These two articles
have caught my attention in the first
few days of September.
First we
have:
‘I hope I’m wrong’: the co-founder of DeepMind on
how AI threatens to reshape life as we know it
David
Shariatmadari
From synthetic
organisms to killer drones, Mustafa Suleyman talks about the mind-blowing
potential of artificial intelligence, and how we can still avoid catastrophe
Sat 2 Sep 2023
18.00 AEST Last modified on
Sat 2 Sep 2023 23.23 AEST
Halfway
through my interview with the co-founder of DeepMind, the most
advanced AI research outfit in the world, I mention that I asked ChatGPT to
come up with some questions for him. Mustafa Suleyman is mock-annoyed, because
he’s currently developing his own chatbot, called Pi, and says I should have
used that. But it was ChatGPT that became the poster child for the new age of
artificial intelligence earlier this year, when it showed it could do
everything from compose poetry about Love Island in the style of John Donne to
devise an itinerary for a minibreak in Lisbon.
The trick hadn’t really worked, or so I thought – ChatGPT’s
questions were mostly generic talking points. I’d asked it to try a bit harder.
“Certainly, let’s dive into more specific and original questions that can
elicit surprising answers from Mustafa Suleyman,” it had trilled. The results
still weren’t up to much. Even so, I chuck one at him as he sits in the offices
of his startup in Palo Alto on the other end of a video call (he left DeepMind
in 2019). “How do you envision AI’s role in supporting mental health care in
the future,” I ask – and suddenly, weirdly, I feel as if I’ve got right to the
heart of why he does what he does.
“I think that what we haven’t really come to grips with is the
impact of … family. Because no matter how rich or poor you are, or which ethnic
background you come from, or what your gender is, a kind and supportive family
is a huge turbo charge,” he says. “And I think we’re at a moment with the
development of AI where we have ways to provide support, encouragement,
affirmation, coaching and advice. We’ve basically taken emotional intelligence
and distilled it. And I think that is going to unlock the creativity of
millions and millions of people for whom that wasn’t available.”
It’s not what I was expecting – AI as BFF – but it’s all the more
startling because of what Suleyman has already told me about his background.
Born in 1984 in north London to a Syrian father and English mother, he grew up
in poverty and then, when he was 16, his parents separated and both moved
abroad, leaving him and his little brother to fend for themselves. He later won
a place at Oxford to study philosophy and theology, but dropped out after a
year.
“I was frustrated with it being very theoretical. I was an
entrepreneur at heart. I was running a fruit juice and milkshake stall in
Camden Town while I was at Oxford. So I was coming back through the summer to
make money because I was completely skint. And I was also doing the charity at
the same time.” (Suleyman, although a “strong atheist”, was helping a friend
set up the Muslim Youth Helpline, designed to make counselling and support
available to young Muslims in a culturally sensitive way.) “So it was kind of
three things simultaneously. And it just felt like I was doing this ivory tower
thing when really I could be making money and doing good.”
Now 39, he’s still not in touch with his dad, and lives alone in
California. Reflecting on what he hopes AI can offer – “a boost to what you can
do, the way that you feel about yourself” – he says: “I certainly didn’t have
that. And I think that many don’t.” But is interaction with a chatbot a
realistic replacement for companionship, support, even love? It’s hard not to
find the idea a bit chilling. “It’s not intended to be a substitute. But that
doesn’t mean it’s useless. I think it can fill in the gaps where people are
lacking. It’s going to be a tool for helping people get stuff done. Right? It’s
going to be very practical.”
This is one aspect of the sunlit uplands of AI; the shadow side is
largely what preoccupies Suleyman in his new book, written with the researcher
Michael Bhaskar and ominously titled The Coming Wave. Even if you have followed
debates about the dangers of artificial intelligence, or just seen Black
Mirror, it’s a genuinely mind-boggling read, setting out the ineluctable
forces soon to completely transform politics, society and even the fabric of
life itself over the next decade or two. I tell Suleyman that it’s “sobering”.
“I mean, that’s a polite way to put it,” he says. “And, you know, it was hard
to write – it was gut wrenching in a way. And it was only because I had time to
really reflect during the pandemic that I mustered the courage to make the
case. And, obviously, I hope I’m wrong.”
