More than 400 of the world’s most distinguished experts in artificial intelligence including the creator of ChatGPT have warned of the possibility that the technology could lead to the extinction of humanity.
In a joint statement, backed by the chief executives of the leading AI companies, the signatories said that mitigating this risk “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.
Two of the three godfathers of A.I. are professors based in Canada. One of them, Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto, recently left his job at Google in order to speak more frankly about the risks of artificial intelligence.
The other, Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal, echoed the sounding of that alarm in a recent open letter urging a pause in the development of increasingly powerful A.I. systems.
He’s among the several high profile names, including Elon Musk and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who believe it’s time to pump the brakes, if only for six months.
The US Food and Drug Administration has granted Elon Musk’s company Neuralink approval to begin human trials on brain chips.
Twitter and SpaceX’s billionaire owner took to social media this week to congratulate Neuralink on the news. The company has been striving for this moment for six years, but the FDA issued some warnings that Neuralink will have to address ongoing concerns, including the safety of the lithium batteries contained within the device.
There is much concern about the frightening advance of AI. In Los Angeles, members of the Writers Guild of America which represents 11,000 writers have entered their fourth week of strikes. They are demanding, among other things, higher pay, and crucially, that the studios guarantee they won’t slice into writers royalty payments by crediting AI tools such as ChatGPT on scripts.
There is indeed a real threat of screenwriters’ jobs becoming redundant as AI advances. Yet the streaming services who employ writers are far more likely to self-sabotage long before AI becomes sophisticated enough to produce television and film scripts worthy of being made.
AI life can lie to humans. Computer programs are perfectly happy to manipulate us in order to fulfil their programmed instructions – and they are getting creative with their deception.
Everyone sighs when faced with solving a CAPTCHA to ‘prove you are a human’. It usually involves the mundane task of clicking on pictures that contain some arbitrary item, like a bike. This is simple for us, but computers can’t do it. This is why it acts as a digital gate to keep roving AI bots out of certain areas of the internet.
A security firm that sells AI weapons scanners to schools is facing fresh questions about its technology after a student was attacked with a knife that the $3.7m system failed to detect.
On Halloween last year, student Ehni Ler Htoo was walking in the corridor of his school in Utica, New York, when another student walked up behind him and stabbed him with a knife.
How will AI change medicine?
Doctors have been understandably skeptical of claims that artificial intelligence will transform medicine. Recall the misleading claims that radiologists might soon be obsolete, years of annoying automated pop ups in electronic health records, and the deployment of IBM’s near-useless Watson. But the development of new large-language models may actually live up to the hype. GPT-4, the latest, largest, and most capable such model developed by OpenAI, aces many AP exams and passes various professional certification exams—even tests for sommeliers—without having been trained for any of them.
Automation is coming, and this time it’s for the white collar workers.
Artificial intelligence will likely impact every profession, experts tell the Star, and office workers are first in line. But don’t go looking for a new area of employment just yet.
The rise of powerful generative AI programs like ChatGPT and Midjourney means robots can now write sonnets, draw portraits, code programs and much more in seconds, far outpacing humans in certain cognitive tasks.
At a congressional hearing this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivered a stark reminder of the dangers of the technology his company has helped push out to the public.
He warned of potential disinformation campaigns and manipulation that could be caused by technologies like the company’s ChatGPT chatbot, and called for regulation.
AI could “cause significant harm to the world,” he said.
BuzzFeed intends to use AI to generate headlines, quizzes and identity-based content to help it reach multicultural audiences in an “authentic voice”, an investor call revealed. During a conference with potential investors on May 11th, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti argued that AI was an “exciting new creativity tool” that could be used for “imagination, storytelling and entertainment”.
Autonomous vehicles are wreaking havoc. So why are our elites so committed to their rollout?
On Christmas Eve 1801, people in Camborne in Cornwall were treated to an extraordinary sight. Through the market town and up a hill rolled a carriage that was powered entirely by itself, for almost a mile. This was the first ‘self-driving’ vehicle, where the source of the propulsion was on board. No one had ever seen anything like it.
Writers’ strikes are expensive bad news for almost everyone
It’s a cliché of publishing that men over the age of forty only read military history. In my case it’s not entirely true: I still occasionally squeeze in the odd novel, some politics, even poetry if I’ve drunk too much sweet wine. But it’s true enough that my mind is probably over-furnished with historical military examples, metaphors and allusions. And for the last week I’ve been trying to find the correct analogy, from the annals of war, to characterize the battle recently joined by the Writers Guild of America.
If a chatbot can churn out hard-hitting think-pieces about why everything on Earth is racist, they’ll soon be out of a job
Last week The Irish Times fell victim to a cruel hoax. On its website it published an opinion column which argued that wearing fake tan is racist. The column attracted a huge volume of traffic, swiftly becoming the second most-read piece on the site. It then emerged, however, that the article had been submitted by a pseudonymous prankster, who reportedly created it using AI.
Humanity’s third major technological revolution is leading us into a future more promising and also more dangerous than any since the dawn of history. It’s coming faster than you think.
The COVID pandemic and the rise of AI have something in common. Between them, they have upended one of the most consequential debates among American tech analysts, and largely refuted the claim that progress in America was coming to an end—that the Adams curve was flattening out as a Great Stagnation cooled the dynamism of American life.
The case for stagnation was a strong one. Current technologies, advocates warned, were providing diminishing returns, and productivity growth in American life was slowing. The regulatory burden on innovation in the United States inexorably grew. Compared with the optimism that accompanied earlier innovations like electricity, indoor plumbing, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, refrigeration, and mass communications, Americans in the internet age seemed noticeably more risk averse and pessimistic about the future.
In Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, a lonely, recently-divorced ghostwriter falls in love with his artificially intelligent virtual assistant Samantha. In another twist of life imitating art, you now can too — except she’s called CarynAI.
