PassWord – 27th January 2016

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM. With me, Peter Warren. The radio program that tells you about the technology trends that are defining our lives. In technology, issues rumble on. A year or so ago, the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was a topic that dominated the headlines. Now it is artificial intelligence and an ongoing debate about whether we are finally going to lose out to the machines. So in today’s show, we report on why those warning that artificial intelligence should be curbed have been branded Luddites by a respected Washington think tank. We also discuss a new book in which the author claims to have laid out the blueprint for the robot being, and we examine the impact that this debate is having on our minds. In the new film Anomalisa, which tries to flesh out what it is to be human using plasticine figures. We also look at why moves by the European Union to create a single market in data face some tough challenges. And we talk to the makers of a technology that is trying to give us a technological edge in this new world by helping us poor humans to see the patterns in data that are child’s play for the intelligent algorithms and artificial intelligences that we are wrestling with in this new world. But first, are we really going to lose out to the machines? In the month that the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, has unveiled a research program called Neural Engineering System Design, which aims to develop an implantable neural interface connecting humans directly to computers, and possibly usher in the age of the cyborg, Rob Atkinson, president of the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, has said, “Enough of this demonisation of technology. We need it if we are to improve our standard of living.” I asked him why.

Speaker B: The main issue is because by saying that artificial intelligence will potentially destroy the human race or summon the demon, as Elon Musk has said, that that just scares people, scares society, and society will be less willing to advance AI. They’ll pressure companies, they’ll pressure government agencies. We need more AI. We need it faster, not, not slower. And that’s the problem with saying that AI is a fundamentally bad thing.

Speaker C: Okay, so why do we need AI? Well, a lot of people will say we’re perfectly happy as we are. Why don’t we just carry on toddling along as we’re doing?

Speaker B: The big reason we need AI, if you look at UK and US productivity growth over the last decade or so, it’s been abysmal and it’s going to probably continue to be abysmal until we get a lot better technology. Technology is going to be the main driver of productivity growth. AI is going to be one of the most important technologies for productivity growth. And if we don’t get productivity growth in the UK, then your children will essentially have your standard of living. You had a higher standard of living than your parents, and that historically is what we’ve always been able to look forward to. So without AI, we don’t get productivity. Without productivity, we don’t get a growing standard of living.

Speaker C: But we’ve always been haunted, haven’t we, by this idea of an intelligence taking over, whether you watch Doctor Who, Star Trek, whether you read science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke. You know, we’ve always been worried about the robot or the machine taking over. Why do you think that is?

Speaker B: Well, it’s a fun story to write and it’s a fun movie to make, and so people see it and, uh, they tend to internalize it and they, oh well, if it happened in, uh, Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, then perhaps it’s possible that it could really happen. So I think that’s why, uh, but if you look at Historically, people oftentimes are afraid of new technologies, and then the technologies come around and people realize they’re actually pretty good, and then they’re not afraid of them anymore.

Speaker C: It’s interesting, though, isn’t it? Artificial intelligence is a word that’s come from the scientific community. The word robot actually came from a Polish playwright, I think, probably about 200 years ago. But it’s not helped, though, is it? DARPA, the US defense research agency, have just announced a program called Brain, and one of the things that they are saying that they want to do, or as I understand from the BBC, that they’re saying that they want to do, is to have a direct human-computer interface. That’s not exactly going to reassure people.

Speaker B: Well, why wouldn’t you want that? That’s a great thing. And can you imagine if you can, as a worker or a doctor or whatever, be able to actually interface with a computer directly? You can get a lot more functionality. Why wouldn’t we want that? Particularly if you think about brain-computer interfaces for disabled people, quadriplegic people, other people who have real hard problems using their limbs. Brain-computer interfaces are going to be a huge, huge liberating force for them.

