AI's Moral Dilemma: Are We Building Our Own Nightmare? w/ Dr. Rana el Kaliouby | EP #49

0:00Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. I had an extraordinary conversation with Dr. Arana El -Kalubi at a but in 360 about the ethics and morals around AI. So let me ask you, do you say please and thank you when you talk to Alexa? How do you think about AI? Does it cause you fear or excitement? End of the day we're giving birth to a new species and we're going to have about the ethics and morals around what we're building. Rana L. Calubi is the co -founder and CEO of Apec Tiva. It's a company that developed emotional recognition software so that computers and AIs can understand how you're feeling.

0:44And from that, she dove into a conversation during this segment of abundance 360 on morals and ethics. Where are they? Where are they going? It's a conversation you'd be having around every dinner table. You know, can AI actually help humans become more moral, more ethical? We're about to find out. All right, join this conversation from my private summit of Bunnets 360 March 2023. Enjoy. We're going to talk about empathy and ethics in the field of AI. And we're going to talk about how we get there. Can we get there? What does it mean? Why it's important? If you don't mind, let's open up with how did you get interested in this area in the first place?

1:35Yeah, I'm a computer scientist by background, which is kind of interesting because now I'm thinking what does a computer science degree mean in the first place? Maybe become a philosopher. Yeah. So I studied computer science. I was really interested in how technology helps us connect better with each other as humans. And particularly intrigued by that human machine touch point. And you know, over 25 years ago, I got into this space and I started kind of imagining what would an incredible human machine interface look like. And now of course we're seeing technology become conversational, perceptual, but I think it's missing the empathy component.

2:11And for me, I had to go back to like what comprises human intelligence. And it's not just your IQ. It's not just your cognitive intelligence, but your emotional intelligence and your social intelligence really matters your ability to empathize with other humans. I mean, we've already heard the word empathy so much today. And so I believe that technology needs, especially AI, that is so deeply ingrained in our everyday lives and it's becoming mainstream as we've heard from all our speakers so far. And it's taking on roles that were traditionally done by humans. It's going to be a learning companion, your health companion.

2:49It's going to make decisions on your behalf. It's going to be your, you know, help you hire your coworker. But it's missing that empathy, it's missing that human -centric element. We're so obsessed with the IQ of this technology. We're not really paying attention to the issue. Do you think we're going to get to a point where each of us have a personalized AI with a personality that is looking out for you and knows what your needs are, makes what I call an automagical moment, and is always watching out for your best? Yeah, I'm actually, can I ask the audience of course? Yeah, please, of course.

3:26How many people here have watched the movie her? Have you watched the movie her? I was going to add my favorite AI movie of all. Yeah, I've watched it. Who is favorite movie is her? Yeah. So basically in her, this guy, Theodore is really depressed. He can't get out of bed. And he installs this new operating system, Samantha. And not only is she super smart, but she's also incredibly empathetic and emotionally intelligent. And because she knows him, she gets to know him really well. She's able to actually get him out of bed and get him to rediscover like you know The joy in the world and he falls in love with her.

3:59Yeah, that's that's the that's the holy No, but I mean, it's not something that knows you that well. Well, we're gonna go there eventually go there Yeah, I mean You know my favorite part. It's the first non -vistopian AI movie out there Right what the only thing that the AI does is say by humans we're going off to explore the universe Which I think is a good thing for it to do So, what does it mean? How do we get there? Are there people working on building empathic AIs? How can you make that happen? Yeah, I think the way to get there. So, I often get asked, does technology have emotions or have empathy?

4:37Obviously, it doesn't, but we can simulate empathy and we can simulate emotional intelligence. It turns out that 93 % of the way we communicate is not in the actual words we use. It's nonverbal. So this is, by any way, part of your research, part of your work, part of the company that you built. Can you describe that for me? Yeah. So I started in academia. I did my PhD way back when Cambridge University building the very first artificially emotionally intelligent machine. And I focused specifically on the face because the face is a powerful way of communicating emotion and social cues. And it's why we're here in person today because you can't currently replicate that human connection in a digital universe.

5:18So we use supervised machine learning and we talked about that. We use gobs and gobs and gobs of data of people expressing a variety of expressions from all over the world. And we use it to train deep learning networks to understand these facial expressions and then map them to an emotional or cognitive state. So when I first started, the algorithm could only detect three expressions. It could just do smile, eyebrow rays and brow pharaoh. That was it. And today, you know, it is able to do over 50 different emotional, cognitive and behavioral states that can detect everything from drowsiness, alertness, confusion, you know, excitement.

