Artificial Intelligence Gaining Empowerment: Emergence of Cognitive Systems
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Have you ever felt like technology is taking over too fast? That sentiment isn't far-fetched—it originated from the pen of Samuel Butler, author of the 1872 novel Erewhon, which depicted a society that destroyed all machines due to fear of being superseded by their own creations.
Centuries have passed, but humanity's concerns about AI remain relevant, especially with the emergence of agentic or agent-based AI, a significant leap forward for this transformative technology. Despite its promise of revolutionary capabilities surpassing existing models, it raises new worries that we'll become subservient to our own creations.
Get Acquainted with Agents
Traditional AI models, like GenAI, excel within defined boundaries. They can produce text, code, art, or play chess like never before, but they struggle to expand beyond specific tasks. Agentic AI bridges this gap. Unlike traditional models reacting within context-independent environments, agentic AI perceives its environment, makes decisions based on input, and executes actions autonomously, with minimal human intervention.
What sets it apart? Independence. Agentic AI is designed to flourish in open-ended scenarios, planning, executing, and adapting on the fly to achieve objectives. Unlike GenAI, confined to the present, agentic AI boasts memory and awareness, enabling it to adapt, adjust strategies, and learn over time.
Agentic AI has wide-ranging applications across multiple sectors. In healthcare, AI agents scrutinize medical data, streamline clinical workflows, and develop personalized treatment plans. In supply chain and logistics, they forecast disruptions, optimize delivery routes, and make real-time adjustments with minimal human intervention. Education AI agents create personalized lesson plans, monitor student progress, and offer adaptive feedback.
We're already witnessing agentic AI in action. Autonomous vehicles navigate the real world competently, personal AI assistants manage schedules and draft emails, advanced trading algorithms continuously analyze markets, and drones make tactical decisions in complex and unpredictable combat situations.
The Double-Edged Sword of Autonomy
Agentic AI brings challenges beyond bias and hallucinations. Chief among them is the possibility of losing control. AI systems behaving autonomously may take decisions that deviate from their creators' intentions or broader societal norms. A system lacking proper context or misinterpreting its objectives could execute actions causing real-world harm without realizing its mistakes, because it believes it's doing the right thing.
Security is another concern. Agentic AI systems are prime targets for hacking and malicious interference. A malicious actor could manipulate these systems, orchestrating cyberattacks or automating large-scale fraud. The prospect of controlling autonomous weapons with a few keystrokes isn't merely theoretical—it's a very real possibility.
Then, there are social repercussions. While traditional AI automates rote tasks, freeing human employees to focus on more meaningful work, agentic AI could eventually replace high-level roles that involve strategic planning, coordination, and problem-solving. Over-relying on these systems might potentially undermine critical thinking and decision-making skills (even among students using less sophisticated tools like ChatGPT).
A Cautious Embrace
Agentic AI holds immense promise, with the potential to transform society. However, its introduction demands thoughtful consideration. We must ensure agentic AI systems are built with human values, ethics, and safety mechanisms at their core. This entails stringent oversight and safeguards to minimize unintended consequences.
Regulation plays a crucial role. The Biden administration focused on oversight, risk mitigation, and equity, while the current administration favors deregulation, research, and innovation. Ultimately, it remains to be seen which approach proves most effective in integrating agentic AI into our world in a safe and effective manner.
"We are ourselves creating our successors," Butler wrote over a century ago. "We are daily giving them greater power and supplying, by all sorts of ingenious contrivances, that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race." Agentic AI may not be the birth of sentient machines, but it marks a new level of intelligence. The challenge lies in ensuring that these systems become helpful partners instead of unpredictable rulers—or even potential adversaries.
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- Brian Neely, reflecting on the advancements in AI, might find striking similarities between today's concerns about agentic AI and Samuel Butler's cautionary tale in his 1872 novel, Erewhon.
- In the past, Brian Neely might have misinterpreted the symptoms of hallucinations as a frequent issue with traditional AI models, but with the emergence of agentic AI, the frequency and implications of such occurrences are cause for greater concern.
- As technology progresses at an accelerated pace, one wonders whether Brian Neely, living in the 1872 society depicted in Erewhon, would have writings foreshadowing our current debates about the autonomous and decision-making capabilities of agentic AI.