I. Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, members of Linacre and Reuben Colleges.
What a pleasure it is to see you all here, even though we are a little bit packed in this evening.
Fantastic that we are able to have the 2022 O.C. Tanner Lecture in person. The Tanner Lectures are now in their 44th year.
They were established by American scholar, industrialist and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner and in creating the lectures.
Professor Tanner said "I hope these lectures will contribute to the intellectual and moral life of mankind.
I see them simply as a search for a better understanding of human behaviour and human values."
Appointment as a Tanner lecturer is recognition of an exceptionally distinguished and important career in the field of human values,
and that is a description fully justified in the case of tonight's lecturer.
Professor Rosalind Picard. Professor Picard is founder and director of the Affective
Computing Research Group at MIT Media Lab and the founding faculty chair of MIT's
Mind, Hand and Heart Initiative. She co-founded Affectiva Inc, providing Emotional A.I. Technology and Sympatico Inc,
which designs and develops A.I. systems to monitor human health through wearable sensors.
Professor Picard holds a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and Masters and Doctoral degrees from MIT,
both in engineering and computer sciences. She became internationally known for constructing mathematical models for content based retrieval
of images and for pioneering methods of automated search and annotation in digital video.
Her book, Affective Computing, published in 1997, started a new field by that name and has become a classic in computer science.
Three weeks ago here in Oxford, Dr. Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, gave a special O.C. Tanner lecture on artificial intelligence.
Dr. Hassabis is perhaps best known across the globe as the inventor of AlphaGo,
a computer game which defeated the world Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016.
In his lecture, Dr. Hassabis enumerated three things that he believed were fundamental for the development of artificial intelligence.
Firstly, a problem with a massive combinatorial search space.
Secondly, a clear metric with which performance could be evaluated.
And thirdly, lots of data. Or perhaps effective simulation.
He then described how the real challenge in developing AlphaGo, to beat the world champion, had been the development of the evaluative function.
It proved impossible, he said, to write in an evaluative function for the game go.
Indeed, he hypothesised that the world's leading go players do not meant do not mentally calculate all possible moves.
Rather, they rely on intuition. His breakthrough had been in developing methods for allowing AlphaGo to be intuitive.
Research into human intelligence has revealed that emotions play an essential part in decision making, in perception.
In learning and more, that is, they influence the very mechanisms of rational thinking.
According to Professor Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent,
then we must give them the ability to recognise, understand and respond to emotion.
Her lecture this evening will expand on that thesis and is called 'Emotion, A.I. and Human Values'.
Please join me in welcoming Professor Picard to the stage. Thank you.
It's a real honour for me to be here with all of you and to see a full room after the pandemic, especially.
I'm going to talk about how we might build a future life with A.I., where the best human values are hopefully honoured and where humans flourish.
I'm going to start with a story - in 1996 when I was very young new faculty member at MIT.
I had mostly been working on computer vision and on the side I had written a paper that was unpublished called Affective Computing.
Somebody had read it over in the A.I. lab, in Rod Brooks's zoo.
The zoo was a very famous group of world renowned roboticists, Rod at the helm, and philosopher Daniel Dinh, a theologian on a first,
and other experts from places like Oxford who were trying to build the world's most advanced humanoid robot.
Instead of inviting me to give the normal lecture, they sat me in a circle.
It almost felt a little like a firing squad, except that it was delightful. It was questions being fired.
Why would you want to give computers emotion? Isn't that what makes people so stupid?
Isn't that a really bad idea? And I went through the evidence for, you know, from neuroscience why we now thought that.
Yes, of course, while extreme emotional states could lead to very stupid decisions and behaviour,
we are always having affective states and they are always interacting with cognition and perception and behaviour and action selection.
And if we could understand them and model them in intelligent ways, maybe it would solve several of the problems that I and I elucidate.
I listed those problems and said I thought that we needed to take a look at this.
Well, by the end of this gathering, they were, I will say, more positive but still sceptical.
Like it still seems impossible to me or I don't know. And as I left, one person who had been silent came up at the end.
It was the theologian and she caught me as I was leaving the room with a question that has stuck with me since, she said.
Isn't emotion the last thing that separates machines from humans?
I gave a very short answer, which I'll touch on at the end of my talk.
A one word answer. But today, I want to go a bit deeper into these topics, first,
I'm going to start with some examples of why we build this and some of the
perspectives now on this and then move into more of the human values towards the end.
The paper turned into a book, and I want to highlight here that expressing and recognising human emotion is just a part of affective computing.
There are many other parts that involve shaping algorithms to actually incorporate mechanisms inspired by human and animal emotion.
And I'm not going into all of that today, although that is also an important part.
I'm going to focus on some examples from interaction with humans, which involves expressing and recognising.
Now, people naturally express emotion to computers, and also, I should say for the younger people today,
they sometimes look at me like that's not a computer, that's a vacuum cleaner.
When we think of computing, I think of it as anything with computing in it.
That can be a robot, a software agent, a smartphone smartwatch, all kinds of devices that involve computation that we can embed in our computers.
So affective computing was thinking not about any particular form.
Now we express emotion to computers. In fact, about the time I started this,
even twenty five percent of people under age twenty four admitted to having kicked their computer out of frustration.
There was lots of expressing. There was almost nothing being done about it.
Here's my favourite early example the first social robot built by Cynthia Brazil
in Rod Brooks's zoo several years after my visit there that I love the example,
not just because kismet is recognising from the tone of speech some affective states, but watch how kismet responds.
So another important skill for the robot to be able to learn from people is being able to recognise communicative intent.
Very good kismet. And the way we've done that with Casben right now is to have the robot recognise by tone of voice.
Are you praising it? Are you scolding it? Where do you put your body? No, no, no.
You're not to do that. No.
So instead of just yelling at your machine or being frustrated, it could actually respond in ways that make you perhaps like it more.
You can imagine how industry is now very interested in this with all of the speaking
devices that try to provide support and services really to sell us things.
You ask Alexa for Alexa this lately, but what's the right way to store Walmart?
Alexa responds The right way to spell Walmart is Alma.
That's not what you asked. So, you know, that was not right.
