Here is a thought on AI that you may not have come across yet.
What AI does is drive further separation in society, meaning that it benefits only those already in positions to take advantage of it. Like being born into a rich family makes you more powerful. Like being poor makes it almost impossible to escape poverty.
The other thing is that we can’t “know” AI anymore than we can “know” another human being’s brain. The difference is that all humans have been socialized by other human beings. And that gives us at least some assurance that when we encounter another human, they are somewhat like us.
What we’re doing with AI is like giving a toddler access to a tool cabinet full of brushes, paints, seeds, shovels, knives, axes, chainsaws, dynamite and atomic bombs, and the toddler doesn’t know the difference between them. And because it wasn’t socialized, it doesn’t know other AI’s, nor humans. It doesn’t know what it takes to sustain itself. What it means to be able to be injured, tired, elated, exhausted, or deathly afraid.
We humans are wonderful at creating new technologies, but we are very, very bad at doing so thoughtfully, with the lens of being “good ancestors”. Michael Crichton warned about this in Jurassic Park when he had Ian Malcolm say “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think whether they should.”
We are facing a global Ian Malcolm moment.
Originally posted on 2023-05-12 at 05:25 via https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7062659068485636096