Instead, according to the researchers, AI is a general use technology whose application could be better compared to the stretched adoption of electricity or the Internet than to nuclear weapons – although they concede in some respects an erroneous analogy.
The central point, says Kapoor, is that we must start differentiating the rapid development of AI methods-THE flashy and impressive displays of what AI can do in the laboratory – and what comes from the real applications AI, which in historical examples of other technologies is lagging behind by decades.
“A large part of the discussion of the societal impacts of AI ignores this adoption process,” said Kapoor, “and expects the societal impacts to happen at the speed of technological development.” In other words, the adoption of useful artificial intelligence, in its opinion, will be less a tsunami and more a net.
In the test, the pair makes other arguments of bracing: terms such as “superintendent” are so incoherent and speculative that we must not use them; The AI will not authorize everything but will be born a category of human work that monitors, checks and oversees AI; And we must focus more on the probability of AI to worsen current problems in society than on the possibility of creating new ones.
“The AI oversees capitalism,” says Narayanan. He has the capacity to help or harm inequalities, labor markets, free press and a democratic decline, according to the way he is deployed, he says.
However, there is an alarming deployment of the AI that the authors leave aside: the use of AI by the military. It is of course, pick up Quickly, an increasingly alarm that life and death decisions are more and more helped by AI. The authors exclude this use of their test because it is difficult to analyze without access to classified information, but they say that their research on the subject is to come.
One of the largest implications for AI treatment as “normal” is that it would upset the position that the Biden administration and now Trump’s White House have taken: the construction of the best IA is a national security priority, and the federal government should take a range of measures – to make it exported to China, dedicating more energy to data centers – to get there. In their article, the two authors refer to the rhetoric of the American “arms race” as “Stride”.