“The distraction here is focusing on questions that are framed as: What if AI did XYZ to humanity? Instead, we really should be focusing on how we learn to co-exist with both super-empowered, transnational organizations and individuals who are now (via the increasing accessibility, ubiquity, and affordability of technology) able to do things that only large nation-states could do 40-50 years ago.
“The challenge with these questions is they treat the world as singular. With AI, it’s probably very much dependent on the specific society, nation and communities’ choices around data, AI, and people that will determine positive versus negative. It is also linked to other contextual influences. After all, there already are 54 different national AI strategies in the world – see https://www.aistrategies.gmu.edu/report.
Instead of applying the Turing Test, we should be asking how AI can amplify the strengths associated with where humans individually and collectively are great – while mitigating our weaknesses both individually and collectively in making decisions. Specifically, instead of AI trying to pass as human, we should be using AI to make us better humans together.
“What if the Turing Test [the long-standing marker of whether a computer system has intelligence] is the wrong test? It could be distracting us from bigger and more important questions about how powerful organizations and individuals use AI.
“It is important to remember the original Turing Test – designed by computer science pioneer Alan Turing himself – involved Computer A and Person B, with B attempting to convince an interrogator, Person C, that they were human and that A was not. Meanwhile, Computer A was trying to convince Person C that they were human. What if this test of a computer ‘fooling us’ is the wrong test for the type of AI that 21st-century societies need, especially if we are to improve extant levels of trust among humans and machines collectively?
“Instead of applying the Turing test, we should be asking how AI can amplify the strengths associated with where humans individually and collectively are great – while mitigating our weaknesses both individually and collectively in making decisions. Specifically, instead of AI trying to pass as human, we should be using AI to make us better humans together.”
This essay was written in November 2023 in reply to the question: Considering likely changes due to the proliferation of AI in individuals’ lives and in social, economic and political systems, how will life have changed by 2040? This and more than 150 additional essay responses are included in the report “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence by 2040.”