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Asked by anon-379419 on 22 Jan 2024.
Question: how do you think ai is going to change the planet?
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Andrew Maynard answered on 22 Jan 2024:
There are lots of ways it could help: Helping researchers discover new ways of saving energy, or reducing carbon emissions, or removing carbon from the atmosphere, or increasing biodiversity.
It could even help us find new ways of getting along together and sharing resources.
On the other hand, AI also takes a lot of energy to develop and run, so there’s definitely a planetary downside here.
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Carl Peter Robinson answered on 22 Jan 2024: last edited 27 Jan 2024 11:59 am
My hope is that AI is used for the good of human kind. Those in the AI community have a responsibility to ensure AI’s continual progress does not cause profound suffering, but instead provides great benefits for EVERYONE and not just a handful of individuals at the head of large companies and corporations. The AI community in this sense I would say now includes not just scientists and software engineers, but anyone involved in its development or usage.
In the short to medium term, there will be some job losses, unfortunately, as certain AI tools mean some work can be automated or done so much faster and more robustly than what some humans can do (e.g., think of robotic automation of warehouses like Amazon’s). Despite this, new jobs will reveal themselves – I do not know what they will be yet – that will hopefully mean retraining and redeployment of the people concerned will offset the job losses; humans have an amazing ability to adapt in times of change.
I think there will be much more interaction with robots powered by some of these AI systems, in terms of social robotics where robot companions can assist the elderly and those living alone. There may even be more and better “household robots” that can free up some of our time by taking over laborious chores. There will also be a lot more human-robot collaboration in various workspaces that require hardware work, and we will utilise AI tools to help with more office-based work (e.g., like what we are using ChatGPT and other LLM chatbots for right now).
Additionally, I hope we develop AI tools to find patterns in the huge datasets we collect to help with problems like climate change. Not necessarily solving it for us, but providing analyses of data that we can use to put actions into place. Having said that, who knows, perhaps an AI tool may even discover new molecules or methods of energy creation that can save us from need to rely on fossil fuels.
There are a whole lot more things that I am sure my colleagues can suggest, but my main hope is AI for the good of people, and not for warfare or other malicious endeavours.
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