AI cannot be responsible itself, but there are ways to ensure decisions made by AI are not discriminatory.
We know now of the open letter written by Elon Musk, MIT Professor Max Tegmark and others and signed by more than 1 000 people, including Apple chief executive Steve Wozniak and Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, requesting a pause on AI development beyond GPT4 for six months, to allow safety measures and policy to get up to speed. Why has it been left to get this far?
We were at once hyper-connected and polarised, mostly getting more and better of the same, whatever our interests. Confirmation bias on steroids. And in wide-eyed wonder, we were there for it. Americans Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin are co-founders of the Centre for Humane Technology and were the brains behind the award-winning Netflix documentary. In his Nobel prize summit 2023 talk, Harris cites the many effects of what he calls our “first contact” with AI — social media.
It is this mismatch that would ultimately nuke many of the “alignment” solutions the tech industry and our civil and government institutions might propose, he believes. And it’s a gap that will only get exponentially wider when AGI hits. What’s more, he says, policymakers tend to focus on the acute effects of the technology, such as a collision involving an autonomous vehicle.
He also pointed to a broader problem in the scientific archive — the “replication issue”. It was discovered in 2005 that up to 85% of studies in the medical field alone, to which the problem wasn’t confined, were considered non-reproducible. In other words, scientifically meaningless. Of course, the idea of government ignorance is intriguing, because AI has been used in elections , and wars for years now. Autonomous drones armed with some of the same technology were used against Libya in the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, which, at the time, was widely pegged as the world’s “first social media revolution”.
● Google Bard’s voice-recognition system mimics your voice accurately — intonation, cadences, all — after just three seconds of exposure to it. The implications for everything from your identity, your bank balance and property to the safety of your children are enormous. Perhaps the proposed single digital banking system could protect you from scammers. Just don’t get involved in any social activism, or you might end up like those truckers in Canada.