Safe As Milk
I think of Artificial Intelligence much same way I think of Nuclear Energy; it is extremely dangerous but in some cases it is the best solution possible. Artificial anything is seldom preferable to the real thing. Artificial sweeteners are not preferable to sugar but if you are obese or have diabetes that may be all you can consume. Likewise if you’ve just been handed five terabytes of files hot from the James Webb Space Telescope, the only way you will be able to sift through all that data in a reasonable time is with an AI. I’m quite sure that there are galaxies and antibiotics and inventions that will owe their discoveries to generative AI.
A social AI learns by vacuuming up data. Trainers gather this data from everywhere and anyone. To a great degree data scraping is done whenever, wherever and without regard. The propriety of actions is meaningless to both the AI and their human trainers.
An AI is a machine given a task and if that task requires it to sift through the private information of everyone on the planet then so be it. It is a huge database run on increasingly complex sorting algorithms. It doesn’t care or think despite what anyone tells you. Morality and ethics are just two parameters to be considered if they are considered at all.
Where AI becomes dangerous is when it falls into the hands of people to whom profit and power outweigh all other considerations. To them AI is the promise of getting something for nothing; it is creation without labor.
We should not be surprised. We have been allowing social media companies to soak up any and all tidbits of our lives for years now. Is it really so shocking that they are driven to put that ephemera to use for their own benefit? The corporate incentive is unending profit not the wellbeing of the user.
Fortunately for us most of what one hears about AI is snake oil. Its the deck fad of the moment. Unfortunately it will continue becoming ubiquitous. There is, really, no getting away from it. We will freely allow it into our lives and that makes AI dangerous.
