AI doomsday warnings a distraction from the danger it already poses, warns expert::A leading researcher, who will attend this week’s AI safety summit in London, warns of ‘real threat to the public conversation’
AI safety folks have been warning about the predictable disastrous consequences of turning economic power over to unethical AI systems for many years now, long before deepfakes, predictive policing, or other trendy “AI dangers” were around.
turning economic power over to unethical AI systems for many years now
What’s the difference from unethical human systems?
No ethics based lapses.
Humans in a systemic unethical system can be individually ethical using deception or until the system grinds them to dust.
An unethical ai built on unethical data will reinforce unethical behavior forever.
Then the only recourse is to create ethical constraints. Challenging, but possible, even with current LLM technology.
Folks expect humans to be unethical, and [at least try to] put in checks and balances for it. When it’s an AI, on the other hand, lots of folks are too computer-illiterate to treat it as anything but infallible magic.
No coffee breaks
It’s the fact that ethical people can easily create unethical AI. The core problem is reinforcing biases/stereotypes in the data without realizing. Obviously there are other concerns about purposefully doing unethical stuff, but the real issue is that AI/ML just learns from what it’s given.
Examples range from cameras that think most people from Asia have their eyes closed https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/facial-recognition-software-passport-renewal-asian-man-eyes-closed/ to things like Amazon reinforcing gender hiring biases https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight-idUSKCN1MK08G
Ultimately even when built “correctly” AI can be extremely dangerous.
An AI can’t be fined or imprisoned.
Neither can the rich who run our shit today
Allegedly you can bring a bad human actor to justice, though we typically do not.
Upvote for a good, thought provoking question.
speed
disastrous consequences of turning economic power over to unethical AI systems
Phew, good thing we’ve got ethical Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks controling out economies and piloting our governments instead 😅 really dodged a bullet there
These warnings and fears would be a little easier to hear if they weren’t pushed so hard by the most disingenuous people ever. Sounds like they want everyone else to pause so they can get ahead.
The most obnoxious ones are not only the loudest but they tend to get more screen time. You won’t see Gebru on cable news as often as you might get ol’ Yud talking about some vengeful AI god.
Aidan Gomez, co-author of a research paper that helped create the technology behind chatbots…
Is anyone else tired of warnings about the dangers of a technology from the jackass who invented it?
Brain dead take.
The paper they’re referring to is Attention is all you need, the paper that first demonstrated the transformers architecture, primarily focused on machine translation though also found to perform exceptionally for language modeling. Blaming him for others’ misuse is like blaming the inventor of the hunting rifle for assault rifles.
The point of the AI doomsday warning is that we are at a point where we still can think about those problems. Fast forward a couple of years and AI will be integrated as deeply into our society as electricity. There no longer will be an option to just switch it off when everything we use depends on it.
Anyway, that aside, I feel the whole scaremongering about bots and propaganda is a bit misguided. Yes, those are real issues that can and will happen. But it’s neither AIs fault nor can it be brought under control by regulating AI. To fix that we have to uplift our journalistic standards by like a lot. At the moment nobody even tries to provide useful information, nobody tells you their sources, nobody tells you GPS coordinates or the time when something happens, nobody even provides plain old links, it’s all just “hearsay” and “trust me bro”.
Just a few days ago the worlds mainstream press was reporting how Israel bombed a hospital and killed 500 people, all while the hospital was still standing with no bomb crater in sight. Some article even included stock photography of other completely unrelated bombings in the past. The whole event was trivial for everybody to verify, yet nobody did. Worse yet, some even doubled down on their initial misreporting days later (e.g. Channel4).
So yeah, with mainstream journalists being less trustworthy than random guy on Twitter, we do have a problem. But that problem is not with AI. If anything, I hope that AI can help us out of this misery by automating the fact checking and sourcing of information. At the moment even seemingly basic task like “where did this photo came from?” require far to much manual work.
We fixed it! AI Perfectly Safe: Top Artificial General Intelligence expert releases final publication of flawless logical explanation of new advances that render all AI and deep learning technology completely safe to all human persons and for all applications serving human community lifestyle. Dangeous AI hypotheses debunked and field of AI safety regarded obsolete by scientific consensus.
Expert now plans to return to remote hometown in Siberia for permanent retirement and will travel by undisclosed route for non-AI-related security concerns.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Focusing on doomsday scenarios in artificial intelligence is a distraction that plays down immediate risks such as the large-scale generation of misinformation, according to a senior industry figure attending this week’s AI safety summit.
Aidan Gomez, co-author of a research paper that helped create the technology behind chatbots, said long-term risks such as existential threats to humanity from AI should be “studied and pursued”, but that they could divert politicians from dealing with immediate potential harms.
Gomez is attending the two-day summit, which starts on Wednesday, as chief executive of Cohere, a North American company that makes AI tools for businesses including chatbots.
The second day, which will feature a smaller group of countries, experts and tech executives convened by Rishi Sunak, will discuss what concrete steps can be taken to address AI risks.
Those fears led to the publishing of an open letter in March, signed by more than 30,000 tech professionals and experts including Elon Musk, calling for a six-month pause in giant AI experiments.
However Yann LeCun, their fellow “godfather” and co-winner of the ACM Turing award – regarded as the Nobel prize of computing – has described fears that AI might wipe out humanity as “preposterous”.
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