How are you preparing, spiritually, practically, and emotionally, for some or all of the following:
- Mass politicized generation of fake citizens
- Training set poisoning
- Intentionally malicious/biased AIs deployed (say, by a billionaire infuriated by basic empathy?)
- Hitherto undiscovered forms of AI leverage by bad actors?
Near as I can tell, we almost lost democracy to the Facebook recommendation algorithm; I don't see our business-as-usual political institutions surviving the loss of trust in mediated communications that will almost certainly result from generative AI, even if said AI is not sentient or conscious.
So how are you preparing your families and communities for what comes next?
Back a step: *are there* preparations we can make?
Read up on the long history of wrong predictions of existential threats. When I was a kid in school we practiced for nuclear bombs by crawling under our desks. Of course anything might happen, and so-called AI will have unknown effects, but we’re probably more likely to see more fraud and advertising than the collapse of democratic civilization.
I’ll watch Doomsday Preppers for the entertainment of seeing people center their lives and the lives of their families around unlikely events and unpredictable effects.
Good to see Henry Kissinger talking about existential threats, something he has personal experience with. I’m writing this from Saigon, a place with first-hand experience of Kissinger’s expertise.
Maybe invest in some AI companies, if you want.
It's a sad(?) reality of life our agency is _so small_. We do what we can. But even there, the best we can do is align ourselves to whatever forces of history our out there that correspond to our values. Even "great people" have more often than not been thrust into whatever role they had, rather than single handedly willing something to happen.
I have no idea what we could do, personally, or as societies, to usefully prepare. Even if there were things that could be done on a society level, I'm pretty sure that most societies wouldn't bother - or see the point - until to late. As the last few years have demonstrated, collective action is not our strong suit, in the west.
I doubt there any other option besides abstinence. Since that won’t happen, I plan to enjoy the ride.
The outcome for most of these is usually unknown. Sure, PCs led to spreadsheets. But they created tons of other things. The internet brought about an era of misinformation and porn, but also spawned Facebook and cheap books in your pocket. Apps led to ride sharing and the ability to report that asshole who ran the red light.
AI will do a lot of obvious things, but I'd say 80% of the things that emerge is unexpected. I mean, LLMs are basically text autocomplete machines and as of today, they answer physics questions better than most trained humans. There's an emergent factor.
Whatever AI will become, it won't be Skynet, because it's literally trained to not become that.
Humans are the best creatures on Earth at adapting. Heck, that's probably the only skill we have. My opposable thumbs are literally talking to someone on the opposite side of the planet now. We'll figure it out.