Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon caused a big stir this week after quitting his job over fears that artificial intelligence may lead to the end of humanity. Evan Hubinger, another Anthropic researcher, joined in, estimating there was a 10% chance artificial intelligence “could kill all humans” within the next decade.
Ten percent is a scary number. It also sounds completely made up.
Though I’m far from an expert on the long-term technological capabilities of AI, I find all this doomerism questionable. For one thing, I’ve been alive for quite a few years and through quite a few scares. I’m not sure there’s ever been a big technological breakthrough without a corresponding freakout. But in the postwar years, it was especially pronounced.
The proliferation of internal combustion engines prompted the Left’s favorite Malthusian, Paul Ehrlich, to warn that humans would be asking themselves if it was “OK to eat the bodies of your dead because we’re all so hungry.” When I was growing up, we were told that nuclear winter was essentially inevitable.
Experts always want to control the contours of technology and progress. They often do it by scaring you.
AI is undoubtedly a powerful tool. A lot of people, though, accept that AI will one day evolve to be smarter and more resourceful than humans, gain consciousness, build secondary superintelligent machines, and come to the realization that humans aren’t compatible with the planet and murder everyone. Doesn’t this all sound a little science fiction? The deeper you investigate those claims, the more obvious it becomes that this is all theoretical. Now, AI researchers are incredibly bright when it comes to numbers and programming, but are we confident in their ability to foresee how the future plays out?
Most people already hate the idea of AI. According to the Pew Research Center, only 16% of us believe it will be a net positive for society. Most of us accept that AI will destroy jobs, for instance. But the employment apocalypse we’ve been warned about for the past two years hasn’t come to fruition. As with any technology that creates efficiency, new jobs are also created. That’s not to say every occupation is safe, but a recent Economist estimate found that AI and AI-adjacent employment added around 730,000 to 1 million jobs above normal market trends in the United States. AI infrastructure and data centers likely account for roughly 20% to 33% of overall economic growth.
You can, of course, be skeptical of those numbers. But you should also be skeptical that Skynet is in your future.
Critics note that the doom-trolling by CEOs such as Sam Altman, stressing the most chilling prospective capabilities of artificial intelligence, triggered a lot of the pushback against AI. It wouldn’t be the first time CEOs exaggerated the importance of their industry to generate interest and convince everyone of their significance.
Nor would it be the first time a big corporation with a new technology wanted to dictate the speed of growth and undermine competition.
The best way to do that is to get the government involved. The notion that big corporations reflexively oppose regulations has always been a myth. Not only do major corporations engage in rent-seeking and seek out compliance costs that limit competition from smaller firms, but they are also often eager to shift the burden of managing risk to the state.
“This is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence,” Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, wrote, advocating government intervention.
Why don’t all these researchers slow it down themselves? If they believe AI is an existential threat to mankind itself, why don’t they sell their shares and close up shop? For the same reason, one suspects, Al Gore flies around using jet fuel. Most of them don’t really believe their own warnings.
None of this is to say that there aren’t risks involved in thoughtlessly deploying a quickly evolving technology. What we do know is that getting hysterical over AI undermines our ability to regulate it in an informed way. For decades, we were subjected to endless, unhinged end-of-days prophecies regarding climate change, and the result was regulations that needlessly inhibited progress and cost us trillions.
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Just look at what’s happened with data centers. The scaremongering that’s gripped the country has created a situation that undermines economic growth and puts us at a disadvantage to China for no logical reason.
Moreover, if AI really is a technology that will one day have the ability to destroy all of humanity, that’s a race we should definitely win. I’ve no doubt we can beat China at the AI game because socialists are terrible at innovation. The only way they win is if we don’t play.