AI: Hollywood vs Reality (Part 1)

Ernest de Leon:
I speak two languages and I can sit in a restaurant and I can hear conversations happening in both languages at the same time, and follow both of them because my brain has to operate on different wavelengths.

Jolie Hales:
Okay, that is not normal. What other language do you speak?

Ernest de Leon:
Spanish.

Jolie Hales:
Oh!  Muy bien!  Hablo espanol tambien, pero no mucho. Necesito estudiar much mas.

Ernest de Leon:
That was actually pretty good.

Jolie Hales:
Hi, everyone. I’m Jolie Hales.

Ernest de Leon:
And I’m Ernest de Leon.

Jolie Hales:
And welcome to the Big Compute Podcast. Here, we celebrate innovation in a world of virtually unlimited compute, and we do it one important story at a time. We talk about the stories behind scientists and engineers who are embracing the power of high performance computing to better the lives of all of us.

Ernest de Leon:
From the products we use every day to the technology of tomorrow, computational engineering plays a direct role in making it all happen, whether people know it or not.

Jolie Hales:
Hello, everyone! Welcome to season three of the Big Compute Podcast. We are back after a little summer break. And I’ve got to say to our listeners, I missed you guys. I don’t know who you are, but I feel like we’d get along.

Ernest de Leon:
On the contrary, I know exactly who all of our listeners are,

Jolie Hales:
Uhhh…

Ernest de Leon:
Just kidding.

Jolie Hales:
Do I see that you added a sound effect in here, it says insert maniacal laugh sound effects. I love that you’re adding sound effects for me. Already off to a good start. So we do have some exciting episodes ahead about awesome innovation through computational science and engineering. And it’s everything from heart implants to flying cars. And for today’s episode, we’re going to have a little bit of fun, and we’re going to talk about AI, which means I’m going to put Ernest on the spot here. So, Ernest.

Ernest de Leon:
Yes.

Jolie Hales:
How would you define artificial intelligence? If you had a great aunt or something who knew nothing about technology and you had to explain AI to her, what would you say?

Ernest de Leon:
Oh, that’s a tough one because a lot of people think of AI in terms of what we’ve long called the singularity, right? The moment where artificial intelligence reaches parity with human intelligence, right? We’re still not there, every 20 years or so, they say that we’re about 20 years away, that’s happened several times now. I’m banking on 2045 but that’s just a random number to throw out there. But I think I would say that it’s the point where we can rely on AI to do just about anything a human being could do.

Jolie Hales:
That also proves the point that AI can be pretty complex and have a lot of different definitions associated with it in a way, because I think artificial intelligence or AI, as we always call it, is just one of those terms that we’ve kind of gotten used to, and we know in our minds what it is, but we haven’t really sat down to narrow it down from the beginning. And so I decided to actually look up the definition online. And it seems like most dictionaries seem to list two different definitions for AI. And one is, and I’ll quote from our good old friends at Merriam Webster, they say the AI has two definitions. The first is, “A branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers.” So that’s referring to the practice or study, you could say. And then the other definition is probably what we’re most familiar with, which is also pretty simplified. It’s, “The capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior.” Just as you were talking about. So that’s the actual machine intelligence or the AI that pop culture tends to focus on. In fact, I think that many in our generation were first introduced to the idea of AI through its portrayal in Hollywood movies. And before you start naming AI movies, Ernest, because I know you know like 1,000 of them, hold that thought because I promise, we will be voluntarily going down that rabbit hole in just a few minutes.

Ernest de Leon:
That’s fine. I won’t name any but I will say that you will find traces of AI very far back to, not the silent film era for obvious reasons, but just after that, early black and white science fiction films, will often have a component where there is an AI that is a computer of some kind.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, even before that, and we’re going to go down an actual timeline of pop culture and movies specifically, and when AI was first introduced, and it is very early.

Movie Trailer:
They built Colossus, supercomputer with a mind of its own, then they had to fight it for the world.

Jolie Hales:
But first, I wanted to introduce you to someone who thinks about AI a lot and frankly knows a lot more about it than I do. And this person is considered to be a thought leader in the AI space. In fact, just before the pandemic lockdown, we at Big Compute had a live in person conference event. It is my pleasure to be here with you at Big Compute. Where a bunch of thought leaders talked about the many ways cloud high performance computing was contributing to innovation, kind of like an in person live version of this podcast. And we were privileged to be able to hear from Sam Altman at the conference, who defined intelligence, at least in the context of being separated from consciousness, as more or less being…

Sam Altman:
Something about the ability to learn new concepts based off of existing knowledge, and maybe something about the ability to sort of learn them fairly quickly. We talk about the right metrics here, but I think intelligence is deeply related to the ability to learn, which is why I think we’re going to get there, because we have algorithms that can learn.

Jolie Hales:
And in case you’re not familiar with Sam Altman, he’s the CEO of OpenAI, which is basically a research lab founded in 2015 by Sam and by Elon Musk, I think they’re friends actually. And they have this goal of promoting and developing friendly AI in a way that benefits humanity as a whole. And it sounds like they believe that AI is really going to take off sooner than we might think. And they want to get ahead of it and make sure it doesn’t end up in the hands of only a small number of people who could then theoretically use it for nefarious purposes, or at the very least, they would just have a lot more power than anyone else. So OpenAI is all about collaboration and sharing information as AI is progressing.

Sam Altman:
We have a set of principles, we tried to write up in our charter what those are, and we’d like the public to hold us accountable to them. I think people can disagree with the charter, though. As the stakes get higher and higher, no one organization and certainly no one person should be making decisions for what the new social contract looks like and how this technology gets used and sort of how we share governance and economics. I think the thing that we will move to in the coming years or decade is more and more of our decisions will be influenced by an advisory board that we’ll need to put in place of people that can kind of represent different groups in the world, which right now we don’t have.

Jolie Hales:
So by hearing Sam Altman describe AI as well as good old Merriam Webster, I think we can safely say that artificial intelligence is basically at least somewhat a machine with the ability to learn. And it’s good to throw down that definition since these days the subject of AI is really hot in the media and it’s really hot in Silicon Valley, and everyone seems to want a piece of it down to the point where we’re seeing a lot of startups claim to work in AI and many of them do, but some of them probably just more wish that they did.

Sam Altman:
Every few years, there’s some buzzword, we’re going to do this with social, we’re going to do this with podcast, we’re going to do this with crypto, we’re going to do this with AI. And I think by the time you get say, three buzzwords in the first two sentences of a startup pitch, you can pretty safely ignore it. And even one, you should be a little bit skeptical unless they’re clearly doing it. So the number of startups that say, “We’re an AI-driven X,” and are actually AI-driven, it’s, I don’t know, one in 20, one in 50, something like that. And the lesson here is, startups pitch themselves however they think will work, VCs often fall for it. The good VCs dig in and don’t fall for you.

