Napoleon was not known as a good loser. But when in 1809 he lost a game of chess (actually several times) to a machine, he reacted with uncharacteristic glee. This contrasts with the warnings voiced by tech pundits in recent weeks about the near certainty that they presume we have entered the age of artificial intelligence, with the French emperor You may wonder why I was so calm.
For one thing, although Napoleon wasn’t sure of it at the time, the machine that defeated him, the “Mechanical Turk,” was a wooden box with fake gears that hid a human chess player pulling a lever. was in a hidden compartment. For another reason, in early 19th century Europe there were more mechanical Turks out there poised to put people out of work or outright enslavement, and they were not widely feared. .
We are still at a moment in history when there are many things that only humans can do, or at least at low cost. It looks like you created a job. So-called “human intelligence tasks” – from moderating social media posts to identifying objects in blurry photos – are big business for multinational tech companies looking to use them to train algorithms. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world run them part-time (many of them are employed through an Amazon-owned service called Mechanical Turk).
But many experts fear that the scope of human-only work is rapidly shrinking. Companies like OpenAI (the company behind the famous chatbot ChatGPT) and Google’s DeepMind have brought us closer to a tipping point where AI will forever define the future of humanity.
Ensuring that the development of AI doesn’t end up burdening us is a challenge that AI ethicists call the “coordination problem.” How can we align the goals of AI to what is best for us and harness its power for human flourishing?
We are still at a moment in history when there are so many things that only humans can do.
Broadly speaking, resolving alignments requires more global cooperation. Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at New York University, and Anka Reuel, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, have called for the creation of an international agency for artificial intelligence. Given the vastly different approaches to technology today, it makes sense for everyone to be on the same page.
But in a narrower sense, each country should not only regulate AI, but establish its own public infrastructure dedicated to putting AI at the top of its national agenda in order to realize its most beneficial properties. I can. Very few people do this. However, the UAE, which rolled out a National AI Strategy in 2017, has a good template and now has both a portfolio of ministers and a public university dedicated to understanding AI (two world firsts).
Industry and Advanced Technologies Minister Sultan Al-Jaber said on Saturday during a visit to the Mohammed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, which he chairs, that the country’s artificial intelligence research and adoption across industries will help diversify the country’s economy. goals, but also help fight climate change.
Partnerships with the private sector are a key part of the UAE’s AI strategy. Dr. Al Jaber will accompany G42 CEO Peng Xiao on a visit, using data engines to help the Emirate of Abu Dhabi improve its climate policy. and the latest on a joint project with computer company IBM.
But what characterizes the UAE’s vision as a global hub for AI R&D is seeing progress in the field primarily through the lens of the public good. Building a coherent AI strategy and designing the national infrastructure needed to achieve it is an important first step in solving the coordination problem and how amazing technology has become. also to ensure that the human continues to pull the lever.
Updated: May 1, 2023, 3:00 AM
