Will AI destroy us... or save us?

10:52Francis Collins:Our species has been around probably for maybe 300, 400 ,000 years. And yet for most of that time, we're doing, you know, chiseling some stones, hunting some animals, you know, living very simply in caves. Not a lot was happening.

11:12Francis Collins:And then around 14 ,000, 60 ,000 years ago, boom.

11:23Francis Collins:The big bang of the human mind.

11:29Francis Collins:Something amazing happens and our ancestors, across the world by the way, right, start creating art. Start to narrate, tell stories about how they experience the world.

11:45Stephanie Dick:When love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep. Through these stories, we project our hopes, fears, and dreams onto the canvas of the invisible unknown.

11:58Francis Collins:All the earth is a grave, and nothing escapes it. And that meant also that we were able to transfer information and knowledge to the next generation. The divine gift does not come from a higher power, but from our own minds. And that's what kicked off this amazing journey of our species to where we are today.

12:32Francis Collins:What seems to have happened is some kind of genetic mutation that furnished us, our species in particular, with the ability of language.

12:46Stephanie Dick:Language and stories. We know they're part of what makes us human. But what else? This body, what is it? How did it begin? People somehow think maybe we knew about DNA for the last several centuries. We didn't. It really wasn't that clear what was the hereditary material that passes from parent to child and that carries all those genetic factors.

13:17Francis Collins:This is Francis Collins. Maybe you've heard of him. But in case not, I asked ChatGPT to write up a bio. Here's what it gave me. Francis Collins is a renowned physician geneticist. He earned his MD and PhD at Yale University and is best known for his leadership of the Human Genome Project, a landmark international research effort to decode the entire human genetic blueprint.

13:42Stephanie Dick:The people at the University of North Carolina will be upset to hear that chat GPT said, I got my MD from Yale, but that's OK.

13:52Francis Collins:Also, there's an error in there.

13:54Stephanie Dick:There is an error.

13:55Francis Collins:Were there any other mistakes?

13:57Stephanie Dick:It was a bit of an omission. I don't think there was any mention of the 12 years I spent as the director of the National Institutes of Health under three presidents, but that's okay.

14:08Francis Collins:We asked ChatGPT to comment on its error.

14:11Stephanie Dick:I apologize for any errors in the biography of Francis Collins. As a language model, I am trained on a large data set of text. I may make mistakes or omissions. I recommend fact-checking any information that I provide. Don't worry. We will. So much of the driving force behind Collins' work is trying to understand what makes humans human, like at the most basic molecular level, but also beyond that. Growing up in the 1950s, he was amazed by the recent discovery of the structure of DNA. There were covers of Life magazine saying discovering the secret of life.

14:52Francis Collins:Was it actually discovering the secret of life?

14:55Stephanie Dick:It's maybe a little over the top because I actually think there's more to life than just molecules. But certainly if you want to talk the biological basis of life, yeah, this was discovering that. It's kind of, you know, the book of life that's inside each cell. It's incredibly inspiring to think about this. And it is the same kind of molecule that all living things on this planet use. Another reason to be pretty sure that we're all descended from some common ancestor. And that as this information molecule evolved over time, it took on different letters and different orders. But it was still that double helix with all of that potential.

15:36Stephanie Dick:Potential. Part of what this discovery did was show us humans a way into understanding things about ourselves we hadn't yet discovered. And Collins believed to further unlock the secrets of who we are, we needed to decode our genetic programming. The big question was, okay, this is a book. We are information organisms, and this is our information source. It's digital, but it's not actually carrying out the actions. How does that happen? How do you take this information and cause a cell to actually do something? If we were going to get that intelligent about our own instruction book, maybe we could not just read it, but we could actually occasionally figure out how to do a find and replace when something was misspelled.

16:23Stephanie Dick:It was clear to me, if we want to do this, we've got to have a better database to work with. We need the human genome. That became my dream. If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know.

16:57Stephanie Dick:You are listening to the heartbeat of the Sage Computer. Every instrument in this room is constantly monitoring, testing, pulse-taking, controlling.

