![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “We're not saying there's not gonna be a lot of great things that come out of it,” he says. He exploits machine learning to help understand the language of whales and other animals. ![]() In a conversation I had with Raskin this week, he acknowledged that he’s an enthusiastic user of advanced AI himself. Though it’s not a prominent theme in the Center’s presentation, the cofounders understand this. Likewise, some of the same algorithms that power ChatGPT and Google’s bot, LaMDA, hold promise to help us identify and fight cancers and other medical issues. This experiment also shows how AI might help us crack the elusive mystery of the brain’s operations, or communicate with people with severe paralysis. They also gave a nice summary of how AI has so quickly become powerful enough to do homework, power Bing search, and express love for New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, among other things.īut there’s another side to that coin-one where AI is humanity’s partner in improving life. (The Center is coy about whether another Netflix doc is in the works.) Like the previous dilemma, a lot of points Harris and Raskin make are valid-such as our current inability to fully understand how bots like ChatGPT produce their output. This one-sidedness also characterizes the Center’s new campaign called, guess what, the AI Dilemma. But the doc torpedoed its own credibility by cross-cutting to a hyped-up fictional narrative straight out of Reefer Madness, showing how a (made-up) wholesome heartland family is brought to ruin-one kid radicalized and jailed, another depressed-by Facebook posts. These were presented through interviews, statistics, and charts. While the film is nuance-free and somewhat hysterical, I agree with many of its complaints about social media’s attention-capture, incentives to divide us, and weaponization of private data. The ultimate expression of their concerns came in their involvement in a popular Netflix documentary cum horror film called The Social Dilemma. Tech designers turned media-savvy communicators, they cofounded the Center to inform the world that social media was a threat to society. In this moment of AI hype and uncertainty, Harris and Raskin are breaking the glass and pulling the alarm. It’s not the first time they’re triggering sirens. The Center’s cofounders repeatedly cited a statistic from a survey that found that half of AI researchers believe there is at least a 10 percent chance that AI will make humans extinct. It evoked the scene in old science fiction movies-or the more recent farce Don’t Look Up-where scientists discover a menace and attempt to shake a slumbering population by its shoulders to explain that this deadly threat is headed right for us, and we will die if you don’t do something NOW.Īt least that’s what Harris and Raskin seem to have concluded after, in their account, some people working inside companies developing AI approached the Center with concerns that the products they were creating were phenomenally dangerous, saying an outside force was required to prevent catastrophe. We were told that this gathering was historic, one we would remember in the coming years as, presumably, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, in the guise of Bing chatbots, would descend to replace our intelligence with their own. SUBSCRIBE to get access to Plaintext, a weekly newsletter on digital technology-who makes it and how it affects us. ![]()
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