The ELO Forum Toronto this Wednesday, November 29th, is arriving at the right time. The Forum has three important presentations on AI, including the keynote by John Lennox, Professor Emeritus, University of Oxford. At the ELO Forum, we will dive deep into the implications of artificial intelligence for life and business today. 

What are some of the potential implications? Elon Musk, for example, thinks that artificial intelligence could eventually put everyone out of a job. The billionaire technology leader, who is CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and CTO and Executive Chairman of X, formerly known as Twitter, and owner of the newly formed AI startup xAI, recently said that AI will have the potential to become the “most disruptive force in history.”

“We will have something that is, for the first time smarter than the smartest human,” he said. Further, “It’s hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed,” Musk continued, “You can have a job if you wanted to have a job for personal satisfaction. But the AI would be able to do everything.” 

Musk has on multiple occasions warned of the threats that AI poses to humanity, having once said it could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. He was one of numerous tech leaders who urged for a pause to the development of AI more advanced than OpenAI’s GPT-4 software in an open letter released earlier this year.

Musk’s comments were made at a recent summit at Bletchley Park, UK, where world leaders agreed to a global communique on AI that saw them find common ground on the risks the technology poses to humanity. Technologists and political leaders used the summit to warn of the existential threats that AI poses, focusing on some of the possible doomsday scenarios that could be formed with the invention of a hypothetical superintelligence.

Another recent AI development occurred at OpenAI, which created the popular ChatGPT chatbot. There was a disagreement that cost Sam Altman, CEO, his job. Experts say that his dismissal reflected a fundamental difference of opinion over safety and societal impact. On one side are those, like Altman, who view the rapid development and, especially, public deployment of AI as essential to stress-testing and perfecting the technology. On the other side are those who say the safest path forward is to fully develop and test AI in a laboratory first to ensure it is, so to speak, safe for human consumption.

Those worries over generative AI came to a head with the removal of Altman, who was also OpenAI's co-founder. “Generative AI” is the term for the software that can create coherent content, like essays, in response to simple prompts. The popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT over the past year has accelerated debate about how best to regulate and develop the software.

ChatGPT's release last November prompted a frenzy of investment in AI firms, including $10 billion from Microsoft into OpenAI and billions more for other startups, including Alphabet and Amazon.

Regulators, meanwhile, are trying to keep pace with AI’s development, including guidelines from the US government and a push for “mandatory self-regulation” from some countries as the European Union works to enact broad oversight of the software.

While most use generative AI software, such as ChatGPT, to supplement their work, like writing quick summaries of lengthy documents, observers are wary of versions that may emerge known as “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, which could perform increasingly complicated tasks without any prompting. This has sparked concerns that the software could, on its own, take over defense systems, create political propaganda, or produce weapons.

John Carbrey, Managing Director, FutureSight Ventures, one of the ELO Forum Toronto speakers, noted that, "On November 6th, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision was released by Open AI.  This is the most powerful and capable AI model built to date and gives ground breaking development access to visual understanding.  This opens up a whole new set of use cases for AI such as graphic design, user experience creation, and understanding images in ways that only humans have been able to in the past."

In short, by attending the ELO Forum Toronto on November 29th you will be much better informed regarding both the promise and peril of AI.

Attend this year's Toronto Forum: