The implications for society? We better up our game.
If only the horses had worked harder, we would never have gotten cars and trains.
Because the correlation between the thing of interest and what the tests measure may be radically different for systems that are very much unlike humans in their architecture than they are for humans.
There’s an entire field about this in testing for humans (psychometry), and approximately zero on it for AIs. Blindly using human tests – which are proxy measures of harder-to-directly-assess figures of merit requiring significant calibration on humans to be valid for them – for anything else without appropriate calibration is good for generating headlines, but not for measuring anything that matters. (Except, I guess, the impact of human use of them for cheating on the human tests, which is not insignificant, but not generally what people trumpeting these measures focus on.)
But the point of using these tests for AI is precisely the reason we use for giving them to humans -- we think we know what it measures. AI is not intended to be a computation engine or a number crunching machine. It is intended to do things that historically required "human intelligence".
If there are better tests of human intelligence, I think that the AI community would be very interested in learning about them.
For how long can we better up our game? GPT-4 comes less than half a year after ChatGPT. What will come in 5 years? What will come in 50?
With GPT bots, the technology is only 6 years old. I can easily see it progressing for at least one decade.
Because so far we are good only at criminalizing and incarcerating or killing them.
