January 24, 2024

The Real Issue with Artificial Intelligence: The Misalignment Problem

By: Peter Levin

Breathtaking advances in technology, from genetic engineering to quantum computing, have opened policy vistas and security challenges that were completely unanticipated even five years ago. The next decade will bring smaller devices, larger networks and anthropomorphic computers that will extend human thought — where they don’t replace human thought — beyond, literally, imagination or belief.

The real hazard is not machine-derived calamity. It is bad human decisions that are accelerated and amplified by AI.

Although AI-doomsday forecasts designed to stoke public anxiety make great headlines and popular podcasts, from the perspective of many Ph.D.-level scientists and engineers the life-under-borg predictions are strangely overwrought. One of the reasons artificial intelligence (AI) captures so much attention is that it, like satellite navigation and drug discovery, is hardly distinguishable from magic. Large language models like Bard, Copilot and ChatGPT sound like a real person, which makes their wizardry even more fascinating. But they are fraught with errors and sweet-sounding hallucinations, and they will never be infallible.

Read the full article from The Hill.

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