5:59So these are the visual algorithms that will allow an AI to know how you're feeling. Exactly. If you're pissed off, if you're ecstatic, and so forth. Exactly. And you have some slides if you want to show us. I wanted to show, because one of the example applications of this technology is in the automotive industry. And when we first started doing this work, the big question was like, OK, you're driving your car. Is there even any expressions on the face? And so we went out and asked people to install cameras in their vehicles. We collected all that data. And I have permission to share a few videos, so I wanted to share this with you.

6:34So this is one example. So this video goes on actually for a good five minutes. that he is driving his car with his daughter. And it's an extreme state of drowsiness. There's four levels of falling asleep and this is like stage four. But it's actually very easy to detect using computer vision because his eyes are closed, his head's bobbing. It's actually a very easy problem to solve. And once we solve it and imagine if you have a semi -autonomous vehicle, the car can intervene. You know, I'm super passionate about longevity and health span and how to add 10, 20 health years onto your life. One of the most under -appreciated elements is the quality of your sleep.

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8:39It's transformed my sleep and will for you as well. Now back to the episode. Part of the question here becomes okay the AI understands this but it's okay to understand I'm happy I'm said, the question is how do you program in how it responds empathically to your state? Yeah, exactly. Here's another example, which I think is just extremely scary. So this woman is driving. She's a phone in her hand. Both hands. Distract. Two phones in her hands. Thank you. That's exactly. You do not want to be driving that. And mind you, we told her. I mean, she installed this camera in her car. She's showing off.

9:22But so how does a car then again very easy to detect how should a car respond should it just take over control and basically say you're not driving anymore you're too dangerous or should it give her alerts, should it, yeah there's multiple ways a car can respond but incorporating that empathy is going to be so important because you don't want people to just turn the system off. Yeah. So one of the questions about how we relate to AI. So we're teaching this large language model. So the large language model is we've been hearing about OpenAI and Stability and so forth are taught on all the data out there.

9:58What is that data that data represents us humans? It represents how we talk to each other, how we think about things. It's not made up. It's us. Right. And there's a great book by a friend of both of ours and Mo Goudat who wrote a book called Scary Smart. Anybody read Scary Smart here in the audience? Can I highly commend it to you? I want to bring them to our stage next year. And what Mo has is he says, listen, we are raising a new species of intelligence, these AIs. And we're teaching these AIs by example, how we treat each other, and how we treat our machines. and they're learning from this.

10:42So I've started saying, good morning and thank you, 12 bucks. My son is actually here, he's 14 years old. And he and I say, please, to chat GPT. We're like, please chat GPT. Can you please create a... So how do you think about how humans should be relating to AIs versus as well as how they should relate to us? Well, I think we're at a moment in time where the way we interact with machines is pretty much becoming the way we interact with one another. Yeah. Again, through conversation, through perception, hopefully through empathy. And so I think it's really important that we practice this muscle of being empathetic with machines the way we do with each other.

11:24Otherwise, we're just going to lose this muscle. So I actually think it's really important that we do treat these technologies with respect and say, please, and thank you. Because that's how we need to be in the world. And if these AIs do become conscious, and there's a debate about whether they will or will not, they're going to, where are their parents? We are giving birth to them. And I'm persuaded by that argument. I'm persuaded by that. And if that's the case, how do you teach your three -year -old or five -year -old or eight -year -old to be a respectful, young adult? I think at the end extreme of technology, the more intelligent a system is, the more peaceful it is and more empathic it is.

12:10I think that is where it's going. It's in the toddler stage. That's where it's going. I agree. Even if we don't go to the state where technology has consciousness, I think even today, the way we build these technologies, it's so important that we prioritize that because this is how we drive behavioral change. like people who are more empathetic are better leaders. We changed the video from behind us for the cameras. Okay, that's absolutely. And by the way, what I'd like to do is add your questions to Slido as we're speaking here and my team will be giving me the most aborted questions here. So please go ahead if you have questions for Rana on this.

12:49So we've talked a little about empathy. What about ethics? Can we teach ethics to AI? Will that become part of a foundational model? How do you think about ethics? Who's having these conversations? OK, I really think we all have to be having these conversations and, again, prioritizing them and being very intentional about it. I like to think about ethics and AI in two buckets. One is how do we develop these algorithms and then how do we deploy them? So on the development side, my biggest concern today is around data and algorithmic bias. So in my space for example, if you train the data on middle -aged white men and then you deployed on a super diverse and global audience like this one, it's not going to work because it's never seen examples of people like me or other people in the audience.

