Why AI Should be Democratized
AI in its current form will never become conscious. The greater issue, and the one everyone should be focusing on, is the fact AI is a machine that has been given a goal. It lacks human empathy, and unless explicitly told otherwise, it will shred humans into pulp if that helps achieve its given objective.
In my previous post…
… I talked about why AI is dangerous, to sum that post up:
An AI, tasked with preventing traffic accidents, would inadvertently engineer a decrease in the population of drivers. Not because it is sinister, but because it is a machine incapable of doing anything other than the objective it was tasked with.
Just as inevitable that the atomic bomb (once invented) would be used to decimate a country, we should be aware of a far worse enemy that perfectly disguises itself as a useful tool.
Intelligent machines, terminators, and humanlike AI are not the problem. AI is a relentless machine that is like a brain engineered for 1 task. It becomes extremely good at the task, even better than a psychopath could. You see it lacks any sort of ethical intelligence. It will simply follow the best course for a given objective. Even if accomplishing the goal somehow means killing drivers -> to lessen traffic -> to accomplish the goal of reducing traffic.
An AI is extremely capable of accomplishing a very specific task because it can accumulate 3 years of human experience in mere seconds. You see an AI can consume video at 100x the speed of a human. It doesn't have to sleep, it doesn't need to eat, or even take a break to rest its eyes, it can just keep going.
Relentless consistency is terrifying. Just imagine your worst horror movies. The zombies never die, a Terminator is invincible, and AI? AI is immortal.
So what is the solution?
if you can't control it, democratize it.
Let’s say some dictator gains the power of a humanlike AI capable of accomplishing any task. That power would be like giving a semi-automatic rifle (that never runs out of bullets) to Alexander the Great.
To prevent one person from abusing it, we have to make sure everyone has access to it.
That’s why Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI, he wanted to “democratize AI” so that anyone could utilize it. He wanted to make sure the world could have the power of AI. He wanted to prevent an immortal dictator.
If only Google and Facebook harnessed that power, who knows what kind of world would await us?
You can't stop innovation. Your only choice is to move forward. So instead of trying to take the power away from the big boys, you give it to everyone.
