Source: AFP
AI enthusiasts are betting that the technology will help solve humanity’s biggest problems, from wars to global warming, but in practice, those may be unrealistic aspirations for now.
“It’s not asking the AI, ‘Hey, this is a sticky problem. What would you do?’ and AI is like, ‘well, you have to completely restructure this part of the economy,’” said Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Brown University.
Littman was at the South By Southwest (or SXSW) arts and technology festival in Austin, Texas, where he had just spoken on one of several panels about the potential benefits of artificial intelligence.
“It’s a fantasy dream. It’s a bit of science fiction. Mostly what people are doing is they’re trying to bring AI to specific problems that they’re already solving, but they just want to be more efficient.”
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“It’s not just about pressing this button and everything is fixed,” he said.
With their promising titles (“How to Make AGI Beneficial and Avoid a Robot Apocalypse”) and the constant presence of tech giants, the panels draw large crowds, but often have more realistic goals, such as promoting a product.
Source: AFP
In a meeting titled “Inside the AI Revolution: How AI Is Powering the World to Achieve More,” Microsoft executive Simi Olabisi touted the benefits of the technology in Azure, the company’s cloud service.
When you use Azure’s AI language feature in call centers, “maybe when a customer called, they were angry, and when they hung up, they were really grateful. Azure AI language can actually capture that emotion and tell a business how their customers feel,” he explained.
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“Smarter than humans”
The concept of artificial intelligence, with its algorithms capable of automating tasks and analyzing mountains of data, has been around for decades.
But it took on a whole new dimension last year with the success of ChatGPT, the generative AI interface launched by OpenAI, the now iconic AI start-up primarily funded by Microsoft.
OpenAI claims it wants to create artificial “general” intelligence, or AGI, that will be “smarter than humans in general” and “uplift humanity,” according to CEO Sam Altman.
That ethos was very much present at SXSW, with talk of “when” AGI will become a reality, rather than “if.”
Ben Goertzel, a scientist who leads the SingularityNET Foundation and the AGI Society, predicted the advent of general artificial intelligence by 2029.
“Once you have a machine that can think as well as an intelligent human, you’re at most a few years away from a machine that can think a thousand or a million times better than an intelligent human, because that AI can modify the its own source code,” Gertzel said.
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Wearing a faux leopard fur cowboy hat, he advocated the development of AGI endowed with “compassion and empathy” and built into robots “that look like us”, to ensure these “super AIs” get along with humanity.
Source: AFP
David Hanson – founder of Hanson Robotics and designer of Desdemona, a humanoid robot powered by genetic artificial intelligence – talked about the pros and cons of AI with superpowers.
AI’s “positive disruptions…can help solve global sustainability issues, although humans will probably just create financial trading algorithms that are perfectly efficient,” he said.
Hanson fears upheaval from AI, but pointed out that humans are already doing a “good job” of playing “existential roulette” with nuclear weapons and causing “the fastest mass extinction event in human history.”
But “perhaps AI has seeds of wisdom that blossom and grow into new forms of wisdom that can help us become better,” he said.
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‘Not there yet’
Source: AFP
First, AI should speed up the design of new, more sustainable drugs or materials, AI believers said.
Even if “we’re not there yet…in a dream world, AI could handle the complexity and randomness of the real world and…discover entirely new materials that would allow us to do things we’ve never we even thought it was possible,” said Roxanne Tully, an investor at Piva Capital.
Today, artificial intelligence is already proving its worth in tornado and forest fire warning systems, for example.
But we still need to evacuate populations or get people to agree to be vaccinated in the event of a pandemic, said Rayid Ghani of Carnegie Mellon University during a panel titled “Can AI Solution the Extreme Weather Pandemic?”
“We created this problem. Inequalities were not caused by AI, they are caused by humans, and I think AI can help a little bit. But only if humans decide they want to use it to tackle the problem,” Ghani said. .
Source: AFP