Will artificial intelligence help us solve every problem? – PBS NewsHour

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now to another in our Brief But Spectacular series.

Tonight, we hear from Sebastian Thrun. Hes an adjunct professor at Stanford University and the founder of Udacity, an online educational organization. He founded Google X, the semi-secret research facility that began development of Googles self-driving car.

SEBASTIAN THRUN, Founder, Google X: Artificial intelligence is to the human brain what the steam engine has been to the human muscle.

Before the agricultural revolution, most of us were farmers, and our distinguishing capabilities were our physical strength and agility. And then we invented machines that make us stronger and, all of a sudden, one farmer can make food for 150 people.

And this has unleashed a flurry of amazing innovations, like airplanes, cell phones, jobs you never heard of like software engineer or TV anchor, all these wonderful things. That is about to change once again.

I think were going to look back and find that driving a car is just like the same way the Middle Ages look from todays perspective. We kill over a million people every year in this world using traffic accidents.

And thats an intolerably high number. We text, we make phone calls, were fatigued, were sometimes even drunk when driving and all this stuff. A self-driving car doesnt text, it doesnt fatigue, it looks in all directions, its never drunk, and it emerges as a safe alternative to human driving.

I have a 9-year-old. I would love to put him in a driverless car and say, go to school on your own. And he would love it, because it would give him the ability to go around and organize his own play dates.

I think every technology comes with its risks and with its possibility for abuse. I mean, you can take a kitchen knife, and you can cut your food, or you can kill somebody or hurt somebody with the same knife. And the same is true for every technology we invent.

So, I think whats important is that we approach these technologies with responsibility. The next generation of technology is going to be called artificial intelligence. And were going to have an I.Q. of 10,000. Were going to be able to solve every problem and know everything there is to know just by using A.I.

My students and I recently did work on artificial intelligence for detecting skin cancer, and we found that if we train an artificial intelligence with about 130,000 images, we can find skin cancer basically using an iPhone as accurately as the best board-certified dermatologist.

And thats sensational, because now we can take the skill of a Stanford doctor and bring that skill to the entire world by a platform that everybody already has, which is a smartphone.

Every time I talk through my phone and its probably about an hour a day it could analyze my speech and thereby find things like Alzheimers much, much, much earlier than we find it today.

And thats exciting, because it would mean we would be able to cure and treat those diseases at a stage when theyre often still curable.

I can tell you, when I started working on self-driving cars more than 10 years ago, most of my professor colleagues told me its impossible and Im wasting my time and possibly my career.

When you look at the Wright brothers, 100 years ago, the worlds experts had come together and concluded that its impossible, there will not be such a thing as flight.

So, when you go forward, why cant we cure all of cancer? Why cant we cure heart failure and heart diseases? And why cant cars fly in the future? Why do they have to be on the ground?

I mean, all these things, when you think through it, the answer might be very different from what the past tells us.

My name is Sebastian Thrun, and this is my Brief, But hopefully Spectacular take on imaging the future.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Sebastian Thrun.

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Will artificial intelligence help us solve every problem? - PBS NewsHour