On My Mind: The uneasy rise of AI
What’s on my mind is a subject I find difficult to wrap my mind around — AI (artificial intelligence, as I suspect most of us recognize it by now).
“Artificial” has a negative connotation to me, while “intelligence”
is something to be sought, admired, respected and used if and when you have it. That’s why I find AI so unsettling.
I embraced AI when it suddenly showed up on my computer and started instantly answering almost all of the questions I posed.
It makes life a bit easier for a person who likes to research and compose news and feature stories. In that respect, AI is dandy.
But AI has its drawbacks and, as we are learning, its risks.
Two family members know the future of their currents jobs is limited because AI can perform the same tasks.
Monstrous data centers are dotting our landscape, and not in an attractive way, to support AI and other components of the digital world.
Early last week news broke predicting AI could cause the death of the entire population of the world within a decade.
“I won’t lie to you — there are real dangers,” said Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei about the development of AI in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning this month. “And I think for too long the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.”
That stopped many of us in our tracks. Doomsday scenarios tend to attract attention. And it was certainly jaw-dropping to learn that private enterprise is asking for some government regulation.
Other AI industry executives Sam Altman (Open AI), Elon Musk (SpaceXAI) and Dennis Hassabis (Google Deep Mind) also gave cautionary advice.
It turns out AI’s inherent capabilities are something the feds have been analyzing and working on for some time now, but the doomsday at our doorstep scenario certainly brought it out into the light of public scrutiny.
These warnings made investors anxious during this past Monday’s trading of AI stocks and prompted a rebuke from President Donald Trump. He dismissed the growing concerns about rapid AI development, calling it a “hoax” and noting his interest in the U.S. keeping ahead of the Chinese in this field. The president stressed the only guardrails the U.S. needs are him as president.
On Tuesday, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche described the sudden interest in the subject as a “flashpoint” and suggested the controversy was engineered by political activists ahead of the November primary election.
So back here, at home base, my AI befuddlement is second only to the scrutiny deserving of any technological advancement already in the pipeline whose originators are speaking with such caution and concern.
