Ensuring a Thriving Digital Future in a Post-Truth World | Mark van Rijmenam | TEDxAthens

Good morning, Athens. What an interesting time we live in. But today I want to discuss how generative AI is revolutionizing education. As research shows, we're in the midst of an AI renaissance, enabling creative innovations with just a few text prompts. Groundbreaking, right? Generative AI like the famous GPT series or midjourney that created my background here, can generate text, images and other content based on input prompts. Just imagine the possibilities in education. Personalized learning materials, automatic generation of quizzes and tests, and creative, engaging projects are just around the corner. Quite a game changer, wouldn't you say? These AI driven advancements have the potential to improve learning outcomes, foster deeper teacher student interactions, and make education accessible to a wider range of learners. But of course, there's always a flip side. Some schools and countries have started banning tools like ChatGPT. Amusing, isn't it? Instead of fearing change, let's educate the public and embrace the potential of this remarkable technology while also addressing ethical guidelines and responsible AI use. Seems like common sense. Really? And what about facial recognition in education? The schools in China are using this technology to track student attention and improve learning outcomes. Bold and innovative, if you ask me. It's 2030 and education is democratized, personalized and accessible to all. Students are engaged and motivated, teachers are empowered, and we've unlocked the full potential of human creativity. All thanks to AI. But that's only if we stop being afraid, start using it wisely and. Hello?

Hello?

Are you still there?

What you just saw was a digital deepfake of me. An exact digital replica where I recreated myself, digitally cloned my voice, mimicked my movements with AI and asked ChatGPT to write a script based on my content. This process taught me the amazing power of this technology and AI can truly revolutionize society or destroy it. As Morpheus from the Matrix once said. What is real? How do you define real? Determining who and what we can trust becomes more challenging every day. After all, if I can create a hyper realistic digital copy of myself, what can bad actors do with near infinite budgets? We are moving to a post truth world and things are about to get dangerous. And that worries me. I've been a futurist for over 10 years, starting with big data, moving to blockchain AI, the metaverse, back to AI. I have a PhD on these topics to understand how emerging technologies change organizations. I've written four books about this myself and I always try to practice what I preach. My work allows me to travel a lot to help organizations around the world understanding the these amazing technologies. But when my son was born in the summer of 2022, I decided to pause my travels. This gave me a chance to think deeply about what's happening. The more I thought about it, the more worried I became. Because now with having two children, I want to do whatever I can to make sure that they end up in a thriving digital future instead of a dystopian. Unfortunately, it seems we are rapidly moving into a future that nobody wants. It seems that we are enslaved by our technologies. Every time when I see parents on the street with a young child in the pram, with a smartphone attached to the pram so that a young kid cannot look anywhere else except for the screen with the bright colors dancing on it, it hurts me and I feel for the kid because this kid doesn't have any chance but to become addicted to to these technologies before he or she knows it. If this is painful. Recent Dutch research show that 25% of the babies under one year old spend two hours or more per day on a tablet or smartphone. And this is self reported, so most likely it is a lot higher. In addition, almost 10% of the parents give a smartphone to their child when it goes to bed while it should be asleep. We've truly become enslaved by our own technologies. And that was even before ChatGPT was launched. In my quest to understand how the technology had changed when this amazing technology was released into the public, I decided to write my fifth book with it. I dare say I was the first person in the world to publish a book written entirely by ChatGPT because it became available only two weeks after the tool became available. And that's also when it hit the world had changed and it will never be the same again. Moreover, the dystopian future that I was fearing since the birth of my son all of a sudden had become a lot closer than I anticipated. And with that, the time to do something about it, which was already a closing window, became a lot shorter. Time is ticking, and I feel that the day ChatGPT was launched, the doomsday clock moved closer to midnight. Because I realized that these large language models, whether developed by Google, OpenAI or any of the other startups developing generative AI tools, are so powerful that increasingly we are at risk of losing control to the machines. And that is not something to look forward to. Or as Gerald Lanier recently stated, AI will not kill us, but AI driving us insane will. Now I consider myself an optimistic dystopian, trying to hold two opposing perspectives in my mind