Editor’s Notes: Searching for Sarah Connor
Trending
Depending on your generation, you may have learned years ago of the work being done on artificial intelligence and thought immediately of HAL 9000, Skynet, or Ultron. Who would have dreamed we should have been paying closer attention to the movies featuring such entities?
I remember reading a story about AI capabilities and the research being done a few years back and joking "Haven't any of these people watched 'The Terminator?!'"
Those jokes aren't so funny anymore.
Last week, Geoffrey Hinton caused a stir when he let loose with his concerns about the technology he helped develop.
Hinton is retired from Google and considered the "Godfather of AI." He has come to believe the technology is downright dangerous -- talking about humanity's survival being threatened when "smart things can outsmart us.
"It may keep us around for a while to keep the power stations running," Hinton said. "But after that, maybe not."
Terrifying, right?
"These things will have learned from us, by reading all the novels that ever were and everything Machiavelli ever wrote, how to manipulate people," Hinton said during MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference. "Even if they can't directly pull levers, they can certainly get us to pull levers."
A colleague who worked alongside Hinton in the development of AI, Yoshua Bengio, acknowledges the concerns -- agrees with them, even -- but has a different approach.
"The main difference, I would say, is he's kind of a pessimistic person, and I'm more on the optimistic side," said Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal. "I do think that the dangers -- the short-term ones, the long-term ones -- are very serious and need to be taken seriously by not just a few researchers but governments and the population."
We already know how disruptive to our society the advent of social media was. And even in the midst of that divisive onslaught, many users couldn't (or chose not to) distinguish between fact and fiction, legitimate and artificial. How much more might we be affected if artificial intelligence is involved?
"My main concern is how they can be exploited for nefarious purposes to destabilize democracies, for cyberattacks, disinformation," Bengio said. "You can have a conversation with these systems and think that you're interacting with a human. They're difficult to spot."
To be fair, many of the researchers and company executives involved in developing (and selling) this technology say the warnings are off-base fearmongering, "detached from the reality" of AI's true capabilities and rely on "extraordinary leaps of imagination and reasoning."
"The notion that these models are somehow gonna get access to our nuclear weapons and launch some sort of extinction-level event is not a productive discourse to have," said Aiden Gomez, one of the minds behind ChatGPT and CEO of the AI company Cohere. "It's harmful to those real pragmatic policy efforts that are trying to do something good."
Maybe. And maybe I really have just watched too many movies.
But I tend to listen to Hinton and Bengio on this one. I'm glad Bengio, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and other computer scientists and tech business leaders are asking for a six-month pause on developing AI systems. I'm glad leaders from Google, Microsoft and OpenAI were called to a meeting at the White House, and that lawmakers in Europe are working on new AI rules. I hope they are taking seriously all concerns-- extreme and otherwise.
In the meantime, if my computer starts singing "Daisy Bell: A Bicycle Built for Two," or answers me when I click the "shut down" button with "I'll be back," you can find me in a tent in the woods, writing via typewriter and sending my columns back to the newsroom via pigeon.
… Hey, Siri, where can I buy a tent?
Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com