Regardless of your age, it’s obvious that the pace of change is accelerating. That alone is pointedly disruptive since human beings accept change unwillingly. The limits too, of our own senses, and abilities mean long ago we became dependent on machines to help us move things, make things, and so much more, each of them extensions of human abilities meant to serve human needs. But the way we managed change was through intuition and feel. Soon, that won’t be nearly enough.

Artificial Intelligence and its companion Machine Learning has been getting some media attention in the last year as the tendrils of these technologies grow further and get stronger. Stories about Google calling restaurants and carrying on a completely human sounding conversation about reservations. Other stories have been published about paintings being created by computers  and  movie scripts, news stories and blog posts all being written by artificial intelligence. The impact on fields like drug development, materials science, manufacturing, software development and other sciences is impossible to calculate.

The most recent wave of press is about something called Chat GPT from a company called Open AI. It’s not fully deployed yet. But it’s serious enough to make Google declare a Code Red as they rush to build out their own AI capabilities.

To help you understand the difference between an algorithm (the math structure behind Google searches) and what Chat GPT does it helps to grasp how they work. Here’s a simple explanation. The search algorithms assign various “weights” to factors like proximity, date, past search history, current popularity, all aiming at “relevancy”for the results.. except in recent years they’ve come to be dominated by advertising. Google shifts the algorithms all the time but it’s not creating anything.  Chat GPT is driven by an “intelligence” that’s created by training a computer to know how language works, the meaning of words, how sentences work, how mathematics works, how painting works, and on through various other fields of knowledge and human understanding.  Then through multiple trials (this is the machine learning aspect) it grows in sophistication and capabilities. Ask Google about nuclear fusion and you get a bunch of links to information about it. Ask ChatGPT about it and you get a multi paragraph explanation that it literally synthesized from its knowledge.

It’s not hard to project that in the next ten years or less AI will exceed human capabilities in areas we previously thought unlikely.

Nearly any human endeavor will be able to be done by a machine, even marble sculpture check out this story.

https://www.robotor.it/a-robot-for-sculpture-made-by-sculptors/

And paintings made by artificial intelligence are fast and easy. What will this mean for artists?

See this site that lets you create a painting in dozens of styles from basically any input.

https://dream.ai/create

Pew Research conducted a study in Summer 2018, now nearly five years old, surveying 979 innovators, developers, business and political leaders, researchers and activists. Many were optimistic about health care, education,  and predicted advances in complex decision making, reasoning, pattern recognition and the ability to customize systems to a high degree. Think smart homes and cars that know what you like, when you like it and adjust the heat, the shades, and much more all automatically,

The study can be read here. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/12/10/artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-humans/

They noted the loss of what is called human agency. You already understand this if you don’t recall phone numbers or facts and now rely on your phone to keep all that information. When decisions about where to attend a school, get an operation, and any of dozens of other scenarios are machine produced we’ve lost our ability to make our own decisions.

Even if we put restrictions on them, human beings and governments will see ways around the pervasive nature of these kinds of systems and use them to surveil, record and potentially control others.

AI, machine learning and their cousin, automation could replace 40% of all jobs we know today and that could easily happen in the next 15 years. it’s predicted that by 2030… in seven years, 70& of companies will have adopted at least one type of AI technology, up from 33% in 2018.

Weapons and war, something human beings seemingly cannot transcend, will also be far more sophisticated, faster, and AI will affect everything from information to explosives. How far will we go in letting computers  make the decisions as to the best way to kill others?

We are approaching the age of Augmented Reality which will allow you to be in the room for the signing of the Declaration of Independence,  or on the podium for the reading of the Gettysburg Address, or on the steps hearing Doctor Martin Luther King  Jr.’s  “I have a dream” speech. Or conversely be direct witness to human horrors. It will enable people to have instant access to information and guidance as they do their jobs repairing a car, or building an aircraft.

The list is nearly endless which means along with this non human intelligence we must be extremely vigilant and attempt to install human values into these systems to reinforce ethics and empathy. Unfortunately the political will to develop legislation is typically well behind the arrival of the technology itself.

Technology on its own, has no soul. It only knows what we input and the intent we impute.

To intelligently guide machines that are smarter, more capable, more knowledgeable is going to require that most human of factors, empathy and compassion.