This is the calm before the AI storm

We all know by now that AI is creepy. It can act like a god. It can help you cheat at school, it can be taught hatred and bias. It can even write this segment for me. 

This is true; every time I open up the app I use to record these, I get asked if I just want a chatbot to go ahead and create a script for me to read. So if you’re having anxiety about a computer taking over your job, I feel you. 

But look, I don’t want to be one of those, you know, those village elders getting all up in a bunch over this newfangled technology. A list of innovations that people believed at one time would destroy the world included trains, which some believed would go so quickly that the human body would melt — telephones, potentially conduits for evil spirits, of course, and even video games, which — alright, I’m not going to get into gun control for this particular segment, but yeah, video games, that’s not the problem. 

So I’m trying to be cautiously optimistic about AI. If machines can learn to do our jobs, I guess that frees us up to do other jobs or like, take up watercoloring? It’ll be okay, right? Like we’re not going to end up in a machine versus man Skynet situation, right?

Oh my god. Sudden alarm is not a thing I enjoy seeing from my tech doyennes. Elon, where are those exceptional leadership qualities you’ve demonstrated so many times in the past? Apparently, hundreds of prominent AI experts, tech entrepreneurs and scientists have come together to sign an open letter, calling for a pause on the creation of technologies that go beyond the abilities of Open AI’s language model GPT-4. 

The letter focuses on the risks such technology poses to humanity, including, yes, the aforementioned job replacement, but also explores its ability to spread misinformation and raises the possibility, albeit a distant one, that AI could replace humans and start a new civilization.

So the people in charge of the AI are noticing that it’s making exponential leaps at a shocking pace and saying, let’s just hold off on this for a minute until we have a better understanding of its capabilities and thus clearer guidelines for regulation. But no, no, when money is on the table, regulations are not what big companies like to talk about. Microsoft has invested $10 billion into AI and now Google is rushing out a competitor to Chat GPT. All of this before researchers (forget about the public) have even had time to wrap their minds around the potential uses and misuses of the previous model’s technology. Do we really want this wild west situation in the hands of big tech, which hasn’t traditionally demonstrated that the care for public welfare trumps the desire for profit.

I get that it’s exciting. I get that its possibilities can feel irresistible. My children already take AI for granted in, like a “whatever mom, it’s the future” way.

But sometimes the stories we tell in the dark are prescient. Sometimes we can feel the danger on the way before we can see it, before we can touch it. And I think that this is one of those cases. We all know that something is off and I just don’t want it to be a surprise when we find out what that something is.

As the Australian journalist Clive James said, it is only when they go wrong, that machines remind you of how powerful they are. So let’s take a step back and remember that there are many things we need to take on with great speed: climate change, the aforementioned gun control, but teaching robots how to book vacations for us isn’t one of them.