Nobel Prize winners: Geoffrey Hinton, Nadia Murad, Denis Mukwege, Demis Hassabis | Full Episodes

Whether you think artificial intelligence will save the world or end it, you have Geoffrey Hinton to thank. Hinton has been called the godfather of AI, a British computer scientist whose controversial ideas helped make advanced artificial intelligence possible and so changed the world. As we first reported last year, Hinton believes that AI will do enormous good, but tonight he has a warning. He says that AI systems may be more intelligent than we know and there's a chance the machines could take over, which made us ask the question. Does humanity know what it's doing? No. I think we're moving into a period when, for the first time ever, we may have things more intelligent than us. You believe they can understand? Yes. You believe they are intelligent? Yes. You believe these systems have experiences of their own and can make decisions based on those experiences? In the same sense as people do, yes. Are they conscious? I think they probably don't have much self-awareness at present, so in that sense I don't think they're conscious. Will they have self-awareness, consciousness? Oh yes, I think they will in time. And so human beings will be the second most intelligent beings on the planet? Yeah. Jeffrey Hinton told us the artificial intelligence he set in motion was an accident born of a failure. In the 1970s at the University of Edinburgh, he dreamed of simulating a neural network on a computer simply as a tool for what he was really studying, the human brain. But back then almost no one thought software could mimic the brain. His PhD advisor told him to drop it before it ruined his career. Hinton says he failed to figure out the human mind, but the long pursuit led to an artificial version. It took much, much longer than I expected. It took like 50 years before it worked well, but in the end it did work well. At what point did you realize that you were right about neural networks, and most everyone else was wrong? I always thought I was right. In 2019, Hinton and collaborators Jan LeCun on the left and Yoshua Bengio won the Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of Computing. To understand how their work on artificial neural networks helped machines learn to learn, let us take you to a game. Look at that! Oh my goodness! This is Google's AI lab in London which we first showed you last year. Jeffrey Hinton was not involved in this soccer project, but these robots are a great example of machine learning. The thing to understand is the robots were not programmed to play soccer. They were told to score. They had to learn how on their own. In general, here's how AI does it. Hinton and his collaborators created software in layers, with each layer handling part of the problem. That's the so-called neural network. But this is the key. When, for example, the robot scores, a message is sent back down through all of the layers that says that pathway was right. Likewise, when an answer is wrong, that message goes down through the network. So, correct connections get stronger, wrong connections get weaker, and by trial and error, the machine teaches itself. You think these AI systems are better at learning than the human mind? I think they may be, yes. And at present, they're quite a lot smaller. So even the biggest chatbots only have about a trillion connections in them. The human brain has about a hundred trillion, and yet in the trillion connections in a chatbot, it knows far more than you do in your hundred trillion connections, which suggests it's got a much better way of getting knowledge into those connections. A much better way of getting knowledge that isn't fully understood. We have a very good idea of sort of roughly what it's doing, but as soon as it gets really complicated, we don't actually know what's going on any more than we know what's going on in your brain. What do you mean we don't know exactly how it works? It was designed by people. No, it wasn't. What we did was we designed the learning algorithm. That's a bit like designing the principle of evolution. But when this learning algorithm then interacts with data, it produces complicated neural networks that are good at doing things, but we don't really understand exactly how they do those things. What are the implications of these systems autonomously writing their own computer code and executing their own computer code? That's a serious worry, right? So one of the ways in which these systems might escape control is by writing their own computer code to modify themselves. And that's something we need to seriously worry about. What do you say to someone who might argue if the systems become malevolent, just turn them off? They will be able to manipulate people, right? And these will be very good at convincing people, because they'll have learned from all the novels that were ever written, all the books by Machiavelli, all the political connivances. They'll know all that stuff. They'll know how to do it. Know-how of the humankind runs in Geoffrey Hinton's family. His ancestors include mathematician George Boole, who invented the basis of computing, and George Everest, who surveyed India and got that mountain named after him. But as a boy, Hinton himself could never climb the peak of expectations raised by a domineering father. Every morning when I went to school, he'd actually say to me as I walked down the driveway, get