There’s a lot of buzz around Artificial Intelligence and the dangers it poses. But I haven’t seen anyone talking about the one thing that has kept me up some nights contemplating. Here it is…
Let’s cut to the chase. The biggest threat of Artificial Intelligence is dependency. To be more specific, society will become dependent on Artificial General Intelligence shortly after it’s unveiled to the world. Why? Because AGI will be able to solve problems we know we have. It will be able to solve problems we don’t know we have. It will be able to solve problems we don’t have yet but will in the future.
If it sounds like I’m giving too much credit to AGI, then you aren’t familiar enough with AGI to appreciate what it will be able to do. Below, I’ll try to explain it better even though it would probably take several chapters of a book to do justice to the risks. But first, I want to offer two perspectives as primers. Here’s an article by Mac Slavo at SHTF Plan describing what some tech experts are saying about AI. Then, I’ll let ChatGPT give its somewhat comical answer about the risks that AI represents. Finally, I’ll go into why dependency will be the big one. First, here’s Mac Slavo…
Let’s cut to the chase. The biggest threat of Artificial Intelligence is dependency. To be more specific, society will become dependent on Artificial General Intelligence shortly after it’s unveiled to the world. Why? Because AGI will be able to solve problems we know we have. It will be able to solve problems we don’t know we have. It will be able to solve problems we don’t have yet but will in the future.
If it sounds like I’m giving too much credit to AGI, then you aren’t familiar enough with AGI to appreciate what it will be able to do. Below, I’ll try to explain it better even though it would probably take several chapters of a book to do justice to the risks. But first, I want to offer two perspectives as primers. Here’s an article by Mac Slavo at SHTF Plan describing what some tech experts are saying about AI. Then, I’ll let ChatGPT give its somewhat comical answer about the risks that AI represents. Finally, I’ll go into why dependency will be the big one. First, here’s Mac Slavo…
Experts on artificial intelligence are coming out and warning of a “human extinction” risk with the progressing technology. Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, along with executives from Google’s AI arm DeepMind and Microsoft, were among those who supported and signed the short statement.
“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,” said the letter. “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” the letter asked.
Other tech leaders such as Tesla’s Elon Musk and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have cautioned about the risks AI poses to human society. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement Tuesday read according to a report by CNBC.
In an open letter released back in March, Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and several tech leaders urged AI labs to stop training systems to be more powerful than GPT-4, which is OpenAI’s latest large language model. They also called for a six-month pause on such advanced development.
The technology has gathered pace in recent months after chatbot ChatGPT was released for public use in November and subsequently went viral. In just two months after its launch, it reached 100 million users. ChatGPT has amazed researchers and the general public with its ability to generate humanlike responses to users’ prompts, suggesting AI could replace jobs and imitate humans.