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AI – will it mean exponential growth for humanity, or a new dark age? Wojciech Gryc explores the potential and offers three approaches to alleviate the risks. 

Large language models like GPT-4, Claude, and others are ushering a new world – one where AI is available to everyone and everyone can benefit from showing an AI agent how to do things without actually building customized algorithms or data sets1. The unreasonable effectiveness of such models promises more models in the future, including ones that work across images, sound, video, and even 3-dimensional objects2.

This new wave of AI is akin to being around when the Internet was developed or when the Apple App Store launched. At the same time, it is completely unclear what capabilities these models have, what capabilities they will have, and how they will interact with humanity. Hence the view of this memo – we are at an inflection point with AI.

Why an AI Inflection Point is Needed

The 21st century is “the most important century”; it promises to usher in continued exponential growth for humanity, or at worst, a new dark age where nothing progresses. Given the challenges of climate change, an aging world with stalling population growth, and other geopolitical and socioeconomic risks, it is reasonable to fear that the 20th century was the peak of humanity’s economic growth. One way to address this is via artificial intelligence; by having digital agents and robots that automate human tasks, we can continue experiencing the exponential growth we’re accustomed to3.

This inflection point enables numerous opportunities and ways to address some of our biggest challenges in the 21st century. These include:

Automation and productivity boosting while addressing the challenges of an aging workforce. AI can dramatically improve productivity and enable us to take better care of retired and aging individuals, while also maintaining (if not increasing!) the level of output we are accustomed to.

Personalizing education, medicine, and other fields can foster social mobility. Education, in particular, can be improved via personalized tutors, support for students who normally don’t have access to support, and much more. When used in such a way, AI can enable social mobility.

AI-aided research, thinking, and invention. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) need not be invented to enable new discoveries across pretty much any scientific field. AI-aided research can help increase the rate at which discoveries are made, and thus enable further economic and social growth.

 

Key points include:

• The inflection point
• Challenges in the 21st century
• Extrinsic and intrinsic risks

Read the full article, The AI Inflection Point and Planning for the Future, on10MillionSteps.com.