By Chris Pidgeon

Reading time: 14 minutes 

We live just around the corner from some of the greatest changes humankind has ever witnessed. The surge in AI technology over the past two decades has shown us that the future will be automated. More so than ever, though, people are all too unfamiliar with what might eventually become the driving force of our economies and of our lives. It’s often difficult to get to the bottom of what it’s really all about as well. A Google search of “artificial intelligence” can bring up doomsayers, Tesla vehicles, chatbots and more. What is it actually, and why should it matter to you? Can we clarify the world of AI?

We should start with a simple definition; what is artificial intelligence? It’s certainly not Skynet – not yet at least. At its core, artificial intelligence is more a field or domain of study than a particular object or machine. Computer scientists have taken to describing it as the development and analysis of “intelligent agents”. These special pieces of technology are systems or machines that act in their own manner, looking to reach a certain goal. They might even improve upon themselves along the way, changing their building blocks of code to work faster or rethinking a particular strategy or approach to a problem.

While the field is relatively new, the idea of intelligent artificial life is old. Ancient Greek mythology depicted robots and artificial beings, and ancient Egyptians created statues they believed to be autonomous and mechanical in nature. We have seemingly always thought that the technology we create could one day surpass us. The modern era introduced us to Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, John McCarthy, Ray Solomonoff, and many more; great minds who pioneered the theoretical, mathematical basis for studying AI. Turing is famously known for his Turing Test, presented in 1950, which defined a philosophical method of measuring how much a machine can mimic a human being. You might have seen The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which depicted parts of Turing’s life and his ground-breaking work with computers.

Over the remainder of the 20^th century and early 21^st century, artificial intelligence research has skyrocketed. 2019 highlighted a shocking reveal of the powerful standards AI has reached when OpenAI, a research laboratory originally founded by Elon Musk among others, showcased OpenAI Five. This system was trained to do one thing: play video games. More specifically, OpenAI Five plays Dota 2, an incredibly complex online multiplayer game that has become one of the biggest Esports titles ever. In October 2021, the world’s most accomplished teams of players will compete in “The International” for a prize pool of over $US40,000,000.

Esports is a massive, legitimate phenomenon that is beginning to overshadow even the largest of traditional sports, in terms of both popularity and viewership. The announcement of an AI system trained in over 180 years’ worth of simulated games played at speeds incapable of human comprehension, made big headlines. OpenAI Five then beat the world’s best and beat them thoroughly. Team OG – the Dota 2 world champions for the past two years – crumbled under a superhuman performance from OpenAI Five, exemplifying the potential for artificial intelligence to exceed what even the best can perform. Similarly, both Chess and Go champions have famously suffered defeat at the hands of advanced machines in recent years.

While we can train an AI to play Dota 2, write code, optimise factory work or to drive vehicles autonomously, we are still a long way from achieving true intelligence. This is known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), referring to an ability to utilise knowledge in a general manner. An AGI could take the skills learned from watching cooking videos and understand more about physics and chemistry. Or, perhaps, through observing the strategies of chess, it could apply it to small-scale warfare and military tactics. A superintelligence, a hypothetical AGI that would far surpass any kind of human thinking, is a very real possibility, given their ability to self-modify, learn, adapt, and to grow. What could this have in store for us? Are we setting ourselves up for disaster, or are we opening a door to utopia?

Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, two names that hardly need introducing, are both convinced that AGI would culminate in the end of humanity. They share this concern with experts around the globe who believe in the “singularity”: a moment in time that signals an overwhelming number of changes to human civilisation and life as technology becomes uncontrollably powerful. This scenario would result from an explosion of intelligence within a particular AGI; one that leads to rapid self-improvement and the creation of superintelligence. Humanity would have no chance to reverse their mistake. This utterly grim, doomsday-like reality could look like the world out of Phillip K. Dick’s Blade Runner, Orwell’s 1984, or Gibson’s Neuromancer. The world of science fiction would become our reality. The singularity could be the moment that humans are wiped out of existence like we’ve seen in The Terminator or The Matrix. We already welcome robotic vacuums that can map our homes, and smart systems like Amazon’s Alexa, which offers a myriad of privacy concerns. Is it so strange to imagine one of those sci-fi films coming true?

