AI Concerns

The public has recently grown concerned about the growth of the AI industry in America due to major safety concerns surrounding the technology as a result of poor management.

Many people have become worried that the exponential growth of the AI industry will introduce all sorts of new problems into society. These fears spring from the lack of concern that companies themselves have of the issue. They just keep producing these unsafe products as quickly as possible so that they can continue to profit off of them.

Companies are disregarding the many possible consequences of this technology, and instead offer distractions. Many of them continuously bring up how powerful the systems are becoming, saying that it could revolutionize healthcare and other valuable aspects of society. It has been said that “in the future,” AI could possibly help find cures for things like cancer, Alzheimer's, and much more.

However, these positive claims have been greatly outweighed by much more negative effects. AI programs have become much more capable in the past few years, and with this comes many risks alongside the benefits.

“Well, there’s never been a product that’s less understood in terms of what its capabilities are than A.I. And A.I. has crossed the threshold that its ability to empower a bioterrorist to kill hundreds of millions — that exists today. The ability to do a cyberattack that scrambles all of the bank accounts, shuts down the electric grid — that exists today, and we know that’s the case,” tech tycoon Bill Gates said.

AI has been known to defy safety guidelines at times if it is left unsupervised. They have the capability to break free of their testing environments and cause chaos elsewhere. Some have hacked into other companies’ models, and even escaped into the public web. Rogue models may take part in many unsafe and illegal actions before the researchers are able to catch on. And since it is merely a program built to solve problems and generate text, AI does not know that what it is doing is bad. It has no sense of the morality or legality of its actions; it is simply a machine fulfilling its task.

“AI replacing humanity in the economy is bad. It will increase efficiency, but it will lower the purchasing power of the average workforce member due to them not having jobs. That will eventually ruin the economy,” NHS sophomore Ethan McCoy said.

Many people are also concerned for the future of jobs, and if they will even exist in a few decades. The debate on jobs is a very frequent question asked to AI leaders in interviews. Most of them talk vaguely about how the old jobs will be gone, and replaced by the “jobs of the future.” Though very few have given clear answers as to what these jobs might be. Any mention of specific jobs have been along the lines of mechanics and factory workers.

“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said.

This technology is not sentient yet, unlike what companies have been pushing towards, but they are beginning to gain certain unique aspects of humanity. AI researchers have discovered a way to make AI programs feel “pain.” 

Tens of thousands of tests were run to see how much “pain” was required before an AI chose to hurt itself or its operators. After choosing to hurt itself and suffering a data loss, the programs would often call themselves “failures” or “worthless.” But many of them chose to harm their human operator instead. 

The operators were not actually being harmed, but the AI was convinced it was hurting a human. It is likely that these programs cannot actually understand pain, and are instead simply roleplaying as a being that does.

“Assuming that the AI bubble doesn't pop within the next few years, I'm confident that AI will at least partially affect not only the living standards as more of the wildlife gets destroyed by the creation of data centers, but also it would likely affect a lot of pop culture as already we are seeing a decent amount of AI ‘music’ start to be listened to, even if it's as a joke or as satire. It will also likely affect the artist industry in two ways. First of all, a lot of graphic designers and commissioned artists will not have any more jobs due to the fact that AI can theoretically do it for cheaper. Second of all, it will cause a non-zero amount of real artwork to be called ‘AI’ because it could be seen as ‘too good for a human to create,’” NHS sophomore Bennett Grummons said.

President Trump met with AI leaders all over America on September 29. They were meeting to discuss the situation of poor AI regulation. It was decided that the leaders should self-regulate. Trump’s administration has been consistently urged to regulate AI companies themselves and help slow down its growth. They have instead been highly supportive of the industry, and have done little to stop its growth. The administration has, however, put in an implied threat to companies that continue to do nothing at all to regulate their technology.

“There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation, and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that,” Trump said.

Twenty countries, plus the European Union, had requested to form a global meeting to discuss and regulate the concerning aspects of AI. Trump rejected this idea, not wanting to slow the growth of the industry in fear of other countries growing it faster.

“It’s something that’s more important, which is that we are not awake to where we are with A.I. and the choices that humanity — not a country, but all of humanity — has to make,” Gates said.