There have been many inflection points in the 80-year history of AI, but 2023 will probably go down as the year it moved to the very center of our global digital lives. AI has become the standard-bearer for the good, the bad and the ugly of (computer) technology, generating strong and contradictory feelings and dispositions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u201cgodfathers\u201d of the current dominant version of AI, the winners of the 2018 Turing Award for \u201cconceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing,\u201d expressed in 2023 alarm, awe, and humility about what they helped create.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alarm: \u201cTen thousand neural nets can learn ten thousand different things at the same time, then share what they\u2019ve learned.\u201d This combination of immortality and replicability, [Hinton] says, suggests that \u201cwe should be concerned about digital intelligence taking over from biological intelligence\u201d\u2014Geoff Hinton, \u201cWhy the Father of A.I. Fears What He\u2019s Built\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Awe: \u201cI want to understand and bridge the gap between current AI and human intelligence\u2026 after playing with [ChatGPT] enough, it dawned on me that it was an amazingly surprising advance. We\u2019re moving much faster than I anticipated. I have the impression that it might not take a lot to fix what\u2019s missing\u2026 If we were to bridge that gap, we would have machines that were smarter than us\u201d\u2014Yoshua Bengio, \u201c\u2018AI Godfather\u2019 Yoshua Bengio: We need a humanity defense organization\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Humility: \u201cWe’re missing something big to get machines to learn efficiently, like humans and animals do. We don’t know what it is yet\u201d\u2014Yann LeCun, \u201cHow Not to Be Stupid About AI, With Yann LeCun\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In \u201cComputing Machinery and Intelligence,\u201d Alan Turing proposed \u201cthe imitation game\u201d in 1950. Avoiding the thorny issue of defining \u201cthinking,\u201d Turing replaced the question “Can machines think?” with the question “Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?” Turing\u2019s imitation game, or the \u201cTuring Test\u201d as it came to be known, assessed how well a computer program could convincingly imitate human conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Clearly, just sounding<\/em> human does not answer Turing\u2019s own benchmark which is to make the machine think <\/em>like humans. Butfooling human judges by simulating<\/em> human conversation was a \u201cgood enough\u201d test for Turing. Five years after Turing\u2019s paper was published, John McCarthy coined the term \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d and the new engineering discipline has been playing the simulation game ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Oxford English Dictionary defines \u201cartificial\u201d as something that is \u201cman-made,\u201d going back to 1616 to find its meaning as \u201ccontrived or fabricated for a particular purpose, esp. for deception.\u201d Merriam-Webster defines \u201cartificial\u201d as \u201chumanly contrived, often on a natural model,\u201d listing as synonyms \u201cphony, fake, false, bogus.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, the inflection points in the 80-year history of AI have been mostly driven by a lot of fake news, generating alarm and awe (and very little humility) with promises of human-like intelligence or even superintelligence just around the corner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s no doubt that computer engineers have succeeded in endowing computers with ever-growing menu of capabilities, including assisting humans with their \u201ccognitive tasks,\u201d starting in the late 1940s with calculation. But computers have not been endowed with human-like intelligence. Not even over the last few years when ingenious \u201cdata scientists\u201d (defined as professional possessing both computer programming and statistical analysis skills), managed to teach computers how to process the vast online troves of texts and images so they can respond to queries and create new narratives and pictures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2023, the widely-accepted notion that we are experiencing a new stage in our digital lives spread like wildfire. It is, so the notion goes, comparable in its impact to the internet (actually, the Web, in 1993) and the smart phone (in 2007). By now, we are expecting a new \u201cquantum change\u201d every 15 years so we are due for a new one. In addition, this new stage reinforces even more the digerati\u2019s conviction, expressed so well already in 1968 by the digital prophet Stewart Brand, that \u201cwe are as gods and we might as well get used to it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2023, OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever cemented his image as the poster-boy of the \u201cwe are as gods\u201d movement, promising the immediate arrival of \u201cartificial general intelligence\u201d or AGI, or even \u201csuperintelligence.\u201d Sutskever explained the power of the idol he helped create: \u201cThat first-time experience is what hooked people\u2026 The first time you use [ChatGPT], I think it\u2019s almost a spiritual experience. You go, \u2018Oh my God, this computer seems to understand.