Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak didn’t hold back when he described the most ambitious figures in the AI race as the “lunatic fringe” of Silicon Valley. The piece suggests the iPhone maker is hoping to position itself on the right side of a growing AI backlash. Given the pace of development, predicting the future of AI is risky, but the author believes Apple is absolutely right about the dangers.
The piece cites the familiar refrain that Apple’s slow pace on AI features could leave the company behind. Virtually all other tech giants have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into training ever more intelligent thinking machines. While Apple trains its own models, it is nowhere near the technology’s frontier, leaving it vulnerable if super-smart AI transforms industry and society in the coming years.
Joswiak counters that the company is focused on launching AI features that perform useful tasks for ordinary people, and that Apple’s privacy focus will become increasingly valuable amid an AI backlash against unconstrained acceleration of a technology we can barely control today. Lunacy is a fitting word for a world in which AI companies fear their work may destroy humanity, yet fear their competitors will beat them to it.
AI is the first technology to threaten such a wide variety of jobs, from truck driving and marketing to software development. Academics have even voiced concern that future generations will stop becoming mathematicians or scientific researchers. Math professor Giordano Scarciotti warned that when AI models solve in days problems academics have worked on for years, it may seem pointless for students to attempt this work, potentially leaving scientific progress without people who can understand and apply the findings. The same risk applies to software development, where fewer humans can understand increasingly advanced AI-generated code.
Source: 9to5Mac · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing