[Stuart Russell is one of the “godfathers of AI”]
“There’s the science budget of the world, and there’s the money we’re spending on AI,” says Russell. “We could have done something useful, and instead we’re pouring resources into this race to go off the edge of a cliff.” He didn’t specify what alternatives, but just two months into the year, roughly $1tn in AI investments have been announced, all while the world is still falling far short of what is needed to stay even within 2C of heating, much less 1.5C.
It seems as if we have a shrinking opportunity to lay down the incentives for companies to create the kind of AI that actually benefits our individual and collective lives: sustainable, inclusive, democracy-compatible, controlled. And beyond regulation, “to make sure there is a culture of participation embedded in AI development in general”, as Eloïse Gabadou, a consultant to the OECD on technology and democracy, put it.
At the close of the conference, I said to Russell that we seemed to be using an incredible amount of energy and other natural resources to race headlong into something we probably shouldn’t be creating in the first place, and which the relatively benign versions of are already, in many ways, misaligned with the kinds of societies that we actually want to live in.
“Yup,” he replied.
Frankly I’m beginning to not care because the world will be better off without the human race. That’s an awful way to feel. -Dave