Future of generative AI: utopia, dystopia or up to us?

Debate about artificial intelligence, especially over the last couple of years, "usually goes one of two ways" said Vox: "AI is either the beginning of the end of human civilization, or a shortcut to utopia".

The truth, as is so often the case with new technology, will probably lie somewhere in between.

Who thinks it will be a utopia?

In his latest book, "Deep Utopia", Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, considered the utopian potential of AI. One scenario imagines technology progressing to the point at which it "can do all economically valuable work at near-zero cost", said The Economist, while under a "yet more radical scenario, even tasks that you might think would be reserved for humans, such as parenting, can be done better by AI".

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"This may sound more dystopian than utopian, but Bostrom argues otherwise", said the magazine.

AI chip maker Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang recently predicted that soon "everybody will have an AI that is an assistant". AI-driven copilots already promise a "workplace utopia, making employees more productive, improving workflows, and helping share knowledge across an organisation" said Fortune.  

Longer term, the idea that AI will make knowledge production cost-free was recently put forward by Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind cofounder and now Microsoft AI's CEO. Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, he predicted a future where new scientific and cultural knowledge will be produced at "almost zero marginal cost" and be "widely open-sourced and available to everybody".

What about a dystopia?

While Suleyman claims this will prove to be "true inflection point in the history of our species," it also represents "a world of information abundance and economic dislocation that few institutions are prepared for" warned Axios.

The impact of AI on the economic and social fabric of society has been well documented but some sceptics have gone further.

In a widely read Op-Ed in Time magazine last year, AI pioneer Eliezer Yudkowsky warned that many researchers "expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die".

"Forget the Hollywood version of existential-threat AI in which malevolent computers and robots ("The Terminator"!) take us over, making us their slaves or servants, or driving us into extinction through techno-genocide" said Skeptic magazine.

AI sceptics such as Yudkowsky "envision a future in which amoral AI continues on its path of increasing intelligence to a tipping point beyond which their intelligence will be so far beyond us that we can't stop them from inadvertently destroying us".

And those in between?

In reality, most AI scientists are "neither utopian or dystopian" said Skeptic, and instead spend most of their time "thinking of ways to make our machines incrementally smarter and our lives gradually better".

This is what technology historian and visionary Kevin Kelly calls protopia. Instead of wondering where our flying cars are, he argues, think of how automobiles have become faster, safer and more efficient over the past 50 years.

Who knows which of the two extreme scenarios is nearer the truth, said Vox, but "the polarized nature of the AI discourse is itself interesting".

In a recent essay in the New York Times, Tyler Austin Harper drew parallels between AI-driven anxieties today and those of the past, most notably in the 1920s and '30s, when people were terrified of machine technology and the emergence of research that would eventually lead to nuclear weapons.

In a period of rapid technological growth and political disruption "there are many reasons to worry about the course we're on" concluded Vox, that at least is "something almost everyone can agree with".