Humans have never impeded the transformation in their lives throughout history rather humans have records in their history of adjusting themselves with innovations if that had been created on an ad hoc basis or with a comprehensive plan of action. Introduction of Artificial intelligence is a milestone and depicts the intellectual capacity of human beings to create or invent more intelligent and efficient inventions than themselves. Given the fact that human beings had started nuclear weapon research projects back in the 1930s, later on, nuclear invention occurred which has enough potential to serve humanity and at the same time exploit humanity to an unimaginable extent like human beings witnessed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities of Japan in mid-1940s, were destroyed. Now it is solely on the shoulders of mankind and especially world leaders to respond wisely and understand that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,”
The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956 but has now become global discourse and headlines due to increased data volumes, advanced algorithms, and computing power and storage improvements. A.I. systems like ChatGPT are built on neural networks, mathematical systems that can learn skills by analyzing data. Around 2018, companies like Google and OpenAI began building neural networks that learned from massive amounts of digital text culled from the internet. By pinpointing patterns in all this data, these systems learn to generate writing on their own, including news articles, poems, computer programs, and even humanlike conversation. The result: chatbots like ChatGPT. The A.I system learn from more data than their creator can understand, this system also exhibits unexpected behaviour. Researchers showed that one system was able to hire a human online to defeat the captcha test. When the human asked if it was “a robot,” the system lied and said it was a person with a visual impairment.
Elon Musk, who opened A.I with Sam Altman, its chief executive, warn that A.I is far more dangerous than we can’t imagine, from the job market to human privacy, human capital and even stock markets, nation and nuclear security, all are under the direct radar of A.I. According to the International Monetary Forum, A.I in advanced markets may impact 60% job market, and almost 40% of global employment is directly exposed to A.I. IMF staff assessed the readiness of 125 countries. The findings reveal that wealthier economies, including advanced and some emerging market economies, tend to be better equipped for AI adoption than low-income countries, though there is considerable variation across countries.
The dilemma with A.I is that it is now compulsory not an option, but options left for humans are humans should address AI’s anticipated negative impacts with actors and stakeholders within and beyond borders, developing policies to assure that development in A.I is directed to augment human and common goods.
—The writer is contributing columnist, based in Islamabad. Email:[email protected]
views expressed are writer’s own.
