The Beginning of AI Revolution & Human Evolution — Part I
I have been wanting to put my thoughts and blog about it for some time. But it took time to warm-up, collect my thoughts now and then and give shape to it. Unlike AI which can be creative in its own way and faster, humans do need time, and pause during the process, both of which contribute to the creative flow of thoughts. I had also asked ChatGPT, to give me a blog on this topic, which I might include in later part of the blog for reference and comparison. Except for that, the blog is all done without involving AI, with some of my own research. I have hyperlinked and included some of these references for your use. I hope you like reading this.
The phenomenal rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT
The viral and crazy popularity in the recent months of ChatGPT, and the current promise of GPT-4 to take it to a dramatically new level within a period of few months, indicates the arrival of the transformation moment, if not singularity. It has kindled all sorts of thoughts and concerns, from its varied applications in improving productivity to taking human jobs away, and to the fear of what many science fiction authors have given imagination in their novels and movies.
As always there is the gap between the reality of what is the current progress & limitations of AI and the perceived imagination of ‘the future is here’.
And this is just the beginning. What we are about to see is an exponential increase (within a year or two) of the use of AI whether we want it or not, whether humanity is ready or not, whether we accept it or not, and whether if it all turns out to be good or otherwise.
I have tried to capture my thoughts around this into different sections as depicted below:
Revolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
In one of my earlier blogs, just 5 years ago (At the edge of chaos — making sense of nonsense), I wrote about the increasing rate of change, a mathematical way to model increased rate of change to a state of transformation, while also touching briefly on the revolution of AI moving from hyper-marketing to a singularity event. Since then, multiple events around the world, particularly epidemic COVID-19 taking over the world, and subsequent lock-downs, had kind of provided a slowdown to this perception. It also created a mindset that has now created an ecosystem to bounce back. OpenAI which started its research in 2015, announced GPT-3 as early as 2020 and Dall-E in 2021. However, the preview launch of ChatGPT in November/ December 2022, went viral and had been signed up by more than a million users in just 5 days. Microsoft and Google, and others have immediately jumped into the hype cycle. This month (March 2023), OpenAI released GPT-4 with a large multimodal model (taking images and texts), with far more superior abilities, and even generate deployable code, thus boosting productivity in software development to never before levels. Microsoft has leveraged this as a “Co-pilot for work” on its 365 platform.
One of the current limitations, as published by OpenAI itself its “still is not fully reliable (it “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors)”.
Despite this, the scenarios/ use cases we can benefit by utilizing AI based services more than ever before, and in some cases even completely replace humans, is only left to human imagination and intent.
So has the ‘Singularity’ arrived? May be, may be not. But it definitely has pushed the AI revolution to a far greater level. It certainly is well beyond, or at least into the second phase of the 4IR or the Fourth Industrial Revolution/ Industry 4.0. This Digital Transformation along with the emergence of Imagination Age with the development of other technologies Metaverse, Immersive and Augmented Reality could propel us into the new revolution, probably not very long as many would have believed it would take but may be within the next couple of years.
Change — Embrace or Fear?
Do we embrace this change or fear?
Will we be early adopters, and probably fail or late adopters and thrive? Or take a wait and watch approach? Or be a rebel (avoid anything that is AI)? Or do we even have a choice at all?
As in the movie The Matrix Reloaded, the character Merovingian says ‘Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without’. Any new change at any level always poses this question. During the first industrial revolution , the social impact was perceptible although initially in smaller geography (around the dominant regions in Europe). This created the foundation of modern civilization with villages turning into towns, and towns into cities, and the population shifting for new jobs to industrial towns and cities, for a newer standard of living. Nevertheless, the machines that replaced hand production methods at that time improved productivity and efficiency, gave scope for increased research and education. The wheels of time ushered further inventions around electrification and telecommunication during the second industrial revolution, moving towards the third revolution with the development of electronic devices and computers, marking the beginning of the information age. All of them went through cultural changes that had different people take different stand. The latest revolution that the present generation have witnessed is the Smartphone revolution that changed almost everything we do in just a decade! The new revolution of AI will be no different. What is going to make it more different is that rate in which this will probably take over. In my view we will be seeing the impact — both positively and negatively — depending on how collectively we handle this — within next couple of years. The current ecosystem (politics, economics, and global work culture) is providing enough ingredients for AI to be adopted sooner.
Most of us have already read and seen many science fiction novels and movies, and to the extent in which AI might lead us to. Certain psychologists, and researchers have also made recent news on how things could turn disastrous for human survival. While there could be certain rationale to these, these are also based on exaggerated ‘perceived notions’ of what the current AI can do, without understand the way it works. For instance, there was a tweet going around on how GPT-4 can escape into the world and be able to control one’s personal computer. A similar concept came in a very popular web series, Person of Interest by Jonathan Nolan.
Some newsmen picked it up, quoting OpenAI Sam Altman’s interview to ABC News on the need to guard AI to prevent negative consequences. It may however be improbable in the current context for ChatGPT Large Language Model (LLM) model to ‘escape’ out into the world. Even Elon Musk is reported have said as early as 2014, “we need to be super careful with AI as they are potentially more dangerous than nukes” and “AI will outsmart humanity and overtake human civilization in less than five years and also that AI and robots will take over everyone’s jobs”. He had later been part of OpenAI board when it was formed in 2015 and quit in 2018 citing certain conflicts with his role as CEO of Tesla.
What then, do we embrace this change or fear?
Different management methodologies have advocated change management as a critical skill to leadership. An article by Larry E. Greiner published in the July-August 1972 issue of Harvard Business Review, talks about ‘Stages of Revolution’ and ‘new set of organizational practices that will become the basis for managing the next period of evolutionary growth’ and that ‘Revolution Is Still Inevitable’.
We have too many things to fear or worry about regarding AI. There is no doubt about that.
However, no fear can be overcome without hope.
Hope — towards a better future for human beings and for the planet. The Architect, in The Matrix Reloaded may differ though, when he says to Neo, “Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness”. :-)
However, modern psychology and resilience approach thankfully indicates humans need hope and optimism to forge ahead. So does Heartfulness and Mindfulness practices. Do explore them to gain a positive mindset for adopting and adapting.
Human Evolution
Setting aside all these paraphernalia surrounding the hype and fear, civilizations in the past and present have always had shown us evolution happens through all such ways, for the betterment of the planet and life at large. ‘Life finds a way’ as Ian Malcom said in ‘Jurassic Park’
Evolution includes the ‘transformation’ of the form and appearance, and ‘the spirit, content and culture’.
The human mind and heart is at the pinnacle of all such evolution. Artificial Intelligence is a creation of the human mind.
And the present technology in using Artificial Neural Network, mimicking part of the human brain will help in better understanding of ourselves — how and what we are made of. As said in Latin, ‘Temet Nosce’ or ‘Know Thyself’ (and again from The Matrix, when the Oracle says to Neo), is an important next step towards evolution of both AI and human beings. As Bernard Marr says, Self-aware AI systems would be the final stage in its evolution.
In my next part to this blog series, I will touch upon couple of more topics around this, including AI Governance, AI adoption, AI philosophy and spirituality.
