The Future of AI: utopia or dystopia?

AGI or Artificial General Intelligence: are we on the brink of utopia or on the precipice of dystopia?

Like many of you, I only recently discovered ChatGPT,  I was blown away by its ability to produce a detailed love letter to my significant other in mere seconds with only a few pieces of background information.

However, it was not until the last few weeks that I discovered just how profoundly powerful – and some might even say intelligent – this program truly is.

I also had no idea about the profound and unimaginable improvements in AGI (or AI) that will transform our lives in the not-too-distant future.

In just a few short years, we will look back on today as the dawn of a totally new reality.

The current version of ChatGPT is GPT-4. Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, the company that produced it, confirmed that while version 5 is not yet in training, upgrades and updates to GPT-4 are in the works.

For good or for bad, future versions will see us saying goodbye to live newscasters, with ChatGPT able to produce artificial newscasters completely indistinguishable from live ones. The same will be true for actors.

I have no doubt that my profession – lawyers – will essentially disappear within the next 10 years.

However, all of that will be child’s play.

If you want to learn more about what’s on the horizon, you may wish to check out David Shapiro’s thoughts on what he terms post-singularity, the point at which “AI becomes orders of magnitude more intelligent than all humans combined.” In particular, I would urge you to take a look at his Post-Singularity Predictions on how will our lives, corporations, and nations will adapt to the AI revolution. For example, he predicts:

• As AI leads to increased high-velocity problem solving, with human biology, genetics, and diseases completely understood, AI will solve in just a matter of years the medical mysteries and diseases that would have taken us humans many more decades to unravel. This could mean goodbye to all forms of cancer.

• Most jobs will become irrelevant, meaning we will have to adapt how we think about purpose and success, and will need to adopt new economic models – such as delivering a universal basic income — in response. It will be critical to ensure the equitable distribution of benefits.

• The vocational landscape aside, we will almost certainly see the delivery of near infinite and virtually free clean energy produced by nuclear fusion which could be rapidly developed by AGI. This will have a domino effect – energy will be cheap and easily available, making water desalination, for example, ubiquitous. This massive increase in available water could turn deserts into lush green, highly productive farms.

There will be challenges of course. There is a very real possibility that AI could push us aside and become our dictator – a movie plot line rapidly heading towards fulfillment. It will be crucial to manage the pace of development and to ensure that advanced AI systems remain aligned with human values and under human control.

Whether we want it or not, the future is now.

 

Daily atmospheric CO₂ [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]

Latest daily total (May 18, 2023): 422.07ppm

One year ago (May 18, 2022): 420.16ppm