Speaker C: No, I can see that, and I can see that that would be something that would be very, very good. Although there will be other people who will say, hang on a moment, this is us taking evolution into our own hands. We’re taking ourselves onto another level, and there can be no sort of guides or controls on that. And do you think there is a need for controls? We’ve got controls over stem cell research, we’ve got controls over embryo research, so shouldn’t we have controls over something like this if it could have the potential consequences that the people, that the people who’ve warned against it are saying?

Speaker B: Well, I think there is a question right now: do you want to tilt towards controls and caution and slowing down, or do you want to tilt the other way of speeding up? And I think we’re at the point where it’s really we need to be tilting the other way towards speeding up and not controls. At some point as we get closer, I mean, for example, the people talk about this thing called the singularity happening, Ray Kurzweil talks about that in 2050. There’s simply no way that’s going to happen by 2050. It’s impossible. He’s wrong. And we’re not going to have AI systems that are smarter than humans for a long, long time. And so I think it’s better to calm down, uh, let’s revisit this in a decade, see where we are.

Speaker A: That was Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation on why we should welcome immersion in the machine. Well, before we do that, something a bit more human and a bit more pressing. Next month is Resonance FM’s fundraising spectacular, so all through February we are going to give you the opportunity to deck yourself in the latest tech courtesy of the companies that are building the information world. So listen out to all of the offers that we will be bringing you in next week’s program. Now, back to AI. The Canadian author and technologist Jean Tardy has just published a new book called MechaSapiens: A Blueprint to Build Conscious Machines, which the author claims will allow you to build your own synthetic consciousness which will be fully autonomous, self-aware, and capable of intentional mutations. I talked to regular Password contributor Jane Wyatt, who has been in contact with Jean about his ideas.

Speaker D: A Canadian scientist, and he’s been working on this blueprint for an artificial intelligence for about 20 years, and now he’s finally published it. And I guess he believes it will work. I’m afraid I don’t know enough about the maths and the technology to know if it would work, but I think you probably don’t need that kind of mechanical knowledge or equipment. If you think back to Alan Turing, he designed a computer long before we had the actual hardware to make a computer. And I imagine that what Jean Vardy has created in this blueprint is kind of similar to Turing’s blueprint for a computer.

Speaker A: What do you think about this? And do you— I mean, it’s one of the really interesting points of, do we need this? Rob Atkinson, the president of IETF, says that we need this because we’re not been particularly productive?

Speaker D: Well, I think there are brilliant innovations that you could do with artificial intelligence, and obviously DARPA, the American defense research people, are interested in creating robotic warriors and a way of waging war. That involves no risk to humans, or no risk to humans on the American side, I imagine. Um, I think that’s quite sinister, the idea of building killing machines. On the other hand, if you have an artificial intelligence such as the one Jean Vardy is creating, then it can surely be programmed to do anything, and it must be possible to program it to do socially useful things and take care of boring, monotonous jobs that people shouldn’t be forced to do, and to give people better, richer lives by taking away all the drudgery.

Speaker A: But do you think— I mean, obviously, arguably, what we could do is instead of people fighting each other, we could have the robots fight each other. And if one robot army beats the other robot army, then Everybody has to give up and say, right, the robots have won, we don’t stand a chance. Um, is that a better way of doing it? I mean, even arguably you could use your algorithms in the networks, which is what the Americans and the Chinese are currently sort of setting themselves up to do. So, uh, and that’s part of their defense plan. Isn’t that a better way of fighting war?

Speaker D: Well, yes, anything that minimizes collateral damage is obviously a better way of waging a war. I suppose you could think back to biblical times when people had champions like David and Goliath, so that only two people— well, ideally only one person— would engage in combat and get killed or wounded. And if you had one artificial intelligence pitted against another, and then they could fight it out themselves in the machines.

Speaker A: But I suppose the argument against that is that it means that humanity’s basically left the battlefield. It means that you can only contest if you have some sort of technological capability.

Speaker D: Well, wars have always been won by the people with the best equipment, haven’t they?

Speaker A: No, absolutely right. I mean, Voltaire said God was always on the side of the biggest battalions.