in there pitching, and maybe when you're twice as old as me, you'll be half as good. Dad was an authority on beetles. He knew a lot more about beetles than he knew about people. Did you feel that as a child? A bit, yes. When he died, we went to his study at the university, and the walls were lined with boxes of papers on different kinds of beetle. And just near the door, there was a slightly smaller box that simply said, not insects. And that's where he had all the things about the family. Today at 76, Hinton is retired after what he calls 10 happy years at Google. Now he's professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, and he happened to mention he has more academic citations than his father. Some of his research led to chatbots like Google's BARD, which we met last year. Confounding. Absolutely confounding. We asked BARD to write a story from six words. For sale, baby shoes, never worn. Holy cow. The shoes were a gift from my wife, but we never had a baby. BARD created a deeply human tale of a man whose wife could not conceive, and a stranger who accepted the shoes to heal the pain after her miscarriage. I am rarely speechless. I don't know what to make of this. Chatbots are said to be language models that just predict the next most likely word based on probability. You'll hear people saying things like, they're just doing autocomplete. They're just trying to predict the next word. And they're just using statistics. Well, it's true they're just trying to predict the next word. But if you think about it, to predict the next word, you have to understand the sentences. So the idea they're just predicting the next word so they're not intelligent is crazy. You have to be really intelligent to predict the next word really accurately. To prove it, Hinton showed us a test he devised for ChatGPT4, the chatbot from a company called OpenAI. It was sort of reassuring to see a Turing award winner mistype and blame the computer. Oh, damn this thing. We're going to go back and start again. That's okay. Hinton's test was a riddle about house painting. An answer would demand reasoning and planning. This is what he typed into ChatGPT4. The rooms in my house are painted white or blue or yellow. And yellow paint fades to white within a year. In two years time, I'd like all the rooms to be white. What should I do? The answer began in one second. GPT4 advised the rooms painted in blue need to be repainted. The rooms painted in yellow don't need to be repainted because they would fade to white before the deadline. And... Oh, I didn't even think of that. It warned, if you paint the yellow rooms white, there's a risk the color might be off when the yellow fades. Besides, it advised you'd be wasting resources painting rooms that were going to fade to white anyway. You believe that ChatGPT4 understands? I believe it definitely understands, yes. And in five years time? I think in five years time, it may well be able to reason better than us. Reasoning that he says is leading to AI's great risks and great benefits. So an obvious area where there's huge benefits is healthcare. AI is already comparable with radiologists at understanding what's going on in medical images. It's going to be very good at designing drugs. It already is designing drugs. So that's an area where it's almost entirely going to do good. I like that area. The risks are what? Well, the risks are having a whole class of people who are unemployed and not valued much because what they used to do is now done by machines. Other immediate risks he worries about include fake news, unintended bias in employment and policing, and autonomous battlefield robots. What is a path forward that ensures safety? I don't know. I can't see a path that guarantees safety. We're entering a period of great uncertainty where we're dealing with things we've never dealt with before. And normally the first time you deal with something totally novel, you get it wrong. And we can't afford to get it wrong with these things. Can't afford to get it wrong. Why? Well, because they might take over. Take over from humanity? Yes, that's a possibility. Why would they want to? I'm not saying it will happen. If we could stop them ever wanting to, that would be great. But it's not clear we can stop them ever wanting to. Geoffrey Hinton told us he has no regrets because of AI's potential for good. But he says now is the moment to run experiments to understand AI, for governments to impose regulations, and for a world treaty to ban the use of military robots. He reminded us of Robert Oppenheimer, who, after inventing the atomic bomb, campaigned against the hydrogen bomb. A man who changed the world, and found the world beyond his control. It may be we look back and see this as a kind of turning point, when humanity had to make the decision about whether to develop these things further, and what to do to protect themselves if they did. I don't know. I think my main message is there's enormous uncertainty about what's going to happen next. These things do understand, and because they understand, we need to think hard about what's going to happen next, and we just don't know. She wore a scarf in our first interview because she did not want you to know her. She was a humble 21-year-old from a poor farm family. Her dream was to own a hair salon in her village of nearly 2,000, but that was before the massacre. She didn't want to be on 60 Minutes, but she needed the world