Why We Shouldn't Fear AI

0:00On this week's AI Long Read, Why We Shouldn't Be Afraid of AI.

0:14Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. This weekend, we are doing a long read from prominent columnist David Brooks. As usual, what we're going to do first is read the piece, and then we will come back and discuss it. And today, this is actual NLW, not an AI version of myself that is doing this reading. The piece is titled, quite simply, Many People Fear AI. they shouldn't. Brooks writes,

1:05Many fears about AI are based on an underestimation of the human mind. Some people seem to believe that the mind is like a computer. It's all just information processing, algorithms all the way down, so of course machines are eventually going to overtake us. This is an impoverished view of who we humans are. The Canadian scholar Michael Ignatief expressed a much more accurate view of the human mind last year in the journal Liberties. What we do is not processing, he wrote. It is not computation. It is not data analysis. It is a distinctively, incorrigibly human activity that is a complex combination of conscious and unconscious, rational and intuitive, logical and emotional reflection.

1:40Brooks continues, The brain is its own universe. Sometimes I hear tech people say they are building machines to think like people. Then I report this ambition to neuroscientists and their response is, that would be a neat trick because we don't know how people think. The human mind isn't just predicting the next word in a sentence. It's evolved to love and bond with others, to seek the kind of wisdom that is held in the body, to physically navigate within nature and avoid the dangers therein, to pursue goodness, to marvel at and create beauty, to seek and create meaning. AI can impersonate human thought because it can take all the ideas that human beings have produced and synthesize them into strings of words or collages or images that make sense to us.

2:14But that doesn't mean the AI mind is like the human mind. The AI mind lacks consciousness, understanding, biology, self-awareness, emotions, moral sentiments, agency, a unique worldview based on a lifetime of distinct and never-to-be-repeated experiences. A lot of human knowledge is the kind of knowledge that, say, babies develop. It's unconscious and instinctual. But AI has access only to conscious language. About a year ago, the Ohio State University scholar Angus Fletcher did a podcast, during which he reeled off some differences between human thinking and AI quote-unquote thinking. He argued that AI can do correlations, but that it struggles with cause and effect.

2:47It thinks in truth or falsehood, but is not a master at narrative. It is not good at comprehending time. Like everybody else, I don't know where this is heading. When air conditioning was invented, I would not have predicted. oh wow, this is going to create modern Phoenix. But I do believe lots of people are getting overly sloppy in attributing all sorts of human characteristics to the bots. And I do agree with the view that AI is an ally and not a rival, a different kind of intelligence, more powerful than us in some ways, but narrower. It's already helping people handle odious tasks, like writing bureaucratic fundraising requests and marketing pamphlets or utilitarian emails to people they don't really care about.

3:19It's probably going to be a fantastic tutor that will transform education and help humans all around the world learn more. It might make expertise nearly free. so people in underserved communities will have access to medical, legal, and other sorts of advice. It will help us all make more informed decisions. It may be good for us liberal arts grads. Peter Thiel recently told the podcast host Tyler Cowen that he believed AI would be worse for math people than it would be for word people, because the technology was getting a lot better at solving math problems than verbal exercises. It may also make the world more equal.

3:47In coding and other realms, studies so far show that AI improves the performance of less accomplished people more than it does the more accomplished people. If you are an immigrant trying to write in a new language, AI takes your abilities up to average. It will probably make us vastly more productive and wealthier. A 2023 study led by Harvard Business School professors, in coordination with the Boston Consulting Group, found that consultants who worked with AI produced 40 % higher quality results on 18 different work tasks. Of course, bad people will use AI to do harm. But most people are pretty decent and will use AI to learn more, innovate faster, and produce advantages like medical breakthroughs.