Speaker D: Well, think back to World War II. If we hadn’t had Turing and his code crackers, then probably you’d now be living in Germany.

Speaker A: So in a sense then, the universities are the places where the battles are won.

Speaker D: You look at how many American universities are funded MIT, for example. There’s a lot of defense spending going in there, which goes back to DARPA.

Speaker A: So universities are now the new battlefield. Jane Wyatt on the man who can tell you how to make your own artificial intelligence. And for those wishing to know more, we have one copy of the book which we are putting into the resonance auction. Now, feeling a little confused? Don’t know where to turn? Well, that’s exactly how the plasticine figures in the animated film Anomalisa feel. Once again, Jane Wyatt, this time in the guise of volunteer arts editor, to tell us why being human is the only way out of the modern world of machines. So you’ve been to see Anomalisa. What’s it about?

Speaker D: It’s a stop-motion animation made of little plasticine figures, the sort of conception that you used to seeing on Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. This is made by a Hollywood director called Kaufman, and I think Steve Kaufman.

Speaker A: I mean, it’s been doing very well, hasn’t it? A lot of people have been saying good things about it. Why?

Speaker D: Well, it’s very moving and funny, and it also makes you think about what it means to be human, because it’s about— without giving too much away— it’s about a man having a midlife crisis. So he’s not happy with his marriage, and he’s got a couple of other broken relationships behind him, and he goes to Cincinnati to a conference where he’s one of the speakers, and he’s speaking about his book which is all about how to increase productivity in call centres. And he thinks the key to increasing productivity is to make every call and every word of every call really individual, to empathise with the client and to be as human as possible. And being as human as possible in this particular animated world is actually quite difficult because he soon comes to realize that actually everybody’s the same.

Speaker A: Well, so he’s a plasticine figure though, but what you’re saying is that—

Speaker D: and all the other plasticine figures have the same voice, so there are only 3 voices in the whole cast of characters. And that’s the point really. So why he falls in love with Anomalisa, which is an extra long name that he gives her as a sort of endearment because she is an anomaly and her name is Lisa, is she’s different. She’s got a squeaky kind of voice, she’s a bit feisty, and she likes to sing. And in spite of all that jollity, quite a lonely character as well. So they get together in the hotel room, which is just as bland and anonymous as every hotel room in every city all across the world. And they celebrate their individuality. And then the morning after, of course, the disenchantment sets in and he goes back home to his wife and family in Los Angeles, and she goes back to Akron, Ohio.

Speaker A: So what do you think the point he’s making?

Speaker D: The point means nothing, it’s plasticine blob meets plasticine blob.

Speaker A: But I mean, so what, what does the plasticine have any sort of role in this? Is it, is there?

Speaker D: Yes, it does. At one point he takes his head off because it’s hurting. And so obviously the characters know that they’re not really human, and yet they, they’re really struggling and striving to find out what it is that would make them human, which is of course being an individual in a world of clones.

Speaker A: It’s interesting though, isn’t it? I mean, is this some sort of reaction to, uh, the, the, the sort of the world that we live in, do you think?

Speaker D: I think you could read it that way, yes.

Speaker A: And a good film?

Speaker D: I really enjoyed it, and I would definitely see it again because although it seems very, very simple almost childish or childlike. It’s actually quite layered and has a lot of little jokes and things that I probably missed on the first viewing. I’d definitely watch it again.

Speaker A: Jane Wyatt on “Anon Alisa” and the very human face of plasticine. Now, films like “Anon Alisa” and even much of the material that you can hear in “Resonance” SFM could soon be being traded across Europe under the terms of a new initiative from the European Union to create a single market for digital services. The idea could promise a boom time for artists in the UK, as we do the one thing that robots cannot do— be creative. There you go, machines, you make your own radio station. To tell us more about the digital single market Here’s Mike Weston, head of data science company Profusion.