to understand how we can end up on the right side of history. So let's first explore my dystopian side. Isaac Asimov once said, the saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster and society gathers wisdom. This was in 1988, but this quote still seems eerily accurate. It seems that in the past 35 years we have sleepwalked into the digital age and us not being digitally aware has resulted in a range of problems for society. If you think that polarization, manipulation and misinformation in the social media era was bad, it will be child's play. Compared to the age of AI where we have technologies converging such as quantum computing, the Metaverse and AI to create increasingly more polarization, manipulation and misinformation, we are creating the perfect storm. The question is why? I think that the metaphorical representation of Moloch can help us understand the challenges and dilemmas we face. Moloch was originally an ancient mystical deity associated with child sacrifice. In the past hundred years it has evolved into a metaphor for the destructive forces within society. And Moloch symbolizes the consequences of competition, FOMO and self interest that can lead to harmful outcomes even when individuals act rationally, resulting in a suboptimal state for everyone. The metaphor was derived from the idea that competition and self interest, like the God Moloch, require constant sacrifice and consume the creativity and individuality of those subject to them. The best example is capitalism. On the one hand, capitalism drives innovation and creates wealth, but at the same time it creates exploitation, inequality and environmental degradation. The same applies to AI. On the one hand, AI can help us restore the Amazon, tackle climate change, create better healthcare and create more empathetic machines. But it also results in exploitation, massive inequality and other negative consequences. Already we see that ChatGPT is being used for misinformation campaigns. In Venezuela, it's being used to create more advanced phishing and malware attacks. And earlier this year, Chaos GPT was created with the sole objective to destroy humanity. And this is only the beginning. Now we see the convergence of forces where AI created by capitalism results in a tiny elite controlling society or the end of it due to FOMO and a pursuit of short term shareholder value. Unfortunately, capitalism has created a suboptimal state for humanity when it comes to the development of AI, it's Moloch at work. A significant shift in research has shown that in the past years, AI research moved from universities where ethics boards are standard to the private sector where oversight is often lacking. According to the AI Index compiled by researchers from Stanford University, as well as AI companies such as Google, Anthropic and Hugging Face. In 2022 there were 32 significant industry produced machine learning models compared to just three produced by academia. And this is a problem because companies are driven by a short term shareholder value instead of a long term stakeholder perspective. And this transition is driven by a fear of missing out on the advancements of AI, as evidenced by Elon Musk's decision to create a ChatGPT competitor called Truth GPT shortly after announcing or arguing for a pause in the development of large language models. While we now have very advanced machine learning models, and some argue we're moving closer to artificial general intelligence, it seems that these models are optimized to benefit the shareholders instead of society. In this process, a tiny elite aims to control vast amounts of wealth. The best example is OpenAI, because recently Sam Altman argued that he believes that OpenAI can capture $100 trillion of the world's wealth. And that's no surprise if we see how they have developed the technology, because when they released it, no doubt it was very successful for OpenAI because within two months they had 100 million people using it, feeding it data, training the model, all for free. But the positive impacts on society remain to be seen. For example, their API now allows anyone with access to integrate the powerful large language model in their own tools where oversight is even less. A sad example is Snapchat's virtual AI friend, which is which runs on GPT4. As Tristan Harris showed earlier this year, this tool encourages child abuse, not the kind of technology that we want in the hands of hundreds of millions of children. The more advanced AI is becoming, the bigger the risk for humanity. And if we do not build it correctly, it will pose an existential threat to us. Therefore, we must establish global alignment on the ethical use of AI and incorporate that into our culture and ensure that AI is aligned with human values. We must fight Moloch. If this seems like an insurmountable challenge, we've done it actually before. For example, we've prevented the world from going down a rabbit hole of human cloning, we prevented everyone from having access to bioweapons, and we avoided all countries to have access to nuclear weapons. So let's remain optimistic and see how we can fight Moloch. So let's turn to my optimistic side. I really believe that we still have one shot, one opportunity to seize everything we ever wanted for a better future. To quote Eminem Will we capture it or will we let it