AI can make all of us family pets

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When I first interviewed Eric Schmidt, a dozen years ago when he was CEO of Google, I had a simple question about the technology that has become able to spy and monetize all of our movements. , opinions, relationships and tastes.

“Friend or enemy?” I asked. “We pretend we’re friends,” Schmidt replied coldly. Now that the former Google executive released a book on The Age of AI on Tuesday, written with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher, I wanted to ask him the same question about AI: “Friend or foe? “AI is imprecise, which means it can be unreliable as a partner,” he said when we met in his Manhattan office. “It’s dynamic in the sense that it changes all the time. He’s emergent and does things you don’t expect. And, above all, he is able to learn.

“It will be everywhere. What does an AI-enabled best friend look like, especially to a child? What does AI-based warfare look like? Does AI perceive aspects of reality that we do not perceive? Is it possible that the AI ​​is seeing things that humans cannot understand? “

I agree with Elon Musk that when we build an AI without a kill switch, we “summon the demon” and humans might end up, as Steve Wozniak said, as family pets. (If we’re lucky.) Speaking of the alarms triggered by Musk and Stephen Hawking, Schmidt said, “They think that by unleashing the AI ​​you will end up with a robotic overlord of 10, 100 or 1 in the end. 000 times smarter than humans. My answer is different. I think all the evidence is that these AI systems are going to think, not like humans, but they’re going to be very smart. We’re going to have to coexist.

Don’t you think Siri and Alexa are going to kill us one night? “No,” he said. “But they might become your child’s best friend.”

Super gods

Opinions on AI are very divergent. Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, rolls his eyes at the digerati of Silicon Valley obsessed with the “sci-fi fantasy” of AI. “It can sometimes turn into a giant false god,” he told me. “You have these nerdy guys who have a terrible reputation for the way they treat women, who become the creators of life. “You women with your little biological bellies can’t stand up to us. We make the high life here. We are the super gods of the future.

We’ve known for some time that Silicon Valley is dragging us adrift. Absurd claims that once could not have been successful – on everything from Democratic pedophilia rings to rigged elections to vaccine conspiracy theories – have now spread at lightning speed. Teenage girls can sink into depression thanks to the bright and deceptive world of Instagram, owned by the manipulative and greedy company formerly known as Facebook.

Schmidt said an Oxford student told him, of social media poison, “The union of boredom and anonymity is dangerous.” Especially at the intersection of addiction and envy. The question of whether we will lose control of AI can be ruled out. Technology is already manipulating us. Schmidt admits that the cloud lords’ lack of foresight as to where the technology is going was “silly.”

“I will say, 10 years ago, when I was working very hard on these social networks – maybe it is just naivety – but we never thought that governments would use them against citizens, like in 2016 , with the interference of the Russians.

“We didn’t think it would then bring together these special interest groups with these violently strong belief systems. No one has ever discussed it. I don’t want to make the same mistake again with some fundamental new technology.

“Destructive potential”

He said the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which he chaired this year, concluded that America is still “a little ahead of China” in the technology race but China “is overinvesting against it. we”. Authors write they are more worried that other countries will develop AI-facilitated weapons with “substantial destructive potential” that “may be able to adapt and learn well beyond their intended targets. “.

“The first thing we need to look at between the United States and China is to make sure that there is no ‘Dr Strangelove’ scenario, a launch on a warning, to make sure that there is has time for human decision making, ”he said. “Say you’re on a ship in the future and the little computer system says to the captain, ‘You have 24 seconds before you die because the hypersonic missile is coming towards you. You need to press that button now. ‘ You want to trust AI, but due to its imprecise nature, what if it makes a mistake? “

I asked if he thought Facebook could put its problems behind it by changing its name to Meta. “The problem is, what do you call Faang stocks now?” Maang? He said of the biggest tech stocks – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. “Google changed its name to Alphabet, and yet Google was still Google.”

And what is this creepy metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg is trying to lure us into? “Everyone who talks about metaverse talks about more satisfying worlds than the current one – you are richer, prettier, prettier, more powerful, faster. So in some years people will choose to spend more time with their glasses in the metaverse. And who sets the rules? The world will become more digital than physical. And that’s not necessarily the best thing for human society.

Schmidt said his book poses questions that are as yet unanswered. Unfortunately for us, we won’t know the answers until it’s too late.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times

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