I first heard about this idea from the CEO of Grammarly, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury when Jason Calacanis interviewed him in This Week in Startups Podcast, he says “Artificial Intelligence sounds like a scary robot, killer robot, having consciousness, we want these tools to make us better to augment our skills”.
While Chowdhury made this statement in a light-hearted manner, it made lots of sense to me why the AI tools we currently use should be called differently. Here is what it looks like.
Public perception of AI
The idea of an artificial being that will be endowed with human intelligence is historic but it was mostly as myth and science fiction, it was not until the middle 20th century before scientists started researching and developing such devices to mimic human reasoning.
Over time the movie industry and academics have warned and described that AI can be dangerous for our society, In most cases in movies, AI has been portrayed as malevolent, while this is in good fate, it has been over-popularised to the public and so most people always has that believe that AI will destroy and harm humans.
Lots of people still have a fear of AI which is termed AI phobia mostly because of its potential negative impact on concerns such as job displacement and existential risk.
while it is still debated with experts whether these concerns are valid or not which will not be discussed in this article, it has made people who experience these fears not use AI tools even when it will make their work easier for them. This has led to AI antipathy or AI inversion. I have met people who have this opinion.
Movies have always depicted Malevolent robots but in good faith, it has shown us lots of ways AI could go wrong.
So Artificial Intelligence sounds scary partly because of the information we have received about the Idea of a large computer-based machine, that can think faster than us, at least as intelligent as us in all aspects, and has more access to and storage of information. Wow that invention sounds kind of scary and it was the actual goal of early AI development but it is not the kind of AI we have developed so far.
In recent years, the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has sparked a technological revolution that is reshaping the very fabric of our society. AI which was once relegated to the realm of science fiction, has become an integral part of our daily lives, influencing industries, healthcare, education, and countless other sectors. This transformative wave is driven by the convergence of several key factors: the exponential growth in computing power, the vast accumulation of data, and breakthroughs in machine learning algorithms.
However, the rise of AI also raises important ethical, societal, and economic questions. Concerns about job displacement, privacy, and the potential misuse of AI underscore the need for responsible AI development and regulation.
The recent development in AI has been on shallow AI, this kind of AI is developed for content management/control, categorization, prediction, summarisation, and more recently generation. All these AI are currently being applied in various industries in the world and thus are very useful in our society.
These different AI have been developed during the various stages of AI development in the world with Content categorization being the first to be applied, while content generation (Generative AI) is very actively being developed in the world right now and it is the most recent type of AI.
Not to be confused, this generative type of AI is also classified as being shallow, it generates really impressive and correct sentences based on internal models or templates it has learned during training on very large data which makes it appear logical and conscious but AI experts and Ethics team have stated that it isn’t yet AGI.
General AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the peak of AI development, it is a concept in the field of artificial intelligence that represents a form of AI that possesses human-like general intelligence. Unlike narrow or specialized AI, which is designed for specific tasks, AGI is capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge across a wide range of tasks and domains, much like a human being.
The malevolent or inadvertent potential of AI has always been represented in movies since the 1960s before AI was started to be applied but going forward we are beginning to understand how to use this technology to benefit us.
Presently, two primary groups have adopted contrasting stances in AI development: the accelerationists and the effective altruists. However, delving into a detailed discussion on this topic is better suited for another occasion.
The Catch
“AI is not going to replace people, people using AI will displace people not using AI.”
The AI technology we have developed so far is more of a computer tool, like every other form of tool we have made historically. It will help us do our jobs efficiently and quickly, of course, this will lead to displacement in jobs just like the invention of the computer, sewing machines, industrial machines, automation machines, etc, new jobs and roles will be created in the society, just like we are already seeing.
In this sense AI tools we have currently are grouped under the kind of AI experts call specialized AI, it was developed to accept specific data to do specific things for us (not for anything else but for us), these tools augment our intelligence, it doesn’t do our jobs for us, it isn’t AGI, it’s a tool for us.
The AI we have today should be called Augmented Intelligence, to reduce fears and wrong speculations about these tools.
In fact, AI has greatly made it easier for me to write this article, AI tools ranging from ChatGPT, Grammarly, Copilot, Image generation, etc are very helpful not only for writing this article but for the website entirely.
Jason Calacanis frequently says on his podcast that AI makes you better, and more effective at what you do.
