This post was originally published on this site.
Thomas Lux ’16 jokes that he’s a Roanoke College fanatic, but it’s hard to resist gushing about a place where he discovered a passion for research and community service, a penchant for leadership and – most importantly – the woman of his dreams, his wife Alex (Grant) Lux ’16.
He has since parlayed that experience into a Ph.D. in computer science from Virginia Tech and a career as a research scientist for Meta, where he specializes in designing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.
Knowing that Lux would be the perfect person to help us envision the future of artificial intelligence, we called him at his home in Redwood City, California, to pick his brain.
Q: What inspired you to pursue this path that you’re on?
It started at Roanoke College, before the industry was so captivated by AI. When I first started doing research, I went into robotics but realized very quickly that it wasn’t the hardware that blocked you from making cool things – intelligence was the limiter. So I considered what I could build that would have the most value for everyone and AI was an obvious answer, if not a little bit of a pie-in-the-sky one. It’s very motivating because if you solve this problem, there is no other problem that you need to solve. It is the penultimate research goal.
Q: What else about your experience at Roanoke got you started on this path?
Oh, a lot. I wasn’t just like an academic. I was a resident advisor. I was in leadership for student government for two years, and I loved to explore different topics while getting my core competencies. The unique thing that Roanoke did for me is that it blended my ability to do great work in three areas: working with people, being creative while building community, and doing great research one-on-one with professors, independent studies and summer research projects.
Q: What do you think is the most misunderstood issue about AI?
People think AI is coming to steal the jobs of the world – kind of the doom-and-gloom scenarios. They are worried about AI taking over the world. Frankly, I think that’s a big misunderstanding. At the end of the day, it’s just like almost every piece of technology we’ve invented over the last few 100 years. Yes, it is a tool more powerful than all the ones before it, so obviously with power comes risk. But there’s no inherent danger to it. It’s all up to how we use it and how we adapt to what our life can be with it around. I think people should embrace it – with hesitancy, of course.
Also, it is technically a little bit easier to build safeguards into AI that make it harder for people to do harm with it than some other tools. So, I don’t think it’s as dangerous as a lot of the experts talk about it being. And I think a lot about this stuff. I’m not just on the sidelines.
Q: What are some ways you think AI will improve our lives in the near future?
I think one of the biggest ones for everyone in the world will be personalized health care. There’s still some work that needs to be done in safety and making sure it doesn’t make bad decisions, but we’re on a very near-term trajectory to these language models being able to look at all your medical records holistically and give you very personalized, accurate, helpful, and cheap medical advice. Google has recently shown that they can perform better than a lot of general practice doctors at looking at the cumulative biometric data that’s collected by watches and phones and assessing your risk for health consequences.
Also, I think the new AI tools that are being created in the realms of genetics have the potential to create whole new classes of cures for diseases that couldn’t exist before, because it’s hard to predict how DNA will cause proteins to fold, and if you can predict that accurately, you can design drugs that bind to very specific parts of the body or cells or structures. I think that is probably one of the best paths to fighting some of our hardest-fought battles in all of medicine, like cancer and heart disease.
Another big area for AI is automated transportation and self driving vehicles. When that becomes widely available it will return a lot of time to people that is currently lost. It will be up to us all to make the best of that newly found time though!
I’m not personally super excited by all the social media stuff – ironic, I know. That’s where people are probably going to see it the most, but I don’t think that’s necessarily going to be the one that changes people’s lives for the better; that’s just going to be entertainment. On the entertainment front, I think it’s going to be a huge windfall to the amount of entertainment material that can be created, but we’ll see about quality. We’ll see if people end up drowning in pools of content they’re not interested in.