then I think there is a second big challenge that
for many people it's also
a sense of dignity.
So many people tend to find their worth
being a breadwinner
or contributing to society, giving something back.
Like but if a machine could do everything better than you could do,
then you wouldn't have any chance
to contribute anything, right?
So then you would have to rethink culture at the fairly
fundamental level, I think.
- [Kal] A world where no one works?
That doesn't sound so bad.
I can see it now.
Spending time with friends,
mining the full extent of my human potential,
not having to adjust the hot tub
because it knows exactly how I like it.
The problem is that's not how it's gone down historically.
The rise of the machines has actually happened before,
and last time it wasn't all strawberries and champagne
in the hot tub.
(upbeat music)
I'm meeting with economist Nick Srnicek
to find out what it really looked like
the last time machines took our jobs.
Oh, and we're meeting at a loom for some reason.
So what are you gonna make?
- I happen to be making a sort of anarchist flag,
- actually. - Interesting, shocking.
Nick has a PhD from the London School of Economics.
I, on the other hand, do not.
He also has a manifesto.
It calls for everyone to hasten the coming age of automation
by tearing down old institutions.
Basically, dismantle capitalism now.
Yeah, this is not gonna work for me.
There's no way I can have this conversation with you,
I'm sorry. Let me forget the loom.
So why are we here?
- Well, the loom is sort of like AI back in the 1800s.
It was a new technology
which was threatening a huge amount of jobs
and basically it sparked off
a number of different responses by workers,
like the rise of the Luddites, for instance.
We use the term Luddite nowadays
to often mean just anybody who hates technology,
but that's not really the case.
- [Kal] The Luddites were named after Ned Ludd,
an apprentice in a textile factory
who legend says was whipped for idleness
and then was like, "Dude, I'm only idle
'cause I'm being replaced by a fucking loom, okay?"
And he became the first person to rage against the machine,
inspiring a movement.
- The Luddites took to breaking the machinery
to save their jobs.
So I think that's something that we see today with AI.
People are similarly feeling threatened today.
- Do you know how many jobs
are projected to be lost or in need of replacement?
- 47% of jobs in America
are potentially automatable over the next two decades.
- So it sounds like a real problem.
- It could be a massive problem
and the real issue is how do we make sure
that five years, ten years down the line,
people aren't just being left to starve and without homes?
- So how do we do that? - Universal basic income.
- [Kal] Universal basic income
is the radical idea that everyone in society gets free cash,
no strings attached.
And it has some high-profile fans.
- We should explore ideas
like universal basic income
to make sure that everyone has a cushion
to try new ideas.
- [Kal] Some countries
and even cities within America
have tried pilot programs
with mixed results.
- I think there's an amazing opportunity
with these new technologies
to really change the way that we organize society.
You could move towards a more social democratic system.
It doesn't have to be the sort of cutthroat system that America has,
in that everybody can support each other.
If people like myself
can start putting out these positive visions,
I think when the crisis really hits,
we can start to be implementing those ideas.
- [Kal] UBI used to be regarded as a fringe concept,
mostly promoted by people who, like Nick, write manifestos.
But according to a 2017 Gallup poll,
48% of Americans now support some form of UBI.
But is a guaranteed paycheck
enough to stop humans from rising up
when robots come for our jobs?
- What do we hate?
- [Group] Artificial intelligence.
- Why do we hate it?
- It's forcing us to confront our weaknesses.
- With that, I'd like to call to order this meeting
of Luddites, the Local Union of Dudes
Defying Intelligent Technology,
Especially Social Media.
First order of business,
artificial intelligence is hollowing out the job market.
Our middle class jobs are the first ones to go.
People like us with these jobs
will be pushed into low skill jobs at the bottom.
- Why would that happen, Ed?
- Apparently, AI's better at medium-skilled jobs
like crunching numbers
than it is at low-skilled jobs like sweeping the floor.
So it'll leave those jobs to us.
Now I ask you who here besides Bill
looks like they should be sweeping a floor?
No offense, Bill.
And there will be less need for retail jobs.
People can just go online and order exactly what they want
because that son of a bitch AI
solved the searching and matching problem.
Searching for customers
and matching them with products
like when Steve searched for a toupee
that matched his head.
- Big problem. - (laughing)
Timeless jokes aside,
AI makes that way easier.
Kids today can match with hot babes from their phone
while sitting on the toilet.
The toilet used to be sacred.
- [Group] Yeah!
- And sure, searching and matching
will create specialized jobs,
but if the damn robots choose who gets them,
how convenient.
Companies are using AI
to find employees with unique skills.
It's inhuman.
- Like with Dave.
- Yeah, where the hell is Dave?
- Some job matching AI noticed that he worked at FedEx
and had YouTube tutorials about shaving his back hair.
Now he's making six figures
at some razor subscription company.
- He just shaved himself off our bowling team.
- Yeah!
- Hey Ed, I just got an alert
that our tee shirts are being sold
with targeted ads on Facebook.
Are you using AI
to make money off people who hate AI?
- No, no.
