LOS ANGELES (KNX) - One of the pioneers of artificial intelligence quit his job at Google last week and is now speaking out about the risks of the tech industry’s AI arms race.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Geoffrey Hinton, whose work is the foundation for AI systems like ChatGPT and Google Bard, told the New York Times.
Are his concerns valid, or do the benefits of AI outweigh the potential risks?
David Auerbach, a tech writer and software engineer who previously worked at Google and Microsoft, weighed in on KNX In Depth.
“Ultimately, we may not be able to make that call except in retrospect,” he said. “If it ends up destroying the world, obviously it wasn’t worth it.”
But a Terminator-esque armageddon isn’t Auerbach’s main concern — a more likely problem is that AI will eliminate jobs and upend the economy. AI is already working in a wide range of human jobs like diagnosing cancer, drafting legislation, arguing court cases, and getting canceled for offensive stand-up bits.
There’s also the potential for disinformation from deepfakes — videos that look real but are entirely computer-generated. Today’s technology makes it easy and cheap to generate fake videos of anyone saying whatever you want them to say — like a recent deepfake of President Joe Biden announcing a military draft.
And the more AI improves, the easier it will be to forget that the computers writing those court arguments and deepfake scripts aren’t actually sentient.
“We’re gonna have content creation that is convincingly human. It’s not going to be done by machines that can actually think, but it’s gonna be able to convince people that it thinks,” Auerbach said. “If you’re willing to overlook it, you’re not gonna mind if it acts in bizarre ways sometimes, because if it gives you companionship and love, well, that’s gonna be a really powerful emotional influence out there.”
AI programs like ChatGPT are already freely available to anyone with an internet connection. As time goes on, AI will only become more accessible — which means we need to learn how to live with it, whether we like it or not, Auerbach said.
“What we’re facing is a tool sort of like the automobile, or like the steam engine, or like electricity, that is going to be in the hands of most people, and we’re gonna have to figure out how to shape society so that it doesn’t cause too much damage and we can get the best good out of it,” he said. “Because indeed, it can do a great amount of good.”
A group of computer scientists signed a petition in March calling for AI labs to pause their research for at least 6 months while safety protocols are developed and implemented.
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