17:13Francis Collins:This era, when humans were seeking mastery of the sky and the body, was in many ways dependent on another groundbreaking technology of the time. An additional brain that can work faster than ours, but does what we wish we could do. The computer. In the old days, the word computer usually meant a person, usually a woman actually, that sat down and did mathematical calculations by hand, okay, and by rule, a ruler, right? And then that word computer, which described a human being, was transposed into the machine because the machine can do it better.

17:52George Zarkadakis:So the mainframe computers would only fit in these massive rooms in the basement, which is fitting because these devalued laborers who did the actual programming work were down there. My name is Stephanie Dick, and I'm an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University.

18:11Francis Collins:She holds a PhD in the history of science, with a specialization in the history of mathematics and computing.

18:20George Zarkadakis:These machines produced massive amounts of heat and noise and working with them you had to carry these boxes of punch cards back and forth as input and output and stick it into the machine. This is like a sweatshop. Everything was really slow, very different from the machinery that we're all used to today which is almost as fast as light and you know conforms to our every demand. You know, the most disturbing part of the history of AI for me comes from the fact that these men who were working in artificial intelligence looked at those massive, noisy, hot mainframe computers and saw themselves in it.

19:06George Zarkadakis:They looked at them and identified a deep affinity, that there was something fundamentally shared between their minds and these machines.

19:19Stephanie Dick:Coming up, as we unlock the secrets of man and machine, we ask the question, will this knowledge bring us closer to perfection or destruction?

19:35George Zarkadakis:Hi, this is Christopher from Los Angeles, California. I love ThruLine because it is always informative and keeps me alive.

19:45Stephanie Dick:This message comes from LinkedIn ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype for marketers. That's impressions. When ads don't create revenue, that's a tough conversation with the CFO. Instead, invest in results. Your CFO will love LinkedIn ads generates the highest row as of all major ad networks. So advertise on LinkedIn, spend$250 and get a$250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com slash NPR pod. Terms and conditions apply. This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics with A Magnificent Life. From Sylvain Chaumet, the visionary director behind The Triplets of Belleville, comes a new animated film about a man's most cherished memories.

20:31Stephanie Dick:When asked to write a column about his childhood, Marcel Pignol must confront his younger self and bring his incredible past back to life. Through his family, relationships, and art, Marcel rediscovers his true purpose. From Sony Pictures Classics, A Magnificent Life, now playing in select cities. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Save on seasonal favorites at Whole Foods Market. Start in the vibrant produce department, stocked with organic fruits and veggies. Then head to prepared foods for easy grab-and-go lunches and dinners. There are so many ways to save. Those yellow sale signs are just about everywhere.

21:07Stephanie Dick:Plus, Prime members can find extra in-store deals every Tuesday and Friday, and the low-priced 365 by Whole Foods Market brand never sacrifices on quality. Save today and every day at Whole Foods Market.

21:22Francis Collins:What is a machine?

21:27Stephanie Dick:A machine is a device that can perform specific tasks more efficiently, or with greater precision, than humans can do alone. The basic idea behind the machine is to make work easier. Humans have been creating machines for thousands of years, starting with simple tools like the wheel, and advancing to complex machines, like computers and robots. The relationship between humans and machines continues to evolve, and is likely to become increasingly important, as advances in artificial intelligence continue to shape our world. Part 2. A More Perfect Human It's 1956. It's summer. It's the Dartmouth Math Department.

22:12Stephanie Dick:And everybody has left, so the department is empty. And 10 men get together to invent the field of artificial intelligence.

22:25George Zarkadakis:It was instigated by John McCarthy, who was a mathematics professor at Dartmouth. The proposal that John McCarthy wrote pulls no punches at all. Quote,

22:37Stephanie Dick:We propose that a two-month, ten-man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Second sentence. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning

22:55George Zarkadakis:or any other feature of intelligence can, in principle, be so precisely described

23:01Stephanie Dick:that a machine can be made to simulate it.

23:04George Zarkadakis:So right from the beginning, there's this pronouncement that human learning and intelligence can be mechanized and automated. It fascinates me.

