AI Skeptics, Take Heart: There Are Millions with You

 

AI Experts Signed Extinction Warning Statement Three Years Ago

 On May 30, it will be three years since this BBC article first appeared: 

Artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity, experts - including the heads of OpenAI and Google Deepmind - have warned.

Dozens have supported a statement published on the webpage of the Centre for AI Safety.

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war" it reads.

But others say the fears are overblown.

Sam Altman, chief executive of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have all supported the statement.

The Centre for AI Safety website suggests a number of possible disaster scenarios:

• AIs could be weaponised - for example, drug-discovery tools could be used to build chemical weapons
• AI-generated misinformation could destabilise society and "undermine collective decision-making"
• The power of AI could become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, enabling "regimes to enforce narrow values through pervasive surveillance and oppressive censorship"
• Enfeeblement, where humans become dependent on AI "similar to the scenario portrayed in the film Wall-E”

Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who issued an earlier warning about risks from super-intelligent AI, has also supported the Centre for AI Safety's call.

Yoshua Bengio, professor of computer science at the university of Montreal, also signed.

Dr Hinton, Prof Bengio and NYU Professor Yann LeCun are often described as the "godfathers of AI" for their groundbreaking work in the field - for which they jointly won the 2018 Turing Award, which recognises outstanding contributions in computer science.

 Read the rest here.

AI REGULATION MATTERS MORE THAN SCHOOLS OR ANYTHING ELSE (AND YES I’M SCREAMING)

Seeing this film has changed the focus of all my activism moving forward.  It’s not the perfect rendering of the AI problem, but it’s perfect enough to light the hair on fire of anyone in our world who cares about human life on Earth. 

Please see it as the first step to becoming educated about the imminent existential threat we face—more imminent and more existential than global warming, fascism, or even nuclear war.  

Beware of AI Solutions in Search of Educational Problems

This review of another of Bellwether's AI propaganda pieces nails it. Founded by Andy Rotherham, Bellwether is a neoliberal non-profit sludge tank focused on generating reports for the purpose of bending educational institutions to the American corporate will. Rotherham got his start as an education advisor of then-President and neoliberal darling, Bill Clinton. Rotherham successfully leveraged his hanger-on status in the DLC to become a prominent propagandist for expanding the value of the education industry to enriching corporate America's bottom line. As such, he ably represents a long line of parasitic pandhandlers who make a living selling corporate solutions that are desperate for educational problems.

When Artificial Intelligence Equals Real Stupidity

Algorithms grading student essays?  What could go wrong?

“The algorithms are prone to a couple of flaws. One is that they can be fooled by any kind of nonsense gibberish sophisticated words. It looks good from afar but it doesn’t actually mean anything. And the other problem is that some of the algorithms have been proven by the testing vendors themselves to be biased against people from certain language backgrounds.”