Africa-Press – Lesotho. Two weeks ago, the Future of Life Institute (FLI) sponsored the publication of an open letter signed by known personalities in the tech world stating: “we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
” The FLI is said to be sponsored by the Musk Foundation, so it was no surprise to see Elon Musk’s name as a signer of the letter.
Will ChatGPT and AI help or harm us? Pic – Columbia News
The premise of this exercise was outlined in a series of questions the letter posed: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?
Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?
In view of the call for a six-month pause, a moratorium if you will, one has to wonder if the letter was generated by humans or perhaps by an intelligence beyond human comprehension.
It is not clear what could be achieved in six months. It is probably true beyond dispute that nothing useful was achieved in human history by pausing progress for any length of time.
The letter stated that decisions such as the questions posed encompass, should not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. One might say that they should not be delegated to elected leaders of any sort either.
Yet, calls for regulation and guideposts are essentially attempts to delegate to some presumed higher level of wisdom, the management of the future development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
They did not pause to explain how one manages development of the unpredictable. The letter went on to state: “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive, and their risks will be manageable.
” Of course, as might be expected, the letter said nothing about how such confidence might be generated.
Nothing is foolproof
Much of the recent focus on AI has been sparked by the advent of ChatGPT, the Large Language Module that is seemingly capable of writing intelligent segments of prose.
And suddenly, the world has become obsessed with the potential for plagiarism especially by students who might use the module to write term papers, theses, and even college admissions essays.
At the same time people in the political sphere have become obsessed with the potential for the spread of misinformation by machine-generated articles.
For More News And Analysis About Lesotho Follow Africa-Press
