Artificial intelligence hit widespread public consciousness more than two years ago in late 2022 with most of the hype generated by Open AI’s Chat GPT — initially GPT 3, then versions 3.5 and in 2023, GPT 4.
It was a souped up version of Google’s ubiquitous search engine with a powerful difference.
What made ChatGPT so attractive was that it was possible for users to garner an enormous amount information about this or that, simply by typing in requests and later by two-way by voice (the “chat” part).
There are hitches with AI, including hallucinations, the fabrication of data and more importantly, limited access to data that is freely available on the internet unlike corporations, institutions, governments, militaries and other entities, which typically control access for security and other purposes to their own private databases.
It was that ease of communication and access to an enormous database in the public realm that made ChatGPT such an early success.
That was until the New York Times and other companies sued ChatGPT, claiming that their content had been used without their consent and, more importantly, compensation.
Widespread awareness of the power of AI may have entered public awareness recently, but versions of AI have been with us longer in the design and operation of “smart” weapons, such as autonomous and sometimes armed drones in Afghanistan, Africa, Ukraine and the Middle East, analyzing data-rich weather and climate changes, and as powerful tools in science for corralling and analyzing enormous data bases for everything from black holes and the radiation associated with them, to the shapes and therefore functions of complex proteins and other molecules.
Soon health care institutions such as Harvard University’s health care system began to explore and incorporate AI in the business end of health care, the analysis of images generated by CT and MRI and other diagnostic machines and even entered the clinic where AI soon proved to be a useful “partner” for analyzing clinical cases.
Even the venerable New England Journal of Medicine spawned its own AI journal: The New England Journal of Medicine – Artificial Intelligence.
Technological advances in AI evolve. Yes, you read me correctly — AI can evolve much as biological systems do by, in the case of AI, searching huge databases to find alternative, more effective algorithms for analyzing data and choosing the best option, sometimes to the surprise of human software developers. Reads a lot like evolution by natural selection to me.
The Journal Nature, one of the most trusted science journals in the world and one of the most commonly cited references by Nobel committees, examined the 100 top institutions in AI in the world.
To no one’s surprise, the top 10 included in the U.S. were Harvard (1), Stanford University (3), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (4), Columbia University (8) and the National Institutes of Health (9). In the U.K., they were Oxford University (6) and Cambridge University (7), in Germany the Max Planck Society (5) and Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (10) and in China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2).
Overall, the United States captured 47 of the top 100 spots, Europe including the U.K. with 24 spots and China with 16. The rest included Canada with three spots, Japan with two, South Korea, two, Israel, two, and Singapore, one.
To my surprise, there were none in the top 100 from Russia, Turkey, Iran and, to me, the biggest surprise, India was not represented despite its aspirations and growing technical and industrial prowess.
The whooping capture of so many spots by the United States is a tribute to American leadership in technical sciences such as computers, but it’s better to look at the U.S. as the centre of a web of multidirectional connections between the U.S., U.K., Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea and Israel, with shared histories and alliances since the Second World War, a period during which students moved freely between those countries.
China’s progress, like that of South Korea, has been amazing but without, a least so far, the well-established web the U.S. and others have profited from for the last 70 years.
Canada AI centres of excellence include the University of Toronto, McGill University and the University of British Columbia.
The University of Toronto was singled out for its AI strategy — according to the Journal Nature’s review, invested a modest $2 billion (CAD) wisely in recruitment in a manner akin to several AI leaders in Europe, including Germany.
AI is here to stay and likely to expand its reach into most facets in life from health care to civilian industries to national defense and science in general.
Many projects, such as the study of weather and climate change, black holes and their energy emissions to the properties and development of novel proteins, would be impossible without AI.
In my view, AI is slated to become immensely more capable, almost beyond our imagination, especially when it becomes coupled with quantum computers in the future.
It all sounds scary, but it may be the only technology capable of truly mastering the complexity of the bee’s brain and eventually the human brain, with its many billions of neurons and trillions of connections and, well beyond those projects, much of science in the future.
The hype surrounding AI in the last two years may have been over the top, but the future of life as we know it will become increasingly dependent on AI, itself a child of the digital computer and as much a future game changer — hopefully for the good, but with the potential for risks to security at every level, misinformation and yet more deadly weapon systems.
Anyone interested in AI should read Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, “Nexus, A Brief History of Information Networks from Stone Age to AI,” published this past fall. His book is provocative, a good read and, more importantly, a road map to the future of AI.
Dr. William Brown is a professor of neurology at McMaster University and co-founder of the InfoHealth series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.
