ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
WONDERS and DANGERS
of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
By Peter Solomon
The clock is ticking…
YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE TODAY
- 1. Email your local, state, and federal representative and demand they establish laws for responsible use of AI.
- 2. Post a link to this message on all your social media sites.
- 3. Flag racist or bullying content.
STEPHEN HAWKING WARNED US: “Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid, the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization.”
Nobel prize winner Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, often called the Godfather of AI, left his job at Google to publicly express his fears about the potential dangers of AI. He was concerned with the spread of misinformation, job displacement, and the possibility of AI becoming too powerful and posing an existential risk to humanity.
On CBS’ 60 Minutes, Sundar Pichai, Google’s head of its AI group, Bard Technology was interviewed.
~Pichai said, “There is an aspect of this which we call – all of us in the field call it a ‘black box’. You know, you don’t fully understand. And you can’t quite tell why it said this, or why it got that wrong. We have some ideas, and our ability to understand this gets better over time.”
~Interviewer Scott Pelley commented, “You don’t fully understand how it works? And yet, you’ve turned it loose on society?”
~Pichai responded, “Yeah…”
AI has provided enormous benefits.
- ~ MEDICINE: The creation of new proteins for medical research.
- ~ LANGUAGE: Large Language Model programs have impressive capabilities in generating text, translating languages, writing different kinds of creative content, and answering questions in an informative way.
- ~ ROBOTICS: AI can act as the brain of robotic units which replace humans in dangerous or repetitive tasks.
- ~ OTHER APPLICATIONS: healthcare, cybersecurity, finance, agriculture, marketing, and advertising.
But many dangerous applications have been developed. Realistic-looking videos, images, and audio recordings created using ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE can make it appear that someone is saying or doing something they never did. AI algorithms for social media are often designed to maximize user engagement. So, AI delivers stories of mayhem and chaos to its users at the expense of peace and tranquility because mayhem is more engaging. If it bleeds, it leads.
Careless use of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE can badly affect humans. In fact, Careless People is the title of a tell-all about how Facebook is run. Horrifyingly, Facebook’s engagement AI helped to fuel the Rohingya humanitarian crisis in Myanmar in 2017. Armed attacks, massive scale violence, and serious human rights violations forced millions of Rohingya Muslims to flee their homes. Many walked for days through jungles and undertook dangerous sea journeys across the Bay of Bengal to reach safety in Bangladesh.
The AI professionals are warning us about the risks.
- ~In 2022, over 700 top academics and researchers behind the leading AI companies were asked about future AI risk. Half of those surveyed stated that there is a 10% or greater chance of human extinction.
- ~In a 2024 survey, researchers who had published in top-tier AI venues were asked about the impacts of advanced AI systems. Between 38% and 51% of respondents gave at least a 10% chance for advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction.
All this reaffirms the need for extreme safety awareness and careful regulation for AI applications.
In 2017, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned that humans would be extinct on Earth in 100 Years. The clock is ticking.
Please visit and follow https://www.instagram.com/100yearstoextinction/ and https://www.100yearstoextinction.com/ for more information on threats to human existence and to information and links to organizations fighting these threats.
