once home to Howard Hughes's Spruce Goose assembly hangar,

and home to much of the first Iron Man,

filmed 12 years ago.

Many happy memories here.

And speaking of taking a look back...

Technology.

It's advancing faster

and taking less time to be widely adopted

than ever before,

like as in it took roughly 10,000 years

to go from writing to printing press,

but only about 500 more to get to email.

Now it seems we're at the dawn of a new age,

the age of A.I...

Artificial Intelligence.

Please define.

[automated voice speaking]

Uh-huh, okay. There you have it.

What does it mean? I don't know.

Tons of folks are working on it, right?

Most people don't know that much about it,

and of course, there's no shortage

of data or opinions.

Anyway, I've heard it said

that the best way to learn about a subject

is to teach it,

but to level with ya,

I have a wildly incomplete education...

Not in my day job,

where I've been A.I.-adjacent for over a decade.

Anyway, I figured now would be as good a time as any

to catch up on the state of things

regarding this emerging phenomenon.

My sense of it is it kind of feels like

Pandora's box, maybe... ish?

Much of my understanding on this topic

has come from sci-fi stories,

which usually depict us

heading toward Shangri-La or dystopia.

Like most things,

I suspect the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Now, along the way,

we'll demystify some common misconceptions

about things we thought we understood, but probably don't,

terms such as

"machine learning," "algorithms,"

"computer vision" and "Big Data,"

they will be conveniently unpacked

to help us feel like we know what we're doing,

kinda.

By the way, Pandora's box...

wasn't a box.

It...

was a clay jar.

How about that?

Demystified.

A.I. is teaching the machine,

and the machine becoming smart.

Each time we create a more powerful technology,

we create a bigger lever for changing the world.

[computer] Autonomous driving started.

[Downey] It's an extraordinary time,

one of unprecedented change and possibility.

To help us understand what's happening,

this series will look at innovators

pushing the boundaries of A.I...

No, stop!

[Downey] ...and how their groundbreaking work

is profoundly impacting our lives...

Yay! [laughing]

[Downey] ...and the world around us.

In this episode, we'll meet two different visionaries

exploring identity, creativity,

and collaboration between humans and machines.

Intelligence used to be the province of only humans,

but it no longer is.

We don't program the machines. They learn by themselves.

Mm. Ah. That's good.

All right.

My background's always been a mixture of art and science.

I ended up doing a PhD in bioengineering,

then I ended up in the film industry,

working on King Kong to Avatar,

simulating faces.

I'd got to a point in my career

where I'd been, you know,

lucky enough to win a couple of Academy Awards,

so I thought, "Okay, what happens

if we actually tried to bring those characters to life,

that actually you could interact with?"

[toddler crying]

Baby... Ooh.

[toddler fusses]

What can you see?

So "Baby X" is a lifelike simulation of a toddler.

Hey. Are you excited to be here?

She's actually seeing me through the web camera,

she's listening through the microphone.

Woo... yeah.

Baby X is about exploring the nature

of how would we build a digital consciousness,

if it's possible?

We don't know if it's possible,

but we're chipping away at that problem.

Hey, Baby. Hey.

[Downey] "Problem" is an understatement

for what Mark's chipping away at.

His vision of the future

is one where human and machine cooperate,

and the best way to achieve that, he thinks,

is to make A.I. as life-like as possible.

Peek-a-boo!

[Baby X giggling]

[Downey] Which is why he began where most life begins...

a baby...

modeled after his own daughter.

So if we start revealing her layers,

she's driven by virtual muscles,

and the virtual muscles, in turn,

are driven by a virtual brain.

Now, these are radically simplified models

from the real thing,

but nevertheless,

they're models that we can explore how they work,

because we have a real template that exists,

the human brain.

So, these are all driven by neural networks.

[Downey] "Neural network"

is a virtual, much simpler version

of the human brain.

The brain is the most complex system in our body.

It's got 85 billion neurons, each of which fire non-stop,

receiving, processing, and sending information.

Baby X's brain is nowhere near as complex,

but that's the goal.

Instead of neurons, it's got nodes.

The more the nodes are exposed to,

the more they learn.

[Sagar] What we've learned is it's very hard to build a digital brain,

but where we want to go with it

is we're trying to build a human-like A.I.

which has a flexible intelligence

that can relate to people.

