Something Like Fire | City Journal
Machines can now talk with us in ways that aren t preprogrammed. They can draw pictures, write passable (if generic) college essays, and make fake videos so convincing that you and I can t tell the difference. The first time I used ChatGPT, I almost forgot that I was communicating with a machine.
Artificial intelligence is like nothing that humans have ever created. It consumes vast amounts of data and organizes itself in ways that its creators didn t foresee and don t understand. If we open up ChatGPT or a system like it and look inside, AI scientist Sam Bowman told Noam Hassenfeld at Vox, you just see millions of numbers flipping around a few hundred times a second. And we just have no idea what any of it means.
Last summer, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Ross Anderson at The Atlantic that releasing ChatGPT in November 2022 was a necessary public service because, five years from now, AI capabilities will be so jaw-dropping that springing it on us all at once would be profoundly destabilizing. People need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships.
Some people are worried about unprecedented AI-driven job loss, a supernova of disinformation, the implosion of education and the arts, the dethroning of humanity by an alien intelligence and possibly even our extinction. Others foresee a golden age of drastically reduced work hours, a shockingly low cost of living, medical breakthroughs and life-span extensions, and the elimination of poverty. Which camp is most likely right?