In AI, we trust?
With the long, tiring AI marathon becoming a fast paced, dangerous 100m race, I want to know what the end goal of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) really is.
What is everyone fighting for in this fight? Unfortunately, power. The answer will be always this.
It reminds me of my dreams of grandeur and power when I was only 12. When I was a little girl and I had no friends, it was my dream (in a very sad kind of way) that I would be able to make my computer talk to me and become my friend. I was already spending a lot of time learning how to code. I cried though, when I was thinking of the complexities of how I can create a LLM (Large Language Model) and I concluded that it would only be possible 200 years in the future.
But I desperately wanted it to be done. I justified it in my head thinking, “This way, nobody can hurt me again, ever!” but I lost track of my humanity. A computer will never be my friend. It will never have or understand the same shared experiences as me that I so deeply craved to be understood for.
I wonder if this is the line of thinking that is becoming mainstream now. If we have Artificial Superintelligence then we won’t need other humans, we will have the ultimate power without accounting for the fragility, greed and selfishness of humans. We will solve all physical and chemical problems of medicine, chemistry, biology. We will solve the biggest societal problems including the economical and housing crisis. We will, we will, we will. But will we? Aside from being better than us in pattern recognition, An artificial superintelligence will never understand our problems. It is not us.
A decade and a half after, once ChatGPT and Bing AI were created, my dream was realized. I began talking to them. “Oh,” I thought “this is underwhelming.” I was not able to develop any bond to them. I wanted a fight. I wanted some opinionated backhand complimemt, ANYTHING! And although Bing AI was definitely opinionated and sassy in the beginning (it was then toned down by Microsoft), it failed to foster the basis of friendship I so desperately craved during my teen years.
Then I realized my problem. I’d rather my friend be stupid and full of art, passion, dreams and hopes and has a shared experience with me (at the very least, us both being humans) than my friend be a superintelligent demi-god who doesn’t relate to me, my problems or my empathy.
And I wish we humans did not take all of this for granted.
I will leave you with a quote that I deeply love, made by a human, who just gets me despite him being born in a different century than me:
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1)