AI Sentience: A Warning of Doomsday Scenarios
Back Print Premium By Ryan Lovelace – The Washington Times – Monday, December 25, 2023
The software engineer fired by Google after alleging its artificial intelligence project might be alive has a new primary concern: AI may start a war and get used in assassinations. Blake Lemoine experimented with Googleâs AI systems in 2022 and concluded that its LaMDA system was âsentientâ or capable of having feelings.
Google disputed his assertions and ultimately ousted him from the company. Mr. Lemoine is working on a new AI project now and told The Washington Times he is terrified that the tools other AI makers are creating will get used wrongfully in warfare.
Fears of Doomsday Scenarios
He said the emerging technology can reduce the number of people who will die and limit collateral damage but it will also pose new dangers. âUsing the AI to solve political problems by sending a bullet into the opposition will become really seductive, especially if itâs accurate,â Mr. Lemoine said.
âIf you can kill one revolutionary thought leader and prevent a civil war while your hands are clean, you prevented a war. But that leads to âMinority Reportâ and we donât want to live in that world.â He was referencing the science-fiction film âMinority Reportâ in which police use cutting-edge technology to solve crimes before they even occur.
AI Race and Dangers
Mr. Lemoine sees the race for AI tools as akin to nuclear weapons. Artificial intelligence enables machines to accomplish tasks through advanced computing and statistical analysis previously only possible for humans. The race to amass the tools will be different and Mr. Lemoine expects people will much more easily get their hands on the powerful tech.
He said the bottleneck evident for well-guarded nuclear weapons and the scarce resources of plutonium and uranium are constraints that do not exist for open-source software models that do not depend upon rare natural resources.
Impact of Revelations
Mr. Lemoine said his decision to go public with concerns that Googleâs AI was sentient in the fall of 2022 caused a delay in its AI product launch, which the company is still working to overcome. In December, Google unveiled Gemini, a new AI model.
Mr. Lemoine said Gemini looks to be an upgraded version of the LaMDA system he previously probed. One major difference is that Gemini knows it is not human, he said. âIt knows itâs an AI. It still talks about its feelings, it talks about being excited, it talks about how itâs glad to see you again and if youâre mean to it, it gets angry and says, âHey, stop that. Thatâs mean,ââ he said. âBut it canât be fooled into thinking itâs human anymore. And thatâs a good thing. Itâs not human.â
New Project: MIMIO.ai
His new project is MIMIO.ai where he oversees the technology and AI for the company building a âPersonality Engineâ to let people create digital personas. It is not intended to work as a digital twin of a person but as a digital extension of a person capable of doing things on the personâs behalf.
âYou might be an elderly person who wants to leave a memorial for your children,â Mr. Lemoine said, âso you teach an AI all about you so that it can talk in your place when youâre gone.â A few other AI makers are competing to build similar products but Mr. Lemoine is confident MIMIO.aiâs technology is better.
Impact on Google and Future Actions
His experience at Google testing and probing its AI systems under development shaped his understanding of AI toolsâ limitless potential and he thinks his work affected Google too. âI think that there are a handful of developers at Google who implemented things a different way than they otherwise would have because they listened to me,â he said.
âI donât think they necessarily share all of my convictions or all of my opinions, but when they had a choice of implementing it one way or another, and that both were equally as hard, I think they chose the more compassionate one as a tiebreaker. And I appreciate that.â He praised Google and said he hopes his interpretation of their actions is correct.
Source: washingtontimes
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