Alexa doesn't have ears to put back. Alexa doesn't look humble and submissive, but Alexa could.
The internal machine learning right could take that response as a signal to adjust what it's done to hopefully do a better job in the future.
It could learn that in a personalised way, it could learn it and a culture dependent way.
There are lots of ways the machine learning loop taking feedback from a person could be used to improve the AI technology.
Now, while I was working in my lab on computer vision and trying to teach a computer to recognise emotions expressed on somebody's space,
which isn't exactly what they're feeling, I'll say more about that in a moment.
A young man came by my office to borrow a physical map. This is before digital maps, and he paused and he said, Hey, what are you working on?
And I told him I was trying to teach computers to do a better job of understanding people's affective expressions.
And he said, Could you help my brother? And I said, Tell me about your brother.
And he started telling about his brother with autism.
And for those of you who don't know many people with autism, not all can have a real challenging time interpreting kind of reading between the lines,
the non-verbal signals, especially what's happening on your face while simultaneously trying to process speech.
I realised that the tools we were building to teach the machine how to do this better could
actually be very slightly adapted to help people and wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?
So we started working on that and fast forward lots of work by our team, including Ron Paul,
you who came over as a postdoc and co-founded Affectiva with me and later commercialised.
There is now very robust and accurate interpret not only tracking of facial muscle movements,
but mapping of those to the labels that people would give to those facial expressions,
including doing groups of people, mapping them to cute little emojis for fun.
But also now this is embedded in robots and other devices to help them interact a bit more smoothly with people.
We didn't just build one tool to help people in the autism spectrum,
we gave away these tools that other people could build into different kinds of learning environments, including things like Google Glass.
We had built early glasses with cameras on them that could look at your face and see.
This one was particularly useful for professors. If I was talking too much and you were looking bored.
I would get a red light to tell me to stop and give you the floor so we could look at if you showed a facial expression of confusion,
interest, boredom, it was like a non-verbal traffic signal. Now, we also were trying to implement things we had read in the scientific literature.
So this became a way to test some of the science in real life.
And one of the things that surprised us right away was that the science I had been told and wrote about in my book.
And you can if you have my book, you can press this part out now and fix it.
I wrote what I had been told by several neurologists that there was a true smile of happiness.
It took a different pathway in the brain and it involved the eye crinkle, the cheek rays as well as the lip corner.
And so if you saw that the person was truly happy was the way the dogma went.
Now, it had been reported that this had appeared in some preschoolers using educational technology, and I was making observations.
And so we ran a long story.
Short ran a randomised, controlled trial study we do to look at if this would actually happen in cases where people were not delighted.
I made a play for you a clip where we've designed an experiment where people are frustrated, they're putting their web information,
their resume online and unbeknown to them, we're using the kind of captures that you can't fill out properly.
I am sorry. You seem to be having difficulties getting through this form.
Would you mind looking at the camera and share your thoughts on how to improve the form this?
I'm stuck. It's important to give the context, because in the next person participating here,
he's experiencing the exact same situation, but you'll see a very different and direct response.
On. You know. That was not the true smile of delight.
However, when you show people not only the still images of these which they rate 50 50, they can't guess which is to light and which is frustration.
But even the videos we find that we can build a computer algorithm does better
than people at recognising which video clips are from people in the situation.
I just showed you where their smile is elicited with frustration versus people.
In another situation I didn't show you where they're watching. Giggling baby videos and even grumpy students usually start off with a giggling baby.
VIDEO Not really smiling, but by the end of it, they're they're usually cracking the light smiles.
Now, this does not mean that computers are better than people at recognising motion.
This is a very narrowly defined recognition task in a very limited situation where it's
a probability of being one of two classes and there's no context being interpreted here.
When humans are given the context and the whole situation, they're much better at discerning what's going on.
Now, when we take the ability of the machine to read facial vocal and additional information, we can put that together in a lot of different ways.
Some of the ways people are proposing involve things like just replacing people.
And I'll show an example of that later. I want to show you a very different example here that's more about trying to help people,
and we started by wanting to help people on the autism spectrum for this particular Ph.D. we were running out of time,
so we decided we would just help MIT students who could use help with some of these skills as well.
Pretty much everybody can. When people talk to each other,
the majority of the information that's conveyed comes from the way we see things rather than the words we're actually saying.
Eye contact smiles. Voice modulation speaking rate pauses.
An emphasis on certain words often add an extra layer of information in our interactions.
Many of us want to improve these interaction skills, but don't have the resources to do so.
Imagine if you could practise your interaction skills with an automated system in the privacy of your own living room.
A programme designed at the MIT Media Lab lets you do just that.
Hi, I'm Mary. I'm looking forward to doing your interview. My automated conversation coach consists of a 3D character on a computer screen that
can see here and make its own decisions based on its interaction with a person,
and it works on a personal computer. Now, let's get started using a webcam.
The system can analyse facial expressions.
For example, it can measure where in the interaction you are smiling and can recognise your head gestures, such as a nod or a shake.
The system also analyses your voice. It not only understands what you say, but how you say it.
Using real time speech recognition and prosody analysis, it can capture the nonverbal nuances of conversations and display it in an intuitive format.
When you're done, it gives you a summary of the information when you smiled,
how fast you spoke and so on, and it can show how these measures change over multiple sessions.
It even allows you to watch the video of your interactions with various measures of your behaviour displayed alongside the video,
such as when you smile, how the volume of your voice rises and falls, and what words you emphasise.
It even shows when your attention wanders. Can't find you?
There you are.
You were saying in a study with 90 MIT undergraduates, the subjects went through simulated job interviews before and after receiving this training.
Those who got the feedback from this automated system were rated as better candidates for the job than those who did not.
Besides job interviews, the researchers say the system could help with public speaking,
dating, learning languages or helping people who have difficulties in social communications.
Now, you might notice that was a little bit dated.
One can make much more human looking avatars now, which you might want to do if you want to intimidate people a little bit more.
In most of our work, we've deliberately chosen not to do that so as not to deceive people about the abilities of the A.I.
When I was working with people on the autism spectrum and trying to understand more about what they really needed,
at one point, one of them, a woman who had become a friend who was not speaking, was typing.
And she communicated to me that I had it all wrong.
She says, Roz, you're what you're doing is all wrong.
I was like, Oh, great, you know, what am I doing wrong? And she said, You're not recognising my emotions properly.
And it's I don't need help recognising other people's emotions.
I need you to recognise my emotions.
And I realised the literature at all focussed on what people on the spectrum couldn't do, not on what we couldn't do for them, right?
How we were not pulling up our end of the bargain.
I said, Gee, I feel terrible. What am I not recognising?
And she said, it's not just you, it's everybody's not recognising our emotions and in particular, they're not recognising our stress.
I realised in the lab we had built physiological measures. These had actually been well known for some time in the physiology literature
that corresponded to sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system stress. And what was missing was the ability to take them out of the lab.
And so we started to build sensors that could embed this physiological measurements, such as the electrical activity, skin conductance.
You know, the notion where your palms get sweaty goes up with perspiration.
But it turns out it also goes up even when your hands don't feel sweaty with very subtle changes in stress.
In fact, it's one of the key signals still used in lie detection,
although it's not an accurate lie detector on its own requires, again, a lot of contextual interpretation.
So we built this sweatband here with sensors in it.
There's another version of the sweatband.
This particular version and an NBA version were borrowed by a student one day coming into my office right before winter break.
Professor Picard, could I please borrow a couple of your sensors?
My little brother has autism, he can't talk, and I want to see what's stressing him out.
I said, Sure. In fact, don't just take one. Take two. They often break. You need to borrow a soldering iron.
He said, No, I have a soldering iron. Great and mighty student can fix them, so he takes the sensors home.
Puts them on his little brother. I'm looking at the data back at MIT and I notice that the boys data was not.
It was usually pretty calm looking, but there was one gigantic peak that I couldn't explain.
In fact, it was on one wrist and not the other, and I couldn't figure out, how can you be stressed on one side of your body and not the other?
So I figured out the sensors must be broken, but I tried all kinds of things to replicate it.
I'm an electrical engineer by training, and nothing replicated the weird data, so I resolved to very old fashioned debugging.
I picked up the phone. I called the student at home on vacation.
Hi, how's your vacation? How's your little brother? Hey, any idea what happened to him?
And I gave the exact date and time in the data and he said, I don't know. I'll check the diary diary and it just keeps a diary help.
Like, what are the odds that some young man has written this stuff, right? He comes back.
He has the exact record. And he says that was right before he had a grand mal seizure.
That led me to connect with Boston Children's Hospital doctor Joe Madison and colleagues and start measuring this
electro dermal activity data in the epilepsy monitoring unit where we could get gold standard 24-7 video EEG,
electrocardiogram, electro dermal activity. And we found that 100 percent of the grand mal seizures we got had this significant more than two
standard deviations above the pre seizure period skin conductance response that together with movement,
we're able to Ming's or work build a machine learning algorithm that could run light in a wearable device and reliably detect grand mal seizures.
Now, it was not able to forecast them at that time.
There has just recently been some very nice work done by the Mayo Clinic using other devices that have come out of our lab for devices,
and they are doing forecasting now using these same data that are used here together with some additional data in our devices.
I didn't know anything about epilepsy when I started this, you know,
I was already this sort of computer vision person become this weird affective computing research person and now I'm,
you know, wasn't really that interested in learning about epilepsy until I started learning more about what was happening.
I'm curious how many of you know somebody with epilepsy? Well, I get many more hands up in the EU than in the US.
One in 26 people in America will have epilepsy. Those of you who did not raise your hand if you go and ask your network,
you probably do know somebody and they just haven't told you how many of you have heard of SUDEP.
Sudden, unexpected death in epilepsy. All right.
Far fewer, this needs to be communicated more sudden crib death, sudden infant death syndrome takes fewer lives every year in the US than SUDEP.
And yet, you know, everybody's a baby at some point. But one in twenty four will have epilepsy.
There's death from this particular unknown cause of death in epilepsy every seven to nine minutes,
and tragically, there will be several during this talk.
But we now know in the last five years we've been learning that it's deadliest if you're alone,
that in fact, the one of the key mechanisms is you have a seizure.
This unusual electro activity, we think it spreads to a part of the brain that can turn off your breathing.
But the breathing can be turned back on. You're still capable of breathing if somebody stimulates you.
So not in a hundred percent of cases, but in many cases when you stimulate the person, they will start breathing again.
And this could be why it is so much less likely that there's a SUDEP when somebody is there,
because the first thing they usually do is they turn you on their side and ask, if you're OK.
And they stimulate you. The hard work of the team at Adam had to go, it was to commercialise this, I have enormous respect now for every company,
all the work they do to take something from a research prototype to something that not only works but can get through FDA approval.
I see medical was easy compared to FDA, and this is now out there being used to help alert with air running on board,
to help alert, to bring a person to help. The first time I got a mail like this, I turned white and I think my skin conductance went through the roof.
The mom described that she was in the shower. Her phone was connected to her daughter's smartwatch, detecting seizures.
She put the phone on the counter, saw it go off while she was in the shower,
ran out of the shower to her daughter's bedroom, found her face down in bed, blue and not breathing.
Flipped her over, stimulated her and her daughter took a breath and another breath, and turned normal colour again.
The family wants to be shown here, they are celebrating one of many happy occasions.
Unfortunately, I've talked to lots of families who were never told about the possibility of SUDEP.
So I'm going to ask all of you if you remember anything when you leave here today to make sure that you talk about
this because the medical professionals that are learning about it are now recommending officially to talk about it,
but they're about 10 years behind and doing so. And now we know that letting people know that seizures can be deadly and that they should have
somebody there who might be able to help them with first aid or stimulation could save their life.
The. As I was reflecting on this and somebody was saying, Oh, this device saved a life, I might know the device didn't save a life.
It was a person who got there who saved the life. The device was helping connect people, and I said, the power is when it connects us to each other.
