Of God and Machines: The future of artificial intelligence
by iSophist · 9 things on Twos
- The future of artificial intelligence is neither utopian nor dystopian. It's something much more interesting. “We're creating God, the former Google Chief Business Officer Mo Gawdat recently told an interviewer. ‘We're summoning the demon, Elon Musk said a few years ago, in a talk at MIT.’ The full brunt of the technology has not arrived yet.
- We just can't help thinking of AI in terms of the technologies depicted in Ex Machina, Her, or Blade Runner people-machines. The most advanced NLP programs operate at a level that not even the engineers constructing them fully understand. Arthur C. Clarke famously said that technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Magic is coming, and it's coming for all of us.
- NLP programs operate based on what technologists call parameters. GPT-3 uses 175 billion parameters. Its interpretive power is far beyond human understanding, far beyond what our little animal brains can comprehend.
- The technology, in other words, came to occupy a place formerly reserved for mediums, priests, and con artists. It may not be the first intelligent machine, Jason Rohrer, the designer of Project December, has said, but it kind of feels like it's the first machine with a soul.
- Google's PaLM, its latest foray into NLP, has 540 billion parameters. This next generation of AI can toggle back and forth between brute computation and human qualities such as coordination, competition, and motivation. It is becoming an idealized solver of all manner of real-world problems. If AI harnesses the power promised by quantum computing, everything I'm describing here would be the first dulcet breezes of a hurricane.
- Our AI future will be weird and sublime and perhaps we won't even notice it happening to us. Stephen Hawking once said that the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Experts in AI, even the men and women building it, commonly describe the technology as an existential threat. But we are shockingly bad at predicting the long-term effects of technology.
- Of 415 published AI tools developed to combat COVID, not one was fit for clinical use, a recent study found. In 2015, the image-recognition algorithm used by Google Photos, outside of the intention of its engineers, identified Black people as gorillas. Bad data in, bad data out, as they say, and our species contains a great deal of bad data.
- A fragment of humanity is about to leap forward massively, and to transform itself massively as it leaps. Another fragment will remain, and look much the same as it always has: thinking meat in an inconceivable universe, hungry for meaning, gripped by fascination. The machines will leap, and the humans will look. They will answer, and we will question.
- Marche, S. (2022, September 15). Of God and Machines. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/artificial-intelligence-machine-learing-natural-language-processing/661401/