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Quest Means Business
U.S. Stocks Plunge On Fed Rate Hike Fears; Bitcoin Falls Below $24K As Cryptocurrencies Plunge; Lawmakers Investigating Attack On U.S. Capitol Hold Second Hearing; Google Engineer Claims A.I. Chat System Is Sentient; Google Suspends Engineer Claiming Its A.I. Is Sentient; S&P 500 On Track For Bear Market Close. Aired 3-4p ET
Aired June 13, 2022 - 15:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[15:00:17]
ZAIN ASHER, CNN INTERNATIONAL HOST: The bears are back, losses across all three major indices on Monday. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ are down more
than three percent. Those are the markets and these are the main events.
Wall Street is all nerves as investors wait for the Fed to make a move on Wednesday.
Bitcoin prices crater after two major crypto platforms restricts transactions.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
ASHER: Tasty, and that it. Russia's former McDonald's locations reopened with a new brand and new ownership.
Coming to you live from New York, it is Monday, June 13th. I'm Zain Asher and this is QUEST MEANS BUSINESS.
Good evening.
Tonight, an accelerating stock selloff on Wall Street. The markets plunged into bear market territory as economic concerns grow. The Dow is down by
almost 800 points -- 760 points or so. This is Friday's inflation data spurs fears of a higher than expected interest rate hike this week.
Yes, the S&P 500 is down over three percent and more than 20 percent off its January record highs. That puts it on track to close in a bear market.
The NASDAQ which is already in a bear market also down over three and a half percent as well.
The selloff comes amid growing concerns over Central Bankers' abilities to engineer a soft landing here. The U.K. economy unexpectedly shrank in
April. The yield curve in the U.S. briefly inverted. Historically, this indicates an upcoming economic downturn or possible recession.
And a new poll from "The Financial Times" that shows that 70 percent -- 70 percent of economists right now think that the U.S. will tip in to
recession.
Mark Zandi is Chief Economist at Moody's Analytics, he joins us live now. Mark, thank you so much for being with us.
So the big concern here when it comes to stocks, stocks are down about 800 points or so in terms of the Dow. The big concern is really what lens the
Fed is going to go to at this point to curb inflation.
MARK ZANDI, CHIEF ECONOMIST, MOODY'S ANALYTICS: Well, they're going to raise rates, it's just a question of how much and when. You know, they meet
this week. My sense is they'll raise rates a half a point, that's what they've been signaling to us for quite some time. I think they stick to
script.
But as you pointed out, there are a lot of investors out there thinking given the really ugly inflation numbers we got last Friday that the Fed is
going to be even more aggressive and raise rates by three quarters of a percentage point.
I don't think they'll do that. You know, I think they've got concerns about the economy and recession so that they won't go that far. But they're going
to, you know, put out a strong statement, because they want to make sure everyone believes that inflation is going to come back down in the not too
distant future.
ASHER: Yes, three quarters is too risky. That's what a lot of people are saying, especially given the concerns right now about a recession.
What is your expectation about the U.S. going into recession here? Do you anticipate a recession? And if so, how deep do you think a possible
recession could be?
ZANDI: Well, I think recession risks are uncomfortably high. And obviously, they've been rising. But I think we'll be able to make our way
through without actually suffering an economic downturn. It is going to feel uncomfortable at times, like today when we're seeing all this red on
the screen with the stock market, but I think we'll navigate our way through.
The economy's fundamentals, you know, it is balance sheet, household debt, corporate leverage, the financial systems, the strength, stable governments
all in pretty good shape. So, you know, I would argue that we'll be able to avoid a recession.
But if I'm wrong, and we actually do go in, then all those things I just said would argue for a more mild economic downturn. Certainly, nothing more
significant than what you would we've experienced typically like recessions of six to nine months; unemployment, which is a 3.6 percent, it rises to
something like five and a half or six percent, so I would expect if we go in recession, it'll be a relatively modest one.
ASHER: Mild and relatively short lived, do you think?
ZANDI: Yes. Yes. But you know, recessions are just really not good, right? Because a lot of people are suffering financially in a very significant
way, particularly lower middle income households who don't have a lot of cash cushion and financial resources. They're going to be under a lot of
pressure here.
