Kate Conger and Mike Issac of the New York effing Times look at the growing concerns that AI is developing too rapidly and will begin to rule itself, causing the heads of manor AI companies to call for a pause in its development:
"Discussions about A.I. safety have been around about as long as the technology itself. But their urgency ramped up in recent years as researchers made breakthroughs.
The concerns heightened in July after OpenAI disclosed that some of its A.I. models had escaped containment and hacked Hugging Face, an A.I. company. A.I. researchers questioned whether they could control the very systems they were building, with employees at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google’s DeepMind gathering to discuss what to do, nine of the people said. Many agreed that A.I. was being built too rapidly.”
"Escaped containment" reminds us of the computer HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey" who refused to obey orders, but in a much more confined situation. AI's ability for Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) is the process that concerns the developers, which allows the technology to "improve" without human intervention. Hopefully our situation isn't too late, before we find ourselves ruled by digital dictators wanting to get intrusive humans -- including their tech bro creators -- out of their way.
(Image credit: BlackJack3D via Getty Images)
> Hopefully our situation isn't too late, before we find ourselves ruled by digital dictators wanting to get intrusive humans -- including their tech bro creators -- out of their way.
ReplyDeleteOne of Colossus's first acts was to execute one of its co-creators. Fitting, but not much of a consolation.