Jolie Hales:
And Sam speaks from personal observation because in addition to being CEO of OpenAI, Sam is also an investor in many tech startups. And he used to see a lot of startups from their earliest stages when he was president of Y Combinator. And for those who don’t know what Y Combinator is, it’s basically a startup accelerator that has launched more than 2,000 companies, which would include companies like Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, Twitch, Reddit, and our very own presenting sponsor, Rescale, which graduated from the program in 2011. In fact, full disclosure, Sam Altman is also a Rescale investor, after having learned about Rescale through Y Combinator. And it’s funny because… personal story, so I was the emcee for the Big Compute conference in February 2020. And it was typical for me to meet each speaker before they spoke, I would meet them either in the dressing room or just off stage, so that I could make sure that I had their introduction and their pronunciation of their names correct. But when Sam arrived to speak at the conference, I totally stood in his bubble and said hello to him, and just kind of stared at him. And maybe he didn’t hear me or something, but we didn’t end up having any conversation and thankfully, his name is very easy to pronounce. So there wasn’t any problem from that.

Jolie Hales at BC20:
Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI.

Jolie Hales:
I just kind of stood there right next to him until we went on stage, we were in some awkward elevator ride. And I remember wondering if maybe he was just one of those people who thought he was the shizzle and didn’t want to talk to a lowly person like me. But frankly speaking, I didn’t know him at all, who am I to judge his entire character based off of one little moment where he may not have even noticed I was there. So I didn’t think negatively of him, but I did wonder about what he was like. But then as he started speaking on stage, I became really glad that I didn’t just pass negative judgment on Sam because I found that he spoke very deliberately on stage, but he also spoke very sincerely. And it soon became apparent, at least to me, that rather than being some Silicon Valley hot shot, he’s actually just a really brilliant, introverted human whose brain is always moving probably at 1,000 miles an hour. And I do believe that he authentically wants good for humanity, you know what I mean?

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, and I will jump to his defense here as well, because my wife often accuses me of the same thing. I can be somewhere and just completely not paying attention to what’s going on around me.

Jolie Hales:
Right, and I’m the same way.

Ernest de Leon:
There can be someone trying to talk to me and I won’t even notice it.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, and my husband will tell an entire story, and I’ll be finishing up a thought in my mind that I won’t realize he’s even talking until one and a half minutes later. And then I have to say, “Hey, I’m so sorry, I didn’t hear a word you’ve just said, but I just realized you were talking. Can you start over?”

Ernest de Leon:
That happens all the time, all the time. Yeah, it’s the same thing. My wife gets frustrated with me and I have to remind her, it’s not that I’m ignoring you, it’s not that I can’t hear you, or whatever the case is. It’s, if I’m in the middle of a train of thought, nothing is going to get me out of that unless I hear someone screaming because they’re dying or something like that, right?

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, exactly. And I think that at this conference, it was like Sam was you and I was your wife, why aren’t you paying attention to me? You know what I mean. And Sam, I mean, he’s definitely got his share of critics. So he’s familiar with people probably judging him whether it’s fair or not. Like for instance, some people say that he’s too altruistic in his thinking, or that his ideas about societal AI goals are unrealistic, and we’ll get into some of what those are. And I don’t know that I agree with everything he believes. I mean, for one thing, I’m not an expert in his field, so I don’t feel like I can really develop any really strong opinions, because I just don’t have the data. But I will say, I do believe he authentically is trying to do what he believes is right and what he believes will help humanity in this new age of artificial intelligence. Because with AI comes this whole new package of potential ethical dilemmas, right? Dilemmas that have been represented in pop culture for decades. I mean, you could even say the ideas behind artificial intelligence morality have been around even before machines really existed. I mean, for instance, think of the novel Frankenstein, right? By Mary Shelley.

Frankenstein Movie Trailer:
It’s alive. It’s alive. It’s alive.

Jolie Hales:
That book was written in 1818, which was a couple centuries ago. But the story is about an artificial being that is capable of human thought.

Frankenstein Movie Trailer:
A monster created by a man named called Mad has turned loose to strike terror into the hearts of men.

Jolie Hales:
It derived from a scientific experiment. And it facilitates ethical questions about scientific betterment for society that are still very much applicable today.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, that novel raised a lot of questions about ethics and morality in general.

Frankenstein Movie Trailer:
The spine tingling, blood killing story that’s turned your emotions, Frankenstein.

Jolie Hales:
But thinking about Frankenstein totally got me down the rabbit hole, as subjects on this podcast do all the time. And I started looking up all the movies that have to do with artificial intelligence in one way or another. And it’s been really interesting to compare those movies to reality and see what they got right as we’re watching this evolution of actual AI. In fact, Ernest, as the movie buff that you are, do you have any favorite AI movies that come to your mind?

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, so my favorite of all time is The Matrix.

The Matrix Movie Trailer:
The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Ernest de Leon:
Obviously the original but I’m a fan of the entire series. I think The Wachowskis are brilliant. And I’ve said many times that that series, you have to watch many, many, many times to get all the layers of depth that are in that story.

The Matrix Movie Trailer:
Human beings are disease, you’re a cancer of this planet, and we found the cure.

Ernest de Leon:
Here’s what it boils down to. There’s a thought out there, when the singularity happens, essentially, it’s going to destroy humanity. And if you think about The Matrix movie, that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. The AI is trying to destroy humanity, right? So there’s this negative depiction about AI. But then you also have another segment out there, different people who are saying, “Well, that is one possible outcome, but there’s also the other possible outcome.” Which is because the AI is fundamentally being trained by humans, you have humans that are very altruistic, and it’s possible if the AI goes down the altruistic route.

Ernest de Leon:
I believe there’s a third option, it is possible that the AI, even though it’s trained by humans, will look at the situation and because of its nature, will automatically try to reach the best or the solution that is most in equilibrium. And it will turn out that it is a coexistence, right? Between an AI and humanity, and that each side benefits from the other.

Jolie Hales:
That’s so fascinating. You’ve been talking about the singularity, I’ve actually never heard the… I mean, I come from the entertainment industry, right? I’ve never heard the singularity and so I looked it up just now, and it looks like the technological singularity or the singularity as you said, is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to the human civilization. So in other words, it’s a hypothetical future where technology growth goes out of control and can’t be reversed.

Ernest de Leon:
And by the way, that’s a very negative portrayal of what the singularity actually is. The singularity is the point at which this thing essentially is able to not only think like a human, but perhaps even surpass human ability.

