Mid-November 2023, Barbra Streisand, a Hollywood celebrity, talking with talk show host Stephen Colbert, expressed deep sadness over the ongoing dreadful violence in Gaza. She said: “It’s sad about what’s going on today ~ meaning people have to live together, even though they’re different religions or whatever. This is insanity for us not to learn how to live together in peace. I could easily cry about this.”

Then with her deeply anguished face, she looked up and said, “Where is God in this time? Where is he or she? Why can’t that energy stop this madness?” I kept thinking that instead of waiting for gods to help us ~ and humans have been invoking gods for millennia ~ what if we have superintelligence that could enhance our intellectual capabilities and collaborate with us to solve our most intractable problems? Could superintelligence have foreseen the Hamas 7 October horrendous attack on Israel? The Hamas attack did not erupt out of nothing. Long preparations must have gone into its planning and execution, the killings and kidnappings, the events that shocked the world.

Nor did Covid-19 that killed millions of people worldwide emerge suddenly out of nothing. It seems that humanity has reached its maximum level of competence. Or you might say, paraphrasing the Peter Principle, humanity has reached its level of incompetence. It is our incompetence that poses an existential threat to humanity. We need superintelligence to transcend our limitations. Of the four categories of AI, traditional AI performs predefined tasks and within its trained domain it excels at pattern recognition, analysis, and decision making. Pfizer and Moderna harnessed AI to speed up the discovery, development, manufacturing, and distribution of their Covid-19 vaccines. Generative AI ~ ChatGPT and other large language models ~ mimics and synthesizes contents from the ocean of materials it’s trained on.

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A prompt-based multilingual conversational model, Generative AI has the potential to democratize knowledge. With instant translation in many languages, even the most illiterate can use it. Through easy-to-use prompts, and the availability of instant translation in several languages, Generative AI would raise the collective intelligence level of people and make societies more productive. GPT-4o,........

© The Statesman