Just How Bad Is It?

 

Before last week, the name Jacob Coxon was probably not one any of us would have known. But as he announced his resignation from his role as a researcher for AI giant Anthropic and published a warning that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade” kicked off a global conversation about the scale of the potential threat of out-of-control artificial superintelligence.

Soon after, Anthropic released a report detailing recent misuses of its powerful AI models, including designing missiles and bombs, creating deadly pathogens and surveilling dissidents. And CEO Dario Amodei, rather than dismissing Coxon as yet another disgruntled ex-employee, announced that he largely agreed with him, calling for a new regime of monitoring, coordination and even regulation. What followed was a rare show of unity and contrition from big tech bosses.

For the TechScape newsletter, Blake Montgomery wondered why Coxon’s warning has cut through, while Nick Robins-Early, David Smith, and Chris Stein reported on Donald Trump’s dismissive reaction, which provoked a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats. David also reported on the unlikely pairing of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, who shared a stage to argue for more protections. Nick asked experts how likely it is that AI CEOs will follow through on pledges to slow the pace. 

And, among the many fascinating opinion pieces we published, make sure you read the one by Alex Turner, a former Google DeepMind staffer who said we really should be listening to the warnings, and the one by Stuart Russell, one of the leading AI experts in the world, on why Amodei’s call for “pacing the frontier” is not enough.

That we’re at this point is as bizarre as it is scary, especially as we’re still working out the impact of the AI models we’re already using in day-to-day life. That’s been a constant theme of our journalism recently. I’d urge everyone reading this to listen to series two of our brilliant podcast series Black Box, presented by Michael Safi and executive produced by Joshua Kelly. 

In Black Box: the Chatbots, Michael meets ordinary people who have become convinced they have made scientific breakthroughs, cured diseases or invented new technologies using AI chatbots, symptoms of what’s now known as “AI psychosis”.

This excerpt of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s brilliant new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World is a must-read, too, examining the motives of the infinitely rich men behind some of this technology and their alliance with the far right. The piece is a call for action to urgently defend what we love – the planet and fellow humans. 

Naomi was also interviewed by Zoe Williams and, with Astra, joined Carter Sherman on our US podcast Stateside to discuss why the convergence of recent climate, far-right and tech crises are creating an atmosphere of apocalypse, and how “hereness” is our way through the doom. I love the idea of “hereness”, particularly in the context of the Guardian’s mission to report on “many somewheres”.

As another antidote to the dire warnings, Nick Evershed wrote a somewhat comforting column urging us not to accept AI domination as inevitable and reminding us that we have the power to change things for the better, as we have done before. And Lois Beckett compiled the definitive list of books to make sense of it all. We could also always talk to each other.

-Katharine Viner, The Guardian