In this blog post, we will look at whether strong and super artificial intelligence can become a reality, focusing on current technological developments and future possibilities.
As the Fourth Industrial Revolution progresses, the world is changing at an astonishingly rapid pace. In this article, we will discuss artificial intelligence, which has recently become a hot topic among the various technologies that have become the main players in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Artificial intelligence has been a topic that people have been interested in for a long time. The famous movie Terminator is an example. Terminator is a movie about the world being ruled by machines with advanced artificial intelligence, but when the movie first came out in 1984, many people were not familiar with artificial intelligence and thought the movie’s content was just a fun fiction. However, last year, AI showed remarkable progress by beating the best Go players in the field of Go, and many people believe that it is only a matter of time before AI surpasses humans. In this respect, AI is worth paying attention to, and many people are paying a lot of attention to the future of AI.
The history of artificial intelligence is not that long. Artificial intelligence was discussed by scientists in various fields in the early 1950s as a field of study by teaching computer programs the abilities of humans in various fields. However, it was not until recently that rapid development began. It is no exaggeration to say that most of the current artificial intelligence technology was developed after 2010. In 2012, we conducted an experiment in which we presented several pictures and used artificial intelligence to assign titles to them. In our first attempt, we made many mistakes, such as naming a picture of two men kissing a “woman holding a candy” because the man was recognized as a candy. We named seven out of twelve pictures appropriately. However, in 2013, AI gave a title that perfectly matched every picture.
In 2014, an experiment was conducted to distinguish Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people using AI. When 20 faces were shown and distinguished, the correct answer rate was 75%. This is an amazing result compared to the fact that Westerners can’t distinguish between people from the three countries by 50%. In 2016, AI surprised the world by beating the best human player at a game of Go, where the number of possible games is well over 10^100. 69% of AI experts predicted that Lee Sedol would win, suggesting that AI was making more rapid progress than experts had predicted.
Since then, artificial intelligence has begun to stand out in a wider variety of fields. In 2020, the GPT-3 artificial intelligence model was released, which has 175 billion parameters and has achieved remarkable results in the field of natural language processing. GPT-3 has demonstrated exceptional ability to write human-like text, hold conversations, and translate between different languages. In 2021, DeepMind’s AlphaFold made significant progress in solving the problem of predicting protein structures, which has the potential to lead to breakthrough discoveries in biology and medicine.
In 2022, artificial intelligence began to be widely applied to various industries, including autonomous vehicles, medical diagnosis, and financial analysis. In the field of autonomous vehicles, Tesla and Google’s Waymo have succeeded in developing and commercializing autonomous vehicles that operate on real roads using artificial intelligence technology. In the medical field, artificial intelligence has led medical innovation by showing excellent performance in cancer diagnosis, drug development, and genetic analysis.
In 2023, the pace of development of artificial intelligence technology accelerated even more with the release of the GPT-4, an artificial intelligence model. GPT-4 has learned more data than its predecessors and has the ability to solve more complex problems. In addition, discussions on ethical issues related to artificial intelligence have become active, and research and policies are being carried out in a direction that strengthens the transparency and accountability of artificial intelligence.
In the midst of these developments, scientists felt the need to distinguish between artificial intelligence and began to classify it into weak, strong, and super artificial intelligence according to its intelligence and characteristics. Weak artificial intelligence is the stage that all current artificial intelligence falls under. It does repetitive tasks according to stored algorithms without self-awareness or the ability to learn on its own. Therefore, it has partial intelligence within the scope of the stored algorithms. Even AlphaGo, which has very high performance, is limited to Go and is considered weak artificial intelligence. A lot of research is still needed before weak artificial intelligence can reach the next level of strong artificial intelligence. To create strong artificial intelligence that has the characteristics of a person who is self-aware and learns on its own, we need to understand the human brain because it has a very complex structure. It is very easy to implement artificial intelligence to perform 10-digit multiplication and various complex calculus, which we often find difficult, but it is difficult to implement artificial intelligence that has intuitive movements and intuition.
There are two types of artificial intelligence: strong artificial intelligence, which has self-awareness, and artificial general intelligence, which is a more advanced form of artificial consciousness. Artificial general intelligence is often referred to as strong AI or full AI. Unlike weak AI, which can only perform the functions it has been programmed to, it is distinguished from weak AI by learning all the intellectual activities that humans can do. It is expected to adapt to the environment faster than humans and perform better at work. Artificial consciousness means that AI feels emotions and has creativity. Therefore, it has the characteristic of doing what it thinks is necessary without human instruction. According to Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher and artificial intelligence expert who is a professor at Oxford University, strong artificial intelligence could be realized in 2040, about 25 years from now. The representative science and technology used to realize strong artificial intelligence is the use of the nematode worm. The nematode worm is the only living thing that humans have identified as having information about all neurons. Based on the information about neurons, the scientists created a robot with the same neuron structure. The robot dodged walls and looked for prey, just like a real creature. This experiment showed the possibility of strong artificial intelligence, which can create a creature with similar characteristics to a real creature with only the neuron structure without the help of artificial intelligence. This is because we can create a creature as long as we can identify a more complex and advanced neuron structure.
Super AI is an AI that is much smarter than the best humans in all fields, including society and science. This is the stage where humans do not have to do anything, as AI develops science and technology on its own, opening up a more advanced world. Super AI is also related to technological singularity. Technological singularity refers to the emergence of an AI that is smarter than the combined intelligence of all humans. When artificial intelligence reaches this level, humans will no longer be able to understand the principles of the technology used by artificial intelligence. No one knows what artificial intelligence will be capable of at that point. If humans can create Wi-Fi with their brains and establish the academic concept of quantum mechanics, super-artificial intelligence, which has an intelligence level 170,000 times greater than that of humans, could lead humans to eternal life and even pioneer other planets. It can be thought of as the descent of a god. Nick Bostrom says that super-AI could be realized in 2060, about 45 years from now.
Nowadays, it is often called the “age of change.” Every year, the science and technology used in artificial intelligence is doubling, and in many fields, artificial intelligence has already surpassed humanity. However, current artificial intelligence is limited in that it cannot learn on its own and has no consciousness. We are now in the process of making artificial intelligence conscious and giving it the ability to learn on its own, thereby making it stronger. Strong artificial intelligence can continue to develop its own intelligence and reach super artificial intelligence, and will have far greater capabilities than humans. It will take only about 20 years for artificial intelligence to reach that level of capability. The pace of development of artificial intelligence is so fast that even scientists cannot fully predict the impact it will have on humans. It is good to develop artificial intelligence at a rapid pace and advance civilization quickly, but it is important for scientists to take responsibility for the future of humanity and accurately recognize the impact of science and technology on humans.
In this rapidly changing world, we must clearly understand the potential and limitations of artificial intelligence and seek ways to make proper use of it. Human creativity and emotions may still be areas that artificial intelligence cannot reach, but the development of artificial intelligence will open up new possibilities that we have never imagined. We should dream of a future in which artificial intelligence and humans coexist in harmony, and we should watch and prepare for the development of artificial intelligence. The development of artificial intelligence has already begun, and it is an unstoppable trend. The world will change with artificial intelligence, and we should be the protagonists of that change.
