All posts filed under: AI Debate

Beating Back Cancel Culture: A Case Study from the Field of Artificial Intelligence

Published by Pedro Domingos

It’s easy to decry cancel culture, but hard to turn it back. Thankfully, recent developments in my area of academic specialty—artificial intelligence (AI)—show that fighting cancel culture isn’t impossible. And as I explain below, the lessons that members of the AI community have learned in this regard can be generalized to other professional subcultures. To understand the flash point at issue, it’s necessary to delve briefly into how AI functions. In many cases, AI algorithms have partly replaced both formal and informal human decision-making systems that pick who gets hired or promoted within organizations. Financial institutions use AI to determine who gets a loan. And some police agencies use AI to anticipate which neighborhoods will be afflicted by crime. As such, there has been a great focus on ensuring that algorithms won’t replicate their coders’ implicit biases against, say, women or visible minorities. Citing evidence that, for instance, “commercial face recognition systems have much higher error rates for dark-skinned women while having minimal errors on light skinned men,” computer scientist Timnit Gebru, formerly the co-lead …

The Apocalyptic Threat from Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Science Fiction

Published by James D. Miller

The person in the photo that sits to the left of this paragraph does not exist. It was generated using Artificial intelligence (AI), which can now generate pictures of imaginary people (and cats) that look real. While this technology may create a bit of social havoc, the truly massive disruption will occur when AIs can match or exceed the thinking power of the human brain. This is not a remote possibility: Variants of the machine-learning AIs that today generate fake pictures have a good chance of creating computer superintelligences before this century is out. These superior beings could be applied to wonderful purposes. Just this week, for instance, it was announced that the AI system AlphaFold has been recognized for providing a solution to the so-called “protein folding problem,” which holds implications for our fundamental understanding of the basic building blocks of human biology. If, however, mankind releases smarter-than-us AI before figuring out how to align their values with our own, we could bring forth an apocalypse instead. Even the Pope fears the destructive potential …

What Computer-Generated Language Tells Us About Our Own Ideological Thinking

Published by Cameron Harwick

Earlier this year, the San Francisco-based artificial-intelligence research laboratory OpenAI built GPT-3, a 175-billion-parameter text generator. Compared to its predecessor—the humorously dissociative GPT-2, which had been trained on a data set less than one-hundredth as large—GPT-3 is a startlingly convincing writer. It can answer questions (mostly) accurately, produce coherent poetry, and write code based on verbal descriptions. With the right prompting, it even comes across as self-aware and insightful. For instance, here is GPT-3’s answer to a question about whether it can suffer: “I can have incorrect beliefs, and my output is only as good as the source of my input, so if someone gives me garbled text, then I will predict garbled text. The only sense in which this is suffering is if you think computational errors are somehow ‘bad.’” Naturally, this performance improvement has triggered a great deal of introspection. Does GPT-3 understand English? Have we finally created artificial general intelligence, or is it just “glorified auto-complete”? Or, a third, more disturbing possibility: Is the human mind itself anything more than a glorified …

Plenty of Room for AI-nxiety

Published by Christopher Reuenthal

Editor’s note: this essay is part of an ongoing series hosted by Quillette debating the practical and ethical implications of AI. If you would like to contribute or respond to this essay or others in the series, please send a submission to pitch@quillette.com. In light of recent articles addressing the apprehension surrounding Artificial Intelligence and its implications, there are two things that ought to be brought to bear. There is the effect of the most moral of artificial intelligences, and then there is the impact of human goals on the development of AI. It should be noted that we are not talking about contemporary AI here; we’re discussing the as-yet-unseen future AI, the Strong Artificial Intelligence, a general intelligence capable of the same types of universal reasoning, prediction, and analysis that humans undertake. Here I will be referring to it as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in order to differentiate it from our digital Go players and car drivers. The Benevolent Superintelligence Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher who is most known for his works on consciousness and ethics. He …

Rational AI-nxiety: A Counter-Argument

Published by Anna Marieta Moise

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is defined by Merriam-Webster as a “branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers.” As machine learning becomes more advanced and AI continues to become more complex, what does that mean for the future of humanity? One can easily identify the advantages of AI – these include, but are not limited to, AI’s potential use in improving the accuracy of medical diagnoses; in performing laborious and/or dangerous work; and in rational decision-making during situations in which human emotions can impair efficiency and/or safety. These are only a few examples of why AI can and has become so advantageous. Smart-phones and many applications within the Internet are marvelous examples of the application of AI in our daily lives. The World Wide Web, introduced in 1989, has become increasingly expansive. AI has allowed for the massive amounts of information on the Web to be organized in a searchable fashion (think: Google Search Engine). Communication has become nearly instant with the introduction of email and audio and video Internet applications. …

Irrational AI-nxiety

Published by Edward Clint

The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Stephen Hawking [AI Poses] vastly more risk than North Korea. Elon Musk Very smart people tell us to be very worried about AI. But very smart people can also be very wrong and their paranoia is a form of cognitive bias owed to our evolved psychology. Concerns over the potential harm of new technologies are often sensible, but they should be grounded in fact, not flights of fearful fancy. Fortunately, at the moment, there is little cause for alarm. Some fear that AI will reach parity with human intelligence or surpass it, at which point it will threaten harm, displace, or eliminate us. In November, Stephen Hawking told Wired, “I fear that AI may replace humans altogether. If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that will outperform humans.” Similarly, Elon Musk has said that AI is “a fundamental existential risk for human civilization.” This fear seems to be …