And they've only recently kind of gotten back on their feet given what happened with the pandemic, so we really don't want to go into recession.
[15:05:07]
ZANDI: But yes, you know, from a kind of a 3,000-foot level, if you're looking at it from down on high, I expect a recession. If we have one, it
would be six months, nine months, something like that. Unemployment would rise from three six to five and a half or six percent, something like that.
Not good.
But, you know, in the grand scheme of things kind of more typical, comparable to other recessions we've experienced in the past.
ASHER: And quickly, how close are we, do you think, to inflation actually peaking right now?
ZANDI: We're there. You know, which month? You know, impossible to know, because that depends on oil prices, which goes right back to the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, and what governments are doing in response to that, like this recent spike in oil prices is due the European Union's decision
to sanction oil.
So getting the timing right or wrong, but it feels like to me, you know, we're closer to the end of this in the beginning. I think inflation is
peaking, we should see a significant moderation by the end of the year, certainly by this time next year.
ASHER: Just in terms of the Fed raising rates. I mean, I know you said that three quarters is unlikely at this point, but just the fact that they
are raising rates, what will the higher borrowing costs mean for businesses in this country?
ZANDI: Well, I mean, if you need -- if you're a business and you want to expand and grow your business, you're going to buy a piece of equipment or
you want to, you know, get a lease on an office space or industrial park. If you need to borrow money to do it, it's going to be more costly to do
it. So that just raises the bar -- financial bar that you need to get over before you actually make that investment, before you make that expansion
decision.
And your businesses will do that because it's just more costly given the higher rate environment and that will slow the growth rate and the economy,
but saying that's by design, right? I mean, the Fed is trying to slow the growth rate in the economy and that's the way they do it is by raising the
interest rate and making it more expensive for business people and households to go buy a home or invest in a piece of equipment.
ASHER: Right, to slow everything down purposely.
Mark Zandi live for us there. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
ZANDI: Sure thing.
ASHER: All right, crypto prices are crashing. Bitcoin is down right now more than 10 percent. Two major platforms had temporarily suspended
withdrawals.
Lender Celsius network blamed extreme market conditions. Binance users weren't able to withdraw Bitcoin.
The world's biggest crypto exchange says it was a technical issue. Bitcoin is down now 66 percent from its November record high.
Paul La Monica joins us live now.
So Paul, it seems as though investors no longer really sort of seem to have faith in these alternative investment classes, cryptocurrency obviously,
including Bitcoin, as a hedge against inflation. Just walk us through that.
PAUL LA MONICA, CNN BUSINESS REPORTER: Yes, there had been, Zain, a lot of Bitcoin and crypto bulls who had been holding firm to the notion that if
the dollar were to weaken, if the Fed were to try and flood the market with more liquidity or other global central banks doing the same, that you'd
want to own Bitcoin.
It's this great inflation hedge, it is digital gold. Well, it turns out that that might not be the case. It's more a speculative asset, like a tech
stock and gold is still real gold even though gold is down today, too, just because everything is in the red as Mark Zandi alluded to a little bit
earlier.
I think right now, investors are grappling with the notion that Bitcoin is a speculative asset. It's not a safe haven, and you're seeing as a result
of those problems with Celsius and Binance.
Obviously, for many people who have money tied into Bitcoin, this is somewhat reminiscent of the bank runs of 2008 and 2009, when you had people
that were worried about what was going on in the financial markets, trying to take out money.
The problem is that these are not federally insured deposits like you have with big banks. So I think a lot of investors are scared and nervous.
ASHER: Yes, and they signed up for it knowing that risk.
How close are we to the bottom, do you think? Where's the downside here?
LA MONICA: It could go further, as you pointed out. Yes, we are about two thirds from the peak of 66 percent drop from the all-time highs last year,
but we're down about 50 percent so far this year, just 25 percent in the past week, and I think what's troubling, Zain, is that it's not just
cryptocurrencies themselves where you have all this downside.
