The AI revolution is upon us. Giant tech corporations have unveiled a new generation of artificial intelligence powered applications like ChatGPT — and industry is plunging full steam ahead, hoping to cash in on the new tech while it’s still hot.
But at the same time that businesses have been champing at the bit to unleash AI’s profit potential, a host of academics and industry experts have been urging caution — with some even predicting catastrophe if the technology is allowed to flourish unimpeded by any sort of regulation.
But is the fear just further hype or do the critics maybe have a point?
You can decide for yourself by reading their actual quotes, which are decidedly not super cheery!
British doctoral student tells Parliament: “It Could Kill Everyone”
During a recent hearing for the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, a doctoral student named Michael Cohen told legislators that AI should be regulated in the same way that nuclear weapons are regulated and warned “superhuman AI there is a particular risk that is of a different sort of class, which is . . . it could kill everyone.” Cohen appears to be a study AI safety at the University of Oxford, so it makes sense he would be concerned about this. Another invited guest speaker, Michael Osborne, a professor of machine learning at Oxford, similarly told the lawmakers: “I think the bleak scenario is realistic because AI is attempting to bottle what makes humans special, that has led to humans completely changing the face of the Earth… AI is as comparable a danger as nuclear weapons.” Fun.
A bunch of AI researchers: AI Could “Cause Global Disaster” on Par with Nuclear War
A recent survey of AI researchers all over the world showed that more than a third of them were concerned that AI could ultimately lead to a “global disaster” on par with nuclear war. The AI Index Report, released by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, shows researchers are pretty concerned about what could happen with this tech if it isn’t reigned in by proper regulations. “These systems demonstrate capabilities in question answering, and the generation of text, image, and code unimagined a decade ago, and they outperform the state of the art on many benchmarks, old and new,” the report says. “However, they are prone to hallucination, routinely biased, and can be tricked into serving nefarious aims, highlighting the complicated ethical challenges associated with their deployment.”
Elon Musk: The AI I’ve Been Funding Could Cause “Civilisation Destruction”
Elon Musk has been one of the biggest funders of the AI technology that is currently taking the world by storm. Musk co-founded OpenAI, which is the AI startup behind ChatGPT. He’s also recently begun pouring money into his own large language model, stupidly dubbed “TruthGPT.” However, at the same time that he’s been paying the bills for droves of AI engineers, he’s also apparently been harbouring some concerns about what they’re creating. During a recent interview with Fox News goon Tucker Carlson, Musk said the following:
“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production, in the sense that it is, it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilisation destruction…”
Nice! It’s good to know that with the stakes so high we have Elon to shepherd us through these dangerous waters. It’s not like he’s ever made a bad business decision before or anything…
Steve Wozniak and Others Urge a “Pause” on AI
The Woz isn’t exactly a stupid guy. The man who’s been called the “true mastermind” and the “brain and the heart” of Apple has many accomplishments under his belt, not least of which is that he helped design most of the early Apple computers, including the Macintosh. Steve Jobs, meanwhile, worked largely on marketing and press appearances, stealing the lion’s share of the public credit.
What does Woz think of our current AI predicament? Well, he recently signed his name to an open letter lobbying to temporarily halt its development, so he can’t be too big of a fan of the direction it’s headed. Summarizing the letter, Apple Insider quotes it as saying:
…“recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control.”
“AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts…These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“This does not mean a pause on AI development in general…merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.”
Elon Musk and other tech luminaries also signed the letter.
FTC: AI Could “Turbocharge Fraud”
When it comes to dissing the current direction of AI, the Federal Trade Commission has also pitched in its two cents. From its perspective, AI could cause rampant fraud. FTC chair Lina Khan recently told Congress that the “turbocharging of fraud and scams that could be enabled by these [AI] tools are a serious concern.” Disinformation researchers have similarly noted that AI applications are primed to cause all sorts of havoc on the internet, as they will make generating fake content exceedingly easy.
Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger: “It is simply a mad race for some catastrophe.”
Henry Kissinger, who many people consider to be little more than a war criminal that was never prosecuted, recently co-wrote an op-ed with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in which he warned against the potential downsides of our current AI craze. Published in The Wall Street Journal, the duo wrote that AI, if improperly handled, could cause major problems for everybody. During a recent panel event in Washington D.C. Kissinger similarly said that if AI was not properly controlled “it is simply a mad race for some catastrophe.” Kissinger and Schmidt also recently wrote a book together on the subject of AI in which they claimed it could lead to the “death of the Enlightenment” and rational human knowledge. Fun! If even good ol’ power-hungry Henry is worried about this, maybe we should be too.
Stephen Hawking: AI Could “Spell the End of the Human Race”
OK, so Stephen Hawking has admittedly been dead for several years, but this seemed like a relevant quote to throw into the mix. Back in 2014, Hawking warned that artificial intelligence could ultimately “spell the end of the human race.” In an interview with BBC, Hawking made a number of other pessimistic predictions: “It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,” he said, while also noting that “humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.” Look, Hawking may not have stuck around to see the AI chatbot craze currently sweeping the nation but he was a pretty smart guy! Maybe we should heed his warnings.