Me too. The Coming Wave distils what is about to happen in a
forcefully clear way. AI, Suleyman argues, will rapidly reduce the price of
achieving any goal. Its astonishing labour-saving and problem-solving
capabilities will be available cheaply and to anyone who wants to use them. He
memorably calls this “the plummeting cost of power”. If the printing press
allowed ordinary people to own books, and the silicon chip put a computer in
every home, AI will democratise simply doing things. So, sure, that means getting
a virtual assistant to set up a company for you, or using a swarm of builder
bots to throw up an extension. Unfortunately, it also means engineering a run
on a bank, or creating a deadly virus using a DNA synthesiser.
The most extraordinary scenarios in the book come from the realm
of biotech, which is already undergoing its own transformation thanks to
breakthroughs such as Crispr, the gene-editing technology. Here, AI will act as
a potent accelerant. Manufactured products, Suleyman tells us, could one day be
“grown” from synthetic biological materials rather than assembled, using carbon
sucked out of the atmosphere. Not only that, but “organisms will soon be
designed and produced with the precision and scale of today’s computer chips
and software”. If this sounds fanciful, it’s just a bit further along a
trajectory we’ve already embarked on. He points out that companies such as The
Odin are already selling home genetic
engineering kits including live frogs and crickets for $1,999 (£1,550). You
can even buy a salamander bioengineered to express a fluorescent protein for
$299 – though when I visit the website, they’re out of stock.
Glow-in-the-dark pets aside, many of these developments hold
enormous promise: of curing disease, charting a way through the climate crisis,
creating “radical abundance”, as Suleyman puts it. But four aspects of the AI
revolution create the potential for catastrophe. First, the likelihood of
asymmetric effects. We’re familiar with this in the context of warfare – a
rag-tag band of fighters able to hamstring a powerful state using guerrilla
tactics. Well, the same principle will apply to bad actors in the age of AI: an
anonymous hacker intent on bringing down a healthcare system’s computers, say,
or a Unabomber-like figure equipped with poison-tipped drones the size of bees.
Second, there’s what Suleyman terms hyper-evolution: AI is capable
of refining design and manufacturing processes, with the improvements
compounding after each new iteration. It’s incredibly hard to keep up with this
rate of change and make sure safeguards are in place. Lethal threats could
emerge and spread before anyone has even clocked them.
Then there’s the fact that AI is “omni use”. Like electricity,
it’s a technology that does everything. It will permeate all aspect of our
lives because of the benefits it brings, but what enables those benefits also
enables harms. The good will be too tempting to forgo, and the bad will come
along with it.
Finally, there’s “autonomy”. Unique among technologies so far in
human history, AI has the potential to make decisions for itself. Though this
may invoke Terminator-style nightmares, autonomy isn’t necessarily bad:
autonomous cars are likely to be much safer than ones driven by humans. But
what happens when autonomy and hyper-evolution combine? When AI starts to
refine itself and head off in new directions on its own? It doesn’t take much
imagination to be concerned about that – and yet Suleyman believes the dangers
are too often dismissed with the wave of a hand, particularly among the tech
elite – a habit he calls pessimism aversion.
He likes to think of himself as someone who confronts problems
rather than rationalising them away. After he left Oxford he worked in policy
for the then mayor of London Ken Livingstone, before helping NGOs arrive at a
common position during the Copenhagen climate summit. It wasn’t until 2010 that
he got into AI, creating DeepMind with the coding genius Demis Hassabis, the
brother of a school friend, and becoming chief product officer. DeepMind’s
mission was to develop artificial general intelligence, AI with human-like
adaptability. Four years later it was acquired
by Google for £400m, making Suleyman and his colleagues unimaginably rich.
