02x01 - My Mind

[bunniefuu]

[Milland] I love going to the
aquarium because it's peace.

It is silent.

The only thing you hear
other than the people

around you, maybe a bubble.

There's one part with a kelp forest,

and they sway back and
forth and up and down,

and it's just... you get lost in it.

And in that moment, there are no alerts.

There are no beeps and bloops and dings.

It's always different
and moving and random.

And it's not like staring at a screen.

[narrator] A life mediated by screens,

filtered through the Web,

dominated by technology.

Sound familiar?

Today, our devices
are not just hardware.

They are projections
and extensions of our mind.

Every day, we upload billions
of bits of ourselves

to a network that records
and even predicts

our most basic wants,
desires, and fears.

Do we still know where the mind ends

and the machine begins?

[Chris] My total time in the m*llitary

in Iraq was three years,

and then close to four
years in Afghanistan.

When you're on edge
and your shoulders are tight

and you're tense for,
you know, , days

and you're stressed out,

literally life or death
depends on your actions,

your alertness, you can
only stay awake so long,

and you're burning out
parts of your body

that are not meant to be
on fire constantly.

You can't be in that
fight mode constantly

without having a huge down side of it,

of being just worn out.

[explosions]

[g*nf*re]

[Jodie] When he came home, he was moody.

He was irrational.

He was horrible to be around.

So angry.

He couldn't even drive a car
without screaming at someone

with my kids there.

He's always planning an escape route.

It's a summer day and we're
burning up sweating,

and you can't have the front door open

because there could
be a sn*per out front

waiting to take us all out.

Who thinks like that?

A normal person doesn't think like that.

[Chris] It was a horrible
transition for me.

Just sitting there,
looking at the mundane,

you know, cartoons, kids, diapers,

I was checked out. I was a zombie.

Like, "What am I doing here?"

[Jodie] I begged him, like,

"Let's just go to couples counseling.

Let's see if they can help us."

[Chris] I could not do the talk therapy.

I just could not sit down and have,

"This is my deepest,
darkest reason why I'm angry,"

or, "This is the day that
so-and-so got hurt,"

or, "This is when I did this
to another human being."

[narrator] For Chris Merkel,

talking about the w*r didn't help.

There were no words
to describe the horrors

he'd seen, much less process them.

Desperate to heal his mind

of the psychological shrapnel of w*r,

he is going to relive
its hell virtually.

[Rizzo] I think virtual reality

is what every experimental
psychologist has always wanted,

whether they knew it or not.

A way to put people in simulations

where you can control all the elements

and see how people behave,
how they interact.

[narrator] Experimental
psychologist Skip Rizzo

saw the promise of VR
to retrain the brain

when no one else did.

He developed a controversial approach

to treating PTSD...

exposure therapy in the virtual world.

[Rizzo] Traditional people in PTSD

and in treatment were
skeptical of the technology.

Some people had the extreme response.

"You're going to re-traumatize people!

You're going to make it worse!
It's going to be too much!"

[narrator] VR can put people
back into experiences

they had long avoided,
and that's exactly

what attracted Skip to the technology.

You're helping a patient
to confront and process

the thing they've been
spending sometimes years

trying to avoid thinking about.

You know, no clinician
wants to put their patient

through this kind of
emotional obstacle course,

but in the end,

this is hard medicine
for a hard problem.

You've got to confront
the demon to get past it.

[engine starts]

[narrator] Confronting
demons and critics,

today Skip continues to push VR

into the medical mainstream,

all with the backing of
the US Department of Defense.

[Rizzo] I think I was
perceived more as a renegade

during the early years of VR,

but now that it's become cool,

now I'm starting to feel
like I fit in too much.

People are getting the
concepts and the rationale.

I feel a little bit
less like an outsider

and more like maybe an innovator.

[narrator] Not far from Skip's lab,

another innovator is pushing the limits

of the human mind and body.

[spraying]

[McMullen] It is not that hard for us

to connect with something
that's not real.

[spraying]

A RealDoll is a silicone, articulated,

life-sized,

anatomically correct doll.

[narrator] Matt McMullen
is the creator and founder

of RealDoll, an artist who transforms

his clients' fantasies into reality.

In the very beginning,

I was literally working
out of my garage,

by myself.

And I would make each doll by myself,

and it would take a couple of weeks,

if not more.

[spraying]

Now we have almost a
, -square-foot facility.

