Imagine that as you are boarding an airplane, half the engineers who built it tell you there is a 10 percent chance the plane will crash, killing you and everyone else on it. Would you still board?
In 2022, over 700 top academics and researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies were asked in a survey about future A.I. risk.
Half of those surveyed stated that there was a 10 percent or greater chance of human #extinction (or similarly permanent and severe #disempowerment) from future A.I. systems.
Technology companies building today’s large language models are caught in a race to put all of humanity on that plane.
The specter of being trapped in a world of #illusions has haunted humankind much longer than the specter of A.I.
Soon we will finally come face to face with #Descartes’s #demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Buddhist Maya. A curtain of #illusions could descend over the whole of humanity, and we might never again be able to tear that curtain away — or even realize it is there.
Social media was the first contact between A.I. and humanity, and humanity lost. First contact has given us the bitter taste of things to come. In social media, primitive A.I. was used not to create content but to curate user-generated content. The A.I. behind our news feeds is still choosing which words, sounds and images reach our retinas and eardrums, based on selecting those that will get the most virality, the most reaction and the most engagement.
By Yuval #Harari, Tristan #Harris and Aza #Raskin
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/opinion/yuval-harari-ai-chatgpt.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare