Blaise, we are talking about “the day after tomorrow,” because tomorrow is crap, it’s too close from today. The day after tomorrow is much more free and cool. It’s full of new technologies and politics.
At Google, I work on machine intelligence. My group is part of a larger organization of more than 1,000 people called Research and Machine Intelligence.
This kind of technologies that you have just described, is it possible to find that kind of technologies nowadays in the shops?
Yes, it is. For example, one of the things that my group makes is the deep neural networks that look at photos and analyze what’s in them, and these algorithms are able to tag the contents of the photos.
You have use a word, "neural network." How would you describe that technology?
In the beginning of computer science, the fathers of computer science, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, were very, very interested in brains and in thinking as well as in computation and mathematics. The origins of computational neuroscience and the study of neurons and the creation of computers, these origins were very tightly intertwined.
Brute force of computation, versus computation like the human brain, is that correct?
Yes. The brute force approach is one that’s based on the idea of mathematical calculation in series and sequence. That model of computation allows you to do things like calculate the trajectory of an orbit to within 12 significant digits, things like this. These were the kinds of things that the very earliest computers did.
What is the first experiment of a neural network that astonished you, and you say that it’s the beginning of something?
I think that it was solving the ImageNet challenge. This happened several years ago. This was very closely related to the problem that I was just telling you about, deciding what is in the photo. ImageNet is a database of millions of photographs that have all been labeled by hand with what is in there.
Thank you, Blaise. We’ll come back to our neural network soon after. Audrey?
Sorry for the technical difficulties. Because Blaise has a slide that’s entirely visual, we have to fix the filming problem. We devised a solution.
Blaise, it’s your fault.
No, it’s not.
That’s OK.
Film crew will just film my screen. This is mirrors of mirrors.
(laughter)
I can see a recursive image of my own screen from the mirrors there. This is actually pretty metaphoric.
(laughter)
I’m happy to be here to talk about the day after tomorrow. The midnight reminds us that we are among the stars. If you look up in the night sky, you see that Earth is a place among the stars. I’ve been working with the technology called virtual reality. I have a virtual reality headset here which Florent will put on for effect — never mind.
The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is the earth from space. On this little ball is everything we’ve ever known, all of the history, all of the future, all the beauty of what it means to be human.
The world that everyone uses is fragile. You can’t understand that from the ground, because it’s not really relevant to you. From the ground, it looks like the sky goes up forever. From space, it looks very small.
Right. From space, we all look very small, and we are very tightly bound together. We share the Earth. All of our problems are of a global scale at the moment, including the climate and everything that people at this night have talked about. The observer effect makes us able to see the problem on a global scale.
My conception of the scale of the reality of the earth went from being unimaginably large to absolutely finite and, in fact, small. It goes from infinity to one. I’m going to get goosebumps about this sort of stuff when I talk about it. Even today, it was only after my flight that I began to go, "I can’t be the only one who’s had this sort of reaction."
Actually, during this whole event, during lunch, and during the radio interviews, I’ve been asking Saskia Sassen, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and everybody I met to put on this compass and watch Earth with me together.
We would all benefit if we all had a shared experience of this kind. Virtual reality is very well positioned right now. It’s starting to give truly immersive experiences and make you feel like you’re there.
The difference between a flat video and VR is the difference between watching a football game and being in the stadium.
It wasn’t until I experienced virtual reality that it became clear to me that it’s one of the missing pieces in the puzzle of how we get everybody to understand the beauty of space.
The overview effect has such a profound impact that once you’ve seen it, there is no going back.
There’s one saying in politics: "Where you stand depend on where you sit."
What we do not want to see, is by evoking the name of innovation, you do not pay taxes, or use it as an excuse to break laws.
That’s Minister Jaclyn Tsai, originally led IBM Asia’s law department. The thing is that after this kind of method, we extract promise from all the stakeholders. If their promise overlap, we have a bill right there. If we don’t, if it needs more clarification, help from the local government and so on, as it currently is, everybody know why UberX is still illegal.
Tilt Brush was one of my favorite demos when I first got to try the Vive. I love it. It’s one of the best things I have done and like to show it off to people that never tried VR.
Because of time, I have to rush this a little bit. But the point is that I was just talking with Blaise, and we thought in virtual reality a facilitator can talk with not just 300 people with telecommunication and telepresence. We can talk with 7,000 people, as we have here, because people can just put on their Google Cardboard or some other virtual reality headset, and participate virtually, as if they are there.
We won’t just be bystanders to history. We will feel like active participants, standing side by side with astronauts.
It is my wish that — this is also a French idea, from Lacan — this Borromean Knot means all the three sectors cannot do without each other. If one breaks, everyone breaks. We’re in the same earth together. This is my hope, that with the digital democratic tools, we can go closer and closer to this ideal.
Thank you, Audrey.
(applause)
Blaise, you have started to explain to us how we worked with artificial intelligence, so you could start with your presentation now about the political consequences of all that.
Audrey, thank you so much for setting us up with a sub-optimal but functional situation, here.
An example of machine learning, doing art?
Yes. Let me skip all of the expository material, and find something along those lines. This is just a fun picture that may actually come across in the camera. This is a picture of Rosenblatt, who was a very early pioneer in computer science, who actually did attempt to implement the neuron-based computational model that von Neumann and Turing talked about, way back in the ’40s and ’50s.
Let’s show this in stereo.
Now, if you had the goggles, and you were seeing this in your headset, this could be in 3D...
In fact, this technology, it’s important that you have talked, both of you, about values embedded in technologies. Sometimes, we say that technology is neutral. Is it the case or not? How do you think that we should work on technology to avoid that we face some crush, for instance?
I don’t think that technologies are neutral. There is a big debate in the US. It’s, of course, the only industrialized country that is having this debate about guns in which the people in favor of not having gun control say things like, "Guns are neutral pieces of technology, and it’s people who kill people and not guns."
That’s a good example, because for the kind of technology you show us about pattern recollection or image recognition, right now, we see more and more of this technology used to recognize people, to distinguish between the black and white and the people who behave this way or this way. It’s many control technologies and not empowerment technologies.
The ability to recognize people from an image of their face and recognize a bunch of their characteristics, of the same kinds of characteristics that you or I would see when we look at a person’s face, is in itself a neutral technology.
Just a quick word. In the beginning of the free software movement, Richard Stallman who started this idea of free software, defined four different kind of freedoms about software.
We are very far from a decentralized organization, and everybody can own and control technology, but all this technology is centralized heavy by corporation or government both. We are very far from that.
I’m not sure how far we are from that. I think that the situation is not necessarily as you see it, in the sense that, for example, an Android phone is an incredibly powerful computing device which, when you buy it, is yours. Anything, any software that you run on this device that executes locally is your software running on your data.
Again, just one word from me. We have existential proof in the form of a project that is sponsoring work with some free software people. It’s called Sandstorm. What it does is it flips the default. It makes it possible to think of the web like you install apps on your phone. By default, it’s secure, it’s sand-boxed. It can only run on the server you trust.
Both of you are believers in technology. You are strongly optimist about that. You think that we are capable of doing stuff, interesting stuff with that. If you have only one fear, something could go ugly with technology. What can it be?
I think that the most disastrous thing that I know of right now that is happening as a consequence of our technology is the destruction of our ecosystem, actually. There are other scenarios that we can hypothesize about in the future, but this is one that we know is happening now and is a direct consequence of our technology.
Thank you, Blaise.
Can I take two minutes?
Two minutes.
Yeah, two minutes. Start counting...
(applauses and cheers)
Machine learning, and Human learning.