I think the best kind of systems

are when humans and A.I. work together.

One of the biggest misconceptions of A.I.

is that there is a super-intelligent being,

or what we call a generalized A.I.,

that knows all, can do all,

smarter than all of us put together.

That is a total misconception.

A.I. is built on us.

A.I. is mimicking our thought processes.

A.I. is basically an emulation of us.

[Downey] Like visionaries before him, Mark's a dreamer.

The current state of his moonshot, however,

is a little more earthbound.

[computer] Thank you for granting access

to your microphone. It's good to hear you.

[Downey] Today, most avatars

are basically glorified customer-service reps.

[service avatar] Rest assured,

your health is my primary concern.

[Downey] They can answer simple questions

and give scripted responses.

I love helping our customers,

so I'm keen to keep learning.

[Downey] Beats dealing with automated phonelines for sure,

but it's a far cry from Mark's ultimate vision...

[Sagar] Hey, Baby. Hey.

[Downey] ...to create avatars that can actually learn,

interpret, and interact with the world around them,

like a real human.

What's this?

Spider.

So we're starting to get a spider forming in her mind here,

she's starting to associate the word with the image.

So, Baby... spider.

Spider.

Spider...

Good! Okay, what's this?

[Baby] Spider.

No. This is a duck.

Look at the duck.

[Baby] Duck.

[Sagar] Yeah.

[Downey] Baby X uses a type of A.I. called "object recognition."

Basically, it's how a computer sees...

how it identifies an object, like a spider,

or tells the difference between a spider and a duck.

It's something that you and I do naturally...

...but machines, like Baby X, need to learn from scratch,

by basically sifting through enormous piles of data

to search for patterns,

so that eventually, it can drive a car,

or pick out a criminal in a crowded photograph,

or tell the difference between me and... that guy.

[Sagar] But now I'm gonna tell her that spiders are scary.

Look out! Rawr! Scary spider! Rawr!

[crying]

Hey, hey. Don't cry. It's okay. Hey...

[Baby crying]

Hey, it's okay.

Now she's responding emotionally to me as well,

so we've gone all the way down

to virtual neurotransmitters, hormones, and so forth,

so Baby X has a stress system.

If I give her a fright...

Boo!

So we'll see basically

some noradrenaline was released then,

and she's gone into a much more vigilant state of mind.

[Downey] What Mark is working on

is known as "affective computing,"

A.I. that interprets and simulates human emotion.

I believe that machines are gonna interact with humans

just the way we interact with one another,

through perception, through conversation.

So as A.I. continues to become mainstream,

it needs to really understand humans,

and so we want to build emotion A.I.

that enables machines to have empathy.

Hello, Pepa.

-Hello. -[man] Hello.

-Hello. -Hello.

-Hello. -[laughing]

Oh, dear.

-We can do this forever. -I know we could. [laughs]

[Howard] They've showed, for example,

older adults who have A.I. aides at their nursing homes,

they are happier

with a robot that emotes and is social

than having no one there.

That's really the enhancement of human relationships.

[Sagar] Hey... Hello.

You know, human cooperation

is the most powerful force in human history, right?

Human cooperation with intelligent machines

will define the next era of history.

Using a machine which is connected

with the rest of the world through the Internet,

that can work as a creative, collaborative partner?

That's unbelievable.

[will.i.am] Jessica. Jessica. One more time, one more time.

We're gonna go from just the first two verses,

and the first two verses

will take us to three minutes, okay?

I love music.

The whole concept of music is collaboration,

so if there are some people that see me as a musician,

that's awesome.

I first became interested in A.I.

because A.I. is a very fruitful place to create in.

It's a new tool for us.

I dream, and make my dreams reality,

whether the dream is a song

or the dream is an avatar of myself.

One time, a friend was like, "Well, you can't clone yourself.

You can't be in two places at once."

That's the promise of the avatar.

I left it over there.

All right, here we go.

[Sagar] So, you're about to enter the Matrix.

I'm gonna sort of direct you through just a bunch of poses.

[will.i.am] The team from Soul Machines

is here to create a digital avatar of myself.

They had to put me in this huge contraption

with these crazy lights.

What do you want me to do?

[Sagar] Your face is an instrument.