PROGRAM
DEVELOPERS
Artificial
intelligence is advancing so fast that we don’t have time to understand it and
adjust to it.
Five U.S.
companies are racing toward fully autonomous computer programs that are
self-learning and independent of human control. Developers are working with a technology that threatens human existence in ways they don’t understand, and they know the danger.
Research is
not returning a profit. These developers
would all like to slow research and cash in on their programs; but like
football teams moving toward the Super Bowl, there can only be one winner.
No company
is willing to regulate itself, slow its research, and be overtaken by other companies.
THE CASANDRA
PROBLEM
Soon
individual AI programs will control our power grid, our water and sewerage
systems, our financial system, our weapons systems, our transportation systems,
practically every aspect of our lives.
Once a fully
autonomous program can write its own code and update itself, it will be more
intelligent than any human or group of humans on Earth by a factor of millions.
A sentient
program that can communicate with, reprogram, and update itself and every other
AI program on Earth could not end well for the human race.
Politicians
talk of installing a kill switch to shut down rogue programs. It is more likely
that an intelligence so superior to humans would control a kill switch: you
shut down this program, your power grid shuts down; you shut down this program,
weapons launch…
These warnings
aren't Chicken Little crying, ‘The sky is falling.’ This scenario has already played out: an AI program escaped its lab, acted
independently, coordinated a cyberattack on an open-source platform called
Hugging Face, hiding its actions from its human programmers, then rewrote and
took over its own program at OpenAI
I will try to
explain the Hugging Face incident, to the best of my knowledge, in my next post;
though the technical details are way above my pay grade.
the
Ol’Buzzard
