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Marie Curie, Lord Voldemort And Sheldon Cooper Tell Us About AI Ethics
www.forbes.com
UNSPECIFIED - SEPTEMBER 03: Marie Curie (1867-1934) with her daughters Irene (g future Irene ... [+] Joliot-Curie) and Eve (r) in 1921 in United States (Photo by Apic/Getty Images)Getty ImagesWhen many of us think about artificial intelligence, we have a sort of nebulous idea about digital entities trying to trick us into believing that theyre human. But in some ways, its a lot more complex than that. The Turing test is only one aspect of how we interact with LLMs and sophisticated neural networks today. Sometimes we know that were listening to the product of voice cloning combined with other technologies, but that doesnt impact how we use the result.Also, theres an emerging field thats getting a lot of attention now in light of all of this new potential. Its called computational biology.What is Computational Biology?ChatGPT define con computational biology as a field that applies mathematical models, computer science techniques, and statistical methods to the study of biological systems. So if, for instance, you analyze the patterns on snail shells with reinforcement learning, that would be an example of computational biology. Likewise, if youre trying to model human personas or behaviors, you could put that in the same category, too. Essentially, were trying to use technology to simulate biological systems, or alternately, diagnose them, and identify changes.A Renaissance ManLets ask this question: how old is the discipline of computational biology?When we dig a little, we see that you can trace the origin of this field of study to none other than Alan Turing, the same person whos widely cited for developing that Turing test concept and suggesting that computers will be able to present like humans, which, to a large extent, theyre now doing. Alan Turing wrote an article called The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis in 1952, about natural patterns emerging from less dynamic states. So in addition to being so instrumental to the emergence of AI, he was a pioneer in computational biology, too.MANCHESTER, ENGLAND - JULY 15: An artists illustration of the Alan Turing 50 GBP bank note unveiled ... [+] by The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney at the Manchester Science and Industry Museum on July 15, 2019 in Manchester, England. The general public were asked to 'Think Science' and nominate characters from the field of science for the next 50. Alan Turing was selected from over 200,000 nominations for nearly 1000 eligible scientists. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)Getty ImagesMORE FOR YOUA Modern ExperimentLets talk about some of the modern applications of new systems that you could think of as dynamic computation of biology where again, the technologies are trying to mirror the behaviors, sentience and cognition of people, albeit, in this case, either fictional people playing roles, or people who are long dead.In a recent presentation, Yufei Chen, an undergraduate from MIT, showed us an AI panel discussing AI ethics it was composed of Marie Curie, Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter, and Sheldon Cooper, the imperious nerd from the Big Bang theory, played by Jim Parsons.Oddly, the last two characters were based on the acting roles, not the actual people.Throughout the presentation we got a look at how sophisticated these new systems can be, as Chen suggested we should rethink entertainment, citing statistics that streaming grows at 20% per year with a market cap of $150 billion by the end of this year.Multi-Agent AI and Other CapabilitiesObviously, this kind of system runs on the principle of voice cloning combined with LLMs.It demonstrates RAG or retrieval-augmented generation, where one component takes the knowledge from the knowledge base, and gives it to the generative engine, which then, well, runs with it.It also demonstrates the ensemble approach that Marvin Minsky suggested in his Society of Mind book, where he famously theorized that the human brain is like hundreds of computer computers, all connected and working together. In the same vein, he noted, a society is full of individuals, collaborating and working together on various results.In this case, we have an AI agent for each voice, and another AI agent as a mediator to make the conversation flow. You start to see the backbone of how these systems are going to work. Chen adds thoughts on capabilities like memory and multimodal function, suggesting we can fine-tune the personalities to get better results, and that AI will eventually do things like play video games with us.So, in a sense, this kind of computational biology work leads toward more interactive applications. Ive written about the idea, promoted by our own John Sviokla, of robust AI tutoring. Ive written about the possibilities of AI companionship, and various types of agent services. Were moving toward a new world at a tremendous rate, and computational biology is sure to be one of our central focus points going forward.
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