“The generation that will think about the best applications of AI may be high school students or even elementary school students today” – Evangelical Focus

Applications of AI


Charlie Catlett, a computer scientist who was deeply involved in the creation of the original internet in the 1980s, has closely followed the evolution (and particular “revolution”) of artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years.

Evangelical Focus I spoke to him during a conference in Poland, where he spoke with Christian leaders from across Europe about recent technological changes and their impact on society.

Charlie Catlett, during the interview with Evangelical Focus, in Poland. / Photo: Joel Forster.

Question: Charlie, we were talking with you about the emergence of ChatGPT just a year ago, and now we have new questions and everything is moving at a very fast pace. Evangelical Focus reader Some of you may recall that you said that artificial intelligence models in 2022 are “like cannonballs splashing water. ” How do you see the evolution of these technologies in recent months?

answer. I think we've seen some very impressive progress in terms of functionality with models like ChatGPT, and other models have emerged that have improved dramatically: Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claud, Meta's Llama series, France's Mistral, and others.

I can’t say I was blown away by any of the big surprises I saw when I first introduced ChatGPT, but I have been impressed with how quickly the technology has advanced in several areas, including multimodal and multimedia.

For example, Google Gemini 1.5In 2017, we saw some very impressive capabilities analyzing video. We can include an entire movie in the prompt and ask, “In which scene in the movie does one of the characters take a piece of paper out of his pocket? What's written on it?” and the model can answer these kinds of questions about a sequence of scenes from the movie.

And recently, Open AI announced a feature called Sora, which takes text prompts and creates animations (photorealistic or cartoonish), which is really remarkable. So, I think there are still some new features coming and it's on a path of rapid growth, but I haven't seen anything yet that will match the wow factor of ChatGPT in November 2022.

Q. The new model that ChatGPT will launch in spring 2024 will be highly interactive. You can have a voice conversation with IA on your mobile phone, it will tell jokes, and it will have a very emotional approach to the user. This is reminiscent of the 2013 movie “Her” starring Joaquin Phoenix, in which a lonely man develops a relationship with IA and eventually becomes completely dependent on her. Is there a risk that this increasingly sophisticated interaction system will exploit the emotional bond between man and machine to sell products or make decisions that should not be made in the real world?

A. These are important questions. A few months ago, I was a bit surprised to see a survey about the most popular AI consumer applications (“apps”): there was no contest, the most popular consumer application was a “companion chat” – one that lets you go to these online services and choose the type of “chat buddy” you want.

So I have some concerns about people replacing human relationships with digital ones.

“The most popular apps are ‘companion chats’, where you can go to these online services and pick out the kind of ‘chat buddy’ that you want”

Could these chat bots be controlled by an entity that wants to make money from the interaction? I think that’s a real danger. We’ve seen this with social media: we take advantage of the free service but we’re not realising that it’s not really free: were giving it our attention and our time, which is our most valuable resource. But we’re also the ‘product’ if you will, that they use to sell advertising spaces on their site.

It would be pretty easy for chatbots to manipulate us in that way. We are very easily manipulated by language, that’s how we humans are built!

Q. We do not really know where these ways will lead us to in 5-10 years. What should we take and what we should leave about AI?

A. Well, I’d say that it’s important to have our eyes open about these tools and what the business model behind the tool is. We need to think about how we want to participate or not participate.

It’s great to keep in touch with people through free social media networks, so they definitely have some benefits. They have downsides as well: addiction to phones of adolescents whose brains are still developing.

“Chatbots are non-persons, and you shouldn’t be having a personal relationship with a non-person”

Over the past ten years or so, I don’t think people have really fully realized that the influence that your social media feed and the associated advertisements have over you.

Whether it’s correlation or cause, we can see increased polarization of our societies, certainly in the West. People are able to surround themselves in social media with only things that they agree with. The algorithms that are designed by a tech company running this free service, are essentially agnostic to the type of information that you want. As you continue to use these services, the algorithms are designed to give you information that will keep you using the site, get you addicted to spending time on the site.

People make the mistake of thinking that the social media companies are trying to influence them one way or another. They’re really not, they’re just trying to influence you to stay on this site.

Surely, the advertisements that you’re seeing are absolutely intended to influence you. They might be political advertisements in the form of a pseudo news story, or they might be an advertisement to try to get you to buy something. So, in our use of these free services, we are being manipulated for profit.

And then, if we want to become depending on a chatbot and develop a relationship with the chatbot, then we’re opening up a whole new way of being manipulated that makes everything that happened over the last 10 years seem almost ineffective.

