Notes from an Environmentalist.
Is AI Serving Humanity or is humanity Serving AI?
Is AI Serving Humanity, or
Is Humanity Serving AI?
On October 16th Google announced it was signing a deal with Kairos Power to build seven nuclear reactors to power its AI technologies.
This came only a month after Microsoft and Amazon had also pledged to fire up old and new nuclear plants to meet AI’s insatiable appetite, an energy appetite that will more than double by 2030, and exceed the power requirements of the entire nation of Argentina.
In May prominent figures like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Eric Schmidt signed an open letter stating that industry should develop safeguards to mitigate the risk of AI causing the extinction of the human race through global pandemics, biological weapons or nuclear war.
In the words of Warren Buffet, “We let the genie out of the bottle with nuclear weapons. Now, AI is part way out of the bottle.” He had been rattled that AI had replicated his image and voice, “so well it could have even fooled my own family.”
After a recent TED talk in Boston a senior Google executive announced that the company’s goal was to “eliminate human emotions. “They are getting in the way of progress and are no longer needed in our civilization.”
The Grandfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton who famously resigned from Google over their AI policies devoted his entire Nobel prize address to warning about the dangers of AI, “a cutting-edge technology that had emerged with astonishing rapidity like nuclear technology and could also lead to the extinction of humankind.”
Of course, nobody is going to stop AI there was too much good to be done and too much money to be made.
But the dangers are known throughout the financial world. The Yale poll of CEO’s, showed that 42% of CEO’s of major corporations believed AI could cause the extinction of humanity in 5 to 10 years.
As the U.S. elections nears there is concern that our own species, “equipped with the affective and hormonal system not that much different than that of a jungle rat has the ability to destroy the world by pushing a few buttons.” The fate of entire societies might be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by a leader acting by his or her gut instincts.
But now, instead of doing our humanly best to reverse global warming, we are doing our humanly best to provide AI the energy it needs to use the internet’s vast data base of how humans make decisions for its own survival. The question remains, is AI serving humanity or is humanity serving AI?
Three Mile Island,