Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity | Dr. Fei-Fei Li

See Andrew Huberman live in New York, Los Angeles & San Francisco:

I think the biggest thing humanity never learns is the older generation lamenting about the future generation as if the future generation doesn’t know anything. They’re rude. They’re they’re they’re forgetting the past. But if you look at arc of history, of humanity, by and large, we advance for the better. Now, I’m not denying the atrocities.

I’m not denying the setbacks. I’m not denying this. But fundamentally I’m a optimist in humanity. I look at kids, they’re curious. Of course, they get massively entertained by this technology, but they also are starting to use it.

What I worry about are teachers and some parents because I think our society today and especially Silicon Valley are not doing them a service. We’re forgetting about them. Hey everyone. To celebrate the launch of my new book entitled Protocols, I’m pleased to share that I’ll be hosting three live events very soon. The first live event is in New York City at Radio City Music Hall on September 17th.

The second event is in Los Angeles at the Dolby Theater on October 8th. And the third live event is in San Francisco at the Masonic on October 28th. At each of these events, I’ll be discussing topics from the book and my favorite part, taking questions directly from you, the audience. To get tickets, you can go to hubermanlab. com/events and use the code protocols to get early access.

Again, that’s hubermanlab. com/events and use the code protocols to get early access to tickets. Welcome to the Hubberman Lab podcast where we discuss science [music] and science-based tools for everyday life. [music] I’m Andrew Huberman and I’m a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr.

Fay Lee, a computer scientist and professor at Stanford and one of the pioneers and luminaries of artificial intelligence and computer vision. As you all know, millions of people use AI chat bots to look up information every single day. And of course, many people are concerned about AI, where it’s going, and how it might replace certain human jobs or degrade our experience of life in one way or another. Today we discuss from a neuroscience perspective what intelligence really is and the ways that AI can and is being used for good meaning to truly enhance learning health and to enrich rather than diminish the human experience. We start off by talking about how human brains of all ages learn new information.

What rules the brain follows in that process and how AI because it is based on the content of the internet both resembles and falls short of what human brains can learn. and we discuss exciting uses of AI and robotics in medicine. To be clear, FFE acknowledges and addresses the many valid concerns about AI. But as the director of the Stanford Institute for Human- Centered Artificial Intelligence, her goal is to make sure that humans and humanity at large are represented in where AI goes next. As you’ll soon hear, Dr.

Fa Lee is an extraordinary scientist and educator. She has been called the godmother of AI for her ushering in of AI technologies, but also for her insistence that the ethics and benevolent uses of AI stay central to AI and robotics. So whether you are young or old, today’s conversation will inform and empower you to understand and use AI in ways that truly benefit you and enrich your life. Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, today’s episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Fay Lee. Dr. Fay Lee, welcome.

Thank you. I’m excited to be here, Andrew. >> Yeah, this is a long time coming. And yes, >> you are a luminary in this AI field, but I also consider you a neuroscientist and computer scientist, and we share a common path through vision science. And so I’d like >> and fellow colleagues >> and fellow colleagues at Stanford.

So I’d like to start in vision. What is so special about vision and seeing and light as it pertains to AI and where it’s all going? Because I think for most people those probably sound like very divorced themes but actually that’s where it all starts. >> Yeah. I see vision as a cornerstone of intelligence in almost two parallel way.

One is what evolution has taught us. You know what’s the evolution of vision and animal intelligence and human intelligence. The other one is computer vision and AI what that relationship is. So I’ll go into each evolution. I always say that 540 million years ago animals saw the first light.

These are simple sea ocean animals, trilobytes and and the the cousins. And before that there was very little sensing. Uh around that same time tactile and haptics was starting also to emerge in animal bodies but but there was no hearing. There’s no you know smelling there’s no but there’s absolutely no nervous system. But the first photoreceptive cells created a evolutionary force that propelled animals to evolve because sensing the external world changes your self-perception changes the way your relationship with the external world.

To put it simply, if you seek you can see food, it changes your your life, right? from a evolution point of view and you become someone else’s food and also you’re actively seeking food. You’re actively seeking mates and and and all that. So really because of sensing and perception evolution took a incredibly accelerated pace in terms of uh animal speciation. Fossil studies have told us that 10 million years after the first uh light for animals was what we call the the big ban of evolution or Cambrian explosion of animal speciation.

And fast forward I think vision has always played a huge role in not only in the early evolution of animals but as well as um advanced intelligence and how that emerged. You and I are both vision student and and scientists. It is estimated half of the cortical AC activities in human brain is involved in visual function. Children were first visual before they were verbal in development. So vision really to this day plays a central role in both the evolution of animal intelligence as well as in the daily life of human human life.

Now in parallel, vision as a uh as a discipline or as a area of uh artificial intelligence was really played a pivotal role in what we see as this modern AI moment in a couple of ways. First of all is the the uh algorithms the neuronet network algorithms. Neural network algorithms were first computer scientists start dabbling that in the early 1950s. And [snorts] Andrew, you might remember what’s happening on the neuros side in the early 1950s is that neuroscientists like Hubo and Viso were starting to record visual cells in malian brain and starting to realize there is a hierarchical structure of nervous cells that stack against each other and pass neuroinformation across these hierarchy. And it goes from you know collecting light from retina all the way to recognizing there is a shape in front of you.

And that very neuro architecture that we see in mamalian brain is also part of the inspiration of neuronet network algorithm. Now today’s neuronet network algorithm runs on hundreds of billions and even trillion of parameters. It has the complexity that departs from what we recorded in the mamalio uh brain or the visual pathway but the origin is very close to each other about half a century ago um a little more than half a century ago. That’s one aspect of uh vision’s contribution to AI. There is another aspect of vision’s contribution to AI that is also pivotal which is through big data is that that comes closer to my own work is that AI around the century was a field of machine learning a lot of diff