Intelligence, Artificial and Augmented
This could be my last blog article for 2024. So I'm going to sit back and maybe reread some of the articles that I've written and see what has been the main themes for me this year. Actually, I went a step further: I fed all the articles I've written in 2024 into an AI model, and allowed it to analyse and distill my writing for the past year. What it concluded was pretty interesting. It even generated a podcast with a male and female host discussing insightfully about my articles!
The podcast I think successfully captured the essence of what I've wanted to achieve with my blog articles. With the advent of AI, we are all on undergoing another technological paradigm shift. This will be more massive than the dot-com boom in the late nineties. AI will transform every sphere of our lives. How will AI help us evolve as human beings?
The advance of AI is happening at a frightening pace because AI itself is a tool that helps us to build better AI. It is a positive feedback loop that is driving this exponential growth. The human mind and human society in general will not be able to respond fast enough to the ethical implications of this new technology. To a certain extent, we went through that with the rise of the internet. It dramatically improved our lives with the convenience of instant messaging, video streaming, online shopping and learning. The entire knowledge of the world is immediately available to us with a few taps of our fingers. But so are all the ugliness and bigotries of humanity--cyberbullying, online scams, child porn and religious radicalism and the spread of terrorist ideologies.
Computer malware and viruses are all by-products of the internet age. We can never get rid of them because they are constantly evolving and becoming better. So will AI technology, under the hands of bad actors. AI will help malware to evolve and adapt themselves to get around ever-tighter security and open up new attack vectors in the form of human impersonators that are indistinguishable from real ones. There'll come a point where we'll never know whether a video or audio is real or fake. We'll need to rely on technology itself to authenticate the truthfulness of any content we see. There will be a constant war between good AI and bad AI.
Every technological change amplifies the good and bad side of humans. With AI, the amplification will be many orders of magnitude. If technology only mirrors our imperfections, perhaps we can use it as an instrument to reflect and analyse ourselves. The technology as it is now, allows me to interrogate myself, ask questions about my personal philosophy through my writings. That is how I want to use AI: to open up intellectual dimensions hitherto unknown or inaccessible to me. Not only will it help me to psychoanalyse myself, it will play the roles of a diligent and intelligent assistant to help me come up with new insights and ideas.
Perhaps the quest towards human enlightenment could also hastened with AI. Raw intelligence is not wisdom but it is a pre-requisite. Will AGI (artificial general intelligence) mature into AGW (artificial general wisdom)? Will AI amplify our baser instincts or elevate our nobler side? Only time will tell. Human intelligence is not powerful enough to make such complex projections. We can only hope that AI will augment our humble intelligence, and help us make wiser decisions. It's going to be a brave new world of AI, and we shall all look forward to the future with hope and cautious optimism.
