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There has never been as much talk as lately about Artificial Intelligence, which is increasingly present in seemingly routine, simple and “harmless” situations.
Content about it proliferates at ever-increasing rates and generally deals with the associated benefits and gains.
But what a lot of people don’t consider is the other side. What are the consequences and negative impacts? What does the future increasingly influenced by Artificial Intelligence hold for us? What challenges do we have ahead of us?
Hardly anyone has precise answers to these and similar questions, but isn’t it time to start worrying?
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Starting our discussion with this apparently rhetorical question before today’s topic is important because when we delve into the philosophical approach to intelligence and here not the artificial or the pertinent to machines, we are faced with important questions.
In our article on “The ethical limits of Artificial Intelligence”, among other questions, we consider that human intelligence is closely related to what is conventionally called emotional intelligence and that, in other words, means saying how much emotions influence our decisions and not just narrowly rational thoughts.
From this, a possible definition for artificial intelligence is one that is capable of producing decisions, without emotional components and, therefore, restricted to the rules present in an algorithm and a broad – as much as possible – data set that is used for evaluation and learning. , by a machine, a computer, a device.
There are those who say that this is where the “beauty” and the great advantage of machine intelligence lie – a cold and non-emotional decision, therefore, impartial and devoid of personal interests.
This ethical and moral dilemma, we have already discussed in the article cited above and for that reason, we will not return to the debate. We will only use it as a base.
The evolution of Artificial Intelligence
From 2020 onwards, there has been a real growing flood of content related to the topic.
In the case of some blogs, sites specializing in technology and even sites with diverse content, there are up to a dozen news related to ChatGPT and we ourselves have already talked about it.
With not so much fuss, other tools / applications that make use of AI also gained space, such as LaMDA from Google, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications and which is a project of conversational neural language models, in which the search giant has been investing heavily for some time.
In the case of LaMDA, it was the center of attention when a collaborator involved in the project came forward to say that it was sentient, that is, a level of consciousness based on sensory perceptions. For disclosing information he shouldn’t have, in the name of a non-disclosure agreement, he was first suspended and then fired.
One of the great image bank services, Shutterstock, announced that in addition to traditional photos and graphic arts, it now offers a platform for AI image generationfor all your customers with paid packages.
Along the same lines as Shutterstock, there are already many more sophisticated tools that are capable of producing graphic arts with a surprising presentation, based on some parameters, in just a few seconds, as is the case of Stable Diffusion.
BuzzFeed, responsible for creating and providing content, among others for Meta products (Facebook and Instagram), announced in December 2022 that it intends to use artificial intelligence to personalize and improve its online content. Among the many repercussions with the announcement, there was a 150% increase in the company’s shares.
Product of a startup, the app replica has been literally gaining many fans, particularly in the public composed of the new generations, it also found itself in the midst of controversy, when it disclosed that several users have sent messages to the company stating that their avatars are beings with conscience. In fact, it’s not difficult to find reports on the web of users who are developing relationships with the avatars created in the app, just as if they were real people.
With even less publicity, it is known that the new wave in China is the investment in virtual influencers and that influencers are nothing more, but in a completely digital version, or if you prefer, without being a real person. Incidentally, at the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games, such a character has already been seen at one of the events – the Luo Tiany.
Microsoft, which is thought to have already invested $1 billion in OpenAIthe company responsible for GPT-3, announced an investment of US$10 billion, and will expand the integration of services OpenAI on the Azure platform.
It is also said that Bill Gates’ company is considering integrating ChatGPT with Microsoft Bing in order to compete with Google in terms of searches.
The list of examples can be immense, but what they all have in common is the degree of investment and efforts to make artificial intelligence the new foundation for a new range of services, on the Internet and beyond, and proves that the evolutionary stage is accelerating permanently, despite some criticism.
Yes, because despite leaving many with their mouths agape, there are quite a few who even treat it with some disdain or skepticism.
Specialists in the area comment that there is exaggeration and that in the reports of Blake Lemoine – the Google engineer – about LaMDA, it is easily possible to verify that there is no conscience, as well as it is remarkable that it is an application of artificial intelligence.
In the same line, there are those who point out the problems of image applications and with other purposes.
