Hot on the heels of yesterday’s AI For Science Forum hosted by Google DeepMind and The Royal Society, this week’s TL;DR Shorts episode features Professor Lord Martin Rees, one of the world’s leading cosmologists and the UK’s Astronomer Royal. Martin has spent decades exploring the vast mysteries of the universe and the future of humanity. A former President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, he is known for his work on existential risks, science policy, and our place in the cosmos. In our latest episode, Martin discusses the transformative rise of AI in science and society and shares his thoughts on how it could revolutionise research, tackle global challenges, or amplify our risks.
Martin acknowledges that AI is an exciting development, for research and society as a whole. The attention it receives speaks to the tremendous potential of AI-enabled tools. When pondering the more worrying aspects of this novel technology, Martin says that he feels the hype is exaggerated. Rather than worry about a superintelligence taking over, Martin believes that we would be better off worrying about the downsides of things going wrong.
Martin reflects on the pace of progress in AI and how it mirrors previous transformative innovations; progress doesn’t go uniformly and exponentially, rather it goes up quickly and then levels off. Comparing the rise of AI to space travel, Martin reminds us that there were only 12 years between Sputnik and the first Moon Landing, but since then there has been very little progress in space flight. There were also 50 years between the first transatlantic flight and the development jumbo jet. However,x since then commercial flight has barely changed. While AI is surging now, Martin reminds us that we shouldn’t presume that this trend will continue exponentially.
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