Why the Human Premium will Make a Come Back on AI.
On BBC Radio 4 this morning, more from Prof Geoffrey Hinton, who has the title of Father of AI. Gen AI or LLM will do things we know about, but its impact will be far, far, reaching on humanity.
I’ve just finished reading Supremacy by award-winning journalist Parmy Olson. It’s the winner of the 2024 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. It’s scary! (My review here).
In this image, I’m near the Syrian border working with a young group of filmmakers in cinema journalism. It gave me the idea for this post.
If you work in academia, a concern is as LLMs get better at what they do, how on earth do you separate student work from Gen AI?
Thus far, one view I take is for the expert’s curated knowledge to become an integral part of an essay. That expertise or lived experience hopefully is reflected in the written submission. It demonstrates presence, and also ensures some active participation in the narrative, from the deliverers’ PoV.
This also brings back the focus onto the human factor, giving credence and importance to universities’ staff. You can ask LLMs about Einstein’s theory of relativity. But to hear Einstein tell you a personal story about the run up to cracking the theory, is something a LLM will find difficult to replicate.
Subjects I lecture include Foreign News Reporting, and Start-ups which has enabled me to bring into lectures some of the most incredible global experts to share personal stories.
There’s a moment in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by the philosopher Prof Nick Bostrom. It’s when we learn how the automobile replaced horses and their numbers plummeted significantly. But in the 50s there’s a reversal. Our equine companions bring us something different, both in recreation and social.
Notwithstanding how this can be related to us as humans, that is companionship, and social, human memories will come to matter more and more in a sterile mechanistic AI world.
Have I told you the story when I crashed Roy Ayers hotel ( he was in a foot cast), to interview him, or when Mandela walked over to the table I was seated on at a function and started speaking to us? This kind of contextual information does something different to LLMs.
The provenance of being human telling a story is set to become a premium. Imagine the tech world we’re heading to in 2100 and a region which has built or otherwise maintained human contact and expression. Guess how much that would cost in social being?