Is AI good or bad for humanity?

The Letters AI

In recent months, there has been a growing debate about the benefits and disadvantages of AI on humanity. Some say that AI has helped them become more productive (I fall into this category). In certain jobs, people are not even afraid of being replaced by AI, at least in their lifetime (especially people in healthcare). On the other hand, companies like IBM and BT Group, formerly known as British Telecom, have decided to cut thousands of jobs to replace them with AI. Others are afraid that AI will outperform human intelligence and become the dominant entity in the world.

In the book “The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond,” Peter Lee, who is VP of Research at Microsoft and one of the authors, talks about the incredible use cases of GPT-4 in medicine. After testing GPT-4 for a couple of weeks, it has become an essential tool for him.

Yuval Noah Harari, however, is against the deployment of AI in our daily life. In an interview, he suggested that AI is so powerful it could create its own religion with its own holy book. It would be a perfect religion without any contradictions, created by a super-intelligent entity that most human beings will not be able to comprehend.

I have been using GPT-4 for several weeks and it has also become essential to me. However, I can’t decide whether AI will be good or bad for humanity. When you undertake actions, you realize there are always factors you hadn’t considered. Your perception evolves during the process, and you become aware of new aspects that you might not have realized before. Consider all the positive and negative impacts that social media has had on our lives.

Here are the links for an interview with Peter Lee and Yuval Noah Harari that I found enlightening. How do you think AI will influence humanity?

Yuval Noah Harari talking to Pedro Pinto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hIlDiVDww4&t=2168s

Peter Lee talking to Eric Topol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CeQAyQ-0oU