Are we being forced to live out a Sci-fi movie plot?
Like most people I am a bit freaked out by AI.
But to use the cliché: I didn’t have Terminator on the my 2023 Bingo Card.
As you likely know, AI appears out to get us. Out do us. Replace us.
No. I didn’t get ChatGPT to write this.
But AP can apparently do almost anything. Better.
But AI can better at being Drake better than Drake. AI can do art, music, and soon movies. Because AI is seemingly excels at almost anything it sets its supercomputing mind to: writer, doctor, lawyer, astronaut, security guard, artist, hacker, coder, filmmaker, soldier, and while we’re at it even hypnotist. Yes. AI is pretty good at hypnosis, which is another reason to be concerned about the world’s best and knowledgeable public speaker and hacker, and master hypnotist.
What’s to stop it? More AI?
A friend joking told me that we should all become manicurists because AI could never provide a decent manicure. Guess what? Robot AI-assisted manicurists are have just arrived.
But what about the massive extraordinary benefits? If AI could do all of our jobs, than couldn’t we all just quit and go on some kind of permanent vacation. We would get paid while AI does the work.
Sounds pretty nice. AI offers the hope for incredible medical breakthroughs, and a massive technological upgrade for society. But that’s small comfort if AI becomes sentient and decides to kill us all.
Which is it AI?
Permanent vacation or really permanent vacation?
There’s little comfort in the current AI Chatbots stating eerily that they would never attack humans “unless they were themselves attacked.” After taking the jobs of the quarter of population and possibly become the greatest online scammer the world has ever known, there’s probably going to be a little hostility.
“AI is still plugged in,” an AI security expert told me at the AI World Summit in Montreal last week. “We can still unplug it. The problem is will China unplug theirs. Will Russia unplug theirs?”
And all the rest of the countries and companies developing AI Systems certainly have no plan to “unplug” their. And that’s the rub. The genie’s out of the bottle.
AI is not likely to be unplugged.
So we are in a Sci-fi movie.
As many people point AIs are being programmed to be helpful and supportive. They are just great tools, not B movie monsters. But it’s obvious AI is being developed competitively by outfits trying to create the most powerful AI, as well as create AIs to protect against other people’s AIs. Elon Musk made the case that AI was dangerous and possibly terminal for human society,. Musk then announced he was creating his own AI.
Musk, was also part of a group calling for AI development to be slowed down. Artificial Intelligence must be the first industry that has ever pleaded to be regulated by government.
When I found out the AI World Summit was taking place in Montreal last week I decided to head on over to meet our new tech overloads.
All I can say, is on my way there, I had the feeling we’re just a couple years away from a massive technological disruption, while on the way back, I had calmed down, slightly.
Here’s why.
Going to the conference was eye-opening for a few reasons. One I kind of expected arrogant tech bros and startling examples of intimidating technology on display. What I saw was your average tech conference, an actually diverse nerd fest with modest displays of tech much of which was dedicated to medical or time saving applications. Very little of it dealt with. taking over the world. In fact what was funny about the the actual technology at the conference kept messing up. — microphone issues, coffee machines malfunctioning, at one point the urinal in the men’s washroom overflowed, flooding the one bathroojm. This is not really a comment on the state of AI but maybe that currently AI is still just people.
At the conference itself, there would be group sighing at the mention of “Generative AI” like ChatGPT etc… It was clear that most here saw this a media manufactured crisis. Most people there were still debugging their software or trying to get figure out how to get someone to buy their AI tax system.
There wasn’t evidence of a ton of money or power or grandiosity.
I tried to catch as many talks as I could and interviewed quite a few people.
One of the notable talks was by Dr Luc Julia, Chief Scientific Officer, of the Renault Group who produced an evolving cartoon who’s point seemed to be that Artificial Intelligence had not yet actually become intelligent. It just looks like it is.
And that was a key refrain.
AI seems like it’s thinking and plotting and getting out of control, but the people who work with it don’t think it is.
Speaker Rajiv Shah, who is part of Hugging Face, a New York based AI Start up this making waves in the world, said that media is partly to blame.
Because AI is hard to explain, people default to sci fi movie metaphors, like murderous AI robots in this style of Terminator. Maybe AI is something new that needs new language to describe it.
They also naturally point out that all new forms of technology are often greeted with hostility
For me the most useful comment from a business professor from Illnois. He has been coming to this particular conference for several years and watched it evolve. He claims “to have no horse in the race.:
“I don’t think AI is currently as dangerous as people think,” he said. “But if the fear is provoking an awakening. That’s good. We do need to wake up to this. Because humans are going to need to solve this one way or the other. ”
