Future of AI ‘more R2-D2 than Terminator’

Ali Mirjalili – named in The Australian’s Research 2023 magazine as the world’s top AI researcher – is confident robots won’t take our jobs or kill us but will be a force for good.

‘Nothing to fear’ … Professor Ali Mirjalili has been named Research 2023 magazine’s No.1 artificial intelligence researcherin the world. Picture: Dan Peled

Ali Mirjalili is an optimist about something most of us – including Hollywood – regard as a threat.

As a professor at Torrens University, he is an expert in artificial intelligence – and he is quietly confident that robots in the future won’t take our jobs or kill us but will instead be a force for good.

Professor Mirjalili is named in The Australian’s Research 2023 magazine as Australia’s, and the world’s, top AI researcher.

Born in Iran, he left in his early 20s to do a masters degree in ­Malaysia. But he hit an obstacle in trying to get a PhD scholarship.

He says he sent at least a couple of thousand emails to universities around the world before he was successful. He was eventually offered a place in the US, which was his preference, but politically too difficult given he was Iranian.

He also had a South Korean offer which presented language difficulties. So he came to Australia in 2012 and completed his PhD at Griffith University in 2015.

For the next four years he had no permanent job. He was a casual lecturer, but was laser-focused on research, spending every spare hour on it, including weekends.

Now he heads the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and Optimisation at Torrens University, and his success has been extraordinary. In 2019, his papers were cited 600 times by other researchers. In 2020, that number grew to above 10,000 times. And for 2022, it already stands at more than 21,000 times. It is this stellar ­citation record that has propelled him to the top of his field.

READ MORE STORIES FROM THE AUSTRALIAN’S RESEARCH 2023 MAGAZINE

Professor Mirjalili says he is not driven by his citations but by the desire to make his work available to other researchers and the general community, including business. His YouTube channel has more than 5000 subscribers.

He has a clear vision of AI’s benefits: “To have robots able to do a lot of legwork in different industries will reduce the cost of food and services almost to zero at some point in the future.”

He is confident that the jobs that will be lost will be replaced by other, better jobs. Elevators are a good example, he says. Once they all had human operators, which led to accidents. Now they are automated and we are safer when we travel between floors in a tall building. And instead of driving elevators, people now have jobs which did not exist in that era.

A similar revolution is now arriving in transport and Professor Mirjalili is excited by it. “I’m a strong believer in self-driving cars with full automation,” he says.

But he admits AI is a double-edged sword and the one thing he fears is its use in warfare.

“To be honest, it can be far more devastating than a nuclear weapon,” he says.

But he sincerely believes that with proper safeguards and regulation by governments, the risks can be made acceptable.

And there’s another way to ­ensure that “good” AI remains ­ascendant – by pitting artificial ­intelligence against itself.

“To defend against the misuse of AI … we need to also use other technologies, other variants of AI, to defend against it,” he says.