SIRI’S INVENTOR PONDERS ‘ A GIANT BRAIN IN THE SKY’
Leading tech figures wrestle with how humanity should deal with looming moral questions
Science and technology have always cut with doubleedged swords, capable of both propelling humanity to new achievements while threatening us with potential catastrophe.
That chilling theme was explored by two leading technologists at SXSW Interactive, a festival that has seen its share of humans rising against the machines.
While no protests were in evidence so far this year — in 2015 a group called Stop the Robots demonstrated against an automated future — there’s still time. The 30th edition of SXSW is rife with provocative sessions such as Can AI Systems Really Think? and Androids and Future Life.
In separate talks, the promise and pitfalls of both DNA sequencing and artificial intelligence were laid out by quantum physicist turned human genome expert Riccardo Sabatini and telecom veteran turned entrepreneur Dag Kittlaus, who developed the virtual personal assistant Siri and sold it to a persistent Steve Jobs in 2010.
“It is important to prevent the bad side,” Kittlaus, 49, said during his cheerfully titled talk, Will AI Augment or Destroy Humanity? “It’s a good idea to keep an eye on this.”
When the moderator, tech author Steven Levy, asked Kittlaus if in fact supercomputers might not take over for entrepreneurs, using their digital brains to create things faster than humans, Kittlaus nodded.
“Yes, it will happen,” he said. “It’s just a matter of when.”
Kittlaus, it can be argued, is hastening the arrival of that day. Later this year, he will unveil Viv, an open source and cloud- based personal assistant that will allow humans “to talk to the Internet” and have the Internet talk back.
“The more you ask of Viv, the more it will get to know you,” he
said. “Siri was chapter one, and now it’s almost like a new Internet age is coming. Viv will be a giant brain in the sky.”
Kittlaus said Viv would differ from Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Echo by being able to make mental leaps.
For example, asking Viv “What’s the weather near the Super Bowl” would cause it to “write its own program to find the answer, one that first determines where the Super Bowl is and then what the weather will be in that city,” he said.
Levy laughed. “So,” he said, “if I stumble out of a bar and just say ‘ I’m drunk,’ will it callme an Uber?”
Kittlaus smiled. “It might, or it might order you another drink.”
Such levity aside, privacy and security issues pop to mind when considering a cloud- based system that’s gobbling up data to create a digitized picture of our lives.
Apple’s current battle with the FBI over providing code to crack open a killer’s iPhone is one matter; granting access to a thinking machine that is privy to a person’s smallest details would be quite another.
Kittlaus’ answer to a question about secure data was less than convincing: “It will be up to you to tell it what you want to tell it.”
On the topic of DNA sequencing, humans will have to bear the responsibility of ethically handling coming leaps, said Sabatini, 34, a researcher who captivated TED 2016 lastmonth with a lecture that found him hauling 175 thick books on stage — the full genetic make- up of DNA- sequencing pioneer J. Craig Venter. Sabatini works for Venter’s company, Human Longevity Inc.
“We should as a species get informed, because this is a controversial topic,” the Italian scientist said. “We need to come to an ethical understanding, or we might get to an unhealthy story.”
Sabatini said that as we understand more about our genetic makeup — of which “only about 1% is clear to us” — therewill be the opportunity not only to check for potential diseases before they ravage the body, but also to genetically modify a future human to havemore appealing traits. Call it man- made Darwinism.
Pressed by moderator and entrepreneur Loic Le Meur about a rogue scientist or state manipulating the genes in fertilized eggs to create a race of superbabies, Sabatini demurred.
“Sure, these are the worst ideas we can have,” he said. “One thing is reading the genome, another is changing it. That is not genetics, it’s selection.”