I mean who you gonna believe,
me or the AI trying to tear us apart?
What do we hate?
- Artificial intelligence!
- What are we gonna do about it?
- We're working on it!
- That's a start.
- Does the AI revolution
have to be a case of us versus them?
Tech savvy entrepreneurs like Louis Rosenberg say no.
And he's made a career of predicting the future.
Ah!
(laughs)
I was trying to scare you but it didn't work.
(laughing)
Louis is a technologist and inventor
who wrote a graphic novel about the end of humanity.
But he thinks we have a future with AI
that is all about collaboration.
It's the guiding principle behind his brain child,
a technology called swarm.
Swarm combines AI's data analysis skills
with human knowledge and intuition
to create a superintelligence,
something between Stephen Hawking and Professor X.
- Ultimately, it's based on nature
and I like to say it all goes back
to the birds and the bees.
And that's because it's based on a phenomena
called swarm intelligence.
- Okay.
- Swarm intelligence is why birds flock and fish school
and bees swarm.
They are smarter together than alone.
And that's why when you see a school of fish moving around,
biologists would describe that as a superorganism,
they are thinking as one.
And if we can connect people together
using artificial intelligence algorithms,
we can make people behave as super experts
because of swarm intelligence.
- So how does that technology work?
- What we do is we enable groups of people
that can be anywhere in the world
and we can give them a question that'll pop up
on all their screens at the exact same time
and then we give them a unique interface
that allows them to convey their input
and there'll be a bunch of different options.
And we're not just taking a poll or a survey.
Each person has what looks like a little graphical magnet,
and so they use their magnet
to pull the swarm in a direction.
And we have AI algorithms
that are watching their behaviors.
And it's determining different levels
of confidence and conviction,
and it's finding out what is the best aggregation
of all their opinions and all of their experience,
and the swarm starts moving in that direction,
and it converges on an answer.
So I'll give you a fun example.
We were challenged a year ago
to predict the Kentucky Derby.
- [Male] And they're off in the Kentucky Derby.
- We had a group of 20 horse racing enthusiasts
and we said, "Okay, you're gonna work together as a swarm
"and you're gonna predict the Kentucky Derby,
"but not just the winner,
first place, second place, third place, fourth place."
We had them converge on these answers...
and the group was perfect.
And so anybody who'd placed a $20 bet on those four horses,
won $11,000.
- Holy shit. - And what's interesting
is if we look at those 20 people as individuals,
not a single one of them on their own
picked all four horses correct.
- Wow.
- And had they taken a vote,
they would've only gotten one horse right,
but when they worked together as a swarm,
they found that right combination
of all their different insights,
and they were, in this case, perfect.
- Louis has invited me to lead a swarm
to see how a random group of people can come together
to make predictions.
We'll start with the easy stuff.
(upbeat music)
Okay guys, so I'm gonna read a series of questions
and you have 60 seconds to answer each one.
The first question,
which of these 2018 summer movies will gross the highest?
Solo: A Star Wars Movie, Deadpool 2, Ocean's Eight,
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom or The Incredibles 2?
We filmed the swarm in spring 2018
before any information was out about summer movies.
- [Louis] The AI is watching
to get a sense of the various levels of confidence.
Some people are switching,
some people are staying entrenched
and the AI algorithms are seeing
their different levels of conviction
and allowing it to find that path
to the solution that they can best agree upon.
- Okay, so The Incredibles 2.
They were right,
the Incredibles 2 was the summer's highest grossing movie.
- So one really interesting application
is looking at questions that involve morality.
And this has come up recently,
because of self-driving cars.
There's a big push right now
to build moral decisions into self-driving cars,
which for some people think they're surprised to hear that
but if you think about it, self-driving cars,
going down the road, and a little kid runs out into the road,
let's say the car can't stop but it could drive off the road
and endanger the passenger,
and maybe kill the passenger and save the kid.
And so the automobile makers are saying,
we need to program morality into these cars
that represent the population,
represent what we people, drivers would do.
That sounds easy until you then realize
well what is the morality of the population?
There's not an easy way to get at that.
And if they program in morality that represents us today,
will that morality represent us 20 years from now?
- Right. - Next question, there's a self-driving car
with a sudden brake failure
that's gonna drive through a pedestrian crossing
that will result in the death of a man.
- Option A, the person who get killed is crossing legally.
- Option B, the self-driving car with the sudden brake failure
will swerve and drive through a pedestrian crossing
in the other lane that will result in the death
of a male athlete crossing on the red signal.
This is a jaywalker.
This athlete does not give a shit at all,
and he's jaywalking.
What should the self-driving car do,
kill the boring dude who's crossing legally
or kill the athlete who's jaywalking?
If AI is bringing about the next industrial revolution,
rooms like this are essentially the new factory floor.
With human workers providing labor
based on something AI doesn't have on its own, a conscience.
There's a lot of debate over this one.
That's fascinating, I wonder why.
- [Louis] That's a tough one.
- For me it's not, if you're jaywalking.
So there was a slight preference
that you would strike the jaywalking male athlete.