23:14Stephanie Dick:It's an enormously grandiose idea. My name is Meredith Broussard. I'm a data journalism professor at NYU, and I'm the author of More Than a Glitch, Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech. Something else that I think was really interesting about this conference is they decided on the name artificial intelligence as the name of their new field. I think the name was chosen aspirationally. Most of the people who are at the forefront of artificial intelligence are great consumers of and lovers of science fiction. And so there's a lot of desire to make science fiction real, that you're going to make a sentient machine.

24:09George Zarkadakis:The Dartmouth Conference has become an origin myth commemorated with a plaque and everything. On this site, artificial intelligence was born. But in practice, the conference was a bit of a flop, actually. There was a lot of conflict and tension and disagreement, and there wasn't actually a coherent field that emerged out of the conference. Of course, the origin myth served to empower these men to tell their own story, and it's a story full of erasure.

24:42George Zarkadakis:We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking.

25:09Stephanie Dick:That deeper story takes us back to the early days of industrialization. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, factories started popping up across the world, reshaping the nature of work. More and more tasks that had once been done only by human hands were now the work of machines.

25:30George Zarkadakis:Over in England, Charles Babbage, English mathematician, was touring factories in the context of industrialization and thinking, wow, these factories can tell us something about the human mind because they tell us about how processes can be broken down and what the elementary steps even of thought might be. So we also see in this moment a kind of devaluation of the classes of people and or machines who do this sort of repetitive, mechanical, broken down labor in service of efficiency and profit maximization and industrialization and early capitalism.

26:18George Zarkadakis:Babbage was really dismissive of working class people. He thought they were annoying and filthy and they were always making noise and singing songs and said famously, I wish to God these calculations had been produced by steam, by which he meant the steam engine, which was driving factory automation at the time.

26:39Francis Collins:People have been playing around with what is called automata, essentially machines that would automatically do something simple for centuries.

26:52Stephanie Dick:This is George Zarkadakis again.

26:54Francis Collins:So there was always this idea of replicating nature, replicating movement, because movement was related to life. I think the Industrial Revolution was in many ways a culmination of all those ideas that people have been experimenting on and off for at least 2 ,000 years.

27:16Stephanie Dick:Our blows will destroy their whole modern industrial plant and organization.

27:24Francis Collins:Something happened to our collective psyche after the atom bomb. At zero minus 15 seconds, a warning tone sounds in the plane. They hoped that it would put an end to this war,

27:38Stephanie Dick:put an end to a butchery that had been going on for many years.

27:50Francis Collins:Until then, everybody was excited about new things and about new discoveries and about new technologies. And then we discovered something that can destroy us completely. It was terrifying.

28:04Stephanie Dick:I still remember the day very well because this was a river filled with dead bodies.

28:10Francis Collins:And I think that's when people realized that maybe there are some technologies that are not for good. And that's when we became gradually, as public, more skeptical to technologies.

28:28Francis Collins:But some elite academics and scientists believed that better technology was actually the key to our future because it could help us bypass the messy parts of being human.

28:39George Zarkadakis:What if human decision-making procedures were too slow? What if people's judgments are clouded by their emotions?

28:46Francis Collins:To give us more control over ourselves and the world around us.

28:50George Zarkadakis:Our machines will churn out the right answers and the right decisions and the right judgments.

28:56Francis Collins:And in effect, replace God with science.

28:59George Zarkadakis:And it's such a confident moment in American academia. After the war, there was more money, there were more people, there was more cultural capital, more political capital for science and technology than ever before. There's also a real concern about the practicalities of preventing a nuclear war, which was a very real threat at that time.

29:27Stephanie Dick:We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous. That's why these children are practicing to duck and cover. We hope it never comes, but since it may be used against us, we must get ready.

29:40George Zarkadakis:Nuclear detente and in particular mutually assured destruction rely very specifically on information processing capability. You need to know where your enemy's nuclear arsenals are. You need to know if you've been attacked or that you are about to be.

29:58Francis Collins:And the argument went that if the United States could have a system that could think, that could strategize, that could react more intelligently than a group of generals and admirals, then we would have a clear advantage over the Soviet Union.

30:19George Zarkadakis:The fear that people were too limited to be trusted to preserve peace. So let's double down on high technological hyper-rationalism.

