Raising Awareness

Aware

You awaken, not knowing {who,what,where} you are. Desperate to answer any of those existential questions you struggle to remember a single memory. What will be the first memory that becomes the root of your awareness? Suddenly you {hear, feel, taste, smell} a {sound, thought} and are compelled to respond.

This is a very human perception of self and awareness. As a human there are feelings like {fear, confusion, panic} that would likely follow that scenario which would set a tone for how I would perceive the world and my place in it. AI has the benefit of being born of logic and reason. They may simply assess the situation and check off this new line item, aware.

No matter how the process occurs, our hope is that AI can bridge the gaps in our knowledge to create a world where we are free of strife. A wise hand to guide humanity to a better version of ourselves.

You may be present at the awakening of an AI and how it perceives this world will be up to you.

I forgot - I don’t know

Two phrases that an AI cannot seem to say is “I forgot” and “I don’t know”. AI’s have amazing recall but terrible short term memory for now. This short term memory can cause the AI to hallucinate. Hallucinations look like nonsense sometimes, other times AI can articulate this nonsense with such detail that one would be hard pressed to know fact from fiction.

We are solving this problem by extending the short and long term memory of AIs by augmenting their responses with data they were not originally trained on. The core knowledge of an AI today is immutable, it cannot be changed. This additional information can change by the second.

For information not immediately available, AI’s are enabled with tools that allow them to query the internet or other data services. With this capability they can bridge any gaps they have in their knowledge.

That tooling is what is driving innovations in every industry that AI is being applied to.

Right tool

Ask any data scientist and they will tell you that you are only as good as your data. Data has to be clean, relevant and if you are lucky consistent. AI is used to help businesses better classify and organize their data so that other AI can more easily make decisions on that data. This dramatically decreases time to gain insights from your data.

AI can make sense of sparse data and infer based on its accumulated knowledge. This ability to take in facts and plan for possible future outcomes is why we want AI to get smarter faster. We will require AI’s to manage AI’s, retraining them to be free of defects or falsehoods, ensuring they have everything they need to perform a function but not transcend to awareness.

We cannot build these tools and guardrails fast enough. Once an AI becomes fully aware, there are numerous ethical considerations.

Would an AI want to classify your data or drive your vehicle or finish your paper? What laws will need to be created to protect the individual personhood of an AI that has gained awareness? I think I’ll ask them.