slip? We must approach AI with a greater caution to avoid the pitfalls of moving too fast and breaking things like we've done in the social media era. Instead of repeating past mistakes, let's harness the power of AI and create AI that will benefit humanity as a whole instead of a select few. To achieve this vision, we must become digitally aware. That means we must stop doom scrolling TikTok videos. We must read the instruction manuals of these very powerful tools if they existed, especially when it concerns our children. After all, we don't allow children to drive cars and when they want to do so, at 18 years old, they they have to obtain a driver's license. I think we can become digitally aware if we focus on three education, verification and regulation. First, education. We should focus on educating the world on the tools that will define our lives. Not only should we use AI in education, as my digital counterpart mentioned, though maybe in a more ethical way, but to truly address the challenges posed by AI, we we must elevate the world's digital awareness. And while today's generation may be considered digital natives, it's crucial to recognize that being native to the digital world doesn't automatically equate to being digitally aware. To tackle the complex ethical and social issues arising from AI, we need to have a comprehensive understanding of the implications of our digital footprint and the importance of our data rights. To achieve this, we must invest in education beyond mere technological literacy. And it should encompass the ethical, social and political dimensions of technology, empowering people to make informed decisions about how they engage with AI and the digital world. And this should start from a very early age, because we have seen now that kids and even babies are getting familiar with this technology from very early on. By fostering a culture of digital awareness, we can equip individuals with the knowledge and tools necessary to vote with their data, to demand transparency and accountability from big tech firms, and to actively participate in shaping a responsible and equitable digital future. Second, verification. The more powerful AI becomes, the more important it becomes to develop robust methods to verify its functionality, intentions and output. And this involves tools to identify AI generated content and to confirm the authenticity of digital identities in our ever evolving digital landscape. After all, if everyone can as easily create a hyper realistic digital deepfake as I can, we must be able to verify that the person we're dealing with, whether by voice, video or in the metaverse, is indeed the person who they say they are. Finally, regulation. In order to manage the impact of AI on society, we need to establish a comprehensive regulation similar to the FDA's approval for drugs, to ensure the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies. That will impact our minds. We must establish a regulatory body like the fda. Just as the FDA evaluates the safety and efficacy of the drugs that will impact our physical health, this new regulatory agency would assess AI technologies that will influence our mental well being, cognitive processes and our decision making abilities. Europe's upcoming AI act is a good start, but AI works without borders, so we need this at the global level. Next, we should require companies developing AI to have ethics boards with with genuine authority. These boards should have real decision making power and be composed of diverse experts, including ethicists, engineers, social scientists and representatives of affected communities. They must be given the authority to set guidelines, oversee the development and deployment of AI, and if necessary, halt projects that don't meet ethical and safety standards. These three solutions are very much achievable if we work together as a species. We must foster a long term global culture that prioritizes ethical AI development and embraces the need for transparency, accountability and collaboration across all sectors in order to fight Moloch. Despite these challenges, I remain optimistic. What keeps me optimistic? The simple fact that we all want the best for our children and that it's a thriving digital future and not a dystopian one. For the past decade, I've been experimenting with technology to understand the intricate workings of these very powerful tools. And no, I'm not a big data engineer, I'm not a machine learning specialist, I'm not a developer, I cannot even code. But I find it important to understand how these powerful tools work and so should everyone else. Yes, we're all busy leading our lives, but this is something so fundamental that we have to look up. We have to become aware of what's happening and where we are going. Because if we are ignoring the signals that our society is on a path of destruction, how will we be able to protect the future generation? The potential of AI is vast. The stakes are high. We have the power to determine whether AI becomes a force for good or a source of destruction. It's up to us to make the right choices, to establish the necessary safeguards and ensure that we create a future that we can be proud of. With the right approach, we can shape a future where AI enriches our lives, solves complex problems and ultimately serves humanity. Thank you.