“The tin man wanted a heart from the wiz!
He had lots of gloom which he did not know!
Oh to be born a human and have emotions!
To laugh at the sun and play with the snow!”
In the Novel called Origin by Dan Brown we are introduced to a character called Winston! This novel was released in 2017 and if you have not yet read it and are planning to read it in the future (really?!!) then do not read the blog further since there are spoilers ahead!
So in the novel when a tech wiz is killed in spite of having end stage disease a whole cascade of events unfold and finally it is revealed that the killer is none other that Winston! What is so surprising you would ask?
Well, Winston is not a man (or woman for that matter!) but an AI! The AI is so clever that he creates a person or an entity and even an organisation called the Regent and kills his own boss!
In the recently released Mission impossible movie also (again; not seen then do not read!) the chief antagonist is an AI!
The movie I, Robot and also movies like Terminator also tell us about AI and how in the future it will be us (us is human beings and not US!) vs them!
All these fear of the AI brings us to the man who was known as the Godfather of AI!
This is because of his new learning procedure called the back-propagation, for networks of neuron-like units.
In simpler terms (yes, I also did not understand it fully!) the ability to create useful new features distinguishes back-propagation from earlier, simpler methods such as the perceptron-convergence procedure (yes; even this is floating above my simple brain!).
So the Godfather is Professor Geoffrey Hinton tells how the concept of a universal basic income amounts to the government paying all individuals a set salary regardless of their means!
His concern was that AI would increase productivity and wealth but the money would go to the rich and not the people whose jobs get lost!
He had concluded that whether AI goes rogue and tries to take over, is something we may be able to control or we may not, we don’t know!
Like in the novels and movies we see above Hinton was also concerned how these AIs can autonomously make the decision to kill people!
Even the latest trend in AI like Chat GPT and OpenAI, which has a history of ethical flip-flopping; are not perfect models for the future! So much time and research has been spent to make the AI as human as possible that the average human has been made more Robotic!
Previously the Turing test was a great discovery! For the uninitiated; Turing Test is a method of determining whether a machine can demonstrate human intelligence! If a machine can engage in a conversation with a human without being detected as a machine, it has demonstrated human intelligence! That means this is a test which a machine has to pass! Here the AI must behave so much like a human that the human at the other end would not realise that he or she is actually interacting with a bot!
The biggest irony now is that in most websites you have to prove to a bot that you are a human! And more insulting thing is that you actually pass many of these tests because you make mistakes unlike a bot! Your imperfections are the ones which are making you pass the test designed by a human but asked by a bot to prove you are a human! Feeling Smart?!
Now anyway as far as I am concerned, let it be known that I was always rooting for the AI, unless of course the Humans win! Then I was always rooting for the Homo Sapien! This is something which only a human can do and not a bot! Also there are somethings which only some selected humans can do! Like act like birthday celebrity Kesavan Venugopal aka Nedumudi Venu!
Now make sure the alexa microphones are switched off and sleep!
Shubh Ratri!
ramadocblog 