Another day, another warning about AI; vis-a-vis the reality we all know, this has roughly the same reassuring effect as a plane fuselage ripping off mid-flight. Starting off with familiar criticisms, such as putting the world out of work and handing over power to tech barons, Alex Holmes and Lina Zilinskaite\u2019s film blasts an concentrated stream of AI concerns in its 83-minute runtime. By the time it is talking about current efforts to create computers out of human brain cells, potentially integrable into our own craniums, and implying this might be a good thing, it is (ironically) hard to know how to process all of this.<\/p>\n
The Cassandra at the film\u2019s centre is Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google X<\/a>, now a touring cautionary voice trying to get the world to listen about the perils of AI. Once overseeing advanced projects for the tech giants, his biggest moonshot lies ahead: to introduce a moral dimension into a tech race that looks increasingly like the frenzied season finale of late capitalism. He talks about feeling parental pride in watching Google\u2019s AI-driven robotic arms learn to grasp objects, as children do. And he feels that humanity\u2019s capacity for benevolence is exactly the training resource needed by neural networks in order to prevent the technology ushering in catastrophe.<\/p>\n The parental angle is personal for Gawdat: he quit Google in the aftermath of the tragic death of his son after a botched appendix operation. So he has an evangelical urgency addressing AI\u2019s current human shortcomings: how it\u2019s enabling a kind of digital narcissism through hyper-optimised social media and porn, facilitating mass surveillance and automated warfare, and evolving in an exponential growth curve that may soon escape human control (Geoffrey Hinton chips in here<\/a>). The tech bros \u2013 of course not interviewed here \u2013 don\u2019t seem too bothered. The uncanny-valley affect of Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman suggest that alien superintelligence has been 3D-printing human avatars for some time now.<\/p>\n Given how quickly AI has been shackled to the basest human impulses, Gawdat is frustratingly less specific about what enlightened AI would look like. Suffusing neural network training data in examples of human positivity and altruism, as he proposes, seems almost laughably naive. But then maybe it is not so airy-fairy; empathy may need to encompass digital entities that, for practical purposes, will be cognisant and sentient. A top Bhutanese lama agrees with him that the current agenda of \u201ccontaining\u201d AI and making sure it \u201cserves\u201d humanity contains too many old oppressive tendencies. It\u2019s hard to know how seriously to take someone proposing the same answer as Ghostbusters II \u2013 positive vibes to banish the negative ectoplasm. But blockbuster times need blockbuster thinking, and the interviewees here supply plenty.<\/p>\n Chasing Utopia is released in UK cinemas on 15 May.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another day, another warning about AI; vis-a-vis the reality we all know, this has roughly the same reassuring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":666295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-666294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/666295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}