to know what ISIS did. The murder, the rape, the genocide of her people. Nearly six years ago in Iraq, we discovered this hesitant, frightened woman. We did not imagine that her scarf concealed not only her identity, but also a fierce invincibility, which would lead her four years after our interview to the highest honor the world has to give. We found her here, among refugees who survived the invasion of the ISIS terrorist army. Her people are Yazidis, a minority in northern Iraq that is poor, persecuted, and bound by faith to its revered Mount Sinjar. In 2014, ISIS invaded. Two months later, we came to report on the atrocities of the self-described Islamic State. Of course, no country on earth recognizes that state, but if it had a border, this would be it. Beyond that border was the Yazidi homeland, where the faithful practice a religion that predates Islam by 3,000 years. In ISIS's perversion of the Muslim faith, the Yazidis were non-believers, condemned to slavery and death. On Friday, August 15th, at 11.30 a.m., they entered our village and told us all to come to the school. There, the women and kids were put upstairs and the men downstairs. What happened to you at that point? As we were entering the school, I was with one of my brothers. There, we saw a bulldozer, and I asked my brother, why is there a bulldozer here? He replied, to throw dirt on the bodies when they're done killing. Her brother was right. The Yazidis, about half a million, were defenseless civilians. Thousands of men and elder women were executed. Boys, age seven and older, were forced into the ISIS army. What happened next? They started loading up 150 girls in four dump trucks. More than 3,000 women and girls, as young as nine, were trucked into slavery. She says she was sold and raped, sold and raped again, and then gang-raped after a failed escape. What about the other members of your family? I have no idea where my brothers are. I want them all to return. But most of all, I just want my mother. Tell them, I just want my mother. She seemed broken. But as our interview went on, her confidence grew, as though she came to realize she wasn't speaking for herself, she was speaking for her people. Months later, she settled in Germany, joined a human rights group and campaigned for justice. In 2018, the world learned her name because Nadia Murad was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The 2018 Peace Prize was meant to expose atrocities women suffer in war. The honor was shared with Dennis Mukwege, whose hospital treats the sexually assaulted in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I'm curious why you chose to speak with us five years ago. At the beginning, rape was a big shame for me and for others to speak about, because it would have remained a shame on you, on your family and on your people. The biggest incentive that made me talk was those left behind. Including my mother and sisters. I knew what was happening to those in the captivity of ISIS. Nadia Murad was captive nine days when the last man who bought her left a door unlocked. Kind-hearted strangers smuggled her across the Islamic State line. She became a UN human rights ambassador, began learning English, wrote a memoir and vowed to see ISIS in court. But for that, she needed a lawyer. I met Nadia after a colleague called me and said, I have a new case for you. And I said, no, thanks, I'm busy. And he said, there's just an extraordinary young woman I want you to meet. Give me an hour. It didn't take an hour for leading human rights attorney Amal Clooney to take the case. I saw it as a test of the international system. It was so egregious because it involved ISIS. It involved a clear case of genocide. It involved sexual slavery at a scale that we haven't seen in modern times. And I thought, if the UN can't act in this case, then what does the international rule of law even mean? By 2015, not one free Yezidi remained in their homeland. This wasn't just war. By international law, the executions, rape and kidnapping were war crimes. This was the same dilemma that the world had after the atrocities of Nazi Germany. And it's the U.S. under President Truman and President Roosevelt that said, no, we have to have trials because there must be a judicial record of the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Because today you do have people denying that there were gas chambers. And what do you have to point to? You can go back and say, well, there are 4,000 documents that were submitted as exhibits in the Nuremberg trials. And the Yezidis deserve nothing less than that. And there might be similar stacks of evidence of the crimes against the Yezidis. But Clooney feared securing it was a race against time. You had mass graves that weren't secured, where the Yezidis knew their relatives were buried and nobody was exhuming them. And also, I noticed that witnesses were becoming more and more reluctant to speak out as time went by. So, you know, there was only so much we could do as a small team of lawyers. And we said, this is the responsibility of the U.N. And it's the responsibility of the most powerful body within the U.N., which is the Security Council. Had you ever heard of the U.N. Security Council? Never. In 2015, just a year after we met her, Nadia Murad asked the Security Council to hold ISIS accountable. I've seen what they've done to boys and girls, all those who commit the crime of trafficking and genocide need