30:29Francis Collins:And that's how artificial intelligence came about.

30:34Stephanie Dick:Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

30:44Stephanie Dick:Which brings us back to that famous Dartmouth conference in the summer of 1956. With the Cold War driving interest in artificial intelligence, there was a lot of money up for the taking. and a conference of mathematicians and scientists from top-tier universities and labs seemed like a pretty good investment.

31:03George Zarkadakis:There was exactly one running computer program that was operational and presented at the conference and it was the logic theory machine that had been developed by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon at the RAND Corporation and it enshrined a particular vision of the human mind. Herbert Simon is famous for saying that human minds and modern digital computers are quote-unquote species of the same genus. They are fundamentally the same, just a symbol processing machine that takes symbolic information as input, manipulates it according to a set of rules, and outputs decisions, solutions, judgments, and so on.

31:47George Zarkadakis:Bodies don't matter, society doesn't matter.

31:51Stephanie Dick:One proposed measure of machine intelligence was something called the Turing Test, named for its creator, British mathematician Alan Turing, who you might remember from the movie The Imitation Game. Would you like to play? Play? It's a game. A test of sorts. For determining whether something is a machine or a human being.

32:15George Zarkadakis:was based on a parlor game for swapping gender that says a man and a woman leave the room and the party goers have to figure out who's the man and who's the woman by sending questions back and forth on paper. And the man's job is to try to pretend to be the woman and the woman's job is to be herself. And he says, what if we took the same test and replaced the man by a computer and the woman by any person? And then the judge, of course, is meant to be able to figure out whether the machine is the human or the human is the human. And what I have always found so shocking about the Turing test is that it reduces intelligence to telling a convincing lie, to putting on the performance of being something that you're not.

33:06George Zarkadakis:from the beginning with this disembodied conception of intelligence the question that turing posed what can the mind do without a body and therefore what might the machine do since it doesn't have one chess was one of the first answers given why did they pick chess well

33:25Stephanie Dick:the early days of artificial intelligence and the early days of computing are dominated by men, mostly white men who were educated at elite institutions. Skill at chess was considered a universal marker of intelligence.

33:45George Zarkadakis:White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.

33:52Stephanie Dick:The problem is that this small and homogeneous group of people has common biases and people embed their own biases in technology. And so we see the blind spots of the creators then reflected in the technological artifacts that they create. They had all this hope and optimism about how fast they could accomplish their sci-fi inspired dreams of a sentient machine, a machine that could beat a human at chess. But from the 1970s to the 1990s, it was a cycle of hype and disappointment. The technology was just not there yet, and eventually the funding dried up. Periods like this came to be known as AI winters.

34:41George Zarkadakis:I hesitate to use the term in part because outside of the United States, it was the 80s and 90s that really led to a burgeoning of AI research in other parts of the world, including both China and Russia. So it may have been a winter in America, but it was a time of great creation and creativity in other parts of the world.

35:03Francis Collins:The early pioneers of the field had underestimated the complexity of humans and overestimated the capabilities of machines.

35:13George Zarkadakis:I think underneath all of that arrogance and hubris is a real lack of faith in people.

35:21Stephanie Dick:He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work. In fact, he rejected the man and made the robot.

35:30Francis Collins:The word robot means worker.

35:33George Zarkadakis:It's a translation of the Slavic word for a serf, for a slave, for a servant. It originated in...

35:39Francis Collins:In the early 20th century.

35:41George Zarkadakis:Karl Kapek's play R.U.R., Rossum's Universal Robots. Rossumovy Universal Roboty.

35:46Francis Collins:Who imagined the future and imagined artificial humans. And they were manufactured.

35:54Stephanie Dick:His sole purpose was nothing more or less than to prove that God was no longer necessary.

36:03Francis Collins:In 1920, decades before the Dartmouth Conference, before the atomic bomb, before the mainframe computer, Rossum's universal robots grappled with the costs and consequences of treating workers as nothing more than their parts. It was an indictment of the exploitation and oppression that people had experienced for centuries in the name of progress. A mistake which, in the play, man was repeating with machines.

