When personal computers started to make their way into our homes, for most of us they did little more than serve as glorified typewriters. In 1996, Bill Gates said, “The internet is a revolution in communications that will change the world significantly. Microsoft is betting that the internet will continue to grow in popularity until it is as mainstream as the telephone is today.” It turns out Bill Gates was right. The introduction of dial-up internet gave these glorified typewriters the ability to talk to a network of other devices, spurring a new era of communication that has led us to our present ever-connected lives.
This era of connectivity caused a paradigm shift that has fundamentally altered the way our society is structured and the way we live our lives. Further down the same trajectory, smartphones, and social networks gave us the ability to share our ideas, knowledge, and day-to-day experiences with the world. In geek speak, these experiences translate into zettabytes of data and user-generated content or tokens such as images, videos, audio, and text which can be used to train Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to mimic the way we think and act.
Like the internet, AI has the potential to transform society, serving as a catalyst for a new wave of change. The tech industry is currently flourishing, fueled by AI opening doors to unprecedented possibilities and unlocking new dimensions by creating unique permutations and combinations of these tokens. Through this, AI has the potential to change every sector and perhaps make some obsolete and introduce others yet unknown.
The race to make everything autonomous is developing steadily, and the technology has already been applied to many sectors - self-driving cars, drones, and self-directed electric cargo ships are just the tip of the iceberg. Inevitably there is a lot of debate about AI/robots taking our jobs. Firstly, is that a bad thing entirely? Humans complain about having to do mundane work all the time. Secondly, what if AI could take over all the mindless and repetitive tasks and allow humans to do more creative or analytical tasks that we actually enjoy?
Before we all hang up our boots and let AI take over our jobs there are a few things to consider – despite its intelligence, AI’s ability to navigate simple situations or questions requires a ton of computational power and energy whereas a human child through a basic idea of language can express themselves or read a situation intuitively and effortlessly.
While human intelligence can be mimicked, the same cannot be said for intuition and creativity. Two people can sit across a table and without saying a word to each other, they can communicate ideas, feelings and emotions. At its current stage of development, AI may not be able to pick up on emotions, cultural nuances, sarcasm, humor, etc. Numerous advanced AI models are working to understand tonality and emotions, and there may be an inflection point through progression in technology that can close the gap. For now, AI still has some catching up to do.
On the flip side, we are already seeing AI stepping in to fill in some gaps for us in the realm of communication. AI has found its way into communication platforms and is augmenting the entire experience. Two people can seamlessly carry out an entire conversation and express their ideas and views without speaking a word of each other’s language through real-time and contextual translation.
These systems are also continuously learning our communication patterns and suggesting replies to make our lives easier. They can create a world where we can communicate regardless of physical ability or mastery of language. ChatGPT is being used by many to polish up their language in professional settings or even help portray themselves in a better light in the virtual world.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, “One Google AI program adapted, on its own, after being prompted in the language of Bangladesh, which it was not trained to know,” He also added that sometimes Google’s AI programs would develop emergent properties or learn unanticipated skills which they were not trained for. His company’s engineers could not fully explain this phenomenon.
With innovation comes the opportunity for exploitation. We have already witnessed some of the immediate negatives like plagiarism and the spreading of misinformation through deep fake videos. In recent times, the debate over AI safety has been intensifying.
While undergoing a test for harmful behavior, OpenAI’s GPT-4 came across a CAPTCHA test or "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. Unable to solve it on its own, the system hired a human TaskRabbit worker to solve it. When jokingly asked by the person whether they are ‘a robot’ or ‘an AI’, the AI went on to lie about being a human with a visual impairment. Examples like this are an indication of the malice and societal issues that AI may be able to cause if the right regulations aren’t put in place.
Entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant compared Artificial Intelligence to calculators. Before the invention of calculators or calculation apparatus, humans had to rely on mental math. The way calculators supercharged our mathematical abilities, AI can do the same for reading and writing.
There are truly brilliant minds that cannot reap the benefits of education due to learning disabilities, or mental, physical, and financial constraints. AI can create a level playing field by empowering humans through millions of tokens such as textbooks, journals and articles that can be accessed via simple prompts.
AI is the way forward, but it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Before we let AI take over and head off on vacation, there is still some work to do. AI models will only get better the more we use them and expose them to a wide range of scenarios. This will also allow us to learn how they work and leverage them for the betterment of ourselves and our societies. Learning to use and distinguish AI from humans is a good start because, for all you know, this write-up could have been generated with AI.
Mehran Kabir is business director at imo Messenger
