How will AI impact generations to come?

Kanta Dihal
Dr Kanta Dihal is a postdoctoral research associate and Research Project Coordinator of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Her current project, ‘AI Narratives’, explores the public understanding of artificial intelligence. She has a PhD in science communication from the University of Oxford: in her thesis, ‘The Stories of Quantum Physics,’ she investigated the communication of conflicting interpretations of quantum physics to adults and children.

Andrew Hessel
Andrew Hessel is the CEO of Humane Genomics Inc., a company developing virus-based therapies for cancer. He is a co-founder of the Genome Project-write, an international scientific effort working to engineer large genomes, including the human genome. From 2012-2017 Andrew was the Distinguished Researcher at Autodesk Life Sciences. He has been a member of the Singularity University faculty since 2009.

Amy Robinson Sterling
Amy Robinson Sterling is the Executive Director of Eyewire, a game that crowdsources neuroscience, played by a quarter million people worldwide. Amy has advised The White House OSTP and US Congress on open innovation. She is a leading catalyst of neuroscience visualization, from interactive web to virtual reality.

Francesca Rossi
Francesca Rossi is the AI Ethics Global Leader at IBM Research. Francesca’s research interests focus on artificial intelligence and specifically constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, collective decision making, value alignment, and AI bias. She is a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, whose mandate is to advise the European Commission on AI ethical guidelines and policies, and is also a board member of the Partnership on AI, a multi-stakeholder initiative to make AI beneficial for people and society.

Francesca Rossi: "The singularity is the hypothesis in artificial general intelligence whereby AI is able to perform every task a human can perform but with greater computing power. In a self-improving cycle, rapidly building machines that are so capable and intelligent that humans cannot control them. I don’t personally know if this is a reasonable hypothesis. I know AI systems will be more and more capable with time but we’ve still got far to go in terms of understanding how to embed machines with many types of human intelligence"

Amy Robinson Sterling: "To me singularity is a world where we have exponential technological growth and machines that are equal or exceeding human intelligence. The way that I think about the progression of AI is as a gradual growth, so I think defining when we reach singularity will be very hard."

Kanta Dihal: "The Singularity is the point beyond which we can make no reasonable guesses or predictions about the future, because technology will have developed so rapidly that we are completely unable to understand with our current knowledge where it will go. I believe it’s highly unlikely we will see a Singularity happen within the lifetime of anyone who is alive today, because that would require solving way too many scientific and technological problems impossibly soon."

Andrew Hessel: "Singularity to me is this idea that computer intelligence will surpass human intelligence, and very shortly thereafter the computer intelligence will surpass the intelligence of all humans. So it’s really this concept, this hypothesis, that a runaway super intelligence will occur sometime in this century, and really push human intelligence to the second rung on the ladder."

Francesca Rossi: "In my view the purpose of artificial intelligence is to amplify our human capabilities and not to replace us. If we make sure AIs are fitted with the highest codes of ethics and we ensure responsible AI deployment and use, then AI can transform and structure complex data into very important insights and help us solve problems that we don’t know how to resolve ourselves. AI can help improve our quality of life and help us understand what it means to be human and to thrive together with this technology."

Amy Robinson Sterling: "We really need to embrace our humanity. There are lots of things that will be taken over by machines but there are also lots of things that are difficult to automate and those are the things that are closest to our humanity. For us to thrive in the future we need to focus on collaboration the future of AI is not humans vs machines, it is humans collaborating with machines. Machines are going to give us the opportunity to spend more time doing the things we enjoy."

Kanta Dihal: "We can really thrive in this new future by embracing the possibilities that advanced technologies are offering us for improving everyone’s lives. We no longer need to travel to talk face to face with anyone in the world. The Internet means that no one should have to go without an education. Most of the huge problems in society today are easily fixable if we can coordinate our efforts. We should focus on doing everything in our power to make sure advanced technologies enable and empower people."

Andrew Hessel: "Hopefully the systems that emerge - if a Singularity happens - will help to reduce things like inequality and improve things like energy management and logistic management. I believe this planet can actually support a very large number of people, tens of billions beyond what we have today, but it’s going to take better supply chains and a fairer system of distribution."

"For us to thrive in the future we need to focus on collaboration the future of AI is not humans vs machines, it is humans collaborating with machines."

Amy Robinson Sterling

Kanta Dihal: "I hope we will all change for the better, physically, mentally, socially, and AI can help us with that in so many ways. Physically we could use cyborgization to improve people’s health and longevity by creating better prosthetics, and by making organ donation no longer necessary, using small, intelligent machines to replace failing organs. Mentally, AI could take a lot of stress and small tasks off our brains, creating more brain space for us to do and think about the things we really enjoy. Socially it can make us even more connected to other people than we are now, creating positive communities of people dotted around the world, and again, if we don’t have to worry about many of the small, difficult, individual things in life, we will have more time to engage with others."