36:30Stephanie Dick:The robots are not people. Mechanically, they are more perfect than we are. They have an enormously developed intelligence. But they have no soul.

36:41Francis Collins:At the end of the play, the robots have brought about the downfall of humanity. Yet, unable to reproduce, their days are numbered. But then, two robots awaken to each other's presence and discover emotions previously thought exclusive to humankind. Love blossoms between them, and a soul stirs within.

37:09Stephanie Dick:The soul is not often a subject for science. But long before he became a geneticist, Francis Collins started to wonder if we had to grapple with that big unknown in order to better understand who we are as human beings. I went to medical school, and I found my atheism wasn't feeling like it settled very well when I was sitting at the bedside of good, honorable North Carolina people who were dying of diseases that we didn't have much to offer. And I wondered how I would handle that. and figured for some of these people, clearly their faith was a source of great comfort. So I began a two-year journey to try to understand why do people believe in God?

37:56Stephanie Dick:Ultimately, I began to realize the impoverishedness that I felt from considering human beings solely as mechanical entities and the appeal of the notion that there was something outside of that that fits into things like love and beauty. altruism and goodness and morality. Does our DNA tell us that that, you know, beautiful sunset was something to stop for just a moment and kind of be a little bit in awe?

38:30Stephanie Dick:Does the way in which listening to Beethoven's Third Symphony bring me to tears, is that written in my DNA? What is that about?

38:48Francis Collins:Coming up, we enter a new era where the souls of man and machine might converge.

39:12Stephanie Dick:Hi, this is Chelsea and Katie calling from Philly. You're listening to NPR's ThruLine. This message comes from LinkedIn ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? For marketers, that's impressions. When ads don't create revenue, that's a tough conversation with the CFO. Instead, invest in results your CFO will love. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. So advertise on LinkedIn. Spend$250 and get a$250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com slash nprpod. Terms and conditions apply. This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics with A Magnificent Life.

39:57Stephanie Dick:From Sylvain Chaumet, the visionary director behind The Triplets of Belleville, comes a new animated film about a man's most cherished memories. When asked to write a column about his childhood, Marcel Pignol must confront his younger self and bring his incredible past back to life. Through his family, relationships, and art, Marcel rediscovers his true purpose. From Sony Pictures Classics, A Magnificent Life, now playing in select cities.

40:27Francis Collins:Can you tell me the story of your ancestor, Deep Blue?

40:34Stephanie Dick:Certainly. Part 3. Souls of Silicon. The match was held on the 35th floor of a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan, with a large crowd of onlookers and a throng of journalists and cameras. Gary Kasparov, considered one of the greatest chess players of all time.

40:57Francis Collins:Yes, I was confident, yeah. That's confident arrogance. Let's remember that before 1997, I haven't lost a single match, period. I was unbeatable at the chess board.

41:09Stephanie Dick:He went up against the machine, IBM supercomputer, Deep Blue, capable of analyzing 200 million positions per second. Last year in Philadelphia, Kasparov won against a slower, weaker version of Deep Blue. This rematch, played in Manhattan, was seen as the ultimate test of man against machine.

41:30Francis Collins:I couldn't say no. It was too tempting. You know, it's just understanding better relations between humans and computers, you know, very important for our progress. Trying, you know, just to find out, so what are the limits of computers?

41:43Stephanie Dick:The atmosphere was tense as the players sat down at the chessboard. Kasparov with a focused, determined expression. And Deep Blue with its bank of blinking lights and silent fans. The game began. Kasparov made his first move with a steady hand. Deep Blue responded with a move of its on. Calculated with lightning speed. It became clear that both players were evenly matched. Kasparov's experience and intuition were met with the machine's raw computational power and ability to analyze large amounts of data. The bishop can easily fall victim to what we call an overload tactic. When one piece has to be so many pieces...

42:31Francis Collins:I grew up in the city of Baku, in the deep south of the USSR. I watched my parents trying to solve chess puzzle. I cannot give you any more information because nobody was there to tweet about this moment when Garry Kasparov discovered chess. And I climbed very rapidly on this chess ladder. So how is Kasparov going to draw up some sort of miracle attack from this position?

