We’ve have been enlisted as subjects in this grand experiment. We aren’t informed about what’s happening, don’t possess the knowledge to understand or assess it, and haven’t an ounce of agency to do something about it.
I’m not optimistic that laws passed by state legislatures will do much if any good. The wording will be difficult, considering the Constitution protects our right to free speech irrespective of its accuracy. Also, one person’s fake is another’s truth. Defining what AI will and won’t be allowed to do sounds like a daunting task.
Why spend hours sitting with a group of people debating some arcane aspect of life when GPT-4 can summarize the conversation and provide a conclusion for you?
OpenAI’s research is just another entry into the corpus of blather intended to make us think that they care about ethics and safety as they (and other tech firms) madly race to develop more powerful and therefore more threatening AI.
Combine compute power with vast amounts of data and there’s no reason why machines couldn’t do pretty much anything that you do. They just have to learn all the different circumstances in which “this” leads to “that.”
The tech industry is doing the same thing it did with the metaverse and social media: its gibberish is announcing its intentions to make tons of money as it pursues cool projects.
Workers have been racing against technology to keep their jobs for centuries. AI will be an unbeatable opponent, so the final score will be Capital 1, Labor 0.
What’s for sure is that we don’t have to wonder when an AI will win a Golden Globe. It already has.
Add all of the blather about self-aware AI deciding one day to destroy humanity and you get a potent cocktail of distraction and reinvention that is existentially relevant right now.
And, as pixels resolve on web pages turning I realized my every moment now belonged to deep learning.