Tuesday, May 2, 2023

Beneath the facade of Artificial Intelligence

The article linked below talks about researchers successfully inventing a liquid metal robot that can shapeshift like a Terminator:

Software and robotics engineers are making rapid progress in artificial Intelligence.

Soon, AI stuff like ChatGPT will become child's play.

Here's my two cents worth of opinion on the recent emergence of artificial intelligence on the Internet:

From electronic calculators to supermarket point-of-sale terminals to utility bills, from bar codes to Quick Response codes, from e-banking to e-wallets, we have steadily "surrendered" the task of checking and counting to computer systems.

We trust the computer to be correct all the time, as long as the input data has been keyed or scanned in correctly.

Few realise that such trust can be misplaced when we depend on sophisticated software systems like google search, for instance, to look for answers to questions, for general knowledge and for links to websites.

It is no longer a matter of computation or calculations.

Instead, the people who control the search engine can control what we see and what we don't see. They can conceal some inconvenient truths or hide some historical facts if they want to, perhaps at the behest of a powerful "deep state".

Recently, AI has made another leap forward in providing, and also controlling, answers to our questions.

Instead of being a search engine that merely displays a list of stuff for us to browse through, AI robots like chatGPT responds to our questions (called prompts) by replying us in complete and articulate sentences composed into a coherent passage.

In other words, it combines information from multiple sources, including language and even local culture (I have seen examples of chatgpt replying in malaysian slang) when responding to our prompts.

In doing so, this artificially intelligent robot seems to converse intelligently with us. Hence its name "chatbot".

Here is where our fascination should end, and our precaution should begin:

  1. The organisations that produce chat robots can control what sources the chatbot includes and what it leaves out, i e. it can control what it wants us to read or learn. Imagine an entire generation of young people who take chatbots as the final authority in all areas of knowledge without question.
  2. Chatbots will continue to advance rapidly, to reply our prompts with such flair and eloquence, with such persuasive statements and convincing arguments that we will gradually, even progressively lose our ability to think, to write and to articulate our thoughts. We will soon be surrendering yet another basic life-task to the computer.
  3. AI users who steadily lose their ability to carry out basic tasks, will increasingly become more dependent on such robots.
  4. Such chatbots will continue to evolve into "higher" forms e.g. a life-like robot who actually sits down and chats with you at Starbucks, or in a more undesirable way, a robot that can threaten you with harm and violence.

The shape shifting liquid metal robot described in the link at the beginning of this article is a precursor to more sinister AI stuff in years to come.

It may herald the fulfillment of some of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation e.g. the image of the Beast.

Brothers and Sisters in Jesus the Anointed One, let us be watchful. We are living in the last days.

NPY
20Feb23
17:55 hrs GMT+8