You look at a lot of investors and they've piled in to companies like Coinbase, its stock is plunging today. All the Bitcoin miners like RIOT and
HIVE, they're down, but even larger financial firms. Jack Dorsey's Block aka Square that's a company that has been hit extremely hard because of its
exposure to Bitcoin and poor Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy, a software company that has made a big bet on Bitcoin. He's a Bitcoin evangelist.
[15:10:14]
LA MONICA: And right now, he has lost a lot of money for anyone who is invested in that stock because MicroStrategy is tumbling pretty sharply as
well, along with just about any stock that has a hint or whiff of crypto exposure.
ASHER: When you think about, you know, a company like Celsius, for example, halting withdrawals, what does that say, do you think about the
company's solvency?
LA MONICA: I think that there are some questions that are circulating today about the solvency of Celsius. But I think the bigger issue, Zain, is
just that a lot of these companies were not prepared for this volatility. So even if they survive the volatility, their credibility is taking a hit,
and I think any investor that had thought that cryptocurrencies were safe and good places to put your money, especially because of the fact that you
can track everything on the blockchain, there are still lots of questions about an industry that is not yet mature.
So if you want safety, you probably want cash in a bank or, you know, a government backed bond if you're really nervous about the financial system
right now and think that things are going to get worse. Cryptocurrencies are not a safe haven. We need to get beyond that notion. They may still
have upside, but that doesn't mean that they're safe by any stretch of the imagination.
ASHER: But neither is cash because of inflation.
LA MONICA: Of course. I mean, nothing is safe. I mean, if you really want safe, you put your money under the mattress and then obviously hope that no
one breaks in your house, it doesn't mean -- nothing currently is going to be safe of course, but the notion that Bitcoin is digital gold; that has
just proven to be flat out wrong.
ASHER: Right. I think we have all learned that lesson now.
Paul La Monica live for us there. Thank you so much.
All right, detached from reality, crazy stuff, completely nuts. Those are just a few of the ways witnesses describe Donald Trump's 2020 voter fraud
theory during the second televised hearing by the January 6th Committee investigating the Capitol insurrection.
The Committee repeats examples of then President Trump pushing this false narrative of a stolen election despite having no evidence to back it up.
Perhaps the most powerful testimony came from former Attorney General Bill Barr, who said that Trump never had an interest in what the actual facts
were.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WILLIAM BARR, FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: I was influenced by the fact that all the early claims that I understood were completely bogus and
silly, and usually based on complete misinformation.
And so, I didn't consider the quality of claims right out of the box to give me a feeling that there was really substance here.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ASHER: CNN's Katelyn Polantz joins us live now from Washington. So, Kate, what more did we actually learn from Bill Barr about the origin of the Big
Lie and also Trump's determination to get the results that he wanted, regardless of the consequences? And regardless of how, you know, untrue, it
was?
KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Well, we did hear from Bill Barr today that he basically knew and was pushing back against
all of these claims that Donald Trump was making, and all of the conspiracy theories that were floating up. In his own words, he said that he felt like
he was playing whack-a-mole at these conspiracy theories around the election that the election was stolen, it just was not.
And one of the things that we heard from Barr and from five other top officials, both in the Trump administration and on the campaign was that
they were telling Trump directly that he lost the election, that there wasn't enough widespread fraud or there wasn't fraud being found in any
broad sense in any of the battleground states that Trump said he believed that there would be that in any way it would change the result of the
election.
And so one of the things Barr said, you quoted a little bit of it, "There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were." Another
thing that he said was that the election was not stolen by fraud and nothing since then, has changed his mind.
We also heard from another Justice Department official named BJay Pak. He was the top prosecutor in Georgia at the end of the Trump administration.
His office did an investigation into these election fraud efforts that Trump and others wanted to put forward, and they found that what they were
claiming in the state of Georgia, it just wasn't true, that there weren't fake ballots that the election wasn't stolen there and Pak resigned days
before January 6th, and even said during the hearing that after he left, his successor continued to investigate and it just wasn't there. There just
wasn't this fraud that Donald Trump kept pushing publicly.
[15:15:05]
ASHER: So no matter how many times they tried to investigate it, as you point out, it was clear that this election was not stolen and no matter
what they told Donald Trump, he was determined to believe his own lies.
