A “pause” on the development of AI? It’s not going to happen
More than 1,000 technology experts, researchers and investors have signed an open letter expressly asking for a six-month halt to the creation of “giant AI systems” citing “profound risks to society.”
But anybody who works in technology will already know that this request cannot be met. It’s a fantasy to imagine that a government or some kind of authority can impose a “ban experiments on AI”. Technology cannot be stopped: whoever discovered fire didn’t ask anyone’s permission, and once its potential was clear, it was never going to be brought under control. When electricity was discovered, there would have been no point in banning it: there would always have been someone, somewhere, would have harnessed its power in order to make money.
Machine learning is just the latest in a long line of technologies that has many people worried: starting with the use of an inappropriate term, artificial intelligence, some believe that we are dealing with a technology that we cannot control. This position is absurd, as is believing that machine learning has the potential for “general intelligence”. This kind of daydreaming even affects people working directly in the field, such as the recent case of Blake Lemoine and his unhealthy obsession with the supposed self-awareness of the algorithm he was working on.
