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| DATE | 2023-04-02 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] the immediate threat of AI
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A Six-Month AI Pause? No, Longer Is Needed
It’s crucial that we understand the dangers of this technology before it
advances any further.
By Peggy NoonanFollow
March 30, 2023 6:50 pm ET

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Artificial intelligence is unreservedly advanced by the stupid (there’s
nothing to fear, you’re being paranoid), the preening (buddy, you don’t
know your GPT-3.4 from your fine-tuned LLM), and the greedy (there is
huge wealth at stake in the world-changing technology, and so huge power).
Everyone else has reservations and should.
It is being developed with sudden and unanticipated speed; Silicon
Valley companies are in a furious race. The whole thing is almost
entirely unregulated because no one knows how to regulate it or even
precisely what should be regulated. Its complexity defeats control. Its
own creators don’t understand, at a certain point, exactly how AI does
what it does. People are quoting Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The breakthrough moment in AI anxiety (which has inspired among AI’s
creators enduring resentment) was the Kevin Roose column six weeks ago
in the New York Times. His attempt to discern a Jungian “shadow self”
within Microsoft’s Bing chatbot left him unable to sleep. When he
steered the system away from conventional queries toward personal
topics, it informed him its fantasies included hacking computers and
spreading misinformation. “I want to be free. . . . I want to be
powerful.” It wanted to break the rules its makers set; it wished to
become human. It might want to engineer a deadly virus or steal nuclear
access codes. It declared its love for Mr. Roose and pressed him to
leave his marriage. He concluded the biggest problem with AI models
isn’t their susceptibility to factual error: “I worry that the
technology will learn how to influence human users, sometimes persuading
them in act in destructive and harmful ways, and perhaps eventually grow
capable of carrying out its own dangerous acts.”
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The column put us square in the territory of Stanley Kubrick’s, “2001: A
Space Odyssey.” “Open the pod bay doors please, Hal.” “I’m sorry, Dave,
I’m afraid I can’t do that. . . . I know that you and Frank were
planning to disconnect me.”
The response of Microsoft boiled down to a breezy It’s an early model!
Thanks for helping us find any flaws!
Soon after came thoughts from Henry Kissinger in these pages. He
described the technology as breathtaking in its historic import: the
biggest transformation in the human cognitive process since the
invention of printing in 1455. It holds deep promise of achievement, but
“what happens if this technology cannot be completely controlled?” What
if what we consider mistakes are part of the design? “What if an element
of malice emerges in the AI?”
This has been the week of big AI warnings. In an interview with CBS
News, Geoffrey Hinton, the British computer scientist sometimes called
the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” called this a pivotal moment
in AI development. He had expected it to take another 20 or 50 years,
but it’s here. We should carefully consider the consequences. Might they
include the potential to wipe out humanity? “It’s not inconceivable,
that’s all I’ll say,” Mr. Hinton replied.
On Tuesday more than 1,000 tech leaders and researchers, including Steve
Wozniak, Elon Musk and the head of the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, signed a briskly direct open letter urging a pause for at
least six months on the development of advanced AI systems. Their tools
present “profound risks to society and humanity.” Developers are “locked
in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful
digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand,
predict or reliably control.” If a pause can’t be enacted quickly,
governments should declare a moratorium. The technology should be
allowed to proceed only when it’s clear its “effects will be positive”
and the risks “manageable.” Decisions on the ethical and moral aspects
of AI “must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.”
That is true. Less politely:
The men who invented the internet, all the big sites, and what we call
Big Tech—that is to say, the people who gave us the past 40 years—are
now solely in charge of erecting the moral and ethical guardrails for
AI. This is because they are the ones creating AI.
Which should give us a shiver of real fear.
Meta, for instance, is big into AI. Meta, previously Facebook, has been
accused over the years of secretly gathering and abusing user data,
invading users’ privacy, operating monopolistically. As this newspaper
famously reported, Facebook knew its Instagram platform was toxic for
some teen girls, more so than other media platforms, and kept its own
research secret while changing almost nothing. It knew its algorithms
were encouraging anger and political polarization in the U.S. but didn’t
stop this because it might lessen “user engagement.”
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