CHARBONNEAU – The risk of extinction from AI is much overblown

A GAGGLE OF TECH GIANTS warn in a letter that the sky is falling and that Artificial Intelligence, specifically generative AI, is to blame.

There are wild speculations that AI will lead to a “technological singularity”— a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.

The reality is that most predictions of AI are hype. The “benefit” of AI will probably give us slightly better-written spam in our inboxes and reams of crappy, machine-generated websites.

Sure, some life-saving applications are possible in fields such as health care and agriculture, but they’ll be hard to spot amid all the junk.

The irony of tech giants warning of something of their own creation is not lost on me. It’s like Dr. Frankenstein warning the world of a monster of his own making –an assemblage of human parts just as AI is a collage of all of human thought presented in a unique form.

In their warnings, tech giants are patting themselves on the back at their marvellous machines. Joseph Wilson, PhD candidate in linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto writes:

“The tech companies are essentially congratulating each other for creating something too good. Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, has called AI, without irony, a technology ‘more profound than fire or electricity (Globe and Mail, June 5, 2023.)’”

Even the environmentalist Bill McKibben is saying I told you so. He was one of alarmists who signed a letter warning of the monstrous AI. McKibben sounded the alarm on global warming in his 1989 book “The End of Nature.” He warned of the dangers of AI two decades ago in another book.

Anyone can warn of the perils of future technology. I’ll state now, for the record, that future machines will transform society forever.

All this alarm has not gone unnoticed. The public doesn’t know what to believe and they’re worried. A newly released poll shows that 47 per cent of Canadians are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI. Only 9 per cent are more excited than concerned.

Even those who are more ambivalent about an AI-saturated future will become exhausted by the constant exhortations to “future-proof your career” or “become AI literate.”

Although tools such as ChatGPT are fun to play with and can astonish us with their output, they are not operating anywhere near human intelligence. They are essentially performing a clever parlour trick.

When it comes to language, we tend to attribute human intention to even the most banal sentences if they’re written well enough. But generative AI can do none of these things. It has the form of human expression but no content.

Yes, regulation is required but not to prevent the genie from being released from the bottle; not because tech companies might unleash a mathematical model that will suddenly become conscious and take over the world, but for the very real, boring reasons that have always existed — the exploitation of workers and spread of misinformation.

Technology is invented by humans. Machines didn’t invent humans despite the fantasy that they could make us their slaves.

Media guru Marshall McLuhan said it best: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://www.eyeviewkamloops.wordpress.com.