Artificial Intelligence poses a profound risk to society. That's the cause of the open letter this week with luminaries like Musk and Woz signing The Future Of Life letter.
The request is to pause, for a least 6 months, the training of AI systems that are more powerful than GPT-4.
The open letter also lists those who have signed it. Observation - a large representation from University alumni. Could it be more obvious how much the walnut panelled hallways of great tertiary institutions are under threat from an extinction level event? GPT-4 can even play the part of educator;
It will even grade your performance.
When your brand and livelihood is under threat, you sign the open letter, which results in no action. Open AI haven't signed and likely have no intention of signing. Why not? They're invested like the rest of us in protecting the industry of higher education for humanity. Right? Or this is all just a foot note as GPT-4 has already eaten Education. Maybe it's the entree before the main course of mass job destruction, and the prospect that 1 in 5 jobs in the world will be affected. 300 million workers, with no job.
According to Google (remember them?) there are 66 million results for the phrase 'Pause AI Open Letter' but only 1,860 people have signed the letter (as of March 31st 2023), which would suggest there doesn't seem to be an outpouring of support for a moratorium on AI advancement. Could it be that for the majority of us, we simply want to accelerate the automation of things so we can save ourselves from the drudgery of work? So we can then use the spare time that AI gifts us to invest in our passion project, or start a side hustle? To perhaps make a film. Nope. AI will do that. To illustrate and paint, with the prospect of making an income. Nope. AI will do that. To make an income from doing social media for your own clients. Nope. AI will do that. To write a novel with the prospect of being published. AI will be used to do that, but will also be used to protect that. Bottomline, the investment to get AI up to automation positive is the cost of disrupting the economies of every country.
This isn't the first open letter on AI. Back in the good ol' days of 2015, when Facebook was innocent and Tesla was $40 before the first stock split. Back in 2015, when Open AI was just a twinkle of code inside a brand new Azure cloud - it was founded in 2015. It was back in 2015 when Hawking and Musk first signed an open letter on artificial intelligence, calling for research to be undertaken on the societal impacts of AI. We've seen this before, but this time there's something at risk. The risk that Open AI will become the next Google, with Microsoft as its well heeled sugar daddy. A missed opportunity to catch up and compete. Perhaps the moratorium on AI is a misdirection on diffusing the runaway effect of Open AI's influence on the future of all technology.
Open AI is already orchestrating an unknown macroeconomic future. And its partner in the new dawn of zero work is Microsoft, whose brazen injection of GPT into their marquee products ensures every worker is shoehorned into using AI to automate their work. The same products used to operate the Universities of the world. Do humans use GPT’s to teach others? Who owns the applied knowledge generated by AI?
The great pause may be the moment before we lose more than we can imagine to AI.