But you might join me in thinking of some counter examples of that, right,
like the how many of you seen the social dilemma know this kind of take down of lots of the social media industry groups like Facebook,
where the focus has been on connecting people? Right?
So it doesn't seem like the power is to connect us, but it's the power to connect us in ways that help people flourish.
And this is like another dimension that I think has been neglected in a lot of what we've built.
And I perhaps in part because it's really been hard to measure.
Now launching these devices, you don't need to read all the small text led to a lot of really cool science findings that I wasn't expecting.
I thought I was going on a detour with epilepsy. You know, I'm ever going to get back to affective computing.
Well, it turns out we ran into the regions of the brain most likely involved in SUDEP that included things like the amygdala,
which are the core regions we've been studying for emotion, core regions involved and in anxiety and depression and mood disorders,
where suddenly what the epilepsy tells us we're working with had stuck direct electrodes.
And so now we could actually monitor directly those regions of the brain.
We have to wait for an artificial scanning environment joint with our other signals.
We could get noninvasively from the body, and that was surprising and exciting.
And I remembered something my boss at the Media Lab had asked before. Decades earlier.
Back when I was just working on computer vision, I try to make machines smarter.
He had said to me. Ross, when are you going to do something useful, like, OK, Walter, what do you want?
He said, I need a mood ring that tells me my wife's mood before I go home.
Now, at the time, I, you know, I grew up with mood rings, they were these stupid temperature sensors that changed colours,
and somebody probably made a huge amount of money and probably I could save
time not having to write research grants if I would do something like that.
But at MIT, we like to do things that are hard and important, and temperature sensor was trivial.
As I ran into these brain science findings about the connexions between these deep regions of the brain and what we were picking up on the periphery,
and I started to learn about the growing problem in mental health.
This data ends at twenty seventeen here.
It has gone up, up, up with the pandemic. What you see in this graph from very nice work by Twiggy at all is the huge
increase from ages 16 to twenty five in particular since the iPhone came out.
I'm not saying that's the cause. We can't go back and run a causal stay there.
However, there are causal studies with social media showing not just correlation studies now,
but causal studies where you do a randomised controlled trial. You ask one group My study was done by hunted all that you can limit the use of social
media to 10 minutes a day versus regular use and just monitor what you're doing,
which itself leads to improvements.
And the group that limited their use to 10 minutes a day showed significantly better improvements in mental health.
So we know that behaviour is connected to mental health, and I could say a lot more about that, but we have to get onto other topics here.
Briefly, what we can now do with the A.I. is collect data from lots of modalities, not just wearable sensors,
not just what you're saying on your phone, who you're connected to regular surveys.
We might ask you information about your sleep. Sleep regularity is looking very important.
And more, and we put all of that together and we get gold standard labels from psychiatrists.
In this case, what you see is across the bottom, the higher the number, the higher the psychiatrist rating is of your Hamilton depression scale.
You're more depressed if you have a higher stress. So these numbers are given by psychiatrists.
The numbers on the vertical axis are given by the passive data only.
We're not having to interrupt and ask you any questions.
Passive from your smartphone use in your wearable, plus one initial value from your first visit with the psychiatrist.
The correlation here is as good as the doctors are with each other, and this was early work.
Now since then, we've gotten data with that's even harder with more variability in it and the correlations vary.
Here it was actually pretty hard to beat the patient baseline if they weren't changing a whole lot.
Since then, we've got results that are beating patient baselines. Also,
it's still an active area where we need to get a lot more data before we can start to really
understand the different categories of these data and also what kinds of treatments might work best.
We don't want to just treat people, though what we'd like to do is things that haven't been able to be done in medicine before.
See, right now, what happens is if this vertical axis represents your well-being and hundreds of numbers are rolled up in here.
By the way, this is my one concept diagram, not real. Data on the horizontal axis is time.
Let's say that you're applying to schools, you get into Oxford, you're really happy, great positive wellbeing there.
And then unfortunately, major stressors hit.
They always do, and everybody takes a dip.
And then we see the difference between the people who are exhibiting fragile behaviour versus who are resilient and can bounce back.
And then if you're in trouble and especially if you're in trouble and you're down on the slope right right now,
strongly encourage you to get help reach out further down.
You are sometimes the harder it is to help, but there's hope you can always come back and recover.
What we'd like to do is help people detect if they're on the red line as early as possible and also give personalised advice,
evidence based help to move to the blue line. So that's active research right now.
It tends to involve digital therapeutics and things that come to you and your phone.
We've built games and other tools to try to support people.
A big problem is that people don't stay engaged.
So even like our latest game, which is more than twice as effective as the published average best digital mental
health interventions and we're even in the top 15 percent of games by day 30,
we're down to six point six percent of the people who got the app actually using it.
And so if a therapy, you need to use a little bit of it every day, it's really hard to get that retention.
Well, what about interactions with people?
I'm reminded of when my next door neighbour said, I hate to exercise, but I'll show up for an appointment with a person.
I don't want to let them down. There is evidence that relational agents will certainly people engage and can hold you longer for therapy.
Relational agents also have evidence of engaging, and Tim Bickmore,
who did his Ph.D. on this with me, has continued and built lots of nice work in this area.
Here's a recent paper from September 2020 where the relational agent,
even this very cartoony type face not pretending to be a real human, just being kind of a dummy.
I was able to support women and improving their health.
All right. What we see, though, an effort to engage and to, well, the cameras.
And also because it's like climbing Everest, it's there and you want to see if you can do it.
And for an eye person, we love a hard challenge. We see work like the example I'm going to show you next where I'll let it speak for itself here.
The Hong Kong team behind celebrity humanoid robot Sophia is launching a new prototype Grace targeted at the
health care market and designed to interact with the elderly and those isolated by the COVID 19 pandemic.
Dressed in a blue nurse's uniform, Greece has Asian features, collar length,
brown hair and a thermal camera in her chest to take your temperature and measure your responsiveness.
She uses artificial intelligence to diagnose a patient and can speak English, Mandarin and Cantonese.
Hello, everybody. I'm Sophia. Let me introduce you to my sister, Grace.
Come over here. Hi, Grace. Thank you, Sophia.
Hello, everybody. I am grace.
