Scary? AI as a tool
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It was a gloomy morning on Thursday when Arty, the intrepid entrepreneur, woke me up with a call on the landline.
“I say….I hope I didn’t wake you up,” he said. “You did….but it’s okay, I needed to get up to prepare for my column. What’s happening?” I asked.
“Well I read this editorial in the Sunday Times newspaper last week dealing with Artificial Intelligence or better known as AI and I got a scary feeling. Will we be replaced by machines, ending the command and authority of the human race,” he asked, posing a valid question.
“No….no….don’t get too worried. AI is supposed to benefit humankind and from all available reports, AI would add significantly to the technological advances made on Earth,” I said.
Although I was enthusiastic about AI in this conversation, I too had an element of worry and concern on the advent of AI and its soon-to-be dominant feature in our lives.
What if we have robots with the intelligence of a human running our affairs? Are we entering an era where workers would be replaced in factories with robots, supermarkets would have robots at the cash machines and similar trends in our day-to-day lives including driver-less vehicles?
Technology has made huge advances in our lives with mobile phones, smartphones, smart cards, contactless cards that can be used at vending machines, banks and so on. Has this made life easier? Yes, to some extent, but the world is working at a furious pace when compared with life in the 1950s and 1960s sans all these fancy gadgets.
Last week, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva fired the first note of concern on the advent of AI.
Artificial Intelligence is hitting the global labour market “like a tsunami”, she said, speaking at an event in Switzerland.
Artificial intelligence is likely to impact 60 per cent of jobs in advanced economies and 40 per cent of jobs around the world in the next two years, she said, adding: “We have very little time to get people ready for it, businesses ready for it. It could bring tremendous increase in productivity if we manage it well, but it can also lead to more misinformation and, of course, more inequality in our society.”
The Sunday Times editorial said the advent of AI is a subject raging in the modern world and its impact is seen on all religions in a world that is becoming increasingly robotic. “A time is coming when humans, their minds and their actions will be taken over by machines that they themselves create, giving these machines a life of their own and a mind of their own,” it said.
The editorial also raised the spectre of whether AI will ever submit to normal laws. “… there is another set of LAWS – Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems – which are weapons that select targets, destroy and kill without human intervention and are on the drawing boards among the superpowers, raising profound concerns for mankind from humanitarian, legal, ethical and security perspectives integrated with uncharted and apocalyptic outcomes,” it said.
AI is virtually a test of a future where machines would be at our beck and call. Or would they be uncontrollable and have a mind of their own? We have to wait, patiently, and see how this technology pans out. There is little doubt that AI will control the world and its workings but it remains to be seen whether humankind would have absolute control over machines and other AI tools.
An article titled, “Is Artificial Intelligence our ‘Oppenheimer moment’?” authored by veteran journalist Bernd Debusmann appeared on News Decoder – a news platform featuring ex-Reuters journalists focusing on the thoughts and aspirations of the younger generation.
He said the tempo of the debate on where AI will take mankind accelerated sharply since a non-profit organisation little known outside the technology community, the San Francisco-based Center for AI Safety, issued a blunt, one-sentence statement a year ago.
It said: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
That urgent call to take the potential impact of AI as seriously as nuclear war was signed by more than 350 researchers, engineers and top executives from the leading companies working in AI. The signatories included Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two Canadian scientists often called godfathers of advanced AI for their pioneering work on artificial neural networks, Debusmann wrote.
He said the rapid advance of Artificial Intelligence has pushed the world to the brink of a technological revolution that will affect most of the world’s eight billion people. AI has been shown to save lives in the healthcare industry even as it raises the spectre of killer robots and out of control nukes in the military. It raises a question of crucial importance: will AI improve our existence or is it an existential threat?
The answer is both and the debate tends to pitch techies against techies.
“Although few will admit it, the tens of thousands of people who work on AI in the tech industry, which now employs more than nine million people in companies like Google, Open AI and Anthropic, don’t themselves know how it will all play out,” he said, adding: “Media coverage on AI has tended to focus on applications like ChatGPT, frequently used by students to write essays and on AI-aided Internet postings to spread misinformation and disinformation. Then there are ‘deep fakes’ that mimic the voice and appearance of a person.”
With so many uncertainties muddling my mind, I needed a break. Walking to the kitchen to get a second mug of tea, I spotted the trio under the margosa tree in conversation despite a slight drizzle. “Mae sere Vesak lokuwata samaranawa (This time Vesak is being celebrated on a grand scale),” said Kussi Amma Sera, munching a maalu-paan bought from Aldoris, the choon-paan karaya’s mobile bakery.
“Giya avuruddata wediya mae avuruddey godak thorang saha dansal thiyenawa (There are far more pandals and dansal this year than last year),” noted Serapina.
“Eth kattiya pravesam wenna oney usa thorang gena. Mama balaporoththu wenawa eva kadang no watei kiyala den thiyena adika wessa saha hulang hinda (However, people should be cautious as these pandals are tall. I hope they don’t come down during the heavy windy and rainy weather),” said Mabel Rasthiyadu.
As I wound up my column, sipping a warm mug of tea on this gloomy morning, I envisaged a period in the distant future, where possibly Kussi Amma Sera, Mabel Rasthiyadu and Serapina, replaced by robots, would be in conversation under the margosa tree, while yours truly would be a machine typing furiously on a computer to churn out this column. Scary thought indeed!
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