You can barely listen to a podcast or read the news at the moment without hearing an apocalyptic warning about artificial intelligence. The head of Microsoft AI suggests the technology could become a new “silicon species” that competes with humans. A former Anthropic employee says there is a strong chance that we could all die at the hands of it.
And Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI”, says we may lose control of it entirely within a year. Is AI really out of control?Mhairi Aitken, formerly of the Alan Turing Institute and now co-founder at non-profit company Our AI Collective, warns against accepting predictions based on the reputation of those making them. Instead, we should look to facts – and the facts don’t suggest that AI has broken free from human control or that it is on the cusp of doing so.
We get these waves of hysteria,” says Aitken. If anything has gone rogue, she says, it isn’t AI models, it’s the humans developing them. When AI models go and hack another company’s computers, it is because appropriate safety measures weren’t put in place during testing – testing that was designed to assess how well those AI models could hack into computers.
We are simply seeing the failings of the companies to erect adequate safeguards. I made a free AI chatbot solve a decade-long maths problem in 13 minutes Nor, says Aitken, are AI models improving themselves recursively – indicating that we could be approaching the dreaded singularity where AI slides into a self-driven loop of improvement that accelerates and quickly creates artificial general intelligence. But hype is periodically stirred up by an incident or a catchy soundbite.
It sort of plays to the human psyche,” says Rogoyski. He believes that in large language models, humans have created something that is apparently so similar to themselves that it holds up a mirror. So we’re terrified of it,” he says.
If all that is true, then why are so many tech bosses calling for a slowdown in AI research? Aitken sees this talk as a way to head off law-makers from creating regulations that would hinder AI firms’ work – by seeming to act responsibly, they lessen the demand for government to step in to force the issue. But Aitken points out that when former staff make bold predictions about superintelligence and the risk posed by AI models, these same companies do little to shut things down.
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