AI Fears: Should we worry?
As a writer, I am reasonably savvy when navigating the digital world, but recent reports about AI-generated music videos of famous artists (e.g., Drake and Kanye West), AI books flooding Amazon’s marketplace, and a chatbot that encouraged unhealthy eating habits to callers to an eating disorders helpline, have heightened my paranoia about opting into Bing’s or Microsoft’s AI-powered search engines.
Silly perhaps since I won’t have a choice in the very near future. However, I am not alone in my apprehension about potential problems with AI.
Geoffrey Hinton, an artificial intelligence pioneer, known as the “Godfather of AI,” recently quit his job at Google to warn of AI’s potential for harm. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported, “His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will ‘not be able to know what is true anymore.’”
Hinton’s also fears that in the future AI could harm humanity by behaving in unpredictable ways--which is already happening--if companies allow computers to generate and run their own codes and potentially create autonomous “killer robots.”
Shades of I, Robot.
If that ain’t scary enough, on May 30, industry leaders, including OpenAI, Google Deepmind, Anthropic warned of AI’s potential to be as deadly as pandemics or nuclear war. According to the New York Times, “… some believe, A.I. could become powerful enough that it could create societal-scale disruptions within a few years if nothing is done to slow it down …”
Regarding the job market, Business Insider, a multinational finance and business news website, reports among the jobs that AI is most likely to replace are coders and programmers; market research analysts; journalists; paralegals and legal assistants; teachers, accountants, and graphic designers.
In March, researchers at Goldman Sachs said, “Analyzing databases detailing the task content of over 900 occupations, our economists estimate that roughly two-thirds of U.S. occupations are exposed to some degree of automation by AI.”
Are such dire predictions too far in the future to worry about?
Consider this: Last month, two days before the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) was set to replace human associates on its hotline, it pulled its chatbot Tessa offline. According to Vice.com, “Tessa was taken down by the organization following a viral social media post displaying how the chatbot encouraged unhealthy eating habits rather than helping someone with an eating disorder.”
NEDA immediately posted to Instagram: “We are investigating this immediately and have taken down that program until further notice…”
Imagine a world where chatbots replace humans for business or personal interactions—from job interviews to mental health counseling.
Perhaps, Doomsday scenarios are premature, but as technology rushes to increase AI capabilities, possible unintended consequences deserve thoughtful consideration in the fields of social science, medicine, economics, education, and finance.
In future millennia, if AI replaces human interactions, might we lose our capacity to create, think critically, solve problems, or make decisions?
No need for Picassos, Bachs, Toni Morrisons, Andrea Bocellis, or George Washington Carvers?
2023 Wista Johnson (Reprint by permission only.) Photo: Andrew Neel (pexels.com)