Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the Next Big Things, and there's no denying it any longer. As with any ground-breaking technology, from fire to the internet, there are upsides and downsides, opportunities and risks, good points and bad. T'was ever thus, and it's as true of AI as it is with other relatively new technologies, like biotech and genetic engineering.
And, regular as clockwork, any new technology will also bring the opponents, rational and irrational, out of the woodwork, to try to shove that genie back in the bottle. Here's the thing: Attempts like this never work, and have never worked since Orgo yelled at his brother Groo over Groo's hearth, "Fire bad! Fire bad!"
Now, though, some of the more strident anti-AI activists are complaining that their opposition to AI may have to take a darker turn, and it's the disappearance of one of their own that is causing them to become more strident about it.
In the months after Sam Kirchner disappeared in November, Matthew Hall searched for him on city streets where homeless live and in wooded hills where campers hide away.
Hall worried for the safety of Kirchner, an intense 27-year-old activist who had been leading sit-ins at OpenAI to protest the dangers of artificial intelligence. He feared for OpenAI’s employees, too.
The last time Hall saw him was at the spartan Oakland cottage that served as headquarters for their hard-line group, Stop AI. Kirchner, an electrical engineering technician by training, was angry, insistent that more had to be done.
“I’m done with this,” he said, according to Hall. “The ship may have sailed on nonviolence.”
Note that last line: "The ship may have sailed on nonviolence." Now, you can color me wildly skeptical of that having anything to do with Sam Kirchner's disappearance; our government isn't in the habit of "disappearing" people, and the big tech corporate giants who are moving the AI revolution would find it easier and less risky to simply drown Kirchner with lawsuits, should he ever become that troublesome. While yes, the disappearance of any American is disturbing, there's almost certainly a less hair-raising explanation.
But here's the thing: The anti-AI side is showing a greater inclination towards, as Kirchner puts it, letting that ship sail on nonviolence.
They cling to dire predictions, like Geoffrey Hinton’s. The Nobel laureate, dubbed the “godfather of AI” for his work on artificial neural networks, warns of a 10% to 20% chance AI will wipe out humans.
At its most extreme and troubling end, some believe they must stop an AI apocalypse by any means necessary.
In April, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots at the home of an Indianapolis councilman, leaving a note: “no data centers.”
That same month, authorities arrested a 20-year-old Texas college student for an attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home in San Francisco, and charged him with attempted murder and arson. The student was carrying an anti-AI document with a section on “our impending extinction,” according to a federal criminal complaint. He has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have said his actions appear to have been driven by an “acute mental-health crisis, not a desire to harm.”
So, this is pretty much the definition of irrational; regardless of risks involved, there's no way this genie is going back in the bottle. The risk will be dealt with as humanity has generally done so with anything new: By fighting fire with fire. AI attacks will necessarily have to be fought with an AI response; human reaction times are far too slow. And Luddism is never the answer, especially when the proponents of that Luddism are willing to resort to violence - and, once again, it's almost entirely the political left that is so quick to start talking about violence.
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There are always risks with any new technology. There always have been. Any new technology changes things, as the French learned at Agincourt, as the United States Navy learned at Pearl Harbor in 1941, and as Imperial Japan learned in 1945. But the march of technological progress has been moving forward, inexorably, for millennia now, and this is no different. In fact, AI is almost certainly years away from having any such capability; consider this from Eric Worrell at one of my favorite energy-technology sites, Watts Up With That:
As for those extinction fears, future AI systems will pose a risk, much the same as bioscience poses a risk in today’s world. An out of control AI has the potential to do immense damage, just as an out of control bioscience laboratory could inflict a new pandemic on the world. But most bioscience laboratories are sensible with the kinds of experiments they do, only idiots perform gain of function experiments with dangerous pathogens, or say try to produce a version of the plague which is immune to modern antibiotics, or plant botulism toxin genes in stomach bacteria, or experiment with that horrible immune system suppressing hack the CSIRO discovered in the early 2000s. And when someone does do the unthinkable, that same bioscience which makes such idiocy possible provides effective treatments for the problem their irresponsible colleagues unleashed.
Artificial intelligence will be no different – if anyone does something stupid with AI, other people armed with AI tools will clean up the mess.
I'm more inclined to agree with the AI portion of that statement than the bioscience portion.
What's interesting is the worry that AI will result in the end of humankind. It's possible, presumably, but if it's a possible extinction event one is looking for, people should be much, much more worried about another inevitable technology, one centered around biology: Genetic engineering, which could be used to create pathogens that could very well eliminate most, if not all, of humanity.
As far as AI goes, though, the nutcases who are threatening vandalism, arson, and violence in opposition to AI are likely to do far more damage and cause far more trouble than the AI itself. And, as noted, that genie isn't going back in the bottle. Like fire, the wheel, and nuclear power, AI is here to stay.
