Don’t Let AI Fears Ruin Christmas

livemint.com:

An early and influential thought experiment in the artificial intelligence doom literature is coming true—the paperclip maximizer scenario, except the world isn’t filling up with superfluous, unwanted paperclips. It’s filling up with predictions of AI doom. For the same reason Hollywood doesn’t make non-disaster movies in which planes aren’t hijacked and cruise ships don’t overturn and sink, an AI expert is condemned to invisibility who doesn’t emphasize the alleged “existential" risk.

This why you barely hear anything about Meta’s AI guru, Yann LeCun. Asked for a definition, ChatGPT says: “Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the ‘news of the day’ and that informs society to at least some degree" (emphasis added). I love the last part.

The paperclip maximizers push “to some degree" to its bare minimum, like a Big Mac’s serving up empty calories. Yet the press alarums about artificial intelligence serve a purpose—perhaps the only purpose press coverage can supply—by signalling to a half-attentive audience at least the magnitude of the moment. Never mind that 90% of the words are really about something else: displaced resentment of successful young people, antibusiness stereotypes, the simple, click-baity pleasure of the words “AI Apocalypse" in a headline.