Relying on technologies to solve our problems means relying on technologists to define them in the first place, which is a dicey proposition. Remember that social media was supposed to “fix” our problems collaborating and speaking in the public square, and it instead gave us lives spent in suspicious and angry isolation.
Mr. Schmidt is telling us that sometime in the distant future, as we waft clouds of carbon from our eyes and gasp for our next breath, an AI will magically appear and tell us what we should do to save the planet.
How many Oppenheimers are chasing today’s Little Boy AI – a generally aware AI, or “AGI” – without contemplating the broad implications for their intentions…or planning to take any responsibility for them, whether known or as-yet to be revealed?
We know the answers to things like slowing or reversing climate change, for instance, but we just don’t like them. Our problems are social, political, economic, psychological…we don’t need AI to tell us that.
The video of the dancing mushroom robot suggests that the AI sensed the mushroom’s intentionality to move. It’s not necessarily true, since the researchers had to make some arbitrary decisions about which stimuli would trigger what actions, but the connection between the organism and machine is still quite real, and it suggests stunning potential for the further development of an AI that mediates that interchange.
Who needs oversight from ill-informed politicians when the smartest and brightest (and often richest) tech entrepreneurs can arrive at such genius-level conclusions on their own?
Pick your profession or activity and there’ll be ways sooner versus later to use AI to predict our future actions and decide where we can do and what we can access or do, and what we’re charged for the privilege.
The premise that an AI would make the “right” decisions in even the most complex and challenging moments is not based in fact but rather in belief, starting with the premise that everybody impacted by such decisions could agree on what “right” even means.
Meetings, pronouncements, and then…nothing, except a phenomenon that will continue to evolve and grow without us doing much of anything about it.
What happens if that otherwise perfectly operating AI reaches conclusions and voice opinions that are no more objectively true than the informed judgments of those elites we so readily threw in the garbage years ago (or the inanity of crowdsourced information that replaced them)?