However, he is optimistic that we can avoid the danger scenarios while our stakes are low.
“It’s alive! It’s alive!! It’s alive!!!
Remember this line from the classic in the world of literature, a masterpiece of horror, and a predecessor of science fiction, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
The novel was written over 200 years ago wherein Victor Frankenstein creates a living being with the hope of creating a superior version of humanity. The Gothic story also defines our fears as Victor’s ‘heart palpitates in the sickness of fear’ on his creation.
Back in the real world, a couple of days back, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that created the widely popular ChatGPT, in an interview with ABC News said that he is a ‘little scared’ of artificial intelligence (AI) potential.
“People should be happy that we are a little scared of this. We can make mistakes while our stakes are low. We need to earn and feed the learnings into the system we create. This is how we can avoid dangererous scenarios,” Altman said.
He added that these models could be used for large scale dis-information, and as they get better at writing codes, they could be used to launch offensive cyber-attacks.
Altman also mentioned that AI will eliminate a lot of current jobs.
In February, ResumeBuilder.com surveyed 1,000 U.S. business leaders to see how many companies currently use or plan to use ChatGPT. The report found that 1 in 2 companies have replaced workers with ChatGPT since November last year. As pert the survey, 63% of business leaders stated that ChatGPT will ‘definitely’ (32%) or ‘probably’ (31%) lead to workers being laid off within five years.
In another report by the World Economic Forum’s “The Future of Jobs Report 2020,” AI was expected to replace 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025.
“We can make much better ones (jobs),” said the OpenAI CEO, who added that while AI technology will have some ‘real’ dangers, it will be the ‘greatest’ technology that humanity has ever developed.
Unlike Victor, who gave up on Frankenstein, who was sensitive, emotional, and who tried to fit in to society—Altman stressed that AI will be a tool in ’human control’, and that society will need to get involved with the technology to protect against any adverse consequences for humanity.
“Society has a limited amount of time to figure out how to react to that (AI), how to regulate and how to handle it,” Altman stated.
