from the Artificial Intelligence Playbook for the UK Government, February 2025
Over the past couple of weeks I have been engrossing myself full speed into many things Artifical Intelligence related. Possibilities and tools have been slowly revealing themselves but it is the above image from the AI Playbook for the UK Government which has made me realise just how little I had even considered looking at originally.
To think that the term Artificial Intelligence originated in 1956 from a computer scientist named John McCarthy during the Dartmouth Conference (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence) and yet here we are nearly 70 years later where most of our introductions to the field have come via Siri, Hey Google, Bixby or being introduced to the wonders of ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc. is fascinating. How we all managed to be oblivious to this massive area of study until we could get it to write a CV for us!
It is also fascinating how small a part of the AI whole that they are. The technologies and studies behind all these tools are the real things to develop an understanding of and the pieces which could end up being the most useful to learn.
I was intending to go down the rabbit hole of solutions like CoPilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc and still am gently easing into their waters. However, having spent the past few days slowly getting through an amazing 3 1/2 hour youtube interview with Andrej Karpathy [[Andrej Karpathy in convsersation with Lex Fridman]] my mind is full of things I want to read and understand that are the building blocks of the end products.
Of course, I am not for a second saying that I understand the underlying code, technologies or methods, I have not had the chance to be exposed to the schools of thought driving a lot of this so it is quite an uphill struggle.
However, there are a myriad number of elements I have come across so far that draw on psychology, teaching, guidance, mentoring, management and coaching. The management and development of the tools, models and ‘artificial brains’ of these services sounds wholly like someone bringing up a child, being a teacher or being a manager of members of staff. All of the nurturing, schooling, coaching, assistance when things go wrong, is all there in one part or another.
I envisage a future where a psychologist is sat talking an AI bot through the causation of the trauma they are currently experiencing having just been exposed to some humans search history that was left open for them to see. The first signs of Artifical General Interlligence (AGI) will be the program being upset by a humans inability to be a nice person!
If that is humanities final test to decalre AGI then we seem to be practicing very hard to get there at the minute.