Podcast from ABC Minefield
It is not uncommon, in our digitally mediated and info-saturated times, for the truly dangerous to jostle alongside the trivial and the banal within our field of attention. Occasionally, the source of fascination and of dread are one and the same — such that an innovation some regard as a mere curiosity, is seen by others as a grave, possibly even existential, threat.
This is a perfectly plausible description of the paradox of the once fêted, now unravelling, social web (how could platforms so well-suited to photo sharing, harmless quizzes and viral memes undermine the conditions of democratic life?). But now it is Artificial Intelligence that best fits the bill. Consider that, just two months ago, 350 academics (including philosophers, legal theorists and technology researchers) and tech executives signed a brief statement organised by the Center for AI Safety:
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Two months before that, Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak joined a thirty-three-thousand-strong chorus calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of AI systems. The open letter released by the Future of Life Institute stated that “AI labs are locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict or reliably control.”
Meanwhile, the exponential growth of users of generative AI programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT since its release in November 2022, and the increasing take-up of Microsoft’s chatbot Bing and Google’s Bard by users, suggest barely a degree of ambivalence from Millennials and Gen-Zs who make up the vast majority of its users and tend to be agnostic about technology’s potential harms. Reflecting the extent to which we quickly become inured to our gadgets, over the last eight months AI-generated text has flooded the “digital commons” as users experiment, explore, exploit, problem-solve and search out the limits of the technology — holding out the further risk that generative AI will soon begin cannibalising it its own content, thereby terminally degrading the world wide web itself.
There are already concerns that the doomsday scenarios posed by the emergence of Artificial “General” Intelligence, to say nothing of Artificial “Super” Intelligence, and the ethical problems raised by the use of AI in extraordinary situations like war, are distracting us from the more subtle ways that the pervasive use of AI in ordinary life is already corrupting our use of language and the transmission of knowledge. The fear of future robotic overlords overwhelm, in other words, the more quotidian realities of the “junkification” of the internet and the “bullshittification” of public and political speech.
Could it be that the greatest risk that these tools present is that they will end up accentuating the vices, rather than the virtues, of their makers?
Guest: Robert Sparrow is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, where he is also Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
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