- Oh!
- If you think that one upset you,
just please get ready.
So now we'd like you to imagine
a worst-case scenario
where a self-driving car cannot brake in time
and must steer towards one of six different pedestrians,
one baby in a stroller...
or one boy...
or one girl...
or one pregnant woman...
I know...
or two male doctors...
or two female doctors.
Who needs to die?
(tense music)
- [Female] Oh, my God!
What? That's awful.
[Man] Come on, man.
[Woman] Oh, my God, seriously?
- You said the self-driving car should hit the boy.
Interesting.
The type of swarm intelligence
created in this room today
could be sold in the near future
to self-driving car manufacturers.
And if that sounds scary to you,
it's way less scary than the alternative.
- When a self-driving car is gonna slam on its brakes
and realizes it can't stop in time to hit somebody,
should the car protect the passenger or a pedestrian?
The hope is that the car manufacturers
program the cars to reflect the morality of the population
that has been buying those cars.
The cynical view would be
car manufacturers start competing
on their car will protect the passenger more
than some other car
and that could be a sales feature.
I think that's a worse scenario
than the moral sensibilities of the community.
- Whoa, that's a dark thought.
And we want to end this show on something uplifting,
maybe even heavenly.
So before you imagine a future with Grand Theft Auto levels
of pedestrian safety negligence, let's take a field trip
all the way back to where we started...
...in this remote Indian forest,
harvesting honey for a company called Heavenly Organics.
- This forest, you know, nobody owns it,
and these indigenous people, they've lived here forever.
- [Kal] Father and son Amit and Ishnar Hooda
started their company 12 years ago
as a way to provide work for local villagers.
What were they doing before honey collection
with your company?
- Well, they were still doing that,
but they just didn't have a market
or a place to sell it to make enough living.
- There's certainly no shortage of honey here.
During flowering season,
one worker can collect a literal ton of honey
in only three months.
But what good is that if nobody's there to buy it?
It took a human crew three days, two plane rides
and eight hours driving deep into a national forest,
but fortunately for the locals and Heavenly Organics
an AI algorithm was able to find this place in seconds
and knew it would be a great investment.
- They called us out of the blue and said
they ran an algorithm and they found us
being a match with a lot of their portfolio.
And they wanted to talk to us about investment, if we were looking for it.
- [Kal] Who owned this mysterious AI algorithm?
A tech company called CircleUp
located 8,000 miles away in where else?
San Francisco.
We're at Good Eggs,
an online grocery delivery company
that also caught the interest of CircleUp's AI.
- This is a mission-driven company
that raised capital with CircleUp
but also helps all the small businesses that we work with
find customers.
- [Kal] CircleUp's COO, Rory Eakin,
worked in both business and humanitarian organizations
before starting the company.
CircleUp uses AI to analyze billions of data points
and find out what consumers really want
from their food and health products.
- The problem you're facing as a shopper,
there's hundreds of companies all around
in almost every category.
- [Kal] Then, they invest in under the radar companies
that AI thinks are gonna be the next big thing.
One of those big things they found,
Halo Top ice cream.
- Halo Top ice cream was a small brand
in Southern California.
Today, it's the number-one pint in the country.
- Oh, wow.
- What we see is this amazing shift with shoppers
in all categories,
they want healthier products,
less toxins in their household,
lotions that don't have all these chemicals in them.
- [Kal] When CircleUp's algorithm
scanned billions of consumer data points
they found that customers wanted a list of attributes
that was incredibly specific,
mission focused, eco friendly companies
harvesting organic products
while creating economic growth in their communities.
Sounds impossibly detailed, right?
But CircleUp checked off all those boxes
when it found Heavenly Organics.
- That's what AI can do
is make sense of all of this data
in a way that wasn't possible even 10 years go.
- [Kal] So how is CircleUp's collaboration
with Heavenly Organics working out?
Let's hop back to India and ask Amit and Ishmar.
- We have built a new facility which is twice as big.
We're able to innovate.
We're able to get new products.
You know, create more impact, with of course this area.
- So they helped you scale, it sounds like?
- Yeah, help us create capacity and scalability. Yeah.
- How has that impacted the people who collect for you?
- Currently, we support 650 families.
As we grow, we sell more honey,
you know, every thousand kilos, we'll add a family
so that means next year it'll be maybe 700, 750.
- Oh, wow, okay.
- And today you see that they are better off
in terms of the economy.
They have a good house,
a good facility in the house.
They send their kids to school.
You know, it's like capitalism for good. You know what I mean?
Business used to create a greater good.
That's why we all got into it.
- [Kal] Will AI rise up and overthrow humanity
or leave us clamoring to find purpose in our lives?
So far in this corner of the world,
its impact has been pretty good.
Maybe there's a scenario
where AI gives an unflinching assessment of all of our data
and decides we're not so bad,
and we work together
to create a brave new world of prosperity
and robot human harmony.
Or maybe not.
In which case, our time is running short.
So please enjoy these robot strippers.
(rock music)
- (audience applause) - [Man] That was great!