DAVID MARCUS: Big Tech invented AI doomsday to duck real life problems
As if Americans didn’t have enough to worry about — making ends meet and planning for the future — the heads of the world’s largest artificial-intelligence companies are now warning that their groundbreaking technology could leave us with no future at all: We may all be dead.
It really is a shame, given that we just survived climate change and COVID-19. Now this? Maybe we can just shut down AI for two weeks to flatten the curve.
This week, Democrats have been jumping all over themselves to hop on board this moribund bandwagon to do what they always do — regulate industry to death and hamper growth.
According to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., "Congress, under both Democratic and Republican control, has been asleep at the wheel, and we now have a president whose ignorance regarding this issue is truly embarrassing."
Meanwhile, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., warned, "AI technology can be very dangerous when pursued without any guardrails." But given her repeated predictions that the world will end within five years because of climate change, it’s unclear why it matters.
Look, AI is not going to destroy humanity in the next decade, as Jacob Coxon, a former employee and so-called whistleblower at Anthropic — a leading AI company — warned recently. Frankly, the notion is absurd, which is why nobody can actually explain it.
One must seriously ask oneself, how exactly is AI going to kill me? Is it going to come to my house with a gun, is it going to hack the nuke codes or unleash a deadly virus? Surely, it's not that hard to have human beings as fail-safes in those scenarios.
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No, the dangers attendant to AI are not sci-fi fantasies of super intelligence going rogue and plotting the demise of the meat puppets. As exciting as all of that is, the real dangers are much more mundane, and much more implacable.
Across the country, local school boards are struggling with whether and how to use AI in kids’ education. County commissioners are balancing the crime-fighting capability of AI-driven cameras against personal freedom. And in Congress, lawmakers are debating outdated laws governing Big Tech’s liability, including Section 230 of the Communications Act, which was written in the technological Stone Age of 1996.
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These practical applications of AI are what Americans are most concerned about, not fabulist movie scenarios meant to scare us all into handing power over to the smart set, again.
All the usual suspects, like Bill Gates and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, are out there saying that the threat of AI requires some kind of woke world governing body, but Americans will not accept such trampling of their freedom. Not this time.
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At the end of the day, AI is a product. It's not magic. It's not some unstoppable force of nature. And like any product, from toothpicks to tractors, the government has a role to play in making sure it is safe for the public.
Viewed from this product angle, it is easy to see why Big Tech would rather talk about esoteric threats of Armageddon than what they are doing to fight bias in their algorithms, or take the safety of children online seriously.
In fact, what Big Tech is really doing is inventing a problem that isn’t there to avoid addressing the very real ones that are.
Even if we did force AI companies to shut down for two months and put their servers six feet apart with masks on, it would have no impact on the actual issues that people care about regarding so-called artificial intelligence.
Big Tech doomerism is a distraction, because, after all, who has time to worry about teenagers getting addicted to social media or chatbots happily cheering on suicide when the world might end in 10 days?
What the American people need and deserve are not grand, fruitless, hand-waving gestures that seek to halt research that probably can’t be halted anyway — certainly not in China. They need sound policy regarding the practical applications of AI.
People are rightfully suspicious, and even a bit scared of AI technology. But the answers to those fears do not exist in the cloud, so to speak, but on the ground — where the virtual rubber meets the very real road.
The question is not whether AI will kill us, the question is how our society will choose to use it, and human beings remain in charge of that, regardless of predictions of doom.