Il fondatore di Dell dice di calmarsi riguardo all'intelligenza artificiale senziente in stile SHODAN perché "ti ricordi lo strato di ozono e tutto il resto" e noi abbiamo risolto il problema

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Viviamo in un'era di entusiasmo per l'intelligenza artificiale e tutti hanno la loro opinione. Ma mentre la maggior parte di noi è un po’ preoccupata per ciò che l’ascesa dei testi ultra-predittivi significherà per la creatività e la critica umana, alcuni tipi della Silicon Valley si preoccupano dell’Intelligenza Generale Artificiale, o AGI, che è fondamentalmente un termine che suona serio. per un'intelligenza artificiale autodidatta dotata di sensibilità e, potenzialmente, di un'insaziabile brama di sangue umano. O qualcosa del genere.

Ma il fondatore e CEO di Dell, Michael Dell, dice di non preoccuparsi. In un recente chiacchierata virtuale davanti al caminetto con la società di gestione patrimoniale Bernstein (avvistato da Il registro), Dell said that he worried about the advent of AGI “a little bit, but not too much.” Why? Because “For as long as there’s been technology, humans have worried about bad things that could happen with it and we’ve told ourselves stories… about horrible things that could happen.”

That worrying, continues Dell, lets humanity “create counter actions” to prevent those apocalyptic scenarios from playing out before they happen. “You remember the ozone layer and all,” said Dell to Bernstein’s Tony Sacconaghi, “there are all sorts of things that were going to happen. They didn’t happen because humans took countermeasures.”

Dell (the man) went on to say that Dell’s (the company) AI business was booming. “Customer demand nearly doubled quarter-on-quarter for us and the AI optimized backlog roughly doubled to about $1.6 billion at the end of our third quarter,” beamed Dell (the man again), which—and I write this as someone for whom ‘literally GLaDOS’ ranks low on the list of fear priorities—does seem like the kind of thing a tech CEO would say in the prologue to a film about AI killing everyone.

Regardless, Dell reckons you shouldn’t be worried about the robot uprising any time soon, because humans are just that good at recognising and heading off problems before they occur. Except for that climate change thing and the nanoplastiche nel nostro sangue, I guess. Oh, and the fact that we didn’t start fixing the ozone layer until there was already a gaping hole in it (that won’t be fixed until 2040, or 2066 if you happen to live in the Antarctic). If you’ll permit me a bit of editorialising, which I guess I’ve already been doing, that feels like reaching the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.

For my money, you shouldn’t worry about AGI because it’s a spooky story well-off tech types dreamt up to hype up the capabilities of their presenti AI tech and because it’s a much neater and easier tale to cope with than the things which are really scary about AI: the potential for the decimation of entire creative industries and their replacement by homogenous robotic sludge. Plus, the possibility that the internet—for all its problems, a genuinely useful repository of human knowledge—becomes a great library of auto-completed and utterly incorrect nonsense of no use to anyone.

After all, I’ve already reached the point where I append most of my Google searches with “Reddit” to make sure I’m actually getting human input on whatever problem I’m facing. And that’s a much trickier problem with much more profit-threatening solutions than is the bogeyman of HAL 9000.