KIWANIS News:

At the Sept. 16 meeting of the Kiwanis Club of New Mexico, James Carroll gave the club members a presentation outlining the history, evolution, and future of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

According to Carroll, he grew up in the “AI Winter”, at a time he was in graduate school and the hope for achieving AI was cooling and when the early hype led to disillusionment and loss of funding. The thinking was, that if natural language and machine translation could be solved, then AI would have “made it”.

The contributors to the rapid change in AI development were the exponential rise in computing performance and the gains in parallel processing which were largely driven by the gaming industry. The internet adds to the AI knowledge base and is constantly adding to the enormous amount of data available.

Algorithmic advances include the creation of artificial neural networks and clever techniques to make the data on the internet useful. These include large language models such as ChatGPT, that are capable of human-level machine translation, and latent diffusion models that can recognize images.

In addressing the future of AI, Carroll ended with a thought-provoking quote from Irving J. Good in 1965:

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass the intellectual activities of any man, however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”