You Should Be Terrified of What's Happening With AI [View all]

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You Should Be Terrified of What’s Happening With AI
11/29/2023 by Jill Filipovic
The Sam Altman OpenAI story is being covered as a Succession-style drama. It’s actually about the future of humanity.



(Nikolas Kokovlis / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

This story originally appeared on Jill.substack.com, a newsletter from journalist, lawyer and author Jill Filipovic.

Last week, the story of Sam Altman leaving OpenAI dominated the U.S. headlines, in part because it was just all so dramatic: A young genius who checks all the Silicon Valley boxes (white guy / prepper / dropped out of Stanford / extremely confident he is changing the world for the better,) who is also widely recognized as the most important person in AI, was unceremoniously pushed out of the AI company he ran, leading to a staff revolt against the board that pushed him out, a soft landing at Microsoft, and then, within days, reinstatement into his old position and a quick reshuffling of the board in which all the women were removed and replaced with men, including Larry “men are better at math than women” Summers. Spicy! But news outlets really did us all a disservice by initially framing this as a Succession-style power struggle rather than what it really is: a battle for the future of humanity. And not just for our jobs, but for our very basic ability to survive as a species.




. . . .

AI may very well make our lives easier. It will almost certainly put any of us out of work. But it may also leave us adrift—without obligation, people don’t do so well. AI also poses what the Atlantic story calls a “mass desocialization event.” We’ve already seen how mediating our lives through screens can be much more isolating than connective—we are able to reach many more people, but the depth and quality of those connections is much lower. We saw this with the pandemic, too: Being at home and communicating via Zoom was not nearly as meaningful as being in person, and while work-from-home has been in many ways wonderful, it’s also contributed to social isolation. We are more atomized than at any point in modern history. More of us live alone. We have fewer friends. And we are by most psychological measures worse off because we spend less time together in person. The more connected among us are doing better; the less-connected are doing worse. And the fewer reasons we have to leave our homes and our devices, the harder it will be to reverse any of these trends.


. . . . .

None of this is to say that we should simply shut down AI research and development. For one, that just isn’t going to happen. For two, even if the U.S. shut it down, far worse actors would keep going, and there is certainly a big benefit to being first in this race. But I am not at all convinced that the people leading the development of this radical new technology have any idea what they’re doing. I think they know technically what they’re doing. But I don’t think they have the knowledge of international relations or history or psychology or security or really anything else to understand what they may be unleashing into the world, and how it might (or might not) be controlled and regulated, used and misused. I think they’re driven by a desire to discover and to be first, and perhaps to make an absolute buttload of money—without coming close to appreciating what it might mean for the world, or what it might mean for the 8 billion human beings whose lives will be touched if not overhauled by this humanity-changing endeavor.

A few years back, I wrote a book about feminism and happiness, and the intersection of those two topics remains one of my chief interests. One thing that is clear in most of the research into human happiness is that what people think will make them happy, or what gives us a quick short-term thrill, is not actually related to what makes us happy in the long-term—what leads to a life that feels good and rich and meaningful, or simply what results in contentedness. AI may be very good at giving us what we say we want. I am skeptical, though, that it will be any good at all at delivering what we actually need. And it may deliver the kind of devastation we never bargained for.

https://msmagazine.com/2023/11/29/ai-artificial-intelligence-openai/