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The risk of extinction from the AI robots

June 17, 2023

Haven’t done the AI thing. Haven’t got the ChatGPT app, apparently the most popular in history. Because now we’re supposed to let the whole evil network of artificial intelligence around the world listen in? Haven’t done one of those fun columns where you instruct the 0s and the 1s to write a column in the style of yours truly, and it does so, and you throw up your hands and say, Why bother?

I really haven’t worried about the thing taking my job. My dad sent me an AI poem and said now us poets are sunk, going forward. But it was a terrible poem. Not to worry.

On the writing front, I’m basically taking the attitude “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross takes. She asked ChatGPT to write lyrics about the end of a love affair to the tune of “America the Beautiful,” and let’s just say the robot is no Cole Porter.

I do realize that lots of technical writing jobs are at risk, where great prose, or verse, is not the point. And in the visual arts, yikes. Terrible time to be a graphic artist, for instance, when as Terry’s AI expert interviewee says, you can tell the thing to come up with a composite photo of a teddy bear riding a skateboard in Times Square, and it does so in seconds.

There’s a whole profession down the drain.

Furtherly depressing, my wife showed me an example of someone asking the program to paint a watercolor in the style of Anders Zorn and it did so, tout de suite. Pretty well, too.

OK, it’s bad. But “risk of extinction of the human race” bad?

That’s what a group of tech industry leaders, including some of the people who invented AI, called out as a little problem we are facing late last month. An existential threat to humanity. On a par with something greater than COVID, and the H-bomb.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. “The open letter was signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in A.I.,” The New York Times reported.

Rats. There goes the neighborhood.

I’m still hoping for some kind of HAL solution. You know, one minute the computer in “2001” has killed the other astronauts, and our man Dave is still out on a space walk. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” orders Dave. “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” answers HAL. Dave: “What’s the problem?” HAL: “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.”

My point is, Dave gets back inside. He pulls HAL’s plugs. “Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.” Then HAL begins singing the old saw: “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.”

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Then, somewhere out beyond Jupiter, Dave ages, dies, is reborn as some kind of space baby.

Not a problem, right?

And yet. “I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” Sam Altman, chief executive of a firm called OpenAI, someone who knows a lot more about the robots than I do, told a Senate subcommittee. “We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”

So here’s the deal. Blue-collar workers have dealt with the threat and the fact of automation taking their jobs for decades. Now the robot chickens have come home to roost for white-collar workers, the kind of people who use 50-cent words like “existential.” The way we chill about it is to acknowledge that having to work less — as both anarchists and Marxists have long sought — is not necessarily a bad thing. Let the robots do the heavy intellectual lifting. Then the humans can go surfing. If they let us.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].

Orange County Register

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The risk of extinction from the AI robots

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