Is AI a threat to human government?

[Jason]

In other words, will it be like The Terminator where robots try to destroy humanity, or perhaps in a related fictional scenario, try to be the tyrannical boss of humans?

 

[Arantor]

1. AGI is years away. I don't care what OpenAI claims, the machine doesn't have a soul and doesn't actually understand anything. It's a fancy regurgitating parrot.

2. All the time money changes hands between business and government (i.e. corruption), AI isn't going to win, because the people who benefit from corruption are not going to just let that gravy train sail away.

 

[Darth Cognus]

Not in the foreseeable future but I leave it to humanity to eventually come up with something er can't control which really screws the pooch, be it AI-scare intelligence, something short but good enough, or some other world-devastating thing mixed together that's probably not sentient but does the job. I can see ourselves eventually engineering our own Matrix scenario. There's no shortage of what could be but I don't think there's enough evidence to say yet especially regarding AI and even tech in general.

I do think it'll get much worse, ie, ai empowered deepfakes that seriously screw with people and cannot be debunked with clear tells. It doesn't have to be sentient to become a broad societal threat.

 

[Arantor]

The way AI is going, it'll become an existential threat by producing enough electricity/GPU use to accelerate climate change disasters.

 

[Dismal_Bliss]

AI is just a glorified search engine for now. It's fun to play around with but I don't think the technology is mind-blowing or anything.

 

[Arantor]

AI is just a glorified search engine for now. It's fun to play around with but I don't think the technology is mind-blowing or anything.

It's not even that.

What it is, for text, for images - even video in some cases - is a regurgitation machine. Ask it for a thing, you'll get some pastiche of words/pixels mashed together that statistically correlate with what you asked for.

I recently asked ChatGPT for an updated version of Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start The Fire' to cover the last 50 years. What I got back:

(Verse 1)
Vietnam War and civil rights,
Moon landing, shining lights,
Hippies, love, and peace, my friend,
Woodstock, a message to send.

Watergate, Nixon's fall,
Energy crisis, oil's call,
Punk rock's rebellion, breaking free,
Disco fever, grooving spree.

(Chorus)
We didn't start the fire,
But it's been burning since the world's been turning.
We didn't start the fire,
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it.

(Verse 2)
Reaganomics, Thatcher's reign,
Berlin Wall, divided pain,
Chernobyl's disaster, a haunting sight,
Live Aid, stars shining bright.

Internet's birth, a digital age,
Globalization, connecting the stage,
Cold War ends, hope in the air,
Nelson Mandela, breaking apartheid's snare.

(Chorus)

(Bridge)
Technology advances, fast and wide,
Cell phones, social media collide,
Terrorist attacks, fear and dread,
9/11, tears were shed.

Financial crisis, markets crash,
Arab Spring, freedom's flash,
Climate change, a planet's plea,
Protests rise for equity.

(Chorus)

(Verse 3)
Brexit's division, Europe's shift,
Trump's election, a political rift,
#MeToo movement, voices arise,
Black Lives Matter, equality tries.

Pandemic strikes, the world in pain,
Lockdowns, masks, a global campaign,
Vaccines bring hope, a light in the dark,
Frontline heroes, leaving their mark.

(Chorus)

(Outro)
The last 50 years, a tale of change,
A rollercoaster ride, wide in range,
Through the rhythm of time, we rise and fall,
But together we stand, for we've seen it all.

Is it mind-blowing? Not really. But is it changing things? Sure. There is an entire cottage industry now of providing tweaked AI models for specific purposes, not to mention people *actively* being displaced from jobs because people are trying to replace human creativity with AI 'creativity'.

 

[Empire]

Risk is possible but the risk may be a positive. It might be positive due to forced adoption of local networks or embedded devices cut off from the internet. The maintenance of this will create new jobs. Most of sensitive tech in infrastructure and military is already local or offline.