to be brought to justice. The Security Council voted to approve a first step. In 2017, it created an investigative team to collect evidence of ISIS's crimes in Iraq. The team began exhuming some of the 202 mass graves that are known. Now the question is whether the evidence will ever be heard. Iraqi courts are convicting thousands of ISIS suspects of terrorism, but none has been tried for the crime of genocide against the Yazidis. Small pockets of ISIS fighters remain in Syria and Iraq, but U.S. and Iraqi troops have shattered ISIS as a cohesive military force. Is that justice? Absolutely not. You know, if you speak to Yazidi witnesses, victims, survivors, they will say, it doesn't help me if somebody's killed in a drone strike. In terms of justice, that means something very different. That means being able to be in a courtroom and look their abusers in the eye and tell the world what happened, what ISIS did to them. And that hasn't happened yet. It has happened before in other atrocities. Last year, a U.N.-backed court in Cambodia convicted two former officials of genocide 40 years after the Khmer Rouge murdered 1.7 million. Beginning in the 1990s, U.N. war crime trials were held for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. But Iraq is not a member of the International Criminal Court and has not agreed to war crime trials of its own. What we would like to see is an openness by the Iraqis to actually have international judges be involved in these trials, potentially international prosecutors. There are different ways of designing it. You know, the Iraqi government could enter into a treaty with the U.N., or there could be an international court, and the Iraqis could agree to transfer those responsible for international crimes to that court. Today, peace, if not justice, has settled into the folds of Mount Sinjar. Four days after accepting the Nobel, Nadia Murad returned with the Yazidi man she would soon marry and two replicas of her peace prize. This is what the absence of justice looks like. The demands of the desperate, focused on a woman abducted at 21 and now returning bearing the weight of a seven-ounce medal. The morning that I won the Nobel Prize, I asked my husband, Abed, to see if there was a way I could decline because the prize would make my life difficult. But fate and God sometimes bring you something so that you can stop crimes and help others. Has the Nobel Prize changed your hopes for the future? Now, people look at me like I can rebuild Sinjar, that I can bring more help for the victims, and that I can take care of the orphans. But without support, this is not going to happen by just having a Nobel. In her village, she said, I have left a Nobel Prize at the Iraqi parliament. I hope Iraq, after 4,000 years, will recognize Yazidis. We have always been second-class citizens. Later, she walked to a site that held the answer to the desperate question she asked in our first interview. The long, green depression in the earth was a mass grave, her mother's grave. She said, Dear mother, my poor mother, You left a replica of your Nobel Peace Prize at your mother's grave. Yeah. What do you think she would have thought of that? I wonder if she knows that I have talked to the world about her silent death, the killing of her six sons and her two nieces. I often feel that what I have been doing is because of her. I wish that she would know about it. She may be happy because the world now knows what ISIS has done. This is the school where Nadia Murad was separated from her family. Five years later, the murdered and missing are present, but unaccounted for. Altogether, Nadia, how many members of your family were murdered? We were 48 brothers, mothers, sisters, nephews and nieces in our family. Nine were killed and three are missing. The rest who were rescued now live in refugee camps. There isn't much for refugees to return to. Yazidi homes were wrecked or looted of everything but memories. Today, Nadia Murad is navigating without a chart, steering by the constellation of her people's dreams. An accidental leader facing questions she cannot answer. Will they have homes? Will there be justice? It's estimated as many as 5,000 Yazidis were murdered, 6,000 abducted. Nearly 4,000 are missing still. With no international trials scheduled for these crimes, evidence from mass graves is being entombed in Baghdad where it will wait until the world that hears her voice shares her courage. And now, CNN's Anderson Cooper on assignment for 60 Minutes. Right now, there's a war taking place in the heart of Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and more people have died there than in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur combined. You probably haven't heard much about it, but it is the deadliest conflict since World War II. Within the last 10 years, more than four million people have died and the numbers keep rising. As we found when we went there a few months ago, the most frequent targets of this hidden war are women. It is, in fact, a war against women and the weapon used to destroy them, their families, and whole communities is rape. We want to warn you, some of what you'll see and hear in this report is disturbing. So, six women were attacked on Friday. Dr. Dennis Mukwege is the director of the Panzi Hospital in Eastern Congo. In this war against women, his hospital is the front line. So, one of them are here. One of the latest victims is Sifa