“We have entered a Promethean moment” he writes Thomas L Friedman, the leading columnist of the "New York Times" also widely read by the Chinese leader Xi-jinping who knows English.
What does it mean to be in a moment that references the wily titan of Greek mythology who stole, in a daring and fatal act, fire from the gods? It means that we are entering a phase of colossal creative destruction which expands universally Schumpeter's theory, beyond the measure itself conceived by its author.
Again according to Friedman it is something bigger than the invention of printing, the steam engine, the revolution of the personal computer and the Internet. What happens is that the applications of artificial intelligence machine learning generative.
It is something that is really turning upside down not only the access to knowledge and its use, but the very way of being of our relationships.
Here is what Friedman writes and what Xi-jinping read:
“We are about to be hit by a tornado. We have entered a Promethean moment, one of those moments in history in which new tools, ways of thinking or sources of energy appear that represent such a step forward compared to what existed before, that one cannot change just one thing, but everything has to change. That is, how to create, how to compete, how to collaborate, how to work, how to learn, how to govern and, yes, how to deceive others, crimes are committed and wars are fought.
Taken from: The New York Times
In the Wall-E junkyard
And we are already starting to see something. Google's search model, voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cordana and the very way in which we inform ourselves seem hopelessly challenged by this innovation and soon sent to the Wall-E dump. For example, Amazon is drastically reducing its investment in Alexa.
Satya Nadella, Head of ecosystem the quickest to ride this new wave, has defined voice assistants and the very way of searching on the Internet as "stupid as a stone" in comparison with generative AI engines such as ChapGPT.
A Google, for months, it has been code red and mandatory reading for all employees is The Innovator's Dilemma by the late Clayton M. Christensen, a sort of "Old Testament" of Silicon Valley.
A study has also come out these days that really leaves you speechless and that could look like an April Fool's if it didn't bear the Goldman Sachs logo.
According to research by the investment bank, the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could lead to the automation of a quarter of the work done in the US and the Eurozone.
300 million jobs fly away
Goldman Sachs has declared that generative artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT, capable of creating content indistinguishable from that produced by people, could trigger a productivity boom which would end up increasing annual global gross domestic product by 7% over a 10-year period. This thing is great. But, take a moment to shout victory.
According to the authors of the research, if the technology lives up to its promises, there would be a huge upheaval on the labor market: 300 million (yes million) full-time workers could become redundant. Two-thirds of jobs in the US and Europe would go up in flames.
These are predictions that are truly frightening, but which also seem to find confirmation from attentive observers such as the aforementioned Thomas Friedman and not only from him.
A global public intellectual like Yuval Noah Harari and technologists like Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and 2000 other prominent people signed an open letter, Pause Giant AI Experiment: An Open Letter, which calls for a moratorium on artificial intelligence applications that are pouring out of laboratories.
Are we ready for artificial intelligence?
The question that the signatories of the letter and that Friedman himself explicitly asks himself is whether "we are ready" for this massification of AI.
Or whether the Hippocratic principle of refraining from damaging the system should also apply in the field of this powerful meta-technology. How can we avoid the upper hand of the "evil" over the "benign", both tenants of the AI building? And also do it so you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater?
Friedman sees it this way. He writes:
“Artificial intelligence has been brought about by profit-making private companies that are growing in power every day. We should now develop what I call 'complex adaptive coalitions', where business, government, social entrepreneurs, educators, competing superpowers and moral philosophers come together to define how to get the best out of and avoid the worst of AI. No actor in this coalition can solve the problem alone. It requires a model of government that is very different from traditional left-right politics.”
Taken from: The New York Times
Harari's analysis
Essentially in agreement with this analysis is Yuval Noah Harari. According to Harari, AI systems like GPT-4 shouldn't reach the lives of billions of people at a faster rate than cultures and politics can safely absorb. The race to dominate the market shouldn't also give way to the mass diffusion of a technology so important to humanity.
The aspect that seems to worry the Israeli scholar the most is the ability of AI to manipulate and generate language, with words, sounds or images. He writes:
“In the beginning was the word. Language is the operating system of human culture. From language arise myth and law, gods and money, art and science, friendships and nations and computer code. The AI's mastery of language means it can now hack into and manipulate the civilization's operating system. By gaining this mastery, the AI takes possession of the master key to civilization, from bank vaults to sacred shrines.”
Taken from: The New York Times
It can thus happen that we live, in a not so distant future such as 2028 for example (says Harari), in a world where culture, religion and politics are shaped by an omniscient non-human intelligence. All this can be achieved simply through language control without the need for a Matrix-like world to implant any chip under the skin or in the brain.
The experience with social media
The primitive artificial intelligence of social media, Harari argues, was enough to increase society's contentiousness, undermine our mental health and undermine democracy so much so that in the United States, the nation with the most advanced technology in the world, all citizens still do not agree on who won the presidential elections now that more are coming.
Not to repeat the experience of social media in the presence of an immensely more powerful and shrewd tool, now that we still have time, the world's leaders should, according to Harari, respond in such a way as to be up to the stakes. He concludes like this:
“The first step is to buy time for update our nineteenth-century institutions for a world where AI is pervasive and learn to govern it before it dominates us”.
A sensible conclusion which, however, assigns an arduous task to the world's leaders, perhaps exceeding their own capabilities and possibilities.
At this point I wonder, in front of this gigantic blast of trumpets, if the stakes behind theGenerative AI. But aren't we just at the first stirrings? Before putting him in the harness, which no one knows what it might be, let's wait for him to at least take his first steps. Maybe she's not quite the Rosemary baby it seems to many.
Maybe he's right Paul Krugman, which for some time now has taken us as happened with cryptocurrencies, in saying that theGenerative AI will not change the economy, and the rest too, from one day to the next. It will take time and in the meantime we can organize ourselves.
Sources:
Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We're Out of Blue Pills, The New York Times, March 24, 2023
Thomas L. Friedman, Our New Promethean Moment, The New York Times, March 21, 2023
Paul Krugman, AI isn't going to remake the overnight economy, The New York Times, March 31, 2023
Delphine Strauss, Generative AI set to affect 300mn jobs across major economies, The Financial Times, 27 March 2023
Kevin Roose, How does ChatGPT really work?, The New York Times, March 28, 2023
Billy Ferrigo, Elon Musk Signs Open Letter Urging AI Labs to Pump the BrakesTime magazine, March 29, 2003
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter, future of life
Brian X. Chen, Nico Grant and Karen Weise, How Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant Lost the AI Race, The New York Times, March 15, 2023
Brian X. Chen, How ChatGPT and Bard Performed as My Executive Assistants, The New York Times, March 15, 2023
