The other side of AI
Published on : Tuesday 06-06-2023
At the beginning of the 2018 film Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, mathematician Dr Ian Malcolm is shown testifying at a US Senate committee debate.
In his opinion the dinosaurs should perish naturally to correct the wrongful cloning done by John Hammond. “We have amassed landmark technological power, and consistently proven ourselves incapable of handling it”, is how Dr Malcolm put it, succinctly. After the dramatic events depicted in the film, in the closing scenes, Dr Malcolm declares the beginning of a neo-Jurassic Age, where humans and dinosaurs must coexist.
Life imitates art, it is said. With a wee bit of stretching of the imagination, one can perhaps see the parallels in the actions of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for creating artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. At the Senate judiciary committee in mid-May, Altman declared his support to the regulatory guardrails for the technology that would enable the benefits of AI while minimising the harms. Implicit in that declaration is the human proclivity to misuse anything that has the potential to benefit mankind. “We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models,” Altman said, his words chosen carefully.
To continue in the same vein, from ‘I, Robot’ to the ‘Terminator’ series, enough has been depicted in the movies about the possibility of robots running riot, bolstered by AI. While the fears are not without basis, AI simply does not have the ‘common sense’ to make our fears true. The cover story of this edition is focussed on Robots in Manufacturing and how they are going to be an important part of the evolving smart manufacturing ecosystem. Interesting times ahead.