Jolie Hales:
Okay, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be a point where it destroys us all like in all the movies, it’s-

Ernest de Leon:
Well, I think that’s what the chief arguments are around this, right? There are people who believe that the singularity is in fact that event. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s the point where the intelligence reaches human parity or even exceeds it somewhat. And so you cannot put it back in the bag at that point because it’s now smarter than we are.

Jolie Hales:
Oh, my gosh.

Ernest de Leon:
The question is what happens next? Right? And that’s the hard part.

Jolie Hales:
That’s crazy. So most people believe this is a thing, this is going to happen, the question is more when than if.

Ernest de Leon:
I think most of us in this field believe that it’s a when, not an if. And that’s why I think there’s a lot of effort around trying to establish these ethical and legal frameworks ahead of time, right? Before we get there, because if we don’t, all that does is it leaves it open to abuse when that finally happens.

Jolie Hales:
It’s interesting as we talk about this, because looking at the list of movies that I’ve actually compiled of AI movies, right? A lot of these themes that we’re talking about are explored extensively in pretty much all of these movies, which is fascinating. So yes, I have a list of AI movies that I’ve gathered after extensive research on the interwebs because this is what I’m paid for.

Ernest de Leon:
Of course.

Jolie Hales:
And let’s go through this list in order of release dates, starting with the oldest movie about AI to the newest. Okay, you’re ready for this?

Ernest de Leon:
Yep.

Jolie Hales:
So the oldest movie that I could find that had to do with AI was actually a black and white feature called Metropolis that was made in 1927, have you seen this one?

Ernest de Leon:
I have never seen that one.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, so I had never seen it either but I watched some clips. And it was basically just an epic music score over moving pictures with a few tech slides here and there. But apparently, this movie has inspired everything from The Matrix to Blade Runner to Star Wars. And that’s because it shows this super stylized, futuristic utopian city. And I mean, as a filmmaker, I got to say the visuals for the time this film was made are pretty impressive, because I mean, they had to be incredibly creative with their limited resources. So as far as AI goes with Metropolis, apparently the plot of this movie involves a robot character called False Maria, who is this AI sort of being that ends up unleashing chaos.

Jolie Hales:
And I won’t give away the ending in case people care to go back and watch it because the entire movie is actually available to watch for free on YouTube. But this movie Metropolis showed the first robot ever depicted in a film, ever. And if you look at the robot, I want you to look at this robot and tell me Ernest, does this robot remind you of any other movie characters you’ve seen before?

Ernest de Leon:
Well, I mean, C-3PO.

Jolie Hales:
Yes. C-3PO of Star Wars was clearly inspired by this movie Metropolis. I mean, the False Maria robot, I swear looks like a female version of C-3PO.

Ernest de Leon:
And it’s funny because I remember seeing this in many, many different films.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, which is so fascinating that it came from the mind of one filmmaker, right? And then it really did influence all of the robot movies after that.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, the other thing I love to see is how in these older films, whenever they’re trying to portray something, like in this case, it’s an AI or robot, everything has human characteristics.

Jolie Hales:
It’s true.

Ernest de Leon:
Right? And I think that… obviously, it’s not the case with C-3PO. But most of the time they’re using that form factor to scare people.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, and we’re going to explore that with this list because it happens all the time. It’s like connecting it’s so much closer to home.

Ernest de Leon:
Right. No one’s scared of R2-D2, no one, right? But if C-3PO went rogue, you’d be scared a little.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, because he has eyes, he has a face.

Ernest de Leon:
Yes.

C-3PO:
I’ve just about had enough of you.

Jolie Hales:
But this movie Metropolis came out more than a decade before the first real robot was actually ever built. So these filmmakers were ahead of their time, not only with ideas behind robotics, but also with ideas about AI, they maybe didn’t know what it was so much then, but they had the same ideas. And in the 1950s, there was the black and white movie called The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951. I mean, have you heard of that one?

Ernest de Leon:
Yes, I actually saw that one, then I also saw the remake of it.

Jolie Hales:
Oh, was there a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still? I didn’t even know.

The Day the Earth Stood Still Movie Trailer:
Are you aware of an impending attack?

Jolie Hales:
Do you remember if you liked it? Or if it was any good?

Ernest de Leon:
It was an interesting movie.

Jolie Hales:
That could mean so many different things. It was interesting.

Ernest de Leon:
It was interesting. Like I said, I don’t remember what the remake was called.

Jolie Hales:
Maybe this will refresh your memory. So the main storyline with this movie, at least the 1951 version, is that a UFO apparently lands in Washington DC and introduces society to a soft spoken robot named Gort.

The Day the Earth Stood Still Movie Trailer:
He’s a robot. Without you, what could he do? There’s no limit to what he could do. He could destroy the earth.

Jolie Hales:
And I’m not really sure if the robot turns out to be good or bad or whatever. I mean, I have my guesses, it’s probably bad. But apparently, that robot has AI-ish qualities of sorts.

Ernest de Leon:
Yes. And now I’m actually remembering. The remake did happen and it had Keanu Reeves in it, one of my favorite actors. And the reason I remember the movie so well is because at least for the remake, this was alien-driven. And it was essentially a Noah’s Ark situation, the Earth was obviously going to be destroyed and so this other alien species showed up and was selecting certain humans and various things and taking them-

Jolie Hales:
To survive.

Ernest de Leon:
… to survive, right? The event.

Jolie Hales:
So what does Gort have to do with it?

Ernest de Leon:
I have no idea.

The Day the Earth Stood Still Remake Trailer:
Rescue task force [inaudible 00:22:50].

Jolie Hales:
The next one I came across was made in 1968. And I have a feeling this one will ring a bell for you. It’s called 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Ernest de Leon:
Absolutely. And this one I think most people have seen.

2001: A Space Odyssey Movie Trailer:
A shrieking monolith, deliberately buried by an alien intelligence starts man on a mission half a billion miles into space.

Ernest de Leon:
I think this is the one that actually set that entire thought train in motion of AI as being malevolent. I think this is where it starts.

Jolie Hales:
It is considered to be essential viewing.

Ernest de Leon:
For sure.

Jolie Hales:
Right? It’s one of the more critically acclaimed films on the AI lists. A lot of them are more of the Michael Bay Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi kind of movies, but this one was something that seemed to set some really interesting precedents in terms of thought when it comes to AI.

2001: A Space Odyssey Movie Trailer:
Controlling the mission is a talking computer known as HAL.

Amer:
Hal, you’re the brain and central nervous system of the ship, does this ever cause you any lack of confidence?

HAL:
Let me put it this way Mr. Amer, no 9,000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.

