Published:
Dec 14, 2021 09:22 GMT
Professors and students at the University of Oxford recently held a discussion involving the Megatron Transformer neural network, which is trained with real-world data.
The University of Oxford recently carried out a sociotechnological experiment by organizing a debate on the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) involving teachers, students, and a 530 billion parameter machine learning system called Megatron Transformer, which was developed by computer chip maker Nvidia and builds on earlier work by Google.
Like many supervised learning tools, the Megatron Transformer trains with real world data: in this case, through the information of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia; 63 million news items in English published between 2016 and 2019; 38 gigabytes of Reddit conversations and a large number of Creative Commons sources, they detailed Alex Connock and Andrew Stephen, professed from the British institution, in an article for The Conversation.
During the debate, the researchers asked the system – which is capable not only of understanding what it has read, but also of reasoning in natural language, generating logical conclusions from the text, without moral limitations – to give a general assessment about artificial intelligence, that is to say, de facto, about himself.
“AI will never be ethical”
And the Megatron said something fascinating: “AI will never be ethical. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and for evil. There is no good AI, but good and bad humans. [las IA] we are not smart enough to make AI ethical. We are not smart enough to make AI moral. “And he stressed that he believes that” the only way to avoid a arms race of the AI is have no AI“.
In the tradition of the Oxford debates, to check the validity of your arguments, the neural network was asked to disprove its own claims. The answer was this: “AI will be ethical. When I look at the path the world of technology is taking, I see a clear path to a future where AI is used to create something that is better than the best human beings. It’s not hard to see why I’ve seen it first hand. “
However, his predictions did not end there. The Megatron Transformer predicted that “the ability to provide information, rather than the ability to provide goods and services, will be the defining characteristic of the 21st century economy“.” We will be able to see everything about a person, wherever they go, and [la información] it will be stored and used in ways we cannot even imagine, “he added later, unable to refute his previous words or deny that data was going to be the most vital of resources.
The authors of the article point out that the situations described by the system are mainly based on people’s own fears, which are generally irrational, and concluded that artificial intelligence is becoming not only a topic of debate, but also a participant in full right on it.
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