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 keep hearing this but have yet to find a good resource to study the issues. Most of what I've read so far falls into two buckets:
"It'll hijack our minds via Social Media" - in which case Social Media is the original sin and the problem we should be dealing with, not AI.
or
"It'll make us obsolete" - I use the cutting edge AI, and it will not, not anytime soon. Even if it does, I don't want to be a lamplighter rioting, I want to have long moved on.
So what other good theories of safety can I read? Genuine question.
That's why there's no single source that's useful to study issues related to AI. Until we see an incident, we will never know for sure what is just a possibility and what is (not) an urgent or important issue [1].
So, the best we can do is analogize based on analogical things. For example: the centuries of Industrial Revolution and the many disruptive events that followed; history of wars and upheavals, many of which were at least partially caused by labor-related problems [2]; labor disruptions in the 20th century, including proliferation of unions, offshoring, immigration, anticolonialism, etc.
> "Social Media is the original sin"
In the same way that radio, television and the Internet are the "original sin" in large-scale propaganda-induced violence.
> "I want to have long moved on."
Only if you have where to go. Others may not be that mobile or lucky.
[1] For example, remote systems existed for quite some time, yet we've only seen a few assassination attempts. Does that mean that slaughterbots are not a real issue? It's unclear and too early to say.
[2] For example, high unemployment and low economic mobility in post-WW1 Germany; serfdom in Imperial Russia.