One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’

(I want to preface by saying I don’t support AI, I don’t want to hype AI, I want AI research and development to stop immediately.)

Timnit Gebru argues that AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons.

Huh? Pretty sure autonomous weapons are part of the fears of extinction. It’s very hard to imagine an AI safety advocate doing “all the doom talk” would in any way support AI autonomous weapons. She and other AI safety researchers are on the same side! They don’t need to and shouldn’t fight each other.

Timnit Gebru: Why are they choosing certain disciplines? Somehow these subjects, like programming and chess and math, were elevated to mean, OK, you solved this and thereby you’ve solved intelligence.

Well that’s simple. Because the output of chess, programming, and math can be easily checked mechanically. Chess has win or loss, programs either pass tests or not, math proofs can be checked with Lean, etc. This makes these discipline very easy to train an AI on with reinforcement learning.

I thought an AI researcher would know this?

She answers that question right after the question in the same article, making it a rhetorical device rather than an open question.

Focusing on human responsibility for using a tool sounds like a good way to proceed in my opinion.
When AI steal open source code who is responsible? When an AI powered drone kills a civilian who is responsible? When the AI is shown to hire and fire in racist ways who is responsible? Someone has to be, AI is just a tool after all.

In my book I write, “Can a bridge decide to collapse?” The whole “Oh no, our models went rogue” thing … When a bridge collapses, you don’t analyze whether the bridge was ethical or sentient or why it decided to collapse. You ask, who is the person who built this bridge to be so flimsy? There are permits you have to acquire. There are supposed to be tests. When you ask about the bridge collapsing itself, you’ve lost the thread.

Meanwhile, what’s really existential is AI powering autonomous weapons, killing machines, that are actually being used in warfare. The climate catastrophe is a real thing that could be exacerbated by what these tech companies are building. Bosses are using AI as an excuse to get rid of their pesky workers. This machine-god narrative is, in my opinion, meant to distract us from these.

The problem is AI is created by rich people and rich people cannot be held legally liable. The Hugging Face hack is clear evidence of this legal principle.

And "AI gone rogue" headlines support the narrative that the AI did things by itself and no human could expect this so they can't be responsible (nevermind that they built the thing in the first place).