How do I feel about AI

Recently I had (again!) the astounding opportunity to attend a concert of one of my favorite artists, Peter Gabriel, someone who has accompanied me in the last decades. Besides being an amazingly talented artist, he has not avoided the #ai revolution and wrote the following:

We are entering a world that is about to be fundamentally transformed by AI. Many people see AI as the enemy, but along with extraordinary scientific, functional and creative tools, it can provide great education and better healthcare to billions. It also has many inherent potential dangers that we urgently need to address.

Due to my professional activities, I've seen first hand how AI can be applied in business, I've seen it working. As a real-life example and in the particular case of manufacturing, AI solutions leveraging huge amounts of production data can be very effective to make production processes more #sustainable (i.e. reduce waste and defects, reduce energy consumption) and enable humans in the shopfloors to become more productive (i.e. ensuring the machines are running with optimized settings).

In the last months, we all have been exposed to the hype (or is it more than hype?) around ChatGPT, Generative AI and the application of LLM (Large Language Models) to multiple use cases, thus at this stage is indubitable the numerous benefits such AI technologies bring to the table. However, at the same time we can't postpone the question of how far should we let AI develop.

I've never been a fan of apocalyptic forecasts nor conspiration theories, and I certainly can't picture a world dominated by a higher, and superior, AI instance. But we would be fools if we believe the human race would remain unaffected by the advances of AI. I particularly adhere to what #yuvalnoahharari wrote in a recent article in The Economist , where he emphasizes the relevance of storytelling throughout human history:

AI?has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images.??AI has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.

In his article, Yuval claims that if we don't regulate AI properly,?we would experience not the end of human history, just the end of its human-dominated part.

So yes, advances in AI need ideally to remain in responsible hands, which is de facto an impossible aim. Every technology advancement comes with "two sides of the coin", and history is full of examples of technology being used in a harmful manner. Once we accept the fact we can't control AI being only used responsibly, the next obvious question is how to regulate it? How to put the right governance and the right agency around it?

The much expected EU AI Act, which would be the first EU regulatory framework for AI, is a very welcome step towards regulating AI, but more will be required. As a bare minimum, Generative AI, like ChatGPT, would have to comply with transparency requirements, like disclosing that the content was generated by AI.?

I'd like to end with a quote from Luciano Floridi, author of the "The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality":

The great opportunity offered by ICTs (Information and Communication Technology) comes with a huge intellectual responsibility to understand them and take advantage of them in the right way.