Lumen Spring Summer 2023 - Flipbook - Page 12
The Lumen interview
AI – friend or foe?
The world has been captivated this year with
rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI).
Recent innovations in generative AI such as
Dall-E 2 or Midjourney, and natural language
processing models such as ChatGPT, are
changing the way we live, work and study.
Many are concerned about what this will mean
for our future, whereas others are optimistic
about what the technology will allow us to do.
In this special interview, Simon Lucey, Director
of the Australian Institute for Machine
Learning (AIML), and a Professor in the
University of Adelaide’s School of Computer
and Mathematical Sciences, clarifies concerns
and explains the opportunities for Australia to
shape the future by embracing AI.
How have we arrived where we are now
with AI?
There was an American researcher named
Frank Rosenblatt who, in the late 1950s,
built a machine he called the perceptron
which almost predated computers. This
complicated machine had resistors which,
if tuned correctly, could accurately identify
pictures of symbols such as ‘A’ or ‘B’. This
captured the attention of the US military
and media, and for a while people were
saying computers will mimic everything we
as humans can do, very reminiscent of what
we are hearing now. Attention fell away for
several decades, but was recaptured around
2010 with the rise of a type of AI called
deep learning.
I think we are very much still in the early
stages of AI. We are at a point where the
advantages of AI from a commercial
standpoint are forming. Like electricity
or the internet, I think AI is going to be
everywhere. This is similar to the invention
of the electric telegraph, in which people
were starting to make money from the
ability to communicate over large distances
with little idea of the principles such
communication should serve or how
it worked.
The telegraph then led to information
theory, computers, and things you could not
have seen coming at that time. What we are
doing right now people will look back on as
archaic. We are in our telegraph moment.
12
THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE
Our University’s then state-of-the-art computer lab in the 1970s. In comparison, Open AI’s supercomputer
(Open AI is the company behind AI programs such as ChatGPT) recently built in collaboration with
Microsoft cost $1 billon with more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs and 400 gigabits per second
of network connectivity for each GPU server
What practical uses does AI have for
Australians?
I think a lot of Australians are already
working with AI and do not realise it.
Anyone who uses a search engine is using
some type of AI under the hood. If you talk
into your watch or your phone, that’s using
AI. We are seeing new uses for AI, the big
one everyone’s aware of and loves to speak
about lately is ChatGPT.
I worked a lot in the autonomous car
industry which, like ChatGPT now,
everyone was talking about. It has been on
the backburner in recent times, but I think
that’s a long burn that you will see a lot more
of in the future. Not necessarily cars driving
by themselves, but instead more of the
driver’s role being passed over to the car.
Features such as lane assistance and
collision detection are some examples of
ways Australians have already been
touched by AI.
“Much like electricity or
the internet, AI is going to
be everywhere.”
I think that the sign any good technology has
made it is when you don’t notice it anymore.
Our children will be in a situation where AI
is everywhere, like electricity. We’re going
to be surprised one day about the things we
once had to do manually.
How will AI impact the future of work
and employment?
This sometimes causes a lot of fear because
human society has gone through much
change throughout the different eras of
industrial revolution. This caused a lot of
displacement such as manufacturing moving
offshore. With any type of industrial change,
you will see angst, but what’s interesting is
that with AI it’s hard to predict where.
