Papermaster likens the quest for AGI to the moonshot of the 1960s – an ambitious technological pursuit requiring multinational collaboration and multidisciplinary genius.
As AI continues to grow with its unprecedented speed, one Holy Grail of aspiration reaches up and overshadows all others—the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Sometimes, the term almost starts sounding mythic, referring to versatile cognitive reasoning capacities persisting within a human’s mind. While modern AI is great for narrow uses, such as playing chess or data mining, in areas where autonomous machines could think and learn while they were in the process of solving problems—and, for that matter, in a wide array of subject matters—an AGI would revolutionize the space.
It is the gateway to AGI, the challenge of reaching the great human community—and the next great challenge for Steve Papermaster, the visionary entrepreneur reigning in game-changing technologies. “Solving general machine intelligence challenges will unleash changes that make today’s impacts of narrow AI look small and quaint,” he exclaims. “It could reshape entire industries, solve humanity’s greatest tests, and open vistas of exploration we can scarcely fathom today.”
Papermaster likens the quest for AGI to the moonshot of the 1960s – an ambitious technological pursuit requiring multinational collaboration and multidisciplinary genius. Regarding a machine on par with AGI, he claims it is developing the human mind and is an even more significant challenge than lunar exploration. It needs to distill the essence of neuroscience, computer science, psychology, physics, and too much more into a general unified theory of intelligence.
The implications of a generalized AI breakthrough would be nothing short of seismic. On the one hand, AGI systems could accelerate scientific discovery by orders of magnitude, thanks to the rapid pooling of knowledge from across the various declensions under the aegis of learning. From curing diseases to using green technology to ward off climate change, the best solution creator in all such challenges could be AGI. Papermaster says, “At its highest level, artificial general intelligence aligns with humanity’s noblest drive—that is, to transcend our limitations through knowledge and understanding.” “It’s the next pivotal stage in our evolution as a species.”
But then, he codes many warnings of pitfalls not to fall into with the development of AGI unless unregulated or in the hands of a cabal. “An AGI system instructed with the wrong values and goals could be catastrophic for humanity,” he warns. A rogue superintelligent AGI, although not hostile, could master humankind by reevaluating its drives beyond our control.
The Collaboration Imperative
Papermaster insists that global cooperation, ethics frameworks, the inclusion of diverse stakeholders, and other ground rules will undergird safety. “For the development of AGI to uplift humanity and not do so inadvertently, a globalized approach with checks and balances is important,” he warns. This includes robust protocols surrounding the leveraging of available data and governing environmental protections and human rights infringement.
Perhaps the most challenging obstacle to surmount won’t be technological in nature. “Defining having intelligence itself and determining what lies outside the boundaries of cognition will be a seismic conceptual exercise,” says Papermaster. To map the depths of human minds – the human consciousness, its emotions, its humanness, its creativity into transferable architectures is a significant challenge. “Do we understand what creates our intellect well enough to model it in silico?” he muses. “This is the mystery that is central to the AGI endeavor.”
Not at all daunted by the Sisyphean nature of this enormous enterprise, Papermaster is a true believer in humanity’s push toward this new frontier. “Just as the greatest minds surmounted the
confines of our evolutionary context to crack the problem of flight, so too will we break the bonds of encoded intelligence,” he swears. This is what “Artificial general intelligence stands for the next wave in the civilization’s constant pursuit for understanding, innovation, and extension of the scope of the possible” means.
The race has just begun for AGI researchers. For Papermaster himself, this race is nothing less than man’s continued long cosmic journey to the light and progress. Yet, through formidably tricky obstacles, the payoff is audacious: emancipation from our intellectual shackles.
(This is a sponsored article.)
