Tools like ChatGPT open new Promethean era – 03/23/2023 – Thomas L. Friedman

I had a remarkable but disturbing experience last week. Craig Mundie, former director of research and strategy at Microsoft, was giving me a demo of GPT-4, the most advanced version of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT.

Craig was preparing to inform the board of my wife’s museum, Planet Word, of which he is a member, about the effect ChatGPT will have on words, language and innovation.

“You have to understand,” he warned me before starting his demonstration, “this is going to change everything. I think it represents humanity’s greatest invention to date. It’s qualitatively different – ​​and it will be transformative.”

Language-wide models like ChatGPT will steadily increase their capabilities, Craig added, and move us “towards a form of general artificial intelligence” offering efficiencies in operations, ideas, discoveries and intuitions.

Then he did a demonstration. And I realized that Craig’s words were an understatement. First, he asked GPT-4 – which has just been released to the public – to summarize Planet Word and its mission in 400 words. He did it perfectly, in a few seconds.

Then he asked to do the same in 200 words. A few more seconds. Afterwards, he asked to do the same in Arabic. Just as quickly. Then in Mandarin. Two more seconds. Then again in English – but in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet. A few more seconds.

So Craig asked GPT-4 to write the same description in an alphabetic verse – in which the first line starts with the letter A, the second with B, and so on through the entire alphabet. He did so, in English, with impressive creativity:

I could barely sleep that night. Watching an AI system produce this level of originality in multiple languages ​​in just a few seconds at a time… Well, the first thing that came to mind was science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that “any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic”.

The second thing I remembered was a moment at the beginning of the movie “The Wizard of Oz”: the tornado scene where everything and everyone is lifted up in a whirlwind, including Dorothy and Toto, and then swept out of the banal world of Kansas into bright and futuristic Land of Oz, where everything is colorful.

We’re about to be hit by one of those tornadoes. This is a Promethean moment – ​​one of those moments in history when certain tools, ways of thinking or sources of energy are introduced that are so different and advanced than what already existed that you can’t just change one thing, you have to change everything. That is, how you create, how you compete, how you collaborate, how you work, how you learn, how you govern, and yes, how you cheat, commit crimes, and wage wars.

We know the main Promethean eras of the last 600 years: the invention of the printing press, the scientific revolution, the agricultural revolution combined with the industrial revolution, the nuclear energy revolution, personal computing and the internet. And now this moment.

But this Promethean moment is not driven by a single invention, but by a technological supercycle. It is our ability to sense, scan, process, learn, share and act, increasingly with the help of AI. This cycle is being put into everything – from the car to the refrigerator, from the smartphone to fighter jets – and driving more and more processes every day.

That’s why I call our Promethean age “the age of acceleration, amplification, and democratization.” Never before have so many humans had access to cheaper tools that amplify their power at an ever-increasing pace, as they are diffused into the personal and professional lives of more and more people at the same time. And it’s happening faster than most expected.

The potential use of these tools to solve seemingly impossible problems is staggering. Consider just one example that most people have probably never heard of — the way DeepMind, an AI lab owned by Google parent Alphabet, recently used its AlphaFold AI system to solve one of the most complex problems in science.

The problem is known as “protein folding”. Proteins are large, complex molecules made up of chains of amino acids.

But, noted Science News, it took “decades of slow experiments” to reveal “the structure of more than 194,000 proteins, all stored in the protein database.” By 2022, however, “the AlphaFold database has exploded with predicted structures for over 200 million proteins.” For a human being, it would be worthy of a Nobel Prize. Maybe two.

With that, our understanding of the human body took a giant leap. As a 2021 scientific paper said, “Unfolding AI’s Potential” [revelando o potencial da IA]published by the Bipartisan Policy Center, AlphaFold is a metatechnology: “Metatechnologies have the ability to help find patterns that aid discovery in virtually every discipline.”

ChatGPT is another one of these metatechnologies. But, as Dorothy discovered when she was suddenly transported to Oz, there was a good witch and a bad witch there, both vying for her soul. So it will be with ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, AlphaFold and the like.

We are ready? It’s not what it looks like. We’re debating whether to ban books in the wake of a technology that can summarize or answer questions about virtually every book.

Like so many modern digital technologies based on software and chips, AI is “dual-use” – it can be a tool or a weapon.

The last time we invented such a powerful technology, we created nuclear energy – it can be used to light up your entire country or destroy your entire planet. It was developed by governments, who collectively created a system of controls to prevent its proliferation for bad actors.

AI, on the other hand, is being promoted by private for-profit companies. The question we have to ask, Craig argued, is how to govern a country, and a world, where these AI technologies “can be weapons or tools in every field”, while being controlled by private companies and increasing in power every day. ? And do it in such a way as not to throw the baby out with the bathwater?

We will need to develop what I call “complex adaptive coalitions” – where companies, governments, social entrepreneurs, educators, competing superpowers and moral philosophers come together to define how to get the best and dampen the worst of AI.

No player in that coalition can solve the problem alone. It requires a model of government that is very different from traditional left-right politics. And we will have to make the transition to it amidst the worst tensions between the great powers since the end of the Cold War, and with culture wars raging in virtually every democracy.

We better figure this out quick, Toto, because we’re not in Kansas anymore.