AI: Manhattan Project or Jurassic Park?

Let’s hand the microphone to Garrett Graff:

“Most people think of Jurassic Park as a cautionary tale for science, when really it’s a cautionary tale for corporate trust and safety teams, board oversight, and regulatory compliance. The dinosaurs’ entirely predictable rampage should really be seen as a failure of the security teams and the fence builders. The mistakes we’re seeing from these frontier AI companies are similarly the failures of the fence builders.

*snip*

“The battle between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind is something like if Leo Szilard, Arthur Holly Compton, and Edward Teller had each led their own competing private effort to develop an atomic bomb and thermonuclear bomb — with no government assistance or coordination, all backed instead by private equity money — simultaneously building their own competing Los Alamos-style labs and negotiating with the military about how (and if) the military could use their own proprietary individual nuclear weapons."


*snip*


“In this analogy, Szilard represents Anthropic — a scientist approaching the development of a new technology with immense urgency but a great deal of caution, trying to bake ethics and responsibility into a system that he understands someone will invent first and wants to ensure is done as safely as possible; Compton, who led the first year of the Manhattan Project and the successful push to create the first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago squash court, is Google, the slow-but-steady corporate model, carefully aligned with national interests and feeling the immense weight of a public company’s shareholder responsibility; and Teller — who famously split with the cautionary Oppenheimer in his enthusiasm to pursue the development of thermonuclear weapons — is OpenAI, the Sam Altman-style, proceed-at-all-costs, damn-the-torpedoes race toward superintelligence.”


*snip*


“All of society right now — all of our knowledge, data, lives, careers, and jobs — is effectively a “downwinder” of the AI companies’ testing and deployment of technologies they don’t fully understand and don’t care enough to constrain effectively. And there’s a lot of emerging evidence right now that AI is both less beneficial and higher-cost to our society than the enthusiasts imagined a year or two ago.”

Read the whole thing.

https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/ai-isn-t-the-manhattan-project-it-s-jurassic-park?utm_source=www.doomsdayscenario.co&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=ai-isn-t-the-manhattan-project-it-s-jurassic-park&_bhlid=480c2412389dddc0f059a25b8e0fc4f1d08561f1

 

 

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