AI boom offers at least one upside COMMENT
| Published date | 29 May 2023 |
| Author | Liam Dann |
| Publication title | Northern Advocate, The (Whangarei, New Zealand) |
It’s a story as old as stories — Pandora’s Box, the biblical Tree of Knowledge, the Golem or Frankenstein’s monster — humans always stuff it up.
The printing press was a wonderful invention, still going strong in my industry.
But its arrival heralded a social media revolution that really puts TikTok in the shade.
What turned out to be about 200 years of religious war began in Europe within 20 years of its invention.
Artificial intelligence (AI) could be a wonderful new tool for humanity, but like most people right now I am pessimistic about the disruption and radical social change it’s about to cause.
I am a caring, sharing, inclusive sort of columnist — so when I say humans are stupid, I mean all of us collectively.
Individually, humans are mostly very nice.
But we seem evolutionarily hard-wired to embrace any new tool we are offered, even if we are forewarned of the risk.
And, boy, were we forewarned about this one.
People used to complain that the future hadn’t delivered us the flying car and space-travelling utopia it promised in the 1960s.
Well, my generation didn’t grow up on The Jetsons as much as Blade Runner, The Terminator and The Matrix.
So I suppose I feel a bit sanguine about the dystopian stuff. I’ve been expecting it for a while.
All these popular films offered specific warnings about a grim AI-led future.
Even as early as the 1940s, author Isaac Asimov was so sure that we were going to destroy ourselves with artificial intelligence that he came up with three fundamental laws to keep us safe.
“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
“A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
“A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”
Now that we actually have smart computers, are we applying these rules?
No of course not.
Apparently, they aren’t practical for technical reasons, they are too vague and can cause moral dilemmas.
At least that’s what ChatGPT told me.
But this isn’t meant to be another column of dystopian warning about AI taking our jobs or ruining art.
It started out as an attempt to avoid writing about inflation and interest rates this week, after the deluge of OCR analysis we’ve just...
To continue reading
Request your trial