Like it or not, AI has become an important tool in many industries across the world. From summarizing reports to compiling complex data into more digestible abstracts, AI is no longer the science fiction dream that it once was.
However, according to a recent report, the inability to effectively reason will prevent AI from achieving lofty goals set by prospective developers. Conducted by scientists at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 475 AI researchers were surveyed on their outlook on future AI advancements.
According to the report, this lack of reasoning ability is key to the pursuit of facts. "Reasoning is used to derive new information from given base knowledge; this new information is guaranteed correct when sound formal reasoning is used, otherwise it is merely plausible," the report reads.
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a hypothetical future in which AI is able to possess human-level intelligence. This means that machines would be capable of performing any intellectual task that a human can. This would include using effective reasoning.
When asked if "scaling up current AI approaches" could achieve AGI, 76 percent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed.
Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the report's research team, was apparently not surprised by the results of the survey. While speaking to NewScientist, Russell offered up his take on the advancement of AI.
"The vast investments in scaling, unaccompanied by any comparable efforts to understand what was going on, always seemed to me to be misplaced," Russell said. "I think that, about a year ago, it started to become obvious to everyone that the benefits of scaling in the conventional sense had plateaued."
As reported by a Goldman Sachs newsletter, some of the largest players in tech will invest around $1 trillion in the next few years on AI data centers and microchips.
According to the U.N. Environment Programme, data centers that are home to AI servers can produce electronic waste. These servers can also consume a significant amount of electricity, producing heat-trapping pollution that contributes to a warming climate.
However, despite AI's apparent ceiling and potential environmental pitfalls, the AAAI research team expressed optimism that its limited applications could be harnessed in a way that benefits society, as the tech becomes more efficient and adjustments are made to grid infrastructure, among other things, writing: "AI can be a powerful enabler of climate and sustainability goals."
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Definitely 👍 "Beyond improving efficiency and reducing carbon emissions across industries, AI is accelerating breakthroughs in areas such as advanced battery materials, carbon removal technologies, and high-precision climate modeling," according to the report.
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