There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the potential pitfalls presented by the rapid rise of AI, and justly so: AI is the biggest thing to happen to humanity since, well, ever. For the first time in the history of the universe, there are two master intelligences.
But it needs to be affirmed, cacophony aside, that there is much in AI about which we can be very hopeful. It does have the potential to free us from labor, once and for all, opening an opportunity for a new chapter in humanity’s story. It can help us solve our most pressing problems. It can bring order to our custody of the earth, and balance to our use of its resources. It can grant us greater health and longer life. It can help us achieve our full potential, both individually and collectively. These are all things to get excited about – and are a meaningful pushback against the gloom-and-doom we’re hearing.
Are these pipe dreams? Or are they serious possibilities?
Bill Gates – Personal digital assistants; medical research
Bill Gates, who has bent humankind to his will more than once, is certainly a voice to take seriously. He sees AI as humanity’s partner, moving forward – and eyes that partnership as potentially game-changing in several important domains.
One of those is our growing inequality. The best option for reducing that, Gates has often said, is improvement in education – in particular, math education.
“The evidence shows that having basic math skills sets students up for success, no matter what career they choose,” he wrote in his newsletter. “But achievement in math is going down across the country, especially for Black, Latino, and low-income students. AI can help turn that trend around.”
AI can, in fact, revolutionize education altogether, by integrating itself into our individual learning:
“It will know your interests and your learning style so it can tailor content that will keep you engaged,” he wrote. “It will measure your understanding, notice when you’re losing interest, and understand what kind of motivation you respond to. It will give immediate feedback.
“There are many ways that AIs can assist teachers and administrators, including assessing a student’s understanding of a subject and giving advice on career planning.”
Gates has also written that AI will also become, for each of us as individuals, a “personal agent” - a digital personal assistant who will our efficiency and productivity in daily living, making us more successful and less stressed.
This personal agent (see “iMe”, below) “will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do.
“You’ll be able to use natural language to have this agent help you with scheduling, communications, and e-commerce, and it will work across all your devices. Because of the cost of training the models and running the computations, creating a personal agent is not feasible yet, but thanks to the recent advances in AI, it is now a realistic goal.”
There will also be group-level AI agents, Gates predicted, working alongside us in organizations:
“Company-wide agents will empower employees in new ways,” he wrote. “An agent that understands a particular company will be available for its employees to consult directly and should be part of every meeting so it can answer questions. It can be told to be passive or encouraged to speak up if it has some insight. It will need access to the sales, support, finance, product schedules, and text related to the company. It should read news related to the industry the company is in. I believe that the result will be that employees will become more productive.
“When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home.”
As an example, Gates envisions digital assistants optimizing the time of health care workers – professionals who provide a human touch to their work that AI cannot replace, but who spend much of their days doing menial paperwork, which AI can take over, freeing them to spend more time on actual caregiving.
AI can also help us leap forward in medical research, Gates has predicted:
“In addition to helping with care, AIs will dramatically accelerate the rate of medical breakthroughs. The amount of data in biology is very large, and it’s hard for humans to keep track of all the ways that complex biological systems work. There is already software that can look at this data, infer what the pathways are, search for targets on pathogens, and design drugs accordingly. Some companies are working on cancer drugs that were developed this way.”
Reid Hoffman, whose venture capital firm Greylock has financed almost 40 AI companies, has echoed each of Gates’ predictions, and made the blanket statement that his own goals, where AI is concerned, are focused on “elevating humanity.”
His peripheral goal is to counter the Skynet Fever with his pro-AI rhetoric, fostering trust to replace the public apprehension.
“That’s part of the responsibility that we should be thinking about here,” he said. “The question is could we learn and iterate to a much better state?” Marc Andreessen – AI to “humanize” its users Then there’s AI prophet Marc Andreessen, who also echoes Gates’ optimism but expands on it: in his estimation, AI won’t just be our partner, but our salvation.
In his SubStack blog, he has made a long list of predictions of how AI will pull us from the quicksand, a few of which echo those above:
an AI tutor for every child, optimizing learning for the child at every step in their development;
an AI personal digital assistant for every adult, acting as “coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist” (see “Digital You, Digital Me”, above) that is “infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful”;
a professional assistant for every scientist, artist, engineer, businessperson, doctor, and caregiver;
Aa similar assistant for every executive, official, coach, and teacher; “the magnification effects of better decisions by leaders across the people they lead are enormous, so this intelligence augmentation may be the most important of all”;
AI to accelerate productivity growth throughout the economy, “driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity across the planet”;
AI augmentation of scientific breakthroughs and new technology development, to “further decode the laws of nature and harvest them for our benefit”;
AI-based enhancements of artistic endeavor, allowing artists “to realize their visions far faster and at greater scale than ever before”;
AI to (paradoxically) “improve warfare, when that has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much better strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and unnecessary bloodshed”;
AI that will “humanize” its users: “Talking to an empathetic AI friend really does improve their ability to handle adversity. And AI medical chatbots are already more empathetic than their human counterparts. Rather than making the world harsher and more mechanistic, infinitely patient and sympathetic AI will make the world warmer and nicer.”
“The stakes here are high. The opportunities are profound,” he wrote on SubStack. “AI is quite possibly the most important – and best – thing our civilization has ever created, certainly on par with electricity and microchips, and probably beyond those.
“The development and proliferation of AI – far from a risk that we should fear – is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children, and to our future.
“We should be living in a much better world with AI, and now we can.” Ben Goertzel – our “mind children”
Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET, also believes AI will make the world a better place – and foresees, like a number of others, an eventual utopia;
“The technology to come after ChatGPT in a couple of years, as we get closer to artificial general intelligence, more like what people have, that will remove even more of the need for humans to work for a living. I think we’re finally at that point, where fewer jobs will be created than are eliminated.
“I’m strongly in favor of this. I think there are far more rewarding things for human beings to do than scramble around to get resources.”
He doesn’t see AI as the kind of threat many of his peers do; he believes AI will be on our side:
“Once we have machines smarter than people, I think it’s very likely they will be well-disposed toward us; these are our mind children, and we can have much easier, simpler, and more exciting lives than we have now.”
On the other hand, he doesn’t think the transition will necessarily be smooth. “On the route to that rosy future, there will be a lot of disruptions,” he said in a CNBC interview, “and it’s hard to see how to avoid that except to move to a benevolent international cooperation on the political level, or a global uplifting of human consciousness, both of which seem harder to come by than the advance in AI technology that we’ll see.”
AI will be everywhere, will touch everything, and will change everything it touches, he predicted. “AI will transform every vertical market. Of course, some markets have more friction in them in adopting new technologies, right?
“If a business is purely digital, just sending bits around rather than manipulating big physical objects, it can be refactored almost instantly,” he said. “Things like graphic arts, music, anything with writing, accounting, software businesses (both enterprise and retail) - these things can be AI-ified very rapidly. Something like manufacturing or transport – fundamentally, can be revolutionized by large language models like ChatGPT and even more so by the next generation of AI, but it’s a bit slower ‘cause you have to deal with all the physical stuff.
“Then some industries like medicine, of course, you’re held back by regulations, [delaying] new technologies even when they’re for the better.
“Every industry is gonna be transformed. Even if the endgame is no humans need to work for a living and we do other stuff besides pursue economic opportunities, in the interim on the way there’s tremendous economic opportunity for those who combine know-how in AI with know-how in some vertical area and they can figure out how to sort of mediate the takeover of that vertical by AI technology.”
In this wave of utopian optimism, it’s Andreessen who gets the last word:
“It’s time to build.”
Comments