Science Friday - Consciousness In 'Westworld,' Heart Cells On Graphene, Bike Safety App. May 18, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

In HBO’s series Westworld, human-like robots populate a theme park where human guests can have violent, gory adventures in the Wild West without the repercussions. The robots are so lifelike that they fool the visitors and themselves. They bleed, die, grieve, and love—thinking themselves human. But as Westworld’s robots grow increasingly independent of their repetitive, programmed loops, the show incites viewers to question whether AI can truly be autonomous or conscious—and who in this story deserves empathy. Roboticist Robin Murphy and neuroscientist Steve Ramirez discuss the show’s science and social commentary.   The jury is still out on whether graphene—the carbon-based substance people have called "wonder material"—will be part of every gadget in the future, but scientists are finding it to be an extremely powerful tool in the biomedical laboratory. In a study out this week in the journal Science Advances, scientists used graphene’s electrical properties to stimulate lab grown heart cells that could be used in patients after they’ve had a heart attack. Plus, a Pittsburgh cyclist designed a crowdsourcing navigation app to help other city bikers find the safest roads to travel. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, coming to you today from the studios of 90.5 W-E-E-S-A in beautiful downtown Pittsburgh. Just how memories are formed, stored, retrieved in the brain, you know, it is still a mystery. The prevailing theory is that changes in the connections between neurons, our synapses, encode our experiences. But this week, researchers reported a surprising finding about memory in snails. What does that mean? Well, joining us to talk about it and other science news from the week is Amy Nordrum, news editor at I-Triple-E Spectrum. She's in our New York studios.

Welcome back, Amy. Thanks, Ira. So what's going on with this memory story? Yeah, this new research out of UCLA could upend some of the current existing theories on how memories are formed and stored in the brain. As you said, the common theory has been that the connections between neurons matter most. but this research suggests that maybe neurons themselves store or at least have a role in storing memories once they're formed in our brains. This research was done with snails, marine snails.

Researchers at UCLA were able to extract RNA from one set of snails that they had applied electrical shocks to and show increased sensitivity in another group of snails that had not ever received those shocks. So it's also a form of learning, but these researchers are saying that this suggests that RNA plays a more important role in forming memories than we previously thought. How did they know that the memories were moved around? Well, they actually were able to then test sensitivity in the snails that received the RNA that had never been shocked before, and they use this organ called the siphon that can push

out and pump in water to and from the snail's body. And after the snails received shocks, they exhibited a longer response time and being sensitive to basically a poke of that organ, so they would extract it into their body, and then there was the longer time that it took for them to recover. And then the snails that they injected the RNA into, that had never been shocked before, showed a very similar response. You know, of course, this sort of upsets an apple cart,

as you mentioned about how we think how memories are formed. So this must be quite controversial, and people are looking to redo it, right? Absolutely. It would need to be replicated to say anything really meaningful, and of course this is in snails, not anywhere near humans yet. The researcher David Glansman told me it took a month to even convince his own lab to do this work. So it's definitely outside of the box thinking.

All right, let's go on to the next one. There's a new version of the pale blue dot picture looking back on our planet from far away. Tell us how that came about. That's right. NASA released a new image this week, and it's connected to the Insight lander that is headed for Mars. We'll arrive there in November. But alongside Insight are two tiny satellites that are flying along for the, mission. These are CubeSats. So I know you've talked about CubeSats on the show before. These two

cubesats are going deeper into space than ever before. Usually CubeSats are relegated to the low Earth orbit area. They're used for all kinds of satellite imagery up there. But these two cubesats are venturing deep into space. You know, part of the challenge of going to Mars is getting all the data back from there. And these CubeSats are playing an important role, hopefully, and being able to send through specially designed antennas data all the way back from Mars once they arrive there. So it's not just that this is a great new picture of the pale blue dot, but it's also significant about the CubeSats unfolding properly, their antenna. Yeah, the whole way we got that photo is one of the CubeSats taking a photo of itself to show that its antenna had unfolded properly, which happily it has. That's great.

