It has been touted as an existential risk on a par with pandemics. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, at least one pioneer is not losing sleep over such worries.Christmas lectures, said he was more concerned AI could become the boss from hell, monitoring employees’ every email, offering continual feedback and even – potentially – deciding who gets fired.
“This is the year that, for the first time we had mass market, general purpose AI tools, by which I mean“It’s the first time that we had AI that feels like the AI that we were promised, the AI that we’ve seen in movies, computer games and books,” he said.“In the [Christmas] lectures, when people see how this technology actually works, they’re going to be surprised at what’s actually going on there,” Wooldridge said.
Among the highlights, the lectures will include a Turing test, a famous challenge first proposed by Alan Turing. Put simply, if a human enters into a typed conversation but cannot tell whether the responding entity is human or not, then the machine has demonstrated human-like understanding.“Some of my colleagues think that, basically, we’ve pass the Turing test,” said Wooldridge.
“We don’t understand really, at all, how human consciousness works,” Wooldridge said. But, he added, many argued that experiences were important.