De oprichter van Dell zegt kalm te zijn over Sentient AI in SHODAN-stijl, omdat 'je je de ozonlaag en zo herinnert' en dat hebben we opgelost

Heruitgegeven door Plato

volgers: 0

We leven in een tijdperk van AI-hype en iedereen heeft er een mening over. Maar terwijl de meesten van ons zich een beetje zorgen maken over wat de opkomst van ultravoorspellende tekst betekent voor de menselijke creativiteit en kritiek, maken een paar Silicon Valley-types zich zorgen over kunstmatige algemene intelligentie, oftewel AGI, wat in feite een serieus klinkende term is. voor zelflerende AI met gevoel en mogelijk een onbedwingbare lust voor menselijk bloed. Of iets dergelijks.

Maar Dell-oprichter en CEO Michael Dell zegt zich geen zorgen te maken. In een recente virtuele chat bij het haardvuur met vermogensbeheerder Bernstein (gespot door Het register), 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 nanoplastics in ons bloed, 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 daadwerkelijk 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.