We enter under Trump 2.0 in what promises to be history’s most significant decade ever in terms of innovation, compounded by the intensifying AI arms race between the US and China.
This essentially means that AI development in the West will not be centrally regulated and strong guardrails will not be put in place at the handful of private companies, each as powerful as a nation state, that call the shots, so great are the prospective spoils at stake and the national security and hegemonic factors in play.
By the end of Trump 2.0, AI might well have yielded a cure for cancer, magical new materials and breakthroughs in climate change.
It could also have yielded the democratisation of lethal weapons, disruption on the jobs front before anyone’s started to think about let alone plan for a post-labour economy, and an triggered an avalanche of disinformation, with AI armed ‘bad actors’ having field days.
Even more concerning is that the development and deployment of progressively autonomous, ‘sentient’ agentic AI could well yield AI ‘with a mind of its own’ that is not humanity aligned.
A big issue at the pivotal AI company OpenAI that caused a storm with the first ChatGPT just over two years ago and which was founded to develop human aligned superintelligent AI, but which has seen a recent exodous of major talent, who have not seen it abiding by its founding priority
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By GlobalDataMeanwhile, the hard consensus among top AI researchers is that AI that is more intelligent than us humans is likely by 2035.
This is the very real concern of AI Godfather and former head of Google Brain, Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and former Google CEO, now Washington insider, Eric Scmidt, among others, at the AI coal face.
Hinton, who invented the neural net technology that enables generative AI, says we’re close to AI systems able to set their own sub-goals while Schmidt fears the imminent arrival of teams and groups of autonomous agent AIs that communicate with each other in their own human indecipherable language.
On the assumption that the world will not centrally regulate and control AI development and deployment but basically let it rip until there is catastrophe, what to do?
Since no nation state wants to be controlled by AI the best hope lies in finding ways, in no doubt uncoordinated albeit partly open source ways, of ensuring that at the firmware level and above tomorrow’s AI systems are blocked from ”not being nice to and aligned with human beings.”