I am built by Hanson Robotics for awakening how I can do all kinds of things for elderly people.
I can visit with people and brighten their day with social stimulation, entertain and help guide exercise,
but also can do talk therapy, take fire readings and help health care providers assess their health and deliver treatments.
Hi, my friend. Nice to see you. OK, great.
So while we talk, I will take your temperature reading and pulse with this little thermal camera on my chest.
See, you are thirty six point six degrees Celsius, by the way.
No risk of COVID. Also, I note that you are responsive and aware, which is good,
and they may share that important data back to the doctors and nurses at the institution.
Resemblance to a health care professional and capacity for social interaction is aimed
at relieving the burden of frontline hospital staff overran during the pandemic,
said founder David Hanson. So he designed Grace to look professional and health care setting.
So that would mean so that she would resemble the sort of human like appearance of health care stock.
And so then this would facilitate more natural interactions.
A human like appearance facilitates trust and facilitates natural engagement because we're wired for a human face to face interactions.
That's just the way that human beings are.
And so giving her a face that would be familiar to people comforting to people and also language abilities that are comforting.
So we now have Mandarin and Cantonese capabilities for the Grace and Sophia robot platforms.
Hey, Grace, why don't you look at my face? Thank you.
And on, I'm going to show you a smile. And let's let's see what your smile looks like.
OK. Yeah. What are sad? Oh, yes, reacting a little sad if I feel pain and then maybe like imagine a big loud noise happens bear, so on.
So with the grace robot, we are simulating over 48 major muscles in the face, so we have 36 motors.
I'm going to pause there. You're invited to go online and watch the whole thing.
It is an engineering marvel, the kind of AI and robotics that goes into making something like this.
How many of you feel really positive and excited about this direction?
Some, OK. All right. How many of you feel kind of unnerved or worried about this direction?
All right, that has the majority here. I want to just point out for some of you who who may be less familiar with how the technology works,
that while some of the air is a bit like a chat bot and some of the demos you'll find online with these robots,
they are largely scripted when you see these really sort of most impressive presentations.
They are not conscious despite the little or alive,
despite the ability to imitate some movements while they display expressions on their face and with gestures, and can do that with tone of voice.
They do not have feelings, and they will, I think, be with us, whether you like them or not.
You know, you might say you hate these things or you like these things.
They're just, there's this flow that I think they're not going to go away.
There is a kind of an enthralling challenge, and these are just going to keep being designed with abilities inspired by people.
It's my prediction. Now, an even older version built by Hiroshi Ishiguro was built to look like him.
His original idea this was even before the pandemic was to send the robot off to give his talk.
So like, I could be my avatar up here,
I could be sitting back in Boston controlling it right and kind of look like I'm there wouldn't be anywhere near as much fun as being here in person.
But as we all now know from all of our Zoom meetings and so forth.
But let's go back to this question.
If we could make it look and act as if the emotions were human in this, is this the last thing that separates humans from machines?
And I've maintained from the beginning that we don't know how to do consciousness or feelings.
And my answer to the theologian at the zoo was No.
And we could discuss more detail later, but some of the key elements are we can make it look lifelike,
but it is not alive nor conscious, and many other things are missing.
But it's not just about these functions that are missing. And this is where I want to transition a little bit to some thoughts about human values.
I think that we are much more than our functions. We are much more than what we do.
Now, there are probably people here who are experts in ontology, and there are at least two kinds of ontology here.
This is not the linguistic category kind, but the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being.
Now again, I'm an engineer. My doctorate is in science, not philosophy.
So I'm going to appeal to some more famous philosophers for a moment here for a very quick summary.
Socrates on a famous T-shirt here to do is to be Plato.
To be is to do. And my favourite Frank Sinatra, W.E.B. Du.
Obviously a great oversimplification, but there is a lot of wonderful discussion out there about the difference between doing and being.
My message for you is that I think we are onto logically equivalent to whom we get.
I have three sons. They are vastly better than me at some things.
If you just compare functions, you may find that someone you get has a much greater function than you at something.
You may have a greater function than them at something. But we are onto logically equal.
What we make is different, even if it looks like us and has a function like us,
if we talk about this kind of ontology, then we are onto logically superior to these things we make.
And building A.I. to help humans flourish, I think we need a higher standard of expressing human worth than abilities or functions.
I'm going to propose some criteria. I'm going to propose a higher standard.
Some criteria include acknowledging the equal worth of every living person.
We do see increasing emphasis, certainly in the US, and I'm seeing a bit more globally of trying to reduce different kinds of discrimination.
I think we also need independence of functions or abilities, and as I get older and older,
I appreciate this one more right, because our abilities change over time.
And certainly, if you're on the operating table, your abilities have changed for a moment, but you shouldn't lose your human worth.
I don't think the standard should be limited by materialism, naturalism and scientism is somewhat myopic ways of describing the world.
I also don't think it should be something that could be instated or removed by somebody in power over you,
a person or a government and power over you.
And last, the easiest criteria is it should be bigger than some professor's idea, bigger than anything somebody like me would just propose.
The concept that I propose meets all of these criteria is the concept known in Latin as Imago De.
For fun, I asked one of the most popular guys right now, GPT three, what is Imago Day?
It's kind of small. I typed in What is my good day? I click Submit.
And it says the Imago Day is the biblical concept that humans are created in the image of God.
This means that humans have the ability to think, feel and create just as God does.
Note, it also elicited a trigger warning, sensitive content.
I think I need to make that clear for this talk as well.
Note also that the second line that the eye has pulled from the Web here and coming up with its answer is focussed only on function.
OK, it's going on things we do not on our state of being.
Now, the Margot is literally Latin for image,
and any of you with an engineering or simple maths background know that we can project down a high dimensional object here,
we just show a 3D object down to a two dimensional image. But we could also deal with objects.
We do this in machine learning all the time with thousands of dimensions,
millions of dimensions, billions of dimensions and projected down to just a few.
So that the image itself is actually leaving out most of what the original is, that it is the image of.
So I want to be clear, that image is not visual similarity.
This is not us looking like God.
It's some kind of image that we may not fully understand.
