Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Phil Tanny's avatar

If we were the parent of a teenager who wanted their first car, we'd ask them to prove that they were ready for such power. So for example, if the teenagers was always crashing their moped, we'd tell them to fix that first, and then maybe we'll talk about a car. Simple common sense, right?

Here's a reason based path forward for AI. Get rid of nuclear weapons, and prove beyond question that we are going to conquer climate change.

Having thus proven that we are capable of fixing our mistakes when they occur, that would be a rational basis upon which to develop new powers of substantial scale.

Expand full comment
Spherical Phil - Phil Lawson's avatar

Gary, you asked, so … The short-term risks to democracy and the 2024 elections cannot be overstated. But, if we survive that, the long-term risks are literally beyond our ability to even begin to conceptualize. In our “post truth” world, it has been extremely difficult to decipher what is more true or perhaps more accurate than what is not true or even a lie. Up till now, with enough time and effort, those who cared could find the ‘more true’ instead of the ‘not true,’ but that was before search purposely repositioned itself to become the ultimate delivery of the chaos. That said, in the slightly longer term, the false bravado and fake intelligence manifest by current iterations of pretend AI will create social turmoil and upheavals, as well as mental and wellbeing injury, harming individuals, families, communities, and countries in ways that go far beyond what is being discussed today. And there is no government, or coalition of governments, other than an authoritarian one, that can develop and enforce regulations quick enough to even attempt to stop this. And never in human history has there been any universal agreement on universal values, or any form of consensus on human values, (and the human values we may imagine, or desire cannot be found in biased data, and all data is biased). The bigger challenge, how to embed these ‘values’ into non-reasoning technologies and enforce adherence to these values, in the extraordinarily short time window required, cannot happen, except again by an authoritarian regime. Values in an authoritarian regime do not come from the consensus of the people, but are dictated ones designed solely to benefit the authoritarians – which in the end may not be a government at all.

Expand full comment
33 more comments...

No posts