The article discusses the real-world risks of AI, focusing on how algorithmic decision-making by corporations and governments is leading to biases, human redundancy, and societal harms like wrongful denials and mental health costs.
As soon as LLMs like ChatGPT became available to the public (which I remember as around November 2022 ), regular humans like me have been gradually increasing their use of this new toy - while increasing use by businesses, corporations and governments to create sophisticated algorithms was happening in parallel. As AI models were scraping the Internet and plagiarizing every chronicled human thought and image, we assisted them by providing prompts as well as helpful information about ourselves. It is a natural human urge to explore. But no one bothered to explain the risks. Now our powers that be - private and public insitutions - deploy algorithms as cost-cutting measures in equations that increasingly make the human redundant. These are crucial decisions that determine who keeps the job and who doesn't, or who gets to stay in the country and who doesn't. Portents of doom through some RSI-driven apocalypse non-withdstanding, these secret algorithms and how they are being misused by our....authorities (handlers? increasingly powerful overlords?) represent the real AI crisis, as I understand it. Now these algorithmic decisions, though lightning fast and efficient at aligning with agendas of cost-saving (greed?) are removing the human from the loop. I naively believed humans were supposed to oversee AI and learn/benefit from it. That would be true if humans were seen as inherently valuable and having rights, rather than just as economically viable or not. Humans in North America are not the "what for" of politics and economic progress. Corporations are, as well as the governments that support them. This approach will have (already has) caused public mental health costs. Discriminative AI has biases and recently an applicant's permanent residence application was erroneously denied by Canada's IRCC because an algorithm "hallucinated" or guessed wrongly about the applicant's real job duties. A man killed himself after being given (incorrect) information about being ineligible for assistance. Even if these glitches were fixed, outsourcing the decision-making to proprietary algorithms we cannot access just sounds totalitarian. Clearly a lot of what is really going is being held back from us. Am I getting any of this right so far?
The article examines why some critics downplay AI risks, particularly existential threats, attributing it to limited awareness of current AI capabilities or dismissals as hype.
The article critiques AI risk narratives from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, suggesting they may use safety concerns to stifle competition and support a colonialist agenda.
The article discusses concerns about AI safety and alignment as AI becomes more intelligent and integrated into society, referencing Anthropic's call for a pause to address potential catastrophic risks.
The article critiques AI companies for claiming existential risks while racing to build AI, arguing for responsible development without panic or fear-based PR.
The article argues that the primary AI risk may not be superintelligence but rather systems that optimize flawed, incomplete representations of reality, leading to institutional drift, automated misclassification, and invisible governance failures.