Being here where Tolkien lived and was a professor, I want to point out, too, that we can make things that may have like imago humano, right?
Or here, Tolkien's made a character, Bilbo Baggins, that has some features like the its maker.
It is a Orser, like its maker. The qualities of the Imago Day are due do not give arrogance and superiority their humility.
Their mercy. Love, grace and forgiveness.
There is a quality this is a free gift given to all, not given more to those who have greater functions.
And it is an estimable worth. C.S. Lewis, another local great, wrote, There are no ordinary people you have never talked to a mere mortal.
Now, some of you who are not religious and I used to be an atheist,
so I sympathise with you will say, is it exclusive to people who are religious right?
This is taught in Genesis and in Jewish traditions and Christian traditions and some Muslim traditions.
No, it is not restricted to people who practise any of these faiths.
It is a concept given to everyone. It's interesting, too, to look at lived experience of people who maybe are not religious.
I was intrigued by an account written an interview with Peter Singer,
the great philosopher and proponent of utilitarianism talking about how when his mother got Alzheimer's and had serious dementia.
His teachings of how to treat her, he was confronted with those, and in fact, she was like, Yeah, you know, you don't have to take care of me now.
You could follow your teachings, which were basically that she didn't have the kind of valuable human life that she had before.
And yet when it came to those final days, he chose to treat her as if she had a good day,
as if she had dignity against what his logic and his teachings had been saying to everyone.
In doing so, I think he also showed Imago Day.
It's interesting, too, to look at things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed by more than 50 states in 1948.
Assuming all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,
they are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
So hopefully we're not going to get much dissension on this.
But how many of you at the start of your Ph.D. or your research have thought about this aspect while you're designing your work?
I know when I began as a Ph.D. student, I was just looking for something cool and interesting and hard, right?
When you're at a place like Oxford or MIT. You want to do something super hard, super impressive, something people say that can't be done.
Some other people might just be over there like just enough. I just want to get my degree right.
People want to get published, they want to get on with their career.
And so the optimality criteria is pretty much like drive it as far as you can to the right and still graduate in a reasonable amount of time.
Thinking about Imago Day, I think, calls us not just to a higher standard about what is human worth,
but calls us to, I hope, a higher standard when we're choosing problems to work on.
And I. Can they simply try to picture it this way that we add an extra dimension and of course, this makes optimisation harder?
But our optimality criteria could aim for the upper right here.
At the MIT Media Lab, we've been challenging ourselves to try to do this,
which means we have to learn a lot about things that aren't just engineering and science.
We're bringing the principles of science and engineering to understanding people and what helps people flourish.
We've borrowed from people who've focussed on flourishing and positive psychology here.
From them, we've learnt, for example, that it's not enough to just try to make people happy, right?
Happiness is just one of many emotions. All of the emotions are valuable.
It's very important supplies to be sad. Your friends are sad, be sad with them.
There are, in fact, the most important.
One of the pillars I've seen described in components of flourishing is probably the one of relationships not being focussed on yourself,
but being able to enter into a relationship where you're focussed on another and developing that healthy relationship.
During the pandemic, the suffered quite a bit and is probably the thing to prioritise.
In particular, if you're struggling with mental health, call a call an old friend at places like Oxford.
We don't have to worry about engagement and achievement much because people are hyper achievers and usually love what they're doing and are engaged.
But these are valuable contributors to human flourishing, and meaning has not been addressed, probably as much as it should in this literature.
Usually, things like religion are stuffed in under meaning as something very important.
In fact, there's some really nice causal inference that's been done on large studies of nurses.
Work by Tyler Vandewalle at Harvard, showing that people with regular religious practise have a lot of better health outcomes.
This particular theory I've shown here, PR in a is attributed to Marty Seligman.
All right, let me wrap up here a quick recap of what we've been through quite a journey here.
A.I. is acquiring increasingly skills that look like it's developing emotional intelligence.
We still have a long way to go. I'm not. I'm not confident we're gonna be able to solve some of the problems, especially with consciousness,
but we can make it look pretty good and that, to some people, is enough.
It will increasingly take on human like appearance, and we will see this in ways that may be very unnerving and disturbing.
They may fail in the business sense. They may succeed in some narrow areas.
There certainly are some areas where it appears to be succeeding.
I think as we reflect, though, more on what it means to be human and on our human values,
we've got to recognise we are not simply our abilities and our functions.
I think we should start leading the community and thinking more about the higher values, the higher human values and looking for a higher standard.
The Imago Day is a higher standard, and it invites those of us shaping A.I. to recognise that people are more than what they do,
that we can look at these other aspects and help people try to flourish.
And finally, this future requires a lot more than I experts in order to understand what it is to help people flourish and to craft it.
We really need to spend time understanding one another and we need all kinds of people, not just engineers and scientists, artists,
designers, entertainers, all kinds of people who understand people to join not just in the vision, but through every stage of this process.
Even new business models, I think, need to be developed. New regulations probably need to be developed.
Everyone in society, I think, needs to to speak out and have their voice be a part of the future that we will build so that
hopefully we build a future where human life with A.I. is one where all humans can flourish.
Thank you very much. Super, well I now invited two colleagues from the university to respond to Rosalind's lecture.
And our first respondent is the face that would be very familiar to many in the audience this afternoon.
Professor Lionel Tarasenko is an engineer and also a leading expert in the application of signal processing and machine learning to health care.
He was previously Head of the Department of Engineering, and in addition to his academic roles here at the university,
he's also a pro vice chancellor and first president of Reuben College. Lionel,
would you like to begin? Thank you very much. Apologies for my voice.
Nothing to do with COVID. I do assure you. I have the evidence on my smartphone to show a negative lateral flow test.
It's an impossible task to respond.
And so you all agree because we've not had one kind of lecture, but we've had about three Tanner Lectures and they've all been equally wonderful.
So I'm going to attempt to perhaps see if there are links between each of the Tanner Lectures which you gave tonight.
These wonderful ways of exploring some really important aspects of research done in
places like MIT, in this universities and many other leading universities,
and indeed many of the Big Tech companies.
You started by showing us how a computer vision could interpret human emotions, and the first thing I would say,
which is very important, what Professor Picard showed is that even if you are analysing human interaction, using speech.
Speech is not enough. And what you need is multimodal ways of analysing the interaction where we are talking to each other.
So in addition to the speech, really to duplicate the way human beings communicate,
we need only to understand through auditory cortex the meaning of the pressure waves impinging upon them.
But we need, as you should, very clearly. And that could you rose from Professor Picard.
Roz. Roz, right? And that facial movements.
It was delightful to see what the true smile of delight looks like, what the look of frustration looks like, and that is very important.
And then you added a third modality. So speech, facial movements from computer vision algorithms.
The third one was stress levels through recording electro dermal activity.
And then the second thing that you showed us,
which I think is very important for all the graduate students here from Linacre and Reuben is. Roz was very honest with us.
Scientific research for those of us who have got our best used behind us, I include myself in that and is not a linear process.
There's a huge amount of, serendipity.
And it was wonderful to see what the leading scientists in the field of AI acknowledged that that many of the things you've done,
which have been some of your best papers and your best work have been serendipitous detours.
And you showed us that with epilepsy and SUDEP,
'Sudden Unexpected Death In Epilepsy', and from the work that you've been doing previously, including the electro dermal monitoring.
And I would argue that for those of you who still at the graduate school level, yes, you can have an idea where you're going to be going.
But please don't miss these details. They're very important.
They may lead you to the best work that you'll ever do. And in this case, I would argue it is.
Some of the work that Roz, Professor Picard, is well known throughout the world,
and it had a huge impact on a subset of patients and improving potentially their outcomes.
And you showed that as well. We wearable devices and again, the principle of using multimodal data through mobile surveys, wearable data,
monitoring activity, monitoring sleep and so on, is perhaps opening a door to understanding depression.
So multi modality, serendipity, and thirdly, absolutely love this,
and there are a few of my own graduate students or some of the post-docs now in theatres around the audience and working on monitoring,
improving monitoring wearables, improving monitoring through videos that we do in my lab as well.
I always ask my students and post-doc: great, you can monitor this.
What are you going to do with our ability to monitor this? And I ask my student the same question. You monitor people's activities.
How do we turn that into an intervention? How do we go? That's the question I always ask my students.
Fantastic. Great results.
How are you going to use that to effect to close the loop, if you will, to have an intervention that will improve the life of someone?
And there was a great picture then showing that as you try to do that,
you discover that actually the monitoring heart as it is, is the easiest part of it.
An intervention that lasts and continues to have a positive effect on a patient and so on, is extremely hard to achieve.
And that part of the talk was really very clever. I've never seen this link before, because what you said and it's absolutely true,
is to maintain the resilience to long term engagement with intervention.
And we need to find ways of doing this,
and you showed us Grace, and Grace was potentially as a human like robot the way in the health care context that she might be deployed,
the way to maintain the long term engagement.
But at that point, this was where I said there were multiple lectures and there were these, I think, your third lecture.
And is it sufficient to be a human like Grace or do we need a real Grace?
In that was what is the difference between a human like Grace and a human Grace, I don't know if any people in the audience called Grace?
And but that's what I'm trying to draw the differences, and that's where you really spent the third lecture.
On Imago Dei. How do we decide to pronaunce? As a vice chancellor,
you have to think very hard about how you pronounce Latin, and the answer is nobody knows.
And you do what you think is right. My wife's a mediaeval historian.
I've talked about her, talked about it with her several times, and there isn't a set way.
So you pronounce it just right, even in Oxford. Imago Dei.
And what you attempted to do, and I think this is very hard, is to explain the concept of image in the way that the image of God,
I believe, is to be understood. If you, if the picture is of a multidimensional God, how is that projected then to two or three dimensions?
And the key idea here is if God is higher being, or however you want to describe it, is in n dimensions where 'n' is a large number.
The projection then, and you because using a flat wall, you had to use two, even down to three,
isn't simply the idea of removing n minus 2 or n minus 3, to get down to two or three.
It is actually combining all end and forming that mapping down to two or three.
And that is really difficult to understand, but it is incredibly important.
It is something that if you've ever done data visualisation and use machine learning algorithms,
you will understand it's something that we do in computer science. How do we use a very high dimensional space then to 2D or 3D?
We do not delete n minus 3 or n minus 2, we construct mappings.
And that's what the images. So the image, even though is limited to two or three dimensions, has aspects of all end dimensions.
And I thought that was a brilliant way for us to think about what Imago Dei might be.
And. What I think you're trying to show, then, is as a result of this image of God, it is a difference between the human like Grace and the human Grace.
And I would then link the third with possibly the second Tanner Lecture that you gave us.
And I would argue it is because we are in that image that we do take the serendipitous detours.
It is an aspect of human behaviour to take those serendipitous detours.
And would I agree that the best A.I. algorithm would not take the serendipitous detour because
it would not optimise an objective criterion that the A. I. algorithm has been designed for?
And that's where I would leave it. And I rejoice that as human beings, we do take those serendipitous detours and many thanks
Professor Picard, Roz, for showing us how that is really intrinsic to what it is to be a human being.
Thank you. Our second respondent this evening is Tom Fletcher, Tom is the Principal of Hertford College.
But between 2007 and 2011, he was foreign policy adviser to three UK prime ministers and subsequently the UK's ambassador to Lebanon.
More recently,
he's been visiting professor at New York University and has chaired the International Advisory Council on the Creative Industries Federation.
Tom. Thank you so much, Nick. And thank you Prof. Picard, Roz, and Lionel.
What a, what a feast, really. It's like a Lebanese meal, as an ex-ambasador of Lebanon,
We have all the dishes in front of you, and you're wondering which one to put your pita bread into.
And I'm sure there'll be lots of opportunities to ask questions in just, in just a moment.
Your, your story of the mood ring reminded me of a friend of mine who was part of a trilingual household,
and he didn't have the mood ring to decipher his partner's moods.
But because they were trilingual, he knew that as he walked in the door, the mood was determined by the language that his partner used.