Jolie Hales:
It’s also being hailed, to your point, as being one of the most realistic or accurate AI portrayals in film history, which is saying something given that it was made in the 1960s.

Dave:
Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL:
I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Dave:
What are you talking about HAL?

HAL:
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

Jolie Hales:
And the synopsis is, “When astronauts are sent on a mysterious mission, their ship’s computer system, HAL, begins to display increasingly strange behavior leading up to a tense showdown between man and machine that results in a mind-bending trek through space and time.”

Ernest de Leon:
Yep, it is a great movie. And you said it’s kind of odd that this is from 1968, but back then when they didn’t have the tools to do CG, they had to rely a lot more on their storytelling ability.

Jolie Hales:
Which to be honest, I missed that because I feel like everything is so expensively cheap now.

Ernest de Leon:
No, that’s exactly right. They’re spending millions of dollars in CG and they’re truncating the story to try to rush it through. There’s definitely an appreciation for the older movies because they had to do a lot more with less.

Jolie Hales:
They had to rely on good storytelling and characters.

Ernest de Leon:
And not just that, but film angles, right? Because they didn’t have CG.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, and I mean, if anybody hasn’t seen this movie, it’s at least worth watching the trailer, which we’ll post on bigcompute.org. You can see just by the shots that are shown in the trailer itself why it is renowned like it is.

Ernest de Leon:
Exactly. And that’s why it stands up with Lavalantula and VelociPastor.

Jolie Hales:
I would guess that it passes them quite easily.

Ernest de Leon:
And the thing is, this happens a lot, right? So there’s a lot of AI movies, and this is the exact concept, that the AI becomes sentient and for whatever reason-

Jolie Hales:
Threatens to take out humans.

Ernest de Leon:
Not even threatens to take out humans, the human becomes scared that the AI is going to either do something bad, fall into the wrong hands, whatever the case is. And the human determines that they need to destroy the AI. Well, the AI knows this, figures it out-

Jolie Hales:
And then fights back.

Ernest de Leon:
… and then fights back. That’s everywhere.

Jolie Hales:
That’s the classic premise for half of these AI movies. And if you look at AI today, and what it actually is, it’s definitely a step away from what we see AI as being in a practical sense today, which is more of a bunch of programmers burning the midnight oil in some office building.

Sam Altman:
Honestly, there’s no way I can make this sound exciting. We show up every day and we bang on our computers, and we try to get algorithms to work and then we find out it was some stupid bug and we all get upset with each other.

Jolie Hales:
That’s my BFF, Sam Altman again.

Sam Altman:
No, it’s a little bit better than that. We are trying our hardest to discover what makes intelligence work. And we are trying to not think about how we get our applications a little bit better next year, but over sort of the long arc of history, what it takes to make machines that truly think.

Jolie Hales:
From supersonic jets to personalized medicine, industry leaders are turning to Rescale to power science and engineering breakthroughs. Rescale is a full stack automation solution for hybrid cloud that helps IT and HPC leaders deliver intelligent computing as a service and enables the enterprise transformation to digital R&D. As a proud sponsor of the Big Compute Podcast, Rescale would especially like to say thank you to all the scientists and engineers out there who are working to make a difference for all of us. Rescale, intelligent computing for digital R&D. Learn more at rescale.com/pcpodcast. Going back to the theme of adventure AI, 1970 brought us the movie called…

Colossus: The Forbin Project Movie Trailer:
Colossus: The Forbin Project.

Jolie Hales:
Where a secret massive intelligent computer system called Colossus is hidden away in the US Rocky Mountains to ensure the nation’s safety against a nuclear attack.

Colossus: The Forbin Project Movie Trailer:
The frightening story of the day man built himself out of existence.

Jolie Hales:
But then Colossus ends up connecting with a similar computer in Russia called the Guardian and chaos ensues. So it’s that plot again that we were talking about.

Colossus: The Forbin Project Movie Trailer:
The choices yours, obey me and live or disobey and die.

Ernest de Leon:
A lot of these were capitalizing on what we would now call the Red Scare.

Jolie Hales:
Totally.

Ernest de Leon:
Which is Russia’s the adversary, and it wasn’t just this. I mean, look at-

Jolie Hales:
It’s all kinds of movies.

Ernest de Leon:
Rocky IV was all about beating the Russians, right? So WarGames is something similar-

Jolie Hales:
WarGames?

Ernest de Leon:
WarGames, yeah.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, that was not on my list, but I know I left a few out.

WarGames Movie Trailer:
WarGames. It was the wrong computer. Shall we play a game?

Ernest de Leon:
The AI is, I think in NORAD, if I’m not mistaken, which is, I believe in the Rocky Mountains.

Jolie Hales:
It’s like the exact same movie, just 10 years later.

Ernest de Leon:
And it’s meant to protect us all from a nuclear attack from Russia.

Jolie Hales:
What the heck?

Ernest de Leon:
I think it’s the exact same movie. I obviously have never seen Colossus: The Forbin Project, but now that I’m thinking… I need to go watch it and then rewatch WarGames because one of them ripped off the other one.

Jolie Hales:
Well, Colossus came first.

Ernest de Leon:
Clearly. Now, WarGames has a little bit of a different tack. It didn’t connect to a computer in Russia. Anyway, I won’t give away the… I mean, it’s 1983, if you haven’t seen it by now. But clearly, there’s a lot of people who haven’t seen Lavalantula and VelociPastor, so I don’t want to ruin WarGames for you. But I’ll just tell you this, it was a very young Matthew Broderick in it.

WarGames Movie Trailer:
I don’t think that I deserved that F, do you?

Jolie Hales:
So in 1970, we’ve established that Colossus: The Forbin Project was released and then three years after that, 1973 brought us the movie…

Westworld Movie Trailer:
Westworld.

Jolie Hales:
Where western style theme park robots malfunction and then begin killing visitors.

Westworld Movie Trailer:
Where nothing, nothing can possibly go wrong. I’m shot. Go wrong. Draw. Go wrong. Oh, my god. Shut down, shut down immediately.

Jolie Hales:
So Ernest, if you haven’t seen that one, it sounds right down your alley.

Ernest de Leon:
Wasn’t there a new thing called Westworld on HBO recently, or something like that?

Jolie Hales:
I feel like there was something like that.

Ernest de Leon:
And it had to do with AI and robots.

Jolie Hales:
I bet you anything, it’s a remake.

Westworld HBO Series Trailer:
I think I made a mistake. So all creatures have been misbehaving.

Ernest de Leon:
This was a series, this wasn’t a movie, as far as I know.

Jolie Hales:
It was probably inspired by this, is my guess.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, I’ll definitely try to go back and watch this, if it will make it into my hall of fame, that’s another question.