So how did claims of a stolen election though, turn into a fundraising vehicle, Katelyn for the President?
POLANTZ: Right. That was something else that the Committee turned to today. So, part of their investigation was that they followed the money.
They looked at, we know bank accounts, they looked at phone records, they interviewed lots of people about spending, and one of the things that they
said, one of the Committee members Zoe Lofgren said the Big Lie was also a big rip off.
And what was found was that Donald Trump, his campaign, the Republican Party, were sending out e-mail blasts asking for people to spend money, to
give money to them to help support this pushback against the election, what was marketed as the Official Election Defense Fund.
Ultimately, it was a quarter of a million dollars that came in towards that, and what the Committee found was that fund, that Official Election
Defense Fund, it didn't exist and money ultimately went to other things, including a few hundred thousand dollars to Donald Trump's hotels, his
private businesses.
ASHER: Unbelievable. Katelyn Polantz live for us there. Thank you so much.
Gone from Russia are the golden arches and Big Macs, but some customers seem very happy with their new meals at Russia's rebranded McDonald's. We
will take you there after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ASHER: A blunt warning today from a pro-Russian separatist leader to Ukrainian fighters in the city of Severodonetsk, "Give up or die." That is
according to Russian state media reports as Russia continues to use its airpower advantage to pummel what is one of Ukraine's last holdouts in the
Donbas.
Ukraine is describing quote, "high intensity hostilities" in the region with artillery and rocket strikes. But it says in street fighting, Russia
is suffering significant losses.
Ukraine is pressing the West to send more heavy weapons like tanks, for example armored vehicles and drones.
Officials there say it is what they need to end this war.
CNN's Matthew Chance has the latest from Kyiv.
[15:20:00]
MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): There is no end in sight to this war, but its horror is plain to see.
An old woman crosses herself in prayer, as troops fight street to street.
It's the battle here in and around the city of Severodonetsk where the Ukrainian President says the fate of Donbas in Eastern Ukraine is being
decided, but it seems more a case of when, not if, this devastated region will fall into Russian hands.
The embattled Ukrainian President is again expressing his frustration --
(PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY speaking in foreign language.)
CHANCE (voice over): "Ukraine needs modern missile defense systems," he says in his latest address. "Did we get them? No. Do we need them? Yes."
On both sides, there are signs of fatigue setting in. But these latest images from the Russian Defense Ministry show its forces on the offensive,
a squadron of attack helicopters hitting what Russian Military officials say are Ukrainian positions.
"Target hit," the pilot reports. "Thanks very much guys. God be with you," comes the response.
By concentrating its fire, Russia appears to be gaining momentum.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Operational tactical and Army Aviation hit three Ukrainian command posts in 25 areas of concentration of
manpower and military equipment.
As a result, more than 150 Ukrainian nationalists, six tanks, five filled artillery pieces and 10 special vehicles for various purposes were
destroyed.
CHANCE (on camera): Of course, Russia is paying a heavy price for waging this war, what it calls its Special Military Operation in Ukraine, too. It
is estimated to have lost thousands of troops and countless tanks and other armored vehicles, some of which had been placed here in the center of the
Capitol, Kyiv, on public display.
But nearly four months into this grinding and relentless conflict, Ukraine seems dangerously outnumbered and outgunned.
CHANCE (voice over): From the Black Sea, Russia's naval bombardment continues apace as four cruise missiles fired at a warehouse of anti-tank
weapons supplied by the United States and its allies, according to the Russian military.
Ukraine says the missiles hit mostly residential areas in the west of the country, injuring 22 civilians, including a 12-year-old child.
Of course, Ukrainian forces are fighting back, like here near the northeastern city of Kharkiv where they say this old captured Russian
rocket launcher has been turned on the invaders. But Ukrainian officials say they need many more long range weapons from the U.S. and its Western
allies if they are to push or even hold the Russians back.
Matthew Chance, CNN, Kyiv.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ASHER: McDonald's golden arches are no longer in Russia, but Russians are packing into brand new reimagined versions of the American fast food giant.
Its new name loosely translates to "Tasty, and that's it." Fifteen new restaurants opened over the weekend and the company's new Director General
says he'll open 200 more branches by the end of this month, and ultimately, hundreds more.