For a while DeepMind’s efforts seemed nerdy and abstract. It tried
to beat people at board games. Among its achievements was using AI to thrash
the champion Go player Lee Se-dol. But it was always about more than that (Hassabis
recently said: “I’ve always been interested in the nature of the universe,
nature of reality, consciousness, the meaning of life, all of these big
questions. That’s what I wanted to spend my life working on”). In 2020, it
unveiled a program that could figure out the structure of proteins, one of the
most fiendish problems in science. Painstaking research over many decades had
described the shape of about 190,000 of these complex molecules – which include
insulin and haemoglobin – information that’s vital for understanding how they
function, and coming up with targeted drug treatments. By 2022 DeepMind had
worked out another 200m.
The rest is here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/02/i-hope-im-wrong-the-co-founder-of-deepmind-on-how-ai-threatens-to-reshape-life-as-we-know-it
Also we have:
Sunday, 03 September 2023 22:30
Generative AI set to disrupt 25% of the Australian economy, Deloitte says
By David
M Williams
New
research by Deloitte indicates more than a quarter of the Australian economy
will be rapidly and significantly disrupted by generative AI or almost $600
billion of economic activity.
The
findings are part of a new report Generation AI: Ready
or not, here we come! co-developed by Deloitte
Access Economics and the Deloitte AI Institute to provide insights for Australian
C-suite executives on Generative AI (or Gen AI) and its increasing popularity
with students and employees. As well as conducting economic research, 2,550
individuals were surveyed including 2,000 current employees from across 18
industries and 550 students.
The
report examines which sectors face the biggest and most imminent disruption and
who is using Gen AI already. It also shares seven ‘no regret’ moves
organisations can make to ensure they disrupt with, rather than get disrupted
by Gen AI.
Deloitte
Australia CEO Adam
Powick said, “Leaders like me need to accept that this technology is real
and recognise that our role is to harness and guide the responsible application
of generative AI, rather than turning a blind eye or resisting change by
banning its use. We need to rapidly educate ourselves on the potential and
implications of generative AI in our settings and actively encourage adoption,
innovation and the sharing of ideas and concepts across our organisations.”
Deloitte
Access Economics Lead Technology Partner John
O’Mahony said, “Our inaugural Gen AI survey revealed students are almost
twice as likely to use Gen AI than current employees. That’s why we named the
report Generation AI: Ready or not, here we come! It speaks volumes –
businesses need to prepare for this new generation of AI users – tech-savvy
young people who are using Gen AI regularly to study, live and work better.
They will no doubt change the way work gets done and test how emerging
technology can transform businesses from within.”
Deloitte
Australia Lead Strategy & Business Design Partner and AI Institute Lead Dr Kellie
Nuttall said: “Individuals naturally embrace tech faster than business –
but Gen AI has seen this happen faster than ever before, broadening the gap
between a business and its workforce. Yes, this leads to a disruptive threat;
but it leads to an even bigger opportunity. Let’s not forget businesses are
made up of lots of individuals, each with the power to disrupt.”
Other
key report findings include:
- With 58% of students already using
Gen AI, this group is almost twice as likely as employees to use this new
tech
- 32% of employee survey respondents
use some form of Gen AI for work purposes, but about two-thirds of people
using it believe their manager doesn’t know about it
- 75% of employees are concerned with
Gen AI’s use of personal, confidential or sensitive information
- Australia ranks second-last out of
14 leading economies on its deployment of Gen AI according to one
international study
- 26% of the economy will be rapidly
disrupted by Gen AI – including finance, ICT and media, professional
services, education and wholesale trade
- So far only 9.5% of large Australian
businesses (those employing over 200 employees) have officially adopted AI
in their business. This drops to 1.4% among all businesses in Australia
Gen
AI is exploding around the world and here in Australia. There are now more than
3,000 Gen AI tools available. The amount invested annually in AI by Australian
businesses is expected to be seven times what it is today by 2030 and the
number of daily users is expected to double in the next five years.
Here is the link:
https://itwire.com/business-it-news/data/generative-ai-set-to-disrupt-25-of-the-australian-economy-deloitte-says.html
As I read
through this, and others in the same domain, I really do just wonder how all
this will play out and what the impact will be, especially on those whose
employment is more labour intensive. We are going to make sure there are few
left behind in what will be a dramatic transformation in all aspexts of work
(and play), over the coming decade.
The feeling ‘we ain’t seen nothing yet!’
pervades I believe.
David.
