Yet another New York Times piece on AI. A non-AI safety friend sent it to me saying "This is the scariest article I've read so far. I'm afraid I haven't been taking it very seriously". I'm noting this because I'm always curious to observe what moves people, what's out there that has the power to change minds. In the past few months, there's been increasing public attention to AI and all sorts of hot and cold takes, e.g., about intelligence, consciousness, sentience, etc. But this might be one of the articles that convey the AI risk message in a language that helps inform and think about AI safety.
The following is what stood out to me and made me think that it's time for philosophy of science to also take AI risk seriously and revisit the idea of scientific explanation given the success of deep learning:
I cannot emphasize this enough: We do not understand these systems, and it’s not clear we even can. I don’t mean that we cannot offer a high-level account of the basic functions: These are typically probabilistic algorithms trained on digital information that make predictions about the next word in a sentence, or an image in a sequence, or some other relationship between abstractions that it can statistically model. But zoom into specifics and the picture dissolves into computational static.
“If you were to print out everything the networks do between input and output, it would amount to billions of arithmetic operations,” writes Meghan O’Gieblyn in her brilliant book, “God, Human, Animal, Machine,” “an ‘explanation’ that would be impossible to understand.”
David - thanks much for sharing the link to this Monmouth University survey. I urge everybody to have a look at it here (the same link you shared).
The survey looks pretty good methodologically: a probability-based national random sample of 805 U.S. adults, run by a reputable academic polling institute.
Two key results are worth highlighting, IMHO:
First, in response to the question "How worried are you that machines with artificial intelligence could eventually pose a threat to the existence of the human race – very, somewhat, not too, or not at all worried?", 55% of people (as you mentioned) were 'very worried' or 'somewhat worried', and only 16% were 'not at all worried'.
Second, in response to the question "If computer scientists really were able to develop computers with artificial intelligence, what effect do you think this would have on society as a whole? Would it do more good than harm, more harm than good, or about equal amounts of harm and good?", 41% predicted more harm than good, and only 9% predicted more good than harm.
Long story short, the American public is already very concerned about AI X risk, and very dubious that AI will bring more benefits than costs.
This contrasts markedly from the AI industry rhetoric/PR/propaganda that says everybody's excited about the wonderful future that AI will bring, and embraces that future with open arms.