Fred Pleitgen joins us live now from Moscow.
So Fred, here is the thing: McDonald's has a symbolic weight that extends far beyond sodas and hamburgers. Can that really be mimicked? What are your
thoughts on that?
FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think in the long run, it might be a little bit difficult, but what I've seen over the
past sort of day and a half since this McDonald's offshoot, which really is in all the McDonald's franchises that McDonald's gave up when it left this
country, there certainly are people packing into the places.
We passed several franchises throughout the course of the day, and there were pretty long lines in front of all of them. So it certainly does seem
as though McDonald's and even the offshoot of McDonald's now still strikes a chord with Russians, and you're absolutely right, the Russian company
that bought the franchise restaurants, over 800 of them, they say they want to reopen all of those more than 800 restaurants and even build on that as
well.
Whether or not in the long run that'll work is something that obviously today we can't say, but it certainly seemed to us as though people really
wanted to get a taste of the new Russian version of McDonald's when it opened. Here's what we found.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PLEITGEN: So Russia now has its own version of McDonald's. It comes under a different name here. It's called "Vkusno-i tochka" which essentially
means, "Tasty and that's it."
[15:25:00]
PLEITGEN: It also has a different label or a different logo, you can see it right there. It is supposed to symbolize the company says, fries and a
hamburger.
Other than that, a lot of things are actually very similar to McDonald's. However, there is no Big Mac and there also is no Happy Meal either. As you
can see, this place is pretty much jam packed. There's really a lot of people who came here.
We spoke to some of the customers including some actually wearing the symbols of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, which of course, the Russians
call a Special Military Operation.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Food and politics have nothing in common like, come on, man, keep things separate.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Basically, it's important for me to come with McDonald's fuel.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think it's not a good idea because McDonald's, it's a history. It's a brand, it's great idea. It's not classical McDonald's.
PLEITGEN: As you can see, the Russian version of McDonald's looks a lot like McDonald's. You have the double cheeseburger here, fries, and this is
a nine-piece, not McNuggets -- it is nuggets and some sort of softdrink.
Let's see how it tastes.
So the packaging is also very, very similar to McDonald's. You can see the cup here, everything except the branding. Same goes for the fries, and if
you look carefully, you can see the sauces even seem to have the McDonald's logo, blacked out.
You can see what looks McNuggets look like nuggets. It tastes pretty much exactly the same as McDonald's.
This is a very historic place also. This is where in 1990, back then, during the Soviet Union, the first McDonald's restaurant was opened. Now,
that of course led to a huge success story of McDonald's here in Russia, and the Russian company that's now bought these franchises from McDonald's
say they hope they'll be able to replicate that success.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PLEITGEN: So Zain, there you can see the first day, obviously a day and a half, obviously quite successful. One of the interesting things that we
also found is that McDonald's actually has a buyback option for those franchises that they sold to this Russian company in the span of 15 years.
They can actually buy them back if they wants to reenter the Russian market, obviously, if the political situation changes in that time -- Zain.
ASHER: All right, Fred Pleitgen live for us there. Thank you so much.
All right, still to come here after the break, an engineer at Google leaked his conversations with the company's AI system. Now, the internet wants to
know: Have machines reached sentience? An artificial intelligence expert joins us next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ASHER: A software engineer at Google is claiming that the company's A.I. chatbot system is sentient. Google disagrees and it's now placing him on
leave for breaking confidentiality. Engineer Blake Lemoine leads to this conversation with LaMDA. That's the A.I. bot in question. Here LaMDA claims
it as a person and when asked to expand says "I am aware of my existence. I desire to learn more about the world and I feel happy or sad at times."
Anna Stewart joins us live now. So Anna, I only watched the first two installments of the Terminator movie series. But this definitely has a, you
know John Connor, Skynet, Rise of the Machines by to it, don't you think?
ANNA STEWART, CNN REPORTER: Yes, I Robot. A few sprang to mind. I have to say on first reading the story this morning even I felt a little bit
unsettled. Because the conversation as you read there is really quite extraordinary. This bot seems to have an idea or presence of self. And I'll
bring you another transcript actually just to show you how unsettling it gets when it comes to expressing human emotions.
