​Seniors Matter(s): HAL. 2023

I have written before about my intrigue with Artificial Intelligence (AI) advances. My interest continues to grow.

The movie, “2001,” is a 1968 epic science fiction film in which the onboard computer, HAL (clever twist on IBM), became more knowledgeable as it assimilated information and began to be able to form thoughts on it own.

What will happen when AI achieves human-level intelligence? And WHEN will this happen?

Human-level AI, sometimes referred to as AGI (artificial general intelligence), is defined as the ability of a machine program to pass the “Turing Test,” demonstrating its ability to understand and/or learn any intellectual task that a human can, and to perform those tasks in a fashion indistinguishable from us humans.

Some, including futurist Ray Kurzweil and technologist Elon Musk, have argued that we may witness the emergence of human-level AI this decade. 

Metatrend is a term used to describe huge new concepts and innovations and promises the availability of powerful AI algorithms and machine learning tools on the cloud, many of them being made open source. Such powerful technology will allow any individuals with an Internet connection the ability to amplify their creativity, improve their problem-solving skills, and increase their earning capacity.

Every industry, from health care, education, and entertainment to design, finance, and retail, will be significantly impacted.

The AI-related predictions of Ray Kurzweil and Elon Musk, discuss a recent breakthrough by Google’s DeepMind, and share five examples of AI already surpassing human capability.

Ray Kurzweil, the renowned futurist, and technologist, famously predicted that 2029 is the date when AI “will achieve human levels of intelligence.”

He first made his prediction on AI achieving human-level intelligence back in 1999. It was such a bold and alarming prediction that Stanford organized an international conference to discuss it the following year.

Elon Musk predicts that AI will achieve human-level intelligence even sooner.

His prediction is that AI will grow “vastly smarter than any human and will overtake us by 2025. That doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.” Things will be weird during this period when computers are considerably smarter than we are.

One of his concerns is that there’s currently no regulatory body overseeing the development of AI.

In May, Google’s DeepMind announced that its new AI agent, called Gato, can achieve more than 600 tasks “across a wide range of environments.”

So, how does Gato work? And what exactly can it do? 

Gato uses a single neural network: a computing system with inter-connected nodes that work like nerve cells in the human brain. It can caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm, and even play the 1980s video game console, Atari.

Here are five examples of how quickly things are moving:
 

1. AI defeats a room full of top doctors in a tumour diagnosis competition (2018). Scientists at the AI Research Centre for Neurological Disorders and a research team from the Capital Medical University in China fed the AI, called BioMind, thousands of images of nervous system-related diseases. Across a two-round competition, BioMind correctly diagnosed 85 per cent of cases in 18 minutes compared to the group of top neurologists who achieved only 64 per cent accuracy in 50 minutes.
2. AI designs a computer chip as well as a human engineer—and faster (2021). A suite of algorithms by Google Brain can now design computer chips used for running AI software that vastly outperform those designed by human experts. Using a type of machine learning called deep reinforcement learning, these AI chip designers can work in a matter of hours, compared to the typical process that can take weeks or even months.
3. DeepMind’s AI cracks math puzzles that have stumped humans for decades (2021). Working with teams of mathematicians, DeepMind engineered an algorithm to address two long-standing puzzles in mathematics: the theory of knots and the study of symmetries. The algorithm was able to look across different mathematical fields and spot connections that previously escaped the human mind. For the first time, machine learning is aiming at the core of mathematics—a science for spotting patterns that eventually leads to formally-proven ideas, or theorems, about how our world works.
4. AI beats eight world champion bridge players (2022). Bridge is a game of communication and strategy that has long resisted domination by AI. Until now. A bridge-playing AI called NooK, developed by French start-up NukkAI, outplayed eight world bridge champions in a competition held in Paris. NooK is a kind of hybrid algorithm, combining symbolic (i.e., rule-based) AI with today’s dominant deep learning approach. In 80 sets against its human rivals, NooK won 67, or 83 per cent.
5. Protein-designing AI imagines medicines humans couldn’t dream up (2022). Scientists at the University of Washington used a deep learning algorithm to not only predict the general area of a protein’s functional site, but to then sculpt the structure. The team used the new software to generate drugs that battle cancer and design vaccines against common, if sometimes deadly, viruses. As the lead scientist in the study, Dr. David Baker, noted, “Deep learning transformed protein structure prediction in the past two years, we are now in the midst of a similar transformation of protein design.”

