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Language: en
you were the chief scientist of Hanson
robotics you're still involved with
Hanson robotics doing a lot of really
interesting stuff there this is for
people who don't know the company that
created Sophia the robot can you tell me
who Sophia is I'd rather start by
telling you who David Hanson is David is
the brilliant mind behind this Sophia
roba and he remains so far he remains
more interesting than his creation
although although she may be improving
faster than he yeah so yeah I make a
point I met David maybe 2007 or
something at some futurist conference we
were both speaking it and I could see we
had a great great deal in common I mean
we were both kind of crazy but we also
we both had a passion for AGI and and
the singularity and we're both huge fans
of the work of the science fiction
writer and I wanted to create benevolent
AGI that would you know create massively
better life for all humans and all
sentient beings including animals plants
and superhuman beings and David he
wanted exactly the same thing but he had
a different idea of how to do it he
wanted to get computational compassion
like he wanted to get machines that that
would would love people and empathize
with people and he thought the way to do
that was to make a machine that could
know look people either eye face to face
look at look at people and make people
love the machine and the machine loves
the people back so I thought that was a
very different way of looking at it
because I'm very math oriented you know
I'm just thinking like what is the
abstract cognitive algorithm that will
let this system you know internalize the
complex patterns of human values blah
blah blah whereas he's like look you in
the face in the eye and love you so I we
hit it off quite well and we talked to
each other off and on then I moved to
Hong Kong
in 20 2011 so I've been I mean I've been
I've been living all over the place I've
been in Australia and New Zealand and my
academic career then in the Las Vegas
for a while within New York in the late
90s starting my my entrepreneurial
career within DC for nine years doing a
bunch of US government consulting stuff
then moved to Hong Kong in 2011 mostly
because I met a Chinese girl who I fell
in love with him we got married she's
actually not from Hong Kong he's from
him lunch on but we converged together
in Hong Kong so married now have a have
a two-year-old babyhood I went to Hong
Kong to see about a girl I guess yeah
pretty pretty pretty much yeah and on
the other hand I started doing some cool
research there with Gino you at Hong
Kong Polytechnic University I got
involved with a project called idea
using machine learning for stock and
futures prediction which was quite
interesting and I also got to know
something about the consumer electronics
and hardware manufacturer ecosystem in
Shenzhen across the border which is like
the only place in the world that makes
sense to make complex consumer
electronics at large scale in low costs
it's just it's astounding the hardware
ecosystem the oven in in South China
like you u.s. key people here cannot
imagine with it with it with it's like
so David was starting to explore that
also I invited him to Hong Kong to give
a talk at Hong Kong Paulo you and I
introduced him in Hong Kong just some
investors who were interested in his
robots and he didn't have Sofia then he
had a robot of philip k dick our
favorite science fiction writer he had a
robot Einstein he had some little toy
robots that looked like his his son Zeno
so through the investors I connected him
to he managed to get some funding to
basically port Hanson robotics to Hong
Kong and when he first moved to Hong
Kong I was working on a GI Research and
also on this machine learning trading
project so I didn't get that tightly
involved with with Hanson robotics but
as as I hung out with David more and
more as we were both there in the same
place I started to get
I start to think about what you could do
to make his robots smarter than they
were and so we started working together
and for a few years I was chief
scientist and head of software at that
Hanson robotics then when I got deeply
into the blockchain side of things I
stepped back from that and co-founded
and singularity net david henson was
also one of the cofounders of
singularity in that so part of our goal
there had been to make the blockchain
based like cloud 9 platform for sofia
and the other other ever her sofia will
be just one of the robots in this in a
singularity net yeah yeah yeah exactly
exactly Sofia many copies of the Sofia
robot would would would be you know
among the user interfaces to the
globally distributed the singularity net
cloud mind and I mean David and I talked
about that for quite a while before
co-founding singularity by the way in
his in his vision and your vision was
was Sofia tightly coupled to a
particular AI system or was the idea
that you can plug oh he's just so keep
plugging in different systems but then
not everyone David's David's if you was
always that Sofia would be a platform
much like say the pepper robot is a
platform from Softbank should be a
platform with a set of nicely designed
api's that anyone can use to experiment
with their different AI algorithms on
that platform and singularity net of
course fits right into that right
because singular unit it's an API
marketplace so anyone can put their AI
on their OpenCog is a little bit
different I mean David likes it but I'd
say it's my thing it's not his like
David has a little more passion for
biologically based approaches to AI than
I do which which makes sense I mean he's
really into human physiology and Bal
Jesus character sculptor right yeah so
yeah he's interested in but he also
