It was only last fall that Open AI’s ChatGPT thrust generative AI into the public psyche. Since then, many future-looking surveys have shown unease and trepidation competing hard for mindshare against hope and excitement. At times the pessimism seems to be gaining the upper hand.

Change might be afoot. This week Steve Rose of the UK newspaper The Guardian challenged AI leaders representing five areas of expertise to argue that AI’s societal pros will ultimately prevail over its cons. Here are condensed excerpts of their written responses.

1. HEALTHCARE: Having better models could be a bona fide gamechanger for drug discovery.

• “Currently, it costs a billion dollars to develop a new drug; it could easily be 10 times less with these [AI] advances. It is probably going to take years before people see an effect, but dozens of startups have been created at the intersection of AI and drug discovery, while pharmaceutical companies are beefing up their machine-learning departments. I am pretty sure it’s going to be an amazing revolution in terms of healthcare.”—Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal and the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms

2. CLIMATE: Using AI to accelerate weather and climate simulations can inform timely interventions and policy decisions.

• “We already have really good climate models, but sometimes they can take months to run, even on supercomputers, and that is an obstacle. We understand climate change very well, but that doesn’t mean we know exactly what is going to happen at each point. Having faster climate models can aid local and regional responses.”—David Rolnick of McGill University, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms and Climate Change AI

3. TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS: Accessible AI systems can give every user a virtual teacher, facilitating fruitful exchanges among and between humans.

• “Truly advanced AI systems could be more than just another technology; they could automate and radically accelerate the process of technological progress itself. In just a couple of decades, humanity could get to the kind of advanced future that feels like it’s hundreds or thousands of years away. This is not at all guaranteed, but I think it’s within reach if we get this right.”—Ajeya Cotra of Open Philanthropy and Planned Obsolescence

4. HUMAN FLOURISHING: AI can help us thrive not just for the next election cycle but for billions of years.

• “We have been on this planet for more than 100,000 years, and most of the time we haven’t had much control of our destiny. Science and technology and human intelligence have made us the captains of our own ship. If we can build and control superintelligence, we can quickly go from being limited by our own stupidity to being limited by the laws of physics. It could be the greatest empowerment moment in human history.”—Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

5. QUALITY OF LIFE: AI is going to improve everything.

• “Most movies about AI have an ‘us versus them’ mentality, but this is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines. It’s the result of our own efforts to make our infrastructure and our way of life more intelligent. It’s part of human endeavor. We merge with our machines. Ultimately, they will extend who we are.”—Ray Kurzweil of Google (and too many other research, invention and futurism settings to list here)

Read the rest at The Guardian.