AI has the potential to be the most wide-ranging and influential general-purpose technology in human history, and the resulting changes will play a major role in determining national fates and reshuffling the deck of global power.
To address the challenges that will come along with that, Stony Brook President Andrea Goldsmith joined Kristen Ellis, associate principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Regulatory and Policy Affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and Jamie Metzel, futurist, author and founder of OneShared.World for a thought-provoking discussion, “The Global Race: AI as the Engine of American Strategic Advantage.”
The April 14 panel — part of Inauguration Week as well as day one of the SUNY AI Symposium at Stony Brook — was moderated by Lav Varshney, Della Pietra Infinity Professor and director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook.
Goldsmith noted that the “humanity” of AI has captivated the imagination of the general public in ways that other technology has not.
“You talk to it, and it talks back to you and it sounds human,” she said. “So people think, it’s human, it’s talking to me… But it isn’t human.
“What will AI be able to do that encroaches on human intelligence? I think that’s a philosophical question that we don’t have the answer to.”
The panel discussed the intersection of AI and national competitiveness, addressing the importance of AI in various scientific domains.
Ellis highlighted the DOE’s Genesis mission, a national initiative to build the world’s most powerful AI-driven scientific platform. Its goal is to create 100,000 AI-ready scientists and double the productivity and impact of American R&D within a decade.
“We’re seeing so many successful partnerships with a blend of industry, university and philanthropic partnerships,” she said. “I think Genesis is a great example of how we’re trying to approach that. The competitiveness component of it is very real.”
Ellis described working with the DOE Office of Environmental Management, which was responsible for the cleanup of Manhattan Project Cold War era sites.
“The Genesis mission is going to be a Manhattan Project-level of effort from the government, and we’re going to need that level of talent to do so, and that yields very quickly into a competitiveness discussion,” Ellis said. “And this isn’t just for computer science; this is going to impact every realm of science into the future as we think about global competitiveness.”
Metzl argued against the hype of artificial general intelligence (AGI), stressing the human input underpinning it.
“If we’re saying AGI means machines being able to do some things better than humans, we’re hundreds of years past that already,” he said. “But having machines do more and more varied kinds of functions, and having more agency, I think that is the inevitable path that we’re on. The conversation that we need to have is not just about technology but also about values. It has to be about governance and regulation and how whole ecosystems are managed.”
Goldsmith furthered Metzl’s point, underscoring the complexity of AI and its integration with the humanities.
“We don’t know where we’re going to be two years from now, or five or 10 years from now,” she said. “If you talk to an optimist, they’ll say machines will be able to do everything, they’ll take every job a decade from now. If you talk to a skeptic, they’ll say AI is not going to be able to do much more than a computer can do today. We already know that’s not the case, so reality is somewhere in the middle.”
“When we interact with AI systems and think ‘they’re so smart, they’re so wise,’ that’s because we’ve fed them thousands of years of human cultural inheritance,” added Metzl. “So I think that too many people are taking humans out of the story, and replacing them with these miraculous machines, but those thousands of years of human cultural development are the feedstock of the intelligence we’re getting back.”
All three speakers agreed that AI has the potential to transform the way we conduct scientific research and how we approach solving the most pressing challenges in our nation and the world, but it is not a panacea to replace human intelligence, creativity, discovery and vision.
Earlier in the day, a poster presentation showcased artificial intelligence research from students across all SUNY campuses. Goldsmith also provided opening remarks for the SUNY AI Symposium.
Acknowledging that AI is a powerful tool that we need to harness for good, Goldsmith spoke of the importance of building into the technology ways for it to police itself and engage ethics and bias. It is one of the many aspects of AI discussed at the symposium.
“Creativity, vision, instinct, perspective, collaboration, emotion and compassion are truly unique aspects of human intelligence. These are things that AI just cannot do,” Goldsmith said. “How we take this powerful tool and merge it with what’s uniquely human is part of what this symposium is about, and part of what the challenge of universities is about.”
— Robert Emproto
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