  Photo: Andy Kelly, Unsplash, CC0.

 

Q. As technology shapes our communication habits, how can Christians preserve a biblical understanding of what it means to be human?

A. I think as Christians we need to see these things as tools, keep an eye on the business models, and participate only as much as we feel comfortable with, and not be duped and just drawn in.

There's nothing wrong with using social media to stay in touch with family and friends, but when it becomes an obsession and takes up a lot of our time, it may be a sign that we should take a step back.

Furthermore, chatbots are not humans, and we shouldn't have personal relationships with non-humans – we're not designed for that. It's no wonder that when we start building these kinds of relationships with chatbots, we open the door to many other dangers.

Q. There are positive aspects to these technologies. As an IT scientist, you have a hopeful and positive attitude. For example, blind people can now see what is happening around them in real time with very accurate descriptions through their mobile phone cameras. Also, AI is being applied in medical operations in hospitals. As Christians, we don't want to get caught up in the negativity and fear, but we want to see the humanity. What positive aspects do you see in the evolution of IA?

A. My personal feeling about what's happening with IA is that I'm cautiously optimistic, more positive than negative. I think the danger has more to do with our approach to the tools than with the tools themselves.

“The medical field is one of the most promising areas where AI has the potential to change the game.”

The medical field is one of the most promising areas where AI has the potential to be groundbreaking. I mentioned earlier about “pseudo vision” for the blind, where you hold up your phone and the phone's AI describes what you see. This is a very exciting technology that will be possible in the near future.

The same thing happened five years ago. An AI program called “AlphaFold” reduced the time it took to understand a protein's shape (a description of its chemistry and DNA). What would have taken several people 30 days in a lab, “AlphaFold” took a computer to do in seconds. The cost and time to understand a protein's shape was reduced by a factor of 1,000. Improvements like these really open the door to improved healthcare.

Using AI techniques that track behavior, we can target disease treatments not just to demographics, but to specific illnesses and specific bodies and metabolisms. Personalized treatments through AI are very exciting to think about.

Of course, there are many double-edged swords here, with efforts to figure out how to extend lifespan and efforts to interface the brain with AI in the hopes of developing implants that will dramatically improve memory.

But equally, you can imagine helping someone function normally. In the case of epilepsy or Parkinson's disease, imagine an implant that allows someone with a neurological condition to function longer and more functionally.

If you had told someone in the 17th century about the medical interventions we can perform today, they would have said, “No, that's like magic.” So I think God has given us insight through science, and we should imagine all the wonderful things that are possible.

As Christians, we want young people (those who are still figuring out what they want to be when they grow up) to imagine these things, because they are the ones who will ultimately create new capabilities.

I was involved with the internet in the 1980s, and I didn't really anticipate things like social media back then. It took a generation after me to come up with these new applications. The generation that's going to be coming up with the most interesting applications of AI is probably today's high school kids, or maybe even elementary school kids. So we want them to be involved with AI, but in a positive, hopeful way.

Q. This idea of ​​the “human imagination” in the use of technology is very interesting. We are in Poland right now at the European Leadership Forum, a conference that covers Europe from a Christian perspective. How are people responding to what you've shared about what technology is accomplishing and its impact? What questions are Christian leaders having?

A. Well, I get a lot of questions in places like this. I think people are nervous about any discussion of existential threats because they are pretty scary when you think about the headlines you see in the media. But change that is more evolutionary than revolutionary is less “exciting” and less visible.

“I want young people to be engaged with AI, but in a positive, hopeful way.”I think there are other concerns that people naturally bring up: How will AI impact the job market? Will I lose my job? It's an interesting discussion because, like with any technology before AI, the answer is, “Yes, many jobs will disappear, and some jobs will be so efficient that you'll need fewer people.”

But it's also true that every technological change creates new kinds of jobs, and I don't think AI will be any different than traditional technologies like radio, television, the internet, the web, cloud computing, etc. AI will probably create more jobs than those technologies.

So I think that's where the hope lies. I said to my son, who works in finance at a bank and graduated five years ago, “In 10 years, your entry-level job will be done by software, so you better be the person who figures out how to replace yourself with software.”

I think “How can I use AI to make my job better?” is valid advice for anyone in any job. I think that's what God wants for us. If your job is to serve God, you want to see these tools as an opportunity to do your job better. If you think about how you can do your job more efficiently by using more AI, you'll ride that wave instead of being swept away by it.

Published in: Evangelical Focus – Life & Technology
– “The generation that will think about the best applications of AI may be high school students or even elementary school students right now.”



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