Wednesday, August 16, 2023

Slouching Towards Singularity

For months now in my daily news summaries I’ve included multiple links to articles about artificial intelligence — up to a dozen on some days. It’s an important topic but I have to admit I’m not much closer to having a firm opinion about the merits of AI than when I started studying it.

Is it good or bad? Maybe that is not even the right question to ask because it no doubt is both.

Will it cost jobs or create jobs? 

Probably in the near term, it will cost many more jobs than it will create, but I get the sense that over time it may turn out to be a lot like the dawn of a new agricultural era, with humans serving like sheepherders supervising AI-powered entities handling those hard (and soft) labor tasks we still require.

Will AI help solve our most intractable problems? Like climate change, war, poverty, health issues, violent crime, environmental decline, hate, inequality, the overall spiritual bankruptcy of our species?

The answers to those questions are simply unknown.

What we can say for certain is that ultimately AI will be what we make of it — a cliche I know but an apt one. For now, prominent researchers have recommended a pause while we collectively figure out how to proceed. That is not really happening, although there are nascent attempts at developing regulatory regimes in several parts of the globe, mainly here and in Europe.

My best guess, therefore, is that we will move forward haltingly with AI, not really knowing where we’re headed. If that sounds familiar, it’s also a pretty good summation of overall human progress to date, isn’t it? It’s apparently going to take more than the existential threat of singularity to alter that.

LINKS:

 

No comments: