We are at an AI crossroads. Who — or what — will decide which way to turn?A flood of panicky op-eds has been appearing at an accelerating rate, especially since the arrival of ChatGPT and its successors.
People are also reading… Immediately following: “Let 1,000 Flowers Bloom: A.I. Funding Frenzy Escalates: In just weeks, a gold rush into artificial intelligence start-ups has become a full-blown mania.” To this eminently reasonable question, a significant number reply that even if they believe the pursuit of AI could end in disaster for our species — the End of the Human Era is how the ultimate achievement of AI is often referred to — they “feel that they have a responsibility to usher this new form of intelligence into the world.
This attitude of inevitability prevails. Here comes AI, better get used to it. As if the advent of AI is an act of nature, like a flash flood. Well, not everybody. Not Ezra, not I, not you, not most of us 8 billion. Right now, AI is being pursued furiously, in the way of capitalism, by, for the most part, those who stand to profit from it. AI itself is not yet at the point of making decisions about whether it should be allowed to take over our lives for us, but we are told that at some point in the not-very-distant future, it will be.