How Experts Foresee the Future of AI and AGI?

As data collection and analysis has gained attention across robust IoT connectivity, AI and its subsets have left no place where they haven't virtually affected. Where some sectors are starting with their AI journey, others have become veterans in its adoption. However, such advancements are beginning to take the center stage but there is much more to come – and more than anything it can turn antagonist.

According to David Vandegrift who serves as the CTO and Co-founder of customer relationship management firm 4Degrees, "I think anybody making assumptions about the capabilities of intelligent software capping out at some point are mistaken."

As the AI investments are hitting the mark of billions, all is becoming disruptive for better and potentially worse as well.

It has been anticipated that the fantastical potential of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) can turn both helpful and homicidal.

According to internationally renowned AI expert Stuart Russell, "there are still major breakthroughs that have to happen before we reach anything that resembles human-level AI. One example is the ability to really understand the content of language so we can translate between languages using machines… When humans do machine translation, they understand the content and then express it. And right now machines are not very good at understanding the content of language. If that goal is reached, we would have systems that could then read and understand everything the human race has ever written, and this is something that a human being can't do… Once we have that capability, you could then query all of the human knowledge and it would be able to synthesize and integrate and answer questions that no human being has ever been able to answer because they haven't read and been able to put together and join the dots between things that have remained separate throughout history."

The experts fear the nightmare scenario "singularity," whereby super-intelligent machines take over and permanently alter human existence through enslavement or eradication. As quoted in a report "The Future of Artificial Intelligence" by Built In, the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking famously postulated that if AI itself begins designing better AI than human programmers, the result could be "machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails."

The report also notes that the SpaceX CEO Elon Musk believes and has for years warned that AGI is humanity's biggest existential threat. Efforts to bring it about, he has said, are like "summoning the demon."

IFM's Gyongyosi said, "I don't think the methods we use currently in these areas will lead to machines that decide to kill us. I think that maybe five or ten years from now, I'll have to re-evaluate that statement because we'll have different methods available and different ways to go about these things."

According to Diego Klabjan, a professor at Northwestern University and founding director of the school's Master of Science in Analytics program, "currently, computers can handle a little more than 10,000 words. So, a few million neurons. But human brains have billions of neurons that are connected in a very intriguing and complex way, and the current state-of-the-art [technology] is just straightforward connections following very easy patterns. So going from a few million neurons to billions of neurons with current hardware and software technologies — I don't see that happening."