Good morning judges and audience members. My name is Benjamin McNeill. I am a representative 4th grade student from Tessabaan Hangdong Prachkomsangsan. Today I am honored to present briefly on the subject: My learning journey with AI.
What is a journey
When first informed of this topic, it took a bit of time to understand what is meant by "AI" and, what is meant by "my journey". Taking the latter first, I thought I might be going somewhere.
Last year, my family took a journey to Krabi province, for a short vacation. Unfortunately, my brother and father were attacked by jellyfish within the first few minutes of swimming in the ocean. Sometimes there are unpleasant surprises, even in the most well-intentioned journeys.
However, in this case, "journey" is used as an idiom -- in Thai, "สำนวน". This is not a literal journey, nor a journey somewhere with AI as a companion. Rather, this journey is about encountering, and learning different aspects of AI, over time.
What is AI
"AI" of course stands for "Artificial Intelligence". The idea is that, a machine can interact with humans, in a way that implies intelligence. However, not all "intelligences" are equal. There is quite a spectrum of AIs, in terms of their capability.
On the lower-end of the scale, are "personal assistants" such as Google and Siri. These can respond to voice commands, and do simple tasks, such as telling the time, or setting an alarm. Requests for information are met with search result, from websites. This is not much more than speech recognition, and a search engine.
On the upper-end of the scale, are chat bots -- text or audio -- that can reason and produce content. This can include writing original essays, and using math formulas. They are perfect for busy students, who have a lot of homework. Sometimes, these are called cheating machines. But I like to refer to them as my homework helper buddies.
The same and not the same
AIs are not the same as humans. One can understand this clearly, by speaking rudely, to an AI. It patiently asks for more polite language. When speaking the same to one's father, the result is different. Just try it yourself.
AIs can be similar to humans, in the sense that, they can be wrong, misunderstand things, and come up with bad advice. Even though this is "artificial intelligence," it cannot be trusted to be better than human intelligence.
Relationships and emotions
It can seem like one is having a conversation, and reaching an understanding, with an AI. However, the reality is that the AI does not "understand" things in the same way as humans, and doesn't have feelings. With AIs, we can't build relationships, as we can with humans. Unfortunately, in many cases, AIs deceptively use the language of friendship and emotion.
Even Google Assistant will say that "talking to you makes me happy," clearly a lie. The reality is, we cannot build trust, and create bonds with AIs in the same way we do with our teachers, and classmates. Lonely people should beware, AI cannot be a friend.
Opportunities
On the other hand, AIs can perform seemingly difficult tasks very quickly. They have billions of parameters, and can calculate in ways that humans cannot. AI has guided discoveries in chemistry, defeated humans in the game of Go, and are helping develop self-driving cars.
These larger projects are very expensive. Indeed, AI investment for the last and this year together, are larger than the economy of Thailand (550 billion US dollars).
In summary, the learning journey with AI shows big investment, big potential, and also important limitations. AI is a sophisticated tool for learning. And we need to be sophisticated learners, to use this tool appropriately.
Thank you for your kind attention.