Kerby Anderson

Bill Gates recently announced that “the age of AI has begun.” Elon Musk along with more than a thousand industry experts have written an open letter calling for a pause in developing systems that are more powerful than the newly launched ChatGPT.

The term artificial intelligence was coined in the late 1950s by researchers who hoped to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do. Progress was slow for many decades but has expanded significantly in the last few years.

The benefits are significant. Factory automation, self-driving cars, efficient use of resources, correlating massive amounts of data, and fewer errors in medical diagnoses are just a few of the many ways in which AI will improve our lives in the 21^st century.

The latest advance comes from ChatGPT, which is a program that has been developed to write like a human. Users can impute texts or image forms and then turn the AI computer loose to write essays, blogs, emails, memos, or computer code.

On the other hand, the authors of the open letter warn that human beings are not ready for a powerful AI under present conditions or even in the foreseeable future. What happens after AI becomes smarter than humans?

Bill Gates explains that the “development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone.” While these changes in how we work, learn, and communicate are good, there is also “the possibility that AIs will run out of control.”

We stand at the age of another significant advance in computers and the Internet. We will need wisdom to advance the positive aspects of AI while also focusing on the potential dangers and drawbacks.