People need to stop worrying about Artificial Intelligence and “relax”, a leading expert in the technology has said.
Last week, world leaders flew to Britain for the world’s first AI Safety Summit and signed the Bletchley Declaration.
Those in attendance acknowledged the technology could lead to “serious, even catastrophic, harm” in the future but equally that it could “transform and enhance human wellbeing, peace and prosperity”.
Pessimists have predicted the technology could lead to huge job losses in certain sectors, while Elon Musk has labelled it a “risk” to humanity.
Speaking to The Anton Savage Show, UCC’s AI Professor Barry O’Sullivan said the impact of the technology is unlikely to be as dramatic as people fear.
“People should relax as most of this is not going to happen,” he said.
Professor O’Sullivan said AI has been made “an amazing advance in many respects” but that it would never be able to fully replace humanity.
“These things are not intelligent, they don’t have any understanding of the world in the way that any of us, any of the listeners, in fact any of our pet cats and dogs, [do],” he said.
“These systems give the illusion of intelligence but they’re not intelligent.”
Professor O’Sullivan said a good example of this is how many people would use the internet to research certain health conditions, but doctors are still as needed as ever.
“How many of us have actually gone on the internet to diagnose ourselves? We have some symptoms and we stick them into Google, we search for them and discover, ‘Oh my God, I seem to have this terminal illness,’” he said.
“Then you go to someone who is an expert in the field, a GP, and your GP tells you, ‘Actually, you know what you need, you need to exercise more and take a vitamin.’”
Jobs
That said, over the years, technology has made a number of jobs defunct; advances in renewable energy mean, for example, you are far less likely to meet a coal miner than you were in the 1950s.
Similarly, AI will mean some jobs are no longer needed but others will be created to support the new technology.
“There’s never been a technology that’s eliminated more jobs than it has created,” Professor O’Sullivan said.
“Jobs have always been created by AI; so in ChatGPT, no one would have heard of a prompt engineer.
“A prompt engineer is, in my view, not the most exciting job in the world but it is a new type of job - that’s the person who figures out how to pose the questions to these generative AI systems to get the answer that you want.
“This is a job that never existed before.”
For those interesting in learning more about AI, Microsoft has created a free six week introductory course on the technology.
Main image: A nursing robot. Photo: Felix Kästle/dpa
