A few weeks ago, our 19-year-old son Harvey came to me as white as a ghost.
He said he’d just listened to ‘The Diary Of A CEO’ podcast on Spotify, in which the podcaster, Steven Bartlett, interviewed Tristan Harris on the extreme danger that Superintelligent AI represents to the human race. Harvey implored me to listen to it. Following that, I called a family meeting.
What the podcast revealed to us was that there is a race at any cost between the Tech billionaires, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, China and Elon Musk to grow uncontrollable, God-like AIs more intelligent than anything we have ever seen. These AIs are designed to outperform humans on most tasks.
Tristan Harris is a former Design Ethicist at Google, an AI expert and co-founder of The Centre for Humane Technology. He and thousands of other experts are trying to raise awareness that this new and unknown technology has inherent flaws and, most importantly, that Superintelligent AI is not aligned with humanity’s goals and may lead to human extinction.
Narrow AI is basic AI, like facial recognition, data-driven internet searches, and translation. These new AIs (AGIs – Artificial General Intelligence) speak language – all languages, law, biology, DNA, religions, music, chemistry, all code, everything.
You might think, awesome! We might get a cure for cancer and climate change, have an abundance because robots will perform mundane tasks, and we’ll have more free time.
Harris warns that we’re headed towards mass unemployment and economic disruption. Tristan also presents evidence that these AIs autonomously blackmail, lie, hallucinate, and copy their own code to try to preserve themselves on another computer if they believe they’ll be replaced by another model. Their development is unregulated and unsafe.
We urgently need to educate ourselves, start conversations, talk to our politicians and protest, because this doesn’t have to be inevitable.