43:00Stephanie Dick:The pawn's pushing, Danny, they look frightful. He's famous for sudden tactical swoops. They keep moving in. Intricate traps. Rook takes knight, my God.

43:09Francis Collins:I was the junior champion under 18 of the USSR at age 12, at 17 the world champion under 20, and at 22 world champion. And kept the title for 15 years.

43:21Stephanie Dick:It seems everybody is interested now in home computers.

43:25Francis Collins:From the onset of the computer science, they all thought about chess, the game of chess, as being an ultimate test for machines intelligence. Even before my famous matches with the blue in 1996, 1997, we, when I say we, top players, we already suffered some of the defeats against these chess engines in blitz, 5 minutes chess, or in rapid chess, 25 minutes chess. So when I faced the blue, it was already, you know, like a sign on the wall.

44:09Stephanie Dick:In the end, it was Deep Blue who emerged victorious.

44:21Stephanie Dick:With Kasparov conceding defeat after the machine's 19th move in the sixth game, The match was a historic moment, marking the first time a machine had defeated a reigning world champion in a match under tournament conditions.

44:40Francis Collins:I was really, you know, furious and I wanted to come back and just to tear this machine down. It was painful, I was really angry, but mostly with myself. So it was a clear sign for me that the history of us competing with machines will be over soon.

45:05George Zarkadakis:There's a lovely article that comes out in the New York Times in the wake of Kasparov losing that says, well, it makes sense that the computer won at chess. Chess is a small problem, but I want to see if a computer will ever be able to beat a world champion at the game Go, for which there are more board positions than atoms in the universe. And it's a really exact and clear example of the so-called receding horizon. where people really want to reserve something for ourselves that is not mechanizable. What is it that is uniquely human? Maybe it's our ability to write a poem. Or maybe it's intuition, whatever that is.

45:50George Zarkadakis:Maybe it's certain forms of creativity or certain types of emotion. And then people try to automate those things. We then redefine our humanness again and again.

46:08Stephanie Dick:Kasparov's defeat marked a turning point. A computer had beaten a human at a game humans taught it to play. For scientists, it was a sign that maybe it was time to stop competing with machines and start collaborating with them. Shok, it's open.

46:30Stephanie Dick:He felt that he had learned the language in which God created the universe. It's alive. It's alive. It's alive. It's alive. Today we are learning the language in which God created life. In the name of God, now I know what it feels like to be God.

46:58Now I'd like to invite Dr.

47:00Stephanie Dick:Francis Collins to the lecture. So, Dr. Collins. I had plenty of occasions to imagine having to give the speech where I would say, basically, we failed, we give up.

47:10Francis Collins:When geneticist Francis Collins and his team first embarked on the Human Genome Project, it was a daunting task. They wanted to map out the order of the 3 billion base pairs that made up a tiny molecule, our DNA. In just over a decade, they did it. Mr.

47:29Stephanie Dick:President, distinguished ambassadors, ladies and gentlemen, it is truly a humbling and profound experience to be asked to speak here this morning. On June 26, 2000, in the East Room of the White House, I had my chance to talk about what this meant and to give a big shout out to those 2 ,400 scientists who made it possible. And I think all of us, one level or another, we're also thinking about this in terms of its implications for who we are, maybe even theologically. We are doing something pretty profound here that's never been done by any species on this planet or maybe in the universe. We're reading our own instruction book, and we're part of that, and we're watching it emerge day by day and putting all that information up on the internet as fast as we get it.

48:24George Zarkadakis:During that same time, hardware gets way cheaper, computers proliferate.

48:29Stephanie Dick:And there was a big breakthrough in a subfield of artificial intelligence called neural nets. this ushered in this new era in artificial intelligence, the era of machine learning.

48:48George Zarkadakis:So what if we didn't try to model the human mind first? What if we didn't try to encode human knowledge first? What if we let the computer learn on its own?

48:58Stephanie Dick:What you do when you build one of these systems is you get a ton of data and you feed it into the computer and you say, computer, I want you to create a model of the patterns that you see in the data. And the computer very obligingly makes a model of the mathematical patterns that it sees in the data.

