What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science that focuses on creating machines and computer programs that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as understanding natural language, recognising images, or making decisions.
These machines are designed to learn from data, which allow them to improve their performance over time.
AI innovations:
LLMs (Large Language Models)
GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformers)
Image Generation to experiment
Create commercial offerings like DALL-E for image generation
ChatGPT for text generation : It can write blogs, computer code, and marketing copies and even generate results for search queries.
Benefits of AI:
Capable of exhibiting superhuman performance on specific or “narrow” tasks.
Example : In the field of chess, Go (a game several orders harder than chess) and also in biochemistry for protein folding.
The performance and utility of AI systems improve as the task is narrowed, making them valuable assistants to humans.
Speech recognition, translation, and even identifying common objects such as photographs.
Even exceeding human performance in some instances.
Limitations of AI:
Their performance and utility degrade on more “general” or ill-defined tasks.
They are weak in integrating inferences across situations based on the common sense humans have.
What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to intelligence that is not limited or narrow.
There are no credible efforts towards building AGI yet.
Many experts believe AGI will never be achieved by a machine; others believe it could be in the far future.
Some experts even saw “sparks of AGI” in GPT-4; AGI could emerge from a bigger LLM in the near future.
True AGI will be a big deal if and when it arrives.
Machines outperform humans in every physical task today and AGI may lead to AI “machines” bettering humans in many intellectual or mental tasks.
AGI systems could be a superior species created by humans outside of evolution.
AGI will indeed be a momentous development that the world must prepare for seriously.
Dangers arising from AI
Superhuman AI:
The danger of a super intelligent AI converting humans to slaves.
Malicious humans with powerful AI:
AI tools are relatively easy to build. Even narrow AI tools can cause serious harm when matched with malicious intent.
LLMs can generate believable untruths as fake news and create deep mental anguish leading to self-harm.
Public opinion can be manipulated to affect democratic elections.
AI tools work globally, taking little cognisance of boundaries and barriers. Individual malice can instantly impact the globe.
Governments may approve or support such actions against “enemies”.
Concern about AI-powered “smart” weapons in the military.
Unfortunately, calls for a ban are not effective in such situations.
Highly capable and inscrutable AI:
They may end up harming some sections more than others unintentionally, despite the best intentions of their creators.
These systems are created using Machine Learning from data from the world and can perpetuate the shortcomings of the data. They may introduce asymmetric behaviours that go against certain groups.
Camera-based face recognition systems have been shown to be more accurate on fair-skinned men than on dark-skinned women.
Such unintended and unknown bias can be catastrophic in AI systems that steer autonomous cars and diagnose medical conditions.
Privacy is a critical concern. Every person can be tracked always, violating the fundamental right to privacy.
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