Page 175 - CW E-Magazine (30-1-2024)

Special Report

may be earlier). but the ‘Singularity’ also because there are early signs that shores in 2024. due to space limita-
Moment should concern us. Ai companies are themselves trying to tions, i will touch upon just a few
self-regulate when they see excesses. illustrations of what the world may
Expert level AGi should not be An example of this is Anthropic be like and leave it to you to imagine
confused with outstanding Artificial (https://www.anthropic.com/), a Pub- the rest.
Narrow intelligence in which we lic Benefit Company working on safe
have already reached near the top. An GenAi even as many Governments We will not be merely using out-
example would be Alpha Zero produced and the United Nations are trying to look Calendars to plan our schedules,
by deepMind (whose cofounder i will create regulations. Anthropic, which instead we will all have Personal Ai
talk about soon), which is a powerful was set up by former employees of Assistants (PAiA), which we will use
Ai system which did the unthinkable – open.Ai, is committed to making Ai to manage our daily life, whether you
beating expert humans at Chess, Go safe. it summarises its goals as 3H are a housewife or working mother
and Shogi. On Dec. 5, 2017, a com- (Helpful, Honest and Harmless) and (both of who have to multi-task to
pany called deep Mind released a it is instructive to watch YouTube juggle many things every day), a
pre-print paper on AlphaZero. which videos about them. open Ai’s dALL student or the CEo of a large com-
with just 24 hours of training with E.3, which can be prompted to cre- pany, or whether you are travelling on
data achieved Narrow Superhuman ate all kinds of images, has built in work or vacation, etc. We will not be
capability. With a mere nine hours of restrictions that prevent adult content, using a screen to check what’s hap-
data training, AlphaZero beat Stock- copying living painters, etc. There are pening. A tiny strapped-on or embed-
fish 8 in a 100-game match (28 Wins, many other good ‘text to image’ gene- ded device will guide many of us on
0 Losses, 22 drawn). in 2019, deep- rators like Midjourney. a virtual screen, which can be made
Mind authored a paper on MuZero to appear at will. Your PAiA will be
which generalised the AlphaZero A big votary for regulation of Ai able to converse with you and even
algorithm to enable tell that you have to
it to play Atari and Regulations can at best, slow down the development be at some place in 30
other Board Games of technology but cannot stop it min. to pick up your
without being taught kid or to attend a meet-
the games or the rules ing or to catch a flight
of the game. But even this is not AGi. is Mustafa Suleyman, the brilliant and suggest the best route to take (and
cofounder of deep Mind (now owned if you permit it will instruct the sys-
Regulations can at best, slow by Google) and author of the ‘must-read tem in your self-driving car or hail
down the development of technology book of 2023’ – The Coming Wave. a cab for you). This not fiction, and
but cannot stop it because regulations There are many others, including Mo will happen much before 2028. Your
have been so far behind technology, Gawdat, who are very worried about highly affordable PAiA will perform
with the gap increasing each year and the unbridled and unhindered growth many tasks that your human PA does.
the human penchant to outwit regula- of Ai capabilities and they know why. What happens to the human PA who
tors. it will be a cat and mouse game. has done this for years? S/he will be
There will be rogue elements who What could the world in 2028 look trained to move on to playing value
will skirt regulations, sometimes even like as seen through today’s lens? adding roles, in which co-ordination
with active State support. Every person on Earth who has inter- and transmission of information are
net access, will use one or more Ai not the core. S/he can be trained to
it is important to trust that the embedded applications in ways that will perform 50% of what a senior man-
‘Singularity’ event will not necessa- change their lives – much more than ager would need to do, despite a PAiA
rily crush us, but will enhance human the existing smartphones have done. having eliminated certain roles.
progress whist redefining the way We are addicted to them because they
we will do everything in the future, can do so much! imagine if smart- A surgeon in a hospital, head of a
if we carefully regulate technology. phones, other gadgets, cars, bikes, department in an educational institu-
Not merely because almost all tech- machines in factories and everything tion, a design engineer, etc. not suf-
nology developments in the past have we use, is powered with software 100 fer the curse of having to do many
eventually found ways to keep human times better and can ‘think’, ‘emote’, non-core jobs just because today’s
interests at the core of innovation, but etc.! This tide will start striking our protocols require them to do so. The

Chemical Weekly January 30, 2024 175

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