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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-07
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu-RyZt_Uas
we it's a lot of smart people in this room really smart after all every single one of you has about eighty five billion neurons in your heads everyone of those neurons is connected to thousands of others which means is over a hundred trillion connections inside every human brain it's the system formed by these interconnected neurons that make you who you are not just your intelligence your
personality your creativity your values and morals everyone of us is a complex system of neurons it's remarkable afterall we humans are pretty damn smart we've created art science literature Simpson's what's also remarkable is how quickly we got so smart if you go back just two million years our brains were one third the size we didn't have language let alone math and physics within the evolutionary pressures
got so intense the thrust to survive we have become the smartest creatures on the planet so here we are the most intelligent species on earth congratulations unfortunately things are about to change that's because an alien intelligence is heading towards us at breakneck speeds it will challenge our position as the intellectual top dog many experts predict it'll get here in fifty years some sale get here in
twenty and let's just be straight we have no reason to believe it will be friendly it'll have its own values its own morals its own self interest and if it behaves anything like we do it'll put its own self interest first to the detriment of all of the creatures encounters no it's aliens not rocketing through space it will be born right here on earth it's simply
an AI that will emerge in a research lab at Google or Facebook or a top university how do I know Limerick I know because I've billions around in my head and I know that research labs are spending billions of dollars creating artificial brains composed of billions of artificial neuron's mother nature has early proven that this approach works it will happen an alien will arrive and it
will be smarter than us and when that happens it'll be our next big evolutionary pressure point one that again requires us to get smarter much smarter or lose our position as the top intelligence in our environment but this time we might not have a few million years we might only have a few decades I know there are those who say we just need to be careful
and we can prevent this alien from ever hatching in a lab there are others who say we didn't put controls in place to be sure that this alien is helpful and friendly eager to do our bidding but honestly we humans have a pretty bad track record for containing dangerous technologies so what we do personally I can worry about this problem for twenty five years ever since
I took my very first course on artificial neural networks back in grad school and for a long time I didn't think that was a solution a decade ago even wrote a science fiction graphic novel called upgrade that outlines exactly how I see humanity designing ourselves out of existence by building the first sent the entire I and how did we let ourselves get so vulnerable to this
fictional ARE we keep the control of our infrastructure we've been allowed it to deliver us our food a decade ago people told me that a I delivery drones were far fetched now it seems inevitable needless to say I was sure we were doomed but then I asked an innocent question how the other species handled evolutionary pressures with you to get smarter much smarter fast it turns
out the answer goes all the way back to the birds and the bees and fish and a chance all of these creatures evolve methods of amplifying their intelligence by thinking together in systems it's why birds flock in free school and be sworn they're smarter together than alone no I'm not talking about crowdsourcing like we humans do by taking votes in polls and surveys I'm talking about
forming systems real time systems with feedback loops so deeply interconnected that a new intelligence forms an emergent intelligence with its own personality and intellect I'm talking about forming a hive mind biologists call this swarm intelligence and it's a natural step in the evolution of most social species I like to think about it this way a brain is a system of neurons so deeply connected the intelligence
forms swarm is a system of brains so deeply connected that a super intelligence forms simply put a swarm is a brain of brains and it can be smarter than any individual member let me give you an example honey bees there's about ten thousand bees and I have a very important problem to solve they need to find a new home to move into that new home could
be a hollow log with a hole in the side of a building where if you're unlucky like I was a crawl space in your garage now this sounds simple but this is a life or death decision that could impact the survival of the colony for generations to solve this problem the beast send out hundreds scout bees that search a thirty square mile area and find dozens
of candidates sites that's the easy part the hard part is that they don't need to pick the best possible solution from all the options that they've discovered now here's the rub honey bee has a tiny brain smaller than a grain of sand and has less than a million neurons you have eighty five billion neurons so however smart you think you are divide that by eighty five
thousand and that's a honeybee you probably wouldn't want a honeybee picking a new home for you and yet honey bees or very discriminating house hunters they need to find a new home that's big enough to store the honey the need for the winter that's ventilated well enough to stay cool in the summer insulated well enough to stay warm on cold nights it's protected from the rain
but also near good sources of clean water and its course he needs to be well located near good sources of pollen this is a complex multi variable problem and to maximize survival the bees need to find the best possible solution across all of these competing constraints and remarkably they do it biologists are shown that honey bees the best possible solution over eighty percent of the time
if you were a human C. E. O. try to find the perfect location for a new factory you face a similarly complex problem and it was very difficult to find the optimal solution and yet honey bees can do it think about that a single be has a brain so tiny it can even conceive of the problem but when they think together as a system they can