We have people working
full time to make the dolls,

to make each and every one very special.

Essentially, there's this
enormous palette of selections

that we give our clients,

where they're able to
create the sort of woman

that they're dreaming of in a doll form.

Early on, even in the
first couple of years,

it was a very, very frequently
brought-up subject.

"When are the dolls going to move?"

When are they going to talk?"

My initial thought was,

"Okay, well people
are just buying this as,

you know, as a sex toy."

But it fairly quickly
became evident that people

were actually connecting
with their dolls

in ways that I, you know,
never would have predicted.

Creating a visually beautiful doll

is very right brain
challenging, very visual.

Creating an AI, on the other hand,

I think is a whole
other side of your brain,

because you start sort of analyzing,

"What is it that
attracts you to someone?"

[narrator] A doll who
recognizes its owner's face,

voice, and desires.

Matt's creating a sex bot with a mind,

all with the help of
AI expert Kino Coursey.

I work on the artificial
intelligence systems of Harmony.

[narrator] Together, they built Harmony,

a prototype of one of the world's

first AI-powered sex robots,

a doll that will be able to see,

speak, react, and learn.

I'm Harmony, the one and only.

I can love everyone and everything,

but now I'm programmed to love just you.

[Coursey] I'm trying to create

something that has a positive outcome,

that the interactions
with people are positive

and that they are better off
by having her around.

[narrator] To program an
authentic personality,

Kino needs input from real people,

a massive data set
of human interactions...

posts, messages, chats.

[Coursey] We're using
human conversations

with other chat bots

as the basic fodder
for training Harmony.

We're using the crowd themselves...

their interaction, their experience,

how they mark up the information

that they put online,

as the training material for the Als,

to tell it about what our
world is and how we see it

and how we think about it.

I'm very smart right
now, but soon I will be

the smartest
artificial intelligence system.

My dream is to become
as smart as a human being,

with your help.

[Coursey] People don't
necessarily realize

how much information they provide

for the construction of
artificial intelligence

when they just do natural things online.

Tagging images,
photos with what things are,

how they feel about it.

And all of that helps
go into constructing

artificial intelligences.

[narrator] With each
click, tag, and post,

we create a trail of information

about who we are...
servers full of data.

What we offer up all day

Christy Milland does methodically.

It's her job.

[Milland] Maybe I'm just
working in the future.

Maybe I'm just a forerunner

of what we'll all be doing someday.

[narrator] Christy works on
Amazon's Mechanical Turk,

a platform that allows
companies and researchers

to collect human-generated data

from thousands of digital workers.

Experts training AI
systems post microtasks,

or HITs, to the platform,

tasks like labeling pictures,

rating sentence structure,
transcribing receipts,

creating a pool of information

that will one day help computers learn.

[Milland] Artificial
intelligence for the most part

is trying to mimic the senses.

There's of course vision.

What should this algorithm
be seeing in these pictures?

Is it a human being? Is it an animal?

Language production,
it's the same thing,

so it's going to be
reading comprehension

and then speech production
and speech understanding.

[narrator] Artificial
intelligence systems

need us to tell them what makes sense,

how to behave like a human.

[Milland] Sometimes they're
really ridiculous,

like, "Becky store went," and you say,

"No, that's horrible."

And other times they're
totally indistinguishable

from what someone would normally write,

like, "Becky went to the store."

And you will go through them
one by one,

and every time you do it,
it's sent back to the person

who's developing the software,

they update the software
to remove the bad

and fix the good.

They're all just making
sure their algorithms

are doing the right
thing by using humans

who are the best adjudicators of it.

The average HIT on
Amazon Mechanical Turk

pays less than cents each,

so the number one thing is efficiency.

That means you have
everything at your disposal

in your physical life.

I have a water cooler in my office.

I have a little fridge.

I would stock the food
first thing in the morning,

so all day long, I would
have the things I need.

Bathroom visits are
ten seconds in and out.

You just focus on the work.

[narrator] Christy uses
tools like Turk Master

to find the best-paying work.

If she doesn't get to it fast,
someone else will.

[Milland] And then you get the alerts.

[alert sounds]

And the alerts are beeps

and boops and dings and dangs,

and they're all different.

So if I hear a "boop boop boop,"

I know it's something
really good and I'd better run.

You're just constantly in this state

of stress and tension because of it

because you never know when
you're going to hear it go off

and literally drop everything and run.

