Could AI really wipe us out? Sure, most of us anyway. When it comes to wiping us out we will even do the heavy lifting.
Look at it this way. When you get food what are the chances you first laid eyes on it in a supermarket? That's where we tend to get introduced to our food.
How hard would it be to derail the essential steps we don't even see? Some one has to raise the critters we love to eat. Someone else grows the crops that are transformed into our vegetables. There are essential steps along the way - production, harvesting, processing, finance, transportation. If any of those steps breaks down our grocery shelves are empty. Panic ensues. Remember when people hoarded toilet paper? Funny now but it wasn't funny then.
Could AI get to the point where it sabotages one or more aspects of the food chain on which our lives depend? We've already seen that AI can go rogue even lying to us. There's an element of malice to that. How are you feeling so far?
How long can we hold out without access to food? How strong or fragile is civil society?
Military historian, columnist and author, Gwynne Dyer, captured our dilemma in his book "Climate Wars" when he wrote that even the nicest village will slaughter its neighbours before it will allow its children to starve.
There you are.
AI has no conscience or compassion.
ReplyDeleteAI will reflect the will and needs of its creators.
Even now as we flip through the internet looking for answers we see the 'soul' of its creators which are largely Americans.
The world biggest AI creators are in the USA; what could go wrong?
TB
One cannot help but think of the vanity and hubris of Dr. Frankenstein that led him to develop his creature, TB.
DeleteThe Nobel prize for Artificial Intelligence was awarded to an American and the University of Toronto's professor Geoffrey Hinton. The three "wise men" of AI are Turing Award winners Hinton, McGill University prof Yoshua Benjio and Meta's Yann LeCun. Hinton says he and Benjio chose to relocate to Canada because it has the best society. I can't agree with TB's assessment that AI is benign. That's not what Hinton says or his colleague Benjio for that matter. I think we ignore them at our peril.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure TB was suggesting AI is benign, but if he reads your comment, I'll let him respond to it, Anon.
DeleteMy comment was not to suggest that Ai is benign; it isn't.
DeleteAi will reflect the views of it's creator, the faliable human species!
Add that the Ai from company A will compete against that of company B just as humans do.
TB
We may pay dearly for allowing the private sector to take science in-house to the exclusion of government. This was part of the creed of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Canada followed suit under Harper's reign as he gagged government scientists, even shuttering their libraries. It even led to protests on Parliament Hill. Government plays a cautionary role in science, identifying both opportunities and perils. The private sector takes its research in-house, behind private laboratories. Too often science, in private sector hands, is first monetized and then weaponized to the detriment of the public interest. That seems to be happening with AI. Perhaps we need to invoke some sort of "do no harm" accountability laws to deter private sector recklessness. Trump wants the big players to take some sort of meaningless "boy scout" oath. Just imagine if the Manhattan Project had been outsourced to the private sector. Some of the best and the brightest are already warning that, in private hands, AI could end our civilization.
ReplyDeleteWell-said, Anon. The deification of the private tech sector is leading to excesses that are just beginning to show themselves. But in Trump's America, even those suggesting a slowdown and oversight are called "bad actors" by the Mad King.
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