Code Red: Humanity at the crossroads of artificial intelligence

  Hello Charlie!

     In recent times, you may have heard a lot about something called Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short. Essentially, AI refers to smart machines that can learn and make decisions on their own, kind of like how humans do. It’s been getting a lot of attention because it’s becoming more common in our daily lives – from our phones to our homes. While it brings some cool things, like helping us with tasks, there’s also talk about whether it could be a problem in the future. In this blog, we’ll explore why AI is on the rise, what good things it brings, but also why some people worry it might be risky for us down the road.

    To start, in recent times, one AI model is on the rise, which you all have probably heard of by now: ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is a form of Artificial Intelligence that’s designed to chat and engage in conversations with people. It’s like having a virtual friend that can understand what you’re saying and respond to your questions or prompts. ChatGPT has been trained on a vast amount of information to learn how to generate human-like responses. It’s often used to provide information, answer queries, or simply chat with users on various topics. While it’s not a real person, many find it helpful and interesting to interact with, as it can simulate conversations in a way that feels quite natural.

    This chatbot was released to the general public on Nov 30, 2022, and since then it's been used more and more by people. It has a lot of use cases for both companies and members of the general public. In companies, especially IT companies chatGPT is often used to create snippets of code as it is capable of making computer programs by merely asking it to (just like you would do with a real person) or it can be used to debug code (as in find mistakes in the code written by an actual human), and of course, it cannot make an entire app or a website by itself as some human interaction is still required but even this may not be a problem in the future as its getting better and better with each passing day. Indeed, with every single question that is asked to the bot (on any topic), it learns to sound a bit more human and becomes a bit smarter (as the whole idea of AI is that it is capable of learning and getting better and better). So over time, it takes in the sentences written by actual humans ( the users ) and tries to imitate this the next time it generates an answer. So it can essentially answer virtually any question you have from asking about how to make a cake, to complex tasks such as asking it to show why :

1 = cos² (x) + sin² (x) = (e^ix + e^-ix )² /4 + sin² (x) = (e^2ix + e^-2ix )/4 + e^2ln(sin(x)) + 1/2

    After chatGPT, there are now thousands of different AI models that exist on the internet for doing all sorts of different things such as DALL-E 3 which is capable of drawing and generating videos from simply a single text prompt ( it converts your text into images and videos ). The use of AI has extended even into the field of pure science, where it is being used to solve complex math equations, or even in the medical field where it is used to optimize the creation of vaccines. However, this rising number of AI models may also cause concerns in the future. Indeed, there is a very typical problem that arises from the simple existence of AI, which is the possibility of a human existential crisis. This is basically a scenario where AI has gotten so advanced and that is so integrated into our society (ie: it is present in factories, at homes, etc), that it will surpass human capabilities by such a huge margin that it becomes conscient of it own superiority and decides that humans are no longer needed and hence it turns on its own creators. 

    Even though such a scenario seems like some sci-fi plot, it is a real concern as openAI themselves ( the company that made chatGPT) has formed a team that will be dedicated to mitigating the existential risks associated with AI, which basically means that they made a team that will work on preventing such a. crisis from happening. There is even a long Wikipedia article that talks in depth about this existential risk that I will like here: Existential risk from artificial general intelligence. 

    So indeed, as time goes on, AI will keep on getting smarter and smarter and will become more and more omnipresent in our lives. Even right now, it's getting harder and harder to discern AI from humans, even in this blog article, you may or may not have even realized that the intro of this blog post was written by an AI, or even that the paragraph right under the image was also just AI, and who knows, maybe this paragraph may be written by AI too...