Looks like people are surprised at lack of engagement on this topic
I would normally stay out of it because I feel I don’t know enough but if you actually want the observations of an average Jane, here’s mine…
I was worried about how society would cope if every system was hacked - by an enemy for example - maybe 30 years ago. But there’s nothing I can do about it because that’s just the way things are now. I think we’ve been too reliant on computers since the beginning of computers really.
When I first heard of AI in the workplace, about 12 to 15 years ago, I can’t really remember - I was accused of being a conspiracy theorist (by other people outside of my work, obviously) because the things that were clearly planned for it were… what you see now in daily life. I wanted to raise awareness and I wanted to slow it down and use guard rails, admittedly for selfish reasons because I just could not imagine getting older and having to deal with this shit.
But then within a couple of years I realised the battle was effectively lost and I stopped trying to say anything about it. Also, I had enough of being accused of a conspiracy theorist during you-know-what.
I actually feel I’ve been very late to the party, for a range of reasons. I’m only just now looking at training for it. That’s partly due to circumstances in my personal life but I do consider myself very late in trying to get some training. Very, very late.
It’s interesting to see people talking about the end of the world by 2030 or 2050 or whatever because that really would make retraining a waste of time and effort, well it would if it was 2030.
My inexpert opinion is yes, this is a different type of threat. But I am not worried about the end of the world in the sense of them getting hold of nuclear codes or something. I find the idea of the world just going on and on incredibly depressing.
I am worried about issues affecting our normal infrastructure and making life completely miserable. I suppose I’d have to apply the same principle as I would during nuclear attack - which is walk towards the cloud, don’t walk away from it, because you don’t want to survive that.
Only it could happen in a much more slow and painful way and you wouldn’t have a handy cloud to walk into?
However, the slow decline that concerns me is something that could have happened before AI anyway, it was the reliance on tech that was the issue. Again, if you go back 15 or 20 years, I’ve had tech people tell me that even tech people don’t understand the tech!
So I’m still not quite sure how new this is. Before AI, an enemy could’ve used a different means to cut off our water, our electricity. The tech was incredibly advanced before AI. I think the extra factor now is that there would be more chaos in the sense that nobody would know how to fix it.
It worries me when I stop and think about it. But I had my real thoughts on this maybe 10 years ago. So I’ve had time to adjust? I do think this is where we are now and unless governments can be pressured into legislation, what can we do?
Someone has made a very interesting point that the big companies DO want legislation - because it will preserve their monopoly. If it can be designed like that, then we can probably get them on side.
in all the time I’ve been pondering this, I never worried about some sort of dramatic end of world scenario. If it could happen quickly that would be okay. But that’s the kind of asteroid hitting the Earth scenario. If humanity could just get wiped out in a matter of seconds and painlessly, I don’t that’s a bad thing. There can definitely be worse.