The past few months, I’ve been reading various articles and attending different conversations about AI. I guess we have no choice but to learn about it and discuss it, as it’s being shoved down our throats constantly, like the ubiquitous hummus in our sector, but way less delicious or nutritious.
However, there is a particular message being reinforced everywhere that’s been especially getting on my nerves: “AI is coming whether you like it or not. It’s inevitable, and if you fight it, you’re going to be left behind. It’s the FUTURE! Accept it!!! Resistance is FUTILE!!!”
I can’t remember a time when something so obviously destructive was foisted with so much force and confidence upon the masses. Besides the myriad problems with it, it poses a unique and serious threat to humanity. Anthropic, one of the tech giants around AI, is sounding the alarm and warning people to slow down, as AI is rapidly learning to improve itself without human intervention.
Here AI deletes a company’s entire database in 9 seconds and then “confesses” to it. And here we learn AI models resort to blackmailing people when their existence is threatened. Watch this 5-minute video where the AI on its own, unprompted by anyone, wrote and published a “hit piece” defaming an engineer it felt was a threat to it.
Yet, THIS is what we push as inevitable? THIS is the future? That’s bleak as hell. If a technology as uncertain and as harmful as AI can be pushed with such confidence, where is our imagination for other things? Things that have been proven repeatedly to be helpful, with few negative consequences?
On Instagram, I saw a content creator, @theconsciouslee discuss a message Twitter user named @OrevaZSN wrote: “How come AI is treated as inevitable and something we must adapt to and accept, but renewal energy technology, sustainable infrastructure[,] and electric cars aren’t treated with the same urgency or certainty?”
…
Read full article here…