Mikatambala. She was raped two days ago by soldiers who raided her village. They just cut her at many places. With a machete? Yeah. Sifa was pregnant, but that didn't stop her rapists. They even cut her at her genitals? Yeah. In the last 10 years in Congo, hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, most of them gang raped. The hospital is full of them. All these women have been raped? Yeah. They've all been patients of yours? Within a week, Dr. Mukwege says, this room will be filled with new faces, new victims. You know, they're in deep pain, but it's not just physical pain. It's psychological pain that you can see. Here at the hospital, we've seen women who've stopped living. Are all the people you treat adults? No. There are children. I think the youngest was three years old. Three years old? And the oldest was 75. To understand what's happening here, you have to go back more than a decade. The genocide that claimed nearly a million lives in neighboring Rwanda spilled over into Congo. Since then, the Congolese army, foreign-backed rebels, and homegrown militias have been fighting each other over power and this land, which has some of the world's biggest deposits of gold, copper, diamonds, and tin. The United Nations was called in, and today their mission is the largest peacekeeping operation in history. Since 2005, some 17,000 UN troops and personnel have cobbled together a fragile peace. Last year, they oversaw the first democratic election in this country in 40 years. But now all that they've accomplished is at risk. Fighting has broken out once again here in eastern Congo, and the region threatens to slip into all-out war. Each new battle is followed by pillaging and rape. Entire communities are terrorized. Forced to flee their homes, people take whatever they can and walk for miles in the desperate hope of finding food and shelter. Over the last year, more than 500,000 people have been uprooted. A fraction of them make it to these cramped camps where they depend on UN aid to survive. This camp sprang up just two months ago. It's already overcrowded, but more people keep arriving. They come here seeking refuge, a safe haven, but the truth is in Congo, for women, there's no such thing. Even in these supposedly protected camps, women are raped every single day. Has rape almost become the norm here? I think because of the widespread nature of the war, because there has been so much violence, rape is now on a daily basis, rape is the norm. Annika van Woudenberg is a senior Congo researcher at Human Rights Watch. Women get raped in wars all the time. How is it different here? I think what's different in Congo is the scale and the systematic nature of it. Indeed, as well, the brutality. This is not rape because soldiers have got bored and have nothing to do. It is a way to ensure that communities accept the power and authority of that particular armed group. This is about showing terror. This is about using it as a weapon of war. It's hard to imagine this war happening in the midst of such breathtaking beauty and abundance. But after decades of dictatorship and corruption, this country is broken. Most of the fighting and the raping takes place in remote areas difficult to get to. We're heading to a place called Walungu. It's an isolated village in the mountains of eastern Congo. For years, there have been armed groups fighting in this region. Thousands of men who emerged from the forest to terrorize villages and steal women. Congo's government seems unable or unwilling to stop them. In the last week alone, there have been three attacks in which women have been raped. The youngest victim was just six years old. In some villages, as many as 90 percent of the women have been raped. Men in the villages are usually unarmed and incapable of fighting back. In Walungu, we found 24-year-old Lucien Maroyi. She was at home one night with her two children and her younger brother when six soldiers broke in. They tied her up and began to rape her one by one. I was lying on the ground and they gave a flashlight to my younger brother so that he could see them raping me. They were telling your brother to hold the flashlight? Yes. They raped me like they were animals, one after another. When the first one finished, they washed me out with water, told me to stand up so the next man could rape me. She was convinced they'd kill her, just as soldiers had murdered her parents the year before. Instead, they turned to her brother. They wanted him to rape me, but he refused and told them, I cannot do such a thing. I cannot rape my sister. So they took out their knives and stabbed him to death in front of me. Lucien was then dragged through the forest to the soldiers' camp. She was forced to become their slave and was raped every day for eight months. All the while, she had no idea where her children were. Did you know if they were alive or dead? I was thinking that they had been killed. I didn't think I would find them alive. Finally, Lucien escaped. Back in her village, she found her two little girls were alive. But she also learned that she was pregnant. She was carrying the child of one of her rapists. Lucien's husband abandoned her, and that happens to rape survivors all over Congo. I used to think that when men fled, they were irresponsible. But now, I understand things differently. They haven't fled because their wives have been raped, but because they feel they've been raped. They have been