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Attention is all you need and my small language model pays attention to the word \u201cseems\u201d in the statement above. The variant of GPT-3 that got all the attention was ChatGPT, which OpenAI tweaked to be conversational and \u201con point.\u201d Someone at OpenAI must have read or re-read Turing\u2019s musings from 1950 about how to impress humans, convincing them that the computer \u201cseems to understand.\u201d Or maybe someone read or re-read Joseph Weizenbaum\u2019s accounts about how surprised he was when he found out that people took seriously his Eliza program which mimicked the conversation of a Rogerian therapist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The human ingenuity or HI of AI engineers not only pushed forward the state of natural language processing but also, in a brilliant marketing move, gave the masses worldwide a taste of that special \u201cspiritual experience.\u201d As a result, many were convinced that we (or at least, AI creators) are indeed as gods and that we might as well enjoy AI, or regulate it, or stop it before it destroys humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2023, OpenAI announced that superintelligence AI, \u201cthe most impactful technology humanity has ever invented,\u201d could arrive this decade and \u201ccould lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe are as gods\u201d is a very human delusion, a false belief about modern man\u2019s ability to \u201cchange everything,\u201d even human nature, with technology. It has been promoted, for a long time, by the creators of science fiction and, since the 1950s, by the creators of \u201cartificial intelligence,\u201d i.e., all computer-based programs, tools, and applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A synonym for delusion is hallucination. Merriam-Webster defines hallucination as \u201ca sensory perception (such as a visual image or a sound) that occurs in the absence of an actual external stimulus and usually arises from neurological disturbance\u2026 or in response to drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2023, \u201challucination\u201d became the word of the year because it was used to describe the false and inaccurate answers large language models sometimes confidently provide. For many, these \u201challucinations\u201d were the only \u201cgap\u201d that needs to be bridged in order to have machines that are \u201csmarter than us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The term \u201challucination\u201d was first used in the computer science literature to describe specific state-of-the-art advances in computer vision. More recently, however, the term has been used to describe errors in image captioning and object detection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Given that hallucinations are the result of a \u201cneurological disturbance,\u201d it makes sense to call \u201challucinations\u201d the statistical hiccups of the \u201cartificial neural networks\u201d that are the foundation of large language models and their chattering offsprings. It is the brilliant marketing move to make them conversational and engaging, however, that forces them to invent an answer. They would not \u201cseem\u201d to have human intelligence if they admit their ignorance… and there would be very little \u201cengagement\u201d with impatient humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seventy years ago today (January 7, 1954), IBM and Georgetown University demonstrated automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English, the first public demonstration of machine translation. \u201cIt is expected by IBM and Georgetown University, which collaborated on this project, that within a few years there will be a number of \u2018brains\u2019 translating all languages with equal aplomb and dispatch,\u201d reported the Christian Science Monitor<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2006, John Hutchins summarized the effect of the predictions regarding the immanent arrival of superintelligence: \u201cA persistent and unfortunate effect of the demonstration was the impression given to many observers outside the field of MT [machine translation] that fully automatic translation of good quality was much closer than in fact was the case. It was an impression which was to last \u2013 in the minds of the general public and indeed with computer scientists outside the MT field \u2013 for many years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s no need to be afraid or in owe of a computer simulation, while celebrating the human ingenuity that finds new ways to make that general-purpose machine, the computer, help us with additional cognitive tasks. It is the very same human ingenuity, human intelligence, human creativity, that also finds new ways to convince humanity that \u201cwe are as gods.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s hope that in 2024, \u201chumility\u201d will replace \u201challucination\u201d as the word of the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There have been many inflection points in the 80-year history of AI, but 2023 will probably go down as the year it moved to the very center of our global digital lives. AI has become the standard-bearer for the good, the bad and the ugly of (computer) technology, generating strong and contradictory feelings and dispositions. 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AI has become the standard-bearer for the good, the bad and the ugly of (computer) technology, generating strong and contradictory feelings and dispositions. 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