Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Sam Altman spills the beans

In the online journal BBC Tech Decoded ("The Intelligence Age," 9/27/24) Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and owner of ChatGPT, is mostly a cheerleader for AI ("In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents"), but he's upfront on some delicate issues, like replacement of traditional human jobs with AI jobs.

As a retired teacher, I was particularly struck by this: "Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need," explicitly predicting the automation of teaching and the raising of children by machines. The essay predicts a similar replacement of doctors: "We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more."

Altman claims this future will bring a "shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today." Although that may be true for AI researchers and investors, not everyone will be a beneficiary. For instance, it's hard to see what benefit will accrue to teachers or their students, who will have software instead of humans to nurture them, or doctors, whose patients will be assessed using averages, not the individual human.

Altman describes the future he sees: "Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with computing energy and human will." He apparently thinks the age we're about to enter should be called the "Intelligence Age." Why he thinks this is a mystery, unless he's only talking about machine intelligence. The typical human, with each forward step of AI, will get progressively stupider. As an obvious example, if cars become self-driving (a near certainty) then people will forget how to drive. The same holds for teaching and being a physician, and for virtually any other current human job you can think of. Humanity will become like the children of AI, cared for and protected by an intelligence it created but can no longer understand.

There is also the increasingly likely advent of widespread war, which will probably work to the advantage of AI, destroying traditional human systems that will then be replaced with efficient AI systems. It will be difficult for people to oppose this development, since survival will be at stake, and an AI mediated post-human civilization is likely to emerge.

Since this AI run civilization seems inevitable, one might ask why bother to critique it.  In my case the answer is that during the transition I prefer not to be assaulted by mindless advertising and propaganda, such as Altman's, designed to distract our attention from a full understanding of what is happening.  Such distraction is on display as well in the current campaign for U.S. President, in which there is no discussion of AI (or the biotechnology that promises to change our physical selves).  While we face an accelerated evolution, compressing millions of years of change into a few decades, the strategy is to lull us to sleep or distract us with chaos so we miss the transition.

I would rather talk openly about it, as that will be the only way that people outside the industry and politics will have any influence.
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