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Hong Kong
OpinionComment
Jonathan Johnson
Jonathan Johnson

Opinion | How AI could free us to return to the pursuit of wisdom

  • As artificial intelligence takes over the grunt work of processing and curating knowledge, the wisdom needed to develop, deploy and use that knowledge remains our work
  • The great traditions of wisdom, in religion, philosophy and elsewhere, will be our compass as we explore new territory

Reading Time:3 minutes
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The frontiers of AI may have forced themselves upon us, but it remains for us to chart our path with spiritual and intellectual principles that have stood the test of time. Photo: Shutterstock
Jonathan Johnson
We are hearing more about artificial intelligence and with increasing urgency. The media is abuzz over chatbots such as ChatGPT, or text-to-image software like Stable Diffusion. It’s an international and local phenomenon.
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In Hong Kong, educators are scrambling to make sense of this new reality even as Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry Sun Dong calls for an AI supercomputing centre in the city.

It’s not just in education and the government, either. In the past few weeks, I’ve had discussions about AI with social workers, programmers, professors, pastors and financiers, each wondering how AI will affect their fields.

What is behind the uptick in awareness of these tools, and how are we to navigate the technological frontiers? While a brief grounding in the former gives us helpful knowledge, what is needed – suddenly, it seems – is wisdom to tackle the latter.

The growing awareness of AI-related programs can be ascribed to access and awe. Long-simmering ingredients like natural-language modelling, databases of human feedback and sophisticated machine perception have recently become accessible for sampling by a non-technical audience.
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Your child in Form 5 need not be a computer expert to create a graphic of a Pokémon riding a pizza, with Stable Diffusion. Your colleague need not work all night to produce a believable debriefing for your boss now there is ChatGPT. Both can be done in less time than it takes to read this article. ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and many others are freely available, and becoming virally popular.

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