Throughout this week of class, we discussed a lot of AI topics that have significant societal implications. A lot of these discussions concerned LLMs along with their issues of biased training data, questionable usage, environmental impacts, misinformation, and accessibility concerns. However, I would like to address the idea of AI understanding as was brought up in the Bender article. We are quickly entering a time where this argument that AI lacks understanding is increasingly coming under scrutiny. If we look at agentic AI, where AI agents complete digital tasks for users, we see a framework that questions our initial idea of understanding with LLMs and AI. Salesforce, a company making significant progress on agentic AI, defines agentic AI as the following: “Agentic AI software is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can operate independently, making decisions and performing tasks without human intervention. These systems are able to learn from their interactions and adapt to new situations, improving their performance over time.” Interestingly, Salesforce agentic AI follows the following framework: “1. Perceive: AI agents gather and decode information from sources like sensors, databases, and interfaces to turn data into insights. They pinpoint meaningful patterns and extract what’s most relevant in their environment. 2. Reason: A LLM guides the reasoning process — understanding tasks, crafting solutions, and coordinating specialized models for jobs like content generation or image analysis. 3. Act: Agents perform tasks by connecting with external systems through APIs. Built-in guardrails ensure safety and compliance — like limiting insurance claim processing to specific amounts before human review. 4. Learn: Agents evolve through feedback and get better with every interaction to refine decisions and processes. This continuous improvement drives smarter performance and greater efficiency over time.” So, AI is increasingly challenging our understanding of its capabilities. Agentic AI also poses complex ethical questions that build on our current understanding of the ethics of LLMs because agentic AI incorporates LLM capabilities. Source: https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce/what-is-agentic-ai/#how-does-agentic-ai-work

Hi, my name is Patrick Johnson. I use He/Him pronouns. I am a senior and computer science major. As for hobbies…I enjoy playing guitar, watching TV/Movies, exercising, and hiking. I have some background with the technological side of AI through my major and some work as a software developer focusing on AI. However, I will be attending law school next fall for intellectual property/technology law, and I would like to dive deeper into the ethical and societal implications of AI as this course has planned. That is why I am taking this course.
AI is going to spur societal restructuring. LLMs have certainly started this, but there will be an entirely new set of ethical and practical considerations with Agentic AI. Agentic AI is not too far off. Nonetheless, regardless of the type of AI, I believe AI in general will have a significant impact on income distribution, our purpose in professional life, and the way we approach work.