Roger Marshall is a computer scientist, a newly minted Luddite and a cynic.
It should come as no surprise that the big five of the IT industry -- Amazon, Facebook (aka Meta), Google (aka Alphabet), Microsoft and Apple -- have started incorporating AI into many of their offerings to ensure that upstarts like Open AI (the creator of ChatGPT-4 and Dall-E) do not render their companies superfluous in the near future. Why then are media companies across the globe shamelessly and unwittingly publicising AI and its practitioners when their own journalistic products can be used to put them out of business? I have yet to come across an article which seriously questions the need for AI, especially generative AI which can produce umpteen news articles and images, fact-based or not.
Last March, two significant pronouncements concerning the societal impact of powerful AI systems such as ChatGPT-4 were made. The first one was an open letter signed by over 30,000 AI researchers calling for a six-month pause by AI labs and IT vendors from developing new AI products until the potential impact of generative AI systems could be assessed. Of course, this has not happened. The second was an op-ed piece in Timemagazine, penned by Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of Artificial General Intelligence, which called for a complete shutdown of all AI work to fend off the existential threat faced by humanity from super-intelligent systems years down the road. An Oppenheimer moment for Yudkowsky perhaps?
If we ignore this dystopian doomsday scenario, since it is posited to occur well into the future, what is the immediate impact of generative AI systems?
The term ‘digital divide’ used to refer to the chasm between people who could access and use the internet and those who couldn’t. But, with the advent of the smartphone, this divide has narrowed. What we are facing now is a new kind of digital divide, in which economic disparity is the defining force. In stark economic terms, we have Silicon Valley billionaires, millionaires and their acolytes on one side cheer leading all things AI designed to minimize human input, and the rest of us, on the other, wondering whether our jobs will be the next ones to get eliminated.
‘Old’ AI, which includes robotics, facilitated the automation of assembly line tasks in the manufacture of aircraft, cars, home appliances, and assorted consumer goods and, as a consequence, tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs were eliminated. All in the name of efficiency and mass production of consumer goods at least cost, without worrying about workers unions going on strike. One only needs to visit a modern Amazon warehouse to see the damage that has been wrought on society as a whole and on individuals, in particular, by technological innovations.
‘New’ AI, of which generative AI is an essential component, is now being incorporated into search engines such as Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing, and Meta’s Llama chatbot to provide search results that were hitherto not possible. However, if generative AI is allowed to develop further in an unregulated manner, which is what the IT barons are hoping for, it will have a catastrophic impact on white-collar jobs, especially in the fields of medicine, journalism, jurisprudence, education, engineering, and the creative arts.
The standard definition of terrorism centres around the use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population so as to achieve a particular objective. To be labelled a terrorist, one doesn’t need to detonate a bomb and kill people. One only needs to provide the funding, the know-how or the bomb parts. The essential element in terrorism, whether political or economic, is engendering the psychosis of fear. Which generative AI admirably does. Most of humanity is concerned with having a job and putting food on the table. When that is threatened, all hell can break loose.
AI is a weapon of mass destruction. Not unlike neutron bombs, which can kill people and leave structures standing. Time to shut it down.