It’s not that often you see industry leaders lining up to warn about their products. The narrative from the AI sector so far is that AI is dangerous. Extinction is supposedly a possibility.
God help the world if a chicken ever crosses a road. The mystery will never be solved. “We’re taking an interrogative approach…” . This comes from the people directly involved after having “invented” the chicken.
This particular clunky, cobbled-together, self-important chicken is a very slight upgrade from your phone. Like your phone, it just uses a lot more of much older technologies. The only new thing about it is the packaging.
Nobody’s deconstructing this self-promoting road-crossing dubious techno-buzzard much.
For example:
Writing software – at least 15 years in development pre-AI.
Computer generated imagery – 20+ years.
Searches – 30+ years.
Bots – 20+ years
Machine learning and language models – 20+ years at least.
Calculations – 2000 years in modern forms.
Chatbots in general – at least 10 years, based on 40-year-old user interfaces.
Functionality – Highly debatable.
Efficiencies – Great to godawful, already hyped to a high level of disinterest.
Integration with business systems – Anyone’s guess.
Does everything? Not really.
How impressed can you be? Not at all. This is just a shopping list of stuff people already have, without the chatbot interfaces.
The risks are equally non-innovative:
Disinformation – Old news.
Errors – All machines make errors.
Surveillance society – We already have one, thanks for asking.
AI management of critical systems – Guess. Any IT person could tell you what’s likely to go wrong without even looking.
Propaganda – Long since part of the furniture, and you’ve done precisely nothing about it.
Malware – If AI can generate malware so can most high school kids.
Deepfakes – Deepfakes predate AI by about 8 years.
Leading to the elegant question – What’s new? Most of these problems already exist. You can see how brilliantly and fearlessly they’re being dealt with.
We have a few new-ish things here:
A blatant admission by at least 350 top industry people who should know better that they both fear and can’t manage their own products.
An implication that they may not even understand their products.
A lot of undefined possible threats and apparently no inputs in handling those threats if they arise.
Buck-passing in the form of delegating the problem to the world in general.
The assumption that humanity will become utterly dependent on this load of bargain-bin technologies simply because it can chat.
This is the original issue with digitization, rehashed into a particularly pitiful marketing campaign. Extinction is a good attention-getter. It worked for the dinosaurs, didn’t it? Better still, it makes it look like someone gives a damn, implausible as that is.
The sheer disingenuousness of the fears of AI is interesting.
One of the big “threats” of AI is the extinction of millions of white-collar jobs. Imagine having to live without all those out-of-touch, insular geniuses. Those jobs were slated for automation decades ago.
It’s a worry if you’re one of those people who can’t let go of fossilized business models. People should take expensive dangerous hours to goose-step into work to do something they could have done hours earlier at home. There must be things in suits looking dynamic for no apparent reason.
Properly managed by people with the guts to manage it, AI will generate a lot of genuine efficiencies. Just install an Off switch, and get on with it. Just remember, chicken brains – You’re liable for all of it.
Screaming at AI will take over from screaming at underpaid resentful employees who would otherwise have lives. It’ll be wonderful.
____________________________________________________________
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
