AUSTIN: Artificial intelligence 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 ambitions for now.
“It’s not about asking the AI ’Hey, this is a problem. What would you do?’ and artificial intelligence is like, ‘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 (SXSW) arts and Technology festival in Austin, Texas, where he had just spoken on one of the many panels about the potential benefits of artificial intelligence.
“It’s a dream. It’s a bit of science fiction. Mostly what people do is try to get AI to solve specific problems that they’re already solving, but they want to be more efficient.”
“It’s not just a matter of 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 pragmatic goals, such as promoting a product.
In one session, titled “Inside the AI Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence is Helping the World Achieve More,” Simi Olabisi, a Microsoft executive, touted the benefits of the technology in Azure, the company’s cloud service.
When using Azure’s AI language feature in call centers, “maybe when the customer called, they were angry, and when they hung up, they were really grateful. Azure AI Language can really capture that sentiment and tell a business how their customers feel,” she explained.
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, a generative AI interface launched by OpenAI, the now iconic AI startup funded primarily by Microsoft.
OpenAI says it wants to build artificial “general” intelligence, or AGI, that will be “smarter than humans in general” and “elevate humanity,” according to CEO Sam Altman.
This ethos was very much present at SXSW, with talk of “when” AGI will become a reality rather than “if.”
Ben Goertzel, a scientist who heads the SingularityNET Foundation and the AGI Society, predicted the arrival of general artificial intelligence by 2029.
“Once you have a machine that can think as well as a smart human, you’re at most a few years away from a machine that can think a thousand or a million times better than a smart human, because that AI can modify its own resource. code,” Goertzel said.
Wearing a leopard-print faux fur cowboy hat, he advocated the development of AGI endowed with “compassion and empathy” and integrated into robots “that look like us” to ensure these “super AIs” get along with humanity.
David Hanson – the founder of Hanson Robotics and who designed Desdemona, a humanoid robot that works with generative AI – pondered the pros and cons of AI with superpowers.
“The positive disruption of artificial intelligence … can help solve global sustainability problems, although humans will probably just create financial trading algorithms that are absolutely efficient,” he said.
Hanson worries about AI-induced turbulence, but points out that humans are already doing a “good job” of playing “existential roulette” with nuclear weapons and causing “the fastest mass extinction in human history.”
But “it may be that artificial intelligence could have seeds of wisdom that will blossom and grow into new forms of wisdom that can help us be better,” he said.
