Artificial Heredo by Delia Rodríguez. In the preceding months it has been she who has shed light on a technology destined to transform the world in a way that is probably only comparable to discoveries and inventions fundamental to Humanity, such as fire, electricity, the printing press or Internet. I accept this witness, conscious of the responsibility that she represents and with the hope of maintaining the trust of Delia's many and unconditional readers, among whom I am in the front row.
There is one constant in any debate about artificial intelligence, which has become relevant this week in several areas: fear. Mentions of fear as a negative factor appear in several of the Star Wars films, but in The Phantom Menace—a title many would apply to AI today—Master Yoda explains: "Fear is the path to the dark side. The "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hatred. Hatred leads to suffering." And suffering is the gateway to that dark side, to making selfish, unfair and harmful decisions for the weakest.
The clearest example that ignorance associated with fear can lead to transcendent decisions is that the president of the United States, Joe Biden, signed an executive order last week with security measures regarding artificial intelligence because he felt alarmed after seeing the latest installment of Mission Impossible. In this new blockbuster, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) faces an AI that in the opening sequences kidnaps and sinks a submarine and murders its entire crew. White House Chief of Staff Bruce Reed explained that “if before that movie — Biden — was already worried about what could go wrong with AI, he saw that there was much more to worry about.” It was not the scientists, it was a Hollywood script that justified a decision by the top leader of the most powerful country on Earth.
Grounded in knowledge are the fears of a group of brilliant scientists and intellectuals, including the godfather of artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton, and the historian Yuval Noah Harari, who published this week the document Managing the Risks of Artificial Intelligence. AI in an era of rapid advances, in which they describe the “large-scale social harms” and the malicious uses that can be put to this technology. They admit that with proper management and distribution, “advanced AI systems could help Humanity cure diseases, raise living standards, and protect our ecosystems. The opportunities that AI offers are immense.” But they also warn that “if we build highly advanced autonomous AI, we run the risk of creating systems that deliberately pursue harmful goals.”
Alberto Romero also refers to the issue in his blog The Algorithmic Bridge (in English). In his article Fear Wins, he reviews how fear has shaped some of the important decisions in history and how that same narrative has taken over the AI debate. Romero believes that governments want to “regulate technology in a way that defies common sense: instead of regulating applications and their deployment in the world, they intend to regulate knowledge and research.” “They did not know how to face the challenge of social networks in time,” he observes, “dangerously underregulating them, and now they are overcompensating with AI, motivated by the fear of making the same mistake.”
The fear of AI was very present at the summit organized last week by the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, in Bletchley Park with representatives from thirty countries and a hundred academics, scientists and businessmen, including Elon Musk. , who predicted with the same ease a fantastic world in which people will live with a high universal income as a possible scenario of machine rebellion like that of Terminator. Movies are always behind the story of fear.