So you have an antenna the size of her breadbox sending data back from near Mars. Isn't that something? It's pretty remarkable. And the advantage is this is a much cheaper way than sending much bigger satellites than antennas deep into space. space like that. Let's move on to a story about chemical warfare and caterpillars and plants? It's a crazy world down there. You have plants, you know, when a herbivore, like a caterpillar, starts to attack them, planets can emit these compounds that are sort of a defense against the herbivore. But it seems through some new research that caterpillars may have found a way to use these plant

defenses to their own advantage, because some new research suggests the relationship is more complicated. Not only are the compounds meant to deter the herbivores from eating further, but the herbivores themselves are kind of protected by the compounds because other predators like wasps do not like to approach a caterpillar that's been, that has the smell of these compounds on it. So it actually keeps the caterpillar safe from its own predators, even though the whole point is to defend from the caterpillar in the first place. So they're sort of making the chemicals that would deter the caterpillars themselves? Absolutely. Yeah. So the plan is emitting these compounds, these chemicals that are very aromatic in this case, this one that was studied,

and then the caterpillar starts to smell like that, but then the wasps don't really like it either. So I don't know if that's really working to the plant's full advantage there. Another story next week is one of the world's largest robotics conference, and you've got your eye on that, right? Absolutely. Some announcements have started to come out. We'll hear a lot more next week, but there are some fun prototypes and interesting experiments that are going to be on show there in Brisbane next week. One of them is a tiny robot called RoboFly.

This is a robot about the size of a fly. It even has its own wings. And it can barely take off. One of the things that is innovative about this particular robot is the way that it's powered. When you try to scale a robot down that small, it's very hard to get a reliable power source on board. So the researchers here at the University of Washington attached a PV cell and then shined a laser onto it.

So the PV cell is able to harvest enough energy from that laser to do a small lift-off. The only problem is as soon as it goes outside the range of the laser beam. it falls back to the ground. Details, details. It's only a prototype. So what are some of the big questions at the conference? Yeah, things like power, certainly mobility, and then also, you know, practical tasks.

Like there's a research group out of Georgia Tech that's built a robot that they're trying to design to dress humans. You can imagine a lot of people need help getting dressed in the morning and undressed at night. And this robot hopefully could help with that someday. But right now the most it can really do is, put a sleeve on someone's arm, and it takes about 10 seconds to do that. It's a very delicate process to work with humans, and it could be very valuable, but we're kind of inching close to that.

Let's now go to the most important story of the week. Researchers looking into the optimal age for puppy cuteness. That's right. Researchers at Arizona State University did what must have been one of the most fun experiments ever as a college student to participate in, they're interested in this question of how the animal-human relationship evolves, and one thing they know is that most so the dogs on the planet are not pets. They, in fact, live on the street.

They're sort of part wild, but they still depend on humans a lot. You know, it's street dogs in big cities. And so they wanted to know, how is this relationship forming? They took a bunch of images, asked some students to categorize them, according to cuteness on a scale from one to 100 of different puppies. And they found that the age at which the puppies appealed most to humans was about eight weeks. This is interesting because that's also the age at which dogs are weaned from their mother, typically.

And so if you're a street dog and you're weaned from your mother at eight, eight weeks old. You're still not big and strong enough maybe to find food on your own. It could be a real advantage to have your maximal cuteness at that particular age so that a human would take you in or at least, you know, throw some food out for you. Hope all these young puppies are listening to it. Thank you, Amy. Amy Nordrim News editor at the ICCLEE Spectrum in New York. Thanks for joining us this week. Thanks, Ira.

And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Local stories with a national impact. If you're a fan of cycling in the city and who is not, you know that not all bike lanes are created equal. And now there's an app that will give you not only your fastest route to work, but also maybe the safest way to get there. Here to tell us more about this is WESA reporter Joaquin Gonzalez. Joaquin, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you, I, congratulations. Or an order you're a citizen today. Yeah, that's right, just as of this morning. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Let's talk about this app. It's called the Lane Spotter. Is that right?

Yes, Lane Spotter. And how does that work? So it's a little bit similar to the apps like Waze or Google Maps used for navigation. So the interface does look like a map. And users can go on there and create a route or directions to cycle from point A to point B. And a similarity with Ways is that they can actually see what you might call alerts, which are instances where another user has flagged some kind of road condition, which could be like a closure or construction.

Here in Pittsburgh, it's a lot of times it's possible. holes, which were kind of notorious for. Yeah, I hate it when that happens when you hit a pothole. It's maybe even scarier than when you're in a car. But maybe the key thing with Lanespotter is that it also lets users create safety ratings for any roads. So not just trails or not even just roads with bike lanes, but really any street. And they can give it a rating from very safe to avoid on a five-point scale.