Andrew Hessel: "I don’t think physically we will change that much. If a super intelligence does emerge we might be humbled just a little bit, and maybe frustrated. I can certainly see resistance - humans in general don’t like to be number 2. We’re very competitive. But no, I don’t think we physically change - that takes technologies other than a super intelligence. I think the idea of humans and machines melding together is a wonderful science fiction concept, but in reality, it’s not very pleasant. Any type of living and non-living systems coming together doesn’t work well. The human body is an exceptionally complex machine."

"Humans in general don’t like to be number 2. We’re very competitive."

Andrew Hessel

Francesca Rossi: "We need to learn to work and interact using a very collaborative rather than competitive approach. We need to work with experts from many different disciplines, people from different cultures and backgrounds and with all AI stakeholders: those who produce it; those who use AI; and those who are impacted by it. Together we need to understand, define and deploy a way of thinking and acting that mitigates bias and unethical behaviours."

Kanta Dihal: "We must embrace and take into consideration many diverse viewpoints, taking into account the viewpoint of everyone who is going to be affected by the technology, and not just those who are developing it."

Andrew Hessel: "If a Singularity occurs it’s a massive upshift to intelligence that makes it hard for us to even comprehend. To put it in human terms, imagine a two-year-old sitting down with a book on quantum physics - they’re not going to get very far. We’re already seeing examples of machine intelligence or capability surpassing human capability. Anything we really direct machines to do today, much of it in game playing or problem solving or pattern recognition, the computers outperform us. So we’re kind of creeping up to a Singularity. I think it will be fairly natural by the time we get to it, and our modes of thinking, if they have to change, will change quite naturally."

Francesca Rossi: "My advice would be to never stop learning and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. But also to remember what makes us human so that science, innovation and technology can support and enhance our human values. In last 100 years we have improved human life in many respects health, life quality, culture, science discoveries, economic growth, and now we need to make sure that in next 100 years we bring an even greater wellbeing to people, societies and our planet. I hope people will have learnt to live in greater harmony amongst themselves and with nature, and with technology."

Amy Robinson Sterling: "It’s crucial we help one another. Fear not malevolent AI, fear malevolent humans with access to exponentially powerful technology. You should say please and thank you to your AI!"

Kanta Dihal: "I guess my advice would depend on whether I’m standing in a barren wasteland, or a Utopian dreamscape a hundred years from now. Let’s hope it’s the latter. If so, my advice would be, “Well, congratulations, and thank you for changing enough.” And if it is the barren wasteland that I’m standing in, then my advice would be, “Please, don’t do this to us and our future. There is still a chance to change the future for the better...but it will require a lot of change."

Andrew Hessel: "The advice I’d give to humankind is to be a little more empathic, a little more generous, and to not take ourselves so seriously. We’re kind of new on this planet - this planet’s been around for a long time, yeah, we’re making changes to it, but we’re just not that important. So relax, breathe, and go into the future with a little bit of grace and humility."

"Relax, breathe, and go into the future with a little bit of grace and humility."

Andrew Hessel

Kanta Dihal: "I hope that the next generation of AIs will think at least a bit badly of us, because we humans have done a lot wrong, both to each other and to the planet, and if AIs would recognise that, and get angry at us for that, it would mean that we have created beings that are better than us."

Amy Robinson Sterling: "I think it’s going to look at us with curiosity, I think it’s going to want to learn from us, and that’s the same way we should look at it."

Francesca Rossi: "They need to be aware of what we want and aware of our desires and our goals so they can fulfil them. Their role is help us augment our own capabilities. By augmenting our capabilities, AI will make us all superheroes, in turn benefiting ourselves, the planet, society and culture."

Andrew Hessel: "I think they’re already seeing us in ways we can’t perceive ourselves. What I’m essentially seeing put in biological terms right now, is kind of an evolution that wasn’t so different from biological evolution. You could think of the Internet as the nervous system, essentially a web of connections between the various cells - in this case the cells are computers and sensors and electronic devices. And once you have that nervous system in place, a brain starts to form to control traffic and improve, essentially modelling, reaction times etc. And that’s kind of what we’re seeing with AI now, building on top of this nervous system of the Internet. Where does it go from there? Well, the brains kept on getting bigger and bigger for a long time in biological evolution, and then eventually we started to create new brains. So what happens when a super intelligence creates a new form of computation that isn’t limited by the computation we have today, which maxes out at things like the speed of light? I just know that this is going to be a really interesting hundred years."

"You could think of the Internet as the nervous system, essentially a web of connections between the various cells - in this case the cells are computers and sensors and electronic devices."

Andrew Hessel

"Fear not malevolent AI, fear malevolent humans with access to exponentially powerful technology. You should say please and thank you to your AI!"

Amy Robinson Sterling