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.
AI is just the latest in a long list of disruptive technologies. We can only guess about the long term ramifications. But if history is any indicator, people in a few decades will probably see AI as totally normal and will be discussing the existential threat of something new.
We had friends over for dinner a couple days back; between us we had two computer scientists, one psychologist, one radiologist, one doctor. Each of us were in turn astonished and somewhat afraid of the rapid pace of change. In a university setting, students are routinely using Claude and ChatGPT for everything from informal counseling to doing homework to generating presentations to doing 'creative' work (smh).
At the end of they day, we all agreed that we were grateful that we are at the tail end of our working life, and that we didn't have to deal with this level of uncertainty
But people surely felt the same way about gunpowder, the steam engine, electricity, cars, phones, planes, nukes, etc.
Or look at specific professions that software has negatively affected in recent decades. Not a lot of people use travel agents anymore, for example.
I’m not saying that the negative effects are good. But that’s just the nature of technological advancement. It’s up to society to adapt and help out those who have been most negatively affected.
AI is not only a general-purpose technology (such as, e.g., electricity or computers), but also the only one that can self-improve. Also, its potential for diffusion is much bigger, because unlike for electricity and computers, barriers are much more easily overcome [1].
But I'd suggest looking at this not as a separate "technology" like airplanes or smartphones, but rather as a software breakthrough. Everything that worried people about software [2] in the 20th and the early 21st century - or anything that came to pass on a smaller scale - is now much more worrisome.
[1] Pretty much any person or machine today that has access to electricity and computers can use AI, thanks to subscription models, cloud computing, VC subsidies, web access, etc.
[2] For example, large-scale automation and job loss, mass surveillance, robot swarms, etc.