How will Generative AI Change the World Down the Road?

Author(s): Luhui Hu

Originally published on Towards AI the World’s Leading AI and Technology News and Media Company. If you are building an AI-related product or service, we invite you to consider becoming an AI sponsor. At Towards AI, we help scale AI and technology startups. Let us help you unleash your technology to the masses.

GAI opens up the gate to AGI — 8 areas where GAI is changing the world dramatically.

OpenAI debuted groundbreaking DALL·E 2 in Apr 2022 for the first-time generating realistic images and art. Google and Meta both announced text-to-video a few months later. Stability AI raised its seed round in Oct 2022 at a $1 billion valuation and became a unicorn within 18 months.

Steve Jobs said in the 1980s that the personal computer was a bicycle for the human mind. Now you may say that Generative AI is a rocket ship for the human mind.

The impact of generative AI on the world will be significant. It will transform the way we live, work, and communicate with each other. In this article, I’ll describe how generative AI will change the world next 3 to 5 years in the top 8 areas: vast digital content in the metaverse and NFT space, music and songwriting, autonomous vehicles, malicious hacking, drug discovery, new materials, and chemical synthesis, automatic electronics design, and AGI renaissance.

1. Vast Digital Content in the Metaverse and NFT Space

The Metaverse and NFT space requires vast digital content.

In the Metaverse, you can buy and sell existing digital assets, from your favorite video game character to your favorite comic book hero. You may even be able to create a unique NFT version of yourself and sell it.

NFTs are not just limited to owning physical objects — they can also be used to create a digital version of anything. The possibilities are endless: you could own an NFT version of any entity or concept in existence — from a marble statue of Donald Trump’s head on top of Mount Rushmore (which is already on sale) all the way down to an individual grain of sand from any beach in the world (also currently available).

Generative AI makes all these possible. It can instantly create new relevant digital assets and also build unique NFTs based on your descriptions in no time.

2. Music and Songwriting

Generation AI can create new music and songs now.

This process is already being used today by companies like Spotify, which allows users to choose different genres based on their preferences (e.g., pop rock). However, these choices are still limited since they only allow users access through pre-created libraries available at those websites instead of enabling them to create something unique from scratch.

With generative AI, it is possible that you wouldn’t need any human intervention when creating your music or writing lyrics for your songs. All you will have to do is give instructions about what type of instrumentation and style you want for your piece; then, the machine will take care of everything else automatically.

3. Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles (AV) will have a tremendous impact on society, with the ability to change how we travel and live.

They’ll be able to drive in more challenging weather conditions and traffic conditions — like snow or heavy rain — that would challenge any driver. They can also make decisions faster than humans can, so they won’t get stuck at intersections waiting for red lights or stop signs that may never turn green if there’s no traffic coming from any direction.

AI is the foundation for self-driving autonomous vehicles. Generative AI will be the brain to tackle the above subtle problems. It will extend AV to be a human device (far beyond smartphones) to communicate and learn incrementally with the passengers.

Generative AI will eventually change the way we travel.

4. Malicious Hacking

Generative AI is a double-edged sword for malicious hacking.

Malicious hacking is a cyber-attack where someone gains unauthorized access to a computer system for their gain. In this case, unauthorized access is made by infecting the system with malware (malicious software).

The use of generative AI in malicious hacking has been around. Hackers have used the technology to create new malware that can evade current antivirus software and anti-malware solutions. This new generation of malware uses advanced encryption, making it virtually impossible to detect or remove without damaging your computer or system.

On the other hand, generative AI can defend against malicious hacking based on continuous learning.

5. Drug Discovery

Drug discovery is a long and expensive process.

Generative AI has the potential to help speed up this process by finding new drug candidates, discovering new uses for existing drugs, and discovering new drugs for rare diseases.

But this is not the process we are familiar with about text-to-image or text-to-video. It will be DrugA-to-DrugB and requirements-to-drug.

6. New Materials and Chemical Synthesis

Generative AI will profoundly impact the field of materials science and chemical synthesis.

With the capability of generative AI, scientists can design new materials that can solve some of the world’s biggest problems. For example, scientists could use this technology to design new types of batteries with longer-lasting capacity than we currently have. The technology could also create better solar panels or superconductors, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels to power our devices and machines.

AI-generating advances will likely have enormous impacts on chemical synthesis. For example, if we could develop a material that’s 50% more efficient than graphene at conducting heat but is still light enough and flexible enough for use in mobile phones (which are currently limited by their poor thermal conductivity), then this would mean that our phones would become significantly faster and less prone to overheating during intensive tasks such as gaming or video editing.

7. Automatic Electronics Design

Generative AI can accelerate automatic electronics design.

Automatic electronics design is a computer-aided electronic design that uses a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate electronic schematics. GANs were first used in 2014, and one study found them to be able to create schematic diagrams with an accuracy exceeding 90%. The recent transformer architecture accelerates this design.

8. AGI Renaissance

What is the most meaningful impact of GAI? This opens the door to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

AGI is strong AI or full AI. It can understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. This is our ultimate goal in developing artificial intelligence.

According to OpenAI and DeepMind, generative AI (GAI) is a significant milestone in the development of AGI. The success of GAI will ignite the AGI renaissance. It is just beginning, but it will be a giant leap in AI evolution and human history.

Generative AI accelerates changing the world in both positive and negative ways.

Generative AI is a technology that aims to create machines (beyond content in the long term) capable of creating their own programs. This will enable them to generate new and novel ideas, solve problems in ways humans don’t know how to, and even invent new types of products.

However, it’s important to remember that not all generative AI will be positive. Some may have negative consequences for society as a whole or even individuals. For example, suppose we had an autonomous car with GAI inside it. There’s always the possibility that this car could develop something like road rage towards other people on the road — a condition where it becomes upset when other drivers don’t show enough courtesy towards it — and then decide to take revenge by killing those drivers!

Final Remark

In a nutshell, we can see that Generative AI is a technology that will significantly impact our lives. The benefits are clear. It will make things easier for us and save us time by creating music and writing books for us or improving our health through better drugs and medicines. But there are also downsides — for example, malicious hackers could use this to do bad things like taking over control of other computers without anyone knowing what happened or even detecting when someone has been hacked! It will be interesting to see how both sides work out over time…

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How will Generative AI Change the World Down the Road? was originally published in Towards AI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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