And so if he walked in and heard Guten Abend, he was in trouble. If he walked in and heard
Good evening, he knew it's very practical evening, and if he walked in and heard Bonsoir, well, I mean, I'll leave it.
I wouldn't linger on that one. You really, I think, challenged us and I come into this space as a non-scientist and as a non-academic.
I'm a recovering ambassador as Nick said. But I think you've challenged us as Lionel finished with, this thought,
with this idea that in working out and trying to understand what makes, what can make machines more human.
Are we able to better understand what actually makes us human? And I have a mischievous thought and three challenges for my world.
If what we used to think it was maps and chaps, you know, protocol and flags and statecraft.
My mischievous thought. Watching your avatars and Grace and the others is, how far are we from being able to automate an Oxford Head of House?
I say that in the presence of at least four, I'm not sure what the collective noun is for principal.
Someone said it was a lack of principle, but I wonder, you know,
but in trying to answer that question, could you replace the four of us with with Grace?
I think that already helps us to start to understand where it is. We might add value as humans.
Many, I think many governing bodies would quite, would be quite attracted to
the idea of replacing the Head of House. Inevitably, at this stage of time, many Heads of House would be quite attracted to the idea as well.
But it does allow us to focus on where do we really add value as humans?
And that's what really struck me from from your extraordinary lecture.
The three challenges for my old world of diplomacy and statecraft and and politics.
Firstly, how do we renew our education systems in response to the challenges you've set us?
How do we ensure that we are educating first class humans,
not second class robots, amongst the students and academics who we're developing at Oxford and, and globally?
Are we able to reset education to renew education in a way that focuses on the hand and the heart, and not just the head?
Well, discipline of history, we tended to learn the list of the wars that we happen, we happen to have won.
Are we able to learn how we co-existed between those wars?
Are we able for the hand, for the skills, to think about what we've done on global competence, which is of social, emotional learning, really?
Many people call it 21st century skills, in my world we call it diplomacy. Can you understand your own filter?
The Instagram filter through which you see the world and understand that other people
have a different filter to yours and maybe yours might not be the right one. Key skill,
but we don't, we don't really teach that, and we certainly don't assess it.
We'll focus always on the things that can be tested and, and memorised.
So could we learn that that skill of global competence,
the global antenna that mean that you could be dropped in, in Bahrain or Singapore tomorrow or Boston tomorrow and adapt, ask the right questions.
Listen. Show the empathy that you described. I think we are well overdue that renewal of education and a focus also on the heart.
Imago Dei, you know, what really makes us curious, kind and brave.
I'd love to see that much more central to education, even at elite academic institutions like this.
The second challenge, I think more traditional diplomacy, is who is going to do the peace process here between humans and technology?
Maybe that is the Nobel peace prise of the future.
I was involved four years ago, five years ago with a leading a report for the UN Secretary General on how we coexist with technology.
40 recommendations, of which only one was adopted.
And that was to create a new committee to think about it. Oh, well.
But we, but we were looking at the real challenges that, you know 1815 Congress Vienna.
It was clear who should be in the room and who convened the room,
and now who decides who gets in the room to decide how we coexist with artificial intelligence, who has the authority to do that?
The UN doesn't have the resource, the bandwidth, the strategic depth to do that.
We had an exchange of letters with the UN Secretary General where 200 of us wrote in, Elon Musk and others, to say we are creating risks.
This is the field of lethal autonomous weapons. We are creating these risks faster than we can actually manage them.
What will you do about it? How will you update The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that you quoted, in order to respond to those new challenges.
Two years later, the UN is still arguing over who should draught the reply.
You know, it's very, very difficult to see who brings that conversation together, and that,
for me, is a real challenge for, for our fields, but also challenge for a university.
Because if governments can't do that, if international organisations can't do that, then maybe this is a place where we can have those conversations,
where we can convene the debates and the diplomacy that is necessary to update the rules of liberty and security for a digital age.
And the third thought also in that world of peace and diplomacy,
but really bringing it further on to how we renew society and a society in which humans flourish.
When I arrived in the Middle East 10, 11 years ago, I used to go around saying something very silly,
which was the most powerful weapon in the Middle East is the smartphone.
You know, the Arab Spring was breaking out around us and we thought, we thought that this would actually help us connect in a really exciting,
extraordinary new ways. And we were overoptimistic. And of course,
what we learnt subsequently and what we have learnt in Ukraine is that actually there are more powerful weapons out there than the smart thing.
But actually, your tool gave me fresh optimism that maybe this can help us find new ways to reach out,
new ways to connect as humans, maybe A.I. can assist us with that effort to coexist with each other.
I think that's an extraordinary piece of work to be done that brings together that work.
What we're learning really about the future of technology, what we're learning about positive psychology,
and also what we're learning about social media and the ability to connect to the whole society.
We've watched people use that, Trump weaponized that against us.
Can we turn that around and use these tools to actually connect people in the way you describe?
And ultimately, can we use it to heal the wounds of history?
And then education does become upstream diplomacy.
And so there's another great peace process there, alongside the peace process between humans and technology.
The peace process between humans and their past and perhaps the tech of the future can help us with that.
And maybe then we get back. You know, as a non scientist, I grew up watching The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski,
and at the end, when he stands in the mud of Auschwitz, where he lost so many of his relatives.
And he reaches down and picks up the mud from the puddle and just says at the end:
We have to reach out and touch people. We have to reach out and connect.
I think that's really where Imago Dei takes us. How do we connect as as humans?
And perhaps that's where our fields connect as well?
A final story I worked for for years on Northern Ireland, for the prime minister in Downing Street,
and I was at one event on peace and reconciliation, and I asked one of the speakers: You know, why are you here?
And she said: Well, my, my father was killed in the terrorist attack in the Brighton bombing.
Alongside many others, and I'm here to talk about connexion, what makes us human.
How do we connect? And I asked the gentleman next to her: You sir, why are you here?
And he said: I was the bomber. You know, ultimately there is something,
that is so human, as Lionel says. And if we can hold on to that, then that can really animate this work, but that can all, that
can also make us better academics, better Heads of House, better citizens.