Page 16 - Delaware Lawyer - Fall 2023

FEATURE | THE AI FUTURE
AI In the Physical World
Embodiment is when AI is loaded into physical forms, and interacts with the physical world, carrying out tasks and responding to verbal commands.
Google has embodied robots with language models, allowing robots to be given untrained commands like “Go to the drawer and bring me the chips.” The LLM translates the command into the code needed to execute the task, with no preloaded understanding of methods required, nor a library or map of objects in the room.
You’ll be able to ask your car why it slowed down. A director might tell a drone to “film the surfer in the red swim- ming suit, in the style of Ridley Scott.”
The implications of AI interacting physically with the world are profound. Healthcare, security and logistics will be disrupted, as well as regulation, privacy and ethics.
Artificial General Intelligence
“OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economi- cally valuable work—benefits all of humanity.” – OpenAI Charter
In November, Google’s Deepmind released a table defining five stag- es of AGI. We’re currently at Level One, “Emerging AGI.” Level Five, “Superhuman AGI,” is when AI can beat 100% of humans at any task. We have narrow Superhuman AIs
(AlphaFold, AlphaZero and Stockfish), but nothing near a generalist.
AGI will do our jobs better than we can. DeepMind’s definition of AGI in- cludes things humans cannot do, like decoding thoughts, predicting future events and talking to animals.
The speed at which experts predict AGI’s arrival is daunting. Shane Legg, DeepMind co-founder, predicts 2028. Elon Musk, 2029. Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI, says five to 20 years. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis both predict less than 10 years.
AI doesn’t grow old; it grows stronger. Think of an athlete perpetu- ally increasing in skill, strength and experience. What if ever y player in the NBA gained the insight of every other player, from every point, forev- er? Imagine this athlete never needed sleep and could simulate gameplay at a rate faster than humans fathom time — the lowly iPhone processes 35 trillion operations per second. Ever y Tesla on the road shares its experiences with every other Tesla and gains the com- bined driving hours of every Tesla that has ever “lived.”
No matter the timeline, as we ap- proach AGI, jobs will transform, and many will disappear. Kodak knew digital single-lens reflex cameras and SD cards were coming. If we want to know how we would fare at Kodak, we’re getting our chance right now, and in 10 years we can “review our film.”
Takeaways
In 2024, look for Google to launch Gemini, with potentially four times the strength of ChatGPT. Expect Apple and Amazon to launch major products. ChatGPT will no longer be exclusively synonymous with AI.
Short-term, there will be a profi- ciency gap. Put hesitation aside and start tinkering. Use every tool you can before the gap widens beyond your ability to improvise. Creative people will see opportunities for AI to force- multiply their work. Others will gaze at prompts like a pencil on a blank piece of paper.
Mid-term, AI will be so adept at conversation, the proficiency gap will close. This is good news for the technically challenged, but it’s a dou- ble-edged sword, as moats histori- cally protecting experts — experience, degrees, creativity, intelligence, scar- city and time — will be democratized and distributed by AI.
Humans are already agents, draw- ing conclusions, recognizing patterns, researching information, mining and interpreting data. We’ve always been redefining domain expertise, as tools evolve.
In 2002, Stuart Kauffman coined the term “The Adjacent Possible.” In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson popularized it: “The adjacent possible is a shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent it- self. The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries.”
Now is an excellent time to explore the adjacent possible in artificial intel- ligence. Every day brings new break- throughs, possibilities and new pages in the book being written by Large Language Models.
The implications of AI interacting physically with the world are profound. Healthcare, security and logistics will be disrupted, as well as regulation, privacy and ethics.
14 DELAWARE LAWYER FALL 2023