A leading voice in artificial intelligence says AI’s future may be powerful, but nowhere near replacing humanity’s greatest thinkers.
In a new conversation with entrepreneur Peter H. Diamandis, Stanford computer science professor and AI godmother Dr. Fei-Fei Li says that while AI systems already outperform humans in narrow domains, they are still far from matching the breakthroughs of history’s towering intellectuals.
She says AI may be superhuman in scale and speed, but not in its conceptual insight.
“First of all, some part of today’s AI is already better than any human. For example, AI’s ability to speak many different languages, translating between dozens and dozens of languages, pretty much no human can do that… AI’s ability to know from chemistry to biology to sports, the vast amount of knowledge. So it’s already super to human in many ways.”
Li then draws a sharp line between performing tasks and generating foundational scientific and artistic revolutions.
“But it remains a question… can AI ever be Newton? Can AI ever be Einstein? Can AI ever be Picasso? I actually don’t know… For example, we have all the celestial data of the movement of the stars that we observe today. Give that data to any AI algorithm, it will not be able to deduce Newtonian law of motion. That ability that humans have, it’s the combination of creativity, abstraction. I do not see today’s AI or tomorrow’s AI being able to do that yet.”
She says AI’s strength lies in partnership with humans, not replacement, noting that the most productive path forward lies in augmenting human ingenuity.
“I think we will continue to see that the collaboration between humans and AI will be the most productive and fruitful way of doing things.”
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