English Learning | AI Revolution| David Byrne | 60 Minutes
There is a revolution happening right now in the world of artificial intelligence. Are we ready for it? I am rarely speechless. I don’t know what to make of this. With rare access, we will show you what Google is developing and the questions they’re asking themselves. On my way, I will bring an apple to you as they begin to unveil computing power that will change every part of our world forever. I’ve been working on AI for decades now, and I’ve always believed that it’s going to be the most important invention that Humanity will ever make.
I’m Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.
We may look at our time as the moment civilization was transformed, as it was by fire, agriculture, and electricity. In 2023, we learned that a machine taught itself how to speak to humans like a peer, which is to say with creativity, truth, errors, and lies. The technology known as a chatbot is only one of the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Machines that can teach themselves superhuman skills. In April, we explored what’s coming next at Google, a leader in this new world. CEO Sundar Pichai told us AI will be as good or as evil as human nature allows. The revolution, he says, is coming faster than you know.
Do you think society is prepared for what’s coming? You know, there are two ways I think about it. On one hand, I feel no, because you know the pace at which we can think and adapt as societal institutions compared to the pace at which the technology is evolving, there seems to be a mismatch. On the other hand, compared to any other technology I’ve seen, more people worried about it earlier in its life cycle, so I feel optimistic. The number of people who have started worrying about the implications, and hence the conversations, are starting in a serious way as well. I guess our conversations with 50-year-old Sundar Pichai started at Google’s new campus in Mountain View, California. It runs on 40 solar power and collects more water than it uses, high tech that Pichai couldn’t have imagined growing up in India with no telephone at home. We were on a waiting list to get a rotary phone, and for about five years, it finally came home. I can still recall it vividly. It changed our lives. To me, it was the first moment I understood the power of getting access to technology meant. So, it’s probably led me to be doing what I’m doing today.
What he’s doing since 2019 is leading both Google and its parent company, Alphabet, valued at 1.5 trillion dollars worldwide. Google runs 90% of internet searches and 70% of smartphones. But its dominance was attacked this past February when Microsoft linked its search engine to a chatbot in a race for AI dominance. In March, Google released its chatbot named Bard. It’s really here to help you brainstorm ideas, to generate content like a speech, or a blog post, or an email. We were introduced to Bard by Google Vice President Xiao and Senior Vice President James Manika. Here’s Bard.
And the first thing we learned was that Bard does not look for answers on the internet like Google search does. So, I wanted to get inspiration from some of the best speeches in the world. Bard’s replies come from a self-contained program that was mostly self-taught. Our experience was unsettling, confounding. Absolutely confounding. Bard appeared to possess the sum of human knowledge. Ah, with microchips more than 100,000 times faster than the human brain.
Summarize. Then we asked Bard to summarize the New Testament. It did in five seconds and 17 words in Latin. We asked for it in Latin; that took another four seconds. Then we played with a famous six-word short story often attributed to Hemingway.
For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Wow. The only prompt we gave was, “Finish this story in five seconds.” Holy cow. The shoes were a gift from my wife, but we never had a baby. They were from the six-word prompt. Bard created a deeply human tale with characters it invented, including a man whose wife could not conceive and a stranger grieving after a miscarriage and longing for closure.
I am rarely speechless. I don’t know what to make of this. Give me. We asked for the story in verse. In five seconds, there was a poem written by a machine with breathtaking insight into the mystery of faith. Bard wrote, “She knew her baby’s soul would always be alive.” The humanity at superhuman speed was a shock.
How is this possible? James Manika told us that over several months, Bard read most everything on the internet and created a model of what language looks like rather than search. Its answers come from this language model. So, for example, if I said to you, “Scott peanut butter and jelly,” right? So it tries and learns to predict. Okay, so peanut butter usually is followed by jelly. It tries to predict the most probable next words based on everything it’s learned. So it’s not going out to find stuff; it’s just predicting the next word. But it doesn’t feel like that. We asked Bard why it helps people, and it replied, “Because it makes me happy.”
Bard, to my eye, appears to be thinking, appears to be making judgments. That’s not what’s happening. These machines are not sentient. They are not aware of themselves. They can exhibit behaviors that look like that because, keep in mind, they’ve learned from us. We’re sentient beings. We have feelings, emotions, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. We’ve reflected all that in books, in novels, in fiction. So when they learn from that, they build patterns from that. So it’s no surprise to me that the exhibited behavior sometimes looks like maybe there’s somebody behind it. There’s nobody there. These are not sentient beings.
Zimbabwe-born, Oxford-educated James Manika holds a new position at Google. His job is to think about how AI and humanity will best coexist. AI has the potential to change many ways in which you’ve thought about society, about what we’re able to do, the problems we can solve. But AI itself will pose its own problems. Could Hemingway write a better short story? Maybe. But Bard can write a million before Hemingway could finish one. Imagine that level of automation across the economy. A lot of people can be replaced by this technology. Yes, there are some job occupations that will start to decline over time.
New words and phrases
- Will the pace of change outstrip our ability to adapt? يفوق / يتجاوز
- you set off AlphaZero in the morning and it starts off playing randomly تطلق
- this is one of two advances that make AI ascendant now first the sum of all human knowledge is online and second Brute Force Computingصاعد / القوة الحاسوبية الغاشمة
- philosophers haven’t really settled on a definition of Consciousness yet
- we start the Genesis of a new Humanity نشأة
- we are dealing with something that is fundamentally new this is the edge of the envelope so to speak
- it was loads of fun
- build the guard rails add the safety features
- Bing tried to divert the questioner
- GPT has been in circulation for just three months
- we should be wearier قلقا
- there needs to be oversight رقابة
- what jobs will it displace?
- a race to the bottom