Will AI save humanity? US tech fest offers reality check

Artificial intelligence aficionados are making a bet that the technology could even support cure humanity’s greatest problems, from wars to world warming, but in instruct, these will likely be unrealistic ambitions for now.

“Or now not it’s now not about asking AI ‘Hi there, right here’s a sticky divulge. What would you possess?’ and AI is fancy, ‘effectively, you’re going to savor to entirely restructure this part of the economic system’,” talked about Michael Littman, a Brown College professor of computer science.

Littman modified into once on the South By Southwest (or SXSW) arts and technology competition in Austin, Texas, where he had exact spoken on one in all the varied panels on the aptitude advantages of AI.

“Or now not it’s a pipe dream. Or now not it’s a miniature bit bit science fiction. Mostly what of us are doing is they’re seeking to bring AI to endure on particular problems that they are already fixing, but exact are seeking to be extra efficient.”

“Or now not it’s now not exact a topic of pushing this button and all the pieces’s fastened,” he talked about.

With their promising titles (“Techniques to Develop AGI Necessary and Steer certain of a Robot Apocalypse”), and the ever presence of tech giants, the panels entice mammoth crowds, but they continually protect extra pragmatic dreams, fancy promoting a product.

At one assembly called “Within the AI Revolution: How AI is Empowering the World to Trace More,” Simi Olabisi, a Microsoft govt, praised the tech’s advantages on Azure, the corporate’s cloud provider.

When using Azure’s AI language characteristic in name centers, “perchance when a buyer called in, they were angry, and once they ended the choice, they were in actual fact appreciative. Azure AI Language can in actual fact grab that sentiment, and sing a commerce how their clients are feeling,” she explained.

‘Smarter than humans’

The opinion of synthetic intelligence, with its algorithms able to automating projects and examining mountains of info, has been spherical for a few years.

However it took on a entire contemporary dimension closing year with the success of ChatGPT, the generative AI interface launched by OpenAI, the now iconic AI delivery up-up primarily funded by Microsoft.

OpenAI claims to are seeking to make synthetic “total” intelligence or AGI, that can be “smarter than humans in most cases” and can “elevate humanity,” in step with CEO Sam Altman.

That ethos modified into once very show masks at SXSW, with discuss about “when” AGI will change staunch into a fact, relatively than “if.”

Ben Goertzel, a scientist who heads the SingularityNET Foundation and the AGI Society, predicted the appearance of total AI by 2029.

“Whenever you’re going to savor a machine that could mediate to boot to a effectively-organized human, you are at most a few years from a machine that could mediate a thousand or one million times greater than a effectively-organized human, this ability that AI can alter its have confidence offer code,” talked about Goertzel.

Wearing a leopard-print faux-fur cowboy hat, he advocated the advance of AGI endowed with “compassion and empathy,” and integrated into robots “that ogle fancy us,” to fabricate certain that these “gargantuan AIs” receive on effectively with humanity.

David Hanson—founding father of Hanson Robotics and who designed Desdemona, a humanoid robot that capabilities with generative AI—brainstromed about the plus and minuses of AI with superpowers.

AI’s “certain disruptions…could even support to cure world sustainability problems, although of us are potentially going to be exact increasing monetary trading algorithms that are fully effective,” he talked about.

Hanson fears the turbulence from AI, but identified that humans are doing a “aesthetic job” already of taking part in “existential roulette” with nuclear weapons and by causing “the fastest mass extinction tournament in human history.”

However “it could maybe well be that the AI can savor seeds of info that blossom and grow into contemporary kinds of info that could even support us be greater,” he talked about.

‘Now not there but’

First and major, AI will savor to urge the receive of present, extra sustainable treatment or presents, talked about believers in AI.

Although “we’re now not there but… in a dream world, AI could well take care of the complexity and the randomness of the particular world, and… look entirely contemporary presents that can allow us to possess things that we by no arrangement even conception were imaginable,” talked about Roxanne Tully, an investor at Piva Capital.

These days, AI is already proving its price in warning techniques for tornadoes and woodland fires, as an instance.

However we tranquil savor to evacuate populations, or receive of us to conform to vaccinate themselves in the tournament of an endemic, stressed Rayid Ghani of Carnegie Mellon College at some level of a panel titled “Can AI Solve the Impolite Weather Pandemic?”

“We created this divulge. Inequities weren’t precipitated by AI, they’re precipitated by humans and I mediate AI could even support a miniature bit bit. However exclusively if humans resolve they are seeking to use it to take care of” the difficulty, Ghani talked about.

© 2024 AFP