Shut it all down until we can figure out what the F is going on.
By Just in case Donald Trump wasn’t providing enough uproar and confusion, the AI boys have weighed in. The sky is falling, the sky is falling! AI will take your job and then kill you! Biological warfare! The end of mathematics!
The problem is that we can’t believe the people making these claims. The AI community is awash in cultic thinking – one cult is Effective Altruism, which calls on us to make the world better for the children of 2526 or later. There are others, a whole alphabet soup of them.
What they have in common is that they originate in smoky dorm rooms late at night. I read their manifestos and realize that fourteen-year-old me would have found them persuasive. For a while.
Many of them are scary. Many have found the apocalypse, something that’s been around a long time but is new to them.
We must do the bidding of the future all-seeing AI, or it will kill us before we get there.
Please.
The problem is that these boys, like one I recall, are packing match heads together into a ball. The one I recall ended a boy’s ability to play the violin when it erupted. What they are playing with has dangers, although not necessarily the dangers they see as they sit around the campfire and pass the flashlight.
We need assessments from competent adults.
The most likely danger I can see is that their toys will escape, and as the Trojan viruses did for a while, multiply and bollix up the internet. These Trojans will have a great deal more power, though.
It’s also possible, given the acumen of boys who think that “Our AI will take your job and then kill you” is a marketing pitch, they are trying to set the stage for persuading the government to send all its science money to them. After all, they need trillions of dollars to make the human-ending catastrophe happen!
I’ll take Alex Wild’s quick assessment. Maybe all the noise about incipient annihilation is designed to justify the repurposing of the National Science Foundation. Send all that money that has been going to universities to the guys who will save our planet from their product!
More seriously, the children leading these organizations should not be in those positions of power. Their activities should be shut down until we can assess their danger. Congress would be the body to do that, but they are also the body that allowed NSF policy to be changed.
The rejection of data centers is one way to stop this nonsense. We need to do more. And no, I don’t care if the Chinese get there first. (They won’t, if we can handle this expeditiously. All those predictions that THE END IS TOMORROW are wrong.)