 |
"Next Year's News This Week" The EQ Advantage IN AN AGE of AI Psychopathy By Berit Anderson ________ Why Read: Every day, headlines drill into the existential threat of AI, but the real threat is how often models are wrong and how much top FAANG leaders driving these models build them in their own image - as manipulative, overconfident liars. - bba ________ Keep Calm and Pack a Towel This week has seen yet another replay of the "Will AI kill us all?" debate. Yawn. It's a tale as old as The Terminator but perfected by OpenAI: rational minds begin to doubt the economic legitimacy of frontier models, and Big Smart Men write open letters / provocative blog posts or make urgent podcast interviews reminding us all to PANIC. Media seizes on Big Smart Man words. Ignite panic! "But!" You might be saying. "All those researchers are quitting! They know what's happening internally! They know things that we don't! Shouldn't we panic? We probably should panic." We should not panic. At least not about AGI. Anthropic and OpenAI have both now officially delayed their IPOs and are calling for a slowdown. Which is convenient when you have no real business case to pull off an IPO. If Dario and Sam were panicked about their models becoming superhuman, they would not be slowing down. Artificial intelligence is not reaching artificial general intelligence status - a long-term potential with no clear definition. AGI would require leaps and bounds beyond language and computation to contextual nuance, creativity, innovation, and sensing across not just vision, but also hormonal and emotional perception. Plus a completely different ecosystem of underlying deterministic architectures that doesn't just make s**t up all the time. Putting ketchup and Cheese Whiz on a saltine does not mean it's time to open a pizza restaurant. On the other hand, we should be deeply concerned that error-ridden machines with strong psychopathic tendencies and high goal fixation are being introduced across critical infrastructure and built into the online business and finance tools that drive the modern economy.
|
