AI could cause catastrophic rather than existential risk, scientist warns

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On this week's episode of Yahoo Finance's The Crypto Mile, our host Brian McGleenon sits down with cognitive scientist Gary Marcus to discuss the reality and risks of artificial intelligence (AI). While the term 'p(doom)'—referring to the probability of a human extinction event due to AI—has been causing a stir online, Marcus brings a more nuanced perspective to the conversation. Debunking apocalyptic forecasts, he explains that AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are unlikely to trigger human extinction but may still pose catastrophic risks. He delves into the term 'p(catastrophe),' highlighting the chance of incidents that could significantly impact the human population.

Yes and no. So there's a lot of hype there. It does some genuinely useful things. Is it living up to all that hype? Yeah. So the best thing I think it does right now is it helps computer programmers type faster. It kind of looks things up for them, it structures the code a little bit. It's not perfect, it makes mistakes but coders are used to fixing errors. They call that debugging. You don't become a coder if you can't do it. And so it's a pretty good use case.

And so you know, it's really a case by case basis. Does this really work for me? If you are writing fiction and you have writer's block and you want some weird idea, maybe it'll give it to you. It can be useful for brainstorming. But not everybody is going to do that. The other thing is some of the drop is probably like college students and high school students went away for the summer, and they'll may come back to one of the open source alternatives that's free.

And the reality is somewhere in between. It can be amazing depending on what you do and it can be pretty lousy and not trustworthy depending on what you do. So we've had like multiple incidents where media outlets tried to use it to write their stories and they always wind up writing stories that have lies in them. And if you're the press, that's really not a good thing.

It's really hard. We're a very persistent species. We're probably not going anywhere. But we could have what I would call catastrophic risk rather than existential risk. So existential is like we just disappear. I don't think that will happen but there could be catastrophes that come out of AI. And the fundamental problem is that the tools we're using right now are called black boxes, which means we don't understand what goes on inside them.

 

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