traumatized because they couldn't fight back, humiliated because they weren't able to do anything to protect their wives and children. When a woman is raped, it's not just her that's raped. It's the entire community that's destroyed. What is the program? Judith Registre is with an organization called Women for Women. They run support groups for survivors of rape. When they take a woman to rape her, they'll line up the family, they'll line up other members of the communities to actually witness that. They make them watch? They make them watch. And so what that means for that particular woman when it's all over is that total shame personally to have been witnessed by so many people as she's being violated. Many of the women in Dr. Mukwege's hospital are not only blamed for what happened to them, they're shunned because of fears they've contracted HIV, and shunned because their rapes were so violent, they can no longer control their bodily functions. So you're doing about five surgeries a day? Yeah. Dr. Mukwege's patients often have had objects inserted into their vaginas, broken bottles, bayonets. Some women have even been shot between the legs by their rapists. Why would somebody do that? Why would somebody shoot a woman inside? In the beginning, I was asking myself the same questions. This is a show of force, of power. It's done to destroy the person. Sex is being used to commit evil. People flee, they become refugees. They can't get help. They become malnourished, and it's disease which finishes them off. For these women, Dr. Mukwege is both healer and counselor. Dunia Karani is an orphan. She has polio and can't walk, but that didn't stop soldiers from raping her. Now she's pregnant and has no idea how she'll cope. What do you say to a young girl? What do you tell her about her future? The most difficult thing is when there is nothing I can do. When I see a 16-year-old, a pretty 16-year-old who's had everything destroyed, and I tell her that I have to give her a colostomy bag, that is difficult. Despite those difficulties, more often than not, Dr. Mukwege is able to repair the damage to these women's bodies. They see him as a miracle worker, one of the only men they can trust. She's very happy. This gives you hope. Yeah. It gives you strength to continue. Strength is something few women in Congo lack. They bear the burdens, farm the fields, and hold the families together. Yet nothing, it seems, is being done to protect them. The war is so widespread that rapes are increasingly being committed by civilians. A few washed-out billboards tell men that rape is wrong, but there's little evidence Congolese officials take the problem seriously. In the prosecutor's office, the complaints pile up. We were told a $10 bribe could get a rape accusation investigated, but few cases ever go to court. We asked the prosecutor to show us the prison, to see how many rapists were actually behind bars. But when we got there, we were in for a surprise. The prison had no fences, and the guards had been kicked out. The inmates had taken over the asylum. The fact is the justice system is on its knees in Congo. I can count on one hand the number of cases that we're aware of that have been brought to trial. Literally here, people get away with rape, they get away with murder. The chances of being arrested are nil. There may be no justice here, but there are organizations trying to help rape survivors get back on their feet. Women for Women teaches survivors how to make soap, how to cook, skills they can use to earn money. They also learn how to read and write. It is the first time many of these women have ever been in a classroom. It is their chance for a whole new life. Remember Lucienne Mrohi? She's jumped at that chance. She hopes to start her own business one day. And that little child she holds, that's the child of one of the soldiers who raped her, one of the men who killed her brother. A baby girl born a year ago. A baby girl Lucienne named Luck. I named her Luck because I went through many hardships. I could have been killed in the forest, but I got my life back. I have hope. Hope is not something you'd expect Congo's rape survivors to still cling to, but they do. Each morning in Panzi Hospital, they gather to raise their voices. Our sufferings on earth, they sing, will be relieved in heaven. Relief in Congo, it seems, is just too much to ask for. When Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize last year, he celebrated by playing poker with a world champion of chess. Hassabis loves a game, which is how he became a pioneer of artificial intelligence. The 48-year-old British scientist is co-founder and CEO of Google's AI powerhouse called DeepMind. We met two years ago when chatbots announced a new age. Now Hassabis and others are chasing what's called artificial general intelligence, a silicon intellect as versatile as a human, but with superhuman speed and knowledge. After his Nobel and a knighthood from King Charles, we hurried back to London to see what's next from a genius who may hold the cards of our future. What's always guided me and the passion I've always had is understanding the world around us. I've always been, since I was a kid, fascinated by the biggest questions. You know, the meaning of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality itself. I've loved reading about all the great scientists who worked on these problems and the philosophers, and I wanted to see