We met on 18.1.2025 in the Gallery and saw a Guardian video about “Artificial General Intelligence: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2023/nov/02/ilya-the-ai-scientist-shaping-the-world.The interviewed person, Ilya Sutskever, is one of the creators of AI.
He said that false messages and fraudulent content will become much more common. BBC had to retract a news item because it was based it on a fake new item from the AI-based “Apple Intelligence” blog: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/apple-ai-fake-news-alerts-highlight-the-techs-misinformation-problem.html
Ilya had a good analogy: what if AGI will treat us like we are treating animals, even pets? Would we be ok with it? Humans may become insignificant.
On the other hand, humans do not need to have AI to mistreat other humans. One reason why Greenlanders don’t like the Danes is that decades ago, island school girls were fitted with UID devices to keep them from getting pregnant. The population of Greenland has therefore not grown on a normal level.
The question came up: Will AGI be dealing like a human being, will it have empathy, and will that be a kind of empathy that humans have? Can it produce life?
Terry Pratchett (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett) wrote about the problem of AI morals in this books decades ago.
The paper clip story shows how AI can get out of bounds: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-and-paperclip-problem
Apparently, AI has already killed people, https://123top.ai/has-ai-killed-people/
The American military is certainly doing a lot of research to use AI and AGI for their purposes. People like Trump and Musk are promoting these technologies.
In engineering and medicine, AI is a useful tool to aid humanity.
More and more, robots will aid humans (in the airport of Stockholm, C. had the first experience), even if in the beginning, humans have to spend a lot of time supervising tasks.
AI is getting better. Google Translate (Deepl is also good) has improved its translation tool recently.
AI and AGI development is decentralized, nobody has it under control. In the end, it will be used to make money for some, and not for others.
Humans have to learn to distrust any message or SMS (No, Brad Pitt is NOT interested in you!)
AGI development (opening Pandora’s box) will be directed to become more “human” by its creators, on one hand,to help, but in the hand of the wrong people, it will be used to manipulate the masses.
What about resistance to this development? Older people (like us) complain about things that do not work, we are thinking of how we can defend ourselves against evil AI. Youngsters try to set up things via an App, and if it does not work, they simply abandon the effort. Bureaucracy might bite them in the behind later…
The outlook is not good, Wars seem to increase (warlike conflicts have actually decreased), and people like Trump come into power. The antidote will be our growing knowledge that we are one village and that we need to stick together, to deflect attempts to divide humanity.
Note: look how much information Ursula obtained for this report by simply looking it up on the internet…
Ursula Hahn
info at madeira-weekly.com