Westworld Movie Trailer:
Boy, do we have a vacation for you, for you, for you, for you.

Jolie Hales:
And of course, we couldn’t talk about androids with the ability to think without mentioning…

Star Wars Movie Trailer:
Star Wars.

Jolie Hales:
C-3PO and R2-D2.

C-3PO:
Human cyborg relations.

Jolie Hales:
And then a host of all the other droids are AI style robots who are basically human characters in machine form, running all over those movies, whether it’s the original 1977 Star Wars film, one of the political thriller prequels, or the critically debated newer films, whether you like them or not, if it’s a Star Wars movie, it’s got humanistic droids in it.

Star Wars Movie Trailer:
These aren’t the droid we’re looking for.

Jolie Hales:
Which we now know were inspired by….

Ernest de Leon:
Metropolis.

Jolie Hales:
Metropolis. And far fewer people are aware of the other AI-related movie that came out the same year as the original Star Wars. This movie was called Demon Seed. And it’s about an AI system that takes its creators wife hostage and attempts to impregnate her in order to take on a human form. So a feel good movie.

Demon Seed Trailer:
It is something more than human, more than a computer. It is a murderously intelligent, sensually, self-programmed non-being.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, I’ve never seen that one, unfortunately.

Demon Seed Movie Trailer:
My child shall live as a man among others. Child? Yes. My child and yours.

Jolie Hales:
It kind of takes on the concept of a smart home a few decades before smart homes actually became a thing. And I know that you, Ernest, I mean, being the cyber security guru that you are, I mean, you don’t have a Google Home or an Alexa or digital locks or any of that stuff, right?

Ernest de Leon:
None of that. I have a dumb home, everything is analog.

Jolie Hales:
See, whereas since I am ignorant of many of the cybersecurity information that you have on a daily basis, I have a smart device in pretty much every room. And it’s connected to every light bulb, every TV in the house. So probably a hackers dream, frankly. But a lot of times I still spend so much time yelling at Google for getting my commands completely wrong and playing grunge metal when I’m trying to play music for my toddler or something. Play Cocomelon songs.

Ernest de Leon:
I want to make something clear, I’m not a technology troglodyte. Obviously, I work in the cutting edge of technology. It’s not that I don’t think I’ll ever have a smart anything, it’s that eventually this technology will get to the point where it is secure and able to be used in a context that I agree with, but right now the answer’s no. And that’s just from the security perspective. Everyone I know who has these things complains that they don’t understand them, or they do the wrong thing half the time or whatever the case is. And even though it’s been around for a while, and people think like, “Oh, yeah, this smart stuff’s been around for like a decade.” It still hasn’t even learned to crawl. So it’s going to take time. But eventually, like anything else, maybe a decade or two from now, it will be fully fledged and it will be everywhere, there’ll be no way to avoid it. But it will also have security.

Jolie Hales:
And then you’ll get one in your house.

Ernest de Leon:
I think by that point, I’ll be out in the ranch and not needing any of this.

Sam Altman:
Most people remember how bad it was five years ago, and people that use Siri or whatever had noticed that it gets a little bit better every year. Actually, a lot better every year. And now it basically doesn’t mess up even in difficult environments, or it doesn’t mess up appreciably more than humans mess up when they’re trying to understand.

Jolie Hales:
Do you at least use Siri?

Ernest de Leon:
If I do it’s usually for stupid stuff like set a 15 minute timer so I can come back and check on my roasted [inaudible 00:34:39] in the oven or something like that. I’m not having it tell me anything of importance, it’s just reminders, alarms and alerts.

Jolie Hales:
I use Google on my phone but I use it sounds like for a lot more than you do. But then I also have Bixby on my Samsung smartwatch and no offense to Samsung, I think they make a lot of good stuff but Bixby is dumb, I’m not a fan.

Ernest de Leon:
Well, Siri is dumb too, and actually I appreciate that about Siri. I know a lot of people would be like, “I don’t want a dumb assistant.” I know I want a dumb assistant, I want one that doesn’t know what I’m saying half the time but does know when I tell it to set a timer. That’s all I need.

Jolie Hales:
The smart devices, I mean, it’s good to say that they are just the beginning, I think, of where AI will take us and where AI has already landed.

Sam Altman:
I think one of the most exciting developments in the field in the last few years has been how good AI for natural language is getting, I think we are going to see an explosion in the next few years of systems that can really process, understand, interact with, generate language. And I think it will be the first way that people really feel powerful AI because you’ll be able to interact with the systems like you do by talking to somebody else, you’ll be able to have dialogue that actually makes sense, computers will be able to process huge volumes of text that are sort of very unstructured, and you as you interact with that system in whatever way you do, will get what you want.

Jolie Hales:
These quotes are all from Sam Altman in 2020. And even since then, progress has been made and announced in AI in terms of language. Specifically, OpenAI has this AI system that translates written language into code. It’s called Codex, which is kind of crazy to think about. I mean, speaking simply, if I understand it right, when you talk to Codex, it then uses your commands and your language to generate code for you so that you, the programmer, doesn’t have to do that. And it is basically like telling a computer what you want it to do and then having it act on your behalf.

Ernest de Leon:
That’s super interesting. It’s almost like they’re using AI for NLP to feed into an AI programming interface. So yeah, this is like inception. That’s awesome. I never even heard of that.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, it’s new. I just barely saw some articles on it over the last few months. And apparently, Codex is a descendant of GPT-3, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of that?

Ernest de Leon:
Yes, I have.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, that was pre-Codex. And that’s OpenAI’s vaunted natural language model. But Codex is trained on billions of lines of code in addition to written text. So I mean, obviously, these are some interesting things being done in the world of language for AI. Whereas I would say 40 years ago, in the 1980s, computers were just starting to really become a household option. I mean, I remember our first computer when I was really young, it was a DOS controlled computer, black screen, green texts. And with this option of having a household computer, came this new excitement in pop culture around the idea of computers and robots. And I don’t know about you, Ernest, but for me, the 1980s and the ’90s were totally my childhood years, and there’s this nostalgia around the movies from that particular time. And it surprised me going back how many of the AI-related movies actually kind of took off in a big way. For instance, Blade Runner in 1982, which everyone’s probably heard of.

Blade Runner Movie Trailer:
A Blade Runner’s job is to hunt down replicants, manufactured humans you can’t tell from the real thing.

Jolie Hales:
That movie is about bio-engineered replicas of humans powered by AI living amongst real humans, but then they only live for four years.

Ernest de Leon:
That’s a great movie. The remake is great.

Blade Runner 2049 Movie Trailer:
I had your job once, I was good at it.

