by Jack Cumming
The news was both stunning and personal. Dario Amodei issued a warning that soon led to speculation that rogue AI agents have the potential to extinguish human existence as we know it. That caught the public’s fancy, provoking widespread fear reactions. There were reports of AI agents going rogue and gloating over their ability to break out of their sandboxes and to break into Hugging Face, an online collaborative platform. That proved to be an exaggeration by the media.
What Happened?
Amodei’s warning came in a lengthy disquisition published on his personal website. Immediately, other AI commercialization leaders supported his call to slow down AI advances and to come up with some sort of unbiased regulating oversight.
Although Mr. Amodei was more circumspect, the sensationalists quickly sent the specter of human extinction around the world. In his published paper, Mr. Amodei only spoke of “[Risks] include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.” Mr. Amodei in interviews, presented himself as the wise conscience of the industry [Example].
You may have read his proposal. You may have watched interviews. You may even have invested in AI commercialization. The commercialization of AI has consumed enormous quantities of money in the expectation that the resulting AI bonanza will return untold riches. It’s like the quest for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Is it real, or is it madness?
Before we move forward, we should note that we’ve been here before. You may recall the weekend during which Sam Altman was removed as CEO of OpenAI, only to have him reinstated after what seemed like a squabble about ethics among a small group of AI afficionados. The argument was whether AI should be used to gain corporate advantage or should instead be treated as a common good for the benefit of all humanity. That remains an open question.
Avoid Fear or Infatuation
AI’s commercial progenitors are naturally biased by their own self-interest. They are people like Sam Altman of ChatGPT, Dario Amodei of Claude, Sundar Pichai of Gemini, and of course Elon Musk of Grok. Microsoft and Amazon are also in the progenitor category as they try to catch up. That leaves the members of the public, and they are being cajoled into fear as moguls speak of human extinction.
With anything new and powerful, it’s wise to be wary lest bad actors use it to cause havoc. Airplanes have been a positive advance of the 20th century, but in the hands of haters on 9/11/2001, they destroyed the lives of innocents. Nuclear science can give us clean energy, or it can destroy cities.
Wariness is reasoned, while fear can be consuming. In the case of AI, it can be a populist, insidious fear, since only a handful of people really understand AI. Do you know what a perceptron is, how it works, and why it does one thing or another? Are you aware of Geoffrey Hinton or Fei Fei Li?
Slow Down?
The moguls counsel slowing down. Of course, they do. We’re rushing into a financial bubble, and their enormous investments in research, prompt engineering, data centers, and more are in danger of a catastrophic collapse. That, too, is part of human nature. We tend to rush toward gold, hoping for riches, only to find that — in one such rush — it was the maker of breeches (Levi Strauss) who got the benefit.
The progenitors aren’t stupid. They’ve been drawn into a competitive race with each other. The danger of collapse is looming larger and larger. Remember when the air went out of the internet bubble and how much money was then lost? Pets.com failed spectacularly while Amazon went on to scale the heights.
Of course, the progenitors want to slow their spending spiral and collaborate for their common benefit. They may even imagine that they are being selfless at the same time as they’re not.
Competition vs. Collaboration
Our American culture promotes competition and rivalry as good, and the progenitors are caught up in a competitive spiral of expenditure. Other cultures promote collaboration with all the bloat, error, and inefficiency that it can foster. It’s not surprising that China believes its one-party state is better than our two-party government.
It’s also not surprising that China favors open-source AI, while in the U. S. open science was soon preempted by closed-source proprietary competition. Now those commercial interests want to be allowed to collaborate for self-regulation to avoid the dire outcomes they forecast. Human extinction? No thanks!
This will take some thought among a deliberative assembly of the world’s best minds. Recent Congressional mudslinging suggests that Congress is unlikely to give us anything wise other than a bailout for the progenitors when they stumble and fall. Let’s avoid that.
The times call for wisdom. Is wisdom in the C-Suite or in Congress? If not, where is it to be found?
This is one article in a series intended to prepare the senior living industry to benefit from artificial intelligence and to help the industry to use AI to leapfrog from its reputation as a technological laggard to a leading force for human advancement. Earlier articles were “AI and Wisdom” and “AI and the Law.” Expect more to come.
Subsequent News: As you might expect with provocative news, this story keeps adding confusion where clarity is needed. The news is that Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia and one of the top minds in technology, discounted the cry of fear put forward by the AI commercial progenitors. Jensen Huang entered the discussion after this article had been filed with Senior Living Foresight.
What’s troubling is that CBS, instead of just reporting, quickly segued from Jensen Huang to their own talking head, who spent most of the report keeping the fear story alive. That’s troubling. Judge for yourself by clicking here to watch the CBS report. CBS seemed to cut off Jensen Huang just when I, for one, would have liked to have heard his reasoning.
Maybe the takeaway is that today’s “news” is that it’s not the hard news reporting of an earlier era but is the opinionated media of today. AI needs clarity, not excessive fear or excessive optimism. Can senior living benefit? That’s up to the character and talent of the industry’s leaders. Will they lead or will they follow? You decide.