And so what Lanespotter actually does is when it's creating a route or directions for you, it takes those safety ratings into account once a certain amount of created, and it tries to optimize your route, and it gives you, you know, sort of the best combination of the most direct route and the safest route. Is this something that the bicyclists have always wanted, were they always looking for an app like this? Yeah, so the app's founder, her name is Lindsay Campbell. She's a longtime cyclist and bike commuter.

She's done this in multiple cities, and she's gotten to know a lot of other cyclists. So, you know, she's pretty well attuned to their needs, I would say. Two big concerns or maybe motivations that she brought up when we spoke were the first one was that there's varying levels of skill and experience among cyclists. And this is especially true as cycling becomes more popular and things like bike shares become more popular. You know, increasingly, that's going to include a lot of beginners. And then the second thing is that from street to street, there's also varying degrees of

difficulty and safety from one street to another. And that can be the case even when there's bike lanes. So just because a road has a bike lane doesn't necessarily mean that it will be the easiest or safest ride. And when we spoke, Lindsay gave me an example of this using a stretch of road here in Pittsburgh. My example of this in Pittsburgh is Forbes Avenue between Braddock and South Dallas. There's a bike lane there, but there's also four lanes of traffic going 50 in a 35-mile-per-hour zone. Wow, that's pretty dangerous, right?

You don't want to be in that kind. So then you can look at the app and it'll tell you stay out of that. Right, exactly. So this is for working people who are commuting to work, right? It's for both. It's for bike commuters, casual bikers. Really, how Lindsay described as anybody who rides a bike, she wants them to have this resource. So the users of the app are having safer experiences? Are they reporting? The app is helping them? Yeah, I believe so Lindsay said she's gotten a lot of positive feedback. And also maybe user involvement is a good way to gauge, you know, how useful people are finding it. So Lane Spotter has been able to partner with bike advocacy groups, not just here in Pittsburgh, but in a handful of larger cities around the country.

So what you're seeing now is that cities like New York, San Francisco, St. Louis, Cleveland, and a handful of others are pretty well mapped out with their safety ratings. You know, I guess besides bicyclists, I guess if you're a motorist, too, I'm thinking about this now. You might, you know, pick out, look at it and see what roads that bicyclists are going to be on and maybe be a little bit more careful when you drive on. Yeah, you know, I hadn't thought about it, but I think that's really true. I mean, the dynamic, obviously, on a motorcycle is much closer to, you know, what you see on a bike versus being in a car. Okay. Joaquin, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, Ira.

Joaquin Gonzalez, reporter for WESA here in Pittsburgh. And we're going to take a break when we come back. What's stronger than steel conducts electricity better than copper and is making waves in the world of biomedicine? We're going to talk about graphene. Yeah, we've talked a lot about it. We'll talk about another possibly use for it. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

This is Science Friday. I'm I Refledo. Back in 2010, two scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of a new carbon-based material called graphene. And at the time, people called it the wonder material because of how light and thin it is, yet it's 200 times stronger than steel. It conducts electricity better than copper. And people said it would revolutionize the tech industry by replacing lithium-ion batteries.

Well, here we are, eight years later later, The jury is still out on whether graphene will be part of every smartphone and gadget of the future. But scientists are finding graphene to be an extremely powerful tool in the biomedical laboratory. For example, in a study out this week, scientists have figured out a way to use graphene's electrical properties to stimulate heart cells by just shining a light on them, cells that could be used in patients after they've had a heart attack. Joining me now to talk about how they did this is Alex Savchenko's research scientist at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Savchenko, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me.

You're welcome. So why does shining a light on these heart cells make them beat faster? So, yeah, essentially the cardiomystarch for research usually are used in a state where they're beating and they're. leisure, like lazy cells. And graphene allows us to use like solar cell type application where

you shine the light, and suddenly you can control how fast the cells beat. It's a pretty neat trick. Why would you want to make these heart cells beat faster? So it's several, there are several answers to that. One is you make them

exercise. Second, for drug discovery applications, which is the most essential. We want to make better drugs for humans. Where you test cardiomyocides, not when they're in their relaxed state, but, for example, when you model tachycardia. And using graphene light stimulation, it's very easy to model exactly how do you want the irregular heartbeat. Can you use these cells and put them back into a patient with heart problems, and these cells now that they're beating stronger, help the heart out a little bit?