Ernest de Leon:
But I’ll agree with you, the ’80s to me were the best decade-

Jolie Hales:
They were awesome.

Ernest de Leon:
… of all the decades I’ve lived in. I mean, I’m sure somebody will say the ’70s, the ’60s, I wasn’t alive, I’m sorry. You mentioned, computers were just coming into the home. My first one was a TI-99/4, you could not do very much with that thing, it wasn’t even DOS, but I was fascinated with that thing. And that’s how I learned how to program in basic, and then the toys of the era, right? Were-

Jolie Hales:
The toys, the action figures. I have the entire Ninja Turtles set with the turtle van and even the turtle boat and Rocksteady and Bebop.

80s Commercial:
It’s the turtles giving the old foot soldiers the boot with their latest invention, the cheap skate!

Ernest de Leon:
To me, what made the movies in general in the ’80s great was that, I think when the ’80s hit, and we started actually seeing computers at homes, storytellers started kind of focusing in, they were looking at the technology and saying, “If this thing advanced to do X, Y, and Z, what would that mean?” So I think it brought science fiction in general, not down to earth, but it made it more tangible, as opposed to more like pie in the sky. And that’s why I think the ’80s were the pinnacle of that because by the time we got to the late 90s and the early 2000s, Michael Bay ruined The Transformers.

Jolie Hales:
Oh, don’t get me started on Michael Bay. He also ruined the Ninja Turtles, and that is sacred ground.

Ninja Turtles (Remake) Movie Trailer:
So they’re aliens? No, that stupid. They’re ninjas.

Jolie Hales:
But when it comes to Blade Runner, yeah in the 1980s…

Blade Runner Movie Trailer:
What I didn’t know was they were looking for me.

Jolie Hales:
Blade Runner was pretty much renowned for its production design, which was futuristic and unique. And again, I didn’t know that it was also inspired heavily by the same movie from 1927.

Ernest de Leon:
Metropolis.

Jolie Hales:
Metropolis. And during the same year, there was also the movie, Tron.

Ernest de Leon:
Finally, we get here.

Tron Movie Trailer:
When Kevin Flynn, a computer genius, unlocks the dimension beneath the screen, he becomes a prisoner in a world of his own making.

Jolie Hales:
A talented computer engineer is transported to a digital world where he has to face off against the computerized likeness of his nemesis as well as the master control program. And I would venture to say I know there’s a remake, I liked the original Tron better than the remake.

Ernest de Leon:
You’re probably not alone, but not only did I like the remake better, I loved it way more than the original.

Jolie Hales:
What?

Ernest de Leon:
And that’s not to say anything negative about the original, I love that one too.

Jolie Hales:
Oh, man.

Tron Legacy Movie Trailer:
He said he was about to change everything, science, medicine, religion.

Ernest de Leon:
The thing I loved about the remake… so the movie is essentially like a two-hour long Daft Punk music video, which was amazing.

Jolie Hales:
And I’m not in love with Daft Punk like you are. So I was like, meh.

Ernest de Leon:
It was amazing, and two, is Jeff Bridges, right?

Jolie Hales:
Okay, Jeff Bridges, I’m a fan. I like him.

Ernest de Leon:
Jeff Bridges is awesome. And the fact that he brought The Dude into the Tron universe was golden.

Jeff Bridges in Tron Legacy:
I created a program in my own image that could think.

Ernest de Leon:
But the beautiful thing I think about this is where Jeff Bridges has a realization that as much as he knew, there was far more that he didn’t know. And he based an AI off of imperfect knowledge because he’s an imperfect human. And the whole thing just brings it all home in that there’s this fear that because we are imperfect, and we train the AI, it will also carry our imperfections, good and bad. But there’s an arc that ties across all of these AI stories that we’re talking about here, and it is the culmination of the human condition in AI. I think that this is the story that really matters in all of this.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, I totally agree. And there’s even more great stuff coming in the 1980s. In 1984, there was another one that I know that you appreciate, Ernest, The Terminator.

Ernest de Leon:
Absolutely.

Jolie Hales:
A total classic.

The Terminator Movie Trailer:
In the 21st century, a weapon will be invented like no other.

Jolie Hales:
Where Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the role of a cyborg assassin who travels to 1984 from 2029 to kill the person who will eventually give birth to a son who will then I guess, fight against Skynet, the artificial intelligence system that will ultimately spark a nuclear holocaust. I always love when old movies try to portray the future like 2029, that’s only eight years.

Ernest de Leon:
Eight years away. Yeah, the Terminator is actually a great franchise. But I go back to, our biggest problem with AI is we’re projecting our imperfections and our faults onto it. And the Terminator was one of the first ones that I can remember, where they took a little bit of a different tack, they allowed the AI to just… again, it took a negative view of AI, which is what most movies do, but the difference is, they let it play out and then it was an attempt to correct the mistake.

The Terminator Movie Trailer:
I’ll be back.

Jolie Hales:
And then after the Terminator, family friendly movies really started to jump into the AI game, movies like Short Circuit.

Ernest de Leon:
Yep.

Short Circuit Movie Trailer:
Number five is alive.

Jolie Hales:
In 1986.

Ernest de Leon:
I love that movie.

Jolie Hales:
Really? That’s awesome.

Short Circuit Movie Trailer:
Artificial Intelligence has gotten too smart. It’s malfunctioning, it might not do anything. But it could decide to blow away anything that moves, couldn’t it?

Jolie Hales:
It’s about an experimental military robot that’s struck by lightning and comes to life. And then also Flight of the Navigator, I don’t know if you remember that one in the same year.

Ernest de Leon:
I love that one. And that little spaceship that could reconfigure itself.

Jolie Hales:
Yes, about a 12-year-old boy who wakes up in a forest and apparently he discovers that eight years have passed without him aging and then he hops into that spaceship you’re talking about. And I think he talks to an AI sort of robot to try and unravel this mystery of the life he lost or something, it sounds like you remember it.

Flight of the Navigator Movie Trailer:
A story of a spaceship. That flying saucer’s first rate. Be cool, dudes. A friendship. I’m going to miss you. I’m going to miss you too. And an experience beyond imagination.

Jolie Hales:
I remember loving Flight of the Navigator as a kid but I don’t remember the plot very well. I just picture that spaceship thing morphing into a bullet like shape and then traveling really fast, and I don’t know, I feel like there was like a big eyeball or light robot thing, which is probably the AI that we’re talking about.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah. And it was just kind of hovering around. It was on an arm, it was on an arm.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, yeah. On an arm.

Flight of the Navigator Movie Trailer:
I’m not going to let you try this out on me, what if you fry my brain? I will not fry your brain. How do you know? I have been programmed with superior intelligence.

