The AI Age

By: Christoph Whilton

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 38 mins

Publisher's summary

The new tech future is unfolding before our very eyes as a monumental shift in computer learning happened in 2012 with AlexNet. Basically, this was a proof of concept in which GPUs or parallel processing units could be used to train a neural network to do predictive analysis, which ushered in the age of artificial general intelligence that we are in now. Before this machine learning was costly and instructions were inputted by human programmers; now, 12 years after AlexNet, the biggest tech companies are running supercomputers with the most robust GPUs in a race to create better AGIs for human use, and we have democratized AGI access and use for humanity that has been trained on all the human data that has been put online. The concept of AI dates back to antiquity, and in the modern era, we can thank Turing and his work in the mid-nineteenth century. The game, however, has changed as we have moved from machine learning, similar to smart devices littering homes around the world, to a "true" form of AI. We haven't publicly reached the singularity, but the greatest minds in the sector, like Kurzweil, Pichai, and Altman, are anticipating that we will have enough computing power in combination with enough knowledge to make artificial super intelligence a reality within 10 to 20 years. We have entered a scientific journey, and the conclusion is unknown. Two certainties will be true for current and future AGI and ASI developments, i.e., it will force us to reflect on what it is to be human and humanity will forever be changed as we are at the precipice of developing a technology that will be the greatest human invention ever simultaneously with being the last as what is being "human" will change. AGI isn't perfect as neural networks have hallucinations and emergent properties, which isn't surprising as humans who are learning experience the same things. Humans fear what we don't know and what we don't understand as we are psychologically predisposed to do so. We have entered The Universal Artificial General Intelligence Age, and there is no turning back as we have changed tech, the world, industry, and humanity forever. At some point soon, we will enter The Universal Artificial Super Intelligence Age, and although many believe that it will be a dystopian future, there is a much higher statistical probability that we will be ushering in a utopian era of ever-present wellness, peace, creativity, achievement, and so much more that can't even be imagined by us at present because of our own minds. Welcome to The AGI Age!

“The pace of progress in artificial intelligence is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast—it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously monumental and beautiful happening is in the five-year time frame. 10 years at most.”
—adapted from an Elon Musk statement