There's a full-blown moral panic about AI right now. But the real risk is losing the race to global AI technological superiority.

Article summarized by AI below: The article argues that artificial intelligence (AI) is not a threat to humanity, but a powerful tool to solve global challenges such as climate change, poverty, disease, and inequality. It gives examples of how AI is already being used to improve health care, education, agriculture, and energy efficiency. It also discusses the ethical and social implications of AI, and how we can ensure that it is aligned with human values and goals. The article concludes that AI will save the world if we use it wisely and responsibly.

  • modulusEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Pretty awful article. I’ll just point out a few issues.

    So in practice, even when the Baptists are genuine – and even when the Baptists are right – they are used as cover by manipulative and venal Bootleggers to benefit themselves.

    If so, if the “baptists” are right, the solution is not ignoring them, though.

    First, recall that John Von Neumann responded to Robert Oppenheimer’s famous hand-wringing about his role creating nuclear weapons – which helped end World War II and prevent World War III…

    Nuclear weapons didn’t help end World War II, and if they helped prevent world War III, a proposition yet to be determined, it wasn’t thanks to von Neumann, who said: “With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when. If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” Forgive me, but taking lessons on existential risks from von Neumann may not be the most advisable thing.

    Once a framework for restricting even egregiously terrible content is in place […] a shockingly broad range of government agencies and activist pressure groups and nongovernmental entities will kick into gear and demand ever greater levels of censorship and suppression of whatever speech they view as threatening to society and/or their own personal preferences. […] This cycle in practice can run apparently forever, with the enthusiastic support of authoritarian hall monitors installed throughout our elite power structures. This has been cascading for a decade in social media and with only certain exceptions continues to get more fervent all the time.

    Aside from the overwrought free expression discourse, the original text links to Twitter on certain exceptions. Considering Twitter an exception in this regard is simply not serious.

    AI isn’t just being developed in the relatively free societies of the West, it is also being developed by the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China.

    And this is a bad thing why?

    The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we – the United States and the West – do not.

    Why?

    This is the best way both to offset the real AI risks and to ensure that our way of life is not displaced by the much darker Chinese vision.

    Ah, the… much darker Chinese vision. Ok, yeah, that sure convinced me.

    In summary, while AI may not be risky in the ways many AI doomers claim, this article makes a poor way of arguing for it, and the actual risk it concerns itself with, isn’t.