A new US State Department-funded study calls for a temporary ban on the creation of advanced AI passed a certain threshold of computational power.
The tech, its authors claim, poses an ‘extinction-level threat to the human species.’
The study, commissioned as part of a $250,000 federal contract, also calls for ‘defining emergency powers’ for the American government’s executive branch ‘to respond to dangerous and fast-moving AI-related incidents’ — like ‘swarm robotics.’
The United States is moving rapidly towards developing a new generation of jet fighter drones piloted by artificial intelligence (AI) which are intended to outsmart China and Russia in any future conflict.
The Pentagon is due soon to select a shortlist from five companies competing for the project with the aim of beginning production of more than 1,000 of the super-fighter drones by 2028.
Machines can now talk with us in ways that aren’t preprogrammed. They can draw pictures, write passable (if generic) college essays, and make fake videos so convincing that you and I can’t tell the difference. The first time I used ChatGPT, I almost forgot that I was communicating with a machine.
Artificial intelligence is like nothing that humans have ever created. It consumes vast amounts of data and organizes itself in ways that its creators didn’t foresee and don’t understand. “If we open up ChatGPT or a system like it and look inside,” AI scientist Sam Bowman told Noam Hassenfeld at Vox, “you just see millions of numbers flipping around a few hundred times a second. And we just have no idea what any of it means.”
By now, most of you have probably seen the preposterous images generated by Google’s new AI conversation app, Gemini. Admitting to ‘missing the mark’, Google has withdrawn the image generator for tweaking, but not before the bot revealed an aversion to white people that was plainly cultivated by its overlords. Users discovered it was nearly impossible to prompt Gemini to produce pictures of ethnic Europeans, especially white men. Douglas Murray is right to object that the word is misused, but then I can misuse it, too. This is digital genocide!
I have been amused by many of the reports of Google Gemini’s peculiar behavior (for excellent examples see here, here, here, here, and read Jeff’s piece), but, in my view, the most interesting thing about this episode is what it has shown about where Google now is as a company. All told, Google Gemini has yielded precisely the opposite reaction that Google’s famous search engine did upon its release. In 1998, those of us who were using AltaVista or Ask Jeeves or whatever found Google and said, “wow, that’s incredible!” This week, everyone who has had some experience with other AI products has found Gemini and said, “what total garbage!” (Or worse.)
The days when Google was held up as a paragon of cool tech innovation are long gone. Today, its search results are manipulated and crammed with ads, YouTube demonetises accurate information it doesn’t like, and just a few weeks ago the company released Gemini, an AI model that refuses to generate images of white people.
The biggest names in tech — from Amazon to Microsoft — have poured roughly $675 million dollars in a robotics start-up whose ‘master plan’ is to bring the first commercial ‘humanoid’ to market, powered by AI.
The funding round is nearly ten times as much as the $70 million that this new robotics firm, Figure AI, managed to raise last May.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, through his venture firm Explore Investments LLC, pledged an optimistic $100 million to the company, with Microsoft investing nearly as much, $95 million.
I bet it’s programmed to hate White people.
While living in New Brunswick, I was used to only half a dozen self-checkouts at the superstore near my apartment. But in Australia, self-checkouts are an outsized part of the grocery landscape. Many locations of Coles and Woolworths outlets – the country’s dominant grocery chains – have double that, if not more.
On a recent visit to a central Melbourne Coles, I counted nearly 40 self-checkouts, and only two employees were circulating among them to help customers. Even at grocery stores in large Canadian cities such as Montreal and Toronto, I haven’t come across self-checkout sections as grand at grocery stores.
Satan’s handiwork nothing less.
It might be considered an AI cock-up on a massive scale.
A scientific paper purporting to show the signalling pathway of sperm stem cells has met with widespread ridicule after it depicted a rodent with an anatomically eye-watering appendage and four giant testicles.
The creature, labelled “rat”, was also sitting upright in the manner of a squirrel, while the graphic was littered with nonsensical words such as “dissilced”, “testtomcels” and “senctolic”.
Canada’s actors, directors and musicians are sounding the alarm over artificial intelligence, saying it threatens their livelihood and reputations.
Groups representing people who work in TV, movies and music are calling on the Liberal government to protect their industries in its AI legislation.
Actors’ union ACTRA says unbridled use of AI could result in people’s names and images being misused in artificially crafted videos—or even replace human actors entirely.
People lose jobs everyday to AI. Whether it’s a labourer replaced by an industrial robot or a clerk by software and no one says boo.
The entertainemnt business is owed no special treatment.
Artificial intelligence isn’t just a niche tool for cheating on homework or generating bizarre and deceptive images. It’s already humming along in unseen and unregulated ways that are touching millions of Americans who may never have heard of ChatGPT, Bard or other buzzwords.
A growing share of businesses, schools, and medical professionals have quietly embraced generative AI, and there’s really no going back. It is being used to screen job candidates, tutor kids, buy a home and dole out medical advice.
Elon Musk is no stranger to bold claims – from his plans to colonise Mars to his dreams of building transport links underneath our biggest cities. This week the world’s richest man said his Neuralink division had successfully implanted its first wireless brain chip into a human.
Is he right when he says this technology could – in the long term – save the human race itself?
Sticking electrodes into brain tissue is really nothing new.
