A collection of scientists and corporate types have decided that inventing AI that can run the world in a decade or so is the most important thing humanity could ever choose to do. Did you get to vote on that?
The Question of “why” a super-intelligent AI might want to destroy humanity is immaterial when we’re talking about an intelligence that we could never understand.
A recent survey of AI use in the workplace found that “AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation.” Phew. I was worried that the whole point of putting AI to work was to put human beings out of it.
School is boring? The answer can’t be attaching kids to AIs and demoting teachers to “primarily provide motivational and emotion support.”
We’re being conditioned to accept AIs as the de facto interface, intermediator, and manager of our experience of the world. Throwing in some marketing spin is no big deal for a deal that’s already been spun.
Amidst all the speculation about AI solving problems great and small (while potentially destroying all of humanity in the process), we’ve lost sight of what it’s already doing to our work and lives: It’s remaking us into peasants.
AI models have been purposefully designed to do more, and do it faster and more often, and thereby ingratiate their decision making — both in response to our queries and, with evermore regularity, anticipate and guide our questions and subsequent actions — into every aspect of our work and personal lives. How could anyone test those consequences?
Two recent research papers on the near-future of AI development use 216 pages of often impenetrable blather to tell us something that could be summarized in two words: We’re screwed.
“We must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas,” the President’s executive order said in mid-January, as it introduced biases of misjudgment, error, stereotyping, and the primacy of unfettered and unaccountable corporate profitability into the development of AI systems.
The idea that students or teachers can constructively outsource their study or work responsibilities to a thinking machine should be unthinkable. Just replace the label “AI” with “my really smart friend” and consider its applications.