Exactly. That's the ultimate goal. So we are at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, are trying hard to do just that. The problem today is we now know how to make these cells from patient-specific cells, like your or mine, for our hearts. But they're in embryonic state. So our technology allows them to grow into a mature state, so then we can put them into a heart of an adult person. Because the embryonic cells just are too small, like baby cells, and they can't work that well.

Yes, too small, less active, they're pumping blood less actively. So, for example, a newborn baby cannot run 100 yards just because heart will not do it in addition to others. Yeah. Can you use a graphene then to study when the heart is stressed out, like during a heart attack? Is there any way you can use graphene that way? That's exactly what we are doing. That's an enabling application, which allows us to actually take a patient-specific human derived stem cell cardiomyocytes and actually make them not only just, you know, contracted rest state, let me put it this way, but modulates the heart attack, the heart attack, tachycardia, some other conditions, and that's the goal. That's exactly what you do. Now, you're a physicist studying graphing.

Are you a little bit surprised at how long it has taken, you know, graphing to pan out into a useful device? Well, the answer to that is a lot of labs in the world are racing with a huge speed trying to make graphene to come exactly, as you mentioned earlier, into our cell phones, changing the battery situation, from battery actually to a capacitor charge. However, in biology, it's very few people

who would have physical background and do biological applications. So that's why we are kind of unique there. And why is it that you switched from physicists to biomedicine? Did you realize the potential possibilities of graphene or you find this interesting, this whole field? Yeah.

No, I was very interested from the very beginning in the whole field. NETP is that you can quantify certain processes in our body, and that immediately leads to much better quality of life for patients. And I thought using physical background allows me exactly like with a graphene case, to merge two things. Biology, which is traditionally for non-physicists and physical methods of using it. That's great. Well, we'll follow your research, and we'll.

I wish you the best of luck. Thank you so much. How long do you think you'll be working on this? A few more years, I'm sure. Absolutely. So this is a hugely emerging area. Graphene, due to conductive properties, is just good for cells by itself. And in addition, we are using light to modulate the behavior.

Interesting. Alex Subchenko, research scientist UC San Diego. Thank you for taking time to have the view with us today. Thank you so much. in HBO's futuristic series Westworld eerily human-like robots play living, breathing, bleeding, grieving, and loving actors in a Wild West style theme park where guests can live out their violent and heroic fantasies

as the Westworld robots pursue their assorted destinies this season we want to talk about and compare what are our standards of realism for robots and artificial intelligence compared to what they're doing in Westworld What should they be today in 2018? Or the question Bernard, a programmer who had learned he's actually a robot, asks in this clip. I understand what I'm made of, how I'm coded.

But I do not understand the things that I feel. Are they real? The things I experienced. Good question. In the world where a technologist are trying to create AI robots, our world, should there be any differences between human beings and machines? Are there dangers in aiming to make robots as human-like as possible? That's what we're going to be talking about this hour.

Let me introduce my guest, Robin Murphy, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University and College Station, Texas. She joins us by Skype. Welcome to Science Friday. Howdy. Howdy. Steve Ramirez, assistant professor of neuroscience at Boston University. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you very much for having me. Dr. Murphy, are the Westfield robots that benchmark that the roboticists are striving to get at at this point, do you think? No. It's interesting to see that everybody thinks that if you're a roboticist working artificial intelligence, you're trying to create a human replicant, a peer-level intelligence that is a replacement or a substitution for a human. I mean, most of us are looking at trying to make robots or systems. that complement human abilities, that assist them or do things that people can't do. And this quest for general AI, not so much.

And how close have we gone to then? What is the general definition of where you want to go with this? Well, I think when you talk about something like entertainment robots and things like Sophia, these robots that look like people, we've made a lot of progress in the physical realism, and the voice generation, and even like the social cues and social conventions that people use, the kind of segue and to give clues as to where we are in the conversation that you're seeing Google Duplex starting to use. You know, that's really, really good. The underlying intelligence that allows you to go from a very restricted domain for talking about just about,

some type of repair or making an appointment to a broader conversation like what we're having now. That requires so much more intelligence. We have to have a common ground. We have models of the, I have a model of belief of your desires and intentions for this conversation that I'm using to try to tailor my answers to your questions to. And also, if we were physically together, you might be looking at something and I would be connecting what you were saying to what your focus of attention was. So there's a huge amount of that stuff that we don't know how to do yet.