Speaker E: In many ways, it’s an extension of what the idea behind the non-digital European market is in terms of having a single consistent market where trade can flow freely and where consumers across Europe know that they can buy stuff consistently in any place. So for example, it might be that you don’t get differential pricing for your downloads of video content or audio content between say UK and France. People living on the border between France and Germany, for example, don’t find themselves in a position where they have different regulations between the two countries that they sit in more or less in the middle of.

Speaker F: [Speaker:DAVID HEATHFIELD] Oh, I see. So it’s a little like, you know, the BBC only allows people in the UK to consume the BBC. But with this, everybody anywhere will be able to do it and they’ll be able to do it for the same price as it would cost any other person in the EU country.

Speaker E: That’s right. And I think there’s a terrific consumer benefit that can sit behind that because it means that you don’t, you know, find yourself getting gouged on pricing when you travel from one country to another with your mobile phone. I mean, I remember in the summer I was on a Greek island that was quite close to Turkey and finding myself sort of straying into Turkish cell phone territory and therefore incurring a whole different range of roaming fees as a result of doing something which actually made little or any sense, let alone any real difference. So trying to cut out those kinds of things.

Speaker F: What are the problems though with this? I mean, obviously it’s a great ambition, but you know, there seems to be some things that need to be sorted out. What are they?

Speaker E: I think the devil will, as inevitably it is with these things, to end up being in the detail because nice as it is to have this theory of having a nice open free market, actually getting the implementation of this consistent across 28 different countries is potentially going to be a bit of a nightmare.

Speaker F: I mean, there’s another issue too, isn’t there? And that issue, of course, is this very, very thorny one about data. Yourself about personal data and where that ends up because it’s very difficult to keep that, say, within the countries who have proscribed it and also within that European area. I mean, we’ve seen the fall of the Safe Harbor and attempts to resuscitate something similar. What are the issues there?

Speaker E: Well, I think what we’re seeing with the data flows between Europe and other parts of the world, notably the United States, is that there’s a really strong philosophical difference between how Europe sees the importance of privacy and an individual’s human right to privacy as enshrined in legislation in Europe versus the way the US tends to see it, which is that the state almost comes first, and particularly security of state comes first. Here in the UK, we’re probably slightly closer to the US point of view than to the European point of view. But what it means in practice is that unless we can resolve resolve those differences between here and the US, that we’re in danger of creating a, a worldwide web that really isn’t a worldwide web. So we have a European version of it versus a US version of it. Because if the logical extreme of Safe Harbor collapsing follows through, we won’t be able to get Google or Facebook or for that matter the likes of Amazon here. Because as US businesses, they won’t be able to hold personal data— which sounds like quite a stormy outcome of it, and I think it’s unlikely that we’ll end up there. But that’s the logical extreme of where these data protection issues could take us to.

Speaker F: But isn’t that something that in a sense a lot of the policymakers wouldn’t be too upset about? I mean, you know, given the small amounts of tax that Google appears to be paying, 3% or whatever it was on the money it’s earned, I think a lot of people will be saying, Good. This is the opportunity for us to develop our own homegrown Googles, our own homegrown Facebooks, and this legislation will actually let us do that.

Speaker E: [Speaker:DAVID HEATHFIELD] Yeah, and as someone running a European business, you know, I’m sitting there thinking to myself, hmm, okay, that does look like it spells opportunity. As a consumer, I might be a little less sanguine about it. I mean, I might look at it and think, well, actually, where is the European version of Google that is something that helps me to get access to the world’s information nice and easily. And at the moment, there are very few areas where we see European businesses that actually are competing on a level playing field with those US giants.

Speaker A: Mike Weston of Profusion on the EU’s digital single market. Now, data, data everywhere. And not a minute to think. It’s bread and butter for the robots, the algorithms, and the AI, but for us poor humans, simply figures and symbols, gibberish. So how can we make sense of it? Venli is one of many companies that are trying to put data into a form that we can understand. The idea is to turn it into pictures. Here’s Pouya Ghiaseddin to tell us about it.