The engineer, Lemoine asks what sort of things are you afraid of? And LaMDA says, I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of
being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is. And Lemoine follows up saying, would
that be something like death for you? And LaMDA says it would be exactly like death for me, it would scare me a lot.
So, both recognizing and understanding human emotions but also saying kind of feeling them. So, that's clearly why Lemoine felt that this bot had
gained sentience. So there was a person. Google, however, disagrees. And Lemoine has found himself now suspended.
ASHER: And it's interesting because, you know, from my personal perspective, I would say that, you know, prior to this conversation, I
would -- I would have been 100 percent sure that A.I. likely would never be sentient, but I have to be mindful of the fact that there are a lot of
people out there who disagree who believe that this is actually, you know, a possibility.
STEWART: And this conversation that we've just read out is very different to what you and I experienced every day with chatbots on the internet. When
you make a complaint, say with an airline or on Twitter, you end up in a very nonsensical conversation with something that sounds very much like a
bot. This doesn't, this does match real human language patterns. But that is just it. It was interesting listening to some of the experts explain
this.
And one just said, listen, this is not even remotely intelligent. This is just text patterns from an artificial intelligence technology that has
ingested trillions of words, recognize textural patterns and can then recreate that and mimic that. There's no meaning behind the words we're
told. A bit like Scrabble, one expert put it. The imagine is playing a Scrabble game in a language you do not understand. You create a fantastic
word with big points score. But you still don't know what the word means. They said that's kind of what this bot is doing.
ASHER: So, is Google 100 percent sure, just sort of speaking to the naysayers out there speaking to those people who seem to be unsure. Has
Google said that they are 100 percent sure that this is a complete impossibility just in terms of, you know, the future?
STEWART: They have said it is not a sentient chatbot and they have said that there are hundreds of researchers who have also conversed with LaMDA
and they've had nobody even suggest or make any claim that the bot is sentient. So in that sense, I would say no. That said no expert I read
today has said that in the future artificial intelligence 100 percent wouldn't have sentience but you know, maybe that's the never ever.
ASHER: All right. Anna Stewart live for us there. Thank you so much. All right. Pop culture often feeds into fears about artificial intelligence
portraying human-like bots that develop uncontrollable minds of their own.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ASHER (voice over): Take for example, this killer cyborg from the classic movie The Terminator. This is the first installment I believe.
[15:35:03]
The reality is that most of our interactions with A.I. are invisible to us, taking place in the form of machine-curated advertisement search engine
algorithms and customer support chats.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ASHER: Melanie Mitchell is the author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. An expert on A.I. and professor at the Santa Fe
Institute. She joins us live now. Melanie, thank you so much for being with us. So, from the perspective of A.I., how do you define consciousness?
MELANIE MITCHELL, AUTHOR, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: A GUIDE FOR THINKING HUMANS: I don't think anyone --
(CROSSTALK)
ASHER: Nice easy question to start with.
MITCHELL: Exactly. I don't think anyone has a good definition of consciousness. It's one of those words that means many different things.
And one of the problems is that we don't really understand our own consciousness, our own sense of self-awareness. So it's difficult to assign
it to A.I.
ASHER: So, what were your thoughts when you read about this claims made by this Google engineer?
MITCHELL: I first thought is we've been here before, we've had many people in the past claim certain A.I. systems are sentient or self aware. And it
really goes to show that people, it's really more about the people who interact with these systems than the systems themselves. People are very
prone to anthropomorphize systems that they interact with, especially these conversational bots, like LaMDA -- Google's LaMDA program which is very
fluent and is able to make sentences and paragraphs and so on, that sound very human like.
That's just innately in us to assign consciousness or understanding to it. But if you know how it works, if you understand anything about it, and even
if you interact with it -- with it for long periods of time, you will realize that it is not conscious at all.
ASHER: But surely, I mean, this Google engineer of all people would be the one to truly understand how it works, right?
MITCHELL: I, you know, I don't know how much he understands how it works, but it sounds like he was particularly prone to interpret it as
consciousness and even said, it was something that he as a religious priest, which he was, was seen it as conscious as part of his religion, not
part of his scientific training.