worked a lot with rule-based and logic
based AI systems too so yeah he's
interested in
not just Sofia but Albin Hansson robots
as a powerful social and emotional
robotics platform and you know what I
saw in Sofia was a way to you know get
AI algorithms out there in front of a
whole lot of different people in an
emotionally compelling way and part of
my thought was really kind of abstract
connected to AGI ethics and you know
many people are concerned AGI is gonna
enslave everybody or turn everybody into
into computronium to make extra hard
drives further their cognitive engine or
whatever and you know emotionally I'm
not driven to that sort of paranoia I'm
really just an optimist by nature but
intellectually I have to assign the
nonzero probability to those sorts of
nasty outcomes because if you're making
something 10 times as smart as you how
can you know what it's gonna do there's
an irreducible answer uncertainty there
just as my dog can't predict what I'm
gonna do tomorrow so it seemed to me
that based on our current state of
knowledge the best way to bias the AG is
we create toward benevolence would be to
infuse them with love and compassion the
way the way that we do our own children
so you want to interact with ai's in the
context of doing compassionate loving
and beneficial things and in that way as
your children will learn by doing
compassionate beneficial loving things
along side you and that way the AI will
learn in practice what it means to be
compassionate beneficial and loving it
will get a sort of ingrained intuitive
sense of this which you can then
abstract in the in its own way as it
gets more and more intelligent now david
saw this the same way that's why he came
up with the name sophia which means
which means wisdom so it seemed to me
making these like beautiful loving
robots to be rolled out for beneficial
applications
would be the perfect way to roll out
early-stage
AGI systems so they can learn from
people and not just learn fact from the
homes but learn human human values and
ethics from people while being their you
know their home service robots their
education assistants their nursing
robots so that that was the grand vision
know if you've ever worked with robots
the reality is is quite different right
like the first principle is the robot is
always broken working I mean I work with
robots in the 90s a bunch and you had to
solder them together yourself and I put
neuron that's doing reinforcement
learning on like overturned solid ball
type robots and in the 90s when I was a
professor things of course advanced a
lot but but the principal stole the
robots always broken stole yeah yes so
faced with the reality of making Sophia
do stuff many of my Robo AGI aspirations
were temporarily cast aside and and I
mean there's just a practical problem of
making this robot interact in the
meaningful way cuz like you know you put
nice computer vision on there but
there's always glare and then the or it
you have a dialog system but at the time
I was there like no speech-to-text
algorithm could deal with Hong Kong Hong
Hong Kong ease people's English accents
yeah so the the speech detect was always
bad so the robot always sounded stupid
yeah because it wasn't getting the right
text right so I started to view that
really as what what in software
engineering you call a walking skeleton
which is maybe the wrong metaphor to use
for Sophia or maybe the right one but I
mean with a walking skeleton is and
software development is if you're
building a complex system how do you get
started but one way is to first build
part one well then build part - well
then build part three well and so on
another way if you make like a simple
version of the whole system and put
something in the place of every part the
whole system will need so that you have
a whole system that does something and
then you work on improving each part in
the context of that whole integrated
system so that's what we did on the
software level in Sophia we made like a
walking sky
software system were so there's
something that sees there's something
that hears there's something that moves
there's something that there's something
that remembers there's something that
learns you put a simple version of each
thing in there and you connect them all
together so that the system will do its
thing so there's there's a lot of AI AM
there there's not any AGI in there I
mean there's computer vision to
recognize people's faces recognize when
someone comes in the room and leaves
trying to recognize whether two people
are together or not I mean the dialog
system it's a mix of like hand-coded
rules with deep neural Nets that come
out with with whether with their own
responses and there's some attempt to
have a narrative structure and sort of
try to pull the conversation into
something with a beginning beginning
middle and end in this sort of story arc
so it's I mean like if you look at the
lubna prize and the systems that beat
the Turing test currently they're
heavily rule-based because like you had
said narrative structure to create
compelling conversations you currently
neural networks cannot do that well even
what Google Mena when you actually look
at full-scale conversations issues yeah
this is the thing so we've been I've
actually been running an experiment the
last couple weeks taking Sophia's
chatbot and then the Facebook's
transformer chat bot which they open the
model we've had them chatting to each
other for a number of weeks on the
server just that's funny
we're generating training data of what
Sophia says in a wide variety of
conversations but we can see compared to
Sophia's current chat bot the Facebook
deep neural chat bot comes up with a
wider variety of fluent sounding
sentences on the other hand it rambles
like mad this sophia chat bot it's a