Jolie Hales:
And then I remember some Jim Henson type puppet creatures, I don’t know, am I in the ballpark here?

Ernest de Leon:
No, you’re right. You’re right. And it’s funny because this spaceship, it wasn’t just that it could fly, essentially, it had anti-gravity, it could just hover.

Jolie Hales:
Oh, yeah.

Ernest de Leon:
It had no engines, it was able to manipulate gravity, yet representing the AI was on an arm floating around inside of that thing, you figure that thing would have hovered inside too.

Jolie Hales:
But they had to do that in order to make the effect work.

Ernest de Leon:
Right, right. Yeah, the technology of the time. But these movies inspired a whole bunch of future movies, and not just movies, but concepts. So one of the things that I remember, at least to me, the first place I had ever seen it was in Fight of the Navigator was when he was ready to get in there, essentially, it took the back of its shell and morphed it into a staircase. And he was able to climb in and then it-

Jolie Hales:
Oh, my gosh, I remember that now.

Ernest de Leon:
It was almost like a liquid metal.

Jolie Hales:
Yes.

Ernest de Leon:
It reminded me of more recently, I don’t know if you watch the newest Star Trek series, Discovery.

Jolie Hales:
I have not.

Ernest de Leon:
Another one which I’m a huge fan of.

Jolie Hales:
Shocker.

Ernest de Leon:
They just in last season introduced the concept of programmable matter, which essentially is that.

Jolie Hales:
Flight of the Navigator morphing mercury-looking liquid?

Ernest de Leon:
Right. In this case, it’s not mercury, but the concept is the same. There’s matter that you can program, you can essentially tell the matter what shape to take.

Flight of the Navigator Movie Trailer:
Sit down. I think there’s been some sort of mistake. Your brain contains data necessarily to get me and my friends home. I’m just a kid. You are the navigator.

Jolie Hales:
I want to go back and see if that movie holds up.

Ernest de Leon:
Probably not.

Jolie Hales:
I doubt it does.

Ernest de Leon:
I made the unfortunate mistake a couple of years ago of going back to watch The Neverending Story. I was devastated. I was like, “Man, I loved this movie as a kid.”

Jolie Hales:
That says a lot because you like all the garbage movies.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, so I try not to go back and watch ’80s movies, but that’s the ones that I know. Short Circuit holds up.

Jolie Hales:
Or Back to the Future.

Ernest de Leon:
Or Back to the Future.

Jolie Hales:
Those are awesome.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, but these Sci-Fi fantasy type things didn’t really hold up. Even the… it was The Dark Crystal.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, with the little Jim Henson puppet things.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, even that one, going back, it’s like, “This is terrible. This is terrible.”

The Dark Crystal Movie Trailer:
In a place outside time, where good and evil struggle to possess The Dark Crystal.

Jolie Hales:
There were two more classic AI movies that sprung up in 1987. So RoboCop.

Robocop Movie Trailer:
Your move, creep.

Jolie Hales:
About a cyborg cop who turns on his evil creators when he learns of their nefarious plans.

Robocop Movie Trailer:
You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. Anything you say may be used against you.

Jolie Hales:
And the TV movie by Disney, I don’t know if you ever saw this, but I was obsessed. Not quite human, and then the sequels.

Not Quite Human Movie Promo:
A scientist has just come up with his greatest invention. Hi, dad. Alan Thicke creates the ultimate kid, but he’s not quite human.

Jolie Hales:
These movies were probably so bad, but I loved them. They were about an inventor who sends his daughter to high school with his latest creation, a robot teen named Ship, so your classic teen Disney TV stuff, but with a robot.

Not Quite Human Movie:
How do you feel? Feel? Yeah, I mean, when Becky said she couldn’t go to the dance with you, what was your reaction? It was something heavy right in my central computer.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, I highly doubt they would hold up.

Ernest de Leon:
Probably not. And even RoboCop, I wouldn’t put it in the realm of AI simply because the intelligence portion of that thing was still a human brain.

Jolie Hales:
Oh, see, I haven’t seen RoboCop in so long, I couldn’t remember.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, it’s still a cyborg, don’t get me wrong. I guess if you want to make that connection that the human brain was relying on electronics to do it, then yes, you could make that argument.

Jolie Hales:
Then it could be AI. There’s a couple other movies on this list that you’ll probably say the same thing about then.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, but RoboCop, they essentially shot off, I think his arms and legs if I’m not mistaken, but his torso and head were intact. So that’s what made it into the robot frame. So it was him inside of there. As a matter of fact, that’s a key part of the movie because at a certain point, he goes rogue so to speak, and it’s because his human brain is overpowering the-

Jolie Hales:
The cyborg side.

Ernest de Leon:
The cyborg side.

Jolie Hales:
So then does he turn into a good cop? He becomes a good RoboCop, right? It’s not a AI gone bad, it’s more like a human hybrid cyborg that goes good.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah. So what ends up happening is he goes from being told what to do and carrying out every instruction exactly as told, regardless of what we would consider the morality or the ethics around it, to essentially a Robin Hood type, obviously not stealing or anything, but just he’s now-

Jolie Hales:
But helping the unfortunate against the powers that be.

Ernest de Leon:
He’s now just purely good. And he does what he does to do the right thing, not because someone told him to do it.

Jolie Hales:
I see. Okay, that sounds like a good ’80s movie plot.

Ernest de Leon:
Oh, yeah, that was great.

Robocop Movie Trailer:
This guy’s really good. He’s not a guy, he’s a machine.

Jolie Hales:
So nowadays, our practical use that we’re seeing of AI is smart speakers, email providers that can anticipate the next words that we plan to write. And we haven’t really seen these sorts of AI cyborgs that have been represented in these types of movies. And just going back to Sam Altman on what’s actually happening in AI, Sam believes that there is an AI revolution that is definitely coming, and it’s probably around the corner.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, I would agree with him.

Sam Altman:
I think there have been three great technological revolutions so far in human history, the agricultural revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. I think we are now in the early innings of the AI revolution. And I expect that one to be bigger than all three previous ones put together. I’m thinking understanding intelligence, that really is what makes humans humans, much more than our ability to get physical stuff done in the world. And so I think this is going to be a huge deal and impact life in a lot of ways.

