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What Does the AI Revolution Mean for Our Future?

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What Does the AI Revolution Mean for Our Future?

How will AI impact our immediate and near future? Can the technology be controlled, and does it have agency? Watch DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and Yuval Noah Harari debate these questions, with The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton-Beddoes.

The Economist,

5 min read
8 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

As innovation and risk accelerate, AI takes baby steps toward an impactful but uncertain evolution. 

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Editorial Rating

10

Qualities

  • Visionary
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  • Insider's Take

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Can artificial intelligence be controlled, and how will it change global economies, politics and daily lives? DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and historian Yuval Noah Harari spoke with The Economist’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton-Beddoes about what the “AI Revolution” means to humanity’s future, and whether inevitable changes caused by this burgeoning technology threaten liberal democracy. The conversation provides a balanced look at how AI reveals risks and rewards as it changes the world order, often in unexpected ways.

Summary

Within five years, people will interact with more human-like AIs.

Mustafa Suleyman says that over the past decade, people connected to the generative AI Revolution have become adept at sorting, labeling and classifying images, audio and text – and using these materials to train computers.

The next phase is to produce new AI-enhanced forms of multimedia and languages. ChatGPT and other current LLMs (large language models) are quite accurate, but within the next five years the “frontier model companies” will use more computer power to train even larger models. Suleyman predicts that new capabilities will allow AI to plan actions over “multiple time horizons.”

For the first time in history, a human-made machine can make its own decisions.

Suleyman proposes a “modern Turing test” in which a machine takes $100,000 seed money and creates a new product in about three months. It would generate design blueprints, negotiate with manufacturers for cost, “drop-ship” the product and collect payment. He thinks an ACI (artificial capable intelligence) could complete the sequence autonomously, working with humans and other AIs. The model would...

About the Speakers

Mustafa Suleyman is the co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI. He is the author of The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind; Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow; and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Zanny Minton-Beddoes is editor-in-chief of The Economist. 

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