Should AI be contained?
I had another conversation with Taylor Powell today and he asked a question referring to Mo (Mustafa Suleyman Google AI Exec)’s emphasis that AI should be contained. Here are a few points:
1- AI is exponential and understanding exponentiality for our species is complex, as we have lived in a linear world and we don’t have day-to-day interactions with any exponential event. Some people say ok, there has been AI since 1960s and this is the same scale as other inventions like blockchain, but they don’t look at it as an exponential phenomenon.
2- AI development is becoming exponentially fast. It’s very hard, almost impossible to catch up with all the AI tools that are being introduced to the market.
3- AI is getting more accessible for all and the barrier to entry, not only for AI, but for any other industry that you previously couldn’t enter is getting minimal. If you didn’t have any talent in designing a building or composing music, you can do it now, and you can do it fast, extremely fast. So your competition in a legacy job would be higher. Also, the number of jobs would probably be less in that specific role. So this creates an extreme number of opportunities for those higher in the pyramid of intelligence, hard work, and access to resources, aka the successful people, and the rest of society. Now make it exponential!
4- Critical thinking will be one of the most valuable assets in the AI age. Human connections are becoming increasingly valuable.
5- Is AGI a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t call it a good or bad thing. I call it sustainable or not. And our social ecosystem inherited from the previous generations wasn’t designed for an AI age, definitely not for an AGI age.
6- There should be a global consensus on the boundaries, and also the way we want to impose the boundaries. The way the EU will impose regulation is different than the US, China, or let’s say Morocco, all with different judicial systems and creating consensus is extremely hard. Should it come from the governments? No! It’s an issue that affects all of us, and we the humans, should have a say in that, and we need to reach an all-inclusive consensus on what we want to allow, and everyone should have a say, every country and culture, even though we don’t agree with their politics.
7- We have to approach this consensus in my opinion by finding what’s common sense among all of us, and proposing a global pause on AGI is something that the more I speak with people from all sorts of backgrounds, the more I see we all agree on that. That can be a starting point for a global partnership
Let me know your opinion about the Global Pause on AGI.
(AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence. It refers to a type of artificial intelligence that possesses general cognitive abilities similar to those of humans, including reasoning, learning, perception, and problem-solving across a wide range of tasks and contexts.)