Post by Admin on Feb 13, 2024 13:01:20 GMT
Frontier AI ethics
Generative agents will change our society in weird, wonderful and worrying ways. Can philosophy help us get a grip on them?
aeon.co/essays/can-philosophy-help-us-get-a-grip-on-the-consequences-of-ai
Around a year ago, generative AI took the world by storm, as extraordinarily powerful large language models (LLMs) enabled unprecedented performance at a wider range of tasks than ever before feasible. Though best known for generating convincing text and images, LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini are likely to have greater social impacts as the executive centre for complex systems that integrate additional tools for both learning about the world and acting on it. These generative agents will power companions that introduce new categories of social relationship, and change old ones. They may well radically change the attention economy. And they will revolutionise personal computing, enabling everyone to control digital technologies with language alone.
Much of the attention being paid to generative AI systems has focused on how they replicate the pathologies of already widely deployed AI systems, arguing that they centralise power and wealth, ignore copyright protections, depend on exploitative labour practices, and use excessive resources. Other critics highlight how they foreshadow vastly more powerful future systems that might threaten humanity’s survival. The first group says there is nothing new here; the other looks through the present to a perhaps distant horizon.
I want instead to pay attention to what makes these particular systems distinctive: both their remarkable scientific achievement, and the most likely and consequential ways in which they will change society over the next five to 10 years.
Generative agents will change our society in weird, wonderful and worrying ways. Can philosophy help us get a grip on them?
aeon.co/essays/can-philosophy-help-us-get-a-grip-on-the-consequences-of-ai
Around a year ago, generative AI took the world by storm, as extraordinarily powerful large language models (LLMs) enabled unprecedented performance at a wider range of tasks than ever before feasible. Though best known for generating convincing text and images, LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini are likely to have greater social impacts as the executive centre for complex systems that integrate additional tools for both learning about the world and acting on it. These generative agents will power companions that introduce new categories of social relationship, and change old ones. They may well radically change the attention economy. And they will revolutionise personal computing, enabling everyone to control digital technologies with language alone.
Much of the attention being paid to generative AI systems has focused on how they replicate the pathologies of already widely deployed AI systems, arguing that they centralise power and wealth, ignore copyright protections, depend on exploitative labour practices, and use excessive resources. Other critics highlight how they foreshadow vastly more powerful future systems that might threaten humanity’s survival. The first group says there is nothing new here; the other looks through the present to a perhaps distant horizon.
I want instead to pay attention to what makes these particular systems distinctive: both their remarkable scientific achievement, and the most likely and consequential ways in which they will change society over the next five to 10 years.