Augmenting Humans with Technology: why it is necessary and why it is so dangerous — Part 2
This story follows Part 1: AI/ML is a necessity
This story follows Part 1: AI/ML is a necessity
AI/ML has become a necessity, but AI/ML does not just help understand or decide, it can also create, learn, control, see and when coupled with mechanical capabilities it can act intelligently in the physical world.
AI/ML does not just help decide but can also create and act autonomously
Generative AI can write content, create unique pieces of art, develop applications:
Pencil uses generative AI to create unique ads content.
OpenAI with his GPT-3 model, an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text, has shown it can convert plain english into code to develop apps and query data using natural language. In fact it is so good, that it is in many instances impossible to say if the text was written by a human or by the AI model!
This painting below was created using Generative AI: models are first trained (should we say “inspired”?) using other paintings to then create unique pieces of art.
Now here is how technology can augment our senses to help us learn better and faster: by combining computer vision, sound analytics and augmented reality this video shows how to learn how to play the piano.
With additional mechanical capabilities, the experiment below by Family Mart, shows how an employee can replenish the shelves of a grocery stores remotely by tele-operating a robot while being miles away from the store.
Finally you might have heard of Sophia from Hanson Robotics, the first robot declared a citizen (by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). Sophia is an attempt to reproduce human emotions (facial expressions reconstruction) as well as an attempt at simulating “self awareness”… a big word of course: but watch this and see what you think:
See Sophia’s facial expressions, recreated by simulating the 42 facial muscles if the human face.
These are only a very small glimpse of what is possible today (like now!). If as a technologist I find these absolutely fascinating; I am also very worried about the huge potential these represent for ill-intentionned people, companies, governments. So here we go, I will say it:
With great powers comes great responsibilities
On a side note: as I was trying to find out who to refer this quote to, I realized that… well it’s either Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben in Spiderman, Voltaire or Churchill, depending on the source…
Part 3: With great powers comes great responsibilities
Data and AI/ML are still at very early stage in terms of governance, ethics and regulation. The most successful companies of the past decade have been harvesting data at industrial scale; and although they have contributed to the democratization of AI model (eg via the open source community for exmaple) they have grown mostly unchecked.
How business and governments use public and private data and how they make decisions will require much more transparency and safe guards that we see today.
To be continued… Follow me (Damien Kopp) to read the next chapter.