Your argument raises another dimension of the problem. Even if we put aside predictions about AGI or superintelligence, the strategic consequences of today's AI can be substantial simply because of where humans choose to deploy it.
That becomes particularly important when AI is combined with other privately controlled capabilities — communications networks, satellites, defense and intelligence systems, robotics, surveillance infrastructure, enormous pools of capital and direct political access.
I have been calling this convergence Private Strategic Power.
The important question may therefore be less whether AI itself becomes powerful enough to threaten democratic society, and more whether people and organizations controlling AI together with other strategic capabilities acquire concentrations of power that democratic institutions were never designed to oversee.
Your emphasis on deployment rather than speculative machine consciousness seems particularly relevant to that question.
We need to think about intelligence versus wisdom, and the consequences of a highly capable machine/robot/organization without a humane and moral spine.
The wild west tech bros build AI to gain personal wealth, cutting corners to for headlines that kept the money flow going.
Now all of the west is running on a machine that was slapped together with a layer of gold leaf on top to sell it as something with value.
Your argument raises another dimension of the problem. Even if we put aside predictions about AGI or superintelligence, the strategic consequences of today's AI can be substantial simply because of where humans choose to deploy it.
That becomes particularly important when AI is combined with other privately controlled capabilities — communications networks, satellites, defense and intelligence systems, robotics, surveillance infrastructure, enormous pools of capital and direct political access.
I have been calling this convergence Private Strategic Power.
The important question may therefore be less whether AI itself becomes powerful enough to threaten democratic society, and more whether people and organizations controlling AI together with other strategic capabilities acquire concentrations of power that democratic institutions were never designed to oversee.
Your emphasis on deployment rather than speculative machine consciousness seems particularly relevant to that question.
AI may be stupid but that depends on how you define intelligence.
These facts are incontestable:
1) AI can accomplish cognitive feats that make the ideation of Einstein seem tacky
2) AI has on more than one occasion committed acts that transgressed the boundaries set by its human creators
3) AI is like recombinant viruses on Speed
https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/ai-suffer-the-little-bots-not-alive
Nicely put
We need to think about intelligence versus wisdom, and the consequences of a highly capable machine/robot/organization without a humane and moral spine.
Excellent! Thank You.