The AI Good Lost in the Hype

The Financial Times has a piece on Demis Hassabis, one of the pioneers of the modern AI science. He thinks we are a lot closer to general artificial intelligence than I do (and yes, he is a genius and I am not, but the fundamental problems of AGI don’t seem any closer to being resolved and we have been 10-20 years away from AGI since my professors were telling me that using Java instead of LISP was going to usher in AGI), but what struck me is that he focused on the Silicon Valley hype taking away from the actual research and understanding what AI can actually help with. Because AI is more than the imitative AI hype, and we are in danger of losing that value.

I have talked about how imitative AI doesn’t really have a business case, is functionally useless, but how that the demands of profiteering ensure that imitative AI companies will try to eviscerate the jobs of creatives because they have no other realistic path to making their money back. But what we call AI does not have to be so limited. It can and does have real potential to help.

Take AlphaFold, the system that Hassabis mentions in the article. It is a deep learning system that predicts protein folds. Okay, that doesn’t sound like much, but it has been an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Without being able to predict a proteins 3-dimnesional structure, understanding how these proteins work becomes impossible. With it, a whole new range of biological research is possible. It is a hard problem because the number of possible structures is determined by the amino-acid chains associated with the protein, and those can lead to an astronomical number of choices. And yet, the protein folds into just one in order to carry out its function.

AlphaFold is generally considered to have solved this problem. As a result, AlphaFold has heled find new therapeutic psychedelics, drug treatments, and neglected diseases. It is not perfect, but it is a great example of augmenting human labor rather than replacing it. Scientists now have a solved computational problem that they can use as a basis for further research and get to beneficial results much faster than they could have even a few years ago. AlphaFold is literally making the world better in a way imitative AI simply does not.

But imitative AI gets the attention and the research dollars. In part because a significant portion of Silicon Valley leadership hates workers and relishes the idea of an all-computer workforce. but more so because it is one area where, if it could ever be made to work as well as it hype-men claim it does/can, then they cold make massive amounts of money. Enough money to justify the financial and environmental costs they have already incurred. One of the reasons they push so hard and claim that these systems are inevitable is because they need to rollover opposition before the hype bubble burst.

But only death is inevitable. If we properly incentivized AI companies through liability and copyright laws and used the power of tax incentives and subsidies to reward people who build AlphaFolds more than those who build Fancy Clippy, we can reap the benefits of AI for all of society, not just those at the top of the Silicon Valley pyramids.