AI Inventor Muses About the Authoritarian Potential of General AI Robert Oppenheimer was famously conflicted about his work on the atomic bomb, as was Alfred Nobel after inventing dynamite. One supposes any rational, non-sociopath would be. But imagine if Alexander Graham Bell had similarly cast aspersions on the widespread use of telephones or Edison on electrification? When Morse transmitted, “What hath God wrought?” as the first official telegraph, it was meant as an expression of wonder, even optimism. We expect weapons of destruction to come with warnings. By contrast, technological revolutions that improved human existence have rarely come with dire predictions, much less from their inventors. So it’s a bit jarring when it happens. And with artificial intelligence, it’s happening. Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” quit Google after warning about its dangers and later told his Nobel Prize audience, “It will be comparable with the Industrial Revolution. But instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us.” Now enter Sam Altman, the man whose company, OpenAI, brought artificial intelligence into the mainstream. In a blog post published this week, Altman opened with his own paraphrase of “But this feels different.” Hinton and Altman are both referring to what many consider the inevitable turning point in the coming AI revolution – the advent of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. In short, this will be when almost every computer-based system we encounter is as smart or smarter than us. “We never want to be reckless,” Altman writes in the blog (emphasis added). “We believe that trending more towards individual empowerment is important,” Altman writes, “the other likely path we can see is AI being used by authoritarian governments to control their population through mass surveillance and loss of autonomy.” To be fair, OpenAI was founded with the goal of preventing AGI from getting out of hand, so perhaps his somewhat conflicted good cop/bad cop perspective is to be expected. Yet that hasn’t stopped Altman from taking what might someday be seen as the “self-fulfilling prophecy” step on our road to perpetual surveillance. Altman is partnering with Oracle and others in a joint venture with the U.S. government to build an AI infrastructure system, the Stargate Project. Two weeks after the venture was announced, his blog is acknowledging the need for a “balance between safety and individual empowerment that will require trade-offs.” What to make of all this? Sam Altman is a capitalist writ large. He believes in the American trinity of money, freedom, and individualism. So when he feels compelled to ponder the looming potential of a technocratic authoritarian superstate from his brainchild, he is to be believed. Altman dances ever-so-deftly around the potential dangers of mass surveillance in the hands of an AGI-powered authoritarian state, but it’s there. AI is the glue that makes a surveillance state work. This is already happening in the People’s Republic of China, where AI drinks in the torrent of data from a national facial recognition system and total social media surveillance to follow netizens and any wayward expressions of belief or questioning of orthodoxy. Altman is fundamentally worried that the technology he’s helping to unleash on the world could prove to be the fundamental unraveling of individual liberty, and democracy itself. One last thing worth noting: Sam Altman is an apocalypse-prepper. “I try not to think about it too much,” he told The New Yorker in 2016. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” Just imagine what he isn’t telling us. Comments are closed.
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