Because AI is a “general-purpose technology” and can be used pretty much everywhere, he said, it’s likely to be a big help in saving time and increasing productivity in areas that are incredibly expensive – such as healthcare, education and transport.
“One of the uses that people are putting AI to at the moment is as a helper for GPs. GPs spend a lot of their time taking notes. As anybody knows, you go to the doctor and they’re sitting at the computer, looking at you, looking at the screen, looking at you, looking at the screen.
“So one thing AI is really good at is listening to conversations and writing out what happened in the conversation in a way that you tell it to write it up and it gives it to you at the end and then you just go through it and say, ‘yes, I like that, I want to edit that bit’.
“Things like that are a huge help in domains where we just don’t have enough people at the moment.”
Last month, OpenAI released a list of five “waypoints” in AI advancement. Currently, we’re at the first level with Chatbots with conversational language. OpenAI believes the tech is close to its second level, called Reasoners, where AI would be able to problem-solve.
Next is Agents, systems that can take actions on our behalf.
Maclaurin said that could be something as simple as asking tech to plan our holiday for us because we’re too busy to do it ourselves, and there are already some “Agents” in place for computer scientists.
“The next step after that, which we really don’t have yet, is the innovator that comes up with a ‘Here’s how we’re going to cure cancer’,” he said.
“And then the final step, says OpenAI, is AIs that could do what a whole big organisation did, like your whole city council or a whole company.
“We don’t have anything like that yet. But, if you think of that as a kind of five-point scale, the only bit we’ve unambiguously gotten that works really well is the first point.”
AI is not foolproof yet – recently, ‘Nanogirl’ Michelle Dickinson went viral for challenging different AI chatbots to tell her how many R’s are in the word ‘strawberry’, and was told by one that there were only two.
Maclaurin said AIs are bizarrely good at some things and bizarrely bad at other things, and it’s a sign that AI won’t be able to replace us just yet – but that doesn’t mean we should be complacent. We should think about how some domains could be affected.
Listen to the full episode for more on the latest in AI technology.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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