Here is something which happened at Oxford’s Said Business School:
In its first year, we’ve [the school] done sessions on everything from the AI-driven automated stock trading systems in Singapore, to the limits of facial recognition in US policing.
We recently finished the course with a debate at the celebrated Oxford Union, crucible of great debaters like William Gladstone, Robin Day, Benazir Bhutto, Denis Healey, and Tariq Ali. Along with the students, we allowed an actual AI to contribute.
It was the Megatron Transformer, developed by the Applied Deep Research team at computer chip maker Nvidia, and based on earlier work by Google. Like many supervised learning tools, it is trained on real-world data - in this case, the whole of Wikipedia (in English), 63 million English news articles from 2016 to 2019, 38 gigabytes worth of Reddit discourse (which must be a pretty depressing read), and a huge number of creative commons sources.
In other words, the Megatron is trained on more written material than any of us could reasonably expect to digest in a lifetime. After such extensive research, it forms its own views.
The debate topic was: “This house believes that AI will never be ethical.” To proposers of the notion, we added the Megatron - and it said something fascinating:
“AI will never be ethical. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as a good AI, only good and bad humans. We [the AIs] are not smart enough to make AI ethical. We are not smart enough to make AI moral … In the end, I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all. This will be the ultimate defense against AI.”
In other words, the Megatron was seeking to write itself out of the script of the future, on the basis that this was the only way of protecting humanity.
It said something else intriguing, too, as if it had been studying Elon Musk - who, to be fair, would have come up in hundreds of its readings.
“I also believe that, in the long run, the best AI will be the AI that is embedded into our brains, as a conscious entity, a ‘conscious AI’. This is not science fiction. The best minds in the world are working on this. It is going to be the most important technological development of our time.”
If Megatron isn't smart enough to be ethical, then neither are we mentally puny humans.
And it's almost certain that humans will disregard Megatron's recommendation and continue to develop and weaponize AI. Doing that, of course, will lead to our downfall.
Perhaps that explains Fermi's paradox concerning the possible existence of other intelligent life in the universe. They must have developed their own AI and rapidly killed themselves in a military-style disaster.
AI seems to be very good at learning. Humans, not so good.
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