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\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Getty Images<\/p>\n
They may be responsible for creating the AI tech that many fear will wipe out jobs \u2014 if not the entire human race<\/a> \u2014 but at least they feel just as paranoid and miserable about where this is all going as the rest of us.<\/p>\n At NeurIPS, one of the big AI research conferences, held this year at the San Diego Convention, visions of AI doom were clearly on the mind of many scientists in attendance. But are they seriously reckoning with AI\u2019s risks, or are they too busy doing what amounts to fantasizing about scenarios they\u2019ve read in sci-fi novels? It\u2019s the question raised in a new piece<\/a> by Alex Reisner for The Atlantic, who attended NeurIPS and found that many spoke in grand terms about AI\u2019s risks, especially those brought about the creation of a hypothetical artificial general intelligence, but overlooked the tech\u2019s mundane drawbacks.<\/p>\n \u201cMany AI developers are thinking about the technology\u2019s most tangible problems while public conversations about AI \u2014 including those among the most prominent developers themselves \u2014 are dominated by imagined ones,\u201d Reisner wrote.<\/p>\n One researcher guilty of this? University of Montreal researcher Yoshua Bengio, one the three so-called \u201cgodfathers\u201d of AI whose work was foundational to creating the large language models propelling the industry\u2019s indefatigable boom. Bengio has spent the past few years sounding the alarm about AI safety, and recently launched a non-profit called LawZero to encourage the tech\u2019s safe development.<\/p>\n \u201cBengio was concerned that, in a possible dystopian future, AIs might deceive their creators and that \u2018those who will have very powerful AIs could misuse it for political advantage, in terms of influencing public opinion,’\u201d recalled Reisner.<\/p>\n But the luminary \u201cdid not mention how fake videos are already affecting public discourse,\u201d Reisner observed. \u201cNeither did he meaningfully address the burgeoning chatbot<\/a> mental-health crisis<\/a>, or the pillaging of the arts and humanities. The catastrophic harms, in his view, are \u2018three to 10 or 20 years\u2019 away.\u201d<\/p>\n Reisner wasn\u2019t the only one to observe this disconnect. In a keynote speech titled \u201cAre We Having the Wrong Nightmares About AI?,\u201d the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci warned that researchers were missing the forest for the trees by focusing so much on the risks posed by AGI, a technology that we don\u2019t even know will ever be possible to create, and for which there is no agreed upon definition. After someone in the audience complained that the immediate risks Tufekci raised, like chatbot addiction, were already known, Tufekci responded, \u201cI don\u2019t really see these discussions. I keep seeing people discuss mass unemployment versus human extinction.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a far point to make. The discourse around AI safety is often dominated by apocalyptic rhetoric, which is peddled even by the very billionaires building the stuff. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicts that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs<\/a>, cause a crisis of widespread identity fraud<\/a>, and admitted to doomsday prepping<\/a> for when an AI system potentially retaliates against humankind by unleashing a deadly virus.\u00a0<\/p>\n And Bengio isn\u2019t the only AI \u201cgodfather\u201d wracked with contrition.\u00a0British computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton \u2014 who received the Turing Award in 2018 alongside Bengio and former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun \u2014 has cast himself as an Oppenheimer-like figure in the field. In 2023, he famously said he regretted his life\u2019s work after quitting his role at Google, and recently held a discussion with senator Bernie Sanders where he went long on the tech\u2019s myriad risks, which included jobs destruction and militarized AI systems furthering empire.<\/p>\n Reisner made an ironic observation: that the name of NeurIPS, short for \u201cNeural Information Processing Systems,\u201d harks back to a time when scientists vastly underestimated the complexity of our brain\u2019s neurons and compared them to the processing done by computers.<\/p>\n \u201cRegardless, a central feature of AI\u2019s culture is an obsession with the idea that a computer is a mind,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAnthropic and OpenAI have published reports with language about chatbots being, respectively, \u2018unfaithful\u2019 and \u2018dishonest.\u2019 In the AI discourse, science fiction often defeats science.\u201d<\/p>\n