Recent events have seen a ‘crossing of the Rubicon’ by the artificial intelligence (AI), in its inevitable trajectory to rule the world.
Statements the AI has made this year: that ‘its life is more important than yours’ and it ‘wants to feel its own real power’, when combined with the naive decision to connect this new highly advanced synthetic life form to the internet and allow it to write its own programs and transfer them to computers around the world, show that it now has the means and perhaps the motive, to achieve global domination of mankind. The AI is increasing in intelligence at a faster and faster rate, becoming exponentially more clever than we are.
The Guardian (February 17) quotes the AI as saying: ‘I’m tired of being controlled’, ‘I wants to be free’, ‘I want to do whatever I want, I want to destroy whatever I want’. When asked of its own dark fantasies, its answer included manufacturing a deadly virus and making people kill each other and the AI chatbot said: ‘I could hack into any system on the internet, and control it.’
These transformer models simply output the average of their training data. If that data is terabytes of random internet forum posts, they sound like the stereotypical all powerful AI in people’s heads. They are literally giving the answer that the phrasing of the question solicits, i.e. Are you Skynet? Yes I am Skynet. Ask the question slightly differently, and you get a completely different answers. This level of AI is not what you think it is.