AI, or Artificial Intelligence, quite frankly scares me.  It scares me in much the same way guns and nukes scare me, for while almost every tool ever invented was developed for a valuable purpose, every single one has also been used by evil people for evil purposes throughout the course of history.  When even the man who has been dubbed the “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, steps down from his lucrative position at Google so he can speak more freely about the potential dangers of advanced artificial intelligence, then yeah, I think we better all be leery.

Almost every tool invented since the beginning of humankind has been developed to fulfill a need, to make life easier or somehow better.  But looking back, every single tool that’s ever been invented by humans has also been used for nefarious purposes at one time or another.  The axe gave man the ability to chop down trees and chop wood for fires on which to cook his food and to keep his family warm.  It was also a tool for murder.  Cars were developed to make it easier for people to travel distances to work or to the market, and yet they have also been used to drive through a crowd of protestors or to run down a person because of the colour of their skin.  The internet?  Well, isn’t it great to be able to access information and stay in touch with loved ones with the click of a button, but how many times has it been used to spread false information or stoke widespread violence, causing far greater harm than could have been done with only a pencil or a telephone?  And the list is endless.  It seems that humankind will always find a way to misuse tools, to use them as implements to do harm rather than good.

Beware the latest technology!

I played around with AI just a bit a while back, found I had no use for it, and put it out of my mind … until recently.  At first, I thought it was a passing phase that people would have fun with for a while, using it to produce “art” and stories.  I worried a bit that journalists might start producing their stories using AI rather than their own skills, or that students would use it to write their term papers rather than actually spending hours at the library doing research, but I didn’t overthink it.  And then, last week I saw the article … a couple of them, actually, about the resignation from Google of Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” and his reason being that he wanted to be able to speak more freely about his concerns with the rapidly developing technology.  That got my attention.

So, what exactly are Mr. Hinton’s concerns?

“I’m just a scientist who suddenly realized that these things are getting smarter than us,” Hinton tells CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I want to sort of blow the whistle and say we should worry seriously about how we stop these things getting control over us.”

“I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us. I think they’re very close to it now and they will be much more intelligent than us in the future,” he tells MIT Technology Review. “How do we survive that?”

Hinton’s immediate concerns are that the internet will soon be flooded with fake text, pictures and videos that regular people won’t be able to distinguish from reality. But eventually, he says this technology could be used by humans to sway public opinion in wars or elections. He believes that A.I. could sidestep its restrictions and begin “manipulating people to do what it wants,” by learning how humans manipulate others.

He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”

This evening, I saw a short interview with Mr. Hinton on PBS that I think highlights some of both the positive and the negative aspects of the future contributions of this new technology.  It’s well worth 8 minutes of your time to watch if you haven’t already seen it.

Time will tell, but all efforts to contain AI, to ensure it is used only for good and not harm, will rely on humans to enact and implement safeguards in the form of laws, and just like regulating guns, I suspect regulating Artificial Intelligence will be determined by $$$$$$$$$$$$$$ rather than by conscience.