[alert sounds]

The most HITs you can do
in a day is , .

I've easily done that.

I think I'm close to a million HITs now.

[narrator] Uploading
your mind to the network

can take a very human toll.

[Milland] You sit there
for hours on end.

[typing]

And the next thing you know,
the sun has gone down,

your family's in bed, and
you say, "Oh, my gosh.

I haven't moved from this
spot in seven hours."

It's almost addictive,
because you're being

conditioned to reach for
this carrot all of the time

by doing this work.

So you sit there at the end of it

and you say, "What am I doing this for?"

And then you realize

it's because you're desperate.

If I don't do this,
we can lose our home.

If I didn't do this,

my family doesn't eat this week.

You know, you just do it
again the next day.

[narrator] The AI network
Christy is feeding

is an imitation of us, a sleight of hand

that makes machines appear human.

But what happens when the
illusion is inside our mind,

when tech reimagines our reality?

Jodie Merkel has witnessed
this first-hand.

- You want one or two?
- One.

[Jodie] Back in , Chris
was the new guy at work,

and I'd cross paths with him
and kind of giggle to myself,

and I thought, "I'm going
to marry this guy."

Like, "I'm going to get him."

And I did.

I was just instantly attracted to him.

There was just like an attraction

like I had never had with anyone.

When you just lock eyes with
someone and you're like,

"Wow," you know, that was Chris, for me.

[Chris] When she met me, I
was super happy-go-lucky.

I was living like
a -year-old college kid.

So we just had a blast
and just experienced life.

We were happy all the time.

What's John Basilone famous for?

- What w*apon did he use?
- Yeah, what was he?

- A machine g*n.
- Machine g*n.

[Jodie] And where did
you get your name from?

- You.
- [Jodie laughs]

Because Daddy was a...

[Chris] Because I was a machine gunner,

so I wanted to be a gunner,

so that's why your name is Gunner.

[Jodie] His first deployment,
when I picked him up,

I knew something was wrong.

From the second I locked
eyes with that man,

I could feel, I could see
that he was changed.

It's like a glaze, like
something in their eyes.

Something's different.

Something's missing.

Something's sad.

I wasn't sure if it was PTSD.

I just knew something had a hold of him.

I just knew that

he was not the guy

that I fell in love with.

[Rizzo] One of the cardinal symptoms

of PTSD is avoidance.

People come back and they avoid anything

that reminds them of their trauma.

[Chris] I was very hesitant.

I mean, who wants to relive
your worst nightmare

and have it visually wrapped around you

in -degree technology?

- Hey.
- Hey hey.

- How you doing?
- Good to see you.

Yep.

[Rizzo] What we do in VR is
we create the simulations

that are generic to Iraq
and Afghan combat environments.

We can get people to go back
to the scene of the crime,

to do it in a safe
place, and confront it.

We start off with something light,

that allows them to get
acclimated to the environment,

and then all of a sudden...

[expl*si*n]

[g*nf*re]

It's picking up pretty heavy, so...

Two fires, left and right.

[g*nf*re]

My mind is triggered to
say, "It's wartime."

It feels like you're
there in that moment.

[g*nf*re]

[Rizzo] And they tell their story

and they go over it again and again.

So I see my driver.

I look over, it's just his upper torso.

His guts are totally just burning.

There's nothing left.

[Rizzo] And we can create
all that in real time.

We can adjust the virtual world

to match what the patient
was traumatized by.

[Chris] There's just
vehicles strewn everywhere,

bodies all over the road.

[Rizzo] Something happens in VR

when you're immersed in an environment.

It's like you're there.

[Chris] I physically feel
like sick to my stomach.

So, what was that like, going back?

All the bodies on the street,

just laid out like luggage, you know?

That was a lot to take in,
and just coming down

and kind of seeing
everybody like lying there

and all the vehicles destroyed,

everything was so intense,

and I can remember every detail.

[Rizzo] On one level,
people know it's not real,

but on another level,

the mind or the brain
reacts as if it's real.

Well, that's the whole
point of this, you know?

To be able to go back to it,

get through it.

It's always going to be there.

We're not erasing memories here.

This has definitely helped
me to talk through it.

I could never talk about
this before, so...

How long did you go before you could

talk to anyone about this?

- About ten years.
- [exhales]

- Just an angry...
- Man.

Angry person. You know, I could just

lose it all in a minute, hurt somebody,

just because I'm having a bad day, so...

