Chatbots are often amazing, but they will soon fall short. That is at least what Sam Altman claims, who in a recent interview with Y Combinator He talked about his past, but also the present and future of AI. His optimism is extraordinary, and he stated that the technological singularity will occur in 2025. The question, of course, is what that means.
What is the “technological singularity”. This concept defines a moment in human history in which technological development will reach an unprecedented point. As our colleague Santiago Sánchez-Migallón explained a few years ago:
“Machines will match and surpass human intelligence. According to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, the so-called “intelligence explosion” will occur, and machines will improve themselves so that each generation, becoming more intelligent, will be able to improve their own intelligence, giving rise to another new generation even more intelligent, and so on to infinity“.
The AGI has a lot to do with it (or not). Artificial general intelligence (AGI) describes a type of AI that will equal or surpass human intelligence, but while it is often suggested that AGI could be a trigger for the singularity, it could also be caused by other technological advances. For example, genetic engineering, quantum computing, bioengineering or a network of “narrow” AIs that combined can achieve the same result.
Altman believes an AGI is possible in 2025. The CEO of OpenAI indicated in the interview with Y Combinator that we could see AGI in 2025. He stressed that today this is simply an engineering problem and that the path to achieving general artificial intelligence “is basically clear.” In September he already stated that the AGI would arrive “in a few thousand days”, which certainly lengthens the deadline he was talking about in the interview.
Optimist for years. In December 2017 a still unknown Sam Altman published an article on his personal blog titled ‘The Merge‘(‘the merger’). In it he indicated how humans and machines will merge and how that fusion will be a gradual process “that is difficult to notice.” For him, this fusion had already begun then: “our cell phones control us and tell us what to do and when; social networks determine how we feel; search engines decide what we think.”
But won’t the AGI be that big of a deal? The curious thing is that Altman believes that the theoretical revolution of this artificial general intelligence “will change the world much less than we think and will impact work much less than we think.” Is what he said in january at the World Economic Forum in Davos, highlighting that in essence it would be “an incredible tool for productivity.”
Changes, yes, but not revolutions. In the interview with Y Combinator Altman emphasized that point by adding that “I think in five years it will seem like we will have an incredibly rapid pace of technological improvements,” but people will have the feeling that AGI “came and gone” and that the society itself will change “surprisingly little.” Other experts like Ray Kurzweil They have very different opinions and point to extraordinary changes.
Contradiction. Altman’s comments seem strange: if AGI is the trigger for the technological singularity, how is it possible that this frenetic pace of improvements does not change society? Altman here seems to be proposing that we are already experiencing this transformation—it is precisely what he pointed out in 2017—but of course his optimism contrasts with the fact that reaching that point does not mean a great revolution.
Image | TechCrunch
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