We Can’t Control What We Don’t Understand

[jrineakter]

he second category included those names now all but synonymous with AI: seer Ray Kurzweil, Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis (Hassabis’ incredible TED interview just went live yesterday), and two visionaries whose books I reviewed last fall: Fei-Fei Li, who founded Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, and Mustafa Suleyman, newly named as the head of Microsoft AI and co-founder of Inflection AI and DeepMind before. I strongly recommend Li’s book The Worlds I See and Suleyman’s book The Coming Wave as the intellectual table stakes for anyone seeking to join the AI conversation.


Others channeling the spirit of Renaissance 1.0 toward Renaissance 2.0 included Vinod Khosla, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a leading investor with his namesake Khosla Ventures in the technologies of the future, including carbon capture, fossil fuel replacement, and AI to boost efficiency and productivity. In Khosla’s exciting vision, which I optimistically share, AI will be all but invisible in the background as agents, from chatbots to robots, to sensors embedded everywhere. AI will carry out the difficult but often critical tasks humanity struggles with, from monitoring hygiene in hospitals, a project of Li’s, to the firefighting AI on the near horizon. Literally millions more such agents will follow. We will take AI as granted as much as we now take the electricity that lights the house at a flip of a switch or the water that flows at the tug of a faucet: “All we need is a few entrepreneurs, who will hong kong whatsapp number data imagine the impossible, dream the dreams, and then become foolish enough to make them come true,” Khosla said. Another example was entrepreneur Hiroki Koga, who described how his company Oishii is taking indoor farming beyond the niche production of leafy greens toward the remaking of agriculture in our hungry world of growing population, disappearing topsoil, and vastly overstretched water resources. Koga is leading us into an era of zero pesticides and almost infinite reuse of water with, among other innovations, AI robots that “sense” ripeness and actually harvest the strawberries. Koga’s talk was one of Rachel’s favorites (this was our daughter’s second time to join me at TED), and we were lucky enough to try them afterwards when we met him. They were the most delicious we’ve ever tasted.


Surely the policy ideas of Helen Toner – the AI policy guru who sparked last November’s five-day rollercoaster that I chronicled and who sought unsuccessfully to oust OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – are earnest. But her calls for government to lead on the challenges ahead fall flat (and fell flat at TED) to mere platitudes. We know that our governments are simply not up to the task. I’ll have more to say below on the imperative for every business to lead where the machinery of government will inevitably fall behind.

There’s a cargo ship of wisdom to unpack from that annual TED mindmeld. But the insight that echoed most in my mind on the way home is Suleyman’s intuition – not on AI per se, but on our struggle for metaphors to describe it. His TED talk was another way of stating what I wrote about in Part One, that the pace of technology is fast outstripping our language and nomenclature to grasp and comprehend it.