The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out.Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it.First, a short description of what AI is: The application of mathematics and software code to teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to how people do it. AI is a computer program like any other – it runs, takes input, processes, and generates output. AI’s output is useful across a wide range of fields, ranging from coding to medicine to law to the creative arts. It is owned by people and controlled by people, like any other technology.A shorter description of what AI isn’t: Killer software and robots that will spring to life and decide to murder the human race or otherwise ruin everything, like you see in the movies.An even shorter description of what AI could be: A way to make everything we care about better.
On the other hand, the slippery slope is not a fallacy, its an inevitability. Once a framework for restricting even egregiously terrible content is in place for example, for hate speech, a specific hurtful word, or for misinformation, obviously false claims like the Pope is dead a shockingly broad range of government agencies and activist pressure groups and nongovernmental entities will kick into gear and demand ever greater levels of censorship and suppression of whatever speech they view as threatening to society and/or their own personal preferences. They will do this up to and including in ways that are nakedly felony crimes. This cycle in practice can run apparently forever, with the enthusiastic support of authoritarian hall monitors installed throughout our elite power structures. This has been cascading for a decade in social media and with only certain exceptions continues to get more fervent all the time.
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And so this is the dynamic that has formed around AI alignment now. Its proponents claim the wisdom to engineer AI-generated speech and thought that are good for society, and to ban AI-generated speech and thoughts that are bad for society. Its opponents claim that the thought police are breathtakingly arrogant and presumptuous and often outright criminal, at least in the US and in fact are seeking to become a new kind of fused government-corporate-academic authoritarian speech dictatorship ripped straight from the pages of George Orwells 1984.
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As the proponents of both trust and safety and AI alignment are clustered into the very narrow slice of the global population that characterizes the American coastal elites which includes many of the people who work in and write about the tech industry many of my readers will find yourselves primed to argue that dramatic restrictions on AI output are required to avoid destroying society. I will not attempt to talk you out of this now, I will simply state that this is the nature of the demand, and that most people in the world neither agree with your ideology nor want to see you win.
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If you dont agree with the prevailing niche morality that is being imposed on both social media and AI via ever-intensifying speech codes, you should also realize that the fight over what AI is allowed to say/generate will be even more important by a lot than the fight over social media censorship. AI is highly likely to be the control layer for everything in the world. How it is allowed to operate is going to matter perhaps more than anything else has ever mattered. You should be aware of how a small and isolated coterie of partisan social engineers are trying to determine that right now, under cover of the age-old claim that they are protecting you. In short, dont let the thought police suppress AI.
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