little more repetitive in in the
sentence structures it uses on the other
hand it's able to keep like a
conversation arc over a much longer
longer period right so they're know you
can probably surmount that using
reformer and like eat using various
other deep neural architectures and to
improve the way these transform
are trained but in the end neither one
of them really understands what's going
on and I mean that's the challenge I had
with Sophia is if I were doing a
robotics project aimed at AGI I would
make like a robo toddler that was just
learning about what it was seeing
because then the language is grounded in
the experience of the robot but what
Sophia needs to do to be Sophia is talk
about sports or the weather or robotics
or the conference she's talking at but
yeah she needs to be fluent talking
about any damn thing in the world and
she doesn't have grounding for all for
all those all those things so there's
there's this just like I mean Google
Mena and Facebook's chat but I don't
have grounding for what they're talking
about about either so in a way the need
to speak fluently about things where
there's no non linguistic grounding
pushes what you can do for Sophia in the
short term a bit a bit away from from
Asia I mean pushes you towards I'd be in
Watson situation where you basically
have to heuristic and hardcore stuff a
rule-based though I have to ask you
about this okay so because you know in
in part Sophia as I can is an art
creation because it's beautiful it's
she's beautiful because she inspires
through our human nature of
anthropomorphize things we immediately
see an intelligent being there because
David is a great sculptor is this Gary
Salter that's right so in fact if Sophia
just had nothing inside her head said
nothing if she just sat there
we already prescribed some intelligence
- it's a long selfie line in front of
her after every time that's right so it
captivated the imagination of the of
many people I was gonna say the world
but yeah I mean a lot of people and
billions of people which is amazing it's
amazing right now of course many people
prescribed much great prescribe
essentially GI type of capabilities to
Sophia when they see here and of course
friendly French folk like Yamla kun
immediately see that of the people from
the AG community and get really
frustrated because understandable so
what and then they criticize people like
you who sit back and don't say anything
about like basically allow the
imagination of the world allow the world
to continue being captivated so what
what's your what's your sense of that
kind of annoyance that the AI community
has I think there's several parts to my
reaction there
first of all if I weren't involved with
Hanson robots and didn't know David
Hanson personally I probably would have
been very annoyed initially at Sophia as
well I mean I can understand the
reaction I would have been like wait all
these stupid people out there think this
is an AGI yeah but it's not an AGI but
they're tricking people that this very
cool robot is an AGI and now those of us
you know trying to raise funding to
build AGI you know people will think
it's already there already works right
so I yeah on the other hand I think even
if I weren't directly involved with it
once I dug a little deeper into David
and the robot and the intentions behind
it I think I would have stopped being
being pissed off worse folks like young
McCune have remained pissed off after
their after their after their initial
well he and they're in this thing that's
this thing yeah I think that in
particular struck me as somewhat ironic
because young McCune is working for
Facebook which is using machine learning
to program the brains of the people in
the world toward vapid consumerism and
political extremism so if if your ethics
allows you to use machine
learning in such a blatantly destructive
way why would your ethics not allow you
to use machine learning to make a
lovable theatrical robot that draws some
foolish people into its theatrical
illusion like if if if the if the
pushback had come from yoshua bengio I
would have felt much more humbled by it
because he's he's not using AI for
blatant evil right on the other hand he
also is a super nice guy and doesn't
bother to go out there trashing other
other people's work for no good reason
shots fired but I'm gonna answer for
sure I think we'll go back and forth
I'll talk to you on again I would add on
this though I mean David Hanson is an
artist and he often speaks off-the-cuff
and I have not agreed with everything
that David has said or done regarding
Sofia and David also was not agree with
everything David has said I don't know
about about foreign point I mean David
David is an artistic wild men and that's
that's that's part of his charm that
that's that's part of his genius so
certainly there have been conversations
with enhancing robotics in between me
and David where I was like let's let's
be more open about how this thing is
working and I did have some influence in
nudging Henson robotics to be more open
about about how Sofia was working and
and David wasn't especially opposed to
this and you know he was actually quite
right about it what he said was you can
tell people exactly how it's working and
they won't care they want to be drawn
into the illusion and he was 100% 100%
correct I'll tell you what yeah this
wasn't Sofia this was philip k dick but
we did some interactions between humans
and philip k dick robot in austin texas
a few years back and in this case the
folk connect was just tell about another
human in the other room so during the
conversations we didn't tell people the
robot was teller operated
we just said here have a conversation
with Phil dick we're gonna film you
right and they had a great conversation
with Phil kaduk
