AI Self-Improvement Can Be Dangerous

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Machines teaching themselves improve is the next phase of AI development. If AI agents can autonomously learn and improve, it will be one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs ever because the speed of develop will increase tremendously but there's a downside to this.

With that kind of technology, how powerful it'll get is going to be unpredictable. Its capabilities will be unpredictable as well. Do we really want something that powerful and unpredictable?

I have always had high hopes when it comes to how AI will benefit us in the near future and we're already seeing this happen but this particular concept of AI learning on its on is giving me a little bit of fear. The scientists say that if AI learns to master its own code, it could outperform humans not just in speed but in complexity as well.

But won't there be huge consequences if AI starts improving faster than we can even understand it. We won't be able to keep up with it's pace and that means one thing, we lose control over AI. Maybe that's actually when this whole possibility of AI taking over the world could happen.

I have mixed emotions when it comes to this particular innovation because on one hand thanks to faster AI development we'll also see faster vaccine development and even cure to dieses that are currently incurable. So the healthcare industry will be more capable but we stand a chance or a risk of losing control over what AI does next.

There's an OpenVaccine challenge and that's a real-world example. AI can be used to find a possible vaccine to treat a disease. At the moment AI is helping to find an mRNA vaccine that can treat some dangerous diseases like COVID 19. But this same autonomy from AI which is giving us progress can cause problems.

They did a test and OpenAI’s model, "o1," only scored in the top 40% of humans for some of the tasks, but with more time, these systems could surpass the smartest scientists. And that is where the problem will start.

This actually means we're moved on from building tools, we’re now building creators. Those creators can turn on us if they wish to.