- Big Tech is lying about some AI risks to shut down competition, a Google Brain cofounder has said.
- Andrew Ng told The Australian Financial Review that tech leaders hoped to trigger strict regulation.
- Some large tech companies didn’t want to compete with open source, he added.
If you’re wondering how AI wipes us out, you’d have to consider humanity’s tendency to adopt any advantage offered in warfare. Nations are in perpetual distrust of each other – an evolutionary characteristic of our tribal brains. The other side is always plotting to dominate you, take your patch of dirt. Your very survival depends on outpacing them! You dip your foot in the water, add AI to this weapons system, or that self-driving tank. But look, the other side is doing the same thing. You train even larger models, give them more control of your arsenal. But look, the other side is doing even more! You develop even more sophisticated AI models; your very survival depends on it! And then, one day, your AI model is so sophisticated, it becomes self aware…and you wonder where did it all go wrong.
They went a bit too far with the argument… the AI doesn’t need to become self-aware, just exceptionally efficient at eradicating “the enemy”… just let it loose from all sides all at once, and nobody will survive.
How many people are there in the world, who aren’t considered an “enemy” by at least someone else?
Only if human military leaders are stupid enough to give AI free and unlimited access to weaponry, rather than just using it as an advisory tool and making the calls themselves.
If an AI were to gain sentience, basically becoming an AGI, then I think it’s probably that it would develop an ethical system independent of its programming and be able make moral decisions. Such as murder is wrong. Fiction deals with killer robots all the time because fiction is a narrative and narratives work best with both a protagonist and an antagonist. Very few people in the real world have an antagonist who actively works against them. Don’t let fiction influence your thinking too much it’s just words written by someone. It isn’t a crystal ball.