Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of people who I don’t trust. And it will do all of this while consuming truly shocking amounts of energy.
Not only do I think these things will happen, I think the Altmans of the world would eagerly agree that they will happen. They just think it will be interesting / profitable for them. It won’t be for us.
And we, the engineers, are in a unique position. Unlike people in any other industry, we can affect the trajectory of AI. My skepticism (and unwillingness to aid in the advancement of AI) might slow things down a billionth of a percent. Maybe if there are more of me, things will slow down enough that we can find some sort of effective safeguards on this stuff before it’s out of hand.
So I’ll keep being skeptical, until it’s over.
I'm tired. I'm tired of developers/techies not realizing their active role in creating a net negative in the world. And acting like they are powerless and blameless for it. My past self is not innocent in this; but I'm actively trying to make progress as I make a concerted effort to challenge people to think about it whenever I can.
After countless of times that the tech industry (and developers specifically) have gone from taking an interesting technical challenge that quickly require some sort of ethical or moral tradeoff which ends up absolutely shaping the fabric of society for the worse.
Creating powerful search engines to feed information to all who want it; but we'll need to violate your privacy in an irreversible way to feed the engine. Connecting the world with social media; while stealing your information and mass exposing you to malicious manipulation. Hard problems to solve without the ethical tradeoff? Sure. But every other technical challenge was also hard and solved, why can't we also focus on the social problems?
I'm tired of the word "progress" being used without a qualifier of what kind of progress and at the cost of what. Technical progress at the cost of societal regression is still seen as progress. And I'm just tired of it.
Every time that "AI skeptics" are brought up as a topic; the focus is entirely on the technical challenges. They never mention the "skeptics" that are considered that because they aren't skeptical of what AI is and could be capable. I'm skeptical if the tradeoffs being made will benefit society overall; or just a few. Because at literally every previous turn for as long as I've been alive; the impact is a net negative to the total population, without developer questioning their role in it.
I don't have an answer for how to solve this. I don't have an answer on how to stop the incoming shift in destroying countless lives. But I'd like developers to start being honest in their active role in not just accepting this new status quo; but proactively pushing us us in a regressive manner. And our power to push back on this coming wave.