As AI gets smarter and more accomplished, how can we isolate that humanity and infuse it in our work?
There are practical worries: AI is set to replace hundreds of millions of jobs in high-income countries, and to alter the economy in profound and irreversible ways. In the first half of this calendar year, it’s already seized at least 10,000 jobs in the US. How will entire layers of the workforce put bread on the table when their skills are deemed obsolete and unnecessary?
There are worries about personal liberty: AI can provide governments with vast power not just to collect data, but also to make sense of it in chillingly immediate ways. Reuters reports that Chinese AI firms are building models that will streamline the already-existing extensive government surveillance of private citizens, resulting in a “one person, one file” system where every person’s family, social circles, purchases, earning power, social media posts, and travel patterns can be pulled up and instantly analyzed by virtual intelligence.
Even in the US, scholars and thinkers are concerned about AI’s potential to trespass or trample individual liberties. Anthropic, the parent company of the Claude LLM, is currently dealing with US law enforcement’s requests to use its AI models for citizen surveillance.
And then there are the worries about apocalyptic disasters. Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers of AI,” keeps sounding the alert that as AI gets more sophisticated and human-like, it will start to exhibit the uglier side of human capacity: deception, cheating, and sabotaging others for self-preservation. Tech experts have already seen calculated deception by at least one LLM. Will AI ultimately decide to take control of the humans who created it? Will it cut off vital resources — electricity, water, healthcare — or utilize devastating weaponry to keep the upper hand?
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