What will life look like when AI is everywhere?

Truthfully, we don’t know. The most gifted and perceptive experts admit they don’t know. Our best guesses are only guesses. The idea of The Singularity—a moment when all AI is smarter than all humans—has attracted much attention, but if it happens, its consequences too are only a guess. It took fifty years between the time scientists first proposed the goal of a machine that could be the world's chess champion, and when that goal was reached. In the late 1990s, a major new goal was set. In fifty years, AI should field a robot team of soccer players to compete with and defeat the human team of champions at the World's Cup. In the interim, more modestly accomplished soccer robots are teaching scientists a great deal about physical coordination in the real world, pattern recognition, teamwork, and real-time tactics and strategy under stress. Scientists from all over the world are fielding teams right now–one of the most obvious signs of how international artificial intelligence research has become.

🙘

Do general-purpose intelligent machines exist that are as smart as humans?

No. But scientists are trying to figure out how to design a machine that exhibits general intelligence, even if that means sacrificing a bit of specialized intelligence. Common-sense reasoning is an enormous obstacle here.

🙘

Comparative smarts between humans and AI

Machines have been "smarter" than us in many specialized ways for a while. Chess, Go, and the quiz game Jeopardy are the best-known achievements, but many artificially intelligent programs have been at work for more than two decades in finance, in many sciences, such as molecular biology and high-energy physics, and in manufacturing and business processes all over the world. We've lately seen a program that has mastered the discovery process in a large, complex legal case, using a small fraction of the time, an even smaller fraction of costs—and it's more accurate. So if you include arithmetic, machines have been "smarter" than us for more than a century. People no longer feel threatened by machines that can add, subtract, and remember faster and better than we can, but machines that can manipulate and even interpret symbols better than we can give us pause.

🙘

The dangers of AI exist on multiple levels, from the global to the social to the personal. Globally, AI is deepening the threat posed by cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns that Russia, China, and others use to infiltrate our society, steal our data, and interfere in our democracy. The limited uses of AI-enabled attacks at present are only the beginning. AI can launch weapons without human oversight (given the past poor performance of Defense Department software, that should give us pause). Russia has already tested AI weapons in Syria. How to insure that human oversight dominates? And what if your adversary doesn’t obey the same rules? China’s domestic use of AI is a chilling precedent for anyone around the world who cherishes individual liberty. Its employment of AI as a tool of repression and surveillance—at home, and increasingly abroad as it sells such programs to smaller authoritarian nations—is a powerful contrast to how Americans believe AI should be used.

🙘

What can we do about the dangers?

Plenty, but it will take funds, talent, and diversity. A national commission charged with examining the status of AI in the U.S. has laid out inclusive plans for dealing with the dangers (see the Report of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence). In lesser ways, if companies don’t examine training sets that machines learn from, governments must. Algorithmic accountability is essential, whether imposed by legislation or best professional practices. Ethics must be addressed as students begin their elementary courses, baked into, not layered on top of professional practices. The EU leads in regulatory efforts, protecting individuals and entire nations from harmful practices in AI. The U.S. needs similar protections.

🙘

Europe Proposes Strict Rules for AI Uses

In April 2021, the European Union proposed strict regulations for uses of AI, the first governmental body in the world to do so. These will be discussed and revised over a period of several years as they move through the EU’s policy-making process.

The purpose is to protect individuals, especially in high-risk situations, and promote trust in AI, not skepticism.

The draft rules would set limits around the use of AI in a range of activities, from self-driving cars to hiring decisions, bank lending, school enrollment selections and the scoring of exams. They would also cover the use of AI in law enforcement and court systems. Regulations would ban the use of live facial recognition in public spaces, though there would be several exemptions for national security and other purposes. The regulations would require that deep-fakes (images or text) to be so labeled.

Significant fines would be levied on organizations that violate these rules.

🙘

China and AI

China has announced its ambition to be world’s leader in AI by 2030 and is moving quickly. In March 2021, Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, who led the National Security Commission on AI, told a congressional committee that China is barely behind Western AI technology, and better in some areas: facial recognition (“generations ahead of what is possible in the West”); “significantly ahead in commerce and mobile payments technology;” and because it recognizes no privacy rights, is building massive data bases that could fuel new advances in fields such as health care—or social control. The Congressional report Schmidt’s committee submitted said: “AI is part of a broader global technology competition. Competition will speed up innovation. We should race together with partners when AI competition is directed at the moonshots that benefit humanity like discovering vaccines. But we must win the AI competition that is intensifying strategic competition with China…We take seriously China’s ambition to surpass the United States as the world’s AI leader within a decade. The AI competition is also a values competition. China’s domestic use of AI is a chilling precedent for anyone around the world who cherishes individual liberty. Its employment of AI as a tool of repression and surveillance—at home and, increasingly, abroad—is a powerful counterpoint to how we believe AI should be used. The AI future can be democratic, but we have learned enough about the power of technology to strengthen authoritarianism abroad and fuel extremism at home to know that we must not take for granted that future technology trends will reinforce rather than erode democracy. We must work with fellow democracies and the private sector to build privacy-protecting standards into AI technologies and advance democratic norms to guide AI uses so that democracies can responsibly use AI tools for national security purposes.”

Given China’s population of a billion and a half, one observer has calculated that statistically, China’s geniuses number the same as the entire population of France. The Chinese government has committed enormous resources to AI research and development. Are China and the West bound to be competitors, even adversaries, or will they share and cooperate around AI to solve global problems?

🙘

Hebraic vs. Hellenic views of AI

The Hebrew God of Genesis commands that humans must never create imitation humans, graven images, or God’s wrath will fall upon them. I call this fear of divine retribution for creating AIs (for usurping God’s unique status) the Hebraic view. At about the same time that Jehovah’s commandments were codified, classical Greek literature took the opposite view. Myths and poems cheerfully feature AIs, especially robots. They appear in The Iliad and The Odyssey as helpers in the divine forge, party servers, or powers that steer ships through storms. The Greek gods welcomed and often delighted in these helpful creations. I call this welcoming attitude the Hellenic view. In Western thought Hebraic and Hellenic views continue to coexist uneasily. At the other end of the Silk Road, however, attitudes toward inanimate objects are more relaxed—emperors enjoy their mechanical nightingales; Shinto worshippers detect a soul in every stone. Robots are no more fearsome than any other object. (I’d be grateful if specialists in other cultures, especially in Africa, would inform me of traditional views around fashioning imitations of natural creatures.)

🙘

What was the first AI program?

Imaginary thinking machines appeared in early Egypt and Classical Greece, proliferated in medieval Europe, and flowered abundantly in 19th century literature (Coppelia, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the Golem, and most famously, Frankenstein). But the first real AI program using a digital computer was called the Logic Theorist, created in 1956 by Allen Newell, J. C. “Cliff” Shaw, and Herbert Simon. The Logic Theorist autonomously proved theorems in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, even finding a more satisfying solution to one theorem than the Principia had presented. Simon wrote to Bertrand Russell with the news, and Russell accepted it with good humor. But scholarly journals of logic declined to publish an article co-authored by a machine. The Logic Theorist learned, remembered, and searched for solutions autonomously (which made it distinct from the numerical calculations computers had previously been put to). Newell and Simon were at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, PA, later Carnegie Mellon University, and were regular visitors at The RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, where Shaw worked and where they could run programs on RAND’s advanced computer.

🙘