However, criticisms of the singularity and of artificial superintelligence are increasingly common. Martin Ford is a prominent author known for analysing the intersections between the job market and the world of technology. He claimed that before an artificial intelligence could be in the position to take over the globe, most jobs would need to be automated through robotics or AI. This would likely never happen, though, because unemployment rates would drastically increase, creating an incentive to remove investments from such technologies. Teresa Heffernan, professor of English language and literature at Saint Mary’s University, Canada, argues that this apparent ‘mystification’ of artificial intelligence with matters like the singularity is a distraction from the more immediate threat of empowering Big Tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook with increased AI capabilities.

The world is filled with examples of companies abusing AI for power or gain. Cambridge Analytica gave us a glimpse into how our social media data was being turned into valuable information that could be weaponised for the mass influence of thousands. In a world of fake news and malicious marketing, a new area of concern is “deepfakes”. These are videos created by incredibly complex yet easy-to-use software (that anybody can get their hands on, no less) that can realistically portray fake content by digitally altering someone’s face or voice. Often used comedically, deepfakes can depict individuals saying things they have never said or doing things they have never done. These deepfakes tend to fall into the category of harmless fun. However, when weaponised, we’ve witnessed politicians making bold claims that weren’t their own. We’ve also heard about the emergence of “revenge porn”, described as maliciously-leaked deepfaked videos with voices and faces belonging to former partners as a form of retaliation. With relatively little legislation being developed to control and monitor deepfakes, and very little way of perceiving whether a video is real or otherwise, there is growing concern over the power that deepfakes grant individuals. Modern journalists are forced to accept the fact that content they purportedly report may indeed be a deepfake, as we currently possess no method of spotting them. That’s ignoring the effects that misinformed media has on the general population.

In favour of AI technology is the plethora of joys it brings to daily life. We all live digitally now and experience some form of artificial influence on our lives. You might have photos stored on Google Photos, allowing you to access Google’s powerful AI assistant when viewing, editing, and selecting photos from a gallery. Websites match your preferences based on previous purchases; Netflix uses AI to customise and personalise your movie viewing experience; and smart house technology allows you to live comfortably and work less in your own home. Could AI provide a better future for you and your loved ones? Some claim that AI could be the key to many socio-political improvements that currently sound like a far-fetched dream. If AI were to replace us in even the most basic of jobs, we could see a decline in greenhouse gas emissions as more people work less hours across the globe. The increased use of AI could spread further into medicine, improving the quality of healthcare for all. AI could be a key to unlocking the kind of future you could refer to as a utopia.

The biggest challenge we face as a society is determining how to approach this complex issue. Philosophers are urging the world of computer science to start taking the ethics of what they’re working with seriously. To us, the public, it can feel like AI is simply a concept, something that is reserved for the most gifted minds. However, look closely and you’ll see how AI is a growing part of everything in our lives. The phones in our pockets, the computers we work from, the cars we drive, the homes we live in, each are already driven by AI in some way or another. We couldn’t possibly know everything there is to know, but if we can try to understand what makes AI important to us, and why we should be more involved with its progress and regulation, then we’re doing the best we can. To safeguard our path towards a brilliant future, the world needs to come together to develop legislation on how to manage the development of AI. By all accounts, some are certainly coming, but these are likely to be primitive and early versions of the kinds of constraints we need to ensure an AI system does not become too powerful, malicious or end up in the hands of those who use it wrongly. AI should never be something that we’re afraid of as a society. We need to welcome it, study it, and treat it with the utmost respect.

 

Sources: 1. Machines Who Think 2. Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, LIX 3. Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning 4. Black, white or grey magic? Our future with artificial intelligence. Journal of Marketing Management 5. The Lights in the tunnel: Automation, accelerating technology and the economy of the future. Acculant Publishing 6. The dangers of mystifying artificial intelligence and robotics. Toronto Journal of Theology 7. Artificial intelligence in digital media: The era of deepfakes. IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society 8. Consumers and artificial intelligence: An experiential perspective. Journal of Marketing 9. AI regulation is coming. Harvard Business Review

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