AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber: AI Already Feels Pain, Loves, and Is Self-Aware

**Jürgen Schmidhuber** (0:00)
The peon signals are just informing the robot about what should be avoided. Peon is just an invention of nature and biological beings, of evolution, which invented this peon central thing for animals, such that they have an incentive to learn to avoid the peon. And we have done that for many, many decades in our learning machine. The chemicals that are used in brains to encode certain states of fear or of love and whatever, they are different from what we are using in our artificial brains.
But the principles must be the same. And then it's self-aware. It's self-aware in the sense that, for example, if it looks in the mirror, it will quickly figure out, oh, the guy in the mirror, I can control what this guy does. If I do this, then he will do the symmetric thing, because I have it under control. But if you are there on the other side of the room, and I do this, and you will do something that's completely unrelated, I cannot predict them. So there you already see this concept of agency, which is immediately recognized as self-agency or the agency of another guy.
Within five years, you are going to lose $900 billion. Somebody is going to lose $900 billion in the near future, because there is no business model, nobody has a business model to recuperate all these losses.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:35)
How much better can AI models get from here? And what does their increasing smarts say about our brains and existence itself? We'll talk about it with AI pioneer and someone that The Guardian has called the father of AI, Jürgen Schmidhuber, right after this.
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**Alex Kantrowitz** (3:15)
Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today looking exactly into where AI is heading, how much potential the technology has to improve after this, and also what it's increasing smart says about us, our existence, our brains. We are thrilled to be joined by one of the pioneers of AI, someone that The Guardian has called the father of AI, Jürgen Schmidhuber, a professor who is joining us today from Amsterdam. Professor, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

**Jürgen Schmidhuber** (3:50)
Alex, it's my pleasure to be here.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (3:53)
So, let's just speak a little bit about yourself and your contributions to where AI stands. You've obviously made a lot of big contributions towards AI. Things like memory, the P and the T and the GPT, as your Twitter bio says. The Guardian's called you father of AI. It seems like the media tends to put these labels on researchers. There's a handful of fathers and godfathers of AI.
How do you respond to that and how would you contextualize your role and where the technology is today?

**Jürgen Schmidhuber** (4:26)
No single person can create an AI by himself or herself. You need an entire civilization to build an AI. You need not only the guys who are trying to invent algorithms, learning algorithms for artificial neural networks, that is what current AI is about.
You also need people who build better computers. You need all the video gamers who are creating a market for acquiring more of these fast and faster computers and providing an incentive to the computer makers to speed up the computation per dollar by a factor of 10 every five years. You need all the farmers who are feeding the video gamers and so on. So it is impossible for a single person to create an AI. You need an entire civilization.