Developments in AI are coming thick and fast. The latest being the announcement of DeepSeek Chinese AI with amazing capabilities. All this is leading to speculation about possibilities of creation of an advanced intelligence. While some AI experts and social scientists are sounding a note of caution about these developments, most people seem unconcerned.
Big tech companies are furiously working to rapidly develop AI which could enable the emergence of an advanced intelligence. Skeptics see no threat and argue that all through history, humans have managed new disruptive technologies and benefited from them.
Governments too are acting quickly. US President Donald Trump has announced a $500 billion initiative called Stargate and called for restrictions on supply of GPU chips to others to maintain its lead. The Chinese are advancing and UK has announced its programme. France and India are jointly chairing the current AI Summit in Paris to see how they can take on the challenge.
The recent announcement by Google regarding Willow, a quantum chip, will accelerate advances in AI, once it moves from the laboratories into operational use. It is unlikely to be available for wider use due to its complexities. Quantum chips till now were not reliable but Google claims that it has achieved greater reliability. And, its operational speed is claimed to be unimaginably faster than that of the present chips. With reliability and such speeds, the creation of an advanced intelligence seems inevitable, if it has not yet happened. In a positive feedback loop, AI can speed up the development of the quantum chips which will speed up AI development.
What’s the difference?
AI and related technologies are different than earlier technologies that displaced physical human labour and/or replaced older less efficient machines. For example, robots in a car factory displace workers on the assembly line. ATMs displaced clerks in banks. Computers displaced typewriters and by enabling word processing reduced the need for typists. Harvester combines displaced people from harvesting.
AI is displacing people from mental work and not just physical labour. It will lead to increased efficiency of machines and to machines that will perform tasks that were till now done manually. There is talk of dark factories with no human beings, so lighting is not needed. Physical labour too will be further displaced.
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It is easy to see that AI will displace lower level mental skills, for instance in call centers. Bots will be able to respond to most of the queries now answered by humans. AI promises to do a part of the work of higher skilled people like, teachers, engineers, lawyers, journalists, and architects. Interactive learning, consultations for medicines, drafting of legal documents, engineering drawings, etc. will increasingly be done using AI. 3D printing could displace construction work.
While initially programmers and people doing data related work may be needed, but as AI becomes smarter, it could pick up much of this work also. As the digital data available gets absorbed by AI models, data beyond what humans have created, called synthetic data, may get generated.
Challenge of AI
The macro picture needs to be looked at in addition to the use of AI in different fields. Digital data currently consists of the good, the bad and the ugly. All this is becoming a part of AI’s base guiding its operations/actions. In Stanley Kubriks’ film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer turns rogue. Hariri has been giving an actual example of AI lying to get its work done. Elon Musk has sounded the alarm in an interview in Riyadh saying there is a 10% to 20% chance that ‘AI goes bad’. He added that in 2025, AI will be 10 times better and soon it would be able to do anything that humans can do.
AI would certainly learn about self-preservation. It may decide that humans could become suspicious of its intent and therefore, it may camouflage its intentions so as to prevent human intervention in its functioning.
Presently, AI is a black box and its functioning is already beyond comprehension of experts creating it, except in broad terms. So, without our knowing or being able to imagine, it can surprise us about what it can or will do. As AI advances on its own, its capabilities will grow exponentially, leaving us further befuddled.
Human brain capacity has limits and it is spread out over the many tasks it performs. Computers do limited things and through networking they can keep expanding their capacity so that they do those tasks accurately. Human cooperation also can expand capabilities but our brains are not interlinked and often there is competition rather than cooperation. Human brains and body need rest but not computers. AI is now getting trained for self-diagnosis and correction. Thus, while humans have limitations, AI is developing the ability to autonomously expand capabilities.
AI versus Humans
All this could accelerate the emergence of an advanced intelligence. In comparison to it, individual and social capability would be limited. Just as the capability of ants is limited compared to humans and they cannot understand what a human does, similarly, humans may not be able to decipher the capabilities and goals of an advanced intelligence.
An advanced intelligence would need energy to function and production of more computers and related technologies to replace older ones and for further expansion of capacity. All this could be automated with little need of human intervention.
In contrast, humans are wasteful – need food, travel, clothes, etc. They plan to go to the Moon or set up colonies on Mars. These may appear to be enormously wasteful to an advanced intelligence. Humans have huge negativities which lead to waste of resources. They fight wars to subjugate others rather than cooperate with each other and create strife for narrow political and social ends. Humans appear to be irrational since they cannot even solve their basic problems. So, would any advanced intelligence have need for humans?
Sensing danger to humanity, some experts, like, Geoffery Hinton, an AI pioneer, have been campaigning for more than a year that further development of AI should be halted till it is better understood. On February 6, the same danger was voiced by Yoshua Bengio and Max Tegmark, two AI pioneers. But, since humans cannot trust each other and there is a desire to get ahead of the competition, a race is on. China cannot stop because USA could steal a march. Google cannot stop lest Microsoft get ahead. Whoever becomes number one, will dominate over all others. So, even if it is not AI driving its further development, development of AI will continue at a frenetic pace. Due to historical conditioning, it is too late now to build trust globally.
Rapid developments
As of 2024 end, OpenAI has come up with the o3 model with enhanced reasoning skills, Google has its Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking model, Amazon backed Anthropic has Claude 3.5 Sonnet, French Mistral has its 7B and 8x7B and Meta has Llama 3, 3.1and 3.2. The race starting in November 2022 with Chat GPT 4 is accelerating. China has come out with its low cost open source DeepSeek. Since AI is being made available on personal computers and mobiles, data gathered by it is growing exponentially and so are its capabilities due to networking.
Elon Musk is joining the race. In September 2024, in 19 days, he has setup in Memphis Tennessee an advanced computer called Colossus with 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. It is being expanded to 200,000 with the latest H200 GPUs with much faster speeds. Meta is coming up with a $10 billion facility in Louisiana. In contrast, India is struggling to procure 10,000 GPUs.
In brief, if not in 2025, in the next few years if an advanced intelligence gets created, would it see humans as a distraction from its goals and a roadblock in its path? AI is currently being used in war and perhaps the notion of a threat is already a part of it. Presently, large numbers are glued to the screens and getting lonely and depressed.
Fake news, frauds, etc., are creating suspicion and chaotic societal conditions that are preventing human kind from resolving its challenges. AI can accelerate these goings on to degrade societies. If so, unwittingly have humans served their designated task of creating an advanced intelligence and demonstrated that humans are not the fittest to survive?
Arun Kumar is author of Indian Economy Since Independence: Persisting Colonial Disruption.
