The Fourth Industrial Revolution: How artificial intelligence is advancing by leaps and bounds and what it means for our society

Artificial intelligence has a short but rapid history. From early experiments to Go, protein structure prediction, self-driving cars, and many other fields, AI has evolved rapidly. The progression of AI to weak, strong, and super AI, and its societal impact, has become a major concern for scientists and the public.

 

As the Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds, the world is changing at an alarming rate. In this article, we’re going to talk about one of the most recent advances in science and technology that has become a major player in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Artificial intelligence has been a topic that people have been interested in for a long time. Take the famous movie Terminator for example. In 1984, when the movie first came out, many people were unfamiliar with artificial intelligence and thought it was just a fun fiction. However, last year, A.I. beat the best Go player in the world, demonstrating the incredible speed of its development, and many people believe that it is only a matter of time before it surpasses humans. In this respect, AI is worthy of attention and many people are excited about its future.
The history of artificial intelligence is actually not that long. The idea of teaching computer programs to perform various human skills was discussed by scientists from various fields in the early 1950s and became a field of study. However, it didn’t take long for the field to make significant progress. It’s safe to say that most of the current state-of-the-art in AI was achieved after 2010. In 2012, an experiment was conducted in which a group of people were presented with a series of pictures and asked to title them using AI. In its first attempt, it made a lot of mistakes, such as recognizing the man as a candy in a picture of a man and woman kissing and labeling it “Woman with Candy,” and only named 7 out of 12 pictures correctly. In 2013, however, the AI titled every picture perfectly.
In 2014, an experiment was conducted to distinguish between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people using AI. It was shown 20 faces and asked to identify them, and it got 75% of the answers right. This is a remarkable result when compared to the fact that Westerners can’t distinguish between the three countries less than 50% of the time. In 2016, AI shocked the world by beating the best human players in Go, a game where the number of cases is well over 10^100. With 69% of AI experts predicting Lee Sedol’s victory, AI was making leaps and bounds beyond what experts had predicted.
Since then, AI has begun to make its mark in more diverse fields. In 2020, the AI model GPT-3 was released, which has 175 billion parameters and is an incredible achievement in natural language processing. GPT-3 demonstrated its ability to write human-like text, have conversations, and translate between different languages. In 2021, DeepMind’s AlphaFold made great strides in solving the problem of protein structure prediction, which could lead to revolutionary discoveries in biology and medicine.
In 2022, AI began to be widely applied in a variety of industries, including self-driving cars, medical diagnostics, and financial analytics. In the self-driving car space, Tesla and Google’s Waymo successfully leveraged AI to develop and commercialize self-driving cars that operate on real-world roads. In the medical field, AI has driven medical innovation with excellent results in cancer diagnosis, drug development, genetic analysis, and more.
In 2023, the pace of advancement in AI technology accelerated with the release of GPT-4, an AI model. GPT-4 has the ability to learn more data and solve more complex problems than its predecessor. In addition, the ethical issues of AI have been increasingly debated, and research and policy are moving toward greater transparency and accountability.
Amidst these developments, scientists have realized the need to categorize AI and have come to classify it into weak AI, strong AI, and super AI, depending on its intelligence and characteristics. Weak AI is the stage that all current AIs fall into. They are not self-conscious and do not have the intelligence to learn on their own, and they perform repetitive tasks according to stored algorithms. Therefore, they have partial intelligence within the scope of stored algorithms. Even AlphaGo, which is very capable, is limited to Go, which is a weak AI. A lot of research is still needed to reach the next level of AI, which is strong AI. In order to realize strong AI, which has the characteristics of a self-learning and self-aware human, we need to understand the human brain, which has a very complex structure. It is very easy to implement A.I. to multiply 10-digit numbers and various complex calculations that we often have difficulty with, but it is difficult to implement an A.I. that has effortless movements and intuition.
There are two types of strong AI: artificial general intelligence, which is self-aware, and artificial consciousness, which is more advanced. Artificial general intelligence is often referred to as strong AI and full AI. It differs from weak AI in that it learns to do all the intellectual activities that humans can do, unlike weak AI, which can only do what it is told to do. Instead, it is expected to adapt to its environment faster than humans and perform better. Artificial consciousness means that A.I. will have emotions and creativity, so it will be characterized by the ability to do what it thinks is necessary without human command. According to artificial intelligence expert Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher and Oxford professor, strong AI could be realized in 2040, about 25 years from now. A representative technology used to realize strong AI is the nematode. The nematode is the only organism for which humans have been able to identify information about every neuron. Based on the information about the neurons, scientists created a robot that actually has the same neuronal structure. The robot behaved like the real thing, avoiding walls and searching for food. The robot’s ability to emulate real-world behaviors using only neuronal structures without the help of artificial intelligence is a testament to the potential of strong AI. As long as we can understand more complex and advanced neuronal structures, we can create such creatures.
A super AI is an AI that is far more intelligent than the best humans in all fields, including social and scientific. This is the stage where AI is able to develop science and technology on its own, without humans having to do anything, opening up a more advanced world. Super AI is also related to the technological singularity. The technological singularity is when an AI becomes more intelligent than the combined intelligence of all humans. When AI reaches this point, humans will not be able to understand how the technology it uses works. No one knows what it will be able to do. If the human brain created Wi-Fi and established the academic concept of quantum mechanics, a super AI with an intelligence level of 170,000 times that of humans could lead humans to eternal life and colonize other planets. It could be the descent of God. According to Nick Bostrom, super AI could be realized in 2060, about 45 years from now.
The current era is often referred to as the Age of Change. The science and technology used in AI is doubling every year, and in many areas, AI is already ahead of humanity. However, the current AI is weak, unable to learn on its own, and lacks self-consciousness. We are now in the process of making A.I. more self-aware and capable of learning on its own, leading to strong A.I.. Strong A.I. will be able to continue to develop its own intelligence and reach super A.I., and will have much greater capabilities than humans. It only takes about 20 years for an AI to reach that level of capability. The rate of development of AI is so fast that scientists don’t have enough predictions about the impact it will have on humans. While it’s great to advance civilization by leaps and bounds, it’s important that scientists take responsibility for the future of humanity and recognize exactly how technology affects us.
In the midst of this rapid change, we need to clearly understand the potential and limitations of AI and find ways to utilize it appropriately. Human creativity and emotion may still be beyond the reach of AI, but advances in AI will open up new possibilities that we have never imagined. As we dream of a future where AI and humans coexist harmoniously, we will need to watch and prepare for its development. The evolution of AI has already begun, and it is unstoppable. The world will change with it, and we will have to be part of that change.