"the following is a conversation with Doug lennet creator of Psych A system that for close to 40 years and still today has sought to solve the core problem of artificial intelligence the acquisition of..."

"podcast and here is my conversation with Doug lennett Psych is a project launched by you in 1984 and still is active today whose goal is to assemble a knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and ..."

"so very much like a um um a clever dog performing tricks we could get them to do tricks but they never really understood what they were doing sort of like when you get a dog to fetch your morning news..."

"instance um my wife and I were driving recently um and there was a trash truck in front of us and um I guess they had packed it too full and the back exploded and trash bags went everywhere uh and we ..."

"the knowledge are not useful selecting only the useful parts and uh effectively making conclusive decisions so let's tease apart two different tasks really both of which are um incredibly important an..."

"uh questions and and like a corollary addition to the first one is how many such things do you need to gather for it to be useful in certain contexts so like what in order you mentioned philosophers i..."

"one at a time so um in um the um 19 early um 1984 um I held a meeting at Stanford where I was a faculty member there um where we assembled um about half a dozen of the smartest people I know um people..."

"like maybe one every 30 seconds or something and other than that it's just shortterm memory and it flows away like water and so on so by the time you're say 10 years old or so um how many things could..."

"this written down by hand and a marvelous um coincidence opportunity existed um right at that point in time the early 1980s there was something called the Japanese fifth generation Computing effort Ja..."

"trouble to make each one as general as it possibly could be um but um the good news was that thanks to um uh initially the fifth generation effort and then later um US Government um agency funding and..."

"um a few um techniques which worked really well one is to take um any piece of text almost could be an advertisement it could be a transcri scpt it could be a novel it could be an article um and don't..."

"you don't want to say things like um no mouse is also a moose uh because if you said things like that um then you'd have to add another one or two or three zeros onto the number of assertions you'd ac..."

"move to was a system of local consistency so a good analogy is you know that the surface of the Earth is more or less spherical globally um but you live your life every day as though the surface of th..."

"specific um contexts to ask a slightly technical question is this inheritance inheritance a tree or a graph oh you definitely have to think of it as a graph um so we could talk about for instance why ..."

"be quite useful I think and in that same way conversation of just how many facts are required to capture the basic Common Sense knowledge of the world that's a fascinating question I want to distingui..."

"artificial intelligence human level artificial intelligence then people will become smarter um it's not so much that it'll be us versus the AIS it's more like us and the AIS together will'll be able t..."

"Muses um and say you know those poor those poor people they weren't really human were they mhm exactly so you said a lot of really interesting things by the way I would maybe uh try to argue that the ..."

"um and so on they don't really understand the difference between trillions and billions and millions and so on very well um uh because calculators do that all for us um and um thanks to uh things like..."

"sorts of dependencies um on technology um and overall I think that the um having smarter individuals and having smarter AI augmented um human species um will be um one of the few ways that we'll actua..."

"through before it's too late yeah absolutely I agree with you and obviously as an engineer I have um I have a better sense and an optimism about the technology side of things because you can control t..."

"networks then propaganda could be much more effective and then the government can overpower its people by telling you the truth and then uh starving millions and uh torturing millions and putting Mill..."

"um they should take into consideration um if they really want to um um learn the truth about something and so on so I think um doing not just educating in the sense of um pouring facts into people's h..."

"amazing is to to sort of you know the the old Pursuit of Happiness so it's not just the pursuit of reason it's the pursuit of happiness too yes the the full spectrum well let me um sort of because you..."

"um you know if something causes you pain whenever you do it probably not a good idea to keep doing it uh so what ideas do you have given how difficult this step is what ideas are there for how to do i..."

"system um in areas where for instance they want to build some have it do some application or something uh like that so I'll give you an example of one um which is something called um abduction so you'..."

"of the wrong answer I came up with is one of these seven things true and then you the expert will look at those seven things and say oh yeah number five is actually true and so without actually having..."

"you can't even think of one causal chain to explain this um then that correlation probably was just noise to begin with and secondly and even more powerfully along the way that caused puzzle chain wil..."

"expansion of the knowledge base you mentioned nlu this is very early days in the machine learning space of this but self-supervised learning methods you know you have these language models gpt3 and so..."

"and that's what I meant by priming the pump that um you know if you you sort of learn things at The Fringe of what you know already you learn this new thing is similar to what you know already and her..."

"for example in um gpt3 um where um it uh uh you know you'll tell it a story about um um you know someone uh putting a poison um you know plotting to poison someone and so on and then the um you know t..."

"really acceptable I like the model of what that learning happens at the edge and then you kind of think of knowledge as this sphere so uh if you want a large sphere because the uh the learning is happ..."

"mine Ted shortliffe was another um assistant professor in computer science um at Stanford at the time and he'd been building a program called M which was a medical diagnosis program that happened to s..."

"you should get this operation and you say why and it says you know 083 and you say no in more detail why and it says 0831 you know okay that's not really very compelling and that's not really very hel..."

"want to represent um binary relations um um essentially relations between two things and if you so if you have um um the equivalent of like three-word sentences um you know like uh Fred's wife is Wilm..."

"represent and reason with these much much much more complicated Expressions um that go Way Way Beyond what simple um three as it were three-word or four-word English sentences are which is really what..."

"the word understand the contents of the Wikipedia Pages as part of the search process and the semantic web says let's try to get come up with a way for the computer to be able to truly understand the ..."