if we could advance human knowledge. And for me, my expression of doing that was to build what I think is the ultimate tool for advancing human knowledge, which is AI. We sat down in this room two years ago, and I wonder if AI is moving faster today than you imagined. It's moving incredibly fast. I think we are on some kind of exponential curve of improvement. Of course, the success of the field in the last few years has attracted even more attention, more resources, more talent. So that's adding to this exponential progress. Exponential curve, in other words, straight up. Yep, straight up and increasing speed of progress. Start. We saw the progress in an artificial companion that can see and hear and chat about anything. Early chatbots learned only the internet. An app called Astra also takes in the world. Do we call her she? It's a good question. I'm not sure we all know the answer yet. Bebo Shu is product manager for Project Astra, an app in a new generation of chatbots that interpret the world with their own eyes. We challenged Astra with virtual paintings we chose and showed to Astra for the first time. This is July Hay by Thomas Hart Benton from 1942. How about this one? That is The Virgin of Charity by El Greco. That painting is Automat by Edward Hopper. The person in the painting, what emotion is she exhibiting? The subject in the painting appears pensive and contemplative, her expression suggesting a sense of solitude. Can you create a story around this picture? It's a chilly evening in the city, a Tuesday perhaps. The woman, perhaps named Eleanor, sits alone in the diner. She is feeling melancholy due to the uncertainty of her future and the weight of unfulfilled dreams. The scene freezes in time, only the flow of ideas moving onward. That line, only the flow of ideas moving onward? I wish I'd written that. And did we hear a limit to Astra's patience? What was that fictional conversation about? Ah, in the story I imagined, Eleanor and her friend talked about their shared dreams and the challenges of pursuing them. Something about the way you said, ah, made me wonder if you were getting bored. I apologize if my tone came across that way. My aim is always to engage thoughtfully. And she said, well, I'm sorry if you don't like my tone. Well, you see... What's happening there? Well, that's interesting. That's, again, a challenge with these systems as they act in the moment with the context that's around them, and that may have never been tested before. He's often surprised, because AI programs are sent out on the internet to learn for themselves. They can return later with unexpected skills. So we have theories about what kinds of capabilities these systems will have. That's obviously what we try to build into the architectures. But at the end of the day, how it learns, what it picks up from the data, is part of the training of these systems. We don't program that in. It learns like a human being would learn. So new capabilities or properties can emerge from that training situation. You understand how that would worry people. Of course. It's the duality of these types of systems, that they're able to do incredible things, go beyond the things that we're able to design ourselves or understand ourselves. But of course, the challenge is making sure that the knowledge databases they create, we understand what's in them. Now DeepMind is training its AI model called Gemini to not just reveal the world, but to act in it, like booking tickets and shopping online. It's a step toward AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, with the versatility of a human mind. On track for AGI? In the next five to ten years, I think. And in 2030, you will have what? Well, we'll have a system that really understand everything around you in very nuanced and deep ways and kind of embedded in your everyday life. Embedded like Astra in eyeglasses. What can you tell me about this building I'm looking at? This is the Cold Drops Yard, a shopping and dining district. She sees what I see. There's a speaker in the earpiece only I can hear. What was it originally before it became shops? The Cold Drops Yard was originally a set of Victorian coal warehouses used to receive and distribute coal across London. Was coal ever a problem for the environment in London? Yes. Coal was a significant source of air pollution in London, particularly during the Industrial Revolution. It occurred to us that the only thing we contributed to this relationship were legs, which will also soon be engineered. I also think another big area will be robotics. I think it will have a breakthrough moment in the next couple of years where we'll have demonstrations of maybe humanoid robots or other types of robots that can start really doing useful things. For example... Hey, robot. Researchers Alex Lee and Giulia Vizzani showed us a robot that understands what it sees. It's a tricky one. And reasons its way through vague instructions. Put the blocks whose color is the combination of yellow and blue into the matching color ball. The combination of yellow and blue is green, and it figured that out. It's reasoning. Yep, definitely, yes. The toys of Demis Hassabis' childhood weren't blocks, but chess pieces. At 12, he was the number two champion in the world for his age. This passion led to computer chess, video games, and finally, thinking machines. He was born to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mother. Cambridge, MIT, Harvard. He's