The new wave of Artificial Intelligence

Something called GPT-4 was released some 3 weeks ago and is being hailed as an innovation that rivals the atom bomb in the scale of its significance. The Center for Humane Technology puts it thus - “imagine that 50% of the engineers who built tha plane you’re stepping onto tell you that there is a 10% chance of it crashing. Would you board?”. The Centre is a much-needed body which has been running since 2018 and has some 65 podcasts to its credit – which are also available as transcripts For those who prefer a more light-hearted approach, here is a journalist’s account of a week spent with the device.

At the end of last month, top-level people in the field published an open-letter seeking a six-monthly moratorium on research in the field in order that the dangers can be properly assessed – in the absence of which recommending that government steps in. The Centre for Humane Technology brings in Robert Oppenheimer to make the point that the threat of the atomic bomb was defused by test-ban treaties. As an example of the capacity of the new device, it has managed to co-author a recent book “Impromptu – ampflifying our humanity through AI" by Reid Hoffman and...AI (2023)"

"The Guardian" newspaper has today a useful article on how it has identified a couple of articles which seem to have been written by GPT-4 and the steps it is taking behind the scenes to avoid this - but the speed with which the device is being taken up and the scale of resultant plagiarism is deeply worrying. 

There are very few of us who dare to challenge technological change. Most of us fear the ridicule involved – being the targets of taunts of being Canutes or Luddites. It, therefore, took a lot of courage for Jerry Mander in 1978 to produce Four Arguments for the elimination of television and for Neil Postman to follow this up in 1985 with “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. And, with his “In the absence of the sacred – the failure of technology” (1992) Jerry Mander took his critique our technological society even further. In this provocative work, Mander challenges the utopian promise of technological society and tracks its devastating impact on cultures worldwide. The Western world’s loss of a sense of the sacred in the natural world, he says, has led us toward global environmental disaster and social disorder - and worse lies ahead. Yet models for restoring our relationship with the Earth exist in the cultures of native peoples, whose values and skills have enabled them to survive centuries of invasion and exploitation.

Far from creating paradise on Earth, technology has instead produced an unsustainable 

contest for resources. Mander surveys the major technologies shaping the “new world 

order”, computers, telecommunications, space exploration, genetic engineering, robotics, 

and the corporation itself and warns that they are merging into a global mega-technology,

 with dire environmental and political results. Needless to say, none of such book were 

taken seriously. 

It took perhaps a BBC television series of technological dystopia Black Mirror 

– which first hit screens exactly a decade ago – for us to begin to realise that technology

 (in the shape of the social media) has its perverse side.  And here’s a useful
discussion with Yuri Harari about AI

More recent texts
Impromptu – ampflifying our humanity through AI" by AI and Reid Hoffman (2023) 
The Age of AI; and our human future H Kissinger, E Scmidt and D Huttenlocher 2021
Ten Arguments for Deleting your social media right now; Jaron Lanier (2018)
Utopia is Creepy; Nicholas Carr (2016)
The Internet is not the Answer; Andrew Keen (2015)
From Guttenberg to Zuckenberg – what you really need to know about the Internet; John Naughton (2013)
To Save everything click here – the folly of technological solutionism; Efgeni Morozov (2013)
The Shallows - what the internet is doing to our brain Nicholas Carr (2010)