"users to where they' want to go and so on and of course the search engines are now using that kind of idea yes so um let's go back to what you said about the semantic web so the dream Tim berners Ley ..."

"reason with um full meaning of what's there for instance um about um Romeo and Juliet um with reasoning about what Juliet believes that Romeo will believe that Juliet believed you know and so on or if..."

"it I I'd love to see exactly that kind of semi-automated understanding of what people write and what people say I think of it as a kind of footnoting almost almost like the way that when you run somet..."

"and so if it understands that there's a free day in Geneva Switzerland uh then if the person coming in happens to let's say um be a nurse or something like that then even though you didn't mention it ..."

"kind of experience if you look at educational software today almost all of it has the computer playing the role of the teacher and the student plays the role of the student but as I just mentioned you..."

"education uh Institution as we know it today sorry for the Romantic question but what is the most beautiful idea you've learned about artificial intelligence knowledge reasoning from uh working on psy..."

"clarifying questions which inadvertently turn out to be emotional to us so at one point it knew that these were the named entities who were authorized to make changes to the knowledge base and so on a..."

"scenarios so one of the applications that psych does one kind of application it does is to generate plausible scenarios of what might happen and what might happen based on that and what might happen b..."

"don't have to deal with love to get to that level of complexity even something like in X being in y meaning physically in y uh we may have one English word in to represent that but it's useful to teas..."

"there there's some dance of like uncertainty of wit of humor of push and pull and all that kind of stuff if everything is made precise then life is not worth living I think for in terms of the The Hum..."

"seconds so the operator would give it another 20 seconds it would wait it says I'm almost done I need a little bit more time so at the end he'd get this print out and he'd be charg you know for like 1..."

"projects so you should make each one count don't be afraid of doing a project that's going to take years or even decades to and don't settle for bump on a log projects that could lead to some you know..."

"never really materialized that's how it's spoken about um I suppose you could say the same thing about new all networks and all all all ideas um until they are so what um why do you think people say t..."

"begin to harness um this untapped amount of humanity I'm not really that concerned about professional colleagues opinions of our project I'm interested in getting as many people in the world as possib..."

"that almost all of our work is commercial applications of our technology so five years ago almost all of our money came from the government now uh virtually none of it comes from the government almost..."

"and it will be um openly available to everyone who has access to psych so that's an important constraint that we never went back on even when we got push back from companies which we often did who wan..."

"that community of Agents gets an answer to your question gets a solution to your problem and if we ever come up in a domain application where Psych is getting the right answer but taking too long um t..."

"on so that that's pretty much one of the main ways in which um psych has recouped this lost deficiency um a second important way is meta reasoning so um you can speed things up by focusing on removing..."

"not as impressive so there's these kind of heuristic modules that really help improve the the inference uh how hard in general is this because you mentioned higher order logic you know the the in in t..."

"content of what the system needs to know and yeah both are fascinating to some degree the entirety of the system as far as I understand is written in various variants of lisp so my favorite programm l..."

"compiled down to U by code yes okay so that that's sort of that's a that um that's a you know it's a process that probably has to do with the fact that when py was originally written and you build up ..."

"much of the value is in the silly software engineering aspect and how much of the value is in the knowledge so development of of programs in lisp um precedes um I think somewhere between a th000 and 5..."

"other thing is remember that we're talking about hiring programmers to do inference who are programmers interested in effectively automatic theorem proving right and so those are people already predis..."

"um it's more that you have to be able to think in terms of for instance creating new helpful HL modules and how they'll work with each other and um looking at things that are taking a long time and co..."

"efficiently let me give you one other um analogy analog of that uh which is something we call rule macro predicates which is we'll see this complicated Rule and we'll notice that things very much like..."

"useful yeah that's really interesting I mean this whole thing is just fascinating for a philosophical there's part of me I mean it makes me a little bit sad because your work is both um from a compute..."

"head was still wet and so its head refers to the horse's head but how do you know that and so some people will say I just know it some people will say well the horse was the subject of the sentence an..."

"education system but let me ask you let me go super philosophical as if we weren't already so in 1950 Alan touring wrote the paper that formulated the touring test yes and he opened the paper with the..."

"created something special here the the test has to be something involving depth of reasoning and recursiveness of reasoning the ability to answer repeated why questions about the answer you just gave ..."

"understands what it's doing that it really is generally intelligent so to pass all of those tests you know we've talked a lot about psych and knowledge and reasoning do you think this AI system would ..."

"Consciousness just as much so there's another burden that comes with this whole intellig thing that humans got is um the extinguishing of the light of Consciousness which is uh kind of realizing that ..."

"humans I don't know I think like I think AI really needs to understand death deeply in order to be able to drive a car for example I I think there's just some like there no I I really disagree I think..."

"stories where in fact it failed even if they're relatively few yeah it's so fascinating to watch us humans resisting The Cutting Edge of Science and Technology and almost like hoping for it to fail an..."

"that we have so the two-part question of can you help identify what are the big problems in the world and two what are some novel solutions to those problems that are not being talked about by anyone ..."

"paradigms what Thomas cun called paradigms and we can't get out of them very easily so a lot of AI is locked into the deep learning machine learning Paradigm right now um and um almost all of of us an..."

"choice that's true in uh making discoveries and so on and if you follow the path of least resistance you'll find that you're optimizing for um short periods of time and before you know it you turn aro..."

"and what it can do and the good news from your point of view is that that's that's why I'm sitting here you're going to be more productive uh I love it and if I can help in any way I would love to fro..."