There are, of course, hundreds of other examples, ranging from AIs creating compelling imagery and writings, to DeepMind’s AlphaFold tool determining the structures of around 200-million proteins.

When you think about a camera, it really is the richest sensor available to us today at a very interesting price point. Because of smartphones, camera and image sensors have become incredibly inexpensive, yet we capture a lot of information. From an image, we might be able to infer 25 signals today, but six months from now, we’ll be able to infer 100 or 150 signals from that same image. The only difference is the software that’s looking at the image. Every customer can benefit from every other customer that we bring onboard because our systems start to see and learn more processes and detect more things that are important and relevant.

After several decades marked by sporadic dormancy during an evolutionary period that began with “knowledge engineering,” technology progressed to model- and algorithm-based machine learning and increasingly focused on perception, reasoning, and generalization. Now, AI has re-taken centre stage like never before — and it won’t cede the spotlight anytime soon.

Therefore, AI is important because it forms the very foundation of computer learning, since through AI, computers now can harness massive amounts of data and use the learned intelligence to make optimal decisions and discovery in seconds. Computers are no longer fancy typewriters and word processors. The impact AI is having on our present day lives is hard to ignore.

During a lecture at Northwestern University, AI expert Kai-Fu Lee championed AI technology and its forthcoming impact while also noting its side effects and limitations. Of the former, he warned:

“The bottom 90 per cent, especially the bottom 50 per cent of the world in terms of income or education, will be badly hurt with job displacement … The simple question to ask is, ‘How routine is a job?’ And that is how likely [it is] a job will be replaced by AI, because AI can, within the routine task, learn to optimize itself. And the more quantitative, the more objective the job is—separating things into bins, washing dishes, picking fruit, and answering customer service calls—those are very much scripted tasks that are repetitive and routine in nature. In the matter of five, 10 or 15 years, they will be displaced by AI.”

In the warehouses of on-line giant and AI powerhouse Amazon, which buzz with more than 100,000 robots, picking and packing functions are still performed by humans — but that will change.

On a more upbeat note, Lee stressed that today’s AI is useless in two significant ways: it has no creativity and no capacity for compassion or love. Rather, it’s “a tool to amplify human creativity.” His solution? Those with jobs that involve repetitive or routine tasks must learn new skills so as not to be left by the wayside. Amazon even offers its employees money to train for jobs at other companies.

While many of those who are forced out of jobs by technology will find new ones, Vandegrift says that won’t happen overnight. As with America’s transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy during the Industrial Revolution, which played a big role in causing the Great Depression, people eventually got back on their feet. The short-term impact, however, was massive.

Much has been made of the fact that AI’s reliance on big data is already impacting privacy in a major way. Look no further than Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook shenanigans or Amazon’s Alexa eavesdropping, two among many examples of tech gone wild. Without proper regulations and self-imposed limitations, critics argue, the situation will get even worse. In 2015, Apple CEO Tim Cook derided competitors Google and Facebook for greed-driven data mining.

More than a few leading AI figures subscribe (some more hyperbolically than others) to a nightmare scenario that involves what’s known as “singularity,” whereby super-intelligent machines take over and permanently alter human existence through enslavement or eradication.

The late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking famously postulated that if AI, itself, begins designing better AI than human programmers, the result could be “machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails.”

Finally, instead of simply fearing the continued progress of AI, we should see the technology as a collaborator.

Humans have long demonstrated a remarkable ability to incorporate technological aids into new opportunities for growth. History paints a clear picture of this.

AI is no different.

But I believe we must move slowly and cautiously.

What do you think HAL?

‘Till next time!