Asimovian AI is the ideal AI that should have emerged in an ideal universe — the AI intended to replace the grueling pains and labors of the masses, not the one striving to become a businessman’s utopia of intellectual worker replacement. Intention is the most important aspect of any implementation, and we are seeing the results of current AI implementation right in front of us: workers getting sacked with each passing day, humanity competing with itself day in and day out over who impresses their superiors more on these token metrics, emerging glorious narratives of how AI will be ‘The Future’, the recurring advice of ‘Use AI or perish in the tech market’. Now who really gains from these events and who loses? I wonder if anyone ever gives serious thought to this broader question or just keeps being a cog in the corporate wheel like everyone else.
It’s high time we pushed the “Pause AI” button right now and take a breather and reflect a bit on what exactly is going on here. And no, no big catastrophe is going to happen if we do that. China isn’t going to get ahead in the race - and even if it did, how does that justify everything else that’s happening here?
I really hope there is someone out there with enough clout and influence who can push this pause button - or at least persuade others to do so. That would be the best thing to happen to humanity at this point. By doing so, we might prevent a massive societal collapse and there is really no downside to this.
The problem, to a degree, is that AI promises to be a decisive tool in industry and hence militarily. No government dares ban it or restrict it — at least from itself — for fear the race to the end will be lost. AI companies dare not pull back without legislation that will never come, for fear that someone else will make the decisive breakthrough that leaves everyone else in ruin.
The problem is, I don’t see that breakthrough coming. Ever. At least not down the path of LLMs. Now, LLMs help me accomplish far more in a day than I’d be able to alone. but even the best ones keep making the same sorts of mistakes. One of the big problems with agentic AI is that AI output becomes AI input — so what happens when the AI output is confidently wrong? It goes down a massive rabbit hole and if you’re lucky 5 minutes later it will second guess the base inaccuracy that led it there. But often it concludes there is something wrong with your network configuration and possibly hardware, when really you just forgot to connect to the VPN.
I digress. My point is that this road is a dead end. It might do some neat tricks, but this is NOT the path to global supremacy or freedom from labor. But just in case I’m wrong. Just in case it is. No one can afford to risk letting someone else beat them to it. I’m not endorsing that point of view, just acknowledging it.