tell operated by my friend stefano guy
after the conversation we brought the
people in the back room to see Stefan
who was controlling the the philip k
dick robot but they didn't believe it
these people were like well yeah but I
know I was talking to Phil like yeah
maybe Stefan was typing but the spirit
of phil was animating his mind while he
was typing yeah so like even though they
knew was a human in the loop even seeing
the guy there they still believe that
was Phil they were talking to her a
small part of me believes that they were
right actually because our understand
well we don't understand the universe I
mean there is a cosmic mind field that
we're all embedded in that yields many
strange synchronicities in the world
which is a topic we don't have time to
go into too much I mean there's there's
some nature there's something to this
where our imagination about Sophia and
people yet young Laocoon being
frustrated about it is all part of this
beautiful dance of creating artificial
intelligence that's almost essential you
see with Boston Dynamics I'm a huge fan
of as well you know the kind of I mean
these robots are very far from
intelligent I played with their last was
a spot meeting yeah very cool yeah it
reacts quite in the fluid and flexible
way but we immediately ascribe the kind
of intelligence we media describe a GI
to them yeah yeah if you kick it and it
falls down and goes out you feel bad
right you'll get help and I mean that's
that's that's part of that's gonna be
part of our journey in creating
intelligent systems more and more and
more and more like as Sofia starts out
with a walking skeleton is you add more
and more intelligence I mean we're gonna
have to deal with this kind of idea
lutely enough about Sofia I would say I
mean first of all I have nothing against
young look you know this is fun this is
all nice guys
if you if he wants to play the media
media banter game
I'm happy to play he's a good researcher
and and a good human being he'd happily
work with the guy but yeah the other
thing I was going to say is I have been
explicit about how Sofia works and I've
posted online and that what eight-plus
magazine an online web zine I mean I
posted a moderately detailed article
explaining like there are three software
systems we've used inside Sofia there's
there's a timeline editor which is like
a rule-based authoring system where
she's really just being an outlet for
where the human scripted there's a
chatbot which has some real base and
some neural aspects and then sometimes
we've used OpenCog behind sofia where
there's more learning learning and
reasoning and you know the funny thing
is i can't always tell which system is
operating there right i mean so once you
whether she's really learning yeah we're
thinking or just appears to be over half
hour i could tell but over like three or
four minutes of interaction i got even
having three systems that's already
sufficiently complex where you can't
really tell right away yeah the thing is
even if you get up onstage and tell
people how sophia is working and then
they talk to her they still contribute
more agency and consciousness to her
then then is is is really there so i
think there's there's a couple levels of
ethical issue there one issue is should
you be transparent about how sophia is
working and i think you should and i
think i think we we have been i mean i
mean it's there's articles online that
there's some TV special that goes
through me explaining the three sub
systems behind sophia so the way sophia
works is is out there much more clearly
than how facebook's AI works or
something right i mean we've been fairly
explicit about it the other is given
that telling people how it works doesn't
cause them to not attribute too much
intelligence agency to it anyway and
then then should you keep fooling them
when they want to be
fools and I mean that you know the whole
media industry is based on fooling
people the way they want to be fooled
and we we are fooling people a hundred
percent toward a good end I mean I mean
we are we are playing on people's sense
of empathy and compassion so that we can
give them a good user experience with
helpful robots yeah and so that we can
we can fill the a eyes mind with love
and compassion so I've been I've been
talking a lot with Hanson robotics
lately about collaborations in the area
of of medical robotics and we we haven't
quite pulled the trigger on the project
on that domain yet but we may well do so
quite soon so we've been we've been
talking a lot about you know robots can
help with with elder care robots can
help with kids David's and a lot of
things with with autism therapy and
robots robots before in the covin era
having a robot that can be a nursing
assistant in various senses can be quite
valuable
the robots don't spread infection and
they can also deliver more attention
than human nurses can give right so if
you have a robot that's helping a
patient with kovat if that patient
attributes more understanding and
compassion and agency to that robot then
it really has because it looks like a
human I mean is that really bad I mean
we can tell them it doesn't fully
understand you and and they don't care
because they're lying there with a fever
and they're sick but they'll react
better to that robot with its loving
more and facial expression than they
would to a pepper robot or a metallic
looking looking robot so it's it's
really it's about how you use it right
if you made a human looking like
door-to-door sales robot that used it's
it's human looking appearance to to scam
people out of their money
yeah then you're using that that
connection in a bad way but you could
also use it in a good way and that but
then that's the same the same problem
with every technology beautifully put
you