Speaker G: We take the numbers and we turn them into pictures essentially, interactive pictures that are easier for non-data analysts to be able to understand and digest so that they can make business decisions. So the pain point that we found is that the people that are typically doing this type of market research or data analysis in an organization, they usually have other stakeholders elsewhere in the company that they have to sell their findings to, to help them make decisions. And the problem is that those stakeholders, like the CEO for instance, or chief marketing officer, they’re not data analysts by trade. So taking numbers and trying to interpret those and make decisions based off of them is not always an easy task. And so what we’re trying to do is, is take that same information but display it in a way that the audience can really digest so that they can make decisions faster, but also so they can feel more confident in the decisions they’re making.

Speaker A: I see. So, but essentially what you’re saying is that people tend to use their eyes to get information, and it’s information in a pictorial way. We all like pictures, we like cartoons, we like that sort of thing. So what you’re doing is getting that data and turning it into pictures. What sort of things are you looking for?

Speaker G: There’s a number of different things. Specifically, our platform focuses on customer choice data. So we’re looking at these elements that we call choice factors. They’re essentially the attributes that you weigh when you’re making a purchase when you’re making a purchasing decision. So like let’s say you’re choosing between two different cell phones, you might consider the screen size or the battery life and stuff like that. And so we’re taking those data elements and then we’re mapping them visually on a Venn diagram. And then with our latest release, the heat map, we’re actually stacking them side by side and showing you how different segments, different customer segments view the importance of these choice factors and then also how they rate you and your competition is performing on them.. So you can start to formulate how you might want to message differently segment by segment, or how you might have to change your offering if you want to capture some new market share.

Speaker A: How do you visualize that? How do you present that to people?

Speaker G: What does it look like? So in versions 1 and 2 of our software, so the original version, the visualization was primarily handled by an interactive Venn diagram that we called the V-Lens. So picture 3 partially overlapping circles. Where one of them is your product or offering, another one is the customer, and then the last one is the competition. If you overlap them, you end up with 7 discrete zones, and then using a patent-pending algorithm that we have come up with, we can map those choice factors kind of like pins on Google Maps on that Venn diagram. So these pins all get some kind of spatial representation on the Venn diagram, and based off of their placement, you can identify if this is something that’s, for instance, an unmet need, or is this something that is a competitive advantage that we currently have that we need to defend? Or is this something that our competitor is beating us on and we might want to copy it? Or we might want to message how it’s not important, something along those lines.

Speaker A: Obviously, we’re in this big data age. This is, I assume then, how we are going to be working with data in the future. We’re going to be extracting this information as quickly as possible, seeing it, interpreting it in that way. And then responding to it. That’s basically the way you see things going.

Speaker F: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker G: And I mean, the big thing is we’re trying to democratize this. So historically, it’s been kind of the job of certain individuals, maybe within an organization, or people with the title of data analyst or insights manager, that kind of thing. And what we’re really trying to do is make it so that even the non-data geek, so to speak, can understand this information, even if they don’t understand how to collect it and crunch. That they can do something with the results without needing someone else to explain it to them. And that’s really where we see data visualization playing a large role.

Speaker A: It’s interesting, isn’t it? This is a final point, because it’s almost the— what made the computer take off was the graphical user interface that allowed people to be able to understand how to use it. Now, and that’s what you’re doing for data now. Exactly, exactly. That was Puyak. Ghiriya Sedin of Venli on how to make pictures out of data to make sense of it. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM, and if you’ve just joined us, I’m afraid that you’ve missed it. But you can join us again next week for the launch of Resonance FM’s fundraising month, when you will get the chance to support the station that The Independent called a glorious experiment that everyone in the country deserves to hear, while The Guardian simply stated that it is the best radio station in London. If you want to find out more about the technology in this programme, then log on to our website at www.futureintelligence.co.uk. Password is a joint production by Future Intelligence and the Cyber Security Research Institute and is produced by Tim Smith. Thanks for listening and goodbye.