Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is changing education, commerce and the workplace in less observable ways. Recently, a friend told me about a immense IT company he works with. The company had a long and established protocol for launching major initiatives spanning solution design, product coding, and implementation design. The transition from concept to implementation took months. However, he recently saw a demonstration that applied cutting-edge artificial intelligence to a typical software project. “All the things that took months happened in a matter of hours,” he says. “This made me agree with your column. Many of the companies around us are now animated corpses. No wonder people are terrified.
What fuels the fury against AI is a lack of trust in the companies that create and promote it. By chance, this week I made a breakfast appointment with Ali Farhadi, the company’s CEO Allen Institute for AI, a nonprofit research venture. He is 100% convinced that the hype is justified, but he also sympathizes with those who don’t buy it because, in his opinion, companies that try to dominate this industry are viewed with suspicion by the public. “Artificial intelligence is treated like a black box that no one knows about, and it’s so expensive that only four companies can do it,” Farhadi says. The fact that AI developers are moving so quickly further fuels distrust. “We collectively don’t understand it, and yet we implement it,” he says. “I’m not against it, but we should expect that these systems will behave in unpredictable ways and that people will react to that.” Fahadi, an advocate of open-source artificial intelligence, argues that at least immense companies should publicly disclose what materials they exploit to train their models.
The matter is complicated by the fact that many people involved in building artificial intelligence also declare their involvement in creating AGI. While many key researchers believe this will be a boon for humanity – a core tenet of OpenAI – they have not made it public. “People are frustrated by the idea that AGI will appear tomorrow, or next year, or six months from now,” says Farhadi, who is not a fan of the concept. He says AGI is not a scientific term, but a vague concept that hinders the adoption of artificial intelligence. “In my lab, when a student uses those three letters, it basically delays graduation by six months,” he says.
Personally, I’m agnostic on AGI – I don’t think we’re on the cusp of it, but I just don’t know what will happen in the long run. When you talk to people on the front lines of AI, it turns out that they don’t know either.
Some things seem clear to me, and I think they will eventually become clear to everyone – even those who throw balls at me for X. Artificial intelligence will become more powerful. People will find ways to exploit them to make their work and personal lives easier. Additionally, many people will lose their jobs and entire businesses will be disrupted. There will be little consolation in the fact that recent jobs and companies may emerge from the AI boom, as some displaced people will still be stuck in unemployment lines or at Walmart checkouts. In the meantime, everyone in the AI world – including columnists like me – should understand why people are so irate and respect their legitimate displeasure.