Essays

“Rubbish in, rubbish out,” says noted creator of rubbish about AI.

We want kids to grow up to be learners, which probably correlates with abilities and willingness to listen, engage, and evolve in their personal and professional lives. Using ChatGPT in this context is like shipping ready-made dinners to a gourmet restaurant’s kitchen.

Belief in the authoritative and restorative powers of technology is a fantasy, and using it as an explanation for what is happening with AI at work, including its impacts on entry-level opportunities, isn’t remotely legitimate.

Like so many problems today, copyright lawsuits over music are a people problem and therefore not solvable with AI or any other technology; in fact, tech might actually make it worse in this instance by multiplying many times over the opportunities for theft and mimicry. 

AIs equipped with perfect knowledge (or it’s corollary, near-perfect big data analyses) will leave us with few divergent views to drive pricing or trades. Markets will become transparent transaction platforms, nothing more.

We can and should strive to ensure that AIs aren’t overly stupid or cruel, but the premise that we can build machines that don’t just operate efficiently but provide answers that please our ever-changing opinions about bias and truth is a fool’s errand.

Existential AI risk isn’t something that’s far off in the future or limited to some evil robot destroying mankind, contrary to what many of the leading lights in AI innovation have told us. 

We need better understanding of the context of AI and digital transformation. News Corp has raised its hand and asked us to witness its success in thrilling its investors. It could be an opportunity to judge whether or not that’s good news for the rest of us.

I think we have unfairly low expectations for the moral capacity of AI engineers.