And Dr. Ramirez, what is so special about our minds? When we say that AI acts human, how do we define what that is if we're trying to aim for that? Yeah, I think it's special because it's, you know, when we start talking about things like consciousness, we define it as our ongoing sense of self-awareness that's realized in the brain. And I think that, you know, it's special because it feels untouchable. And I study memory, and we say the same thing. That there's a lot that feels ephemeral and feels as though it doesn't have some kind of biological substrate. But now that we're starting to portray consciousness on shows like Westworld or study consciousness in humans or perhaps the kinds of consciousness that other mammals, for instance, might have, I think it's special and not special.

It's special because that sense of self-awareness is an amazing thing. that arguably defines part of our humanity. It's not special in big quotes in the sense that it still yields to the scientific method, and it's still something that's realized in the 86 billion brain cells stuffed between our years. So are you saying that you believe that robots can, AI can eventually create something like consciousness? You know, my good feeling, because I don't like waffling on this question, is, yeah, definitely. I mean, it's something that I think that they can experience perhaps or one day will experience a kind of consciousness, but it's probably not anything, or it's probably not exactly like what we experienced,

because they'll, of course, be made up out of different stuff. But, you know, if Bernard's character, for instance, can have us convinced that what was a human actually turned out to be a robot, then he not only passed the Turing test, but actually displayed that level of self-awareness of what he doesn't know about what these feelings mean. And, you know, we've all felt that as well, where maybe the first time you fall in love, it's this strange thing that you're not sure how to define, but you know that it's there somewhere in the brain. So my answer to that would be, I hope so, for a bunch of different reasons. Let me tell you what they, let me play a little clip of what they say on the series on Westworld.

One of the Parks founders claims there is no significance between human consciousness and AI. There is no threshold that makes us greater than some of our parts. No inflection point at which we become fully alive. We counter-define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as close as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content for the most part to be told what to do next. Robin, what's your reaction to that clip?

I love Westworld, and I love clips like that. I mean, that's just wonderful because that's exactly what we're seeing. There's no threshold, there's no like, and then bingo. you're now conscious. This whole, this is what we've seen all along in the development of intelligence systems. There's a spectrum. And so getting, getting to see that reflected in popular science, popular media is great because it makes our job much easier. But also that idea is what is consciousness.

I'm not qualified to talk about that. But certainly this idea that we're living in loops, that we, the behavioral aspects that we, see an intelligence, that there is a, what makes something, we've been arguing about what is intelligence for a long time. A cockroach seems pretty darn intelligent. I mean, you know, when you're trying to duplicate that, being able to navigate, get through environments it's never seen before, you know, all these things start to add up. So it's very exciting. I don't know, I really like this show and those types of comments. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

And let me give out the number. A lot of people would like to talk. 844-8255 is our phone number if you want to talk about Westworld, the consciousness and the robots. You can also tweet us at SciFRI. You know, the programmer Arnold, we've been talking about him. He's actually, I guess the robotic form of him is in Bernard. No spoiler here, if you've been watching. the series. He builds a pyramid theory of consciousness, memory, improvisation, self-interest, and then later he reframes it perhaps consciousness is an inward journey. Is this consistent

with science, Steve? I think, I mean, it's a useful metaphor, but it kind of makes consciousness sound like it exists in this kind of ladder-like scheme, whereas we know that there's different aspects of things that we're conscious of, whether it's when you're staring at a sunset or listening to music or having a conversation with yourself internally, for instance. So there's language components, memory components, our ability to understand what other people are thinking components. And I think all of those, rather than being a pyramid per se in the brain, it's more like a sweep of modules, I think, in the brain. And Robin, how would you react to that? I think that Steve just nailed it on the head. In artificial intelligence, we've tried to,

after the initial forays into artificial intelligence in the 60s, we started looking at biological intelligence. We started doing industrial espionage. We weren't making a lot of progress. So we started looking at biological intelligence. And that ladder-like schemes and that soup of modules describes the best architectures that we're coming up for artificial intelligence and robotics. So you start off with your very basic behaviors, your motor schemas, those those, those loops of reflexes that you have, then you have more sophisticated systems, and then you're duplicating what we see in the visual cortex, starting to do those types of more advanced. And yet we know from biology that it's not all just a straight clunk, and then this layer,

then this layer, then this layer, they communicate, and that richness adds to the complexity. Yeah, I'm wondering, you know, even going back to the original Westworld, back with Eul Brenner is one of the robots, I remember. And when somebody got shot, and I remember somebody said, in one of the guests got shot and said, I've been wounded. And, you know, breaking that little divide between the robots being able, are rebelling and breaking Isaac Asimovs, one of his great three rules about robotics, right, that the robots can't attack their masters. Oh, dear God, we're not bringing up. Okay, sorry. I love Isaac Asimov, but the three laws of robotics were set up explicitly to sound good that have all of these subtle ramifications that could power plots, right? Because it's ambiguous.

