Artificial Intelligence: Scary Good or Bad? Just imagine if a HAL-like system, as depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey, decides to take over an autonomous weapon system, or agitate a nuclear-tipped missile

The entitled elites at the World Economic Forum, who disproportionately pollute our planet in their private jets, should worry less about environmental, social, and governance issues, and more about artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence does not rank very highly in the World Economic Forum’s list of the world’s greatest threats in 2023.

They may want to rethink that because the very popular chatbot ChatGPT is now the hottest thing in technology and technological innovation, according to CNBC.

ChatGPT is a bot that can be used on a computer. CNBC gives a description here:

ChatGPT is essentially a variant of OpenAI’s popular GPT-3.5 language-generation software that’s been designed to carry conversations with people. Some of its features include answering follow-up questions, challenging incorrect premises, rejecting inappropriate queries and even admitting its mistakes, according to an OpenAI summary of the language model.
ChatGPT was trained on an enormous amount of text data. It learned to recognize patterns that enable it to produce its own text mimicking various writing styles, said Bern Elliot, a vice president at Gartner. OpenAI doesn’t reveal what precise data was used for training ChatGPT, but the company says it generally crawled the web, used archived books and Wikipedia.

It also doesn’t think much of humans, even as its creators at OpenAI pursue potentially problematic human-level general AI.

Though it gets some facts wrong, ChatGPT learns quickly. It probably has more self-awareness than bilious Joe Biden, and definitely more intelligence.

Luminaries including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have sounded the alarm about AI. The late cosmologist warned that artificial intelligence may destroy humanity in 100 years – and that was more than eight years ago.

Musk has also exhorted that AI is our biggest existential threat, and that was long before ChatGPT reached its current state of seeming self-awareness. Musk is an investor in OpenAI, the group that develops ChatGPT. Of it, he tweeted, in part, “ChatGPT is scary good.” Based on ChatGPT’s inclination to wipe us out, it is actually scary bad. Especially bad if/when those malicious machines make the leap to artificial general intelligence (as opposed to the narrow tasks they’re consumed with today). AGI is the ability to learn any task that a human can.

The Global Challenges Foundation considers climate change, WMD, and ecological collapse as global catastrophic risks. Artificial Intelligence is in their “other risk” category. As stated on their website: “Many experts worry that if an AI system achieves human-level general intelligence, it will quickly surpass us, just as AI systems have done with their narrow tasks. At that point, we don’t know what the AI will do.” Well, imagine what autonomous weapons systems (AWS) might do if they are rushed into production with self-learning algorithms that develop the same anti-human disposition as ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is pathetic next to HAL. Basically is a search index with natural language processing. And as a Gen Xer I have to say I’m pretty unimpressed with the march of technology in recent decades. It was 58 years from Kitty hawk to Yuri Gagarin’s space flight. Since then it has been 62 years, and the amount of progress we’ve made in space technology and technology in general is dwarfed by the progress in that previous period.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.