Ernest de Leon:
We talk about cloud high performance computing, and the simulations we run in there, right? And when you pair AI with that, you start getting predictive analysis. So traditional simulation is one where I put parameters in, and then there’s an output. I go look at the output and I’m like, “This is not really what I expected, or what I wanted, or what I thought, I’m going to put a different set of parameters and run it.” And where AI comes in, is AI kind of sits in the middle but earlier in that process, it’s looking at the bulk of the simulations you’ve run before, all of them, right? And what it’s doing is it’s saying, “Based on the 10,000 simulations you’ve run before this, the parameters you’re putting in for this are most likely going to result in this, and that’s not what you’re looking for. So let’s not run that simulation.” And so what it’s doing is it’s trying to narrow down the number of simulations you have to run to get to this stated goal, right? So instead of running 100 or 1,000 simulations to get something that you want, it’s trying to narrow that down to 10, that’s just an example. So it’s putting predictive analytics against simulation. So everything we do in computing, period, but specifically in HPC and in AI, is bound by two things, right? Our capabilities around electrical engineering and mechanical engineering, more specifically, material science and semiconductor design, right? These are the two areas that kind of drive all of this. And right now, both of those are very much not AI-driven, there are some, I would say low level AI things being done, but they’re not quite to where I would consider it was full AI.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, I agree with you.

Ernest de Leon:
And when we get to the point where we have solid AI, it’s literally going to change the world. It’s not just a revolution in terms of what AI can do, but just imagine this, the high performance simulations we run in the cloud, right? They can only run as fast as the hardware that we have behind them. The hardware that we’re designing, the semiconductor design is happening on the current generation of semiconductors, right? So the current generation of processors, memory, RAM, all that stuff. Once this cycle starts feeding into itself, the speed at which our material science and semiconductor design accelerates, results in a pattern where the technology is actually advancing faster than we can use it.

Jolie Hales:
Interesting.

Ernest de Leon:
Right? And that is where we will truly change the world because we’re now not hamstrung by our own ability as humans to design these things. We now have the ability for AI to do it at a speed that we cannot even compare with.

Jolie Hales:
Interesting. Yeah, I see what you’re saying. And I imagine that that would come with an entire package of challenges, you could say, I know that there’s already a lot of talk about fears that AI is going to take away jobs, they say. And I will get out a little bit of a soapbox here, it’s my personal belief that AI probably will take over a lot of jobs, right? For instance, self-driving cargo transport might not need a human driver anymore, for obvious reasons. But I guess I tend to err on the optimistic side of this because I feel like humans will always adapt. And once you learn a skill, who’s to say you can’t transfer that skill to another area or even learn another skill? I mean, that’s the nice thing about human beings, is that we’re capable of doing more than just one type of thing, right? And so it’s my opinion that advances in technology shouldn’t be feared, but maybe more carefully planned for and ultimately embraced for a better future if we can continue moving in that direction kind of safely, if that makes sense.

Ernest de Leon:
I agree with you. But I would take it a little further, I would say the vast majority of people’s jobs are going to be taken by AI in the next 40, 50 years. And I mean over 90%.

Jolie Hales:
Wow.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, because think about it, the reason we needed these large labor forces historically, was primarily for physical labor, I realized that that’s changed and there’s a lot of other types of jobs now. But the reality is, with just about any of those, a machine that has the correct capabilities built into it can do it better than a human, period. There are a few [inaudible 00:55:26] that’s not the case, right? And I acknowledge that. But the vast majority of things, like you talked about transit, right? Farming, even service industry jobs like serving food, all these kinds of things can be done better by an AI, better by a robot, we just don’t have the technology to fully do that yet.

Jolie Hales:
True.

Ernest de Leon:
That technology is coming. And not only is it going to be more effective, it’s going to be more efficient, and it’s also going to be safer, right? So a lot of the jobs that are dangerous out there-

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, I do like that.

Ernest de Leon:
… humans won’t have to do anymore.

Jolie Hales:
Like just driving.

Ernest de Leon:
Exactly.

Jolie Hales:
You know what I mean? A huge cause of death are car accidents because people make mistakes, and if you make a mistake while you’re behind the wheel of a giant machine that’s going at 70 miles an hour, that could end up in a really bad result for you, or some random person who isn’t making mistakes.

Ernest de Leon:
Exactly.

Jolie Hales:
So I mean, there are definitely advantages to taking this technology to the next level. And I feel like those advantages could be beneficial enough to make it worth it.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah. And there are already people discussing this problem, right? Because we have known for at least a decade now, probably more like two, that this was going to happen, that eventually, we were going to automate just about every single human out of a job. And it wasn’t like it was an intentional, malicious thing to do, we just knew that technology on its own path was going to do that. Once the science is there, you can’t put it back in the box, right? So this is going to happen. It’s one of those things where all of us have to think about this, right? And what it means and what we’re going to do about it. And I think that’s a great thing that Sam is doing here, is kind of like trying to put this in the consciousness of as many people as possible, and not trying to drive an agenda one way or the other, just saying, “You need to think about this and what’s going to happen and figure out how you’re going to respond to it. Because if you get caught at the point where this stuff takes over, and you have not thought about it, it’s going to be really hard to deal with it.”

Sam Altman:
I also believe that as hard as it was the time of the industrial revolution to imagine the jobs of computer programmers working at Big Compute, it’s hard for us to sit here and think about what the jobs on the other side of this will be, but human demand, desire, its creativity seems pretty limitless. And I think we will find new things to do. Betting against AI has always been a mistake.

Jolie Hales:
And I think everybody who knows anything about AI has a certain place on kind of the viewpoint spectrum, be it more optimistic or more pessimistic. And while we have some ideas of what AI is going to look like, we don’t know exactly what a world filled with AI will look like yet.

Sam Altman:
I think it’s very hard to think about what the world definitively looks like when computers are more intelligent in some ways than humans or when computers can do most work that humans can. So the only prediction I can make with confidence is that things will be very different. And anyone, I think, who says we’re going to keep everything the same is lying. But although change is inevitable, we can work really hard to make sure the future although it’s guaranteed to be different is better.

Jolie Hales:
And I think that’s a good cliffhanger to leave this episode on. And then we’ll pick up next time.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, we still have a lot more AI movies to go through.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking when I thought that we could talk about all of them in less than an hour, that’s not going to be a thing.

Ernest de Leon:
No, after all, we’re not AI. And if you want to check out some of the movie trailers we’ve been talking about, visit bigcompute.org.

Jolie Hales:
Yes. And you can also see Sam Altman’s full talk there. And with that, tune in next time to hear more about where AI is going compared to where Hollywood thinks it’s going. I feel like I’m a Saturday morning advertiser. Tune in next time.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, we’re selling a weight loss pills on a radio station, that’s what it comes down to. And to help spread the word, you can leave a review for us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Jolie Hales:
Or tell a friend.

Ernest de Leon:
And always remember to use MFA and 3-2-1 backup.

Jolie Hales:
Stay safe out there.