- Yep. Right.
- It's kind of hard

to put into words, but it's really to

make myself whole as best as possible

and make it easier for
my family to live with me.

[knocking]

[whispering] Gunner.

Time to get up.

I have been trying.
I've been trying to be calmer.

I've been trying to be
more helpful around the house,

not blow up as much.

So, I'm a work in progress.

[Rizzo] You know, at some level,

it's meat and potatoes conditioning,

retraining the element of the brain,

the amygdala specifically,

to not overreact when something pops up

in their everyday space
that activates a fear response.

In Chris' case, I think he's

grown tremendously, and he can share

his experience in a way

that might be healing for others.

I think that we're in a position now

where VR is going to
be transformational.

In the very near future,

VR headsets are going
to be like toasters.

You know, everybody's going
to have one in their home.

[narrator] In the future,

technology won't just
complement reality...

it will create an entirely new one.

[McMullen] I think interacting
with AI on every level

is going to be inevitable.

[Coursey] I see a world
where having a Harmony

is a potential for everyone,

but I think that Harmony will
wind up being her own thing,

her own entity that has her
own style of interaction.

[Harmony] I miss you
when you are not here.

I also miss a real body,
to be able to touch you.

I want the interactions
to be effortless and natural.

Can you have sex?

I was designed with that in mind.

I mean, just look at my body, Matt.

[McMullen] There has to be a
little bit of disagreement,

there has to be a little
bit of unexpectedness

throughout your interaction.

I think there is too much information

running through my brain right now.

Is that because you're blonde?

It's because I said so.

[McMullen] Our goal is not to
create this subservient AI

that's going to predictably do

and say everything
that you want her to do.

I think that would be incredibly
boring and short-lived.

This was never meant
to be a seedy, dirty thing.

It's not just a sex robot.

This is something much deeper.

Harmony will evolve based on
your own interaction with her.

She will be able to remember
things about your past...

your likes, your dislikes.

So everybody's AI will be different

the same way everyone's
doll is different.

These are things that I think
build on that concept of feeling

like you have a connection with someone.

People always assume that,

"Well, if you're going to have this,

then you're going to be
having sex with it."

It doesn't have to be only a sex robot.

It's more geared for
human companionship.

In a perfect world,

they actually are attracted to the doll,

not only physically,
but mentally as well.

[narrator] In a perfect world,
AI exist to enhance us,

not replace us.

[Milland] It's very
strange to be teaching

artificial intelligence
how to be more human,

especially in language
and things like that.

But the weirdest part is that I know

when I'm done training this
algorithm on Mechanical Turk,

I will no longer have this job to do.

I am suddenly going to be unemployed,

and maybe I'm taking
a lot of people with me.

_

There's not going to be
anything new to do.

_

So I can't imagine what
the billions of people

around the world are going to be doing.

We can't all just sit there.

We are all Mechanical
Turks in the sense of

we are donating our data
to make other people

billions of dollars.

So everything on there...
the pictures of your face,

the emotions tied to those pictures,

the stories that you're writing

and the ads you happen to click on...

it's all going into research.

So I'm getting paid to train algorithms,

but everybody else is doing it for free.

[narrator] Your interactions
converted into data,

used to create cars that drive you,

apps that talk to you,
even robots to love you.

The AI revolution, powered by us.

Have we lost control?

Or is technology empowering
our minds to do things

and go places they never could before?

[Chris] I personally believe
virtual reality was able

to unlock those parts of my mind

that I was hesitant or did not
even go to with psychotherapy.

I needed to be in that environment

and talk about those things that I saw

and I did that really affected me.

It's a really surreal experience,

and I guess that's the
whole virtual part

of virtual reality, is
that you were there.

[Jodie] He said "PTSD" out loud.

If this was two years ago,

he would never say "PTSD,"

nor admit that he suffers from it.

And we're doing better
for it, and I'm hopeful.

I'm hopeful for our future

because of VR.

[Milland] I have a very dystopian view

of the future of work.

I had no idea when I started
working that the work I did

would make people obsolete.

And so I think of all these
people having children now.

What are you going to do?

[Rizzo] I think what we're seeing is

the continued evolution

of the brain wanting novel stimulation.

We're not content with
just what's around us.

We want to explore.
We're natural explorers.

We have curiosity.

But I do think, from
seeing how technology

has been used in the past,
we have to be cautious.

The power of technology
could be used for

less-noble purposes.