Take AI Leaders At Their Word Or Call Their Bluff

Artificial Intelligence may or may not destroy human existence by 2030 or sometime in the next decade. Why waste the computing cycles and tokens when we’re doing a damn good job of beating it to the punch?

After some dangerous confessions and warnings, along with continuing news of AI engines escaping their sandboxes, the leaders are calling out to slow things down, saying that they need to be regulated before what they are spending so much money on creating can become uncontrollable. Of course that spurs debate between those who love the technology and are making money off it, those who despise it—harbinger of doom it may or may not be, and now the millions who are stirring on the sidelines they usually sit on.

Some believe this is just another in a long line of overhyping the technology to improve bottom lines. Some see it as a timely move to try and influence the upcoming talks with the always-feared Chinese. Some, including those who have been working and studying the technology for quite some time, see AI as a real threat.

If we want to wipe the last two camps out of the memory banks and the debate, then either take them at their word or call the AI leaders’ bluff. Take them at their word that their brain children are too dangerous and put systems in place to regulate and slow things down. Or demand they pull the plug. They’ve exhausted the use of hyperbole in hyping the promises of their tech and most fell for it along the way. Why not take them at their word now?

Oh, wait. Whether the danger or is real or a bluff to be called there is a problem. The folks who would do the regulating belong to an institution that no longer exists called Congress. The president could do so, but then so could a dead fish for all it would matter. Funny, not funny that he joked about banning fishing just yesterday.

To think these ultra-competitive tech titans will slow themselves down in some selfless act of altruism to save the human race is folly. As much folly as hoping some governmental set of regulations or committees or dictates would. As much folly as pretending the conversation hasn’t been poisoned a million ways from Sunday to the point that no one knows what to believe.

At one point in our recent history the powers that be came to accept that the banks were too big to fail. We’ve sort of reached that point again with AI. It may not be too big to fail, but those who’ve created it, and those who have financed it, have already failed the rest of us. The rest of us who they need to pay for and feed their robots and robot-like artificial brains.

Call their bluff.

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(Photo by Museums of History New South Wales on Unsplash)