But we cannot forget that history is full of people who contested innovations and technologies that later proved to be successful. There was a time when the Internet itself was just an embryo of what it is today, just as many dared to say that it was nothing more than a fad with an expiration date.
Whatever the case, with advances and limitations, the space that innovation has been occupying, raises some old and some new questions, such as the aforementioned ethical limits, or another large set of examples of technology stealing jobs.
But there’s even more to worry about…
The future of artificial intelligence
This is not an exercise in futurology, that is, trying to predict what new steps AI will take and what disruptions it will cause.
Until recently, one of the obstacles to its development was the necessary computational power. However, increasingly powerful hardware is also increasingly affordable, especially for some companies, which can allocate hundreds of GPUs and CPUs and train complex and “hungry” models for processing.
Volume of data and information, neither. Big Data and Deep Learning are increasingly abundant “raw materials” and are in the cloud and accessible to anyone. GPT-3, for example, was trained with 175 billion parameters. The next generation – the GPT-4 – which is on the way, is thought to be trained with 1 trillion parameters. Google’s Transformers Switch, builds on 1.6 trillion!
More than examples, they are realities that show that the speed with which knowledge doubles is increasing. If the visionary, writer and multidisciplinary Buckminster Fuller said that until the beginning of the 20th century, human knowledge doubled every 100 years, with the improvement of AI, we are close to reducing this interval to who knows months, weeks and even days.
There are even those who are already considering using artificial intelligence itself to produce improvements in itself!
This is already being done to eliminate some bottlenecks encountered in processing
It is certainly not just another curious, interesting, but useless innovation or technology, or of little practical use. Many of the biggest companies in the world are investing heavily and some of them have already introduced and only promise to intensify its use. Just look at an Amazon warehouse with thousands of square meters of products and with a high degree of AI to control everything and which reduces the need for employees to a few dozen of them.
There is also a trend that is gaining strength, according to which a virtual “personality” that replaces people can be more reliable by not having “character deviations” and the moral weaknesses to which human beings are subject. This is reinforced by the fact that global brands such as Adidas, Nike, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana and Givenchy, among others, have already used virtual influencers in some of their campaigns.
The recent episodes involving Replika’s avatars and the increasingly frequent and intense contact with virtual experiences driven by AI models, make us imagine that situations like the plot of the 2013 film, “Is it over there”, are getting closer to abandoning fiction and becoming the “new normal”.
With an increasingly improved “understanding” of people’s behaviors and reactions, which has already been acquired and put into practice by the AI of social networks, with the purpose of presenting content according to our expectations, desires and interests, it will be increasingly easier for them to encourage nomophobia and digital addiction.
All modern social networks want is someone committed to dedicating more and more of their time and attention to what they offer. It is from this behavior that their fortunes come.
As alarmist and apotheotic as the statement may seem, if we continue like this, we are heading towards an inversion in which machines will produce knowledge, make decisions and we will just be the automatons that they once were, without thinking, just performing repetitive activities, mechanical, automated.
Yes, because at this point we are at, the future is very close in which a text like this will dispense with a flesh-and-blood and supposedly thinking author. Soon there will be no need for a reviewer, nor for publication. As it will also be unnecessary for it to have that size, because more and more content has to fit in a very few minutes, preferably in seconds.
We are in the era of shorts, reels and TikToks. Therefore, no matter how interesting or curious it may be, any content that does not produce millions of likes, views and shares will be a waste of time and, preferably, very short and objective.
Neither does anyone who produces videos, photos, illustrations, any images. Photographers, graphic designers and illustrators? Artificial intelligence also promises to replace them.
If, on the one hand, the new generations seem to deal extremely well with all these changes and even yearn for them, how and how many real-life experiences are being left in the background or even in the past? Will our memories soon be reduced to what some AI created in the virtual world?
Who knows, the future of the metaverse may be substantially different from what Zuckeberg has been imagining and where he is investing billions. Perhaps it is the universe we already know, but highly influenced and altered by artificial intelligence, producing a parallel reality and very different from the one we are used to knowing and living.
In this direction, the fiction film of tomorrow will no longer be about the machine taking the place of the man, but the inverse! Well, that is if whoever makes the film is not the machine!
Conclusion
The future of Artificial Intelligence, while looking promising and even exciting in some scenarios, poses important challenges and concerns.
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