How close are we a complete world transformation due to AI?
Tom Scott distils down his encounter with AI doing a job he used to do (almost equally well) and then reflects on why this could be a completely transformative development for the world – much like when the internet really took off in the late 90’s. I think he’s probably right. As someone that has played with AI art generation and watching the ground breaking papers that are using AI for even traditional rendering and modeling tasks in just the graphics world, I think we’re just at the first part of his sigmoid curve.
This transformation is likely to be very different than just the early internet upheavals of the music industry, cellular phones, and stores/commerce that he describes. Those were largely transformations of market form with the same commercial and societal needs.
I think this is different in at least 2 ways. First, AI is bringing about a change in which thought, analysis, creativity, and response to problems themselves is likely about to be abdicated (and somewhat blindly by the lazy or those that aren’t critically looking at what is being generated). And we’ll be abdicating that power to systems aren’t truly or fully understood, controlled, or protected.
With things like chatGPT, we will very easily start abdicating the hard work of thinking itself. If we no longer crafting the actual language of our responses, doing the hard logical work of building arguments for our daily actions or policies we live by – we will never develop the critical thinking ability to even question what is generated. Instead, they are generated for us. What would that do to us long term? Especially we we already see that chatGPT and other AI systems can get things terribly wrong – and not give us the first clue they are wrong.
Secondly, like all tools, they could even be controlled/manipulated by nefarious agents. Today, our most deadly and horrific tools of destruction (nuclear bombs and sophisticated strategic weapons) are today largely contained within government military systems and by needing the highly specialized ability to build them.
AI can be wielded by anyone, anywhere in the world, with any motivation (political, personal, etc.). With just a small rack of commercially available servers, one has the ability to unleash the kind of infinitely scalable social media posting, auto-responding, narrative controlling, news story generating, and possibly subverted think-for-you devices upon the whole world.
We have known since at least 2019 that this is happening on all major social media platforms despite the best efforts of some of the smartest people in Silicon Valley working on it. Smarter every day did a series of stories on the problem. Research has proven again and again these things are happening and are very, very easy to do and very, very hard to stop:
A few clever AI systems that would likely cost less than a single cruise missile could easily overwhelm social media forums, message boards, Wikipedia edits, generated news articles, etc – before we could ever hope to verify the claims or combat its ability to generate hundreds of thousands of responses, up/down votes, planted webpage articles, etc every hour. How could one even verify the claims if everything is suspect? Why WOULDN’T a country do this if it cost less than what a single missile costs? Even better, what if the AI can be subverted to bias certain responses (which we have already seen too)?
In the post-truth internet, people are well into putting their trust in anonymous influencer opinions and echo chamber forum posts before well verified facts. What will this mean in our internet era in which ‘objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’?
My how far we’ve come from the idea that the internet would become a forum in which people share ideas and the best ones rise to the top. How dangerously naïve we were…