It’s been almost 20 years since a socially awkward young computer science student launched a website to rate “hot” women.
Facemash, as Mark Zuckerberg called his creation, was shut down in a matter of days. But this humble teenage experiment, in retrospect, was the first staggering step on the road to something even he couldn’t have predicted at the time. The social media phenomenon has been accused of unwittingly polarizing society and destabilizing democratic processes. It fuels hate speech and spreads dangerous conspiracy theories around the world. Despite what the donors claim is their best attempt at quenching the flames.
The impact of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok was unpredictable then, and arguably still misunderstood today. About teen mental health. We could never have imagined how life online would change our sense of self and blur the lines between private life and public content. How the algorithms developed to drive social media consumption shape what we read and hear and, as a result, how we think and feel But if I hadn’t predicted it accurately from the start, in hindsight there certainly were moments along the way when the penny should have fallen.
Had the government not allowed the tech giants to compete well ahead of regulation, they could have saved themselves years of cleaning up the resulting mess. But we’ve all missed that moment, blinded by the wealth the industry has created and distracted by the joy its products have undoubtedly given in the process. is trying to do the same thing with something unpredictable.
Artificial intelligence is arguably the most exciting thing to have happened to mankind in generations, and it holds the key to magical and transformative breakthroughs in everything from medicine to productivity. At the same time, it is also the most terrifying given its potential to overthrow the existing social and economic order at breakneck speed.
This week, some of the world’s leading AI experts called for a six-month moratorium on training the next wave of systems, more powerful than the now-famous ChatGPT-4 chatbot. Understand the impact on humans. They warn of “an uncontrollable race to develop and deploy an ever-more powerful digital mind that no one, not even its creators, can understand, predict, or reliably control.”
Shortly thereafter, the UK government issued a white paper stating, to the contrary, that the UK would only have a short window of advantage in its competition, about a year, and for fear of strangling the golden goose, only the lightest regulatory measures would be taken. argued that it should be adopted.
The UK does not have a new dedicated regulator to manage what some believe could be an extinction-level threat to humanity. Instead, ministers will “empower” overworked existing regulators to do what they might have expected them to already do, backed up at points not specified by law. Probe the impact of AI on the sector with a set of possible pointers.
All seem to be governments desperately desperate for economic growth, perhaps wanting something akin to Brexit bonuses. If the EU follows its usual cautious regulatory path, the UK will establish itself as a relatively liberal and enthusiastic home for her AI pioneer.
The white paper mentions the jobs that AI will undoubtedly create, but not the jobs it will eliminate or the social unrest that may follow. (Think what the decline of coal, steel, and manufacturing brought to the rust belt towns of Europe and America, and how it fueled the rise of populism. is Goldman Sachs.)
Ministers highlight the tremendous breakthroughs possible in healthcare. But they are concerned about new forms of fraud and mass disinformation that could be perpetrated using AI tools capable of communicating as persuasively as humans, or how terrorists and rogue states could use autonomous weaponry. I haven’t said much about how to abuse . They barely say enough about the new rights humans may need to coexist with AI. For example, the legal right to know when an algorithm, rather than a person, has been employed to screen job applications, deny mortgages, or disguise one’s appearance. Create a completely real image or create a flirtatious reaction on a dating app (yes, there are AI applications for that).
The risk of AI being sentient or developing human emotions remains relatively remote. But anyone who’s ever ranted about Twitter knows that it’s already well beyond the point that algorithmic systems influence how humans feel about each other. graciously asserted to Sun this week that AI is not “something we should fear.” The government had it all. Feeling safe? me neither.
Unfortunately, a global moratorium on AI development seems unlikely given the failure to manage such global cooperation, even against the existential threat of the climate crisis. But there has to be some way around what happened on social media. At first it was a free-for-all that made billions of dollars, but was eventually followed by an angry backlash and a fateful attempt to bottle the genie. Artificial intelligence develops by learning from its mistakes. Is it too much to ask humans to do the same?
