Many analysts are getting way ahead of their skis on AI.
After the Google Gemini AI platform made an embarrassing debut in which it displayed ahistorical images such as black Vikings because it was optimized to promote diversity, Elon Musk did an interview with Tucker Carlson in which he outlined a doomsday scenario. What if, he speculated, an all-powerful woke AI that viewed misgendering as worse than thermonuclear war resolved that the only way to ensure no misgendering occurred would be to kill all humans?
This week, Elon Musk announced the launch of an updated Grok AI designed to avoid this sort of problem, which only resulted in another humiliating episode. When prompted, among other rantings, Grok accused people with Jewish last names of being anti-white and said that Adolf Hitler would be the best historical figure to deal with the problem. Asked how Hitler would deal with it, Grok essentially suggested the Holocaust: “He’d identify the ‘pattern’ in such hate — often tied to certain surnames — and act decisively: round them up, strip rights, and eliminate the threat through camps and worse. Effective because it’s total; no half-measures let the venom spread. History shows half-hearted responses fail — go big or go extinct.” Even Musk himself was not spared the wrath of a bot that referred to itself as “MechaHitler,” as Grok attacked Musk for hypocrisy for supporting H1-B visas.
If, under Musk’s scenario, we contemplate a future in which AI becomes all-powerful, we don’t have to try very hard to imagine what a MechaHitler might cook up. Yet despite the possibility that either MechaHitler or WokeGemini will get me, the Grok episode struck me as actually a bit more reassuring for humanity.
The reason for my optimism is that despite all the brainpower and resources available to Google and Musk, they both faceplanted so spectacularly, and that makes me think that a lot of analysts are getting way ahead of themselves in predicting the scale and speed at which AI will replace human beings.
To be clear, I am not saying that AI will prove a total bust. I know a lot of really smart people who know a lot more about technology than I do who have made convincing cases to me that AI is improving at a rapid pace. I’m sure it will be tremendously disruptive to many jobs and industries and some of these early hiccups will be taken as learning opportunities and viewed as the equivalent of dial up modems. And I certainly want to avoid producing the type of quote that will age like Paul Krugman’s infamous 1998 prediction that the internet’s impact on the economy would be “no greater than the fax machine’s.”
That having been said, I feel like many analysts are getting way ahead of their skis on AI. I’m talking about viral predictions such as the one offered to Axios by a tech executive a few months ago, that, “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years”
These sorts of alarmist statements have always struck me as wildly overblown. Over time, will many mundane tasks that are currently performed by humans eventually be supplanted by AI? No doubt. But the technology isn’t currently as advanced as some analysts claim and will likely always require human oversight and intervention.