And so I'm always, you know, as you can tell, cringe when people say, oh, robot should follow the three laws of robotics. Well, that means that they will inherently be screwed up because they can't fly. follow them. It was set up to have those disconnects. Well, but people have, well, as you say, that was a long time ago, and certainly the whole science fiction has followed, you know, past that and into the New West World and other places. But we're going to take a break and talk lots more about where robotics is today and consciousness. Please call us our number 844-724-8255. We promise not to bring up Isaac Asimov anymore. I love Asimov.

Just that, yeah. Okay. Well, I had to. You know, he's the father of that whole thing. We'll talk about it. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. I'm Ira Flato.

You're listening to Science Friday. We're talking about robotics this hour with my guest, Robin Murphy, and Steve Ramirez. Our number 844-724-825. Robin and Steve, if we're for trying not to build human consciousness into robotics. How do we decide what the limit of the consciousness should be and the different kind of consciousness they should have?

Let me ask Robin first. You know, I don't know that many of us in AI robotics think of it as building consciousness. I would think of it as that we think in terms of levels of initiative, what is the appropriate degree that we can delegate to a particular agent? autonomous agent. So what is it, was it mean to just do exactly what I tell you to do? Is it okay for you to change the gains or how you do it? Or is it okay to come back and say, no, I can't do this? Is it okay to come back and say, I've got recommendations? Or is it, you know, hey, we're giving you everything in complete ability to change up? We're still at the lower levels of building initiative

into systems. But in each case, it's always bounded. It's in there somewhere. that we programmed in and what those boundaries are. Just like when we give our directions to a kid or a coworker, we typically have bounds on those. Steve, do you share any of the real fear that we've heard some scientists and technologists fear that the AI robots can get smarter than we want them to and take us over? Maybe this is me being an eternal optimist,

but no, I think I have maybe only 1% of that worry. I think, I mean, I agree with everything that Robin's. that when we there tends to be this this tendency to kind of Hollywoodify these things and to say that well once we have a handful of robots that can jump or run or self-driving cars for instance that they're going to become self-aware and then take over the world and this is assuming that that's their intention to begin with whereas i tend to think that these things actually uh just free up a lot of more time for us to go and do other jobs and you know like self-driving cars is a good example where it kind of makes it makes a handful of us a little bit uncomfortable being in the

backseat of a self-driving car, but, you know, we used to think about that with things like Uber, and it would be crazy to say 15 years ago that you're going to get into the backseat of a car with a stranger, and now it's pretty routine, and we don't really bat an eye. So I think that, in that case, the Hollywood style of thinking about this tends to be kind of a little bit overly grandiose, as opposed to we're going to have robots that continue to assist us in ways, like whether it's through prosthetic limbs or self-driving cars or things that rather than replace our humanity just happened to nuance it. 8447248255 is our number.

Let's go to Nathan in Philadelphia. Hi, Nathan? Hello. Hi there. I was wondering if there is a bill of rights for artificial consciousness, and if not, who would write it? Good question. Should, I mean, should we worry about robots, their machines, are their ethics, rights

for them? No one's very quiet on this. So there's a lot of ethics and there's a lot of work, particularly in Europe, looking on the rights for consciousness. And we saw David Hanson, Sophia Robot, got a, was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia. I'm going to flip it over a little bit. What the scary stuff to me personally is what I'm seeing as a member of the Board of Foundation for Responsible. robotics, and that is this rapidly expanding sex doll industry. It's huge. And there's a serious debate

in the social sciences over whether these very realistic sex spots have therapeutic value, which is with that. But there's been no studies. So what we're seeing, the creepy child-sized sex spots. And so we're seeing Europe starting to get into legislating that British, the UK, just had a big law set of arrest there. The United States, we've got some legislation pending, you know, there. So whereas Westworld was kind of focusing, you know, maybe robots need legal protection because they're intelligent, they deserve protection under the law. We also need to be thinking about more immediate stuff, like the sex bots.