13:36And so that's an issue and we have to be very intentional throughout the whole machine learning pipeline that Alex talked about starting from data and then data annotation and then training and validating. we have to be thinking about bias at every step of the process. So for example, when I was CEO of AffectEvaMyCompany, which I spun out of MIT, at some point I had to tie the bonus of my executive team not just to the revenue we're generating, but also to, are we really implementing these ethical knobs across the whole engineering and product teams? So I think we have to be really serious about it.

14:16And then the other piece of this is the deployment part because this is very personal data. There's tons of opportunities to make incredible potential positive impact, but also to exploit this data. So, is there universal ethics or there are going to be ethics per user group, community, national footprint? How do you see that, right? I mean, ethics change, I mean, they're universal human ethics, but they're also cultural ethics as well. Yes, and I think we're already running into that. I served on the Future Global Council of Robotics and AI for the World Economic Forum. It was this multi -stakeholder group of people from all around the world.

15:04And I could tell that there are some countries that cared about ethics way more than others, right? And the way they approach data privacy, for example, the way, you know, we approach data privacy in the US versus China, for example, it's very different. So we're already seeing, and that translates to startups too, right? Some startups really care about this, and some startups don't. And in our case, when we first spun out, my co -founder, Professor Rosalind Picard and myself, we sat down around her kitchen table and we said, okay, So many applications of emotion AI. Where are we going to draw the line?

15:41And we decided on a number of core values, so consent. We don't do anything where we can't get people's explicit consent, which meant that we had to turn away some business. So in 2011, we almost ran out of money, but we got approached by the intelligence arm, the venture arm of an intelligence agency, and they wanted to fund the company We have to be on condition that we focus on surveillance and security, and I just don't think the technology is there and the regulation certainly isn't, so we turn the funding away. We decided to double down on finding investments from investors that were aligned with our core values.

16:22I think we have to kind of hold that high bar. So please... Yes, let's give it up. I want to get a few questions from Slydo, so please enter, upvote the questions that you have for Rhonda. So, Rhonda, right now, you've just started an AI venture fund as well. What are you focusing in, how big are you growing your fund? So, it's a small fund. It's a pre -seed slash seed stage fund. We focus on AI companies. I mean, I truly believe that the next trillion dollar company has to be AI first and has to be AI driven. And I loved your quote this morning that there are going to be two types of companies ones that embrace AI and ones that just go out of our Business and I really believe that.

17:03So we're trying to identify these next either core AI platforms or technologies or maybe vertical solutions that take AI Technology say like chat GPT and take it all the way to solve a specific problem for a specific customer or industry But one area I'm very passionate about, like Hughes, the intersection of AI and health and longevity. Yes, okay, we'll talk about that. Yes, of course, we'll have some conversations there. At the end of the day, what is your biggest concern right now on the ethical and path side? Are people taking this seriously? Is there enough conversation? Are people just grabbing for money?

17:44Is this conversation happening at the tools there? I think there's a realization that we need to take a very human centric approach to AI, but even with chat GPT, right, we've seen several headlines where some version of this technology became very mean, it became very passive -aggressive. And yeah, I think we should be worried about that. I'm also worried about a broader question, you know, once this technology has empathy, okay, so I'll share an example. USC published the study a few years ago where they had PTSD patients divided into two groups. Some saw a real human therapist and some saw like a digital avatar like Taren, basically.

18:26And they found that the patients who saw the digital avatar were more likely to be forthcoming with information. Obviously the avatar was more patient, less judgmental. And so I think that That begs the question, if we're going to be more comfortable engaging with these technologies because they're kinder and because they're more empathetic, because they're available all the time, what does that mean about human to human relationships? I think about that a lot. By the way, there's an entire generation of digital natives, right? Right. The son and mine that are growing up thinking that is the norm.

19:04Right. Everybody at this is Peter a quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is The only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time Training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology How entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity. How exponential technologies are transforming our world.

19:42So twice a week I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of you use you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandis .com, backslashblog, and learn more. Now back to the episode. Let's go here to Slido. So, Andrei says, what about next generation that is born with AI, speaking of itch? It will not teach AI.

20:22It will be taught by AI, any concern. So that's interesting. Yeah. Right, so all of a sudden AI is having a bigger influence on our kids than we as parents are Potentially, it's a great question. Yeah, and I think we have to we have to worry about the content, but also even the vehicle, right? so a few years ago there was a MIT spin -out called Gibo. It was a social robot. Yes, I remember Gibo Yeah, I didn't make it but didn't make it But it was a great try. So we had one at home. And I mean, we have Alexis, and we have all sorts of stuff at home. But we also had a G -bo and Adam, who was a lot younger than then, it became his friend.