4:20But AI's ultimate accomplishment will be to remind us who we are by revealing what it can't do. It will compel us to double down on all the activities that make us distinctly human. Taking care of each other, being a good teammate, reading deeply, exploring daringly, growing spiritually, finding kindred spirits, and having a good time. Keats observed, I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination. Amid the flux of AI, we can still be certain of that. Today's episode is brought to you by Venice. The leading AI companies store your entire conversation history and attach it to your identity forever.

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5:24AI Daily Brief listeners receive a 20 % discount on Venice Pro. Visit Venice.ai slash NLW and enter the discount code NLWDailyBrief. That's NLWDailyBrief. All one word. All right, back to NLW here. So this is part of a series called Don't Tell My Friends But, which the New York Times characterizes as a series in which we ask Times columnists what everyone else is wrong about. And I think that that framing makes this even more relevant. There is, on the one hand, the conversation around how concerned about AI we should be, which risks we should be focused on. Should we care more about immediate concerns, like deepfakes?

6:01Or should we be concerned about runaway rogue AI, the sort of fears that keep so many AI safety advocates up at night? Is there room for both? Or, on the other hand, are the concerns about both overblown? The point is that there is one debate about the actual things to be scared of or not. But then I believe there is another conversation around how people are making that decision. There is a massive media narrative war being fought right now around who gets to own the discourse around AI safety, around AI risk. I've expressed recently that this is why I believe the tension around SB 1047 in California is so fraught.

6:34The bill reflects an assumption that the AI safety folks are right. that those concerns are the concerns to be nervous about and that they are in fact real and concerning. The reason that so many people have been disinclined to engage when it was an earlier part of the process is that they simply believe that the foundations of the bill were wrong-headed in the first place. Now the folks who are supporters of that bill point regularly to statistics around how many people agree with them. And indeed, there's no shortage of statistics around how scared people are of AI. But there are a couple things going on with that.

7:04First of all, tech is at a very low ebb when it comes to what people think of it in general. It has been assailed, both for mistakes that it has made, as well as for reasons beyond its control, certainly since 2016. Everyone of all political persuasions has hated it for some reason or another. Thus, with AI being the newest tech thing, there is a base-level animosity that it's dealing with that I believe is expressed in these opinion surveys. The second piece of this, however, is that in the wake of ChatGPT being launched, the story about AI X-Risk and this idea that we may all be hurtling towards our own self-created doom have had extraordinary resonance in social and traditional media.

7:41On the one hand, it's tempting to blame the publications for just looking for clickbait. On the other, when you have credible sources who are willing to write op-eds on how the robots are going to kill us all, it's pretty tempting to run those pieces. But for much of last year, that was the whole story. Frankly, this was a little head-spinning for the AI safety people, who had spent a decade or more talking about these risks, feeling like manic street preachers screaming into the void. And one of the hopes that I've shared previously on this show is that now that it's clear that there is more attention on this particular set of questions, we might be able to have a slightly more nuanced conversation, or at least, if not nuanced, a conversation that focuses on the practicals of what we should actually do about this.

8:17Why I like this piece from Brooks is not that I think it's some hugely insightful or novel interpretation of the situation, it's that to me it represents the potential of a small nudge towards balance, a small shift back towards a place where mainstream media isn't just telling people that they need to be scared. My read on the history of humanity is that we tend not to make good decisions when we're doing them out of fear. They tend to be rushed, overreactive, and drastic in ways that are hard to walk back from. This doesn't mean that concern for the future shouldn't be part of this calculus, but to the extent that folks agree that right now, nothing truly bad has actually happened, and that indeed, even the risks that people are debating are risks that belong to the future, then perhaps our discourse around them doesn't have to be quite so fraught.

9:01Perhaps it could be based instead in a slightly more clear-eyed assessment of what real warning signals would be for the various risks that people are concerned about, be they those short-term, misinformation-type risks, or those that belong farther out. I'm glad to see a prominent columnist from the New York Times, who is frankly the type of person that you would assume would be very nervous about AI, which is of course why they asked him to do this particular column, shifting that conversation back towards the center a little bit. Anyways, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Until next time, peace.