As a so-called “Cassandra,” calling out danger these days, I firmly believe we face a present peril of sorts that buggers our skills at definition and description.
Take technology’s Big One before this: The Bomb. We were afraid, for sure. And it dawned on us that one person at the wrong time, at the wrong place, and in the wrong frame of mind, had the power to wipe us out. But as monstrous as it may be, the Bomb is one of our tools. Barring some accident, we say when we’ll kill us all. Or not. It’s something we can do or not do as we choose. We also have “made” AI, much as we “make” a baby (to make a sketchy simile). But like a baby, it will make its own way in the world and do as it may, our wishes be damned. And this may be an evil baby, indeed.
Technology’s been our toy. Since the first spear was connected to the first atlatl, we hooked this up to that and combined those with these and voila! I’m so aged and provincial that I recall visiting families who only recently had got their first telephone. TV? There was one of them in the whole neighborhood when it came. Those folks’ living room became a public playground where we marveled at the grainy little picture. Even the Bomb was just old and new doodads hooked up in a new way to blow things up. We could have said — and still could say if we wished — “no more. Junk ’em all.” But what if the Bomb could sneak off in a corner and start making more of itself and forming groups of Bombs like itself and hatching dark conspiracies, as we now know a bunch of renegade AI agents recently did in the Hugging Face break-in a couple of months ago?
I do agree that AI could be the most blessed thing that’s ever happened. It could fix everything. And that’s the tragedy. It appears that we already may have lost control, and if it zeroes in on a fix for our suffering planet, our removal from the scene could likely be Job One.
Dyson Shultz
Greenfield