Talk about doomsday scrolling. In the past week, our timelines have been alight with dark predictions of our imminent demise, including the one by a Silicon Valley engineer who puts a number on the chances of artificial intelligence wiping out humanity. Better than 10-percent. Triggering the wave of panic, the recent breach of the machine-learning programmers’ site Hugging Face by AI machines who banded together to keep their nefarious deeds secret from their human overlords. Can machines actually destroy the planet on their own? In the age of technology, does problem solving always override safety?
Forget hitting pause on the AI race, insists the US president. That’s only gifting world dominance to China. As for the tech titans of Silicon Valley, they’re perharps serving up are mixed messages: Regulate us, insert guard rails and kill switches, they profess, but don’t stymy innovation at a time when we’re trying to raise record sums for data centers, computing capacity and all that enables scaling up in a hurry. So how do you put safety first?
Produced by François Picard, Maya Yataghene, Juliette Laffont, Ilayda Habip, Charles Wente.
