Comment by al_borland a day ago
I've seen many futurists claim that human innovation is dead and all future discoveries will be the results of AI. If this is true, we should be able to see AI trained on the past figure it's way to various things we have today. If it can't do this, I'd like said futurists to quiet down, as they are discouraging an entire generation of kids who may go on to discover some great things.
I'm struggling to get a handle on this idea. Is the idea that today's data will be the data of the past, in the future?
So if it can work with whats now past, it will be able to work with the past in the future?
Essentially, yes.
If the prediction is that AI will be able to invent the future. If we give it data from our past without knowledge of the present... what type of future will it invent, what progress will it make, if any at all? And not just having the idea, but how to implement the idea in a way that actually works with the technology of the day, and can build on those things over time.
For example, would AI with 1850 data have figured out the idea of lift to make an airplane and taught us how to make working flying machines and progress them to the jets we have today, or something better? It wouldn't even be starting from 0, so this would be a generous example, as da Vinci way playing with these ideas in the 15th century.
If it can't do it, or what it produces is worse than what humans have done, we shouldn't leave it to AI alone to invent our actual future. Which would mean reevaluating the role these "thought leaders" say it will play, and how we're educating and communicating about AI to the younger generations.
> I've seen many futurists claim that human innovation is dead and all future discoveries will be the results of AI.
I think there's a big difference between discoveries through AI-human synergy and discoveries through AI working in isolation.
It probably will be true soon (if it isn't already) that most innovation features some degree of AI input, but still with a human to steer the AI in the right direction.
I think an AI being able to discover something genuinely new all by itself, without any human steering, is a lot further off.
If AIs start producing significant quantities of genuine and useful innovation with minimal human input, maybe the singularitarians are about to be proven right.