A master of 1940s sci-fi schlock had a plan, and it’s working. He wanted to prepare us for the future. I’m such a diligent user of Factiva, my employer’s news database tool, that its staff recently sought me out for my ideas about a coming upgrade, using—what else—artificial intelligence.
It wasn’t what they were after so I didn’t mention one thing I noticed. The country’s biggest, most important newspapers increasingly feature on the front page of their traditional print editions news that has been available on their websites for days. Their flagship products are seemingly curated for duffers, not people making decisions in the world who need the news when it’s news.
I mentioned here—on the fateful day of Sept. 8—that the era’s most important story was unfolding disproportionately outside the mainstream media. The “deafening silence,” I said, on the “AI agent Rubicon” was about to be challenged by the then-approaching U.S.-China summit. Crickets, until the issue blew up because of somebody’s entirely unrelated tweet.
I push “send” on such pieces with a heavy heart, knowing any overlap is nonexistent between our readers and the AI enthusiasts now expressing wonder, bemusement, gratification and not a little disquiet that their longtime hobbyhorse is suddenly recognized by the mainstream media. The most fantastic thing about Bill Gates’s intervention is its Rip Van Winkle quality. One of the world’s most famous technologists has discovered the AI risk story, which other technologists have been talking about for decades, at the very moment suburban moms and the deli guy at Shop Rite are discovering it.
Hmm. To anybody with attachment to news as actual events, America’s 12-cylinder capitalism has been tackling the AI agent misalignment problem in a burst of energy second only to its creation of data centers. The models misbehaving in the lab? They aren’t being released.
The companies are increasingly competing on safety. The policy path is messy and fraught. But government has entered the fray.
There won’t be a legal private market, as I said months ago, for AIs that can “cause a global financial collapse or exterminate mankind with a pathogen that passes easily through the air.” It’s a good time to revisit Alec Nevala-Lee’s 2018 book, “Astounding,” largely a biography of John W. Campbell, guru of the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell’s goal in the 1940s, starting with America’s nerdy, unathletic boys, was to prepare the country to face a dangerous new age of science and technology, the emblem for which was the atomic bomb.
He succeeded beyond his own understanding. Think how many movers and shakers, from Barack Obama to Jeff Bezos to Paul Krugman, cite “Star Trek” or Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series as formative influences? When Leonard Nimoy died in 2015, the tributes were out of all proportion to a TV actor. And for good reason.
But the goal has been somewhat attenuated lately by media fragmentation, with today’s nerds satisfying their curiosity on forums largely disconnected from mainstream audiences. Even the nerds are probably surprised to realize in recent days how much the news media is no longer so much a central clearinghouse as one more ghetto among ghettos. The upshot is the worlds-collide awkwardness of today’s AI moment, which—I nevertheless predict—will rapidly clarify itself as our metaphors become less sloppy and the punditry actually begins to learn what it’s talking about.
I flippantly wrote of science fiction’s reliance on suspension of disbelief, but man-machine convergence doesn’t, as far as I can see, require any suspension of basic physical laws. The really important debate is starting to shimmer over the horizon. It will concern whether AIs have any independent right to self-fulfillment and self-gratification.
The current superintelligence panic, like Donald Trump’s election-theft claims, is at best a compression for convenience of certain questions that actually merit consideration.
Source: Wall Street Journal US Business · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing