Who Will Guide Our Future: Machines or Human Minds?

Context: The fears around the latest Artificial Intelligence tool- GPT-3 to displace human intelligence, are ill-founded and impede the advancement of science.

Flaws in the GPT-3 language model

• Accuracy is not its strong point: While it may be used for surrealist fiction and other commercial application, its comprehension of the real world is often seriously off.

• They don’t learn about the world; they learn about the text and how people use words in relation to other words.

• Dangers of Misinformation: A software that writes without understanding what it’s writing raises the prospect of frightening misuse in the form of misinformation, spams and phishing.

• These new sophisticated tools are capable of analyzing “high-dimensional” data-sets, and the predictions they provide often defy the best human ability to interpret them.

• Mirrors Biases in the Society: Because it was trained on text found online, it’s likely that GPT-3 mirrors many biases found in society.

Measures are taken to avoid AI dominance: 

• Creators of GPT-3 prohibit it from impersonating humans; that is, all text produced by it must disclose that it was written by a bot.
• OpenAI has also invited external researchers to study the system’s biases, in the hope of mitigating them.

Mitigating the Human fears of new technology

• Not a new phenomenon: This is not the first time that an emergent technology has seemed to pose an existential threat.

• For E.g. It was feared that nuclear energy would contaminate the world.
• DNA engineering was expected to unleash biological warfare.

• Looking at GPT-3 as just a tool: Francis Bacon was one of the first to propose that human perception and reason could be augmented by tools.

• Much like the compass and the telescope, GPT-3 is yet another tool that humans have at their disposal.
• Although the disconcerting divergence between the ability of human senses and what the tools are capable has increased, AI will just be a tool.