This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast More What You Here weekday afternoons on the Drive. Doctor Bard Costco, no relation to the Big Box Store, is an attorney and an engineering professor at USC, also best selling
author and world renowned scientists, scholar and media commentator. He's also the author of the best selling book Fuzzy Thinking, probably the best primer around for learning what Fuzzy Logic is about, being rereleased on a digital version next week, and we're having him on to talk about artificial intelligence because doctor Costco, it's coming to kill us all. Well, maybe not right away, Okay, actually quite the opposite. And I'm kind of on the fence with it.
In general. I see the panic, but then I also see the benefits. And I'm trying to keep the attitude that Eisenhower had about nuclear energy. Yes, we be concerned, but we mustn't be hysterical. Absolutely, it's exactly right. And there's many types of AI, like anything else. What you're hearing a lot about is the linguistic type like chat GPT, and that's
something that's got some kinks in it to be worked out. That was released chat GPT four in March by Open AI and its competitors have raised and release other versions. They're not quite ready for prime time, and they have a lot of problems. But there's other types of AI, but those are more generally what are called black box AI. Though they learned patterns real well.
But the trouble lead is that they also make things up and hallucinate and like for example, you might have seen the sixty minutes article last episode last week where they went to Google, which has a massive system called Palm that's got over half a trillion parameters, each parameter like a wire synaps in your brain, and they asked the question about inflation of a great answer cited five economics texts, but it made them up. There aren't such economics texts, and
it didn't tell the user that it literally lied it call it hallucinated. So hallucinated, so you have to be very careful demand an explanation. In contrast, if you take an AI system which is mainly statistics and a lot of computing power and apply it to medical diagnoses, like what a radiologists would look at for cancer detection or just whether you have a retinal problem, it's fantastic and it's relatively easy to validate those systems, so we don't have this what
we call XAI or explainable AI problem. Now, fuzzy logic is more often traditionally applying to control systems, like for example, I should say fuzzy logic is thinking with shades of gray, and it has a rule based structure, so you get and input output, and you get a mapping and get some kind of audit trail and even a confidence measure which you don't get with the
others. But I have a Subaru a car, and it uses fuzzy logics and transmission so many times per second, taking censor debt and making decisions about whether or how to shift, and so it doesn't it doesn't get feel a one shot thing like cat GPT, and there's many many versions of that. You probably have a gadget in your house like that has fuzzyologic in it, whether a washing machine or even something as humbles, a microwave, oven,
thermostat. I think my thermostat claims to have AI, but it's I know, it's very basic. Yeah, it could easily have that, and that's all well to the good. But on the other hand, when we look at the use of these systems by companies, and I'm very concerned I am a privacy attorney about the effect on our privacy, especially from our government let a loan other governments, and the laws have not been updated as they should have been. The laws they were updated, I think in a bad way
after nine to eleven, and we haven't come to grips of that. So, for example, the FBI, we found out from the Federal Court a couple of months ago, has violated the rights without the search warrant of the PHISER Rights, an intelligence surveilling fact of over two hundred and seventy thousand citizens US citizens. That's in the last four years, just just what we know of. And now that key provision is called seven oh two of PHISER Actor is up for renewal this year. So that's an issue. We have to
address that in many others, but not just that. Leads the big agencies have computers and software that every day gets better. So even if we don't change the laws, their ability to monitor what we have or now we learned last week that the FBI goes online and buys our own private data that it couldn't get without a search warrant. And what they can do with that is shocking. And what other actors can do with that sort of thing for the
next election, Wow, it's going to be interesting to see. I think we can call that, will likely call that the AI election in twenty twenty four uncharted, not just to predict how people will vote, but to manipulate them. Well, that's what concerns me more than anything. And I don't even I'm not even too worried about the government. Doctor Bart costcos with us and he's his number one selling book, is Fuzzy Thinking. He's also an
AI expert. My concern isn't what the government's going to do with this. My concern is what commerce and the marketplace will do with this, and pollsters that work for a particular political party who are not bound by the constitution. Already, already we are so monitored by the Googles and the facebooks and the twitters of the world right, and then there's been some interaction we've been learning thanks to the Twitter files and others, with these government agencies and lee.
Beyond that, there's these other actors out there. We learn from the Snowden cases, and I recommend Oliver Stone's movie If People haven't seen it. It's not just the abuses we learned. There were entire programs, surveillance programs in ways to circumvent our Fourth Amendment, which protects right of search and seizure by simply getting our buddies in England or New Zengland or New Zealand or even Canada to do the dirty workforce. And then there are the other governments who are
doing a lot with that. So the profiles being built about you and the like you don't know, and just the small, comparatively small problems of deep fakes are out there. There could be stuff going on with your likeness and voice. You may never know it. You may not get a job offer because of something you're a deep faked on, and that's a real problem. We have a problem with hallucinations, We have a problem with privacy. I
think we'll address it. But at the same time, computing powers growing so fast and the big tech companies are racing so fast we don't quite have time to catch up. Well, that seems to be in a lot of industries. But I've been trying doctor Bard Costco's with as fuzzy thinking as his book, and it's about to be reissued digitally, and he's an AI expert. I try to focus on what this massive amount of computing can do for the
medical industry. For example, it is probably not out of the realm of possibility for there to be a microbot developed that can have artificial intelligence that will know where the cancer cell is and can go and destroy it. And things like that are what excite me. Yeah, absolutely. I mean one consequence
of the coronavirus vaccines. I know there are a lot of problems with them and the issuance, but for thirty years folks have been working on these Manolipo systems like that for just what you're talking about, to teach the system some signal detection capable. It may not have an AI computer that actually may be kind of housed in its biologies, but to detect very specifically that particular cancer cell, or not just cancer cell, it may be the zombie cells or
things like that. You will see a lot of that. I think lots of cremic courts in all those cases lead. I don't think you want to be the first person to experiment. Oh no, no, the third or fourth pass it. Maybe give it a go, but that's all to the good as you throw more statistics, optimization algorithms and computing power at that kind of thing, a classic signal detection. I think the benefits will be marvelous. Plus the effects of implanting chips to resource sight and a lot of other
problems, it's already starting to happen. We do some of that at USC Actually. Ah, excellent, Yeah, because I mean that's the new that seems to be the new things like glaucoma and retinal deterioration. That seems to be the new threat that. No, but we can't. We don't have anything to do about We can't. We can't do anything about it. We'd like to grow new eyes at some point and in the interim back up what you've got with your eyes. All those sorts of things are coming very doable.
They don't violate any law of physics. It's just a matter of stealing. And if you just look at just this past century of technology again, nothing that goes first goes well, whether it's the first car or the first airplane or first cell phone, but man, does it come in time. What you want is something that has something like Moore's law of the doubling of chip density on your side, and AI has that signal detection has that those
things will only get better and much faster. Doctor Bardcosco for someone listening and was taking note of what you were saying earlier about deep fakes, I mean, is there anything we can do in general or just not turn on our phones ever? Ever? Yeah, you've got to be careful with your information.
I personally don't participate in social media for legal reasons. I think it's a huge mistake and people are going to be growing profiles of you not I mean, we know, for example, China does this just across the board for people. But I think it's being done. I'm guessing at a mass scale by corporations and others. You don't know who's selling your information. I would be very hesitant to put my information online. Doctor bard Costco AI expert
author and attorney as well as a professor. His book is Fuzzy Thinking, probably the best primer around for learning what fuzzy logic is all about, and it's available rereleased digitally. Don't have to give your personal information to get it. But I thank you doctor for joining us a bit. Thank you, thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, The Lee Met Matthews podcast and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia presentation