solve it so accurately that the human brain would be hard pressed to match them so how do they do this by forming a swarm intelligence a brain of brains that combines the knowledge and wisdom and insight and intuition of the group and converges on a single unified decision I know what you think it really is a honey bees happily how they express opinions have they converge
on solutions remarkably they do it by vibrating their bodies biologists call this a waggle dance because to us it looks like the bees are dancing but really they're generating signals that represent their support for the various home sites under consideration by combining the signals the bees engage in a multi directional tug of war pushing and pulling on the decision into the converge on the one solution
that they can best agree upon and it's usually the optimal solution and unlike us humans the bees don't entrench they don't fall into gridlock they don't settle for a band solution that nobody's happy with they find the solution that best for the group as a whole I point this out because the phrase hive mind often gets a bad rap implying a group of mindless drones who
can't think for themselves that certainly have science fiction portrays it but honestly it's just not true I hive mind is nature's way of aggregating the diverse perspectives of a population and maximizing the collective wisdom and let's be honest we humans are pretty smart as individuals putting groups were not always that lives that's because groups don't do a great job of combining the diverse perspectives we use
votes in polls and surveys the problem is polls are polarizing the drivers to entrench supposing in reinforcing our differences between nothing to help us find common ground swarm is the opposite it's flexible and dynamic revealing where we agree most in other words swarming doesn't just make a species smarter it makes a species wiser now we shouldn't feel bad honey bees are so far ahead of us
the been doing this for thirty million years we humans have only been around for two hundred thousand give us a few million years and we'll catch up which brings me back to the problem I started with we may not have a few million years our next big evolutionary pressure point may hit us within just a few decades which is why I asked myself a big question
why can't we humans amplifier intelligence now these birds and bees and fish conformer brain of brains why can people do it that's what I want to know so few years ago I founded a unique artificial intelligence company called unanimous AI we build hives mines when we feel we've been up to this is a natural swarm no the last few years we've been modeling how swarms like
this amplify the intelligence of groups and we've been using those models to create the algorithms and interfaces to allow humans a form similar swarms online this is a human swarm it's about a hundred people all working together to move that glass pock each little magnets you see is controlled by a person logged in from somewhere around the world by moving their magnets their varying their opinions
in real time pushing and pulling on the system in much the same way that honey bees do by waggle dancing so how can a swarm like this answer questions let me give you some examples last year CBS interactive challenged us to predict the Kentucky Derby and not just the winner the first four courses in order in horse racing that's called the superfecta and last year it
went off at five hundred forty to one odds now we do know anything about horse racing we'd never done anything like this before but we were game so we formed a swarm of twenty horse racing enthusiasts not experts just enthusiasts and we had them think together as a system to predict the winners of the race so here's a swarm predicting the first place finisher Nyquist we
do the same thing for second place third place fourth place and then the reporter voters story and publish the results even went to the Kentucky Derby placed a bet on the superfecta and tweeted out her ticket which put some pressure on us so how do we do we nailed it are and anybody who had placed a twenty dollar bet thank you so anybody would placed a
twenty dollar bed in our predictions would've won eleven thousand dollars I placed a twenty dollar Denton one eleven thousand dollars the reporter placed a bad a bunch of her readers placed bets one one of her readers reported winning fifty thousand dollars now and this is remarkable what's even more amazing is that of the twenty people in the swarm not a single one of them got all
four horses right on their own in fact by taking a vote they only got one worse right out of four but by thinking together it's a swarm they were perfect that's the power of swarm intelligence leaving other example last year Newsweek challenged us to predict the Oscars so we formed a swarm of fifty movie fans not experts just regular fans and we had them sing together
is a system to predict each of the categories so here's the swarm predicting Best Actress and you can see them pushing and pulling on the system moderated by our AI algorithms and converging on brie Larson and we did the same thing for each of the different categories and then Newsweek published our predictions which some pressure on us so how do we do let's compare the individuals
to the swarm so those fifty movie fans as individuals were forty percent accurate it's not great but predicting the Oscars is is hard by taking a vote those fifty movie fans were forty seven percent accurate which is a little bit better by thinking together is a swarm they jumped all the way up to seventy six percent accurate but that's almost double the accuracy of the individual
members what's even more amazing is we can compare to the average professional movie critic XP four percent in other words by thinking together as a swarm these average movie fans became an artificial super expert that was able to beat the New York Times the LA times Rolling Stone variety note these are just two examples but study after study shows that when people think together in swarms
they can amplify their intelligence by twenty percent forty percent sixty percent and that's using current technology the long term potential is likely much greater afterall if a swarm of bees can solve complex problems that would challenge a human brain a swarm of humans should be able to solve problems that we can even conceive we should be able to form a true super intelligence and because the
building blocks are people having not just our knowledge but our values and morals and sensibilities the resulting super intelligence will not be alien it will be human just smarter and wiser we might be able to solve some of the hardest problems we face like poverty and inequality in sustainability so the next time somebody uses the phrase hive mind as a negative remember this is honey bees
