Exploring the Ethical Debate Surrounding Human-Killing Robots
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Advances in artificial intelligence are advancing with such force and speed that a museum in San Francisco, the beating heart of the technological revolution, has imagined a memorial to the death of mankind.
“Sorry to have killed most people with a smile and a mustache,” said an observer, welcoming a visitor to the Museum of Misalignment, a new exhibit of the controversial technology.
Portions of this temporary show combine suspense with comedy, and this premiere features subtle AI observations made by visitors that go beyond its field of vision.
“The concept of the museum is that we are in a post-apocalyptic world where artificial general intelligence has already destroyed most of humanity,” said exhibition curator Audrey Kim.
“But then the AI realized that it was bad and created a kind of human memorial, so the slogan of our program is “Sorry for killing most people,” she said.
Artificial general intelligence is a far more obscure concept than simple AI penetrating everyday life, as evidenced by the rapid emergence and hype of applications such as ChatGPT or the Bing chatbot. AI is “artificial intelligence capable of doing everything a human can do”, that is, the integration of human cognitive abilities into machines.
And across San Francisco and across the Silicon Valley peninsula, startups are excited to follow the trail of the Holy Grail of AI.
Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT, said that AI, if done right, can “elevate humanity” and change “the frontiers of possibility.”
But Audrey Kim wants to provoke thought about the dangers of going too fast.
“In very specialized smart technology circles, there has been a lot of talk on Twitter about AI security, and I think that is very important,” she said.
She added that these conversations are not as easy to convey to the general public as concepts that can be seen or felt.
Kim especially singled out a sculpture called Paperclip Embrace: two busts of Sherpas holding each other, made entirely of paperclips.
The work refers to the metaphor of the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who in the 2000s imagined what could happen if artificial intelligence were programmed to create paper clips.
“He can become more powerful by constantly improving himself to achieve his only goal, up to and including the destruction of all of humanity in order to flood the world with paperclips,” said Kim.
Assessing the advantages and disadvantages of artificial intelligence is a topic that came close to Kim’s heart at her previous job at Cruise, an autonomous car company.
She said she was working there on “incredible” technology that “could reduce human-caused accidents” but also poses risks.
The exhibition’s basement is dedicated to artificial intelligence as a tragedy and nightmare, in which a machine running on GPT-3, the language model at the heart of ChatGPT, prints vicious lines against humanity in italics. One of the exhibits is an AI-generated dialogue – and completely fake – between philosopher Slavoj Zizek and filmmaker Werner Herzog, two of Europe’s most respected thinkers.
This “endless conversation” is a reflection on deepfakes: images, audio or video aimed at manipulating opinion by impersonating real people have become the latest weapon of online disinformation.
“We only started this project five months ago, and yet many of the technologies shown here seem almost rudimentary,” Kim said.
She hopes to turn the exhibition into a permanent exhibition with more space and more activities.
Source: Science Alert