Mandela Effect and Liar's Dividend

The complex tapestry of AI's impact on society

- HARMEET SINGH AND SALIK KHAN

The father of modern computing and World War II hero, Alan Turing, presented his seminal paper on artificial intelligence (AI) in 1950. The paper opens with these words: ‘I propose to consider the question: Can machines think?'

Turing’s contemplations would set the stage for a technological revolution that is now transforming society positively, but is also bringing forth unforeseen challenges. Writing about it, tech researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt described 2023 as the Year Of AI Panic. Even though AI and machine learning have been around for a couple of decades, things began to change in June 2017.

THE NEW WORLD ORDER OF AI

The world saw a paradigm shift when a bunch of Google engineers published, ‘Attention Is All You Need’—an oddly titled paper, proposing a new form of machine learning architecture called ‘transformer’. This paper paved the way for the dominance of large language models. Generative AI took centre-stage replacing good old-fashioned symbolic AI.

This newfangled set of algorithms fundamentally changed AI training models. Earlier, the problem with AI was the knowledge—you needed to feed enough rule-based knowledge to a machine about a subject for it to make intelligent decisions. Today, all you need is an enormous amount of data sets and enough computational power—the lever and fulcrum of the new world order.