The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the modern world has made many things possible that were otherwise impossible a few decades ago. It made machines learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform tasks that are normally done by humans.
In a recent Twitter post by OpenAI's top researcher, he claims that AI may already be gaining consciousness today. Even before this statement, many have already voiced their concerns about whether AI or robots would someday replace humans and take over the world.
OpenAI Chief Scientist Claims AI Today May Be Slightly Conscious
OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has made his startling claim on Twitter that today's large neural networks are gaining consciousness. His statement was considered to be an unusual point of view as most AI researchers regarded machine learning as a technology that has been greatly improving throughout the past decade.
Although, scientists also pointed out that AI still needs to improve a lot because it still falls far short of human intelligence, a goal that AI researchers have been trying to achieve. Sutskever might be just jesting, but it is also possible that he is already looking downrange.
During his interview in the iHuman AI documentary, he declared that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will solve all the problems of the world today. AGIs are AI that is said to operate at a human or superhuman level. But he also warned that this technology will present the possibility of creating stable dictatorships.
As Futurism reported, Sutskever seems to have claimed that AI consciousness has arrived. But ironically, OpenAI was founded to specifically curb the existential risks that sentiment robots pose. Per their company's mission statement, OpenAI is posed to make AI that will benefit all of humanity.
The company has introduced their GPT-3 model that can make a chatbot copy a dead person and spew words that it learned. But a 2022 MIT review reported that it is behaving better now after OpenAI reconfigured it.
Will Advanced Robots Take Over the World?
As technology advances, hyper-advanced AI is inevitable and there could be a time that AI programs will have human-level intelligence or consciousness capable of speech and reasoning. By that time, it may have an impact on the economy, politics, and perhaps warfare. According to Scientific American, the birth of true AI will greatly affect the future of humanity.
But this also raised concerns that it will one day grow uncontrollably and perhaps lead to taking over the world and wiping out humanity. Scientists refer to this as the "AI singularity".
However, scientists from the University of Huddersfield wrote in The Conversation that AI singularity does not seem that plausible on a practical level given how limited AI actually is. Although some advances in AI today can outperform humans in some tasks, there is still little data that suggests that AGI can emulate humans' ability to respond to different tasks and put humans at risk in the future.
On the other hand, scientists said that its possibility can not be completely ruled out because of the dramatic effects AI has on human society.
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