There’s been developments at breakneck speed in AI over the last few years, and a senior Google researcher has said that there’s an unusual phenomenon that’s powering this rapid development.
Senior Google researcher Francois Chollet has said that there’s a bit of a “messiah complex” among Bay Area researchers who want to create AGI. He said that this Messiah complex is almost a ‘religious quest’ to create superintelligence, and through it become “gods”. Chollet is the creator of the Keras library used for deep learning, and also the author of several highly-regarded books on Deep Learning using the Python programming language.
“Do you think there’s a bit of a messiah complex as well (in the quest for AGI)?” Chollet was asked in an interview. “Absolutely,’ he replied. “I think you see it a lot in the San Francisco Bay area. There are people who have kind of latched onto this idea of building AGI. And (they are) using it to sort of like picture themselves as the messiah, as you say,” he added.
“Personally, I see creating AGI as a scientific problem, not as a religious quest, this kind of merging together with the idea of eternal life. Which is, of course, very natural because the story in most religions is always about this combination. (People feel that) if you create AGI, it will, it will make you live forever, pretty much,” he added.
“It’s this very religious idea, right? And it has become this religious quest to get there first. And whoever gets there first will become, uh, gods,” he added.
Chollet seemed to be hinting that some of the research into AGI was being done not with the usual scientific aims of publishing research papers, or in the case of Silicon Valley with the goal of making more money, but with something a lot more profound. Thus far, only gods have created intelligent beings in humans, but if humans can create some intelligent beings through AGI, they’d end up becoming gods too. And Chollet feels that it’s this quasi-religious zeal that seems to be driving some of the intense research into AI development in Silicon Valley.