Photo: Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Denis Hassabis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year, is now the CEO of Google DeepMind. In March this year he gave a wide-ranging interview to The Times of London. “For the next ten years I think there is going to be an amazing flourishing of creativity, empowered by AI. For those who understand and are native with these tools, it’s going to be a sort of superpower.
“Then there’s the question of what happens after that. That’ll be the next era, as AGI (artificial general intelligence) gets better and better. That is more difficult to predict.” As The Times correspondent Tom Whipple writes, “It will not be a world, he thinks, of work as we understand it, but it will bring ‘radical abundance’ and, perhaps, radical human obsolescence.” By 2050, Hassabis envisions a world so different from today that Leonardo da Vinci (one of his two favourite scientists, along with Alan Turing) would have more affinity with us in 2025 that we will have with ourselves in just 25 years.
While Sir Denis was not at SXSW, another powerhouse Brit who was also knighted by the British monarch was there. Sir Tim Berners-Lee may not be a household name, but he has transformed the lives of everyone. TIME magazine named him one of the most influential people of the 20th century. Everytime you to go to a website, you are using his work: Sir Tim invented the World Wide Web. The “www” that precedes every website is due to him, and the http as well.
Sir Tim agreed with Sir Dennis about the perils of prediction. “We were told years ago to expect self-driving cars, and it didn’t happen.” While it’s true a few of them are on the streets of Austin, Sir Tim said “If you’re in London, you wouldn’t. You have to be very careful about making predictions. It’s very difficult to understand what’s going to be hard and what’s going to be easy.”
Even so, he did hazard one prediction. My headline comes directly from what he said at SXSW here in Austin. Coming soon will be “an AI that knows you better than you know yourself.”
To quote from computer scientist Jaron Lanier in the March 22 issue of The New Yorker, “Thus we embark on the much-heralded era of ‘agentic’ A.I., slated for mass introduction in 2025. In this case, agentic will likely mean two extensions to familiar chatbots: one remembers everything that is possible to know about you from the perspective of your devices; the other then takes online action, sometimes preëmptively. Agents will be more autonomous and less dependent on your constant guidance.”
This is the very development raised by Sir Tim. As he told the SXSW audience “There’s always been a question about AI: who does it work for? Take robots that work for Amazon: if one of your robots comes to the door, suppose I accept the package and I say ‘hey, you can stay.’ So now I’ve got a robot in my house. Maybe it could be pretty helpful. It could drift into my house and it could start helping me at home. But it doesn’t work for me if I ask it. If I say I need some washing done, can you get me more washing powder? Where would it get the powder from? It will order it from Amazon because actually it works for Amazon. I want one that works for me.
“You know what, my doctor works for me, and my lawyer works for me. And so we’re used to that. We have the culture that my doctor works for me, and the doctor may get paid by the university or the healthcare provider, but they work for the patient in the sense that they’re trying to always try to make the choices. So, I want an AI that works for me, and make the choices that I would make. I don’t want an AI which is trying to sell me something I don’t want, an AI that gets the best deal for it. I want the best deal for me! And so, the question for every AI is ‘who does it work for? Whose better interests are you pursuing?’”
Photo of Sir Tim Berners-Lee is by Dr C Cunningham, copyright SunNewsAustin.com