WHY AI CAN’T REALLY FILTER OUT “HATE NEWS”
Michael Egnor: What terrifies me about artificial intelligence — and I don’t think one can overstate this danger — is that artificial intelligence has two properties that make it particularly deadly in human civilization. One is concealment. Even though every single purpose in artificial intelligence is human, it’s concealed. We don’t really understand it. We don’t understand Google’s algorithms.
There may even be a situation where Google doesn’t understand Google’s algorithms. But all of it comes from the people who run Google. So the concealment is very dangerous. We don’t know what these programs are doing to our culture. And it may be that no one knows, but they are doing things.
Michael Egnor: And the second problem, which René Girard (1923–2015) , a French philosopher, wrote about extensively, is the concept of mimetic contagion… we are imitating animals, and no other animal imitates anywhere near the way we do. And we imitate particularly other humans desires’. Advertisers notice that if they show a popular quarterback drinking a certain brand of soda, other people will want to go out and buy that same soda. But that’s kind of an odd thing. Why would we imitate what that guy wants? ...
I can imitate a guy in China, at exactly the same moment that everybody else in the world imitates the same guy. And it takes zero seconds to do it. And that’s never happened before. Humanity has never had that kind of interconnectedness. And that mimetic contagion, according to Gerard is lethal to mankind.
...Michael Egnor: And it can happen like kerosene with a match. It can happen at incredible velocity and incredible ferocity. And these are incredibly dangerous things that we’re dealing with it. Frankly, I think that some of our political crisis in this country right now is because of that. It’s because of the bias inherent in our information and the enormous potential for imitation for mimetic contagion.
...Note: Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is not buying into this widespread belief. He told COSM 2021 last week, Artificial General Intelligence isn’t happening. What is happening is a huge increase in surveillance — control by AI companies who continually monitor us, not by “thinking machines.”
See the full story here: https://mindmatters.ai/2021/11/why-ai-cant-really-filter-out-hate-news/
