Desdemona, a humanoid robot designed by Hanson Robotics and endowed with expressiveness and interactivity to teach AI to understand and care about people. — ETX Studio picNEW YORK, March 16 — Artificial intelligence aficionados are betting that the technology will help solve humanity’s biggest problems, from wars to global warming, but in practice, these may be unrealistic ambitions for now.
“It’s a pipe dream. It’s a little bit science fiction. Mostly what people are doing is they’re trying to bring AI to bear on specific problems that they’re already solving, but just want to be more efficient.”With their promising titles , and the ever presence of tech giants, the panels attract big crowds, but they often hold more pragmatic objectives, like promoting a product.
OpenAI claims to want to build artificial “general” intelligence or AGI, which will be “smarter than humans in general” and will “elevate humanity,” according to CEO Sam Altman. “Once you have a machine that can think as well as a smart human, you’re at most a few years from a machine that can think a thousand or a million times better than a smart human, because this AI can modify its own source code,” said Goertzel.
AI’s “positive disruptions...can help to solve global sustainability issues, although people are probably going to be just creating financial trading algorithms that are absolutely effective,” he said. Even if “we’re not there yet... in a dream world, AI could handle the complexity and the randomness of the real world, and... discover completely new materials that would enable us to do things that we never even thought were possible,” said Roxanne Tully, an investor at Piva Capital.