A few months ago, Ian Hogarth wrote the Financial Times Op-Ed headlined “We must slow down the race to God-like AI.”
A few weeks ago, he was appointed head of the UK Foundation Model Taskforce, and given 100 million pounds to dedicate to AI safety, to universal acclaim. Soon there will also be a UK Global AI Summit.
I feel like this is just investing in the tech hype of AI - AI/LLMs are really just probability calculators, if very impressive ones.
We’re not going to see ‘god-like’ AI run rampart and become sentient (at least not any time soon) - the real dangers of AI are the applications of it that are done my humans. The people who force it into spheres that it is ill-equipped to benefit, to undercut people who’s work can be ‘replaced’ or ‘enhanced’ by AI.
AI will inevitably be harmful. But not because it becomes uber-advanced; it will be harmful because techbros and grifters will use it badly, driven by money, hype or plain stupidity. Believing AI is more advanced than it is just feeds into the human machine that’s going to do real harm.
