I expected a strong response to Friday’s
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The second is what might be called the WarGames risk – that the United States, China, and other nation-states will give too much control to autonomous military systems, including drones and robots, in an effort to retain dominance, and that we will shortly find the systems are too efficient at killing and cannot be stopped. (These two seem very similar, but they are crucially different. In the Matrix scenario the machines kill us all without our direction and/or approval; in the WarGames scenario, we push the button.)
Sunday’s successful drone attack by Ukraine on airbases deep inside Russia shows just how capable drones have become, and militaries face increasing pressure to use AI in more and more of their systems both to reduce the risk to warfighters and for tactical and strategic advantage.
This risk is likely more real and urgent than the first, but it is also likely to be more manageable by treaty and top-down control. We and the Soviet Union had the ability to incinerate the world during the Cold War, but we managed to avoid launch. That said, big countries – the United States and China in particular – urgently need to start negotiating on this issue.
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Finally, the third risk is economic.
Your emails make clear that AI’s threat of disruption to the white-collar workforce is not just real, but already beginning to happen.
AI’s skeptics say those changes are overstated.
AI’s bulls point out that since the 1700s, humanity has had massive shifts in labor as first farming and then industrial production became far more efficient, and the net result has not been massive unemployment and starvation but societies that are wealthier and healthier than any human being could have imagined even 200 years ago.
And AI’s (economic) doomsayers will note that those changes occurred over centuries, not a few years, and besides it is not clear what will be left for white-collar workers to do if artificial intelligence automates knowledge work.
I don’t have the answers, but I’m glad I asked the question. For now, I’ll take UTRI (Unreported Truths Reader Intelligence) over AI any day.
Next year, much less 2035? I guess we’ll see.
More to come, of course.
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(What you thought)
