Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Stephanie Arnett/MITTR | OPENAI (ILYA)

When reading MIT's Technology Review's article discussing the possible emergence of super intelligent AI's going rogue, the notion of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? resonates.  

Cover of first hardback edition

I’ve come to meet Sutskever, OpenAI’s cofounder and chief scientist, in his company’s unmarked office building on an unremarkable street in the Mission District of San Francisco to hear what’s next for the world-tilting technology he has had a big hand in bringing about. I also want to know what’s next for him—in particular, why building the next generation of his company’s flagship generative models is no longer the focus of his work. 

Instead of building the next GPT or image maker DALL-E, Sutskever tells me his new priority is to figure out how to stop an artificial superintelligence (a hypothetical future technology he sees coming with the foresight of a true believer) from going rogue.

A lot of what Sutskever says is wild. But not nearly as wild as it would have sounded just one or two years ago. As he tells me himself, ChatGPT has already rewritten a lot of people’s expectations about what’s coming, turning “will never happen” into “will happen faster than you think.”

“It’s important to talk about where it’s all headed,” he says, before predicting the development of artificial general intelligence (by which he means machines as smart as humans) as if it were as sure a bet as another iPhone: “At some point we really will have AGI. Maybe OpenAI will build it. Maybe some other company will build it.”

Let's think probabilities because reality, as defined by Quantum Mechanics, is probabilistic so the concept of AI going rogue becomes a possibility as we don’t know how AI works due to the fact code has to write code to enable neural nets, the front end of AI, to interact with the real world in real time as human programmers cannot write software in real-time to do the task at hand, an inconvenient fact the so called AI experts seem to ignore at our peril.

In essence, we don't know, in this case, where AI 's headed as guesstimates about predicting the future forever remains a crapshoot thank to, you guessed it, the vagaries of Quantum. :)

Happy T Day! :)