Unpopular opinion: this discussion feels like power looms and cars all over again. In my opinion the problem isn’t the technology, the problem is that we allow Ito be controlled by a few very wealthy and hence powerful people. Also, there’s no stopping this development. Those who aren’t prepared to adapt and use it, will suffer. I’m not saying I like it, I’m scared, tbh.
That opinion isn’t so unpopular and it’s a perfectly reasonable point of discussion.
Many people have, understandably, made the comparison with the industrial revolution, the invention of the printing press etc. Of course, the world adapted and things changed.
There is a very important distinction though. When the printing press was invented, the press didn’t write the books or decide itself what books to print. When industrialisation came about, the machines didn’t start autonomously creating even more powerful machines.
The autonomy aspect is the differentiator and the troubling part, if left unchecked. We’re going to potentially see AI entirely autonomously start designing weapons, design more powerful computers and algorithms, design viruses, be able to hack other machines and systems that we all rely on. None of the previous “revolutions” had anything like this kind of dangerous impact or autonomous ability.
We were always able to switch the machines off, and we decided what they did or didn’t do.
For me this is only one aspect, the other being what kind of society do we actually want to have. Do we actually want to start offloading all our thinking onto a machine. We’re at the stage where people use AI extensively at work and have less need to understand thee underlying skills/discipline/domain.
What next? Will we tell schoolchildren they no longer need to learn?
EDIT - I just saw the thing about waiting an hour to post. I didn’t spot that as I’ve never seen it before. My apologies.
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I think once these tools get better and people learn to use them properly, we will look back on this scepticism about AI in the same way we look back now at people who were saying the internet was a fad or who said that computers will destroy jobs. It is just another form of technological anxiety that will fade over time.
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I’d be ok with the current level of progress, just wish I could run frontier commercial models locally.
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This interview captures so much about what’s wrong with the people who have been empowered to drive this bus off of a cliff. Unserious, bad-faith actors, the lot of them.
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