How about sex between consenting robots of adult age? Is that okay? Sex between consenting robots is fine with me. Okay. Agreed. A reason to ask this is years ago when we first started covering artificial intelligence, I'm talking like 10 years ago or more, I interviewed some roboticists and people who were talking about their early robots,

and they said to me, you don't understand that the next big money-making thing is going to be, you know, AI, sexual AI. And because that's so big on the internet now in terms of pornography that no one's going to stay away from that kind of issue. And it's interesting, Robin, you're raising it now because it seems to be important. It is. And I would encourage people to go to the foundation, the website for the Foundation for Responsible Robotics. And their study that they did for the European Union on our sexual future with robots really goes through both the AI aspect. what the investment is in that, and what are the unanswered questions about good thing, bad thing.

But it is a thing. It is a thing. No doubt about that. One of the themes we see in the show in Westworld is the relationship of memories to the robot's sense of self. They having strong memories, and they have multiple memories of different lives, and they have the ability to build new ones. These memories The girl My daughter I want you to remove them

I can't Not without destroying you Your memories are the first step to consciousness Big concept there Robin Can we build realistic AI without something like memories No we can't

And as you start looking at What we expect in realism That for us to talk we have a common ground. We have, which is memories, how we've built up our understanding of the world. We also have a lot of built-in emotion. One of the things that I disagreed with how Westworld, which is kind of different than disagreeing with the scientific paper, I guess, but, you know, an academic word disagree.

You know, this idea of emotions are so basic. They help regulate those ladders of intelligence, those modules in between there. So we don't see how you can actually. get to that to get to conscious level, peer level consciousness, without memories, without this common ground, without scripts of how the world works. I think one of the most fun things about, from a programming standpoint, is that you've got a TV show about robots, which is following a script, right, and screenplays. And that's actually how we look at programming stereotypical actions. things that happen events that happen very often. I think when you look at things like Google

duplex, you're going off the fact that when you call to make an appointment is very intentional. The person who's taking your call and doing the appointment is very intentional. There's only a modicum of social convention of hi, how are you, whatever, nobody really cares. Now we're getting into the meet of what days, what times, all of that, that these are things that we're learning to build in as scripts, almost as if we're writing a little script. place for our artificial intelligence systems. And speaking of that very point yourself, I have heard recently that there have been calls for having the robots on the other end of the phone line being identified as being robots

instead of people. We want to know we're talking to, is it a robot or is a person? People are ready now starting to ask for things like that. Well, and I'm personally wondering about that. Big Fuhrer is, is it because if it's a robot, they're probably recording the conversation and using it for the database as yet another intrusion into our privacy. And we have to expect if it's creepy, but for me, it's sort of like a board person from a call center versus a non-sensient robot. I mean, there's just not a lot of difference. Can I just get my appointment and

be done with it? Steve, I know that you've research memories. And I want to go back to that question. Can we be conscious without memories? How important are the memories? Yeah, in this case, I mean, I think it ends up being like you really can't have perhaps one without the other where they're both intertwined. I mean, memories threaten unifier overall sense of being. So, you know, we see in cases like in dementia like states where you can be conscious in the moment, but your overall sense of identity over time loses that kind of common denominator that is memory. And I actually, that was one of the most fascinating things to me about how this is portrayed in Westworld, because when you look at characters like Dolores or Maeve

and having sort of memories of their previous iterations start creeping back in, it basically, you can't help but ask the question, well, do we forget, right? I mean, our iterations are basically like when we go to bed and we wake up in the morning, or perhaps who we were when we were two years old and three years old, which most of us can't remember, whereas what we did yesterday we remember. So I think it really gets at that fundamental question of, you know, are you the same as your previous iteration and except in Westworld, it's displayed, of course, by fixing the host. But I thought it was interesting because it also brings the light the question of, well, if those memories are there, then are there ways of actually trying to tinker with them

and bring them back, even though they were once thought to be lost? And I think that that's actually a very real scientifically tactible question. Yeah, that is one of the really interesting aspects that they're focusing on in Westworld. Let me get it in, a tweet from Mike who says, first he says, I'll be careful not to mention Asimov. He goes on to say, do you believe AI can eventually be more intelligent than humans using self-learning algorithms? I feel like humans are approaching the plateau on how much we can actually do and process. Steve, what do you think?

Okay, Robin, you go first. I mean, what does more intelligent mean? We already have AI systems that can outperform people. on certain tasks. So what are we talking about? Are they like a robot or an AI system like the old movie Colossus that comes over and just says, okay, I'm taking over the world and I'm going to end world hunger and I'm going to end war and I'm going to do all of this. You just do what I tell you to. Are we talking that kind of intelligence? Good question.

