It would be hard for me to tell you why we need to be skeptical of AI, because I read so much, it's difficult to distill it all. I can only point you toward bits and pieces. But watching this Jon Stewart interview with the dogged journalist Carole Cadwalladr is a good start.
Here's today's newsletter from Josh Marshall, called "Artificial Intelligence and The Posture of Skepticism", which concludes:
Who takes the time to really dig into most reports? Who actually tracks down every individual citation? This is even more the case when — so important to remember this — you remember that AI’s “thought” process is based on producing answers that appear valid and credible to humans. So the fakes will be packaged in unremarkable and inconspicuous ways. How many legal briefs are getting produced like this?
We all know and most of us have experienced the way AI is already clogging up a lot of the internet. But that’s stuff meant to get picked up by search engines — write ups on how to change a tire, the net worth of Brad Pitt, recipes. Sort of who cares? But there’s a lot of evidence that AI work product is creeping into “important” areas too. So we’re already living in the AI age but what it’s doing is less replacing humans or operating at a level comparable to humans but seeding the information world with a new generation of slop, superficially credible but falsity-seeded content.
This is far from a novel insight. It’s one of the basic critiques of AI. It’s also true that it’s easy but misleading to dismiss a technology based on its earliest iterations. 1990s era Internet video was basically a joke. But eventually there was Netflix and cord cutting. Things change. But this does seem to be where we are right now with AI. And for the moment the question seems to be less what AI can do that is at the level of humans or exceeding their abilities as how close it can get and how tempting its use is for the purposes of productivity gains and cost savings.
In a way, we as a global society are already in the grip of a primitive form of machine learning, the kind that is designed to maximize engagement on social media platforms. They’re very primitive by the standards of AI. But they’ve already upended our society in basic and fundamental ways. And despite our knowledge of the upending, we’re basically incapable of freeing ourselves from them.
So like I said, a posture of consistent skepticism.
Just want to say that if I could only subscribe to one thing, it would be Josh's Talking Points Memo. News and smart thinking!
And I'll also recommend Duncan Black, who's been calling out Elon Musk's lies and incompetence for years now, like this.
One of the reasons self-driving cars are so difficult to reliably achieve is that in an urban environment, there are so many factors that have to be considered. So the companies that have been somewhat successful (like Waymo) at this require cars with lots of sensors to interpret what's going on around them.
But Elmo has made an executive decision! He says all you need are cameras, and more cameras. This is probably why his vehicles keep crashing. But what do I know, he's a self-proclaimed genius!
As we have seen, genius IQs do not necessarily come equipped with emotional intelligence. Clearly, Elmo "I care so much about the climate" Musk is one of those people, as the people of Memphis, Tennessee fight the insanely unregulated pollution from his AI power plant.
Won't it be great when we have machines that will simply shut down the power plants if we say no to them?
Read that, and maybe we can have a discussion of whether the services that will be theoretically performed by AI are worth destroying the planet. Elmo knows what he's doing -- no wonder he wants to go to Mars!