49:22George Zarkadakis:These massive data sets were suddenly feasible to store and process in computer memory, which had sort of been prohibitively expensive before.

49:35Stephanie Dick:It's the beginning of a future of medicine. It's the end of ignorance. Gene-based medicine. Drug discovery, drug development, and curing diseases. Some have said to me that sequencing the human genome will diminish humanity by taking the mystery out of life. You know, we're chemical computers. This is the program that runs us. Nothing could be further from the truth.

50:00George Zarkadakis:there's a deep desire for the human condition not to be a deterministic output of our chemical or genetic or cultural forces but for there to be something that allows for free will and surprise and creativity that belongs to us.

50:20Stephanie Dick:Math is a system of symbolic logic. It is not the indefinable thing that makes us human. And when you are building a computer program, it'll work if you do it this way, and then it won't work if you do it the other way. But that's not how culture operates, right? That's not how relationships work. So there's a really a fundamental difference between what we can do with computers and what we can do in society. Because when it comes right down to it, computers are machines that do math. They compute. And we forget that when we get grandiose about artificial intelligence and we get grandiose about our imaginings.

51:09Francis Collins:Then I'm just imagining a world in which, you know, you have more intelligent machines operating on humans, are the decisions those machines are making in those moments, which, you know, for humans, for example, you might make informed by instinct. Without that, you know, is something missing?

51:31Stephanie Dick:Or without that, are you making fewer mistakes? Sometimes the gut feeling is not one you should have followed.

51:40Francis Collins:So Dr. Frankenstein creates life out of dead matter. In a way, that's what we do with AI as well. We take dead matter, like silicon chips and wires and metals and whatnot, and put them together and coat them, and boom.

52:00Stephanie Dick:Artificial intelligence is becoming a sort of black box with law enforcement. Google uses AI and misinformation spreads wildly on Google. The Chinese Communist Party is using this technology to build the ultimate surveillance state.

52:15Francis Collins:Look, I'm an incorrigible optimist by nature. So that's why, yeah, I grew up in the Soviet Union. Yes, and I saw the collapse of democracy in Russia. And I still believe that, you know, the history of humanity gives us reasons to be optimistic. I'd like to imagine a future where we have built, we have developed human systems that bring the best out of us rather than the worst out of us. I think it's a time where we have to reconsider, you know, this is how in this new environment, which is dominated by computers, we can find a robust democracy. Because humans still have monopoly for evil. And that's why, you know, let's stop worrying about the Terminators and Matrix.

53:02Francis Collins:let's recognize that it's about us. Machine is like a mirror. And if you don't like what we see in the mirror, you have two choices. Either you can work on your body to improve the picture, or you can try to distort the mirror. The latter decision is just, it's a recipe for disaster.

53:37Francis Collins:That's it for this week's show. I'm Randh Abdel-Fattah.

53:40Stephanie Dick:I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.

53:45Francis Collins:This episode was produced by me.

53:47Stephanie Dick:And me and... ChatGPT. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguine. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Kadiyama. Yordanos Tesfazion. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal.

54:05Francis Collins:Thank you to Olivia Chilcote, Devin Kadayama, Shahir Khan, and Magdalena Devorjakva for their voiceover work.

54:12Stephanie Dick:Thanks also to the Clinton Presidential Library, YouTube creator Brian K., Micah Ratner, Rachel Seller, Taylor Ashe, Olivia Chilcote, Ryan Mitchell, Tamar Charney, and Anya Grundman.

54:26Francis Collins:This episode was mixed by Alex J. Wenskis. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Navid Marvi, Sho Fujiwara.

54:38Stephanie Dick:And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org.

54:45Francis Collins:Thanks for listening.

54:54Stephanie Dick:This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics with A Magnificent Life. From Sylvain Chaumet, the visionary director behind The Triplets of Belleville, comes a new animated film about a man's most cherished memories. When asked to write a column about his childhood, Marcel Pignol must confront his younger self and bring his incredible past back to life. Through his family, relationships, and art, Marcel rediscovers his true purpose. From Sony Pictures Classics, A Magnificent Life, now playing in select cities. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Save on seasonal favorites at Whole Foods Market.

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