Yeah. I think also that it's, I completely agree to second that where I think it also depends in what aspect and how do we define intelligence, right? Because I rely on my phone, for instance, to get from location A to B multiple times a day, and it can just figure out the best path to get from work to a restaurant than I could have figured out, for instance. Or things like calculators or, once again, like self-driving cars, they're probably going to be better than us at a lot of things. But then we get the different – we get another dimension of, well, if we're trying to mimic human behavior,

you could imagine a world where there's AI, like in – the newest Blade Runner, for instance, where the main character basically has an AI love interest or like the movie, Her, and then you realize that it starts to blur the lines a little bit. But I think one of the things that the show does really well is bring those questions out. But I think that's starting from the perspective of, will they be more intelligent or smarter than us? And it's just a matter of it depends at what. Yeah. I reflect on this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios talking about robotics.

You know, in the original movie Westworld, we were clearly supposed to side with the humans. And in this series now, nearly all the relatable characters are robots. I think sympathies have shifted, but why do you think that is, Steve? Why do you think, you know, we've moved over to the other side? Yeah, I mean, it ends up being a great vehicle for entertainment, right? Because it kind of, it flips the narrative on its head a little bit where, you know, we're used to, we side with the humans because, of course, we're humans. But in this case, again, when you look at the character of Bernard and you can see how, well, basically had faked everybody to think that he was human and then ends up being a robot. So I think it's basically to force us to feel a little bit uncomfortable by being able to say, wow, I actually found myself relating to what I thought was human.

which actually ended up being a robot. And then that way it actually forces that conversation to begin, which I think the show does really well, whereas other shows might have the more clean and cut. You know, we side with the humans, the robots take over, the humans win. I think in this case, there's more layers to the narrative, which I think just makes it a more enticing show. Yeah, you get to think about it a little more.

Let me go to see if I can get another phone call in before we have to go. This one's in Pennsylvania. Kai, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, how are you? I didn't get your name on the screen there. My name's John. Hi, John. Have you got a question for us?

I do. Number one, I wanted to say, I am a big fan of Westworld, and I've been hooked on all this stuff since watching the movie The Fortin Project. Okay. But there was an episode of Star Trek the next generation in which the computer started developing inside of itself neural networks and using all the data that was in the computer about all the memories of all the people and all the memories of everywhere they had gone and all the things they had explored, emerged a consciousness. A consciousness just suddenly emerged and created itself out of all this information and data. Does anyone speculate that anything of that sort could actually happen or could ever happen

with our own Internet? Good question. I mean, are these paradigms of just walking bodies? Are they obsolete? already? I mean, is the internet where the next big robotic thing is going to happen? Robin, what do you think? We've certainly seen that in science fiction speculating in the popular press that we're just going to have this

emergent behavior, this self-awareness come out of that. Again, it really violates what we know about how we program with the bounded rationality where we also have

these explicit boundaries, these limits on initiative, how it would jump out. We don't know how to write that code. We don't foresee writing that kind of code. All right. That's about all the time we have for now. I want to thank my guest, Robin Murphy, Professor for Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. She joins us by Skype. Steve Ramirez, assistant professor of neuroscience at Boston University. Thank you both for joining us today. Thank you very much. I hope you're enjoying Westwell and you think it's good for robotics, no?

It is. I'm sure they're enjoying it. Yeah. Okay. That's all the time we have. I want to thank our host today, the 90.5 WESA in Pittsburgh for hosting us, and to WESA's John Sutton, Russ Lloyd, Tom Hurley, Helen Wigger, Terry O'Reilly, Nick Wright for their help putting on the show, helping us put the show on from their radio station today.

And I want to join us tomorrow night. At the Carnegie Library Music Call for a special live taping of the show, there are still a few tickets left at ScienceFriiday.com slash Pittsburgh. We're going to have a great live show from the Carnegie Library Music Hall. You can get a few tickets that are still left, ScienceFriety.com slash Pittsburgh. Charles Berkwurst is our director, senior producer Christopher and Taliatta, our producer Zara, Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor. Katie Heiler.

Technical engineering help from Rich Kim Sarah Fishman and Jack Harwich back in New York. And we're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. And you can outplay us on those smart speakers. Ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want. So every day now is Science Friday. We have all our educational contact up on our website, content at our website. I'm Ira Flato in Pittsburgh.