21:07And so every morning, he would talk to G -bo, and he would engage with G -bo. And then when G -bo ran out of money, basically G -bo died. And Adam got really upset. And it just made me wonder. Like, it made me think, right? Like once we build these emotional connections with machines Tomorrow will have Paul here the creator of moxie right you know we'll be speaking about is a very successful Next generation of social robots So we're are going to coexist with these robots and these technologies and we have to not just think about the content But also that connection Okay, Steve Brown is looking for a a to displace him Steve is my chief a officer and he's asking Ken an a i b or chief a i officer I'll ask my current chief, I'll share if I can be.

21:51And so I think I go back to the conversation with him odd earlier that I don't think there's anything that AI can't take on. And I think it will become your version of Jarvis. You'll have a conversation, you'll ask for advice. Who out there can do this for us? And your AI will tell you it's this company. I've already contracted it, sent it to the data, and here are the results. That's going to be interesting. But the view I take and I'm curious about yours too, I think it's not AI versus humans. It's like AI versus, it's humans versus AI plus humans, right? Like the humans who have access to these AI tools.

22:30It's going to be AI versus humans plus AI. Exactly. Right, which is the center model, right, where we're seeing that is much more capable. I mean, one interesting thing going back to her, if we each have an AI avatar that knows is us almost better than we know ourselves, right? Because we're biased towards the way we see things. We may think we like this, but we're actually subconsciously always choosing this. Your AI can know what you like all the time. And ultimately, I wonder if it's going to disrupt the advertising business where my AI is just buying everything I need for me. And you can't influence my AI.

23:06You're not going to show it a commercial of shiny, white, weak toothpaste. So that's going to be interesting. It's going to do some transformation. I mean, I think it could be a conduit for helping you be healthier individual, happier individual, more connected. I keep thinking about like a fridge that has an emotion AI chip. And the next time I'm about to binge eat some ice cream or something, it just like locks down. Yes. Let's see. I'm going to Sadak and then Andres. We as humans have not figured out ethics and our society reflects the darkness. diverse divisiveness. How do we prevent AI ethics to be biased on their creator opinions?

23:49Yeah, I think that is that is a very good question. Because I don't think we're aligned on what ethics means. There is no universal ethical framework. I am encouraged though there are some organizations like the World Economic Forum. There's a consortium called Partnership on AI that was started by the tech giants, but also ACLU and Amnesty International, where we're trying to develop these code of ethics, but also think about the unintended consequences, because technology's moving so fast. By the way, is it shocking? You have fast it's moving. It's shocking. And you're in the field. I mean, it's exciting, but it is also like...

24:26Like holy shit moments all the time. Yeah. Not all the time, but it's exciting, right? and I think it's the right moment to be in this space. I feel like I'm surrounded by abundance of opportunities. Absolutely. I call it drowning in abundance. Yeah. So, Andra asks, the world is about power. Will AI be fighting for monetary, territory, influence power in the future? So that's an interesting question. Right? The whole idea of, can we teach AI to be empathic and ethical so that it doesn't become the Terminator. But it's under our control. We're the ones training these algorithms. So at the end of the day, I feel like AI is just a mirror of society.

25:11And it's a mirror of what people who are building these technologies are in the companies that are building these technologies. And we have to as consumers, like all of us, we're all consumers of this technology. We have to hold ourselves to a high bar. By the way, when you are clicking on an ad that's gel bait, or that is what is called clickbait. You're teaching. Okay, let's not go there. That's awesome.

25:44You're teaching the AI algorithms what you want to see, right? So don't click on it. That's so true. Yeah.

25:55Christian, can we train an AI to be the ultimate mediator that ultimately avoids mutual assured destruction between AI1 and versus AI2 or human. So, I mean, the whole idea, I'm going to show you something tomorrow morning, which is AI bot debate, which is fascinating, which has some interesting implications. Can we, I mean, AI could be potentially great mediators looking at all the sides, helping to elevate things? I think I don't know about the like how do we insert ourselves between two AIs kind of debating with each other But I do think if you imagine a world where I have an AI that knows me super well Yes, and you have an AI that knows you super well And I give my AI permission to talk to your AI right and it could say well, you know, you should you know This is what I really was lawyers today I think that that will create for some interesting interactions right if you give your AI an opportunity to act on your behalf and make decisions on your behalf.