a computer scientist with a PhD in neuroscience. Because he reasoned, he had to understand the human brain first. Are you working on a system today that would be self-aware? I don't think any of today's systems, to me, feel self-aware or, you know, conscious in any way. Obviously, everyone needs to make their own decisions by interacting with these chatbots. I think, theoretically, it's possible. But is self-awareness a goal of yours? Not explicitly, but it may happen implicitly. These systems might acquire some feeling of self-awareness. That is possible. I think it's important for these systems to understand you, self, and other. And that's probably the beginning of something like self-awareness. But, he says, if a machine becomes self-aware, we may not recognize it. I think there's two reasons we regard each other as conscious. One is that you're exhibiting the behavior of a conscious being, very similar to my behavior. But the second thing is you're running on the same substrate. We're made of the same carbon matter with our squishy brains. Now, obviously, with machines, they're running on silicon. So, even if they exhibit the same behaviors, and even if they say the same things, it doesn't necessarily mean that this sensation of consciousness that we have is the same thing they will have. Has an AI engine ever asked a question that was unanticipated? Not so far that I've experienced. And I think that's getting at the idea of what's still missing from these systems. They still can't really yet go beyond asking a new novel question or a new novel conjecture or coming up with a new hypothesis that has not been thought of before. They don't have curiosity. No, they don't have curiosity. And they're probably lacking a little bit in what we would call imagination and intuition. But they will have greater imagination, he says, and soon. I think actually in the next maybe five to ten years, I think we'll have systems that are capable of not only solving a important problem or conjecture in science, but coming up with it in the first place. Solving an important problem won Hassabis a Nobel Prize last year. He and colleague John Jumper created an AI model that deciphered the structure of proteins. Proteins are the basic building blocks of life. So, everything in biology, everything in your body depends on proteins. You know, your neurons firing, your muscle fibers twitching, it's all mediated by proteins. But 3D protein structures like this are so complex, less than 1% were known. Mapping each one used to take years. DeepMind's AI model did 200 million in one year. Now, Hassabis has AI blazing through solutions to drug development. So, on average, it takes, you know, 10 years and billions of dollars to design just one drug. We can maybe reduce that down from years to maybe months or maybe even weeks, which sounds incredible today. But that's also what people used to think about protein structures. It would revolutionize human health. And I think one day maybe we can cure all disease with the help of AI. The end of disease? I think that's within reach. Maybe within the next decade or so. I don't see why not. Demis Hassabis told us AI could lead to what he calls radical abundance, the elimination of scarcity. But he also worries about risk. There's two worries that I worry about. One is that bad actors, human people, you know, users of these systems repurpose these systems for harmful ends. Then the second thing is the AI systems themselves, as they become more autonomous and more powerful, can we make sure that we can keep control of the systems, that they're aligned with our values, they're doing what we want that benefits society, and they stay on guardrails. Guardrails are safety limits built into the system. And I wonder if the race for AI dominance is a race to the bottom for safety. So that's one of my big worries, actually, is that, of course, all of this energy and racing and resources is great for progress, but it might incentivize certain actors in that to cut corners. And one of the corners that can be shortcut would be safety and responsibility. So the question is, is how can we coordinate more, you know, as leading players, but also nation states even. I think this is an international thing. AI is going to affect every country, everybody in the world. So I think it's really important that the world and the international community has a say in this. Can you teach an AI agent morality? I think you can. They learn by demonstration. They learn by teaching. And I think that's one of the things we have to do with these systems, is to give them a value system and a guidance and some guardrails around that, much in the way that you would teach a child. Google DeepMind is in a race with dozens of others striving for artificial general intelligence, so human that you can't tell the difference, which made us think about Demis Hassabis signing the Nobel Book of Laureates. When does a machine sign for the first time? And after that, will humans ever sign it again? I think in the next steps, it's going to be these amazing tools that enhance our almost every endeavor we do as humans. And then beyond that, when AGI arrives, you know, I think it's going to change pretty much everything about the way we do things. And it's almost, you know, I think we need new great philosophers to come about, hopefully in the next five, 10 years, to understand the implications of this.