Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda says AI recreations of her dad are ‘personally disturbing’::Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda says AI recreations of her dad are ‘personally disturbing’: ‘The worst bits of everything this industry is’
You are making the exact same mistake that I just talked about, that I have also made, that a bunch of tech enthusiasts make:
An AI Overlord will be engineered by people with human biases, under the command of people with human biases, trained by data with human biases, having goals that are defined with human biases. What you are going to get is tyranny with extra steps, plus some of its own concerning glitches on the side.
It’s a sci-fi dream to assume technology is inherently destined to solve human issues. It takes human concern and humanites studies to apply technology in a way that actually helps people.
under the command of people with human biases
Humans won’t be in control. The AI will consume and interpret more data than any human ever could. It’ll be like trying to verify that your computer calculates correctly with pen&paper, there is just no hope. People will blindly trust whatever the AI tells them, since they’ll get used to the AI providing superior answers.
This of course won’t happen all at once, this will happen bit by bit until you have AI dominating every process in a company, so much that the company is run by AI. Maybe you still have a human in there putting their signature on legal documents. But you are not going to outsmart a thing that is 1000x smarter than you.
Even given the smartest, most perfect computer in the world, it can give people the perfect, most persuasive answers and people can still say no and pull the plug just because they feel like it.
The same is not even different among humans, the power to influence organizations and society entirely relies on the willingness of people to go along with it.
Not only this sci-fi dream is skipping several steps, steps where humans in power direct and gauge AI output as far as it serves their interests rather than some objective ultimate optimal state of society. Should the AI provide all the reasons that they should be in charge, an executive or a politician can simply say “No, I am the one in charge” and that will be it. Because to most of them preserving and increasing their own power is the whole point, even if at expense of maximum efficiency, sustainability or any other concerns.
But before you go fullblown Skynet machine revolution, you should realize that AIs that are limited and directed by greedy humans can already cause untold damage to regular people, simply by optimizing them out of industries. For this, they don’t even need to be self-aware agents. They can do that as mildly competent number crunchers, completely oblivious of reality out of spreadsheets and reports.
And all this is assuming an ideal AI. Truly, AI can consume and process more data than any human. Including wrong data. Including biased data. Including completely baseless theories. Who’s to say we might not get to a point AI decides to fire people because of the horoscope or something equally stupid?
Even given the smartest, most perfect computer in the world, it can give people the perfect, most persuasive answers and people can still say no and pull the plug just because they feel like it.
How do you “pull the plug” on electricity, cars or the Internet? You don’t. Our society has become so depended on those things that you can’t just switch them off even if you wanted to. Even if outlawed them, people would just ignore you and keep using those things, because they are far to useful to give up on. With AI you will not only have that dependency as a problem, but also the fact that AI is considerably easier to build than any of those. All you need is a reasonably powerful computer (i.e. regular gaming PC). There are no special resources or infrastructure that makes construction of new AIs difficult.
Not only this sci-fi dream is skipping several steps, steps where humans in power direct and gauge AI output as far as it serves their interests rather than some objective ultimate optimal state of society.
Meta just failed to gauge the output of an AI that generates stickers. Microsoft had to pull the plug on Sydney. OpenAI is having constant issues with DAN. We can’t even keep that stuff under control in those simple cases. What are our chances when this has actual power, autonomy and integration in our society?
The danger here is not Skynet, you can nuke that from orbit if you have to. A singular AI program can be fought. The real issue is the fact that AI is just a bunch of math. People will use it all over the place and slowly hand more and more control over to the AIs. There won’t be any single place you can nuke and even when you nuke one, the knowledge how to build more AIs won’t vanish. AI is a tool for to useful to give up on.
