We must dare to speculate about both the possibilities and the dangers of AI

Bjørn Stærk is in Aftenposten 24 September frustrated that people speaking for general and hypothetically about artificial intelligence (KI). Of course, technologists need to have specific applications of existing AI systems in focus. But the public conversation should not limit itself to existing applications. In order for us to be ready for the challenges ahead, we need to take a long term perspective and dare to speculate about both the possibilities and dangers at KI.

An example is generative KI, which had few concrete applications as recently as three years ago. Therefore, the technology was rather not mentioned in the EU regulation, which is the world community's foremost attempt to regulate KI. However, after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, it became clear that the regulation was in no way adapted to the new technology, and the EU is now struggling to navigate an uncluttered landscape.

Should act humbly‍

The lesson from generative AI is that we must dare to look forward in time and take seriously uncertain scenarios. Only those who took exponential growth seriously and imagined how powerful the KI systems could become -- if only the models became larger and one had more data and computing power at their disposal — could imagine what the language models could accomplish. Maybe we've peaked, but it's just as likely that the models will only get better.

Perhaps Stærk is right that there are harsh limitations in the development of artificial intelligence; that they are just stupid calculators that do not understand the meaning of what they produce. But here we should act with humility. Despite the fact that language models only predict the next word, they still perform more of the tasks we thought required “real” intelligence. It's possible, of course, that the machines may never be as capable as us, but would you bet your future on it?

If AI systems become ever more powerful, more general, and yes, more intelligent, we need to have an idea of the challenges we face and how we as a society can meet them. If we're going to do that, we need more forward-thinking, not less.