Transformative Potential of AI Technologies

This paper by Ross Gruetzemacher and Jess Whittlestone examines the concept of transformative AI, which significantly impacts society without necessarily achieving human-level cognitive abilities. The authors propose three categories of transformation: Narrowly Transformative AI, affecting specific domains like the military; Transformative AI, causing broad changes akin to general-purpose technologies such as electricity; and Radically Transformative AI, inducing profound societal shifts comparable to the Industrial Revolution.

Note: this resource uses “GPT” to refer to general purpose technologies, which they define as “a technology that initially has much scope for improvement and eventually comes to be widely used.” Keep in mind that this is a different term than a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), which is a type of large language model used in systems like ChatGPT.

Original text:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.00747.pdf

Authors:
Ross Gruetzemacher and Jess Whittlestone

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