I just wrapped a super-sobering and, at the same time, fun and hopeful conversation on the urgent issues surrounding the plaid-speed evolution of AI. With my guests Brad Allenby and Andrew Maynard at Arizona State University, the prime focus was the Vatican rollout of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter and the Pope’s admonition today that “artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.”
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Allenby’s research has focused in part on how nations’ fears about the existential threat posed by NOT embracing AI in security arenas. He basically wished the pope luck in trying to hold back that tide. He pointed out how Russia is actively working with transnational criminal networks to exert power. That’s not something that will bend to papal desires any time soon — let alone the United Nations or the like.
Maynard, who tends to focus these days on practical ways to make the most of AI, said something vitally important that is one reason I have diverted a lot in recent years from my focus on environmental sustainability:
I actually think we make a mistake when we try and equate AI to human intelligence. This is absolutely an alien form of intelligence. And as soon as we try and equate it to humans,
we make categorical errors because it means we can either be wowed because we say
it’s better than human intelligence or we can be dismayed or dismissive because we say it’s not as clever as me. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve got something completely alien that is increasingly in charge of the things that our lives depend on.
Brad Allenby jumped in to hammer the point home:
Let me reinforce that Andrew has made probably, I think, the most important point that people need to grasp. We are not talking about artificial intelligence. That language itself takes us back to thinking that somehow human intelligence is the sine qua non of cognition, which we know it’s not.
We are dealing with a truly alien intelligence that we’re building and distributing with very little idea of what it’s going to do.
I mean, this is an extraordinary roll of the dice by all of humanity. And I think you’ve got to be careful not to trivialize it. Andrew’s absolutely dead on.
Here’s their double-barreled warning. Listen and pass it around!
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Who’s responsible?
I asked Gemini to draw a cartoon illustrating the disconnect between those of us affected by AI’s high-speed spread and those “in the bus.” Andrew Maynard said it’s important to understsand that those in the bus are not just AI developers:
[The cartoon] reminded me of something which I think often gets missed. So we’re often looking at the developers of AI saying all the responsibility lies on them and they’re not doing this right.
But I would actually add another category there. It’’s the first-mover implementers. It’’s the companies that are rushing to incorporate AI into everything. It’s the governments that are trying to AI-ize everything.
It is the universities that have decided that they have got to go fast and throw caution to the wind to put AI in everything. They are all people in this bus that are pushing AI progress so it’s not just the tech bros it is every company that is saying we do not have time to ask about care and responsibility and ethics because we just got to go fast. And that is propagating the challenges I think that we’re seeing beginning to emerge.
There is much, much in the full webcast above. See my curtain-raiser post for some unnerving comments made at the Vatican today by Chris Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic:
In today’s discussion, I mused on whether humanity’s techno-surge at the moment is replaying a script that all technologically advanced civilizations in the Universe have followed — and that perhaps this explains why it’s so damn quiet out there (Google for “great filter” or “Fermi’s Paradox”). Do all possible civilizations burn themselves out this way?
Maynard made me feel a lot better by bringing the focus back to what each of us — and our institutions, and popes — can do today no matter what lies ahead:
I think there’s a very real chance that as a civilization, we will burn out, that we will discover that human exceptionalism means nothing to the universe and to the march of entropy. But I don’t care.
I think what is important, and again, this is just my philosophy, is what it means to be human here and now, what it means to be human in terms of the value we create for ourselves, how we identify worth, how we create value with relationships with others.
That’s not being exceptional. It’s just, to me, being human.
And if you focus on that and the near term, it really doesn’t matter too much what the future of humanity is. Maybe our candle will burn bright and burn out. But the here and now then becomes important. And that, in a sense, is what is reflected in the encyclical.
Not all of it, because the encyclical is wrapped up in a religious sort of bubble that says actually sort of human’s relationship with God and by extension with the universe has primacy here.
I would disagree with that, but I would agree 100% with the fact that you find meaning and value in those relationships in the here and now. And so that actually gives me hope and it gives me excitement when I see what happens with AI, because wherever it goes, if we keep hold of what it means to be human within that, we can continue to create value on our own terms.
That felt like the key takeaway, to me.
What about you?
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