Artificial intelligence has been around prominently longer than you might think. On this edition of Digital Futures, we want to explore where this is being used now. If it's evolved successfully from its initial goal of making intelligent machines and we want to fill you in on what you and I as consumers need to know about. I'm going to raise all these points and more with my two incredible experts, AI Architects and author of In Our Own Image, George and Rolo, an AI pioneer and creator of Clevverbot which we'll be trying later by the way. Guys, thank you for doing this. Thank you. So let's set the scene a bit before we dive straight into what promises to be a very, very, very worthy topic. As it stands now, where are we with the development of artificial intelligence? And can you quickly demystify this for an everyday consumer? We are now at a stage where artificial intelligence is coming of age. It matures as a technology and is becoming more, if you like, visible and felt in everyday life. For instance, starting from Syrian Cortana, digital agents with whom we can actually communicate in natural language to businesses which use machine learning in order to go through that data, mine and again, new insights about the consumers or their employees. So we are at this stage right now and I believe that it's the reason why AI is debated in the public sphere as well. Well I would say that we are right at the beginning of the AI revolution. We only recently have, has enough computing power and data become available for people to start making discoveries. In my own field of natural language, people are discovering things thick and fast, but a lot more will be coming. There will be a revolution if you like in the way that we interact with machines becoming much more verbal and taking away from visual interfaces, placing them with something new. Okay. So now, my next question is very loaded and a little bit lengthy. So bear with me. When we watch videos of humanoid robots out in the real world, that can be a little bit unnerving, understandably and a lot of sci-fi films are based on the premise that we as humanity could get to a point in which we won't be able to control our own AI powered creations. And then you've got big influences and really big names such as Hawking Gates and Musk, who are publicly warning us of the dangers of AI, now could robot technology for instance actually obliterate humanity? But how much of this commentary out there is scaremongering, George? Well, I think the scaremonger is for arguments very flaw, at least in three ways. What I would call the three fallacies of AI scaremongering. First of all, technologically, they assume that technology will keep advancing according to Moore's law, which is not necessarily the case. In fact, most engineers now see a leveling of Moore's law in the way that technology scales up. Second is what I would call sort of the body-mind duality. For some reason, they assume that the mind intelligence or consciousness is something that is disembodied, does not relate to a physical body, doesn't need a body to exist. And this sounds very much like a religious statement indeed. And also what we know from science, from biology, from your science and your biology is something completely different. You need a body, you know, you have a mind and consciousness. And the third fallacy, I think, I would call it the identity fallacy. We are, through Pomor Fies, artificial intelligence in a big way when we think that it will have malice or have a negative feelings about us. If you want to, you know, that kind of intelligence, you only have to have a human to destroy the world. You don't need that artificial intelligence to get into the older trouble. Do you know what you can curve at George? I would. I would concur largely with George's view that it is, the skirmongering is unrealistic. I would prefer to bring up a sci-fi movie that is generally positive or at least sees AI as benign, which is the movie HER. Spike Jones is film in which Joachim Phoenix falls in love with a machine. There's an extra reason why I would bring that up, though, which is that while watching it, I had a spine tingling feeling that this was not a coincidence that there were too many similarities to something. And a few months later, I saw Spike Jones interviewed where he said, yes, he was inspired by seeing, by interacting with my program, Clevverbot, to make that movie. And so I like to feel that that's the kind of approach that AI can take, the direction that it can take. Nice to know that there was a connection there with something that you've created, how satisfying. Now there's a lot to take in there. Let's talk now about some of the major benefits that AI can bring to humanity. What are some of the positive uses of AI to date that you've seen and the sectors that stand to benefit most from advancements in AI, Rolo? I'd say that it's much more than just talking to machines or the next gadget from the big tech companies. I believe it should be significant in advancing the whole of science. And there are a lot of important reasons for wanting that, such as material science. We need things like superconductors. We need superior solar power technologies to start making a difference to our world. And only by enhancing the tools that we use to make discoveries, can we possibly achieve those sorts of very important world goals? We're talking here about a major disruption for economy, society, almost every sector. I can't imagine any sector of the economy, which will not be disrupted. Because of that, what artificial intelligence will be doing, I totally agree that science will benefit greatly. But you have to think about other areas of the economy as well. Wherever you've got data or great masses of data, it's only through artificial intelligence techniques like machine learning, for instance, that we'll be able to mine this data and make use of them, correlate them, layer them over and so forth. Yes, managing the change that is going to happen in the future as a result of AI is much more important than the danger of AI ever taking over. Absolutely, I totally agree. I totally agree. And it's so how we will impact, for example, our work, our jobs, how we'll impact the way companies function. Indeed, how we'll impact our relations, so that I totally resonate and find it very interesting what Rolo just said about the movie. It will be a different way we will relate with each other and with machines. So actually, maybe the media have a role to play here in putting out a lot more commentary than they do to counter some of the very negative pieces of press out there about how robot technology will obliterate humanity and displace jobs in a wide scale. Now, George, I want to stay with you. You risk some very, very compelling points in a video you recorded for your recent book. Could you tell us why exactly you think that humans strive to perfect artificial intelligence? Well, I tell you why I sort of did the page in artificial intelligence. I thought it would be a great way to understand the human being. And I think that's what drives people into exploring everything around the human and artificial intelligence, at least in originally, is a way of modeling the human mind on a computer and studying it. Now, I want to open this one up to both of you. One of the long-term goals it seems within the field of AI is for creativity and social intelligence to go exist. Is the end result here then a robot with its own mind? George, I believe that it is theoretically possible at some time in the future to be able through different kind of electronics, perhaps, a different kind of approach, the whole idea of AI I mentioned before that I don't believe in minds outside bodies. So it has to be some kind of embodied artificial intelligence. I believe it is possible to create something that will awaken to the fact that it exists. And I think that will be a very interesting moment in history. Rola? I also believe that a machine that thinks in a genuine sort of a sense is possible. That evolution happens to have discovered one way through, or maybe a few ways, through which it can be achieved. But there are others, and that they don't require perfect imitation of the human brain or anything of that kind. Rola, George, this is really riveting to me and hopefully to our viewers as well. Thank you so much for doing digital futures. I've massively enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Some might say that if we're the ones creating AI, then it should be within our power to control its exact use and applications and therefore mitigate some of the concerns around it. Or might that just defeat the very purpose? Tell us what you think on Twitter using the handles that will flash up on screen right now. Thank you for watching.