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.
The solution is to put an AI intermediary into interactions. We already should have AI that rewrite the web pages we view into an ad-free format but I guess my ideas on this topic is ahead of the inevitable curve.
>It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze.
Most of our work and employment lines are a variation of drugery a d slave labor so that's a good thing way overdue.
>It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of people who I don’t trust.
It have democratized the access to consultation expertise and an increasingly widening pool of digital skills/employees for everyone to use and access. A huge amount of things previously locked or restricted by capital access are now freely accessible to literally anyone (with some skill and accuracy issues still to be ironed out).
And this last point is particularly important because we're only going to have more and better AI crop up, and unlike a humans their time isn't priced according to living expenses and hourly wage locked behind formalized business structures with additional layers of human employees that all need to pay rent and eat that drives the cost skywards.
It also matches my own prediction of a mundane non-singularity. Long before we get anything properly superhuman we'll have a proliferation of innumerable sub- or parahuman AI that proliferates and become ambiguous in society and the world.