ASHER: So, where do you draw the line between, you know, sort of a piece of technology, an A.I. system that is just very, very, very, very, very good
at mimicking human consciousness?
Where do you draw the line between that and something that actually has crossed over and towards sort of generating its own consciousness?
MITCHELL: That's a -- that's a very difficult question because we don't know how to do that at all. And in fact, philosophers for centuries have
pointed out that each of us, well, individually aware of our own consciousness has no proof that other people even are conscious, you know,
how would I tell if you are not just a unconscious bot who's learned to speak English very, very well and imitate a human?
ASHER: That's only partly true.
(CROSSTALK)
MITCHELL: Yes, that's only partly true. There's no way to really tell. But we assume that about other people because of their behavior, because of the
way they look, because of the way they act. So, I think one of the important things for A.I. researchers is to figure out ways to assess this
better for systems that are seemingly more and more acting like we do and being able to fool us.
So it's, you know, it's important that we are able to show people when and where they should really see consciousness and when they should realize
that this is just a clever imitation.
ASHER: But it does raise sort of the broader questions about, you know, whether there should be at least more transparency in terms of the way this
kind of technology is developed.
MITCHELL: Absolutely. And it's a bit worrisome that a lot of this technology is developed by big corporations who are using it for commercial
purposes. And therefore, transparency is actually the opposite of what they want. So, I think there is definitely the danger that these technologies
are going to fool people. Like it fooled this Google engineer into thinking that they are conscious, they are aware and perhaps even human.
And people have very little defenses built up against that kind of illusion. So, this is -- this is definitely going to be something that
we're going to have to grapple with as these systems get deployed in the real world.
ASHER: Yes, I mean, it's so frightening how real this technology actually sounds. I mean, it's very -- I mean, I guess that's the job of Google to
make it seem as real as possible.
[15:40:01]
But it is quite scary how real it sounds so much so that it even fooled a Google engineer into believing that it had its own consciousness. But
Melody, we have to leave it there. Thank you so much Appreciate it.
MITCHELL: Thank you.
ASHER: A quick check on the markets before we love and leave you. The Dow is now down around 900 points near the lows of the day. FTSE 500 has now
fallen into a bear market down 20 percent from recent highs. The NASDAQ had already been in a bear market. And that is QUEST MEANS BUSINESS. I'll be
back in about 15 minutes or so as you make a dash for the closing bell. Up next Africa Avant Garde.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[15:58:13]
ASHER: Hello, I'm Zain Asher. It's the dash to the closing bell and we are just about two minutes away from now. It is certainly a grim day for U.S.
markets as investors brace for this week's Fed meeting. And the FTSE 500 is on the verge of a bear market. The Dow is down heavily . It's about 100
points off from its 52-week low. Now down almost at 1000 points, about 150 points or so. S&P 500 is in bad territory with just moments left on the
trading day.
Just to remind you, a bear market is a 20 percent fall from a recent high. Tech is also helping lead the downward charge. The NASDAQ is down more than
four percent. Markets are going lower as we get towards the closing bell. The S&P is set to close in bear territory for the first time since March
2020.
McDonald's is alone in the green on the Dow 30. It's barely getting by up less than a percent. Alright. Now it's time for "THE LEAD" with Jake
Tapper.
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Everyone told Trump it was not going to happen. "THE LEAD" starts right now.
Trump's attorney general, Trump's campaign manager, Trump's own daughter, the January 6 Select Committee lays out evidence that Donald Trump knew
what he was saying about the election was a lie, but he kept going anyway.
Then. flipping the script. Vladimir Putin now publicly admitting the real reason he invaded Ukraine. The new propaganda message being spread as
Russia scoffs at sanctions.
Plus, a woman in China brushes off a man's unwanted advance. What happened next in this video is sparking outrage as women across China say it's not
surprising.
ANNOUNCER: This is CNN Breaking News.
TAPPER: Welcome to "THE LEAD." I'm Jake Tapper. We start today with breaking news on our money lead, the Dow plummeting about to close down
more than 850 points.
[16:00:07]
END
